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The Personal (Computer) Is Political

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The Personal (Computer) Is Political The personal (computer) is political A PROVOCATION PAPER written for Nominet Trust by Dr Aleks Krotoski March 2014 www.nominettrust.org.uk This document is designed to be read with Adobe Acrobat Foreword 2 Foreword To be able to fully participate in our physical and digital communities requires a range of actions and understanding. The value of the technical skills of coding and programming and the creativity of making and designing digital products are well understood, but at the heart of our ambition to support young people’s digital making is understanding how digital technologies are made. This understanding can come about through the process of digital making, or of tinkering with existing digital products, but it is this understanding that is so important. Understanding how digital tools are made helps us to recognise how they afford, constrain and mediate our actions – from the many new opportunities for connection that they afford, to the obvious character constraints of Twitter to the less obvious constraints of how a search engine presents only the ‘relevant’ links to you. As more and more government services become digital and more of our actions are mediated through digital technologies, this understanding and awareness becomes even more important if we are to fully and effectively participate in the communities around us. Nominet Trust continues to support social-tech entrepreneurs in the design and use of digital technologies to address persistent social challenges, and works with partners such as Nesta to support young people as digital makers. This report is a timely exploration of the importance of such issues and I look forward to working with you to ensure the values of social entrepreneurs are embedded in the digital making process. Dan Sutch Head of Development Research www.nominettrust.org.uk Nominet Trust – March 2014 About the author 3 About the author Written by Dr Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about Email: [email protected] Dr Aleks Krotoski and studies technology and interactivity. for Nominet Trust Twitter: @aleksk Her book, Untangling the Web: What the internet is doing to you looks at the psychology research behind the claims Website: alekskrotoski.com about the positive and negative forces of the digital age. Aleks' PhD thesis in Social Psychology (University of Surrey, 2009) examined how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Aleks presents BBC Radio 4's award-winning science series The Digital Human. She has been hosting The Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast since its inception, in 2007. She presented the Emmy and Bafta winning BBC 2 series Virtual Revolution in 2010, about the social history of the World Wide Web. She writes for The Guardian and Observer newspapers. Her writing also appears in Nature, BBC Technology, New Statesman, MIT Technology Review and The Telegraph. The author wishes to thank Ben Hammersley for his help in the Designed by Ben Carruthers final draft of this report. Illustrated by Andy Potts www.nominettrust.org.uk Contents 4 Contents www.nominettrust.org.uk The web and us 5 The web and us What is ‘the web’? Pinterest make it possible for non-specialists to go online. These technologies, also known as ‘social media’, make it easy The World Wide Web is the greatest communication innovation to connect and exchange ideas with people around the world. of the modern age. At once a printing press, a telegraph, a telephone, a television and a radio, it integrates the innovations Now we're on the brink of phase three, as we, the digital public, of existing technologies and takes them to hyper-speed. begin to question what it is that we're doing online. We have become so intimate with the technology that we ask it to At its essence, the web is a technology that connects us to entertain, educate and enlighten us. We use and are directed one another and to the things we've put online. It is a social by services that were created by a small cabal of people who live machine, created for function but adapted by people to service in one small part of the planet, without questioning what that their needs. means for us as individuals and as society. Our window to information and each other depends on what this homogenous Our culture has developed a habit of turning and insular group views as important enough to be part of their to our technological devices for navigation software code. The third phase of the web is when we reclaim ourselves from the machine by educating ourselves about what and socialising, for solving problems and the technology wants from us, and how we are unthinkingly maintaining our relationships servicing its needs, rather than using it as a tool to serve ours. In its lifetime, the web has so far had two phases: the first (1994-2003) reflected how it began as an information We are technofundamentalists resource, used primarily by academics and people who were literate in computer languages. They built the software Our culture has developed a habit of turning to our infrastructure of the network we are familiar with today: the technological devices for navigation and socialising, for solving services and software that allow us to navigate and exchange, problems and maintaining our relationships. This affects us from like search engines, e-commerce platforms. They made the web the highest level of our society to the most personal: our functional because they helped us figure out where to go and politicians want to apply technological solutions to global how to get there. conflict and economic hardship, while we ask our devices the most intimate questions, and expect them to answer. The second phase (2004-2013) was more about connection than code: people who have no computer skills were given the Yet we as a society regularly question the content we receive tools they needed to easily publish creations widely to their from other sources of information: our representatives raise www.nominettrust.org.uk audiences. Websites like Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr and questions about accountability in Parliamentary hearings, our The web and us 6 newspapers tackle false claims, our investigative journalists of the designer of a technology. This phenomenal information expose wrongdoing and corruption. And we as individuals are resource and great connector is also ‘art’. taught in school to question our sources. Other art forms and sources of information have their own So why should the online world be any different? Are the agendas: we subscribe to newspapers and television networks processes of persuasion so radically changed by a computer that reflect our views and give us what we need to know screen that we throw away our critical capacity and become, (whether we ask for it or not). Yet we all use search engines to as Siva Vaidhyanathan described in The Googlization of find out what we're looking for. Everything, ‘technofundamentalists’? Does the software warrant our blind acceptance of what we're delivered – In cinema and theatre, there's a term to describe what it is that invisible risks and all – rather than thinking of how it could the director keeps inside the frame of the camera or within the be different? proscenium arch: mise en scene (literally, ‘to put in the scene’). It is shorthand for the control that a creator has over how a story is told. Adding or removing elements creates compelling Technology: built in the image of its creators storytelling. But it also begs the question, what's outside the frame? In 1986, computer historian Melvin Kranzberg at Georgia Institute of Technology published six laws of technology. Computer software designers do this as well, but we do not yet These laws remain the cornerstones of the history of recognise this as such. We are not yet as well-versed in the lingo technology, a discipline that he pioneered. they use to tell their stories about what it is they wish to get across in their services. We can only take what they prescribe as His first law reads: relevant and valuable based on their interpretation of the human Technology is neither good, nor bad, nor is it neutral. condition. Technology can't be understood without seeing how it is A technological system has biases built into it that we will most linked to society. It is as much a cultural artefact as music, likely see in retrospect. A service that works now may not in film, art, architecture, food and comedy because it is produced future, for reasons that may only become obvious after time has by human beings in a particular time, who have particular passed. This is not a technological comment, but a cultural one: interests, particular backgrounds and particular tools at their in fifty years, when we have the ability to observe Google or disposal. It is possible to identify a Spielberg movie, a Gehry Facebook dispassionately and without our current biases and the building, a Warhol print, Mexican cuisine, a Beatles song, filters that we view the world through, will they feel as dated www.nominettrust.org.uk and for those who have the language, to see the signature and incongruent as Brut cologne or bellbottom trousers? The web and us 7 The psychology of information and social networks. Search engines help us to identify what, of the millions of websites on the World Wide Web, should be We make sense of the world through the information we most relevant and most valuable to us.
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