Technology, Education, DemocracyCybera 2016October 28, 2016Matt Ratto Associate Professor Faculty of Information University of Toronto matt.ratto@utoronto.ca

QWhat are the opportunities and the challenges offered by emerging modes of technologically-mediated communication and decision-making?

QWhat is our role and responsibility as educators and as developers of research and teaching digital infrastructures?

QWhat do citizens need in the 21st century?

ALiteracy: same but different

...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.

--Thomas Jefferson

it is of the paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order...

Report to the Trustees, Boston Public Library, 1852

Infrastructural Literacy

infrastructure as "pervasive enabling resources in network form"

--Geoffrey C. Bowker, Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, and David Ribes, Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment

Awe must help citizens develop a greater sense of how the informational world and its attendant infrastructures helps shape how and what we think

Big Data

Why is this about Democracy?

Algorithmic manipulation

Brittle and opaque systems

Potentially systematic bias

critical making

The approach• active engagements with the technological rather than passive use

of technologies as 'tools'• inquiry that adresses role and scope of technology in modern

society • linking of technical activities and social critique to enrichen both

Activity:-Hack CHI, engage with issues of big data, privacy, and surveillance.

-Design and Deploy

Quantitative Toilet

Outcomes

Outcomes• Diversity of responses• Processes for creating 'legitimate' technical interventions • What will people 'trade'

“Makes Sense to Me!”: Participatory Sensing, Information Visualization, and 3D RepresentationiConference 2016,

--Gabby Resch, Daniel Southwick, Matt Ratto Yanni Loukissas

Goals:• raise awareness of a data and civics;• critically interrogate big data claims;• develop dialogue around sensing and information visualization.

Activity:-construct and deploy wireless body worn sensors;-produce multiple visualizations and physical representations; -explore the technical, social, and semantic challenges involved with collecting, interpreting, and disseminating personal data.

Outcomes• Highlight the subjective choices and work of 'sensing' and data

wrangling• Revealing the norms of data practice and visualization

(generalizability, objective views)• Begin to posit and produce alternatives

Inhabiting the Topo-Datagraphical NetworkToronto School: Then, Now, Next 2016Gabby Resch, Dan Southwick, Matt Ratto

Activity:-Built an interactive immersive experience-change the scale by placing users directly within the geospatial landscapes of datasets

Outcomes-Affective responses to data-Discovery of small variations (valleys) as important as large (peaks) -Dynamic engagement with 'messiness' of data

What are the opportunities and the challenges offered by emerging modes of technologically-mediated communication and decision-making?What is our role and responsibility as educators and as developers of research and teaching digital infrastructures?

What do citizens need in the 21st century?

Infrastructural literacy requires approaches that blend social analysis and technical workHow to support?

Can an intelligent house fall in love with the house next door? Can they have baby houses? Is an architect a trained "womb" for houses, or more crudely, is an architect how a house makes another house? Does an architect feel like she/he is violating fundamental forces of evolution if she/he does not include the latest new technology in the house she/he next gives birth to? Do you believe in progress? Is the house that Donald Trump lives in better than the house you live in?

--Rich Gold (1994) How smart does the bed in your house have to be before you are afraid to go to sleep at night?

@mattratto