technology

“It’s easy to look around a college campus and think – there’s no digital divide here,” begins a blog post on a new digital divide by sociologist Jessica Calarco. Despite the ubiquity of digital devices on today’s campuses, Calaraco argues that college students are still very much divided into haves and have nots: “the digital divide on college campuses has shifted from one of technology access to one of technology maintenance. [In a recent study] we [found] big gaps in the quality and reliability of the technology students own.” Inside Higher Education also has a story about new digital divide research of Professor Calarco and others.

Wired magazine is reporting that San Francisco, CA could become the first United States city to ban its agencies from using facial recognition technology. The article notes that for critics of facial recognition technology, “[i]n the hands of government…it enables all-too-easy access to real-time surveillance, especially given the availability of large databases of faces and names (think your driver’s license or LinkedIn).” The city’s Board of Supervisors is considering a new ordinance that would implement the ban. Additionally, “the ordinance would require city agencies to gain the board’s approval before buying new surveillance technology, putting the burden on city agencies to publicly explain why they want the tools as well as the potential harms. It would also require an audit of any existing surveillance tech—things like gunshot-detection systems, surveillance cameras, or automatic license plate readers—in use by the city; officials would have to report annually on how the technology was used, community complaints, and with whom they share the data.” There should be very spirited debate about this proposal!

The sub-header of the recent Pacific Standard article The Boundary Between Our Bodies and Our Tech is “Our online identities have become a part of who we are in the real world—whether we’re always aware of it or not.” The author asks readers to conduct a thought experiment:

Where do you end? Not your body, but you, the nebulous identity you think of as your “self.” Does it end at the limits of your physical form? Or does it include your voice, which can now be heard as far as outer space; your personal and behavioral data, which is spread out across the impossibly broad plane known as digital space; and your active online personas, which probably encompass dozens of different social media networks, text message conversations, and email exchanges? This is a question with no clear answer, and, as the smartphone grows more and more essential to our daily lives, that border’s only getting blurrier.

The rest of the article provides a compelling analysis of the blurred lines.

In the September 2018 issue of Wired magazine Clive Thompson argues that we need software to help slow us down, not speed up. He discusses “friction engineering,” which is “software that’s designed not to speed us up but to slow us down. It’s a principle that inverts everything we know about why software exists.” In social scientific circles, a great example the article cites is the social media site Nextdoor’s attempts to redesign its software to reduce racial profiling [see also my August 13, 2018 post.]

One strange item about the article: the online title is “We Need Software to Help Us Slow Down, Not Speed up.” In the print magazine, however, the article appears on page 38 as “Slow Software: In Praise of Fiction.” Weird.

In an August 2016 post about racial profiling on Nextdoor.com, I noted that the social networking site was experimenting with ways to curb actions based on racial stereotypes and biases. I just discovered a May 2018 Harvard Business Review article that provides an analysis of their efforts. The author notes, “how Nextdoor responded illustrates not only the importance of reacting quickly in a crisis, but how useful a data-driven, agile approach can be. Agile teams benefit from different perspectives, skills, and expertise, so the co-founders assembled a small, diverse team to tackle the issue.” Hopefully Nextdoor will continue to have success in its efforts to combat racial profiling.

In “The Rise of ‘Urban Tech,'” urban planner Richard Florida argues, “from food-delivery startups to mapping and co-living companies, technology focused on urban systems is drawing billions of dollars in venture capital.” These “urban tech” firms are “unleashing a new round of creative destruction on cities. Like previous economic transformations, the rise of urban tech and the emergence of the city as the primary platform for economic organization will not be without growing pains. It will be up to urban leaders and the struggles of workers and citizens to channel this transformation in a democratic way, so that it respects the needs of all city dwellers and creates prosperity for all.” Vigilance is required.

Dockless bike sharing is growing in many cities around the world. Wired magazine has an interesting story about the city of Seattle’s efforts to implement a dockless bike sharing system: “the city allowed three companies—Ofo, LimeBike, and Spin—to deploy up to 4,000 bikes each in a six-month trial, in return for a deluge of data about their customers and operations. Seattle planners wanted to understand in granular detail how the systems would work, and how its citizens would use them.” The data are now being analyzed. Hopefully insights will emerge that can be applied to other cities!

The 2020 U.S. Census is right around the corner. I’m looking forward to finally being able to definitely say that I’ve submitted a census form. I probably received a form as a homeowner in Minnesota in 2010, but don’t recall it. I lived an apartments in 2000 and 1990, and don’t remember receiving forms then either. So I am not sure if I was counted in the past 30 years (!). Perhaps digital data collection will increase the accuracy of the count, but there are pros and cons to using more technology in the census. We’ll see…

The Atlantic magazine has launched an interesting new podcast series about the intersections of technology and society: in 8 episodes, Crazy/Genius “asks big questions about everything from online dating to blockchain to space exploration. Is technology moving us forward or backward? How did we get here — and where are we headed?” Up first: “Why Can’t Facebook Tell the Truth?”

“Soon, talking to strangers will be even easier” is the title of a recent article in Wired magazine about language translation technology. Author David Pierce begins the article with a description of current technology that helps travelers navigate foreign locations. He continues with “as translation tech improves, though, the benefit will extend way beyond just helping you get around. When translation happens quickly and accurately enough to have a conversation that spans two languages and feels almost natural, we’ll be able to experience places in an entirely new way.” Maybe the technology will evolve to better enable conversation between two people speaking the same language but using different dialects. For example, I was surprised by how many times I did not quite get what a British person was saying to me during my recent vacation to London. Eventually, of course, translator microbes will solve all of our problems :).