[Air-L] Technology Ethics in Action: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

[Joanne Cheung]

Dear all—

I’m thrilled to share a new open-access special issue in the Journal of Social Computing, “Technology Ethics in Action: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”! 

This special issue interrogates the discourses and impacts of “tech ethics.” As many institutions embrace tech ethics in response to concerns about digital technology, it is necessary to consider the impacts, limits, and opportunities of these initiatives. The articles in this issue analyze tech ethics as a practical and political endeavor, rather than a primarily philosophical one. What's happened as "tech ethics" has become a widespread discourse? What are the limits of tech ethics initiatives? How can we develop better paths forward? 

The twelve academic essays encompass a diverse background of authors and a wide exploration on the topic of tech ethics. The topics range from ethics-washing to ethics-bashing, inherent racial bias in algorithms, data scientists as political actors, and the vast unseen and unacknowledged labor that is required to keep algorithms running. 

The articles are published in two editions: 

The first section presents the limitations of trying to fix technology through ethics <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=9684739&punumber=8964404>
The second section presents methodologies and solutions for how technology could better serve society <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=9698149&punumber=8964404> 
 
My contribution,“Real Estate Politik: Democracy and the Financialization of Social Networks” <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9698151>, looks at the structural problems with social media from the perspective of land use and land activism. I draw an analogy between the financialization of attention by platforms with the financialization of land by commercial real estate development, and explore community land trusts and Indigenous land stewardship as models for public interest technology.

This work emerged from the Ethical Tech Working Group at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. We hope it will be a useful resource for this community's research, teaching, advocacy, and more. 

Best,
Joanne Cheung

—
joannekcheung.com <https://joannekcheung.com/>