The Centre for Law, Technology and Society is delighted to announce the publication of Can’t Compute: Moving Towards an Equitable Digital World, edited by Suzie Dunn, Nasma Ahmed and Faculty member Dr. Florian Martin-Bariteau.
In today’s society, we all live in a digitally immersive context. While technology brings benefits and conveniences to our daily lives, many forms of technology reinforce individual and systemic biases, and injustices. Digital technologies have been shown to both replicate and amplify existing discriminatory social patterns. Algorithms and artificial intelligence have been shown to reinforce racial and gender stereotypes, social media has been used as a platform to promote hateful and violent speech, and privacy invasive tools, such as internet connected cameras, have been used as surveillance devices against populations already over policed and monitored, notably Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, and members of the LGBTQ2S+ community.
Despite these problems, technology has also provided unique opportunities for members of equity seeking groups. Smartphones have been used to capture and expose racist police brutality, social media has been used to build solidarity and social movements, and digital tools have been developed that advance the lifestyles of people living with disabilities.
As noted by the editors,
As digitalization increases, we can’t compute an equitable digital context without an understanding of those issues. We need those voices in tech, academic and social spaces. While there is an increase of thought leadership on these issues globally, there is a need to engage more fulsomely in a Canadian-specific context, in order to address the unique history of discrimination, equality, and colonialism from Canadian authors.
Available in open access, the Can’t Compute collection of essays aims at bridging this gap in Canadian studies to highlight technology issues that are relevant to members of equality-seeking groups, not simply by exploring those issues but by amplifying voices from those groups unrepresented in mainstream conversation about the digital context.
The personal narratives, scholarly articles, and fictional stories in Can’t Compute represent diverse voices and a broad range of topics in the sphere of digital technology. Each piece was written during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the editors,
A time when global inequities were intensified, there was a resurgence of far-right groups, abusive online behaviour was amplified at higher rates, and dependence on technologies was increasing at unprecedented levels. The impetus for bringing this collection together was to highlight the perspectives of people who work and live at the intersections, as there continues to be a significant gap in representation of these voices and issues in literature on technology, even as it becomes increasingly apparent that members of these equity-seeking groups often face a disproportionate brunt of technology's negative effects.
This multidisciplinary collection features a variety of writing styles and formats to describe the ways in which technology affects Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, people living with disabilities, women, gender minorities, and members of the LGBTQ2S+ community. These various vantage points provide an opportunity to explore the difficulties equity-seeking communities face when engaging with technology. In the chapters in this collection, the authors discuss how technological tools both connect people by creating spaces for community building, while also isolating people when digital spaces do not represent them, are not accessible to them, or are unsafe due to harassment and discrimination.
This collection of chapters written by academics, activists, and storytellers describes a multitude of ways that technology is impacting Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, people living with disabilities, women, gender-minorities, and members of the LGBTQ2S+ community. Equity-seeking groups have found new terrain on the Internet, with people gathering for positive, community-building experiences. However, these same technologies have also caused some of the most serious harms and exacerbated existing discrimination.
The editors hope that these chapters will help inform those researching, developing, and living with digital technologies regarding key issues faced by these equity-seeking groups. This collection builds on the foundational work done by previous authors and advocates, and seeks to inspire more writing, learning, and sharing on these issues in the future.
Download the book here in open access
In addition to being lead by two CLTS members, the collection includes contributions from PhD candidate Michelle Liu.
This project funded by the University of Ottawa Research Chair in Technology and Society.