We often compare social media to our "real lives," a place where all the problems exist and discrimination persists. We see technology as a code spewed out by a system that churns out algorithms, so we search up how to defrost chicken on wikiHow when we move out of our parents' house. Let's delve into this mental separation of these two facets of our lives, and I hypothesize that the gap is thinner than we think. More specifically, can software be discriminatory?
Well, let's ask Sadowski. In his article, "Everyone should decide how their digital data are used — not just tech companies," he writes about how data has been dominated by large corporations, which affects the ability to research certain social problems that are pervasive throughout software. These companies shift the way scientists and theorists are able to study how data affects society, preventing a more transparent narrative of the discrimination that is perpetuated by technology. Don't believe me? Check out this example below:
“A reliance on the largesse of private companies also challenges tenets of scientific rigour and responsibility. Contractual restrictions can prevent researchers from reproducing and validating others’ results. In 2019, health researchers reported that ‘significant racial bias’ in the training data for a proprietary commercial algorithm meant that US$1,800 less per year was spent on the treatment of Black patients compared with white patients with the same level of health. The bias — which is disputed by the company — was revealed only when researchers did an independent audit of the records of a large university hospital.”
Now when we compare software to real life, we forget to acknowledge that software is created by people in real life. The numbers and codes don't just write themselves, and they don't exist without biases built into these systems, similar to how discrimination is built into society. Software may be more similar to our daily lives than we think, and this is especially true when you think about who holds the power.
Even after Facebook gained 1 billion monthly users since 2014, as we might have guessed, not much has changed. Other large companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Apple, have the same issues, with percentages of Black and Latinx workers at a standstill. And if this wasn't enough, Amazon doesn't even report its worker demographics, making it hard to track how many people of colour make it into executive positions within the company. And even when we go back to how the internet was invented, it is reported that it was for U.S military gains, and created by two white men.
So, as we enter the digital age with the influx of technology and zoom meetings on every screen you look at, is there still a difference between software and "real life," or is this gap just getting thinner as we evolve? To make more sense of everything that has been discussed within technology and the real-world impacts of these systems, we can take a philosophical approach with Manovich's "Software Takes Command." He provides definitions for software and buckle in, because there are a lot.
Defined by the MIT Press Software Studies book series, "software is deeply woven into contemporary life—economically, culturally, creatively, politically—in manners both obvious and nearly invisible." Software is described as something that can be studied in areas from the humanities to design theory. It has always existed, and can be studied within existing structures, while being a new field of study.
Manovich highlights the root of what I am trying to get at, whether software is more human than we might think, and therefore, more biased than we believe. Once you think about the people behind the codes that make your wikiHow pages and the companies that control the outflow of this data, a power imbalance glaringly obvious. Now, before you lock yourself in a room and go all Nietzsche all me, software is becoming a more democratic space because of the access programming and scripting. This is the time to be studying software and how it affects and creates culture, so we can all be cogniscent that"the time for 'software studies' has arrived."
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