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Being Human in Digital Cities – review
In Being Human in Digital Cities, Myria Georgiou explores how technology reshapes urban life, transforming how we relate to ourselves, each other and the space around us. Examining the digital order’s influence, including datafication, surveillance and mapping, Georgiou’s essential book advocates for centring humans through the paradigm of the “right to the city” based on social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability, writes Samira Allioui.
Being Human in Digital Cities. Myria Georgiou. Polity. 2023.
Technology, embodied through so-called smart cities (places where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital solutions for the benefit of their inhabitants and business), has been implemented into all aspects of public and private urban life. Recently, the United Nations created the Hub for Human Rights and Digital Technology as a way to encourage cities to strategise around their “right to have digital rights,” stating that: “Together, as we seek to recover from the pandemic, we must learn to better curtail harmful use of digital technology and better unleash its power as a democratising force and an enabler”.
Myria Georgiou’s Being Human in Digital Cities addresses the question, how do digital cities change what it means to be human in relation to digital urbanism and digital justice? It has never been more urgent to understand how the digital order functions and its implications for controlled cities and lives. The city is where so many hopes and fears emerge for the future of humanity, and therefore studying its changing nature in a digitalised world is crucial. Moreover, the relationship between the transformation of cities and the right to the city has not yet been seriously explored.
It has never been more urgent to understand how the digital order functions and its implications for controlled cities and lives.
Intrigued by the growing symbolic power of technology in regulating the city, Georgiou demonstrates how an unstable but tenacious urban order is planned, performed, and sometimes resisted on platforms and networks to sustain the social order in cities that experience perpetual crisis. Georgiou’s principal thesis is that the digital order reflects the revived and contradictory mobilisation of humanist values across different quarters of the city. Human-centric conceptions of technology are at the heart of an emerging digital urban order. According to Georgiou, these values are gaining renewed currency by imagining and planning relationships between humans and data.
The book identifies the rhetorics and performances of the digital order as core elements of processes of change in the relational constitution of cities, technologies, and power (42). The book’s generative force comes from Georgiou’s assertion that a dynamic comeback of humanist values in and for the digital city is underway. Her central argument is that humanism matters when it mobilises (populist humanism), normalises (demotic humanism) and contests (critical humanism) power (143-144). Considering the various implications of being human in digital cities is a critical topic at a time when declarations and manifestos have emerged worldwide claiming to protect citizens’ digital rights. Digital rights are a range of protections regarding access to the internet, privacy, transparency regarding how data is used, control over how data is used and democratic participation in municipal technology decisions. They need to be protected because they represent the bridge that links our traditional human rights with the complexities of the online world, ensuring that our digital identities, decisions, and interactions are treated with the same protection and respect as in the physical world.
[Digital rights] link our traditional human rights with the complexities of the online world, ensuring that our digital identities, decisions, and interactions are treated with the same protection and respect as in the physical world.
The digital order has become a post-neoliberal response to neoliberal crises, and it breaks from the strategies of neoliberalism in different ways (31). It is a new order which “emerges because of widespread pressures to recognize the sacredness of life and the value of society” (30). Through “the promotion of unpredictability, openness and diversity, the digital order integrates instability into stability” (31). The author subtly explains why she privileges the category of the human and consequently rehumanisation-dehumanisation in understanding the digital order. Since technology is more and more infiltrating our consciousness, we become addicted to our devices that distract us and feed us information. But paradoxically, while these changes drive us to retreat to corners of comfort, we try to conquer divisiveness by cultivating communities. A research journey across eight cities of the global North and South – from London to Seoul, and from Los Angeles to Athens – over seven years has shaped Georgiou’s understanding of the digital order. From this grounding, she explains how she adopts a decentred conception of the city which privileges a transnational and transurban vision and practice. Georgiou’s methodological choice of a critical humanist approach promotes an open, creative, and participant-led approach that includes the perspectives of humans.
Georgiou adopts a decentred conception of the city which privileges a transnational and transurban vision and practice.
Her compelling research reveals two paradoxes. First, migrants’ experiences, gathered through interviews conducted with 60 teens in Athens and Los Angeles, present rehumanisation-dehumanisation as a continuum rather than a blunt proposition. Second, the Global South is ever present in cities of the Global North (113). Georgiou’s findings suggest that becoming urban reinforces autonomy. For example, migrants’ everyday experiences, mediated and linked through urban migration and technology, reveal their acute awareness that the development of autonomy protects them from certain kinds of dehumanisation such as exclusion Moreover, during this research conducted in the context of a European project on young people’s digital lives, Georgiou witnessed sentiments of enthusiasm and relief when participants were talking about a commonly used urban technology: Google Maps, including Google Earth and Street View (115). Participants were relieved because “becoming urban is not only about learning but also about being an autonomous subject in navigating city”.
Her work evidences the value of everyday technologies (namely, smartphones and apps) and the concept of “secret city” (117) for those excluded from so many other spaces of representation. A secret city only exists in a sociotechnical imagination. As a place of consumption, it is imaginary in the sense that it remains discovered and consumed through technical devices. In fact, as smart cities begin to become dehumanised realms and behavioural data is neglected, the place of humans risks being devalued. Georgiou’s research is an invaluable attempt to claim and interrogate human experiences in their entanglement with the digital in urban settings.
Georgiou describes predictive policing, the practice of using algorithms to analyse massive amounts of information to predict and help prevent potential crimes as a mundane form of symbolic violence regularly applied in the city (126). This is part of a wider trend of states’ increasing the surveillance of citizens, with surveillance understood as any personal data acquisition for management influence or entitlement. Predictive policing systems have been empirically shown to create feedback loops, where police are frequently sent back to the same neighbourhoods, regardless of the true crime rate. In the US, predictive policing tends to disproportionately target more African Americans, areas with higher concentrations of Latinos and Black, Asian and Minority ethnic (BAME) people.
In response to these trends of profiling and surveillance, the right to the city emerges as a new paradigm that provides an alternative framework with which to rethink cities and human settlements based on the principles of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability.
In response to these trends of profiling and surveillance, the right to the city emerges as a new paradigm that provides an alternative framework with which to rethink cities and human settlements based on the principles of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability. According to Georgiou, it presents “a revamped moral vision which points to potentially democratising processes that recognize and address urban injustices” (97). It is worth noting that Georgiou, unlike other authors, prefers to address the concept of the right to the city rather than the “right to a smart city”, her research does not advocate an approach focused on “smart citizens”, “smart citizenship” and “smart cities”. She avoids a citizen-centred approach and instead privileges life, freedom, and wellbeing, expanding her framework to include all humans in urban settings, whether they are citizens or migrants.
Finally, the book, brimming with secondary research, opens new critical avenues into techno-political research on digital cities. More precisely, knowing that humans are less studies as agents involved in the creation of digital, the book sheds light on urban humanity which often remains an opaque category. It highlights humans as agents of change and the displacement of questions of power but also of rights to the city. She investigates essential questions about what it means to be human in digital cities, suggesting that “the most compelling claims to humanism come from those who experience dehumanisation”. Such offerings beg the question of readers, who is and isn’t seen as fully human within city spaces and how does the dawn of the digital city affect those boundaries?
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Goldilock Project on Shutterstock.
If you hate Amazon, blame Rishi Sunak | David Mitchell
The online giant’s vast storage unit on the M1 is a logistical miracle – it’s a pity the lax-on-tax PM has spoiled the view
Cartoon: Future veterans of the information wars
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Connecting Migrant Farmworkers With Health Care and Family
This story was originally published by Carolina Public Press.
Francisco Romero has spent about nine months of every year for a decade toiling in North Carolina’s cotton and tobacco fields — or just about any other job that relies on the brawn of migrant workers to sustain the state’s $100 million farm industry.
The work is essential, he said. Without it, his family would struggle to make ends meet. Still, the distance from family exacts a heavy toll.
He was absent when his father in Guanajuato, Mexico, fell ill with Covid-19 and died. “At a moment like that, the money doesn’t make up for the loss,” said Romero, 37, from a farmhouse in the far-western mountains of Jackson County.
Farm work can be an isolating experience for migrants, who typically work and live in remote areas where the internet is unreliable or nonexistent. Workers fire off quick WhatsApp messages when they happen upon a field with cell reception, only to see it vanish in the next field over.
More typically, though, they contact family during weekly trips to buy groceries in the nearest town.
That changed for many in May 2020 when the state’s Farmworker Health Program set up internet service for migrant and seasonal farmworkers. The reasoning was that connectivity improves health, which was especially true during quarantine amid the peak of COVID-19.
The program made it possible for farmworkers such as Romero to keep in regular contact with family. Although he has been absent for most of his infant son’s first year, he has been able to follow the boy’s progress.
“My son is experiencing many changes,” Romero said, “so the occasional voice message, a photo, short video my wife sends, things like that are very essential.”
Certain health issues afflict farmworkers at notably higher rates than workers in other jobs, including heat-related illnesses and musculoskeletal injuries. The lack of internet access, which is a reality for many farmworkers, further complicates their ability to receive health care.
These workers also want for social support and family connections, and the absence of these things becomes a strain on their mental health. Indeed, according to the state’s Farmworker Health Program, 40 percent of farmworkers nationwide go through depression, while nearly a third experience anxiety at some point.
The Internet Connectivity Project established during the pandemic, devised several ways of furnishing the internet to farmworkers. The project placed hundreds of devices across the state, allowing farmworkers to schedule remote health visits using a mobile phone or another electronic device. This care method, commonly referred to as telehealth, gained wide acceptance among all kinds of patients during the pandemic.
Of the estimated 75,000 farmworkers in the state, the program served just 3,100. But among those it did reach, the response to having internet access was positive.
“Some outreach workers reported a mental and emotional shift when they were visiting workers who had been utilizing the hotspots,” said Jocelyn Romina Santillan-Deras, digital inclusion coordinator for the Farmworker Health Program, housed under the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Rural Health.
Family nurse practitioner Kelly Ware examines farmworker Andres Garcia during a farm visit by the Vecinos mobile medical clinic. Credit: Colby Rabon / Carolina Public Press
Outreach staff noted that migrant workers also seemed happier to see them during their visits. “Some farmworkers mentioned that there was improved communication and self-efficacy due to the hotspots and having access to the internet,” she said.
The state has been using the words “digital health” to encompass not only what is widely understood to be telehealth or telemedicine, but also remote monitoring and electronic health records, Santillan-Deras said.
“It’s a little more broad than telehealth, but it incorporates telehealth,” she said.
The state devised three ways to get farmworkers internet: internet hubs, reimbursing growers for internet services, and lending hotspots. The hotspots proved to be the easiest and the cheapest.
To set up internet in farmhouses and migrant-worker camps, the state partnered with local health organizations, and in Jackson County that organization has been Vecinos.
Based in Cullowhee on the Western Carolina University campus, Vecinos provides health care and wellness programs in Spanish and English, primarily to farmhands and seasonal workers.
Patients who can’t make it to the organization’s outpatient clinic might be reached by a mobile medical clinic, or via telehealth. The last option was made significantly easier by the connectivity project.
Kelly Ware, a nurse practitioner with Vecinos, has come to rely on telehealth for patient follow-up care. “It’s hard to get patients in for a consultation,” Ware said, “so telehealth is a big game changer to maintain contact with patients.”
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Ware sees patients in the Cullowhee clinic twice a week. She and other providers drive out to hard-to-reach farmworker camps in the surrounding area as many as three times a month.
Some of the more common health issues they find include urinary infections, rashes, poison ivy, upper respiratory ailments, unchecked diabetes and high blood pressure.
Telehealth has proved useful for keeping tabs on patients with chronic conditions, Ware said.
“If they have recurring issues, I may see them in person, and then I follow up with them on telehealth,” Ware said. “We can’t bring the whole clinic out to them; telehealth is easier.”
In early November, during the last mobile clinic of the year, Ware met with about a dozen workers in a farmhouse tucked away deep in the mountains, 40 minutes southeast of Cullowhee. They had recently arrived from other farms for the Christmas tree harvest, the last job of the season before many returned to their families in Mexico.
Some of the men had blood drawn and received flu shots, while one man, who had dropped something heavy on his toe, was seen for a possible fracture. His toe was swollen, but the man couldn’t afford to miss work for a visit to the doctor, much less pay for an X-ray.
A farmworker has his height taken during a Vecinos mobile medical clinic farm visit. Credit: Colby Rabon / Carolina Public Press
Ware suggested icing the toe and fitting it with a splint, then left him with ibuprofen for the pain. “He’s probably one that I should just follow up on … and put him on the schedule for telehealth,” she said.
Vecinos provides telehealth over the messaging app WhatsApp, in part because it is already widely used among farmworkers. Even so, the visits don’t always come off as planned.
After all, farmworkers spend long days in the field, and when they get home they cook dinner and lunch for the next day. Sometimes they are too tired for a telehealth appointment, or they forget that they had an appointment in the first place.
But telehealth still has important advantages, chief among them the flexibility of scheduling a visit in the evening or on weekends when the outpatient clinic is closed.
“I will talk to patients even if it’s off schedule,” Ware said. “I’ll talk to somebody at 12 o’clock at night on a Friday if that’s convenient for them.”
That kind of flexibility has helped Ruth Alvarado manage her high blood pressure and periodic bouts of chest pain. She lives near Sylva, about a 10-minute drive from Cullowhee, and gets by cleaning houses and making Christmas wreaths. When she feels ill, which is not infrequent, she sends Ware a text message.
“I can get the flu or worse if I don’t take care of myself,” 51-year-old Alvarado said. “I get off work late, and even if I make an appointment at the clinic in Cullowhee, I can’t get there. It’s easier for me to tell them my symptoms in a text or a phone call.”
Building on the success of the Internet Connectivity Project, the Office of Rural Health applied for and received a $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. It will spend the money on digital inclusion efforts that state Health Secretary Kody H. Kinsley said will “close the health care coverage gap by increasing access to care when and where workers and their families need it.”
The use of telehealth by Vecinos, like the Internet Connectivity Project, began as a way to reach patients during the pandemic. The project officially ended in March of this year, but the state will continue implementing its digital equity and inclusion activities. Funding will come from the Office of Digital Equity and Literacy, plus $6 million from the National Institutes of Health in September for the Agricultural Worker Digital Equity Initiative.
But even as telehealth has given Vecinos another avenue to reach patients, its executive director, Marianne Martinez, said the region will need more than hotspots to overcome its connectivity challenges.
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“Far Western North Carolina is unique because of the extreme lack of internet,” Martinez said. Some areas are internet dead zones, where a hotspot would be useless.
“There will not be infrastructure here for a long time,” she said. “As things are now, you have to go to the top of the mountain just to send a message to family, while trying not to get eaten by a bear.”
Andres Garcia has not had a health checkup using WhatsApp or, for that matter, any other virtual platform. But in his three years working on North Carolina farms, the Jackson County farmhouse is the first time he’s had even sporadic internet connection – and it’s a boon to his mental health.
The workers do what they can to use the internet when the modem temporarily locks in on a signal. When it does, “it makes a big difference to me to see my family on a video call or hear them in a voice message letting me know how they’re doing,” Garcia said. “It puts my mind at ease knowing they are OK.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The post Connecting Migrant Farmworkers With Health Care and Family appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
Cartoon: Pick your social network
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Knowledge Exchange Showcase - Understanding Visitor Engagement of Free Heritage Sites Using Social Media
Kathryn Eccles (Oxford Internet Institute), gives a talk on her Knowledge Exchange research project on using social media data to understand visitor engagement at heritage sites. Kathryn Eccles, Oxford Internet Institute
Dr Kathryn Eccles has been a Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Oxford Internet Institute since 2008. Kathryn is currently the PI of the Cabinet project, which has developed an interactive, mobile-optimised digital platform to support and encourage object-based learning.
Kathryn’s research interests lie primarily in the Digital Humanities, ranging from the re-organisation of cultural heritage and higher education in the digital world and the impact of new technologies on Humanities scholarship and scholarly communication, to broader debates surrounding the human and social aspects of innovation and technological change. In 2014, Kathryn was appointed as the University of Oxford’s first Digital Humanities Champion, in which capacity she played a leading role in developing the cross-University Digital Humanities strategy, advocating for Digital Humanities within the University and externally. Building on the University’s strengths in Digital Humanities, Kathryn continues to develop and contribute to training provision for all career stages and facilitates the embedding of digital practices and methodologies into Humanities teaching and research.
Never Mind the Privacy: The Great Web 2.0 Swindle
The sermon today comes from this six minute video from comedian Adam Conover: The Terrifying Cost of "Free” Websites
I don't go along with the implication here that the only conceivable reason to run a website is to directly make money by doing so, and that therefore it is our expectation of zero cost web services that is the fundamental problem. But from a technical point of view the sketch's analogy holds up pretty well. Data-mining commercially useful information about users is the business model of Software as a Service (SaaS) — or Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) as it's alternately known.
You as the user of these services — for example social networking services such as Facebook or Twitter, content delivery services such as YouTube or Flickr, and so on — provide the "content", and the service provider provides data storage and processing functionality. There are two problems with this arrangement:
- You are effectively doing your computing using a computer and software you don't control, and whose workings are completely opaque to you.
- As is anybody who wants to access anything you make available using those services.
Even people who don't have user accounts with these services can be tracked, because they can be identified via browser fingerprinting, and you can be tracked as you browse beyond the tracking organisation's website. Third party JavaScript "widgets" embedded in many, if not most, websites silently deliver executable code to users' browsers, allowing them to be tracked as they go from site to site. Common examples of such widgets include syndicated advertising, like buttons, social login services (eg. Facebook login), and comment hosting services. Less transparent are third-party services marketed to the site owner, such as Web analytics. These provide data on a site's users in the form of graphs and charts so beloved by middle management, with the service provider of course hanging on to a copy of all the data for their own purposes. My university invites no less than three organisations to surveil its students in this way (New Relic, Crazy Egg, and of course Google Analytics). Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that government intelligence agencies are secondary beneficiaries of this data collection in the case of companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. For companies not named in these leaks, all we can say is we do not — because as users we cannot — know if they are passing on information about us as well. To understand how things might be different, one must look at the original vision for the Internet and the World Wide Web.
The Web was a victim of its own early success. The Internet was designed to be "peer-to-peer", with every connected computer considered equal, and the network which connected them completely oblivious to the nature of the data it was handling. You requested data from somebody else on the network, and your computer then manipulated and transformed that data in useful ways. It was a "World of Ends"; the network was dumb, and the machines at each end of a data transfer were smart. Unfortunately the Web took off when easy to use Web browsers were available, but before easy to use Web servers were available. Moreover, Web browsers were initially intended to be tools to both read and write Web documents, but the second goal soon fell away. You could easily consume data from elsewhere, but not easily produce and make it available yourself.
The Web soon succumbed to the client-server model, familiar from corporate computer networks — the bread and butter of tech firms like IBM and Microsoft. Servers occupy a privileged position in this model. The value is assumed to be at the centre of the network, while at the ends are mere consumers. This translates into social and economic privilege for the operators of servers, and a role for users shaped by the requirements of service providers. This was, breathless media commentary aside, the substance of the "Web 2.0" transformation.
Consider how the ideal Facebook user engages with their Facebook friends. They share an amusing video clip. They upload photos of themselves and others, while in the process providing the machine learning algorithm of Facebook's facial recognition surveillance system with useful feedback. They talk about where they've been and what they've bought. They like and they LOL. What do you do with a news story that provokes outrage, say the construction of a new concentration camp for refugees from the endless war on terror? Do you click the like button? The system is optimised, on the users' side, for face-work, and de-optimised for intellectual or political substance. On the provider's side it is optimised for exposing social relationships and consumer preferences; anything else is noise to be minimised.
In 2014 there was a minor scandal when it was revealed that Facebook allowed a team of researchers to tamper with Facebook's news feed algorithm in order to measure the effects of different kinds of news stories on users' subsequent posts. The scandal missed the big story: Facebook has a news feed algorithm. Friending somebody on Facebook doesn't mean you will see everything they post in your news feed, only those posts that Facebook's algorithm selects for you, along with posts that you never asked to see. Facebook, in its regular day-to-day operation, is one vast, ongoing, uncontrolled experiment in behaviour modification. Did Facebook swing the 2016 US election for Trump? Possibly, but that wasn't their intention. The fracturing of Facebook's user base into insular cantons of groupthink, increasingly divorced from reality, is a predictable side-effect of a system which regulates user interactions based on tribal affiliations and shared consumer tastes, while marginalising information which might threaten users' ontological security.
Resistance to centralised, unaccountable, proprietary, user-subjugating systems can be fought on two fronts: minimising current harms; and migrating back to an environment where the intelligence of the network is at the ends, under the user's control. You can opt out of pervasive surveillance with browser add-ons like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Privacy Badger. You can run your own instances of software which provide federated, decentralised services equivalent to the problematic ones, such as:
- GNU Social is a social networking service similar to Twitter (but with more features). I run my own instance and use it every day to keep in touch with people who also run their own, or have accounts on an instance run by people they trust.
- Diaspora is another distributed social networking platform more similar to Facebook.
- OpenID is a standard for distributed authentication, replacing social login services from Facebook, Google, et al.
- Piwik is a replacement for systems like Google Analytics. You can use it to gather statistics on the use of your own website(s), but it grants nobody the privacy-infringing capability to follow users as they browse around a large number of sites.
The fatal flaw in such software is that few people have the technical ability to set up a web server and install it. That problem is the motivation behind the FreedomBox project. Here's a two and a half minute news story on the launch of the project: Eben Moglen discusses the freedom box on CBS news
I also recommend this half-hour interview, pre-dating the Snowden leaks by a year, which covers much of the above with more conviction and panache than I can manage: Eben Moglen on Facebook, Google and Government Surveillance
Arguably the stakes are currently as high in many countries in the West as they were in the Arab Spring. Snowden has shown that for governments of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance there's no longer a requirement for painstaking spying and infiltration of activist groups in order to identify your key political opponents; it's just a database query. One can without too much difficulty imagine a Western despot taking to Twitter to blurt something like the following:
"Protesters love me. Some, unfortunately, are causing problems. Huge problems. Bad. :("
"Some leaders have used tough measures in the past. To keep our country safe, I'm willing to do much worse."
"We have some beautiful people looking into it. We're looking into a lot of things."
"Our country will be so safe, you won't believe it. ;)"
Bilingualism and the Internet
Scott Hale (Senior Data Scientist) delivers a talk as part of the Creative Multilingualism and TORCH Bitesize Talks at Linguamania, Ashmolean Museum. Scott Hale (Senior Data Scientist) delivers a talk as part of the Creative Multilingualism and TORCH Bitesize Talks at Linguamania, Ashmolean Museum.