Digital self-determination/Beginning Inquiries
Just what is "digital self-determination"? Take a few minutes to consider what you think of when you hear that term. What examples come to mind? How does it exist? Where does it exist?
In this module, we take our first steps in exploring that question through three very different lenses highlighted by the speakers. By the end of this module, learners should have expanded some of their thinking and consideration about the concept.
Learning Materials
[edit | edit source]Review the following before moving into the rest of this section:
- Promoting Digital Self-Determination from Internet Governance Forum (4 pages)
Video Sparks
[edit | edit source]These videos are not meant to comprehensively cover the topics. Instead, these videos are meant to spark a conversation about the ideas contained within. They often contain questions or different lenses from which to explore the week's topic. Viewers should look to the videos for ideas and from there, explore possible on their own, relevant research, videos, government documents, reports, etc that can further enhance their understanding.
| Speaker | Roger Dubach | Malavika Jayaram | Jenny Korn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Video | |||
| Video summaton | Roger Dubach reflects on how governments try to bring citizens’ active engagement to the digital world, and warns us of the risk of an understanding of digital self-determination that ends up locking us into a data-protected world. | Malavika Jayaram links the idea of self-determination to identity, how others perceive us, and the role of the other in the relational process of making meaning of ourselves and our agency in the digital realm. | Jenny Korn urges us to ask, “for whom does this digital self-determination benefit?” How do certain types of algorithms and other digital technologies represent and omit minority communities? How could we keep in mind our unknown unknowns during the research sprint, and what boundaries do they imply? |
Learning Artifacts
[edit | edit source]Before the program started, we had participants make a 1-minute video discussing some of their thoughts on digital self-determination. As a follow up to engaging with the speakers above, we asked them to revisit their thoughts to create a new resource that furthers our understanding of digital self-determination based upon the videos above.
| Artifact | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Mind Mapping Artifact | Karolina Alama-Maruta | An exhaustive mind map that captures the complexity of digital self-determination from its components to its definition |
| Karolina Alama-Maruta | This short video presents one of the approaches towards defining the concept of digital self-determination. | |
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Rachid Benharrousse | The digital space is already political and subject to dominant digital infrastructures. The Habermasian notion of Refeudalization is used to further the former idea. |
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Ana Margarida Coelho | An infographic on how agents construct their external images and how the system is significantly beyond their control |
| Leonid Demidov | This video explores digital self-determination on an individual level. | |
| Tomás Guarna | A brief text offers thoughts on the challenges of reaching a definition of digital self-determination and a promising path forward | |
| Zachary Marcone | One student's perspective on not losing sight of "self-determination" when attempting to forward "digital self-determination." | |
| Carmen Ng | A short video exploring digital self-determination through various personas and a visualization of some of the components of the concept | |
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Carmen Ng | A visualization of some of the components of the concept of digital self-determination. |
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Timi Olagunju | This is a poetic rendition of an understanding of digital self determination for a lay, non-expert person. |
Activity
[edit | edit source]Based upon this introductory module, how might you update, enhance, or adjust your answer with one or more of these speaker’s ideas in mind--particularly, for new approaches to digital self-determination that you might not have considered or encountered previously?
Goal: To create an artifact that deepens the discussion of digital self-determination based upon this module.
Format: This artifact can be written, audio recording, video, or some other multimedia concept (card game, branching scenarios, collage, Prezi, etc).
Be as creative as you want with this but keep in mind that if you are making things, particularly visuals or integrating video/audio content from elsewhere that you make sure you have the legal permission to do so. Along those lines, using of Creative Common licensed materials or even materials from places like the Internet Archive.
Length/Duration: This is a bit tricky with different formats. For instance, the goal could be 300-500 words. Yet, that might be wildly over the mark if you are writing a poem or under the mark if you wrote out a script, but just perfect if you’re writing some reflections.
Instead of the ideal length, consider the audience. Think about how you would construct this response to someone that is new or interested in this subject. What might be a reasonably small but deep engagement with one or more of the questions provided by the speakers and the vantage points that your work could provide to such an audience.
If you are exploring this course on your own, we encourage you to create artifacts to share on Twitter or other social media platforms using the following hashtag: #DigitalSelfDetermination
Speaker Bios
[edit | edit source]Roger Dubach
Roger Dubach, born in 1974, studied Law at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and Philosophy at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). In 2003, he joined the diplomatic service of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and was appointed as a Diplomatic Advisor to the Director of the Federal Office for Energy in 2006. In this and his next function as Energy Counsellor at the Swiss Mission to the EU in Brussels, he acted as Technical Director of the energy negotiations between Switzerland and the EU. In 2013, he was appointed as a Personal Advisor to the Federal Councillor Doris Leuthard, and later as Deputy Director of the Task Force for the Swiss OSCE Chairmanship. Between 2016 and 2018, he served as Diplomatic Advisor on G7 and G20 issues in the Cabinet of the OECD Secretary-General in Paris, and was appointed by the Federal Council in August 2018 as an Ambassador and Deputy Director of the Directorate of International Law.
Malavika Jayaram
Malavika is the inaugural Executive Director of Digital Asia Hub, a Hong Kong-based independent research think-tank incubated by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where she is also a Faculty Associate. A technology lawyer for over 15 years, she practised law at Allen & Overy, London, and was Vice President and Technology Counsel at Citigroup. She was featured in the International Who’s Who of Internet e-Commerce & Data Protection Lawyers, and voted one of India’s leading lawyers. She taught India’s first course on Information Technology & Law in 1997, and has taught as adjunct faculty at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law in Chicago. She is on the Advisory Boards of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Mozilla’s Tech Policy Fellowship, and on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. Malavika is an Associate Fellow with Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), as part of its Asia-Pacific Programme. She is also a member of the High-level Expert Advisory Group to the OECD project, “Going Digital: Making the Transformation Work for Growth and Well-being."
Jenny Korn
Founding Director of Princeton Diversity Discussions + Research Affiliate and the Founding Coordinator of the Race+Tech+Media Working Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Jenny Korn is a feminist activist of color for social justice, a ciswoman scholar of race and gender in mass media, digital life, and artificial intelligence, and a member of Mensa, the high intelligence quotient (IQ) society. Korn is a Research Affiliate and the Founding Coordinator of the Race+Tech+Media Working Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She is the Founding Director of Princeton Diversity Discussions, a free, public, ongoing series of in-person and virtual group gatherings to share personal opinions and lived experiences focused on race, racism, and racial justice that she founded seven years ago and now meets weekly across over twenty sites in the United States. The author of numerous publications, Korn has won awards from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research; the Association for Information Science and Technology; the Philosophy of Communication Division and the African American Communication and Culture Division of the National Communication Association; the Minorities and Communication Division and the Communication Theory and Methodology Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; and the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender. She has given over one hundred talks as invited keynote presentations, university guest lectures, interactive community education, and refereed conference presentations. As a public scholar, Korn has been quoted in interviews with NPR, CNN, SXSW, Bustle, Colorlines, Fox News, Forbes, Mashable, Reader’s Digest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington Post, and more. Drawing on critical race and intersectional feminist theories, Korn explores how Internet spaces and artificial intelligences influence, and are influenced, by assemblages of race and gender and how online producers-consumers have constructed inventive digital representations and computer-mediated communications of identity.