Protecting The Voices 'Beyond The Valley'

WAMU 88.5

Published October 29, 2019 at 10:06 AM EDT

Facebook employee Mohamed Almari works from his laptop decorated in various Facebook stickers at the company's corporate headquarters campus in Menlo Park, California.

Professor Ramesh Srinivasan believes that technology, when used correctly, can be a powerful tool for fomenting democracy.

However, he also knows that these platforms are often used to divide and conquer communities.

His new book, “Beyond the Valley,” outlines how those working in tech today are attempting to make their products and tools inclusive and equal.

An excerpt from the book:

If we can no longer trust what we see—if in fact we are even manipulated by what we see—we must learn to understand, confront, and overcome the forces that threaten our individual minds and hopes for democracy. Indeed, human beings, bots, and microtargeting algorithms all play a role today in closing us off from facts, multiple points of view, and the contexts behind the information we see.

What can American citizens do to better understand how technology is dividing us? How can we make it stop?

Produced by Stacia Brown.

GUESTS

Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor of Information Studies at UCLA; author of ‘Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World Are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow”; @rameshmedia

For more, visit https://the1a.org.