Background Knowledge Probe

1. Draw a picture of an innovation in the process of being innovated.
2. Looking at your completed drawing, consider the following:
   • Describe the innovation in your drawing. What might be its uses? What might be its impact once it is released to the target population?
   • Who is doing the innovation? Why? For what goal(s)?

Who Shapes Technology?

“A Critical Social + Technical Perspective” and associated essential resources highlighted ways technologies are a seamless, indivisible combination of social and technical components that are co-created by everyday users. But as Wajcman notes, those things white, male, and middle- and upper-class innovators primarily focus on creating are specific “male machines” rather than broader, everyday life technologies.^[1] When workshop and class participants are asked to draw a picture of “an innovator innovating,” many draw individual white men innovating the modern digital technology machine. This tendency towards drawing innovations and their innovators in this way is a representation of the current dominant narrative in much of U.S. culture.

We also considered how once developed and made available for broader use by people, technologies do not remain static, but rather are adapted and co-created to fit within ever-changing contexts.^[2] The co-creation happens when uses of technology are done in ways that amplify our individual and group actions in the world.^[3] While this mutual shaping of technologies is ongoing, we often think of the digital technology product itself in the more static conceptualization. As such, often in these drawings of an innovator innovating, it’s a certain subgroup of initial innovators, and does not include in the drawing the intermediary and everyday co-creators of a digital technology. Nor do we include in the drawing those who are shaping the innovation and design as part of the engineering, coding, marketing and distribution, and other stages of the product’s life cycle.

Take a moment to review your picture of an innovation in the process of being innovated, and reflect on your considerations of the questions above. In what ways might your readings and works so far in the book have influenced your response to the Background Knowledge Probe?

Broadening our Understanding of Creating

Today’s Maker movements often emphasize a broader set of activities in the process of making something. While some of these spaces emphasize specific digital technologies, many others view this more broadly as craft-making. As Bruce Sinclair notes:

Since the nineteenth century, engineering in this country has depended on a published literature and on advanced formal instruction that has included physics and mathematics. Craft skill depends on a different kind of knowledge, most of it unwritten and learned on the job. Apprenticeship—whether institutionalized or not—rests on emulation and repetitive practice in the interest of acquiring manual skills, and it is married to experience with the ways in which materials behave in different circumstances. Not only is this kind of knowledge complex and difficult to transfer; it gains importance when considered in the context of the history of American slavery, the formal acquisition of knowledge by slaves having been forbidden by law.

Bruce Sinclair. “Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology.”^[4]

Throughout U.S. history and continuing today, people of color and women have often been kept from educational opportunities, particularly in areas such as engineering, and more recently, computer science. And yet, hidden are the myriad ways elite occupations have been successfully done via these very same people while mainly white males are given the credit for the accomplishments made by the broader group of innovators, designers, and creators.

Carolyn de la Peña has highlighted how finding these hidden stories regarding the design and innovation of technologies by white women have required challenging but essential meta-historical narratives through personal papers and the records of their and their husbands’ activities. Finding the records of people of color are even more challenging. To proceed, de la Peña notes:

Rather than imagining “race” as a term that describes particular individuals marked as nonwhite, I want to suggest we think of race as an epistemology at play in all technological production and consumption. This concept makes it possible to see the significance of the obvious: that white people have race. And they make it, sustain it, and protect it in part through technology. More importantly, this approach suggests that it is not only the problem of source that keeps us from integrating race fully into our analyses. Instead, the real difficulty occurs in tandem: difficult-to-locate sources combine with our own tendencies to fail to see all that can be found in what is available, and to creatively engage and interpret in order to draw race out of the archive.

Carolyn de la Peña, “The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race”^[5]

As a white, cisgender, heterosexual male scholar working at a higher education institution in the United States, it is essential that I recognize the ethical dilemmas involved in writing this book introducing networked information systems within the information sciences. In doing so, I continue to work to identify ways in which I am building from, and integrating into this work imperialist, patriarchal, and racist ideologies which are embedded within general Western and specific United States culture and practices.

In order to broaden my understanding of digital technology design and innovation, I have drawn heavily from Community Informatics (CI) practice, a field that seeks to make “effective use” of technology through a practice of community inquiry, participatory design, popular education, and asset-based development to enhance quality of life.^[6] This led me to co-develop a list of critical questions for Community Informatics in practice.^[7] As related specifically to the philosophy of technology, rather than bringing forward the digital technologies we think are essential for information seeking and sharing, we need to instead consider:

What everyday technologies might be unseen and displaced because of an overly narrow definition of what should be considered an appropriate technology? Who are the local innovators whose technologies might be championed as part of a CI project?… How might the voices of technology skeptics and traditionalists inform adoption, or non-adoption, of a CI project? What important insights regarding culture, values, and history are these perspectives bringing to the engagement?

Martin Wolske and Colin Rhinesmith, “Critical Questions for Community Informatics in Practice from an Ethical Perspective”

Lesson Plan

With this historical context in mind, in the next session we will consider the evolution of computers and their “building blocks.”