The Tech Shock Podcast - Kira Allman
There’s plenty to unpack this week as Vicki and Geraldine speak to Kira Allman, expert on digital exclusion, report author for the Digital Poverty Alliance, and Manchester City Council’s Senior Digital Strategy Officer.
Kira begins by explaining how she became so involved with issues surrounding digital – describing herself as always having had a personal motivation to deal with “issues of justice and representation”.
An anthropologist by training, Kira says that her field work on digital activism in Cairo led to a firmer interest in tech-related inequalities; a commitment that has since expanded and broadened to encompass the UK context.
Vicki, Geraldine, and Kira go on to discuss a whole host of topics, from Kira’s work with community-owned broadband network ‘B4RN’ (Broadband for the Rural North), to our inadequate understanding of society’s ‘digital divide’. Currently, Kira argues, we put too much weight solely on access, and fail to question the real value of digital due to the current status quo.
Other key talking points include the current cost of living crisis, why digital shouldn’t be viewed in isolation from cultural and local values, how the architecture of the online world is “unfair by design”, the ‘sweet spot’ of media literacy, and finally, as if that wasn’t enough for the group to contemplate, a rethinking of how much we should datafy life – and what it means to be ‘human’ in the age of AI.
Next week Vicki and Geraldine are joined by Kingston University psychologist Aiman El Asam – they’ll be discussing how children’s vulnerabilities can be used to predict later harms, and how ‘rules’ don’t necessarily remove the risks of the online world.