Book submitted for consideration for publication
Race, Gender and Technology in the Internet Age
This book examines the hopes and fears surrounding a series of modern artifacts in the internet age to offer greater perspective on their promises and risks. It aspires to a global, comparative perspective, if often focusing on the US and European experience. Its central argument, well-known among historians and other analysts, is that scientific and engineering activity is deeply embedded in existing social, economic and cultural institutions.[i] We should not therefore expect revolutionary changes in the ways we work, think, and behave to accompany the technological innovations of the internet age. But there will be changes, they will be disruptive, indeed deeply disruptive for the already disadvantaged and for the newly unemployed.
Even more, the smart devices and other technological innovations of the internet age will reinforce existing racial and gender disparities. Racial and environmental injustice will not disappear because of the computer or smart phone. AVs (autonomous automobiles) may solve transport challenges for the wealthy (where to park? How to continue to work while at the wheel of a modern car?), but they will reinforce mobility inequality unless efforts are made to expand smart public transportation in inner cities and rural regions. Indeed, AVs cannot yet properly identify black pedestrians as accurately as white ones. Similarly, AI programs are burdened with racially-tainted algorithms.
The internet age – rather, promoters of the great potential of the internet age – have promised improvements in the quality of life from public health to clean energy production; from miraculous and already visible advances communications to others in transportation.[ii] They note the incorporation of AI into smart, more efficient technologies. Along with these changes of speed and effectiveness, many observers argued that greater equity in society would devolve in short order. But the utopian virtues of the internet age – instantaneous access to information, goods and services, and to other people – often obvert our attention from the costs and dangers: loss of privacy, hacking, surveillance and reinforcement of existing social, gender and racial inequalities.[iii] Utopian visions rarely manifest in the daily world of the need to ensure work, shelter and food for many people.[iv] The reason is simple: technologies do not magically alter inequalities in economic, political and social relations, but reinforce them. In fact, a significant internet divide prevails where many individuals – rural, poor, illiterate, those in southern tier nations, women and children – do not have access to the advantages of computing, the internet and AI.
Persistent inequalities of race, gender and class that manifest across post-industrial societies determine who has access to such technologies now considered essential in daily life as cell phones, computers, and public health infrastructures; who is more likely to bear the environmental and social costs of technological development; and how successful publics and governments have been in adjudicating the risks and benefits of modern technology.[v] The implications of properly evaluating the socio-political impacts of internet age technologies extend well beyond national borders. The United Nations declarations on human rights point directly and indirectly to the digital divide: the right to work in “just and favorable conditions,” the right to an adequate standard of living, and the rights of minorities. These rights are embodied in UN millennium development goals for sanitation, including ending open defecation, expanding online access and ensuring affordable and clean energy, that are covered in this book.[vi]
[i] Several of the books that helped me better to understand the complexities of science, technology and society include Ruth Cowan, Roe Smith, Loren Graham, Thomas Hughes, David Nye, Gabrielle Hecht, Dorothy Nelkin, Lawrence Badash, Joel Tarr, and Leo Marx. There are many other important works that have shaped my thinking listed in the notes.
[ii] The internet age – whatever we call it, the computer age, the information age, the new media age, the silicon age – and linked to it the post-industrial age of commercial and social development linked to finance other services more than industrial production – emphasizes human capital. Among the earliest writings on the coming of the new age, see Alain Touraine, La Société Post-industrielle (1969) and Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1984). On the rapid growth of the internet from DoD’s ARPANET to a network of networks linking millions of computers across the globe, with 2.25 billion pages and almost 5 billion users in 2023, see Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (MIT Press, 1999). Abbate chronicles the role of people in government and military agencies, computer scientists in academia and industry, graduate students, and telecommunications companies that contributed to such applications as electronic mail and the world Wide Web. Abbate avoids the exaggeration of many other accounts that hold the internet in awe and see mostly scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs as major actors. She also avoids the Amero-centric version of most of these histories.
[iii] In a series of essays in Josh Lauer, Kenneth Lipartito, eds., Surveillance Capitalism in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) several authors reveal –and warn about – the ways in which both governments and businesses have surveilled citizens by gathering using data about race, sex, class, income, and interests that enable and accelerate commoditization and directed marketing, not only political control.
[iv] On technological hopes, see Joseph Corn, editor, Imagining Tomorrow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986) and Howard Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
[v] Among the many important and engaging studies on gender and technology, I have learned a great deal from Ruth Schwart Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), and “From Virginia Dare to Virginia Slims: Women and Technology in American Life,” Technology and Culture, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1979): 51-63; Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York and London: Routledge, 1989); Nelly Oudshoorn, The Male Pill, A Biography of a Technology in the Making (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Arwen P. Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Work, and Technology in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen Mohun, editors, Gender and Technology: A Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
[vi] United Nations, “Take Action for Sustainable Development Goals,” at https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/