Subtitle
featuring Dan Greene, Postdoctoral Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England
Teaser
How did we learn that we need to learn to code—or else? This talk draws on an ethnography of a library system amidst a massive digital transition, tracing how strained public institutions re-frame the problem of persistent, structural poverty in the information economy as a ‘digital divide’ in order to secure political legitimacy and manage overwhelming urban crises: homelessness, precarious employment, municipal austerity. Three years of fieldwork and interviews with librarians and homeless patrons reveal how the hope for computer-assisted social mobility is built into the infrastructure and operation of the library itself, over and against competing visions for the space. Exploring the institutional roots of political frameworks like the ‘digital divide’ and the ‘skills gap’ helps to deconstruct them and reveal their effects, but it also allows us to reconstruct a new paradigm through which we can understand the digital networks that tie us to different institutions and mediate our economic lives; an approach I call ‘technologies of inequality.’
Parent Event
Event Date
Jan
31
2017
12:00pm
to
Jan
31
2017
12:00pm
Thumbnail Image:
Tuesday, January 31, 2017 at 12:00 pmBerkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard UniversityHarvard Law School campus, Wasserstein Hall
How did we learn that we need to learn to code—or else? This talk draws on three years of fieldwork among Washington, D.C.’s public libraries, and interviews with librarians and homeless patrons, to explore how poverty comes to be understood as a ‘digital divide’ and how that framework changes the nature and purpose of public institutions in an era of skyrocketing inequality.
About Dan
Dan Greene is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. His research focuses on the future of work and its shadow--the future of unemployment. A former social worker, Dan received his PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland, where he was also a University Flagship Fellow and a member of the EViD (Ethics and Values in Design) Lab. His dissertation (and current book project, tentatively titled The Promise of Access: Hope and Inequality in the Information Economy) draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to explore the reproduction of the digital divide and how urban institutions like startups, charter schools, and public libraries make the problem of poverty a problem of technology and remake themselves in the process. At Microsoft Research, he’s beginning his next project: A history of technologies used for hiring and firing, and the automation of human resource management. Dan’s research has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Communication, Surveillance & Society, and TripleC. You can find him online at dmgreene.net.
Links
- Dan Greene's research site: dmgreene.net
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