Abstracts
Session 1: LABOR
"Who Was the User? Gender on the Personal Computing Frontier"
Joy Rankin, Yale University
In my dissertation, from which my symposium paper is drawn, I argue that students and educators using academic time-sharing systems during the 1960s and 1970s transformed computing from a business, military and scientific endeavor into an intensely personal practice. These time-sharing systems enabled multiple users, each at their own terminal, to share the resources of one powerful mainframe computer. The terminals were teletypewriter terminals, and the movement of teletypewriter terminals into the time-sharing computing space is central to my inquiry for this paper.
By 1960, teletypewriters – used for transmitting messages via telegraph – had become familiar office equipment, and they were the province of pink collar office workers and telegraph operators. At the same time, mainframe computers were increasingly programmed by men and attended by women. My paper explores the gendering of computing when teletypes moved from offices to classrooms, alongside the simultaneous shift from mainframe computing to time-sharing.
I also strive to understand how “users” were identified – and gendered – in this early personal computing era. I aim to contribute to the growing body of historical scholarship addressing gender and computing. By spotlighting a few women as “pioneers,” many of the existing histories convey the notion that the presence of women in science and technology has always been unusual, which is inaccurate. Even as historians have analyzed gender in relation to computing, they have considered the professional realm. I examine computing use beyond that professional realm. Historians of technology generally accept that users shape technology, but they often fail to consider gendered notions of users, how interacting with digital technologies changes perceptions of gender, or how cultural ideals of what is appropriate for men and women, boys and girls, have influenced design and manufacture, or the ways we distribute and use things. Considering and untangling these nuances is crucial to understanding the emergent American computing culture of the 1960s and 1970s.
"Getting MADD: Mothers, Drunk Driving, and Changing Views of Driving Safety"
Renée Blackburn, MIT
In this paper, I look at the way in which women, and more specifically mothers, negotiated their stereotypical gender roles along with the role of “victim” and “victim advocate,” while also entering the political and technological worlds of automobile safety design and policy in an attempt to change previously held notions regarding unsafe driving methods. To do this, I will mainly look at the development of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in the 1980s, and the ways in which the women involved used their roles as mothers and victims to legitimate their knowledge and expertise as victim advocates and, eventually, as experts on policy and design implementation. However, the traditional gendered ideals of morality tied to women create an air of expertise that allowed them space to create grassroots organizations, like MADD, that could bring to the forefront and question previously held driving norms.
In addition to their victim advocacy and moral stance, MADD also pushed for further technological innovation from the automobile industry and policy answers from the government. For instance, what was seen as unacceptable technology to the public in the 1970s, became championed as a potential solution to public health issues in later decades. MADD advocated for the use of the ignition interlock, initially used to keep the car from starting unless the user buckled his/her seat belt but modified to include a breathalyzer, to help lower instances of driving while intoxicated. In doing so, they further blurred boundaries between the gendered spheres of public and private life within which men and women stereotypically operated. Women’s activist work in organizations like MADD in the 1980s continued to perpetuate gendered stereotypes of women and mothers as inherently nurturing while also creating space for them to legitimately enter conversations about safety technology policy and design.
Session 2: SEX + BODIES
"Online Moral Economy of Sex Selection in Women's Club, Turkey"
Burcu Mutlu, MIT
Significant numbers of Turkish people are traveling overseas, mostly to Northern Cyprus, to bypass legal restrictions on the uses of fertility technologies within Turkey. There, access to IVF is strictly limited to married heterosexual couples using their own gametes, and Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) is allowed only for medical reasons such as sex-related genetic diseases. The Internet, beyond providing opportunities for advertising reproductive services, offers these people an anonymous social space to exchange information, support and personal stories with each other on mostly morally stigmatized and legally problematic reproductive technologies. This paper focuses on the online discussion forum of the Turkish web portal called Women’s Club to discuss reproductive tourism in general -- and non-therapeutic sex selection in particular. By critically examining the content of postings concerning sex selection by Turkish women in the forum, I argue that online forums offer these women an anonymous moral space to pursue their reproductive goals in secrecy, although some family secrets do not escape the moral scrutiny of others even within these forums.
Drawing on anthropological scholarship on reproductive technologies (Strathern 1992; Paxson 2004; Clarke 2009; Roberts 2012), I will first closely look at the forum postings to explore how the members of Women’s Club, by strategically deploying religious rhetoric, morally account for sex selection “with or against God’s will” in order to justify their decisions and actions as a “proper” way of making babies and becoming mothers. And then, I will shift my focus to the act of posting itself as a component of women’s strategic maneuverings through which they tend to “craft” not only moral selves and technologies but also a shared space for moral reflection.
"Carceral Biopolitics and the Traffic in Child Pornography"
Mitali Thakor, MIT
In this project I describe the design and deployment of automated image recognition software to detect child pornography, as a case study of new alliances in anti-trafficking. Based on ethnographic fieldwork informed by feminist STS, I describe the rise of coalitions and movements against sex trafficking, calling attention to shifts in federal law enforcement attitudes to the circulation of child sexual abuse images (“child pornography”) as it relates to trafficking. Anti-trafficking efforts bring together a complex “counter-network” (Thakor and boyd 2013) of seemingly disparate activists and law enforcement, and most recently, computer scientists. The recognition that child sex trafficking is often facilitated online has led to increasing reliance on image-based digital forensic evidence in the prosecution of traffickers and exploiters.
Through ethnographic research in the US and Southeast Asia, I describe the digital labor of child pornography detection, from machine learning strategies for “objectionable content” detection to sting operations on decentralized and protected networks. I describe one technique for the detection and classification of child pornography gathered from electronic service providers, done in two stages, as an automatic workflow server based process to match images in databases, and as a manual review process of human recognition. I argue that image recognition software exemplifies a “carceral feminist” technology as described by Elizabeth Bernstein (2007;2010), as anti-trafficking activist communities serve a punitive model of justice in feminist politics. New image databasing tools raise questions about the racial and carceral impact of anti-trafficking techniques, and of surveillance, cyber-policy, and digital labor in general.
Session 3: DATA
"Gender Binaries and the Ideological Affordances of Data Activism"
J. Nathan Matias, MIT
Gender detection algorithms, when used for media activism, have what I call ideological affordances -- the kinds of feminism that these systems are more easily capable to support. Over the past two years, I have developed techniques for large-scale analysis of gender in the news, social media, and participatory media. I have also designed interventions towards gender diversity online. In this talk, I will discuss automatic detection of gender binaries and LGBTQ identities, as well as the social behaviour and privacy issues that influence the kinds of feminism most easily supported by automated interventions.
"From @big_ben_clock to @BiCuriousRover: Twitter, Posthumanism, & the Voicing of Technological Objects"
Amy Johnson, MIT
On Twitter, existence is envoiced rather than embodied. Twitter is, moreover, broadly egalitarian in its practices of use—any possessor of a valid email address can register for an account. Voices can be directly articulated by a human, a team of humans, a bot, a combination of bot and human. Different—but often overlapping—types of voicing abound. Thus, we have the heteroglossic voicing of personal self-expression; the scripted voicing of a bot; the audienced voicing of celebrity; the ventriloquized voicing of an organization; the double voicing of parody; the world-building voicing of a fictional character. Warner (2002) contends that a public is marked by an addressivity that pairs recognition of self and strangerness, and in doing so enrolls individuals as members of a larger imagined social group. In Goffmanian terms, we might understand this as communicative interaction in a very particular participation framework.
I examine the linguistic, participatory, and curatorial choices of Twitter accounts that voice technological objects to ask, who are we on Twitter? How does this posthuman participation framework affect our understanding of self and strangerness? What do these voices and voicings reveal about addressivity on Twitter—and the societies we imagine ourselves members of?
"Who Was the User? Gender on the Personal Computing Frontier"
Joy Rankin, Yale University
In my dissertation, from which my symposium paper is drawn, I argue that students and educators using academic time-sharing systems during the 1960s and 1970s transformed computing from a business, military and scientific endeavor into an intensely personal practice. These time-sharing systems enabled multiple users, each at their own terminal, to share the resources of one powerful mainframe computer. The terminals were teletypewriter terminals, and the movement of teletypewriter terminals into the time-sharing computing space is central to my inquiry for this paper.
By 1960, teletypewriters – used for transmitting messages via telegraph – had become familiar office equipment, and they were the province of pink collar office workers and telegraph operators. At the same time, mainframe computers were increasingly programmed by men and attended by women. My paper explores the gendering of computing when teletypes moved from offices to classrooms, alongside the simultaneous shift from mainframe computing to time-sharing.
I also strive to understand how “users” were identified – and gendered – in this early personal computing era. I aim to contribute to the growing body of historical scholarship addressing gender and computing. By spotlighting a few women as “pioneers,” many of the existing histories convey the notion that the presence of women in science and technology has always been unusual, which is inaccurate. Even as historians have analyzed gender in relation to computing, they have considered the professional realm. I examine computing use beyond that professional realm. Historians of technology generally accept that users shape technology, but they often fail to consider gendered notions of users, how interacting with digital technologies changes perceptions of gender, or how cultural ideals of what is appropriate for men and women, boys and girls, have influenced design and manufacture, or the ways we distribute and use things. Considering and untangling these nuances is crucial to understanding the emergent American computing culture of the 1960s and 1970s.
"Getting MADD: Mothers, Drunk Driving, and Changing Views of Driving Safety"
Renée Blackburn, MIT
In this paper, I look at the way in which women, and more specifically mothers, negotiated their stereotypical gender roles along with the role of “victim” and “victim advocate,” while also entering the political and technological worlds of automobile safety design and policy in an attempt to change previously held notions regarding unsafe driving methods. To do this, I will mainly look at the development of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in the 1980s, and the ways in which the women involved used their roles as mothers and victims to legitimate their knowledge and expertise as victim advocates and, eventually, as experts on policy and design implementation. However, the traditional gendered ideals of morality tied to women create an air of expertise that allowed them space to create grassroots organizations, like MADD, that could bring to the forefront and question previously held driving norms.
In addition to their victim advocacy and moral stance, MADD also pushed for further technological innovation from the automobile industry and policy answers from the government. For instance, what was seen as unacceptable technology to the public in the 1970s, became championed as a potential solution to public health issues in later decades. MADD advocated for the use of the ignition interlock, initially used to keep the car from starting unless the user buckled his/her seat belt but modified to include a breathalyzer, to help lower instances of driving while intoxicated. In doing so, they further blurred boundaries between the gendered spheres of public and private life within which men and women stereotypically operated. Women’s activist work in organizations like MADD in the 1980s continued to perpetuate gendered stereotypes of women and mothers as inherently nurturing while also creating space for them to legitimately enter conversations about safety technology policy and design.
Session 2: SEX + BODIES
"Online Moral Economy of Sex Selection in Women's Club, Turkey"
Burcu Mutlu, MIT
Significant numbers of Turkish people are traveling overseas, mostly to Northern Cyprus, to bypass legal restrictions on the uses of fertility technologies within Turkey. There, access to IVF is strictly limited to married heterosexual couples using their own gametes, and Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) is allowed only for medical reasons such as sex-related genetic diseases. The Internet, beyond providing opportunities for advertising reproductive services, offers these people an anonymous social space to exchange information, support and personal stories with each other on mostly morally stigmatized and legally problematic reproductive technologies. This paper focuses on the online discussion forum of the Turkish web portal called Women’s Club to discuss reproductive tourism in general -- and non-therapeutic sex selection in particular. By critically examining the content of postings concerning sex selection by Turkish women in the forum, I argue that online forums offer these women an anonymous moral space to pursue their reproductive goals in secrecy, although some family secrets do not escape the moral scrutiny of others even within these forums.
Drawing on anthropological scholarship on reproductive technologies (Strathern 1992; Paxson 2004; Clarke 2009; Roberts 2012), I will first closely look at the forum postings to explore how the members of Women’s Club, by strategically deploying religious rhetoric, morally account for sex selection “with or against God’s will” in order to justify their decisions and actions as a “proper” way of making babies and becoming mothers. And then, I will shift my focus to the act of posting itself as a component of women’s strategic maneuverings through which they tend to “craft” not only moral selves and technologies but also a shared space for moral reflection.
"Carceral Biopolitics and the Traffic in Child Pornography"
Mitali Thakor, MIT
In this project I describe the design and deployment of automated image recognition software to detect child pornography, as a case study of new alliances in anti-trafficking. Based on ethnographic fieldwork informed by feminist STS, I describe the rise of coalitions and movements against sex trafficking, calling attention to shifts in federal law enforcement attitudes to the circulation of child sexual abuse images (“child pornography”) as it relates to trafficking. Anti-trafficking efforts bring together a complex “counter-network” (Thakor and boyd 2013) of seemingly disparate activists and law enforcement, and most recently, computer scientists. The recognition that child sex trafficking is often facilitated online has led to increasing reliance on image-based digital forensic evidence in the prosecution of traffickers and exploiters.
Through ethnographic research in the US and Southeast Asia, I describe the digital labor of child pornography detection, from machine learning strategies for “objectionable content” detection to sting operations on decentralized and protected networks. I describe one technique for the detection and classification of child pornography gathered from electronic service providers, done in two stages, as an automatic workflow server based process to match images in databases, and as a manual review process of human recognition. I argue that image recognition software exemplifies a “carceral feminist” technology as described by Elizabeth Bernstein (2007;2010), as anti-trafficking activist communities serve a punitive model of justice in feminist politics. New image databasing tools raise questions about the racial and carceral impact of anti-trafficking techniques, and of surveillance, cyber-policy, and digital labor in general.
Session 3: DATA
"Gender Binaries and the Ideological Affordances of Data Activism"
J. Nathan Matias, MIT
Gender detection algorithms, when used for media activism, have what I call ideological affordances -- the kinds of feminism that these systems are more easily capable to support. Over the past two years, I have developed techniques for large-scale analysis of gender in the news, social media, and participatory media. I have also designed interventions towards gender diversity online. In this talk, I will discuss automatic detection of gender binaries and LGBTQ identities, as well as the social behaviour and privacy issues that influence the kinds of feminism most easily supported by automated interventions.
"From @big_ben_clock to @BiCuriousRover: Twitter, Posthumanism, & the Voicing of Technological Objects"
Amy Johnson, MIT
On Twitter, existence is envoiced rather than embodied. Twitter is, moreover, broadly egalitarian in its practices of use—any possessor of a valid email address can register for an account. Voices can be directly articulated by a human, a team of humans, a bot, a combination of bot and human. Different—but often overlapping—types of voicing abound. Thus, we have the heteroglossic voicing of personal self-expression; the scripted voicing of a bot; the audienced voicing of celebrity; the ventriloquized voicing of an organization; the double voicing of parody; the world-building voicing of a fictional character. Warner (2002) contends that a public is marked by an addressivity that pairs recognition of self and strangerness, and in doing so enrolls individuals as members of a larger imagined social group. In Goffmanian terms, we might understand this as communicative interaction in a very particular participation framework.
I examine the linguistic, participatory, and curatorial choices of Twitter accounts that voice technological objects to ask, who are we on Twitter? How does this posthuman participation framework affect our understanding of self and strangerness? What do these voices and voicings reveal about addressivity on Twitter—and the societies we imagine ourselves members of?