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@GloireKnowsBest will be presenting this work today at the #CHI2024 conference in the Social Activism B panel.

The conclusion is that if we care about the societal impact of computing systems, we should pay as much or more attention to designing the structural factors that shape what computer scientists can practically produce as we do to the design of computing systems themselves.

E.g. in computing systems research for digital agriculture, there is intense pressure to conceptualize agricultural systems as engineering problems amenable to technical solutions, and to elide application-specific impacts to produce so-called "generalized" solutions.

Their practical work then becomes oriented towards these shifting simulacra of societal impact, shaped by the pressures of funding organizations, domain collaborators, industry, peer reviewers, and gatekeepers in the academic system.

In doing this "seam work", they must continually renarrate their work and its intended societal impact to different audiences. These continuously shifting stories produce fractured and reshaped visions of how their system and its consequences should be understood.

He found that as researchers move applied research from conception to publication, they are constantly stitching together ideas and coalitions across the seams of different organizations and disciplines.

@GloireKnowsBest used critical technical practice - interleaving a year of hands-on computing systems-building with structured critical reflection - to analyze how societal impact is understood and oriented to in academic computing systems research.

People often aim to address negative impacts of computing systems by convincing computer scientists they should build something different. But well-intentioned computer scientists still find it hard to address societal impact. Why?.

Our #CHI2024 paper on how academic computer science research practices shape the societal impact of digital agriculture is out! This paper combines social science with hands-on systems-building to analyze how computing's societal impacts are shaped.

I also found this in the mean time:

Seeking: book recommendation for a smart teen on the politics of technology as it applies to their own life. Not preachy, but real: These apps are not designed for your benefit, but for the benefit of those that build them. Like Tim Wu's Attention Merchants, but for teens.

RT @CornellCIS: Karen Levy, associate professor of information science, talks with Modern Farmer about new requirements for logging devices….

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RT @SharifaSultana4: Congratulations to all the AI & Society fellows; particularly super proud to see @ishtiaqueSIA on this list! https://t….

RT @AcademicImp: Are you kind to everyone except yourself? Philosophy can help you view yourself - and treat yourself - in the compassionat….

Now I'm old, my department is well-established, and the kind of work I was doing is mainstream. But I still find mainstream kind of boring. Shout-out to the weird folks everywhere who don't quite fit in departments as currently constituted; may you also find an unexpected path.

Cornell IS gave me a chance and hired me to help start a new department. Many colleagues both here and elsewhere nurtured me and made it possible for my career to grow, at a time when it wasn't obvious that was a good idea.