data c104 hce tools

What are the 11 HCE “tools”?

Agency, Classification, Co-production, Identity/Positionality, Labor, Narratives, Performativity, Power, Representation, Sociotechnical Sytems, and Vulnerability.

def: Agency

the ability or capacity to act or exert power

How does “agency” relate to technology?

informs the way in which people both perceive and exercise their capacity to exert some degree of control over the sociotechnical relations in which they are enmeshed

What are examples of “agency” in the class?

Patients tracking their health through data apps and devices

Classification

Implicit and explicit social organization of beings and knowledge into discrete categories governed by identifiable principles.

Classification influence

Societies produce knowledge and do work (e.g. with technologies) by sorting, ordering, and classifying phenomena in the world. Classification systems inform social order and vice versa.

What are some examples of “classification” in class?

Air Quality Data, Racial Classification in Apartheid South Africa

Co-production

Technology is co-produced with society.

Examples of co-production

Ideas of privacy co-produced with social media platforms, statistical tools are co-produced with the formation of the nation-state, ethical codes are co-produced with professions, labor conditions in the datafied world are co-produced with technologies of surveillance

Identity/Positionality

Life-shaping and socially conditioned aspects of selfhood, such as gender, race, class, disability status, income, immigration status. Identity is co-produced with technology.

Relationship between identity and positionality

Identity is not only about how you see yourself but also how society sees and treats you (positionality).

Examples of “identity/positionality”

• Disparate impact of algorithms on different identities (facial recognition technologies; predictive policing)

• Social media activism as a component in the civil rights struggle for the recognition and rights for people with particular identities

• Self-tracking technologies built around particular concept of identity (self-aware, efficient)

Labor

The socially organized use of human bodies and lifetime to reproduce the material conditions of human life. Labor is also a social agent - “organized labor” can be a political force that shapes the conditions under which labor takes place

What does understanding labor do for us?

Asking about labor helps us look to sociotechnical processes of production, working conditions, and how labor is differentially valorized, exploited, and structured in various historical and sociotechnical contexts.

Narratives

Stories in time that express and explain things that matter to people: who they are, how the world is, how things work, what needs to be done, what futures are possible, desirable, or inevitable. 

Narratives can come to feel natural, but always need to be questioned.

Relationship of technology and narratives?

Technology shapes and is shaped by narratives that are at-large in society.

Performativity

The way that actions that describe the world (language, concepts, metaphors, models, classification systems, measurement systems, predictions, automated decision-making systems) can shape and even bring into being the very phenomena they set out to describe.

Examples of performativity in class

• Racial classification systems

• Algorithmic Self

• Quetelet’s “Average Man”

• Performance rating/scoring systems

• Surveillance capitalism, A/B testing and behaviorism

• Predictive Policing (urban surveillance; Allegheny Family Screening Tool)

Power

The asymmetric capacity of an agent to structure or alter the behavior and decisions of other agents, populations, or systems. Technological (computational) power is intertwined with political power.