I'm beyond excited for the standing room only panel at AoIR 2024, "What does a good internet look like, and how do we get there?"
Helen Kennedy opens the panel by asking the audience to think about how imagination can help us think through normative questions re: what the internet can look like. She opens with Ruha Benjamin: "Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within."
Ros Williams then talks about how the term "equity" is polyvalent because the internet is a tool of (in)equality. We have to be grounded in critique, but think of equity as a heuristic to shape the boundaries of what is / isn't desirable. They reference the INDIGENIA project, which researches how gen AI can be used for Indigenous futures and "digital good living."
Minna Vigren is up: why does sustainability matter? It directs us to think through the fragility of the planet and the lack of sustainability of digital life.
Jonathan Ong (UMass Amherst) then links resilience to Global Majority perspectives. Resilience is ostensibly about supporting individuals' and communities' wellbeing to address future challenges. However, it's easily hijacked by technocrats / political elites to sell their tools- and tech-first solutions. We need to develop critical analytics to support bottom-up and community-driven digital interventions. We should also be wary of disempowering "digital dystopia" narratives that rob the Global South minoritized communities' of their resourcefulness, cunning, and self-determination! How are Global Majority tech and democracy programs overdetermined by Global North donor agenda? Check out Glo Tech Lab for more.
Now we're going to hear from some fantastic PhD students about some examples! Shaoying Zhang opens by talking about digital wellbeing and people's digital disconnection practices in China. How do different people perceive "digital wellbeing" and who is able to define it? Digital disconnection is commoditized by services: apps let users plant "trees" whenever they put down their phone.
Arathy SB is now talking about intersectional experiences of digital menstrual tracking users in India. What would a good digital tracking system look like? Design often centers cis-het women, but what about marginalized menstruators?
Vimbai Chapungu's research investigates the digital expansion of Black-owned hair businesses on sustainability and equity. Racial equity = addressing historical inequalities. Sustainability = ethical sourcing, environmental impact reduction. How are online Black-owned hair businesses challenging industry norms and impacting equity and sustainability? Colonialism has led to harmful practices (carcinogenic products, texturism). This industry is $6 billion!
Rhianne Jones is now going to talk about why all of this matters for practitioners. The BBC is mission driven and has normative ideas about what media + public interest can look like. It goes to the heart of what the org is all about. In industry, there are few resources devoted to these issues. How do we address this? Gen AI is a good example of this. Digital Good Network (DGN) is doing research on this. We're working with a wide range of orgs to better evaluate different facets of "digital good."
Jean Burgess is going to link these issues to major societal concerns. The combo of human-machine capabilities can create cohesive communities. The language is starting to shift and becoming more precise around sociotechnical systems. How do we get there? Through critically informed work that is literate in sociotechnical systems!
Q&A period
Q: where do we go from here? How do we scale these projects and talk to larger donors to get these projects to grow.
- A: Digital Good Index -- a lot of projects are thinking about harm mitigation rather than speculative futures. We want to provide a tool for orgs like donors to evaluate these projects.
Q: what is the "digital bad?" Who are those stakeholders? There are obvious baddies, but there's a lot in between.
- A: Gina Neff was inspired to create Digital Good Index in closed door discussions w institutional investors, who want out of fossil fuels, tobacco, etc. Investing in tech is "better." But they need heuristics for what "good" looks like.
- Helen Kennedy: the binary of "good" vs "bad" is problematic. But "good" has convening power! It is an object of study and not a given.
Q: how does this relate to actual communities? How do you negotiate with the right to refuse?
- A: Jonathan Ong wants to connect answer to digital bad and funding. He gets funding from lots of different groups that support Global South work. The report he's producing w collaborators in Brazil + Philippines is trying to capture people's frustrations where they are treated as implementors rather than creators. We need to think about the global aid industrial complex; they are tooled to spread Western "values" rather than solidarity. Who funds? Who is invested in taking "digital good" forward? Those are important questions we need to be asking.
- Helen Kennedy: there is room to say that tech should be refused / abolished. An example of this is "Public Voices in AI"
Q: When we try to scale tech, that's when the "good" goes away. How do we think about scale and multiplicity in these contexts?
- A: Jean Burgess -- I don't know the answer to that. History of social media is instructive. Scale is a logic of venture capital field; the real problem is concentration of power. The alternative to that is community-led, smaller initiatives.
- Ros Williams -- should the goal be scale? What's the opposite of scale? That is highly localized. Because it's so contextual, growing is actually counterproductive. Interoperability sounds lovely, but if we can't connect locally, that's a bigger problem.
Q: there's an orthodox view that badness is a regrettable byproduct of innovation and "good" slows things down. What are alt frameworks for temporality? Which have worked best to communicate this best to industry?
- A: Helen Kennedy -- it's easier not to be inclusive and being participatory takes longer. We have to stand our ground on somethings rather than cut corners.
- Gina Neff -- it's easy to say that we're good and industry is bad. It's much more nuanced than that.
Q: I see a lot of influencers talking about Black hair. Is that what you're talking about when you say "digital?"
- A: Vimbai Chibungu -- It's about the social media side of things. There weren't products that catered to women who were wearing more coiled styles.
Q: What is the role of companies in period-tracking and digital disconnection businesses?
- A: Shaoying Zhang -- Big Tech is trying to integrate digital disconnection into their platforms to shield themselves from societal criticism.
- Arathy SB -- we need to push against the pinkwashing of these tools. It's definitely be coopted but we need to ask about whose wellbeing is centered
Q: The platform cooperativism movement is one example of good. Decentralization / creating multiple networks is one approach; can we actually build completely new infrastructure for good?
Q: I have a playful question, esp re children. What's an example of the "good" you point to when someone asks?
- A: David Desmondhaigh -- the "generativity of the early web" (Jonathan Zittrain) is one way we can think about the digital good.
- Helen Kennedy -- the projects from the Digital Good Network! There are projects about queer joy, which must be central to creating good digital society.
- Jean Burgess -- there's something about the textures of our everyday lives and relationships; I wouldn't see all of the beautiful flowers that Gina sees everyday!
- Jon Ong -- Nora Suren + Jane Pyo have a project about how influencers are trying to create common ground between Asian and Black comms. They're both on the job market! Go to their panel tomorrow at 1 pm!
Q: There are daily humiliations that refugees go through when it comes to creating digital identity. Participatory design can address this, but there is a whole ecosystem like Thai gov / orgs like USAID who want to undermine this. Where do we go from here?
- A: Helen Kennedy -- we have connections to policymakers + practitioners through DGN, and we're trying to chip away from this. Seeta talked about feeling depleted when you're trying to build out justice. I see what we're doing is chipping away slowly through projects like Digital Good Index.