The race to make tech more equal
By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)
Back when Bryan Semaan’s mom had a Facebook account, doomscrolling wasn’t part of her vernacular.
The Iraqi culture she was raised in compels celebration of accomplishments and milestones, “so any time someone posted something, she felt she had to interact with it,” Semaan said. “That personal engagement runs very deeply through our culture.”
But it became exhausting for her to keep up as her network swelled into the hundreds, so she deactivated her account. For Semaan, it’s a fitting metaphor for his research—which challenges the assumptions tech developers make about the users of their products and services. And it’s the kind of problem he wants to study through the Center for Race, Media and Technology, which the University of Colorado Boulder unveiled in the spring.
“The people developing these technologies are in Silicon Valley—so, mostly male, mostly white,” said Semaan, director of the center and an associate professor of information science at CMCI. “A lot of the values we bake into these technologies are being forced onto people in different cultures, often creating problems.”
As a first-generation American, Semaan said he identifies with the liminal moments faced by others living between worlds—immigrants, veterans, refugees, people of color or Indigenous people—and the challenges of adopting to Western societal structures. Technology plays a big part, and the discipline’s blind spots are a key focus of Semaan’s research, which asks how these tools can create resilience for people in those liminal moments, such as a climate refugee fleeing disaster or a queer teenager anxious about coming out.
To kick off the center, in March, CMCI welcomed Ruha Benjamin, a professor at Princeton who’s developed her scholarship around what she calls the “New Jim Code”—a nod to both the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation and the biases encoded into technology. Benjamin, he said, “focuses on how people consider technology to be a benign thing, when in fact it isn’t—tech nology takes on the values of those who create it.”
Fortunately, Semaan said, we’re at a moment when society is recognizing the importance of equity and justice, while seeing technology as a problem, a solution and a thread tying together the great challenges facing humanity—political polarization, disinformation, climate change and so on.
He’s optimistic that the Center for Race, Media and Technology will collect the broad perspectives needed to make, as he put it, “the intractable problems tractable.”
“What I imagine for the center is encouraging collaborations among the experts we bring together,” he said. “And I’m really hoping my research direction changes as a result of getting to work with the amazing people I’ll meet.”
If it’s collaboration he wants to get out of the center, Semaan’s successes to date have been more about tenacity. Early in his career, he said, some of his colleagues tried to steer him from migrants and veterans, dismissing his interest in making technology equitable as “a diversity ghetto.”
That didn’t deter him—and, with the benefit of hindsight, those rejections made him a better scholar.
These bigger challenges are going to require people thinking together at a much grander scale, which means changing how we work.”
Bryan Semaan
“In my research, the people you work with are incredibly vulnerable, or are so busy surviving that they can’t talk to you,” he said. “You have to be passionate about that work, and prepared for long-tail effort before you make progress.”
The work of the center will be a long game, but if successful, Semaan said, it will put CU Boulder at the center of the conversation around purposefully designed technology.
“It dovetails with the university’s broader mission around diversity,” he said. “It’s not just saying we’re going to increase diversity—it’s the issues we are approaching and the support we are building for different scholars across the university. Because these bigger challenges are going to require people thinking together at a much grander scale, which means changing how we work.”