In her Eyeo 2019 presentation, Diana Nucera defines four principles of digital justice:

  • access
  • participation
  • common ownership
  • healthy communities

I’d like to ask you to think about their own communities- these could be your class cohort, your family, your neighborhoods, discord servers or any community that you feel connected to. With one of your communities in mind, think of all the different technologies that your community uses together, and that help define it.

This could be the messaging and social networks you use, the payment platforms you use to share money, the games you play, the programs you use to create your own media, the file sharing services, digital stores and streaming services you use to consume media together, or the digital tools that allow you to work or learn as a group.

How does access to those tools help shape who stays a connected member of your community?

How do you introduce new members of your community to those technologies and help them learn to use them, or is knowledge of these technologies a pre-requisite to being in the group?

What would happen to your group if one of the technologies you rely on were interrupted or went out of business, or started charging a steep fee for access?

Can you imagine researching and assembling your own networks, tools media etc to replace that lost commercial technology with one that was tailored specifically for your group? Instead of worrying about whether it is technically feasible, imagine what the ideal replacement would be like if your community made their own replacement.

Describe what your community might make for itself if you had all the knowledge and resources you needed.

How would this new tool/media/network/technology affect the health of your community & who could be part of the group?

Think about these questions and if you feel like any of them spark ideas, please share them!

Digital justice demystifies technology to the point where we can not only use it, but create our own technologies and participate in the decisions that will shape communications infrastructure.

what is democracy: https://ucla.kanopy.com/video/what-democracy -1:02:40 -58:41

https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/motherboard-dear-future-people-building-their-own-internet-detroit/59cebd5795073d0905939aeb?jwsource=cl 2:18