Response to #1
I am very impressed by everyone’s article choices and discussions for the Expanding the Canon assignment. As a group, we explored so many issues from sexual orientation to gender to race to disability and so on. I especially enjoyed Ed’s post on how CEO behavior affects diversity and organizational culture. This topic was similar to the one I selected (Strategic Diversity Leadership) but Ed took it further and highlighted the practical steps that CEOs can take by linking to a Forbes article. The comics Ed used were funny and helped illuminate the issues in a different way. Sherri’s post on the dark side of personality tests hit home for me. I have taken several online personality tests over the past month as I applied for various jobs, and now I am a little scared about how this information will be used. I think Sherri’s use of bold statistics strengthened her post, and I really liked the movie trailer too. Kathleen’s post on the assumptions that healthcare workers make about disabled people was eye-opening because it showed that bias can exist in the most unlikely places. This post featured my favorite media element, the video of Melissa Crisp-Cooper. Watching her daily activities and her interactions with the doctors created empathy and made the issue come to life.
When I think of these thoughtful blog posts and all of the other articles that we’ve read (and that came up in my searches), I got this overwhelming feeling, as if the problems were getting larger the more people studied them and tried to solve them. A big complex question started to form in my mind. Something like, are we expecting too much from our workplaces? Or, maybe another way to put it is, are we offloading our personal responsibility to treat each other fairly and with respect to this thing called a “workplace.” Anyway, that is how I am seeing this topic differently at the moment.
Response to #2
Reading Ian Bogost’s article, “The Problem With Diversity in Computing,” was sort of like following a person carrying a flashlight in the daytime pointing out fairly obvious things. “That there is a picnic table, and oh, we also have a diversity problem in the computer industry.” Yawn. “Hey look, over there. STEM pipeline programs aren’t working.” Double yawn. Diversity problems and inclusion are everywhere, and Bogost does a solid job describing the ones in the tech industry. However, after getting the opinions of various academic types, he doesn’t do much more than throw up his hands, concluding his article with a statement that would keep a philosopher up all night: “the problem with computing is computing.” But along the way, Bogost’s flashlight shines briefly on an issue that I believe lies at the heart of the diversity problem in the tech industry, and that’s the wealth and power that have been created and concentrated in Silicon Valley. In my experience, people with power don’t like to give it up or even share it. Bogost calls computing professionals “a tribe separated from the general public,” but he misses a chance to explore this idea further. We need to shine the flashlight into the faces of the leaders of the tribe, the CEOs who are shaping every aspect of society, and put them on the spot. Ask them: “What did you do this week to give up some of your personal wealth or power to make your company or the tech industry more diverse and inclusive?” In my view, these leaders have a professional and personal responsibility to work on the problem, and until we hold them accountable, the problem will remain.
Hi Dylan,
I also agree that Ed did a really good job with his post. I liked that it was very detailed yet didn’t seem like a lot of plain facts since he included his own analysis and added in cartoons. I think this made me want to keep reading more of his work. I also like that he was very organized in his formatting with his subheadings. I really like your comparison to that flashlight scenario. I think it drew me in and made me interested to see where you were going with it. I also like that you tied that comparison to the effect that Bogost rhetorical strategies had on the audience afterward.
For folks who are invested in and informed about problems with diversity in technology, Bogost’s article probably doesn’t offer much that’s new, but many of the readers of The Atlantic will fall outside of this category, and may be encountering these discussions for the first time. Those folks (who are, by the way, mostly older men, many of them white) might be bumping into these issues for the first time. (See this article for a breakdown of The Atlantic’s reader demographics: https://medium.com/@josephhhz/a-systematic-breakdown-of-the-atlantic-magazine-aed8ce0725b6)
Readers of your generation–digital natives from more diverse backgrounds–are more likely to be steeped in these considerations. Audience matters, as we know.
You raise a fascinating question here, Dylan, about the roles that work and workplaces serve for us, whether we expect too much from them, and what kind(s) of relationships we want to have with our coworkers. There’s a lot to unpack there (and plenty to research!)