the reality tunnel

Here are two new instances of technology (both via boingboing) that seem to really aid social justice movements.

Cause Caller is a VOIP tool that lets you define a cause and contacts related to that cause (for instance, congressional representatives on a panel investigating a particular issue).  Users can then enter their phone number and the application will call them back and connect them with the different contacts.

ICED (I Can End Deportation) is a video game made by the human rights group Breakthrough that, according to Breakthrough’s website:

puts you in the shoes of an immigrant to illustrate how unfair immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights. These laws affect all immigrants: legal residents, those fleeing persecution, students and undocumented people.

The title to this post is from a young person quoted in Susan Herrig’s article Questioning the generational divide: Technological exoticism and adult construction of online youth identity. (In: D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (pp. 71-94). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.) which deals with the differing perspectives of digital media from adults and youth.

I found the discussion of how youth use media pretty interesting:

Young people use new technologies for social ends that are much the same as for earlier
generations using old technologies. Young people instant message, text message, or email their friends much as my Baby Boomer generation talked on landline telephones. They abbreviate and use language creatively to signal their in-group identity, much as my friends and I wrote backwards (manipulating the affordances of the hand-written
medium) and created special writing conventions to pass notes in class. They flirt online, while we flirted on the phone or in the hallways at school. They express their daily angst in blogs, whereas my generation kept hand-written diaries. They painstakingly craft their profiles in social networking sites to win the approval of their peers, while we dressed up to be “seen” hanging out at school dances and community youth events. Moreover, “search engines [function] as a library, … product-based sites as a mall, and downloadable movies and games as a theater or video arcade.” As was also true when I was young, the ends are more interesting and important to the participants than the technological means, especially if the means have been available all one’s life.

as well as the discussion of some possible motivating factors of youth technology use:

Moreover, contrary to the stereotype that the digital generation is enamored of technology, for many youth, technology use may not be the most fun activity, but rather what is most available, a substitute for something they would rather do. In a recent survey of media use by 6-17 year olds in the U.K, a majority of teens said that they would rather go out to a movie or do something with friends than stay home and consume media, and they complained that their neighborhoods did not provide enough activities for youth. Increasingly, parents are afraid to let their children go out for fear that they will not be safe, especially in urban areas. According to new media researcher Henry Jenkins, more elaborate indoor media environments have evolved to compensate for unsafe or otherwise inhospitable outdoor environments. danah boyd, in her chapter in this volume, argues that social networking spaces such as MySpace.com substitute for traditional offline hangouts, whose numbers have dwindled dramatically in recent decades in the U.S.

Link to PDF of article.

I was browsing the web looking for information about social justice movements and technology and I found a blog post talking about the involvement of women in free/libre/opensource software projects.  The conversation centers around the question of whether the disparity between male and female participation in FLOSS projects is because of fundamental differences in preferences based on gender; like women preferring more social interactions which some perceive as rare within the FLOSS-development world or women preferring not to allocate their leisure time towards software development; or  larger cultural factors (which seem to parallel some things I’ve read elsewhere about gender, power, and sexism).   The discussion is nuanced and civil and pretty interesting:

The reliance on long hours of intensive computing in writing successful code means that men, who in general assume that time outside of waged labour is ‘theirs’, are freer to participate than women, who normally still assume a disproportionate amount of domestic responsibilities. Female F/LOSS participants, however, seem to be able to allocate a disproportionate larger share of their leisure time for their F/LOSS activities. This gives an indication that women who are not able to spend as much time on voluntary activities have difficulties to integrate into the community.

Interestingly, this point seems to suggest that it is the domestic responsibilities, whether perceived or real, that make women feel they don’t have enough free time to contribute effectively to open source projects. I figured that women simply wanted to take on activities outside of technology moreso than men, and maybe this gives a possible reason why. If women have been responsible for certain aspects of home life for many centuries, then it is not hard to believe that they would feel even today that they did not ‘own’ their free time in the same way as men, even if in modern times these responsibilities don’t always exist.

Through the blog post, I found out about Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Policy Support project whose report on gender and FLOSS provided a lot of the context for the blog’s discussion.  I also found out about the GNOME project’s Women’s Summer Outreach Program.  Which got funding from Google to provide 3 additional allocations for Summer of Code GNOME projects for developers who were women.  I liked this from the program’s web page:

Isn’t this unfair to men? What about people who were rejected from Google’s Summer of Code?

The recent FLOSSPOLS report describes many opportunities that women miss out on when getting involved with computing and free software, ranging from being introduced to computers at a later age, being less encouraged to specialise in computing, having few female role models, having less free time to spend programming than men do, and being on the receiving end of sexism when they do try to get involved. We think it’s this imbalance that’s unfair, and we’re trying to help fix it.

As for whether this is unfair to Summer of Code applicants, we don’t think so – this is GNOME’s money to use how it sees fit, and we want to use it to correct a disturbing lack of participation from women in the GNOME development community. We’re doing this for outreach reasons as well as for technical ones, and so just adding another three projects to the twenty Summer of Code projects being sponsored wouldn’t achieve our stated goals. If you’d like to talk about this with us, feel free to get in touch.

Link to Women in Open Source II blog post from The Female Perspectiveon Computer Science blog.

Online classes were just emerging as I left college.  There was a piece on Morning Edition this morning about the technology and trends in general and an instance of them at on University of Illinois branch.  I think this technology is inevitable and it does have some egalitarian advantages, as the president of the University of Illinois system state:

“But let’s be honest, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who don’t have the privilege of earning their education by leaving home, giving up their job, leaving the family and living on one of these campuses,” White said.

Still, there are also implications for a trend that is apparent even with living in a college town and meeting a lot of students on tour.  The idea of a university as a forum and a place where you might get exposed to unexpected ideas or ideas across disciplines is quickly eroding.  Technology plays a role in furthering this cultural shift.  As one professor says:

“But I can assure you that the next generation of students are ‘24/7 students’ that want stuff right now. They don’t want to come to your class and listen to a professor lecture and tell funny stories,” Mims said. “They want just what they need to succeed in that class and get a job and be successful in life.”

I did a fundraising event for Pages to Prisoners in partnership with a local multi-cultural sorority.  The sorority members made a presentation about prison and education issues, and one woman read an article about the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that allows incarcerated people in New York get a liberal arts college degree.  When one of the inmates who was participating in the program was asked why it was important for inmates to receive a liberal arts education as opposed to vocational training, the man said that while job training could teach you how to do a specific job, the Bard education that he was getting through the program was teaching him how to think.

I fear that the “I want what I think I want when I want it” collegian is going to further erode the value of knowledge and discourse in culture.

Link

My started a blog which comments on a recent local radio interview with computer researcher Chris Soghoian.

WFHB describes the interview this way:

Does the government’s “no-fly” list make air travel any safer? Do other supposed “security measures” really protect us from terrorists? Host Chad Carrothers spends an hour with Chris Soghoian, the Bloomington grad student who drew national attention when he set up a website that allowed visitors to print fake Northwest Airlines boarding passes in an effort to expose flaws in national security policy. The federal Transportation Security Administration forced him to take down the page and the FBI raided his Bloomington home and “borrowed” his computers and passport. Find out why Chris did what he did, his views on the role that researchers, academics, and common citizens take in studying, criticizing and pointing out the flaws in our security systems, and why he thinks the federal government hasn’t learned the intended lesson in this WFHB local radio exclusive.

I thought the WFHB interview was a disappointing though, becuase even if the way the U.S. views security is fundamentally flawed, and we aren’t made more safe, Chris still invests himself, both in terms of the time and energy of his research, and in terms of belief in the narrative of security. Fundamentally, this narrative of security suggests that there is an amorphous human threat set on harming and amorphous sense of “us”, and that we can do something to protect “ourselves” from it.  The thing that is troubling about this narrative of security is that it never fully aknowledges that the threats we perceive are from other humans, nor does it seek to understand those who we perceive as threatening in a way that is more complex (or even compassionate) than stereotypes or prejudices.  Stepping outside of that narrative, I find that the prospect of violence is still troubling, but that the motivations for violence can be quite rational and mirror motivations or violence that follows from my life, or its cultural context.  So, trying to protect myself from harm seems pretty futile, either personally, in belief in the idea of security, or through the proxy of goverment in waging wars or making policy decisions about airline regulations.  It seems far more likely that some kind of harm, either physical or psychological, will follow from these actions than some kind of harm will befall me as a result of a terrorist attack.  I hope that we can live our lives in a way that seeks to understand others, and seeks to change the relationship between people, or nation-states, or cultures that make violence and retaliation seem almost rational.

Tor, which is discussed at the end of the interview, is pretty awesome, however, at least from a technological standpoint.  It’s software that is fairly easy to use that allows you to anonymize your web (and other Internet) traffic. Still, I don’t want to get caught up in thinking of this cat and mouse game between government and individuals, repression and privacy.  I’d like to think that I’m accountable for the communication that I make and consume and that if I’m targetted for that, I can address it headlong and get support from my friends and community rather than having to hide things that are totally reasonable.