ABSTRACT: In 2018-9, Facebook’s user base grew by nearly 10%: the bulk of this growth was in countries of the Global South, each with complex socio-political arrangements, many in the midst of or recovering from war or other forms of conflict. The social impacts emerging from the rapid growth of such transnational digital platforms are often ambivalent. This talk addresses these concerns through an exploration of vernacular digital innovation in Cambodia, a country which is still recovering from the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975-79) and which, in late 2017, underwent an authoritarian media crackdown. The findings presented in this talk build on theory at the intersection of infrastructure studies (Star and Ruhleder, 1996; Larkin, 2013) and media’s relationship to memory (Gordon, 2008; Larkin, 2008; Richards, 1994). These findings call for the responsible design and international regulation of Facebook and other popular transnational platforms that are used in low-income countries with linguistic, political and cultural specificities. The empirical sections of this talk are based on the author’s historical and ethnographic research in Phnom Penh beginning in January 2014, including 20 months of full-time research from June 2017-January 2019.

 

BIO: Maggie Jack is a PhD candidate in the Information Science Department at Cornell University where she studies the creative use of digital tools in post-conflict and postcolonial environments. Maggie uses her past professional experiences in the technology industry in Silicon Valley and the international development sector and her academic background in the History of Science (BA Harvard University; MPhil University of Cambridge) to approach questions of contemporary computing with both scholarly and practical lenses. Her work is in conversation with the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), and Science and Technology Studies (STS). She has a minor PhD concentration in Anthropology and is a member of Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program. She has received funding for her research from the National Science Foundation, Intel, the Gates Foundation, Cornell’s Einaudi Center for International Studies, Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, the Design Technology Lab of NYU Abu Dhabi, and others. She has worked with international development organizations including the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Her award-winning writing is published in the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). In 2019-2020 she is a Digital Life Initiative (DLI) and Women in Technology New York (WiTNY) fellow at Cornell Tech in New York City.