https://voicethread.com/share/14454769/

https://voicethread.com/share/14428794/

I had also signed up to write about Equality Lab’s “Digital Security in the Age of Trump,” but it looks like that page changed to something else—and it’s also functioning very wonkily.

Engine Failure

This is essentially a Q&A in Logic Magazine, with Safiya Umoja Noble (assistant professor in the Annenberg School of Communication at USC) and Sarah T. Roberts (assistant professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies). The discussion centers around these questions:

The internet is dominated by a handful of big companies. How do they organize information to maximize profit? What are the consequences for the public sphere? And what would a better model look like?

Noble’s responses take up most of the Q&A, with Roberts’ coming in briefly at the very end. What’s particularly interesting about Noble’s work is that she’s working on “a non-commercial search engine that makes its biases visible.” Noble goes into the problems with how Google, as a search engine, is built and functions—which is essentially how citation analysis works for papers in journals and publishing houses. The more that you are cited or linked to by someone else, the higher you will rank on Google. However, Noble’s point is that citation analysis doesn’t give you context for why someone decided to link to your work. The ranking system, then, is flawed because it can’t distinguish between whether someone is linking to your work because they are agreeing or disagreeing with you.

These flaws have been problematic and have broader social stakes. Noble bring ups a few examples:

• The porn industry was able to dominate much of the information landscape by having thousands of sites that link to each other and by buying a number of keywords. That’s why, for years, if you Googled terms like “black girls,” “asian girls,” and “latina girls,” without even adding the words “sex” or “porn,” you would get search results of pornography.
• Dylann Roof, the person responsible for the Charleston church shooting, noted that Googling the phrase “black on white crime,” after the Trayvon Martin shooting, played a significant role in forming his white supremacist views. The search results he got, of course, led to many white supremacist websites that used the phrase, but they didn’t return any results that could have provided context on the white supremacist movement.
• Immediately following the 2016 United States presidential election, when you did a search of election news on Google, it’d return results about Trump winning the popular vote—which was obviously false.
• What goes viral on Facebook can be very lucrative for Facebook, even if it’s highly problematic or controversial content. This includes fake news stories posted by Macedonian teenagers and videos of police murders of unarmed African Americans.

To go about improving on and beginning to resolve these issues, Noble believes that the following would help:

• The tech industry hiring people with advanced degrees in ethnic studies and women’s studies and sociology.
• Maximizing profit not being the only “value system” in our society. In Noble’s words, “Engineers may not be malicious, of course. But I don’t think they have the requisite education in the humanities and social sciences to incorporate other frameworks into their work. And we see the outcomes of that.”

When asked whether possible solutions could be trying to reform these companies from within, thinking about regulation, nationalization, and building alternatives, both Noble and Roberts said yes to all of those things.

Discussion Questions:

1. How would we get buy-in to something like the new type of search engine that Noble is working on and proposing? It certainly sounds intriguing and like a great idea—given all the problems that Google presents, which she outlined—but the reality, still, is that Google is widely recognized and used by everyone worldwide.
2. In terms of challenging the model of the internet being controlled by a handful of big companies that care more about profits than the larger ramifications on society, Roberts mentioned international examples where countries actually had success in regulating tech companies:

• • In 2000, the French government threatened to not let Yahoo operate in France if the platform continues to allow people to sell Nazi memorabilia on its auction site.
  • In Turkey, Facebook already has to operate under the condition that any material that relates to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party must be taken down.

Do you think the United States would get to the stage of being just as aggressive in regulating tech companies? Why or why not?

Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms

In this piece, Chris Gilliard discusses whether and how education can “save the web.” Gilliard goes into a few key concepts:

• Surveillance capitalism: a “form of information capitalism [that] aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control.” This has resulted in Web2.0, which consists of personalization, clickbait, and filter bubbles—“the only web most students know.” Gilliard believes the web is “broken” specifically because of surveillance capitalism, although he admits that “broken” isn’t the most accurate term. He writes, “A web based on surveillance, personalization, and monetization works perfectly well for particular constituencies, but it doesn’t work quite as well for persons of color, lower-income students, and people who have been walled off from information or opportunities because of the ways they are categorized according to opaque algorithms.”
• Digital redlining: “the creation and maintenance of technological policies, practices, pedagogy, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against specific groups.” Some examples of digital redlining that Gilliard brings up:
  • The process by which different schools get differential journal access. Here, digital redlining dictates how quality information gets locked by paywalls that prevent students from accessing that information.
  • The level of surveillance, in the form of analytics that predict grades or programs that suggest majors to students.
  • The degree that students who perform Google searches get certain information based on the type of machine they are using or get served ads for high-interest loans based on their digital profile. (Gilliard notes that the latter is a practice Google now bans.) Interestingly, this particular example slightly relates back to “Engine Failure.”
• Consent: Gilliard writes that “if higher education is to ‘save the web,’ we need to let students envision that something else is possible, and we need to enact those practices in classrooms.” In order for that to happen, he says that “consent” needs to mean more than “click here if you agree to these terms.”

Discussion Questions:

1. Gilliard ends his piece with this:
   

   Using higher education to “save the web” means leveraging the classroom to make visible the effects of surveillance capitalism. It means more clearly defining and empowering the notion of consent. Most of all, it means envisioning, with students, new ways to exist online.

   How would you go about doing these things in your own classroom? Is it even possible to use higher education to “save the web?”

2. What would the web look like if surveillance capitalism, information asymmetry, and digital redlining were not at the root of most of what students do online? This is a question Gilliard mentioned that we don’t know the answer to, but what do you think the web would look like if that were the case? Would it be the most ideal version of the web that we all wish we had now? Why or why not?