Christopher Schroeder

Tag: digital culture

  • Revolutionary Thinking

    Revolutionary Thinking

    I had been encouraged after a conference session to read Heather Ford’s (2022) Writing the Revolution, and can understand after having done so why this book was recommended.

    Ford in it offers her decade-long digital ethnography of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Wikipedia entry from its emergence and through its evolution and uses it to challenge conventional ideas about facts in the digital world. To do so, she outlines a framework for facts that includes allies, or those who author or edit Wikipedia content, and companions, or sources that validate and verify these assertions.

    Ford uses these results to challenge conventional Wikipedia principles, such as neutral point of view, verifiability of facts, and prohibitions against primary research. Instead, she argues that facts are contested and change, and as such illustrate the reality that knowledge is not objective but rather situated, especially in a digital world.

    This account systematically examines her observations and consistently supports her claims. Moreover, it establishes context through interviews with central participants, including those who led early efforts to establish this page, and in so doing shaped the narrative around this event, such as whether, and when, to call it a revolution.

    I wanted more synthesis, implications, and even application, especially beyond the Wikipedia world, but I admit that at least the latter wasn’t the ostensible purpose of this book, which is a successful account of academic research. As such, it illustrates a way of bridging the academic and the public, and offers a way of thinking about more relevant research.

    And I found it to be useful in ways I didn’t expect. For me, its engaging style consistently demonstrated a grad school tenet — knowledge as situated — that seemed intuitively true, and yet to have wide-ranging implications, especially for institutionalized practices, which I could never confront.

    I think Ford’s account clearly illustrates an interim step in an effort to transform a grad school stipulation into a useful foundational principle.

  • Quite Careless Indeed

    Quite Careless Indeed

    Sarah Wynn-Williams’s (2025) book Careless People is offered as a memoir of her six years at Meta (Facebook), but it focuses as much on the people whose decisions created this company, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was reportedly hired to appease the Trump administration.

    Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat, wanted to work for Facebook she explains because she believed in its potential and its power. She also recognized that this company needed a global perspective to maximize this potential for positive impact, and was eventually offered a position, which she developed in a way that allowed her to become central to its global policies.

    This focus as much as anything explains the emergency injunction won by Meta to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting her book although that according to some only increased its sales. If so, this response obviously backfired, but that likely means more money for Wynn-Williams but does not increase the likelihood of the public benefits she once identified.

    Wynn-Williams generally knows how to tell engaging stories. Some moments are uneven, but many are engaging. I consistently wondered what happened next, and what some of these powerful yet peculiar people would say or do.

    She also if this account is accurate has admirable attributes, such as confidence, motivation, and resilience. These seem even more so in contrast with her shortcomings that she details, such as the time she stopped in the middle of labor with her feet in the stirrups to draft a requested talking points memo, and insisted despite her husband’s and doctor’s requests upon sending it before returning to the task at hand.

    This and other moments might make some question Wynn-Williams’s judgment. Perhaps most alarming was her willingness to stay in her position despite the political, social, and individual harm, such as blatant sexual harassment, that she witnessed and even experienced. These decisions some could suggest might have condoned such conditions no matter how often she cited the need of her family for health care or any increased capacity to change the company as a company insider.

    Wynn-Williams’s relationship with Meta ends when she is fired. She insists that she had wanted to leave and had been searching for another job, but some might wonder whether she would have ever left on her own volition. Such critics could cite her decision to relocate reportedly at Zuckerberg’s request, which as she admits affects not just her but also her family, or her concerns about the economic consequences if she did.

    Wynn-Williams also offers what could be considered a cautionary tale for those who might still be techno-optimists. She isn’t wrong to imagine the potential power in social media and other digital technologies. At the same time, she depicts the risks of being naive about surveillance capitalism, and especially its ability to disable this potential and exploit users.

    That perhaps is a bigger problem. Despite her engaging stories, she hasn’t provided a narrative. Many moments are engaging although according to some contain little new information, but these together are never quite connected into a sequence of events that ultimately offers useful insight about not just this author but also if readers are lucky the times or world in which we live.

    This flaw can be found even in its title, which refers to Tom and Daisy and their relationship in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1925) canonical The Great Gatsby. In it, Tom and Daisy are indeed careless, and even entitled, but Mark, Sheryl, and Joel in contrast seem more than careless, and rather self-absorbed, exploitative, and even ruthless in this book.

    A question I have after reading it is whether Wynn-Williams could be considered part of this problem.

  • A Little Privacy Please

    A Little Privacy Please

    My kids cannot understand what I’m sure they would consider my obsession with privacy.

    They technically didn’t grow up with cell phone, and got their first in middle school. Still, they’ve spent most of their lives with these devices, and the cultural changes created by these, and they insist upon the death of privacy.

    I often ask in response why they don’t post their iCloud passwords on social media, or even give these to me. They obviously don’t and won’t but also don’t consider such stances as pro-privacy choices.

    I still advocate for the use of Signal for example as our messaging app of choice and ask about the more than 700 trackers, and almost 1,900 ads, blocked by my VPN over nine hours. They mostly ignore me.

    I was reminded this week of these different expectations in of all places a public bathroom at a prestigious private research hospital.

    I noticed the person at an adjacent urinal using his cell phone. I overheard another in a stall having a conversation, which continued at the sink — the phone was wedged between his shoulder and his ear — and as he left.

    Such experiences are surprisingly commonplace, and have been so for some time. I actually was once debating whether to ask someone to stow his phone as I watched him drop it in the urinal he was using and then fish it from the brackish water.

    I can understand why some think privacy no longer exists. At the same time, I fear the intrusion of these devices into all areas of human experience, and the absence of informed debates about these intrusions throughout everyday lives.

    We need to talk more about the recent Apple iCloud encryption changes for UK users or Amazon Alexa changes for everyone who uses its Echo devices. Otherwise, we are relinquishing freedoms and rights that we might wish one day, and perhaps in the not too distant future, we still had.

    Perhaps we can start with what should be obvious, and thus easy, agreements, such as cell phone in public bathrooms.