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?

Education Technology has spread into every field and discipline, with numerous applications in each. This creates a seeming invincible ubiquity, untangling the interconnected lines of data-tracing is nearly impossible. Meinke’s “Student Data Harvested by Education Publishers: They haz more than u think,” discusses the overlapping strategies used by social media platforms and educational platforms to collect user information and process it to ostensibly create better interactions for all involved.

Many of the articles in this week’s readings discuss Cambridge Analytics’ use of Facebook data to facilitate getting targeted outreach and content to users for political ends. This revelation had little true impact on Facebook: their stock value temporarily dipped, and Zuckerbot had to go before Congress. Otherwise, not much happened, people still regularly went on Facebook to add their own personal content and click preferences to the information they explicitly volunteered to the create their user profile. “But education is different,” says Meinke: we take classes to earn degrees and are entitled to a sense of safety and guardianship from our institutions. I agree that education is different but for very different reasons, unlike with social media- which has no proven role in education and is ostensibly “free” in the market sense of the word- interactive course content comes with a hefty price tag. Nowhere is it understood that the students’ data will be held, analyzed and disseminated in perpetuity in payment for access to said content/platform. Indeed, the price of textbooks (e-book or dead tree) has gone up by triple digit percentages in the last decade, even adjusting for dollar values. Students have paid enough upfront for their privacy to have it remain intact, and to have access to their course content beyond the semester. Program learning outcomes are based on the idea that students will enlarge upon skills learned in previous courses.

The rationale for granting access to learning management system data to publishers is posited as the facilitation of platform use by both faculty and student. However, in the nascence of online textbook augmentation students entered a long activation key and would create their profile by selecting the school and course in which they were enrolled. There was nothing wrong with this model, however, the trend towards single sign on (SSO) has created a myth that people cannot handle having multiple logins and also that unique logins will deter platform uses. We can all agree that having to create a new account instead of using an existing Facebook or Google account will probably give some users pause enough to reconsider their buying or comment-posting choices- but there is a critical distinction between the user of mass-published educational content and just about any other instance of use that online learning is frequently compare to: the end-user has already paid to access the platform. The enticement and marketing ships have long sailed. Also, the pursuit of credentialed education should not be trivialized as being tantamount to posting comments or other casual engagements.

I would add to some of the responses in the Davis and Bulger interview with a recommendation that social media not be used in a classroom setting.  “One of the things that excites faculty the most and what they want to learn more about is different ways to use social media in the classroom. An assumption I encounter frequently is that as students are already using social media, social media will be easy to adopt and adapt for learning both for the professor and the student….” We may argue that there is no such thing as true privacy online, but the latent, abstract and remote impact of Cambridge Analytics knowing bits of your professional, social and academic life versus the immediate, and potentially devastating impact of your teacher or boss seeing these overlaps are incomparable.

For the class:

Do you use social media as part of your course activities? If so how?

Can open educational resources combat the integration and slick marketing of the big publishers?

In the wake of Cambridge Analytics, repeated data-breaches across industries, and the lackadaisical responses they’ve garnered, along with the high usage and access provided by freemium platforms, is their room for social action to preserve privacy or is it a matter of personal choice?

In her 2013 article, Noble describes a Google search that she conducted in 2011 using the keywords “Black girls.” She observed that both the advertisements and top 10 search results were dominated by hypersexualized and pornographic portrayals of Black women. Noble argues that these results demonstrate how the Internet is far from a democratic utopia. Instead, search engine results reproduce and amplify misrepresentations of race and gender and reinforce the social, political, and economic disenfranchisement of women and people of color. Noble’s research demonstrates the inaccuracy of users’ perceptions of search engine results as being neutral or objective and reveals how the organization of results is heavily influenced by commercial interests.

In their 2017 article, Noble and Roberts critique higher education’s reliance on learning technologies which also monitor students by collecting their data. These “black-box technologies” are not transparent about their data collection practices and often use this data to improve their services and attract clients. The authors argue that IT professionals and technology scholars need to work together to think through the social implications of using these learning technologies before adopting them.

Discussion Questions:

To what extent did Noble’s 2013 article change your views about search engines? Have you observed biases or misrepresentations in your search engine results?

Noble and Roberts ask: “Will the future of knowledge reside with powerful information systems, unknowable algorithms, and privatized islands of data? If so, at what cost? Further, what role do we, as information technologists and educators, play in identifying and discussing these nuances with our students, staff, faculty, and campus administrators?”

In interviews with faculty, Head et al. (2020) observed that faculty rarely discussed these issues with their students. What would you say to your students about search engine algorithms and black-box technologies? How could you integrate an assignment related to these issues into your course?

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, created almost 20 years ago, that allows for nearly anyone to edit.  The three articles that I focused on for this week’s discussion address the community and environment within Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, by presenting a mixture of “truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods.” 

In Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly, by Julia Jacobs, there was discussion about the narrative that can potentially form a ‘barrier’ to gender equity.  The article gives a few examples of stories where editors who were feminist or L.G.B.T. were subject to harassment from other Wikipedia editors.  The article also describes different tools (for example, “partial block”) developed by Wikipedia to monitor and restrict users from editing specific pages on which they have proved to be a problem.

In Chapter 1 of Good Faith Collaboration, by Joseph Reagle, Reagle discusses the overall environment of Wikipedia and some of the related “accounting processes” established by Wikipedia.  The three core policies discussed are “Neutral Point Of View”, “No Original Research,” and “Verifiability.”  These core policies are essential to the functionality of Wikipedia to perform as an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Lastly, in Meet The Climate Change Denier Who Became The Voice Of Hurricane Sandy On Wikipedia, by Dan Nosowitz, Nosowitz interviews a Wikipedia contributor, named Ken Mampel.  Mampel is an unemployed, 56-year-old Floridian who was recognized as the most active contributor to the Wikipedia page on Hurricane Sandy.  The article discusses Mampel’s resistance towards acknowledging “global warming” or “climate change” and any related edits to these topics on the Hurricane Sandy Wikipedia page.  Throughout the article there is discussion of edits that are made in “good faith” versus “bad faith.”

These articles led me to think about how they may relate to our current uncertain circumstances as CUNY community members within the COVID era and how these circumstances may affect us as professionals in our respective disciplines moving forward.

Some questions/prompts that I would propose for us to discuss through the aforementioned perspective would be:

• Who decides that a group of individuals is “qualified” to implement restrictions/policies on a larger collection of “non-qualified” individuals?
• As social media continues to be a source of instantaneous information transfer, how do social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook converge/diverge from online platforms like Wikipedia? Where and how do “fact-checks” originate on these platforms?
• With one of Wikipedia’s core content policies (“No Original Research”) and other social media platforms in mind, when does “original research” no longer become “original”?  How might this impact you as you continue to do research? How might this impact your pedagogical approaches toward your students (especially those from underrepresented groups) as they seek to do research? 

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and one of the many digital tools that exist in the internet. It is a global collaborative effort, that is rooted in providing access to information to peoples across the world, in a variety of languages.

These two articles address an issue that is prevalent in Wikipedia: the gender disparity among “Wikipedians” and Wikipedia Editors. Khanna points out that during a survey conducted on December 2011, it was reported that 90% of the editors in Wikipedia are male, 9% are female, and 1% are transexual/transgender (N=6503). But, at the same time, the article points out that “Among editors who had joined in 2011, 14 percent were female compared to 10 percent for 2010, 9 percent for 2009 and 8 percent for editors who had joined in 2008 and participated in this survey. Possible explanations include that Wikipedia has been attracting a higher ratio of women recently, or that female editors leave the project sooner.” Meaning that there was a small increase of women that were joining Wikipedia as new editors, compared to previous years.

• How can we, as community members and scholars in training, continue to diversify and expand our contributions to educational platforms like Wikipedia?

FemTechNet offers one approach: Using Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool and as as a medium for teaching about Feminism and technology. The article by FemTechNet offers us an opportunity to reflect on how educators can use Wikipedia to engage students in democratizing knowledge production, editing articles, and to work in a collaborative environment that fosters research and writing. The “magic” of Wikipedia is that you can find literally any article on any subject matter, and you have the opportunity to create new content. It can be used in multiple subjects, from the Bench Sciences, to the Humanities. The major contribution of this piece is to provide an opportunity to address gender bias in Wikipedia, and to think about strategies and pedagogical approaches that can be incorporated in the classroom and in community spaces to edit and contribute to the platform.

One project that uses Wikipedia to address these gender biases is Art+Feminism (https://www.artandfeminism.org), specifically in the arts. This initiative is now expanding to other demographic groups, such as inviting and promoting organizing among new Latinx editors in Wikipedia.

• What projects or initiatives do you know are doing similar efforts with Wikipedia or in other platforms to address these issues?
• What other approaches can we as educators use in our classrooms and in our communities that can help address gender, racial, ethnic biases in technology?

In “Quantify Everything: A Dream of a Feminist Data Future”, Amelia Abreu discusses the Quantified Self movement, emphasizing “self-knowledge through numbers”, and how it ignores the context in which data are collected while also excluding populations, including caregivers. Caregivers are “human data trackers”, responsible for monitoring their charges’ needs and behaviors, though this facet of life is largely ignored and unquantified in the QS movement. Data, instead, is largely considered and interpreted from a white, middle- to upper-class male point of view.

• One quote from the article that really struck me is “For a movement that promises ‘self knowledge through numbers’, there’s little emphasis placed on what those numbers might reflect outside of their immediate circumstances.” Do you feel that the QS movement, and society at large, fails to appropriately consider and interpret measurements and data from students and instructors? What do we make of students’ grades—we place emphasis on grades for grad school and financial aid, purposes, but do we take into account everything in a student’s life that contributes to the grade that they earn? How much do we interpret grades as a reflection of the instructor’s teaching style, and less so as an indication of the student’s abilities? Do we quantify all the work that students do, or do we allow work to go ungraded? Have instructors structured classes in such a way that those points that are quantified will reflect better on the instructor? How do students interpret their grades in relation to themselves—what do they actually learn about themselves, and how do they apply this new “knowledge”? What purpose do grades serve outside of the classroom setting?
• Similar to caregivers, is all of the effort that instructors put into teaching (especially adjuncts and graduate student instructors) quantified? What aspects of teaching are ignored? How do the wages given to lower-ranked instructors fail to consider their efforts and work, as well as circumstances outside the classroom? What kinds of data do we as instructors use to gain knowledge about our teaching practices and how well we help our students?

Francesca Tripodi discusses how engagement with Yik Yak, a once-popular social media app, affects students’ interactions and sense of belonging within college campus communities in “Yakking about college life: Examining the role of anonymous forums on community identity formation”. While the anonymity of the app and the ease of usage made it appealing to many, the pervasiveness of the app across the campus focused on in Tripodi’s study made it simultaneously appealing and a must-have to some while enhancing feelings of exclusion for marginalized individuals. Yik Yak got its start in the Greek system on campus, and thus was available to those in a place of privilege (and not to those in such a place) from its conception.

Those Tripodi interviewed mentioned hesitation to post a Yak when they first downloaded the app, and they spent large amounts of time drafting Yaks they hoped would garner positive attention from others in the community; indeed, a specific formula for a “successful” Yak (as determined by upvotes) was often adhered to by app users. Some were able to find support from other students in Yaks posting about mental health struggles and feelings of burnout (and made use of the anonymous posting to feel more comfortable sharing such Yaks in the first place). However, those who did not feel a sense of belonging or inclusion on the physical campus were less inclined to use Yik Yak because of this lack of belonging; the app belongs to only a subset of the campus population to which these marginalized users do not belong, and thus further excludes students from the campus community.

With the history and usage of Yik Yak in mind:

• Tripodi discusses the notion that the anonymity of Yik Yak would allows users to more freely post content that they would not state in public. Considering that students spent significant amounts of time drafting Yaks to gain positive feedback, and content was often recycled, how much do you agree with this notion? Do you think that without the ability to upvote Yaks, content would be less formulaic?
• Do you feel students engage with the discussion board and other platforms in a similar way to the Yik Yak users Tripodi discussed, in that students tend to conform to the pattern and content of what others have already shared in order to gain approval from instructors and peers, and limit the thoughts and opinions they share if they deviate too far from the majority? Now that we have moved our classes online, do you feel that new teaching practices are marginalizing students’ voices more? For those of you who use the discussion board, are the posts you see more varied, or are your students simply agreeing with what others have said? What steps are you taking to keep all of your students engaged with your course?
• Do you think there would be differences in engagement and content on Yik Yak between residential campuses and commuter schools like CUNY? What forms of communication or social media to students rely on today to form online communities with other students, especially now that all interactions are off-campus?  

The readings I focused on this week were about feminism, marginalization, and discrimination in online spaces. Bailey’s All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave introduces the argument that digital humanities conversations focus on white males. Typical topics of digital humanities are inevitably white, masculine, and able-bodied, leaving people of color, women, and disabled people on the margins. Bailey explores works that address minorities within digital humanities, looking for those that are inclusive and accessible. There is both the issue of marginalized people being left out of the digital humanities as well as the exclusion of digital society from typical humanities studies. Bailey describes the solution as “add and stir”. As academic groups diversify, they must be dispersed evenly, but there are structural issues which prevent minorities from entering certain institutions.

• How might we accommodate the inclusion of women, people of color, and disabled people in the digital humanities conversation?
• Given that our society is becoming increasingly technological, how do we convert traditional humanities studies to address digital humanities without losing marginalized groups?

In Hashtag Feminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the Other #FemFuture Loza recounts how mainstream and digital feminism has largely benefited white women and excluded minorities. There are many movements and hashtags orchestrated by women of color to have their voices heard among the needs of white feminists. Additionally, shocking tags like #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen are used to broadcast to white feminists that not everyone’s voices are being heard. Loza also addresses that many white women feel threatened by such bold statements and here is backlash that pits women against each other. Furthermore, women outside of the black-white binary may struggle even more to be included over the clash between these two sides, as they cannot place themselves on either side.

• In what ways can we make sure our attempts to be inclusive are not simultaneously marginalizing women, people of color, disabled people, and etc?
• How do you practice feminism or equality in your own classrooms? Is marginalization something you ever encounter as an instructor or student?

                Fillapacchi notices a startling categorization in Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists. There is an “American Novelists” section and an “American Women Novelists” section, but no section called “American Male Novelists”. This article was written in 2013, and I checked, there is indeed now an “American Male Novelists” category, so the argument does not currently apply. However, Fillapacchi uses her connections to spread the word. Wikipedia users quickly began adding female authors to the “American Novelists” page so it was no longer just presumed to be male. Wikipedia is certainly not the only institution to give a “female” qualifier for women while allowing men to hold the standard/general title.

• I invite anyone to discuss issues they may have relating to sexism or racism here at CUNY (or elsewhere) if they have any topics they want to bring up.
• I also think it would be okay for this to be a place to voice general concerns we have in these stressful times that we might want to discuss during class, considering sexism and racism may not be on the top of anyone’s mind right now.