Technical bias

Douglas Rushkoff (Program or Be Programmed) argues that we don’t think enough about how our new technologies run, or how they are biased.

Most of us know how to use software; few know how to make it, and we don’t think about how those who do make it are making their decisions, how their decisions shape our use of their programs. Google searches provide an illustration: “Every Google search is—at

least for most of us—a Hail Mary pass into the datasphere,
requesting something from an opaque black box. How does it
know what is relevant? How is it making its decisions? Why
can’t the corporation in charge tell us?” (17).

Technologies always have biases, “a tendency to promote one set of behaviors over another.” for instance: “It may be true that ‘guns don’t kill people, people
kill people’; but guns are a technology more biased to killing
than, say, clock radios. Televisions are biased toward people
sitting still in couches and watching. Automobiles are biased
toward motion, individuality, and living in the suburbs. Oral
culture is biased toward communicating in person, while
written culture is biased toward communication that doesn’t
happen between people in the same time and place. Film
photography and its expensive processes were biased toward
scarcity, while digital photography is biased toward immediate
and widespread distribution. Some cameras even upload
photos to websites automatically, turning the click of the
shutter into an act of global publishing” (20).

If we are unaware of the biases, we’ll be tossed about by those biases, and so Rushkoff’s book offers “ten commandments” for resisting the biases of the internet and keeping our use of technology human. For instance, contemporary technologies are “biased against time altogether,” and thus detach us “from the rhythms, cycles, and continuity on which we depend for coherence” (22). Therefore, the first commandment is, “Be not always on.”

Or: “Our digital networks are biased toward
social connections—toward contact .” Thus, Rushkoff thinks that “any effort to redefine
or hijack those connections for profit end up compromising the integrity of the network itself, and compromising the
real promise of contact” (93-4). But the same social media technology can be monetized: “The anger people feel over a social networking site’s everchanging
policies really has less to do with any invasion of
their privacy than the monetization of their friendships. The
information gleaned from their activity is being used for other
than social purposes—and this feels creepy. Friends are not
bought and sold” (94). Therefore the seventh commandment: Do not sell your friends.