I\u2019m musing today about the way that Covid19 will ultimately affect the economy and how technology, and automation, will play a part in that. Part of what scares me about shutting down all \u201cnon-essential\u201d business (though I completely agree that we should do this because human life > money) is that what is deemed \u201cnon-essential\u201d may very well not appear again\u2014especially if we find technological work arounds–depending how long this distancing lasts. Furthermore, with more and more people working from home (though we should add the caveat that there are class, gender, racial, and socioeconomic factors involved in who \u201cgets\u201d to stay home as well, who \u201cgets\u201d to be safe), I ultimately wonder how this distancing will render more work devalued and hidden (I\u2019m echoing Gray\u2019s words here)? How will employment models change as the economy changes? How will labor structures change as we decide what is essential, and who fills in the employment cervices between tech and humanity?<\/p>\n
In terms of tech companies and the Gillespie piece, he suggests that \u201cplatforms do not just mediate public discourse: they constitute it\u201d (199). I\u2019m thinking of the new Covid19 button on Facebook where you can push to get curated \u201cnews\u201d about the virus. They do not make it obvious how such content is curated, who is in charge of such curation, and what they gain from giving you access to this information. I\u2019m thinking of a friend recently who told me that she didn\u2019t watch the news anymore because Twitter told her all she needed to know about Covid19. I\u2019m thinking about Gillespie\u2019s quote in which he says \u201cthe public problems we now face are old information challenges paired with the affordances of the platforms they exploit: . . . misinformation buoyed by its algorithmically-calculated popularity\u201d (200).<\/p>\n
It seems that information about Covid19 is spreading faster than the virus itself\u2014with interesting labor implications following in its wake. I\u2019ll talk about this more in class next week, but I\u2019m thinking of switching my final project to something along these lines. I\u2019ve recently become aware of Kaggle, a data science community, that is running competitions for folks to come up with data models regarding Covid19. They are making datasets available for anyone who wants to play with machine learning to respond to their call\u2014and offering financial incentives to do so. I wonder what they gain from such crowdsourcing (in the guise of \u201chelping the community\u201d). Indeed, it may very well help to use deep learning to come up with \u201canswers\u201d to issues related to Covid19. However, I genuinely wonder how such answers will be monetized and who will benefit from such monetization.<\/p>\n
In any case, the Covid19 epidemic is pulling the veneer off of many things that our society struggles with\u2014socially, economically, and informationally. The ways that misinformation has spread (can I take ibuprofen if I think I have coronavirus?) and those who even have access to information in the new home-offices to which many of us are relegated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m musing today about the way that Covid19 will ultimately affect the economy and how technology, and automation, will play a part in that. Part of what scares me about shutting down all \u201cnon-essential\u201d business (though I completely agree that we should do this because human life > money) is that what is deemed \u201cnon-essential\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-5"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}