Technology, Social Justice, and Medium
Concentrating the convergence of talent, knowledge and creativity
What do Periscope, Circa, Back to the Future, and Slack have in common with Dominique Matti, Joel Leon., and Soirée-Leone?
Time. Or perhaps timing is more precise. You can call it serendipitous or synchronous, if you prefer. I think of it as simultaneity. Captured here in Medium are thematic trends reflecting the edges of what technology can do, hints of what it could be capable of doing, and the pressing tensions of life in the United States.
Diogenes Brito’s story about Slack’s new icon, Just a Brown Hand, is the most obvious intersection of technology and social justice, presenting a visual representation of brown skin as normal. Go #earth-tones! Meanwhile, Dominique claims the title of being “absolutely an angry black woman” due to the specific, detailed list of a hundred or more microaggressions she has personally endured, pervading daily life; Joel describes overcoming cultural distance (“Watching White folks participate in life felt like an episode of National Geographic to me. Shit was entertaining, and it felt like a different world”) to become best friends with a white guy; and Soirée says white fragility “is holding us all back.”
The announcement from Josh Stein that DFJ is investing in Periscope focuses on data scientists and their use of this “impossibly fast data analysis platform,” which handles “billions of data rows in seconds.” The customers and examples provided in the story are impressive indeed. But what if we turned that kind of processing power to do something in, say, the Medium ecosystem, similar to what Circa did for journalism? Anthony De Rosa wrote,
Where I think Circa took a step forward …was the idea that we could add structure to ANY story…we could take ANY story and add a structured element to it…atomize news…using those atoms, apply metadata to them and allowing a reader to follow discrete stories which would only push to you the atomic units you had not already read…
Any story. Circa was designed specifically for journalism but it could be applied to the stories we’re living on the internet now, especially those that are clear reflections of dynamics in real life at this moment in history. Where Circa sought to enable journalists to write the first and second draft of history at the same time, a more robust application of data analysis to our own interactions with each other could speed up the emotional and intellectual processing needed by multitudes of individuals to confront and deal with the shit that’s holding us all back. Medium Staff — obviously your approval and engagement would be required. Shawn White, is your Story Unbound limited to fiction? Couldn’t we stitch, unbind, and re-stitch non-fictional offerings in co-creative attempts to tell, together, the story we want to live into, the society we want for the future?
Physics may not let us travel backward in time, as Ethan Siegel explains in his analysis of Back to the Future, but we can help each other come to understand the frames of reference that are relevant to the unfolding timespace of our shared lives on earth. Exploring frames of reference in this sense may be more than metaphorical. Mikhail Bakhtin’s identification of chronotopes in language use suggest that calibration on the societal scale is possible. Since we’re not going to be able to travel back in time to fix the mistakes of unhealed racism with its potential side effect of planetary-level destabilization, it may behoove us to start making the most we can from evident interconnections and parallels in social media and real life.
It’s my second week in the Medium ecosystem and I’m feeling optimistic that a fair number of the folks who are active here may in fact be both willing and capable of engaging a serious dialogue about whiteness. The first pair of Dark Allies posts got some traction, but it probably isn’t transparent that we’re trying to stimulate and maintain an on-going dialogue. Soirée and I are both writing more-or-less at the same time about (more-or-less) the same thing. We each have something different to say, which is both an illustration of diversity and, we hope, a way to a) keep the dialogue engaging and b) begin to expose the faultlines of social justice discourse so that we (as in, lots of people) can grow through the limitations of white fragility in order to productively and creatively re-design society.
Read Soirée-Leone’s take: White People Don’t Pick Strawberries
