On September 10, CITAP hosted Daniel Greene to discuss his book The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope in conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Alice Marwick. They discuss how the problem of poverty became a problem of technology and the skills to use it, how philanthropic donations have changed how public institutions operate, and how ‘learn to code’ became the default response to the broken labor markets of the twenty-first century.
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42:19
Where Do We Go From Here?
We've explored how disinformation plays on our biases, fuels our anger, and even nudges us to find only what we wanted to learn. The mess is daunting. Building a healthier, informed democracy is not an individual project, but it's one we begin imagining in this episode. Given what we know about the problem, how do we begin to fix things?
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38:39
What does tech owe democracy?
Technology platforms didn't create our political divides. They aren't blameless, either. Host Daniel Kreiss sits down with Katie Harbath & Tressie McMillan Cottom to understand the role of "efficiency machines" in social contexts and imagine the guardrails we need for social media and other tech companies to become stewards of a healthy democracy—because public life is far easier to destroy than rebuild.
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41:51
Admit it, You Love Being Angry
Disinformation is social—it's designed for sharing, to draw bright lines between "us" and some other "them." To do that, disinformation campaigns mess with our emotions. These narratives can convert feelings of anxiety, fear, and powerlessness into bright, actionable anger, or sow doubt and uncertainty in the face of optimism. Host Shannon McGregor digs deep into all the feels and how to channel good anger in the face of these manipulations.
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48:05
Across Oceans, Tables, & Platforms
Online, information and disinformation cross huge physical distances easily. Applications like WeChat and YouTube keep Asian American communities more connected to far-flung friends and family than ever. By comparison, bridging the dinner table and its language and generational differences can prove much more daunting. Host Rachel Kuo explores how disinformation circulates in Asian American communities, from the workings of 'auntie information networks' to the role of history in shaping how communities access and evaluate information.
Technology—even when “sufficiently advanced”—isn’t magic. Algorithms aren’t spells cast by programmers. When we imbue tech with mystical powers, we lose sight of the human factors, from economics to culture, and politics, that shape how it’s actually designed and used.
Does Not Compute is a podcast about technology, people, and power brought to you by the Center for Information, Technology, & Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill. At CITAP, we study technology as it’s tangled up in our lives and societies. On Does Not Compute, we’ll pry into the black boxes and get to know the people behind the code to understand technology platforms in context. Together, we’ll explore how old inequities get reinvented on new platforms, how unexpected communities unite for good (and harm), and how media manipulators play on our identities and emotions to spread lies.
If we want to fix our relationship to technology, we have to understand what’s broken first. Let’s dig in.
South Africa