Digital Citizenship

In this course, when we talk about the social implications of computing, most of the focus is on the risks and challenges of new technologies. That's because you mostly know about the good implications: the ability to communicate with friends worldwide, the explosion in creative expression, information at your fingertips, and so on. The risks and challenges need attention, but we shouldn't completely neglect the benefits of computing, as it has inspired advances in a wide range of fields, including the arts, science, engineering, and communications.

Social media are designed to improve lives by helping people communicate and collaborate, but cyberbullying was an unexpected, illegal, and unethical misuse. It would have been better if the programmers who invented social media had anticipated these possibilities (although it's not obvious what they would have done differently). Today, responsible programmers do try to predict possible misuses of their software before they release it to the world. But it's not possible for programmers to anticipate all of the possible misuses of a technology.

People also create computing innovations to solve problems; every branch of science has been transformed by modern computers. In biology, the central example is DNA sequencing. DNA, the fundamental "blueprint" for all living organisms, consists of very long molecules; human DNA includes over three billion tiny building blocks. Modern supercomputers make it possible for human researchers to perform computations to analyze these sequences.

Folding@home is just one of several citizen science projects. The first one was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which uses volunteered computer time to search for large prime numbers, which are of importance in public key cryptography. Another early citizen science project, probably the most famous, is SETI@home, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, created by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley. This project searches the pictures produced by large telescopes for radio signals that could be produced by intelligent life on a faraway planet. (SETI@home hasn't found any signs of intelligent aliens so far, although it has found candidate radio signals for further study.)

Citizen science apps rely on a concept called crowdsourcing, where data or information is collected from a large number of people via the Internet. Crowdsourcing allows people to collaborate on a project by each contributing a small portion of the data, the funding, etc.

Advances in technology have also allowed widespread access to information and public data, which facilitates the identification of problems, the development of solutions, and dissemination of the results. In medicine, for example, some combinations of medicines can be very dangerous, and doctors have to know whether the any new medication they prescribe is safe in combination with the ones the patient is already taking. There are thousands of prescription medications available in the United States, and there are medicines available without a prescription that may interact as well. Doctors can't possibly remember the drug interactions for every pair of medicines, but they can use medical databases to check for drug interactions online. Another example that's designed for the public is websites like opensecrets.org, which collect and summarize information about major contributors to political candidates' campaign funds so that people look up who has privileged access to the people who are supposed to be representing you.

Digital Collaboration

The worldwide nature of the Internet both requires and enables collaborative design. Human capabilities can be enhanced by collaboration via computing. Computers these days are so small and so inexpensive that nearly everyone has one in their pocket. So, for a software project to be successful, it must meet the needs of people at all levels of expertise; it must meet the cultural expectations of users from every country, of every economic class, every race, every gender, and every other social division; it must meet (or create) a need of all those people.

Nobody has enough experience with enough cultures to design for all these expectations. Instead, innovations are designed by a team that includes potential users, from a variety of cultures, ideally by choosing diverse technical experts (programmers, graphic artists, user interface experts, and others) who'll do the actual implementation and who clearly understand the purpose of the innovation. In addition, modern innovators survey large numbers of users outside their team to double-check that everyone's expectations are satisfied. This is why you may see invitations from a company to "alpha test" a new program. It's only partly to help catch out-and-out bugs; it also finds out early if some users are going to get angry about something the developers never considered.

Another reason a variety of people on the design team is desirable is to help avoid bias in the innovation. In some early testing of self-driving cars, it was found that they weren't good at detecting pedestrians who were people of color. This wasn't deliberate, of course; the artificial intelligence program that detected pedestrians had been trained on a vast collection of photographs of people, in which all the people happened to be light-skinned. Luckily this problem was discovered in early testing, before the self-driving cars were really sent out on the road.

How do computers and the Internet enable collaboration? The way that's most taken for granted is the worldwide telephone system. Telephones are older than computers, but the early telephone systems didn't have area codes, let alone country codes. You could dial people in your town, but to call anyone else you had to ask an operator (a telephone company worker) to connect you by hand. Today, connecting telephone calls is done by computer, and you can dial just about any telephone on Earth yourself.

Besides talking with each other, developers can collaborate on multi-author documents using software that allows them to share the ownership of an online document. The best-known such system is Google Docs; like Skype, it's free in the money sense but not in the sense of sharing the software that implements it.