Privacy And The Digital Divide: Investigating Strategies For Digital Safety By People Of Color

People of color are becoming increasingly concerned with digital privacy. They are concerned about the obfuscated data collection and sharing practices of major social media plat- forms and the strong entitlement of other users in the online space to their content. This study examines how people of color conceptualize and behave to produce safety in the online space, or, in other words, digital privacy. This study challenges notions that people are not purposeful about privacy in the online space and highlights the voices of people of color, whom are not of- ten included in theorizing or decision making about the online space. This qualitative study reveals generational differences in the digital privacy strategies of people of color. Participants who are Millennials and Generation X are influenced by intergener- ational knowledge when they conceptualize and seek to create privacy. Participants who are from Generation Z lack this knowledge, and, therefore, approach privacy differently. This difference is revealed in the choice of participants that are Millennials and Generation X to self-deplatform from major social media. Instead, Younger participants, who belong to Generation Z, practice strict curation of their online selves. The aim of this strategy is to endure. They believe that future economic and social benefits wait on the other side of disprivacy

Signals in the Black Stack / GEOMEtyr Design Manual

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational systems while examining historical instances where the reconfiguration of human informational relationships have signaled to participants a profound, vaguely utopic change to their scope of possible actions as agents within a public sphere—before this sphere becomes subsequently disempowered by selective integration with only those power structures admitted by the private interests of a ruling class. The argument proceeds by scrutinizing each facet of this story in turn: first, the concept of information as an entity with structure; next, the development of the public sphere as a realm with distinguished character; then, the advent of our Internet as an operation with globalizing consequence. Each of these are developed distinctly and in parts, piece by piece, until their parallels are unified for final analysis

“INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATURES”: CONSENSUS STANDARDIZATION IN THE SECOND AND THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS

Consensus standardization is a social process in which technical experts from public, private, and non-profit sectors negotiate the direction and shape of technological change. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have recognized the importance of consensus standards as alternatives to standards that arise through market mechanisms or standards mandated by regulators. Rather than treating the consensus method as some sort of timeless organizational form or ever-present alternative to markets or laws, I argue that consensus standardization is itself a product of history. In the first two chapters, I explain the origins and growth of consensus standards bodies between 1880 and 1930 as a reaction to and critique of the existing political economy of engineering. By considering the standardization process—instead of the internal dynamics of a particular firm or technology—as the primary category of analysis, I am able to emphasize the cooperative relations that sustained the American style of competitive managerial capitalism during the Second Industrial Revolution. In the remaining four chapters, I examine the processes of network architecture and standardization in the creation of four communications networks during the twentieth century: AT&T’s monopoly telephone network, the Internet, digital cellular telephone networks, and the World Wide Web. Each of these four networks embodied critiques—always implicit and frequently explicit—of preceding and competing networks. These critiques, visible both in the technological design of networks as well as in the institutional design of standard-setting bodies, reflected the political convictions of successive generations of engineers and network architects. The networks described in this dissertation were thus turning points in the century-long development of an organizational form. Seen as part of a common history, they tell the story of how consensus-based institutions became the dominant mode for setting standards in the Third Industrial Revolution, and created the foundational standards of the information infrastructures upon which a newly globalized economy and society—the Network Society—could grow