MARÍA P. ÁNGEL

Privacy, Law & Technology, STS

Theoretical Foundations of Information Science

INSC 501, Prof. Megan Finn, Winter 2021 – See Syllabus

This course was designed to introduce students to some of the most recent and ground-breaking research in information studies. Each week, we were required to read sections of books written by iSchool graduates and which had been based on dissertation projects. Likewise, we would complement those books with “theory” articles that allowed us to better understand how scholars use theory to inform their own research and how, in turn, their research also contributes theoretical insights. Besides, “theory” pieces would also help us situate the books in broader academic conversations about racializing surveillance, decolonizing the technological, Black cyberculture, techno-philanthropism, techno-idealism/utopianism, technological promise, and entrepreneurial citizenship.

In some of the sessions we also had the opportunity to have the books’ authors or scholars familiar with the books as guest speakers. Both Morgan Ames (The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child​) and Christo Sims (Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism​) spoke with us.

This course constitutes a turning point in my STS journey in two different ways. First, it introduced me, for the first time, to scholarly conversations about imaginaries, promises, cultural mythologies, and ideal futures, which would turn out to be central to my dissertation project. Second, it allowed me to dig deeper into: i) the research methodologies followed by the different authors; and, ii) the ways in which they approached and handled their own positionalities while doing fieldwork and analyzing their findings. I realized how messy and iterative the process can be, and how failures and problems are actually part of a normal research process.

Final Products

In my final paper, I looked to situate Morgan Ames’s (2019) concept of “charisma” in a broader theoretical context. In that way, in the paper, I explored how the pedigree of this concept stretches back to several variations of the concepts of cultural mythologies and social imaginaries, previously proposed by David Nye (1994), Vincent Mosco (2005), Paul Dourish & Genevieve Bell (2011), Benedict Anderson (1983), Charles Taylor (2002; 2004), and Sheila Jasanoff (2009; 2013; 2015). Additionally, I put Ames’s concept of “charisma” in conversation with a related concept offered by Peter Nagy and Gina Neff (2015), namely, the idea of “imagined affordances,” which also invites us to bring imagination back into the conversations about technology and society. 

As a result of putting these different authors and theories into a conversation, I came to the following conclusion:

“Ames’s concept of charisma is not unique. Rather, its formulation built on previous scholarship about cultural mythologies and social imaginaries. In particular, it was inspired by the continual redeployment of Nye’s ‘technological sublime;’ the inevitable nature of Mosco’s ‘myths of cyberspace,’ as well as their persistence even in the face of failure; and the political correctness of Dourish & Bell’s ‘mythology of ubicomp,’ which did not admit criticisms. Similarly, it was influenced by the normative character of Taylor’s ‘social imaginaries,’ and in its circulation from the MIT Lab to Paraguay it followed similar phases as the ones proposed by Jasanoff for her ‘sociotechnical imaginaries.’

Finally, Ames’s concept of charisma should be understood as part of a bigger group of analytical concepts, including Nagy and Neff’s concept of ‘imagined affordances,’ which have looked to restate in scholarship the key role that imagination plays in describing the relationships between technology and society.”

Moreover, in the final exam of the course I had to answer the following General Exam-type question: “Using no more than 1000 words, explain: (i) how the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ has been developed and explained in the different readings; (ii) which evidence supports the claims made by each author; (iii) how the different uses of the concept differ from each other and how are they similar; and (iv) how this concept is related to a theory/theme/concept that you explore in your work.” For answering it, I decided to focus on the following two books:

Due to the influence that my resulting analysis had on the theoretical framework of my dissertation project, I will reproduce my complete answer to the question here:

“For both Ames (2019) and Sims (2017) the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ is useful to name and/or describe the desirable futures and social changes that the designers of their studied EdTech projects expect to achieve with them. Ames explicitly draws on this analytical concept to claim that the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project was based on the MIT designers’ social imaginary of the “technically precocious boy” an often-rebellious boy who would not only show a natural and fearless mastery of technical toys, but also a facility for technical tinkering. By having children programming the computers, and not being programmed by them, XO laptops would not only unlock these children’s full potential, but would also drive social change, because in the process of teaching themselves, children would ‘lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty’ (Ames, 2019, p. 49). In that way, designers said, the project would naturally and inevitably lead to peace, prosperity, and social and economic development in the region.

Similarly, Sims (2017) claims that the project of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology was animated by the entrepreneurial reformers and professional experts’ vision of a ‘school for digital kids.’ This imagined school would be based on a playful game-like pedagogy, so that students could spend their days working through complex challenges and role-playing the identities of tech-savvy creative professionals. In this way, by focusing on the development, rather than the consumption of media technology, ‘students at the downtown School would learn to be creative makers, remixers, and hackers of technology and culture’ (Sims, 2017, p. 2) and would therefore become ‘lifelong, technically sophisticated, and flexible learners, innovators, and problem solvers’ (Sims, p. 25). Also, by accommodating students with very different backgrounds, this pedagogical design was expected to uproot bureaucratic rigidity, inequality of opportunity, and social division. As a result, the social imaginary went, the new school would connect the students and the school to the world, preparing kids for the interconnected and competitive job market of the twenty-first century and for the digital age. 

As seen, the content of both social imaginaries is described by Ames and Sims in terms of imagined educational futures and consequent bigger social changes. Besides, both authors ascribe similar characteristics and consequences to these imaginaries. In terms of characteristics, both of them describe these social imaginaries as developed against the same alternative educational model, namely, the ‘factory model.’ Also, both of them recognize the benefits that these collective visions offer to their promoters, by facilitating coordination and providing them with direction and conviction to pursue collective goals. In third place, both Ames and Sims describe these social imaginaries as moral and political. Moral, because they give their promoters a sense of purpose and a reassurance that ‘they were committing themselves to something that was both morally good and original’ (Sims, p. 106); and political because they not only require designing idealized technologies or school systems, but also delivering democratic, developed, peaceful, and equalitarian worlds.

In terms of consequences, both authors use vignettes of pedagogic activities or leisure time at school and home (the latter just in Ames’s case) to claim that these social imaginaries usually end up: (i) encoded in physical structures (educational systems or computers); (ii) leaving factors and forces, such as children agency or contextual realities, out of the picture; (iii) falling short of stated ideals, by failing to translate to most of the projects’ intended users; (iv) being constantly remade, maintained, and repaired in order to survive, in part through the use of scripted and constructed performances and rituals (e.g. charismatic performances (Ames) and sanctioned counter practices (Sims)); (v) sustaining and extending the status quo; (vi) being difficult to challenge, given their naturalizing force and moral character; and (vii) eventually renewing themselves in new projects, due to their ‘immunity’ to the lessons of history (Sims, p. 4).

However, it is important to highlight that, unlike Ames, Sims does not explicitly refer to the concept of “social imaginaries.” Rather, he uses the term “collective fixations,” which in a similar way to Jasanoff and Kim’s ‘sociotechnical imaginaries,’ ‘‘enframe’[s] (Callon 1998) how reformers imagine the world’ (Sim, p. 16), by bringing together their desires for ideal futures and their optimistic ideas and feelings about techno-political solutions. Another difference in the use of the figure stems from the way in which each author characterizes the origin of the social imaginaries and the means by which they became encoded in the projects. Thus, while Sims briefly refers to frustrations with the status quo as the main source of the social imaginary of the ‘school for digital kids,’ Ames makes a lot of emphasis on the nostalgic design as the origin of the ‘technically precocious boy.’ Also, in terms of how the social imaginaries were encoded in physical structures, Ames explains how the social imaginary came to life thanks to both the role of media and the encoding of the values of playfulness, connectivity, and freedom in the features of the computer. In contrast, Sims elaborates on the processes of problematization and rendering technical, through which complex political-economic and structural problems could be translated into manageable problems that could be fixed with technology. Finally, Ames and Sims differ on the ultimate negative consequences that they attribute to these social imaginaries. On the one hand, Ames highlights how these imaginaries place the responsibility of creating development in the hands of children, and how they end up diverting attention and resources from more incremental, complicated, and less showy reforms. In contrast, Sims focuses on how failed philanthropic interventions end up fueling a whole industry that specializes ‘in diagnosing societal ailments and prescribing seemingly innovative new fixes’ (Sims, p. 166).

Similar to how the social imaginaries of the ‘technically precocious boy’ and the ‘school for digital kids’ animated designers of the OLPC project and reformers of the Downtown School to challenge the conventional educational system, I tend to think that new social imaginaries about the ideal relationship between technology, society, and law are pushing American privacy law scholars to change their conception of the right to privacy. Therefore, understanding how Ames and Sims use the concept of ‘social imaginaries,’ how they characterize it, and how they ascribe it consequences, gives me ideas on how to incorporate it as an analytical concept in my own dissertation.”

References

Selected Readings

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