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Another consequence of the trend to only talk about data and not society, norms, politics, values and everything else confusing about the analogue world is the victim-blaming implicit in most of these articles. The cause of the problem? Women sharing data. The solution? Women need to better control their data

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(Source: The Atlantic)

Tech writers […] have focused too much on the data and have forgotten the social world in which the data is situated.

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(Source: The Atlantic)

The implication that a woman must be sexually appealing to be taken seriously as a thinker did not start with the internet: it’s a charge that has been used to shame and dismiss women’s ideas since long before Mary Wollstonecraft was called “a hyena in petticoats”. The net, however, makes it easier for boys in lonely bedrooms to become bullies.

- Thought provoking statements by L. Penny (columnist) in a Guardian article about woman bloggers

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

- John Naisbitt (via weaux)

(Source: weaux)

… there are some amazing tools for social scientists to use to study technology, but rarely are they used to help create technology. This is foolish. Technology creators are not idiots. Their work is certainly affected by the social environment. Yet, their creations also do affect the social culture. It is a bi-directional, non-deterministic process.

- danah boyd wrote this in 2004 - it still cannot be repeated and underlined enough today (2011).

(Source: zephoria.org)

Much of the time engineers resist the idea that their work has moral or political consequences at all. Many see themselves as interested in efficiency and design, in building cool stuff rather than messy ideological disputes and inchoate values.

At times, this attitude can verge on a “Guns don’t kill people, people do” mentality — a wilful blindness to how their design decisions affect the daily lives of millions.

[…] when the social repercussions of their work are troubling, the architects of the online world often fall back on the manifest-destiny rhetoric of technodeterminism.

[…]

Technodeterminism is alluring and convenient for newly powerful entrepreneurs because it absolves them of responsibility for what they do. Like priests at the altar, they’re mere vessels of a much larger force that it would be futile to resist. They need not concern themselves with the effects of the systems they’ve created.

- Eli Pariser FTW

(Source: wired.co.uk)

Early this morning, I was in a bad mood and decided to break a law and start my car without buckling my seat belt. My car usually does not want to start before I buckle the belt. It first flashes a red light “FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT!”, and then an alarm sounds; it is so high pitched, so relentless, so repetitive, that I cannot stand it. After ten seconds I swear and put on the belt. This time, I stood the alarm for twenty seconds and then gave in. My mood had worsened quite a bit, but I was at peace with the law – at least with that law. I wished to brake it, but could not. Where is the morality? In me, a human driver, dominated by the mindless power of an artifact? Or in the artifact, forcing me, a mindless human, to obey […]?

- Bruno Latour, French sociologist, What Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts (via baaadnewsbears)

(Source: puffthemagicdragin)