Category: Instructor

Evaluating Impact in the “Forgotten Field” of Prison Librarianship[1]

Jay Rosen 

601 Research Paper

“There have been plenty of articles — too many, it seems sometimes — that describe prison libraries, say they are useful as rehabilitative tools, and stop there.” (Barone, 1977)

For decades, a number of prison librarians and researchers have decried the near-total lack of data in their field regarding the impact of prison libraries on incarcerated individuals. In spite of their critiques, the majority of prison library literature remains descriptive in nature and relies more on speculation than empirically valid claims when describing impact. This paper attempts to identify the main reasons why it is so difficult to adequately evaluate the impact of prison library services. Chief among these include the diminishment of prison library services in America following the Supreme Court’s 1995 Lewis v. Casey decision; professional divides and isolation within the field of prison librarianship; the uniquely complex challenges faced by inmates; difficulties inherent in evaluating impact; profound variations in the missions, resources, and institutional contexts of prison libraries; lack of attention towards impact evaluation in foundational prison library guideline documents; and generally inadequate and understaffed prison library facilities.  

Following an exploration of these issues, suggestions for strengthening impact evaluation in prison libraries are proposed, including enhanced advocacy efforts towards politicians, funders, and the public; increased partnerships with public libraries; an explicit adoption of the “public library model” by prison libraries; inclusion of library professionals in relevant policy discussions; improved communication between prison librarians and correctional staff; increased collaboration between re-entry efforts, prison education programs, and prison libraries; strengthening of administrative procedures; general clarification of prison library services; extension of relevant public library initiatives to prison libraries (for instance, the Public Library Association’s Project Outcome initiative); and the development of a more robust theoretical context on which to ground subsequent research.

In discussing the challenges prison libraries face, this paper will focus primarily on American state and federal adult correctional institutions with “full service” libraries. This paper will not consider prison law libraries, although many claims made concerning impact evaluation are likely applicable to those environments as well. Perspectives from Denmark, Norway, and elsewhere across the world are also included.

The Value of Evaluation

Given that most prison libraries are underfunded and understaffed, one can hardly fault prison librarians — often the only permanent, full-time, formally-trained staff member in their library — for prioritizing direct service over data collection. In light of this reality, it is at times tempting to ask why impact evaluation matters in the first place, particularly when resources are so scarce and prison librarians’ time so limited. However, impact evaluation shows great promise in regards to ameliorating these very issues. To name a few benefits, improved impact evaluation can help strengthen decision-making, resource allocation, delivery of services, and funding for prison libraries (Lithgow & Hepworth, 1993). While this paper will not attempt to exhaustively defend the importance of impact research, this section will serve to introduce some of its most significant benefits in this context. 

Connections have frequently been made between data collection and improved advocacy efforts. Vogel writes, “The odds of maintaining or even expanding the library can be increased by a librarian who represents the library program as a major contributor to the development of the reading and information skills of the entire incarcerated community” (Vogel, 2009). Data reflecting the connection between prison libraries and the development of desirable qualities and behaviors can go a long way in securing potential funding and portraying prison libraries as valuable institutions deserving of attention and support. Compelling reports can be “invaluable” in convincing prison administrators to approve requests for increased budgets and materials as well (ALA, 1992).   

In a similar manner, improved data collection helps to ground prison libraries in ongoing discussions and research on re-entry, inmate education, and prison reform more generally. As will be highlighted later, prison librarians likely have a great deal to contribute to these conversations, yet are almost entirely absent from them today.  

It is estimated that roughly half the world’s prison population — over 5 and a half million people — use prison libraries in some capacity (UNESCO, 2019). Better evaluating the impact of prison library services will not only provide information on how prison libraries are used today, but also offer opportunities for librarians and researchers to critically assess and refine services going forward. 

Most significant, though, is the largely unrealized role prison libraries might play in facilitating successful re-entry and reducing recidivism. The vast majority of inmates in America are ultimately released from prison back into society — some estimates put this figure as high as 95%.[2] This is likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future, as many people incarcerated during the so-called “War on Drugs” continue to be released, and as a growing number of prisons release inmates early in response to budget shortfalls (Stearns, 2004). Though most inmates in America will eventually be released, 43% of them will return to prison at least once (Pew Research Center, 2011)[3]. Better understanding the impact of prison libraries will enable librarians to strengthen their services in order to encourage positive outcomes and lower recidivism rates for this population. 

Moreover, improving prison library services will likely improve literacy and education rates for individuals re-entering society, thereby helping to reduce costs associated with higher crime, incarceration, and re-incarceration. These financial benefits would be matched only by the improvements in public safety that result from decreased crime. 

In short, improved impact evaluation will strengthen prison library services, thereby increasing their positive potential and providing compelling evidence for their continuation and expansion. 

The Mission and Purpose of Prison Libraries Today

Before delving into the particular challenges faced by prison libraries in regards to impact measurement, it is useful to first clarify their primary aims. Prison libraries first emerged in Europe and the United States throughout the 17th century as a means of providing “moral and religious education” to inmates (Garner, 2017). The first prison “librarians” were actually clergymen who dispensed religious books to prisoners in the hopes of encouraging their “spiritual and moral reading and training” (UNESCO, 2019). Under this arrangement, prison library collections consisted entirely of approved religious texts, with books that served primarily to entertain (novels for example) strictly forbidden. 

This model of prison libraries persisted through the early 20th century, until the idea of reading for “educational purposes and for emotional, personal and intellectual development” (UNESCO, 2019) began to gain traction. In fact, not until 1970 were prison libraries formally recognized in the United States as institutions promoting “wholesome recreation, direct and indirect education, and mental health” (Lehmann 2011). Today, prison libraries have largely adopted the public library philosophy of promoting information access as an unconditional human right, and have developed policies and collections intended to meet the diverse information needs of their patrons. Their mission has expanded tremendously beyond offering spiritually edifying materials to include providing contact to outside communities, supporting rehabilitative programs, offering information on vocational skills, providing informal educational programming, encouraging self-directed recreational reading, providing access to legal information and the courts, and attempting to generally prepare inmates for re-entry (ASGCLA 1992). 

Though the missions and resources of individual prison libraries vary depending on the needs of their patrons and the restrictions and allowances of the correctional facility they are embedded in, most can easily be placed into six of eight roles of public libraries as identified by the Public Library Association (PLA): these include Community Activity Center, Community Information Center, Formal Education Support Center, Independent Learning Center, Popular Materials Library, and Reference Library.  

A number of national and international documents guide and govern the development and implementation of prison library services around the world. Commonly cited guidelines include the American Library Association’s (ALA) Library Bill of Rights, Freedom to Read Statement, Freedom to View Statement, and Policy on Confidentiality of Library Records; the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies’ (ASGCLA) Resolution on Prisoners’ Right to Read and Library Standards for Adult Correctional Institutions; the Council of Europe’s European Prison Rules; the United Nations’ Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners; and the International Federation of Library Association and Institutions’ (IFLA) Charter for the Reader.

As the missions of prison libraries have expanded, so too have their intended outcomes. Common intended impacts of prison libraries include improved literacy skills, information literacy, and the development of “critical reasoning skills, self-confidence, self-esteem, empowerment, and changed perspectives” (Warr, 2016), as well as the strengthening of hope, motivation, social bonds, and mental health for inmates (Finlay & Bates 2018). 

A chief motivation for the expansion of purpose and intended impact in prison libraries is the apparent success of correctional education programs in reducing recidivism rates and promoting successful reentry (Wilhelmus, 1999). But despite a clearer articulation of their purpose and intended outcomes than perhaps ever before, most prison libraries around the world remain plagued by a lack of empirical data testifying to the actual impact of their services. The next section will review the many reasons this is so.  

Challenges in Evaluating Impact in Prison Libraries

Librarians and researchers have lamented the scarcity of empirical evidence on the impact of library services on incarcerated users for at least sixty years now. David M. Gillespie’s 1968 analysis of prison library literature describes a prevailing overreliance on description over evaluation of prison library services (Gillespie, 1968), and the American Friends Service Committee similarly declared in 1971 that prison library literature lacks “credible scientific data on the effectiveness of correctional treatment program” (Barone 1977), with most programs determining their effectiveness not through rigorous research but rather “speculation.” These early concerns appear to have been largely ignored, and most in the field have not yet heeded calls to provide empirical data to buttress claims of positive impact. The situation has so little improved that one can scarcely tell whether particular pleas for increased research and data collection were published fifty years ago or in 2018. 

Why has this remained such a pervasive and largely unaddressed issue? What barriers prevent librarians and researchers from evaluating the impact of prison library services on inmates? This section identifies a number of distinct but overlapping problem areas. 

Difficulties in Evaluating Impact 

Notwithstanding the particular challenges faced by prison libraries, it is notoriously difficult to compellingly demonstrate causal relationships between particular factors and particular outcomes. Because there are so many forces at play in any individual’s life in a given moment, it is incredibly difficult to isolate any one aspect and argue for its particular impact. This fact helps explain why so many accounts of prison library impact rely on anecdotal evidence and largely unsubstantiated claims. Though it is tempting to make connections between library use and improved outcomes for inmates based on sentiment and observation alone, “the reason for an inmate’s success or failure is probably more complicated, [and is] produced by many factors, including criminogenic needs, risk principles, and the complicated interaction between an inmate and their institutional environment” (Stearns, 2004). Were prison librarians and researchers to dramatically improve impact evaluation tomorrow, it would remain exceedingly difficult to make conclusive, causal claims about the impact of particular library resources on particular inmate outcomes. As the esteemed social scientist Raj Chetty puts it, “there are so many things data may be trying to say” (Cook, 2019). 

Both quantitative and qualitative data present particular challenges in regards to impact evaluation. Though quantitative data is typically more tangible and easily collected than qualitative information, it is frequently misleading and limited. Ratios of library materials to inmates were often cited as a measure of success for prison libraries, despite the fact that prison library collections were mostly “outdated, little used, and sometimes inaccessible” (LeDonne, 1977). Other “hard data” including circulation statistics, number of patron interactions, and library program attendance, for example, likewise say very little about the quality of a patron’s experience, and can inadvertently foster inaccurate narratives.  

A greater consensus exists these days regarding the importance of gathering qualitative data to demonstrate impact. However, qualitative data presents its own set of challenges. For one, it is generally difficult to assess phenomena related to behaviors, attitudes, and other aspects of “human experience and development” (Finlay & Bates, 2018). Though many advocate for prison libraries on behalf of their ability to provide solace and “generate a feeling of normalcy” (UNESCO, 2019) for their users, it is hard to capture these invisible characteristics through data collection. This is true of many of the other behaviors prison libraries seek to encourage, including improved self narratives, identity development, and increased confidence pursuing self-directed learning opportunities (Warr, 2016). Is it possible, though, to provide objective evidence of subjective changes? 

Impact evaluation research also suffers from conceptual, methodological, and management issues. Conceptual issues relate “to the definition of library effectiveness, to who judges effectiveness, and to the definition of information needs and uses” (Vanhouse, 1989). Methodological issues instead relate “to the data collection methods, sampling, and statistics” used, while managerial issues “address the appropriate use and interpretation of measurement data” (Vanhouse, 1989). These issues spur complex and ambiguous questions which lack a “single, operational definition” (Vanhouse, 1989).  

Other issues related to impact measurement in prison libraries include the fluidity of user needs, attempts by inmates to conform to the measures of particular studies, and the fact that most inmates are not followed up with by researchers after their release (Barone, 1977). 

Taken collectively, these factors encourage caution when gathering and assessing data in prison libraries: 

“While we may be able to construct abstract models of the relationship between library actions and output measures, in practice the complexity of the library and its environment interferes with attempts to understand and manipulate output measures…They should be used with caution and an understanding of their limitations” (Vanhouse, 1989). 

Recent research similarly testifies to the challenges of identifying “an appropriate means of measuring outcomes and evaluating change” (Behan, 2014) in as unique and complex an environment as prison. This is not to suggest that such attempts cannot and should not be made. Rather, one should be mindful of the specific limitations, challenges, and pitfalls inherent to evaluating impact. 

Lack of Research and Attention 

With few exceptions, documents offering policies and guidelines for prison libraries devote marginal attention to assessing and evaluating prison library services. IFLA’s Guidelines for Library Services to Prisoners provides one sentence on measuring impact following their 94 distinct recommendations, only suggesting that libraries should conduct performance evaluations every “3-5 years.” UNESCO’s Books Behind Bars report likewise contains only a few words on impact evaluation. The same is true of prison library literature more broadly. Clark and MacCreaigh’s Library Services to the Incarcerated offers only a two page appendix on “performance measures,” and many other works refer to data collection and performance measurement in passing or as a brief aside.  

That these otherwise comprehensive, thoughtful, and well-researched works offer only a few pages (or words) on impact evaluation is extremely telling of the lack of attention devoted to this issue. Impact evaluation is deserving of more than lip service, and organizations and individuals already invested in relevant research, advocacy efforts, and policy discussions have a role to play in more clearly articulating and developing guidelines on impact evaluation. 

A Highly Decentralized Field 

There exists a great deal of variation in regards to how individual prison libraries are established and embedded in particular correctional facilities. Some prison libraries belong to their institution’s education department, others exist within rehabilitation-centered departments, and still others exist independent of any formally defined correctional department. In addition, the degree of cooperation between prison libraries and nearby public library systems varies tremendously, with some libraries collaborating extensively with one another and others have no connection whatsoever. Every prison library, then, is unique in both its operation and relationship to relevant institutions. 

Unsurprisingly, prison libraries differ remarkably in regards to their missions as well. As a result, it is not uncommon for confusion and disagreement to arise regarding the purpose and structure of a prison library: Does the library exist primarily for recreation? To grant access to legal materials? To rehabilitate or “reform” inmates? To serve as a public library surrogate? 

Of course, variation amongst prison libraries is a natural reflection of their unique user groups, resources, and restrictions. However, this decentralization complicates efforts to create useful and widely applicable guidelines for impact evaluation in prison libraries. 

Diminishment of Prison libraries 

The precarious and diminished status of prison libraries in America is also central to understanding the general lack of research and data in this field.  

The Supreme Court’s 1995 Lewis v. Casey decision dealt a powerful blow to prison libraries across the United States. The decision affirmed prisoners’ constitutional right to access the courts, but further declared that this right is not violated when prisoners lack “legal research facilities or legal assistance” — so long as prisoners are not “substantially harmed” by their absence. Though this decision primarily affected prison law libraries, it was widely seen as a reflection of prison libraries’ diminished importance in the eyes of the courts (Vogel, 2009). 

Other factors undermining prison libraries in America include the embrace of high security “Supermax” facilities, a trend towards prison privatization, the economic recession of 2008 (leading to the freezing or elimination of many prison librarian and educator positions (Lehmann 2011)), the introduction of re-entry programs in isolation from prison library programs, and the continued funding of “faith based” initiatives that compete with prison libraries for limited funds (Vogel, 2009). 

 On a deeper level, prison libraries suffer from a punitive approach to incarceration on judicial and congressional levels. This approach — which emphasizes punishment over rehabilitation and desistance — also finds expression in the mass media, with the result that most Americans are “bombarded with fictionalized and docu-images of prison, prisoners, and prison life,” images which tend to represent incarcerated people as sinister, hyper-violent sociopaths (Vogel 2009). Significantly, these depictions often represent prison libraries as spaces where inmates become further radicalized, encounter dangerous ideas, or hatch criminal plans (Stearns, 2004). 

Lack of advocacy for prisoners and prison libraries both results from and exacerbates these caricaturized, negative portrayals. The ALA has come under fire for its insufficient lobbying efforts on behalf of incarcerated library patrons, with some arguing that the organization forgets — or refuses to acknowledge — “that prisoners are a library constituency too” (Vogel, 2009). In the absence of sustained public advocacy from larger library organizations, prison libraries are vulnerable to a lack of recognition and support from prison administrators, a situation that further contributes to their diminished state (Garner, 2017). 

 Further, prison libraries are neither guaranteed nor expressly prevented by any “federal laws, constitutional provisions, or Supreme Court decisions” (Vogel, 1997). As a result, prison libraries exist in a highly ambiguous legal gray area. Advocacy on behalf of increased legal protections for prison libraries might go a long way towards addressing the lack of empirical data in the field. 

Recent mainstream discussions about the devastating and disproportionate impacts of mass incarceration perhaps signal a change in our public attitudes towards prisons and their inhabitants. At the least, there seems a growing recognition that the majority of American prison conditions are not conducive to any form of rehabilitation (some research suggests the opposite, in fact). Nonetheless, the above examples demonstrate that hostile perceptions of prisoners and prison libraries lead to their diminishment and complicate efforts to evaluate their impact on one another. 

Inadequate and Understaffed Facilities 

The generally inadequate status of most prison libraries goes a long way in explaining the lack of substantive research in the field. Most accounts of prison libraries make reference to the financial challenges they face. “The library program is often the lowest in priority, usually lacking an adequate budget, facilities, personnel, and moral support from the administration and custodial staff” (Barone, 1977). More recent scholarship testifies to the persistence of these issues; “As a rule, prison libraries are insufficiently funded” (Šimunić, 2016) and remain “lowest on the priority list” of state library budgets (Vogel 1997).

Among other negative outcomes, the impoverished state of prison libraries results in extremely understaffed facilities. As previously mentioned, prison librarians are often the only permanent, professionally trained employee of their library, and are commonly assisted by inmates who work part-time or volunteer. Prison librarians are thus tasked with carrying out a wide range of tasks and frequently struggle to “develop user programs and activities beyond the very basic services” (UNESCO, 2019). It is worth noting, too, that these librarians often work in professional isolation and in a highly regulated, restricted, demanding, and sometimes stressful environment. Prisons further represent a particularly difficult and unfamiliar setting for most librarians by requiring “restricted access to information, high levels of censorship, and little to no access to information technology and other resources” (Finlay & Bates, 2018). 

As if these challenges were insufficient, prison librarians are charged with the near-Herculean task of meeting “the information and diverse reading needs of a large multicultural community whose members have involuntarily been forced to live together” (ALA, 1992). In an environment in which most librarians are simply trying to keep things afloat, it is easy to understand the near-complete absence of empirical data describing the impact of their services.[4] 

In addition, many prison libraries are staffed by correctional employees who lack expertise and training in delivering library services (Šimunić, 2016). Although the IFLA advocates staffing prison libraries with professionally trained librarians, there is little evidence of widespread adherence to this recommendation. It is therefore not uncommon for prison libraries to be managed entirely by prison officers and inmates, or at least for their day-to-day operations to fall under their purview. Of course, this arrangement is better than nothing, and is a reflection of the larger lack of care and support offered prison libraries today. Nonetheless, this arrangement represents a “major obstacle to future development and to the ultimate goal of building truly professional prison libraries” (Lehmann, 2011). 

Prison librarians also commonly lack computers and other technologies typically available in most other kinds of libraries. This complicates the tracking of basic internal operations and makes the systematic collection of empirical data immensely more difficult. In a similar vein, prison libraries are excluded from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) Library Services and Technology Act, which allocates funds to be used for expanding services and accessing information resources (Lehmann, 2011). 

 Finally, prison librarians frequently lack autonomy and struggle for respect and understanding from other correctional staff. As Lehmann and Locke write, “in any profession that involves working with special populations, a narrow focus often develops in which the worker views that population only within the values and theories of that particular discipline” (Lehmann & Locke, 2005). It goes without saying that librarians and most other correctional employees operate under quite different and perhaps incompatible goals and principles. In the context of prison libraries, the “narrow focus” of each camp usually manifests in perceptions of librarians as naïve, easily manipulated “do-gooders” and correctional staff as apologists for a callous and oppressive system. It is important to note that neither view is “correct” or even useful; on the contrary, these perceptions prevent librarians and correctional staff from productively collaborating and understanding the other’s priorities and approaches. While this kind of relationship surely does not exist in every prison, it is a commonly referenced dynamic and a further obstacle to cultivating an atmosphere of trust, shared understanding, and mutual respect in prison libraries.  

In sum, disregard and lack of sufficient investment by library associations, politicians, funding institutions, and many correctional staff results in prison libraries that are often grossly underfunded and understaffed. This unfortunate reality makes the delivery of library services the primary aim of most prison librarians (quite reasonably so), and limits their ability to systematically evaluate the impact of their services.  

Professional Divides and Isolation 

Another factor contributing to the dearth of prison library research is the siloing of prison librarianship on multiple levels. Despite a surge of interest regarding inmate re-entry, relevant research and literature by and large fails to acknowledge the importance of skills encouraged by libraries (information literacy, for example) on the process of returning to society. Similarly, there is “an eerie lack of awareness about digital literacy and job preparation…in public policy guidelines” for re-entry programming” (Vogel, 2009). As a result, prison librarians are left “on the sideline” of most re-entry debates (Vogel, 2009). Librarians and library advocacy groups are similarly left out of most policy discussions regarding prisoners (UNESCO, 2019), who are themselves excluded from most education discourse (Vogel, 2009).  

A disconnect exists, too, amongst public and prison libraries. Though many public and prison libraries collaborate with one another to share staff and resources, no central guidelines exist to formalize this partnership. Initiatives developed by public libraries in regards to impact evaluation are therefore often not inclusive of prison libraries, or are never shared with them.[5] 

Finally, even if better communication between public and prison libraries was achieved, the LIS field itself has been called “isolated in considering the common problem of organizational effectiveness,” failing to draw on relevant research from the public and service sectors (Cameron & Whetten, 1983).

Seen in this light, prison libraries and prison librarians are isolated branches of an already isolated field. 

A Uniquely Challenging User-Group 

Though it is difficult to measure impact with any user group, it is perhaps more so with a population facing a disproportionate degree of personal, economic, educational, and social problems. On the whole, incarcerated individuals have lower levels of education and higher rates of illiteracy, suffer more from substance abuse and mental illness, and come from disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds at significantly higher rates than non-incarcerated populations. In addition, many incarcerated people in America struggle with technology and do not speak English as their first language (Lehmann, 2011). As a result of these disproportionate disadvantages, they are frequently considered a “unique user group with special needs” (Lehmann, 2011).
           

These problems disproportionately affect inmates even in countries with prison systems considered more modern and humane; Scandinavian inmates likewise experience the same personal, social, and economic problems at higher rates than most civilians in these countries (Ljødal, 2011). This fact raises broader questions about the links between membership in disadvantaged minority groups and incarceration. For the purpose of the paper, however, these examples are raised in order to demonstrate the difficulties prison librarians face in attempting to meet the diverse information needs of underserved individuals facing often immense challenges in a number of areas. 

Improving Impact Evaluation in Prison Libraries        

Given this multitude of challenges, what can be done to improve the measurement of prison library services?            

To begin, most prison libraries would do well to clarify and formalize their primary services and objectives. This clarification will help determine an initial sense of overall effectiveness, and will indicate which measures are important to track. “Once roles have been selected and programs developed to support those roles, measurement of the quality of the library service becomes more exact” (ALA, 1992). Clarifying services and objectives through written policies and informal discussions might also bring attention to previously unacknowledged funding sources.           

Dissolving professional and institutional barriers can also go a long way in empowering prison librarians to better measure the impact of their services. Unanimously adopting the “public library model” will help prison libraries align with “the professional standards and ethics of the wider library profession” (Finlay & Bates, 2018). This alignment has occurred in Denmark and other Scandanavian countries, resulting in enhanced cooperation and greater access to resources and support for prison librarians (Ljødal, 2011). Increased communication and support can also be sought out between LIS professionals, researchers, and correctional staff in order to reduce hostility and “produce empirical studies that not only help the library…but can enrich both the fields of librarianship and criminology” (Stearns, 2004).            

Prison libraries can also play an increased role in relevant policy discussions amongst stakeholders and the judicial system, and can seek to establish “national and regional prison library networks and associations” (UNESCO, 2019). This would result in the creation of policy documents and practical guidelines informed by prison librarians and reflective of their ongoing experiences. Consulting prison librarians throughout the prison construction process would also lead to the establishment of optimally designed and functional library facilities; Norway is one country which regularly consults library professionals when constructing and renovating prisons (Ljødal, 2011). All of these suggestions will serve to increase representations of prison librarians in valuable processes and discussions, contributing to the creation of an atmosphere more conducive to impact evaluation.            

Similarly, increased connections can be made between re-entry efforts and prison libraries. In recent years, many state prisons have introduced re-entry curricula that include classroom instruction and assignments related to personal development, education opportunities, and financial literacy, among others (Vogel, 1997). Prison libraries have a great deal to contribute to these programs and to the fields of re-entry research and inmate education more generally; “We argue for wider inclusion of the library in contemporary research on prisoners’ experiences of learning” (Finlay & Bates, 2018).            

Public library initiatives intended to improve impact evaluation can also be adapted and extended for prison libraries. PLA’s Project Outcome initiative offers standards and tools — including survey management options, data visualizations, training resources, and custom report builders — to be used in measuring the outcomes of public library services and programs. Furthermore, data generated through this project can be shared, viewed, and discussed online, allowing library professionals to see how their particular results compare to state and national averages. Since its introduction in 2015, Project Outcome has been widely praised and expanded for academic library settings. There is no apparent reason why this initiative cannot be tailored for prison libraries as well.            

The development of a more expansive and robust theoretical context for prison libraries will provide a strong foundation on which subsequent research and data collection can occur; “A larger body of empirical evidence, grounded in relevant theoretical constructs, is needed to truly understand the role of the library in the lives of prisoners” (Finlay & Bates, 2018).  The development of “sound ideas” regarding the function and goals of prison libraries will also provide clarity and a greater degree of autonomy to prison librarians. Holistic theoretical models for prison libraries have been proposed in recent years and center on desistance research, criminogenic factors, and insights from the fields of psychology, education, and medicine, among others (Finlay & Bates, 2018). Situating the theoretical context of prison librarianship in relevant adjacent fields will encourage “interdisciplinary examinations of inmates and how prison affects them” (Stearns, 2004), and offer insights that could not be gained in isolation.             

Finally, more aggressive and sustained advocacy can be pursued in order to improve the public perception and financial status of prison libraries. Successful advocacy efforts aid in creating a culture that recognizes prison libraries as “vital contributors to the field of corrections” (Stearns, 2004) and highlight their role in promoting “recreational pursuits, education, literacy improvement, and socialization” (Ljødal, 2011). As previously discussed, advocacy is also central to increasing visibility among funders, stakeholders, and others “responsible for increasing noncustodial budgets” (Vogel 2009). 

Conclusion            

Prison libraries face significant challenges in regards to evaluating the impact of their services. At the same time, numerous reforms can be pursued in the short and long term in order to begin enhancing and formalizing data collection processes. Improving the measurement of prison libraries services will benefit inmates, library and correctional staff, researchers looking to better understand the role prison libraries play in facilitating re-entry, and anyone seeking to convince funders, politicians, and the public of prison libraries’ largely unrealized value and potential.

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Shofmann, F. (2016). Performance Measurement. Retrieved November 21, 2019, from Public Library Association (PLA) website: http://www.ala.org/pla/initiatives/performancemeasurement

Šimunić, Z., Tanacković, S. F., & Badurina, B. (2014). Library services for incarcerated persons: A survey of recent trends and challenges in prison libraries in Croatia. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 48(1), 72–89. doi: 10.1177/0961000614538481

State of Recidivism (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/0001/01/01/state-of-recividism.

Stearns, R. (2004) The Prison Library: An Issue for Corrections, or a Correct Solution for Its Issues? Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 23:1, 49-80.

UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.unodc.org/pdf/criminal_justice/UN_Standard_Minimum_Rules_for_the_Treatment_of_Prisoners.pdf

Vanhouse, N. (1989). Output Measures in Libraries. Library Trends, (38): 2. University of Illinois.

Vogel, B. (1997). Bailing out Prison Libraries: The Politics of Crime and Punishment Frame the Crisis in Prison Library Service. Library Journal, (19): 35.

Vogel, B. (2009). The prison library primer: A program for the twenty-first century. Scarecrow Press.

Warr, J. (2016). Transformative dialogues: (Re)privileging the informal in prison education. Prison Service Journal, 225, 18-25.

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (1991). Organizational effectiveness: a comparison of multiple models. San Diego (California): Academic Press.

Wilhelmus, D. W. (1999) A new emphasis for correctional facilities’ libraries. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 25(2), 114-120. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0099-1333(99)80009

[1] The term “forgotten field” was first used by Suzanna Conrad in her 2017 work, Prison librarianship policy and practice. Conrad, S. (2017). Prison librarianship policy and practice. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

[2] This according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2011 Reentry trends in the U.S. report. Hughes, T. & Wilson, D.J. (2011). Reentry trends in the U.S. Retrieved fromhttps://www.bjs.gov/content/reentry/reentry.cfm

[3] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/0001/01/01/state-of-recidivism

[4] It is worth noting, too, that many librarians have little to no training in statistics, data analysis, and performance measurement (Vanhouse, 1989). This presents somewhat of a catch-22, as outside researchers have been shown to influence behavior and shape experimental results in undesired ways (Lithgow & Hepworth, 1993).

[5] Take, for example, the Public Library Association’s (PLA) Output Measures for Public Libraries — a set of standards “widely used in the public library community” (Vanhouse, 1989) — as well as PLA’s more recent Project Outcome initiative. While the latter was recently expanded for academic library settings, there is no indication that the PLA has considered adapting these resources for prison libraries.

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Bringing the Cloud Back Down to Earth

BY BLAIR TALBOT

On Sunday, October 20th I attended the Radical Networks conference and attended two talks: The Carbon Footprint of the Internet with Jasmine Soltani and Everything has a Resonant Frequency: Crystals, Networks, and Crystal Networks with Ingrid Burrington. Both talks covered a lot of ground (or rather, earth) on the sweeping topic of the environmental impact of the Internet and the manufacture of its physical infrastructure by two very broad thinkers whose research has forged ahead in areas where concrete data is hard to come by.  For clarity and concision, I will focus on my main takeaways from the first talk, the Carbon Footprint of the Internet.

Soltani began her talk by explaining the bottom-up approach she and other activists have taken to calculating the carbon footprint of the Internet in the absence of definitive, trustworthy sources: identify all the components and processes that make up the Internet, calculate the energy consumption of each, and identify the energy sources of each and convert that energy amount to the CO2 equivalent. To date there still exists no surefire way to calculate the carbon footprint of the Internet, and therefore estimates of the energy intensity of the Internet diverge by a factor of 20,000, which can in part be explained by different definitions of what the Internet is and what it includes (Hilty & Aebischer, 2015).

Current estimates state that the Internet accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Belkhir & Elmeligi, 2018), which is both significantly less than what I would have predicted and still too abstract to comprehend.  For comparison, in Greenpeace’s suspiciously optimistic 2014 report on renewable energy and the Internet, Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet, the authors state that if “the Cloud” were a country, it would be the 6th largest consumer of electricity on the planet (Cook et al., 2014).

One fact that is generally agreed upon is that the most energy consumptive element of the Internet is the manufacture and maintenance of its physical infrastructure, beginning with client devices (49%), Telecom infrastructure (37%), and data centers (14%; The Climate Group, 2008). For example, client devices, which refers to all of the devices we use to access the Internet (mobile phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, etc.) account for the highest proportion of energy consumption; depending on the study, estimates vary from 40% (Belkhir & Elmeligi, 2018) to 53% of the total energy consumption of the Internet (Raghavan & Ma, 2011).  Most of this energy consumption is due to the manufacturing phase of client devices (referred to variously as either Embodied Energy or Grey Energy) and accounts for 45-80% of the total device life cycle energy (Hischier et al., 2015). 

There are numerous complications with this measure and others like it because not all of these devices are used to access the Internet 100% of the time—someone can use a laptop to write a paper, for instance, without ever using the Internet, nor are device lifecycles consistent across all users—one person can use a phone for 6 months and another for 6 years. These are just some examples of the nuances that make definitive calculations about the carbon footprint of the Internet very difficult, if not impossible. (Ingrid Burrington touches on the difficulties these metrics pose in her article “The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge” in The Atlantic.)  I found Soltani’s research commendable because despite the scarcity of data available and the opacity of the data that does exist, she has forged ahead and brought attention to this timely topic.

What was also surprising about her talk—and where she differs substantially from Burrington—is she remains optimistic about the overall positive impact that the Internet could have in reducing net carbon emissions in other sectors despite the Internet’s own significant contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions. While she herself strays away from a techno-optimist stance, she does cite some suspiciously sanguine (and perhaps outmoded) views, such as those from an optimistic 2008 report by The Climate Group: “The scale of emissions reductions that could be enabled by the smart integration of ICT into new ways of operating, living, working, learning and traveling makes the sector a key player in the fight against climate change, despite its own growing carbon footprint,” (The Climate Group, 2008).  As an example of this, she mentioned that teleconferencing takes about 7% of the total energy cost that a face-to-face meeting would, taking into account factors like different modes of transportation, etc. (Ong et al., 2014).  

She does concede that other examples of the “dematerialization” of information, including the move from traditional modes of music and movie distribution to digital streaming platforms, have less of a positive environment impact: depending on the study, streaming video is either only slightly more efficient than DVD distribution (Shehabi et al., 2014), or has an even higher net energy impact that is still rapidly increasing (The Shift Project, 2019). Whatever the exact figure is, it is highly impactful due to the fact that video streaming accounts for 64% of all internet traffic (Ejembi & Bhatti 2015).

The onus of finding environmentally sustainable solutions to this predicament we are all in should undoubtedly lay with the tech companies and governments with the greatest carbon footprints, and not on individuals.  If one trusted the government to oversee the private sector, we could take inspiration from Paul Ford’s proposal to establish a government agency which he calls the Digital Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for protecting citizens in the event of repeated “data spills,” (Ford, 2018). How fitting, then, to also imagine tasking this hypothetical branch of a rotten bureaucracy with the additional task of disciplining the tech industry and cleaning up its messes.

Despite the absence of government legislation and private sector self-regulation, Soltani says that individual consumers can also take action.  Her suggestions include extending the life of your client devices, using ad blockers (online advertising is very energy consumptive), protecting your data privacy (the storing of your personal data is also energy consumptive), and “stream lower quality videos, I guess,” (Soltani, 2019).  All of these actions, save for electing to stream grainy YouTube videos, are all actions that have manifold benefits for consumers: less money spent on replacing devices and less personal data being collected, stored and sold to marketers and insurance companies at our citizenry’s expense. 

While these actions she suggests may benefit individual consumers and make a small environmental impact, they do nothing to challenge the structural logic of late techno-capitalism and its extractivist methodology.  Capitalism has always benefited from the dislocation of earth materials from Earth, the dematerialization of commodities and the invisibilization of labor. What is unprecedented at this stage of capitalism is that these existing abstractions of capitalist production have themselves become further abstracted and etherealized in the image of the Cloud. The semiotics of the Cloud further mystifies the terms of commodification and shrouds its mechanics in a blanket of mysticism. Divorcing the Internet from the materiality of the Internet in the image of the Cloud directly benefits the Internet’s profiteers and limits people’s ability to see the ideological machinery at work in their daily lives. 

To uncloak this mantle of mysticism surrounding the Cloud, Nathan Ensmenger proposes treating the Cloud as a “type of factory” and interrogating it as such:

[W]hat kind of a factory is it? Who works there, and what kind of work to they do, and how is it different from the type of work previously performed by factory workers? Where does it fit in a larger technological, labor, and environmental history of human industry? And perhaps most importantly, how did it come to be seen as categorically different? (Ensmenger, 2018, p. 20)

This historical-materialist critique of the Cloud is a promising start towards resituating the Internet in its material, political, social, and cultural context. Only by bringing the Cloud back down to Earth can we begin to imagine a more equitable distribution of power in our hyper-networked reality.

A Bolivian family at work at a salt mine
A Bolivian family at work at a salt mine by Robin Hammond for Daily Mail

POSTSCRIPT

This talk raised many questions I am still grappling with weeks later. As libraries and cultural centers move towards digitizing their assets and moving more and more services online, endeavors often hailed as universally beneficial and in line with our coupled missions to make information more accessible and to preserve it for posterity, we do so with little to no heed for how this impacts our shared environmental future. When environmental collapse comes to a head it won’t matter if our books are conserved in print format or preserved digitally. As long as the lifecycles of the hardware we’re using to preserve digital formats continue to physically deteriorate, and the software we use for the same mission continues to rapidly accelerate, information professionals are forced to continually endeavor on the perilous journey of continuous data migration, making us complicit in the whole system of filling the earth with toxic, obsolete electronic equipment and mining the same earth yet again for more rare minerals to inaugurate another terminally obsolete technological lifecycle, ad infinitum.  Infinite, that is, until we run out of minerals.

“Looking from the perspective of deep time,” Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler write in their essay on the human labor and planetary resources required to operate an Amazon Echo, “we are extracting Earth’s history to serve a split second of technological time, in order to build devices that are often designed to be used for no more than a few years,” (Crawford & Joler, 2018). All media is an extension of the earth, be it codices made of paper manufactured from trees which took hundreds to thousands of years to grow, or be it a PDF viewed on a laptop composed of lithium, cobalt, and silicon (and the 14 other rare earth minerals necessary to manufacture a single laptop or smartphone) that took billions of years for Earth to produce. Where we now differ from Gutenberg’s time is the dizzying rate of acceleration at which we are moving towards total depletion of the earth materials needed to produce the information communication technologies that are embedded in the infrastructure of every branch of daily life. 

REFERENCES

Belkhir, L., & Elmeligi, A. (2018). Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations. Journal of Cleaner Production, 177, 448–463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.12.239

Burrington, I. (2015, December 16). The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge. Retrieved from The Atlantic website: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/there-are-no-clean-clouds/420744/

Cook, G., Dowdall, T., & Wang, Y. (2014). Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet [Greenpeace USA report]. Retrieved from Greenpeace website: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/ legacy/Global/usa/planet3/PDFs/clickingclean.pdf.

Crawford, K., & Joler, V. (2018, September 7). Anatomy of an AI System. AI Now Institute and Share Lab. Retrieved from http://www.anatomyof.ai

Efoui-Hess, M. (2019). The Unsustainable Use of Online Video. Retrieved from https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/

Ejembi, O., & Bhatti, S. N. (2015). Client-Side Energy Costs of Video Streaming. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Data Intensive Systems, 252–259. https://doi.org/10.1109/DSDIS.2015.49

Ensmenger, N. (2018). The environmental history of computing. Technology and Culture, 59(5), S7–S33.

Ford, P. (2018, March 21). Facebook Is Why We Need a Digital Protection Agency. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/paul-ford-facebook-is-why-we-need-a-digital-protection-agency

Hammond, R. (2009, April). In search of Lithium: The battle for the 3rd element. Retrieved from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1166387/In-search-Lithium-The-battle-3rd-element.html

Hilty, L. M., & Aebischer, B. (2015). ICT for Sustainability: An Emerging Research Field. In L. M. Hilty & B. Aebischer (Eds.), ICT Innovations for Sustainability (pp. 3–36). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09228-7

Ong, D., Moors, T., & Sivaraman, V. (2014). Comparison of the energy, carbon and time costs of videoconferencing and in-person meetings. Computer Communications, 50, 86–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2014.02.009

Raghavan, B., & Ma, J. (2011). The energy and emergy of the Internet. Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, 9. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2070562.2070571

Shehabi, A., Walker, B., & Masanet, E. (2014). The energy and greenhouse-gas implications of internet video streaming in the United States. Environmental Research Letters, 9(5), 054007. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/9/5/054007

Soltani, J. (2019, October). The Carbon Footprint of the Internet. Presented at the Radical Networks Conference 2019, New York, NY.

The Climate Group. (2008, June 30). Smart 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age (pp. 1–87). https://www.theclimategroup.org/sites/default/files/downloads/annual-report-2007-2008.pdf

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Interview: UX & its social concerns

I recently had the opportunity to interview Nina Mistry, the co-founder, and chief product officer of Artistic License Creative. She has been connected to the UX filed for more than two decades and my interview goal is to gain insights about what drives this profession today and her understanding of technology within our social realm. Artistic License Creative is a start-up that is driven by social change and innovation through the medium of digital technology. While the company is based in Toronto we met on her recent visit to New York where she shared her views on the UX field and social concerns surrounding it. 

I had prepared a set of questions to structure the interview and almost all areas of interest were covered. It started with sharing details about herself and how she landed in the UX field. She is originally from Mumbai, India where she completed her undergraduate education in textile design. She graduated in the year 1999, a year where the internet had landed in most of our households. She believes that it was the internet that helped people become entrepreneurs overnight. “It made the whole world become your market,” says Nina. Her first job was as a designer at a small scale e-commerce company in India. After this, she went on to work with the software development team of interactive television that revolutionized live voting in India. She has also contributed to the design of the Target app and continues worked on many such projects even today.

Nina believes the whole idea of UX truly came to life when Apple launched its iPhone. She believes that the Iphone’s scroll user experience with the pinch and scroll and embedded keyboard scroll were game-changers in the field of technology. This is when design moved beyond its aesthetic principals and become an interactive experience. Her company Artistic License Creative (url in references) emphasizes on delivering content and experience(i.e. ways the content is consumed. Her company collaborates with people and works on projects that are driven by a cause. Whether it’s making documentaries, e-learning platforms websites or mobile applications they are driven by the purpose of making a difference. 

Nina believes that it’s her curiosity and love for simplicity that makes her a relevant UX designer today. She thrives on the fulfillment derived by watching users use, react and cherish her designs. “Watching my vision materialize into an experience is the best feeling ever,” says Nina. The field design experience today seems to be divided into two distinct fields the User Research and User Experience field. When asked about this categorization she expressed that the main goal of a designer should seek solutions and there should be no distinct dividing lines in the process. The research process builds curiosity and sets a solid foundation for the design process.

Her research process mainly includes interviews and observations. Nina says “Sony conducted a focus group for their boom box. When asked about the color preference 70% picked black with 30% picked yellow. At the end of the session, participants were given the boom box as a gift for their participation and had to pick it up on their way out. All participants picked the black one. When people are observed they behave differently. It’s usually not what they say.” This relates to McGrath, “Methodology matters” reading which discusses the limitations of research. The article talks about how the limitation of one method can be covered by another and how using more than one research method would help in more realistic insights. For example, Sony’s interview flaw was coved by observing the audience making a realistic choice in person. 

Furthermore, her design process is driven by the AGILE method which involves quick sketching, user testing and validation followed by multiple iterations. She says “more than a design process, it’s a co-creating process. It’s not just about user opinions but you think like the user.” We then moved on to discuss any specific experience or innovation that has caught her eye in recent times, she stated that a big influencer to determining this is how ethically the product is made and functions. When further asked about unethical innovations of technology today she discussed the emotional impact of Instagram’s need for maximum likes for validation leading to anxiety to FaceBook’s “fake news” targeted at psychological warfare. This connects to our discussion on Vaidhyanathan’s, “Anti-Social Media” which suggests only a limited online newsfeed for it’s its user. Nina re-iterated Vaidhyanathan’s take on users being oblivious to counterclaims taking away the reality of the situation. 

She states Aza Raskin, the creator of the infinite scroll says that he “regrets creating it in the first place.” Elaborating more on the infinite scroll she states the user is targeted with ads  and news aimed to change their opinion. And the common user is taken for granted and exploited for their lack of awareness. Nina states Google having all our information from our bank accounts to our heath records is unethical. And stresses that the “I agree to the terms and conditions check-box that people check is the biggest lie, as if you read the terms you would probably not agree.” This again connects to Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization” which discusses our lack of privacy as a price we pay or collateral damage for using technology.

When asked about threats associated with design in the future Nina mentioned that the biggest threat with artificial intelligence and machine learning replacing human jobs. What kind of jobs would humans do it machines do most of what we do today? How will we adapt to this change? Would third world countries even have the infrastructure to adapt? She predicts that there will come a time where there will be no jobs leading eventually leading to an economic setback.

To conclude, speaking to Nina was a great way to validate all our class discussions associated with technology and social concerns. Nina was open and thrilled to answer all the questions. She made it a fun discussion where we both were sharing our views and adding on to each other’s arguments. Overall, she concluded with saying as a young aspiring design professional one should always have the wonder and curiosity along with seeking ethical solutions. “Be less motivated by monetary gains and more motivated by social good.” She concluded.

References

  • Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford University Press, 2018.
  • Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75-89.
  • McGrath, Joseph E. “Methodology matters: Doing research in the behavioral and social sciences.” In Readings in Human–Computer Interaction, pp. 152-169. Morgan Kaufmann, 1995
  • Artistic License Creative. Accessed November 19, 2019. https://artisticlicensecreative.com/.
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Impact of Social Media on the Youth

INTRODUCTION

Social Media has become an important part of our society that it is impossible to imagine our lives without it. Every other person is part of one or many social media platforms, some of the most popular ones being, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube. People, especially youth prefer to socialize through these platforms where you can interact with people from different parts of the world by just a click of the button. From giving us new ways to come together and stay connected to the world around us, to providing an outlet for expression, social media has fundamentally changed the way we initiate, build and maintain our relationships. As the popularity of social media is spreading all over the world, there have been mixed feelings about these networking sites.

My quest on how and to what extent social media is impacting the youth, led me to conduct a survey as well as an interview targeting an audience of 17 to 24 years.

I was able to conduct a detailed questionnaire which was responded by 12 participants along with an interview with two persons. The participants’ occupations were mixed – both professionals, as well as students, were part of the research process.

FINDINGS

From the research, I was able to gather, that most of my participants used social media networks such as WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.

There are both positive as well as negative impacts of using social media. It is necessary to talk about both sides of social media in order to get an overall idea of the research findings. First, let’s discuss some positive impacts followed by the negative impacts that were found based on the analysis of the results of the research.

POSITIVE IMPACTS

  • Exposure

People can interact with other people around the world through social media networks which, empower them in many ways. Social Media becomes a platform where people can showcase their ideas or talents, learn new skills and acquire knowledge through social media.

  • Finding friends

Social media is also able to connect people by using algorithms in a way that normally wouldn’t happen in the real world. The role of algorithms in filtering our results based on our history, location, interests and other details are explained in “The Relevance of Algorithm” by Tarleton Gillespie, the reading that was discussed in class. This reading speaks in detail of the “algorithmic identity” of a person and how this helps in filtering the results to provide us with the best suitable results based on our location, likes/ interests and our profile information. The high possibility of finding long lost friends has been pointed out as an important factor in expanding the social life of these young people.

  • Mental Health

A large number of people mentioned feelings of motivation and inspiration while using social media. Using Facebook, WhatsApp and other apps help in increasing the friendship quality and network size.

  • Interaction

Also, many people who are not comfortable talking face to face feel safe and less intimidated by chatting with a person online. The growth of mass self-communication, the communication that reaches a global audience through p2p networks and internet connection has been talked about in “The Rise of Network Society” by Manuel Castells.

NEGATIVE IMPACTS

On the flip side, social media has some negative impacts as well.

  • Usage

Also, a large number of people used social networks when they are bored, as soon as they wake up in the morning or before sleeping with more or less no goals to achieve. Most of the people registered using social media for 1 to 5 hours daily. This increased time consumption by using social media may affect their productivity and cause addiction.

  • Physical Interaction

Though social media is widely used for its socializing abilities, it is also criticized for reduced physical socializing capabilities. The impact of Social Media has changed the manner in which we see ourselves, the manner in which we see our personal relationships, plus it has also affected the manner in which we connect with our general surroundings. Most of the participants recorded having a huge number of friends online compared to the limited few who were their actual friends in real life. This may also be due to the fact that many of the youth accept strangers as on social media, making themselves prone to exposing their personal details to a group of strangers.

  • Mental Health

Many young people complained of mental breakdowns. These people are also found to be obsessed with the likes and comments they receive on social media as they mentioned constantly checking and keeping track of the likes they received to account for their popularity. Many youngsters also confirmed how they compared themselves to others on social media by stalking their aesthetically perfect Instagram photos or staying up to date with their relationship status on Facebook. This causes an increase in unrealistic expectations, self-doubt as well as feelings of jealousy

  • Physical Health

There are lots of unhealthy physical effects of social media usage. A large number of people indicated poor posture and eye strain as some of the physical impacts they experienced. One can get eyestrain from staring at screens for too long. Fatigue by staying up too late posting on social media was also an issue found among the youth using social media.

CONCLUSION

From this survey, I can conclude that most young people are aware of the risks and dangers of social media, yet they do not intend to quit these, as our lives are intertwined with it. Social Media usage, if constantly checked and kept under control, it can outweigh its negative impacts to make the social media platforms a better and effective means of communication. One of the ways of doing this can be by limiting the usage duration by having apps to track your usage and lock you out of your phones for a certain amount of time. Taking some breathing time away from these media can help bring back our conscience to the physical world and create a balance in our lives.

Posted on by Divya Thomas Chuttiparavilayil 0

Observation of The NYPL Stephen A. Schwarzman Research Library

The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, located on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Second and Fortieth Street, stands as a centerpiece for the New York Public Library. It is a grand marble building that has remained a spectacle since 1911. Few things have been changed in the library, beyond modern updates and fixes, and most people want it to stay that way. But what about what goes on inside the marble? 

Are the librarians the same people that checked out the first books?

Have librarian practices remained the same?  

Is information still circulated through the same stacks that were built in 1911?

Do people still use the research library?

What type of people actually participate in library offerings?

Just how old is this library? 

To catch a glimpse at the answers to these questions, I spent a day observing researchers and patrons at the New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, as well as interviewing library staff.

Setting

I decided to spend most of my time in a smaller research room instead of the main Rose Reading Room for multiple reasons. First, tourists flock to the Rose Reading Room, and they are not the focus of my inquiries. Second, the Local History and Genealogy Milstein Division where I took up shop, allowed me to view researchers, librarians, and staff all at the same time. Third, this division of the library was broader than some of the other research rooms and as a result I would be able to observe a wider range of questions, requests, and interactions.

Observation

From the start I notice that everyone who enters the research room has one two reactions. They either straighten up and constantly check with the librarian visually to make sure they are not breaking any rules (similar to how people react to seeing a police officer), or they smile and say hello as if they feel welcomed. Both reactions indicate that librarians on title alone have a level of respect from the general public. It is for this reason that they have a certain code of ethics and an obligation to their community to keep the information in the library safe. It is also why diversity among library staff, and inclusion for all is so important in a library. As respected figures, librarians set a standard for others. 

Staff & Diversity

It is not difficult to see that the New York Public Library places value on diversifying their staff. The Local History and Genealogy division (LHG) in particular represents varying races, sexes, languages, genders, ages, and sexual orientations. The library publicly puts valuable information into all types of people’s hands, which I believe is an effort to normalize the idea that information professionals can be anyone.

Interestingly, I also noticed that most of the librarians in LHG were male. In my personal experience it has often been that most librarians are women. Despite this, I noticed, unsurprisingly, that there was no change in how the librarians interacted with patrons or researchers, or how their work got done. Overall, based on the ALA Manual definition of diversity- “race, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, creed, color, religious background, national origin, language of origin or disability”, the NYPL has kept up with ethical and responsible hiring standards. 

Patrons

If the librarians are the brain of the library, and the books are the lungs, the patrons are the heart. Without the people that wander the stacks looking for information, nothing would be read or investigated. The librarians would be out of job, and the books would be useless. It is for this reason that I found it interesting that not everyone has equal access to the library.

The key to everything NYPL has to offer is a library card. It is a simple plastic thing with a barcode number that can reveal a world of opportunity. Want to check out a book? Better grab your library card. What if you want to browse the internet for a bit? Got to use your library card. It seems the only thing you can do without a library card is stare out the window and enjoy the climate controlled building. 

To get a library card you need two things: an address, and an ID with that address on it. For most people that come to the NYPL this isn’t an issue. Even if your ID has a different address on it, you can pull up a bill or a piece of mail with your name and place of residence on it and they’ll welcome you to the club.

For a smaller, but still very relevant group of visitors, however, having an address is not easy. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, there are 62,391 people without permanent homes in New York City. That is 62,391 people who cannot use the library to find jobs on the computer, or check out a book to develop marketable skills. This exclusion of a group of people that would benefit significantly from library services is definitely a flaw in the NYPL system. 

Interview

After spending some time observing in LHG, I sat down with one of the librarians so that I could learn about the things I couldn’t see. Contrary to stereotypes, he had a demanding voice and stature and I felt compelled to listen to him.  

Information Overload

One of the more important topics revolving around librarianship, in my opinion, is how these professionals handle data or information overload. Not long ago librarians often had to fight against having too little information available to them. With the internet, digitization of thousands and thousands of records and collections, as well as increased patron contributions, librarians have an overwhelming amount of resources. When asked about this, the LHG librarian explained that he had to learn how to research more effectively. Databases have helped narrow down search results, but he mostly relies on his own ability to filter out the extra stuff. He also mentioned that in the research libraries in particular, patrons use the online catalog and databases to find their own materials before bringing it to him for assistance. This means, however, that his job also now includes teaching patrons how to use the library website, its databases, catalog, and other little overly complicated bits. 

With all of this new digital content and information floating along above our heads in the cloud, an important question is; Who owns it, and why do libraries have it? The librarian had a quick answer to this, which was if the library had to own everything it circulated, no one would know anything of importance. He pointed out a feature of LHG that was pretty popular with researchers; a file system of researcher-created records of families, places, and things. The library doesn’t necessarily own any of the findings in those files, but it keeps them and cares for them because it’s the library’s obligation to to do so. 

Burnout

Naturally our conversation concerning piles and piles of information lead straight into my next question. Did he ever feel burnout? Was he ever tired of his job and did he ever feel like the work wasn’t worth the punishment? He had been quick to respond before, but was slower this time. Yes, he did sometimes feel the effects of burnout, but not in a way that made him feel like his work wasn’t worth it. Rather, he felt that sometimes the institution thought his contribution was less than what it was in reality, and that was the frustrating part, reasonably. I found this interesting considering I had previous overheard two librarians gossiping about how the people making important organizational decisions knew nothing about the system. The conclusion from this is that the NYPL administration may not fully consider the insight of those who work in the very trenches they are redesigning. 

Politics, Neutrality & Librarianship

I managed to end my inquiry on the most difficult topic; Librarianship and neutrality. The librarian I spoke to had little trouble forming an opinion, ironically. He suggested that librarians can be neutral until there is a political or ideological thought that threatens the overall well-being of the library’s patrons or the collection. Generally, politics can’t play a part in researching a topic for someone, because that could limit what information you can give. Same goes for controversial ideas. He did mention at the end of our talk that he believes that it’s impossible to stifle your own beliefs completely, and that its the responsibility of the person to control how those beliefs come out. 

Conclusion

As I learned about the ins and outs of the library during my observation and conversation, I found the answer to my biggest question. Despite being old on the outside, most of the inside of the library was young and new. The librarians were informed and up to date on the pressing matters of their profession. The staff was diverse and welcoming. The exclusion of some groups in the city needed some work, but I feel as if the library is aware of this issue and is working on solutions. Overall, the NYPL Stephen A. Schwarzman Building is blazing into 2020 as a leader of library practices. 

References

Birdsall, William F. “A Political Economy of Librarianship?” Progressive Librarian, no. 18.

Cope, Jonathan. “Neoliberalism and Library & Information Science Using Karl Polanyi’s Fictitious Commodity as an Alternative to Neoliberal Conceptions of Information.” pp. 67–80.

Gehner, John. “Libraries, Low-Income People, and Social Exclusion.” Public Library Quarterly, vol. 29, 15 Mar. 2010, pp. 39–47., http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01616840903562976.

Nauratil, Marcia J. “The Alienated Librarian.” New Directions In Information Management, vol. 20, 1989.

Rosenzweig, Mark. “POLITICS AND ANTI-POLITICS IN LIBRARIANSHIP.” Progressive Librarian, no. 3, 1991.

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” The American Historical Review, vol. 108, no. 3, June 2003, pp. 735–762., doi:10.1086/529596.

Vinopal, Jennifer. “THE QUEST FOR DIVERSITY IN LIBRARY STAFFING: FROM AWARENESS TO ACTION.” In The Library With The Lead Pipe, 13 Jan. 2016.

Posted on by Emilee Buytkins 0

Person, Place, Thing: Grumpy Cat, Shopping Malls, and IKEA Assembly Instructions

Person: Grumpy Cat

In late September 2012, a cat photo was posted on the internet. This happens every single day. But this cat photo was different; it was the first internet appearance of Grumpy Cat. More than likely, you know exactly which cat I am referencing. How can this be? In 2015, CNN estimated that there were over 6.5 billion cat photos on the internet. With seemingly endless cat photos, how can you and I both know Grumpy Cat?

There is no denying Grumpy Cat’s internet fame. In fact, it is a photo of Grumpy Cat (real name Tardar Sauce) that appears at the top of the Wikipedia page, “Cats and the Internet”. But how did we get here? This is too brief a writing to discuss the many specific mechanics that create internet fame. However, we can certainly say that internet fame is impossible without sharing information.

Tarder Sauce posing with her wax model at Madame Tussaud’s in 2016

The first photo of Grumpy Cat was posted on Reddit, where users edited it into memes almost instantly. With each new iteration, a new audience was exposed to Tarder Sauce, growing her online presence. From there, it became a phenomenon. Grumpy Cat memes exploded to other parts of the internet.

The internet allows for rapid sharing of information; whether it is the sharing of current events, personal anecdotes, or cat photos. We are able to learn, research, and share faster and easier than ever before.

It is arguable that images and memes in particular are shared more than anything else online! Some only reach specific audiences, remaining within the network of its creator. Many are impossible to track the image’s source, such is their rapid spread. However, once in a while, an image or concept emerges that identifies with all, much like Grumpy Cat.

Place: Shopping Malls

Shopping malls, the ultimate retail destinations of America. Most are arranged in a similar fashion: with large “anchor” stores at each end, with smaller stores in aisles, and often a food court in between. Many malls, particularly the largest, have multiple levels. With such large interior spaces, wayfinding in shopping malls is extremely important. Shoppers need to know not only the location of each store, but the location of bathrooms, food, escalators, and exits.

Ross Park Mall, Pittsburgh, PA

How this information is communicated to the shopper can make or break one’s experience at the mall. The shopping mall wishes to encompass every retail desire one may need, but facilitating the ability to find it is necessary. All malls employ some sort of directory; most look like a simplified floor plan displaying the location of each store and amenity.

Some directories separate stores into categories, ie. Women’s Clothing, Men’s Clothing, Gifts, Kiosks, Food. Others choose to list stores alphabetically, or break down locations by zone. Signage in the aisles usually centers around the anchor stores, and therefore requires knowledge of the general direction you are heading.

In my own experience, directory signage is often few and far between, requiring the shopper to retain the information presented to them. Thinking back to the suburban mall my friends and I used to frequent in high school, the signage was sparse, and escalators were tucked away such that you could only use them if you had prior knowledge of their location.

Given this, one must consider: are malls intentionally making wayfinding difficult for shoppers? By wandering around a mall looking for a specific store, one is more likely than not to enter other stores along the way, adding additional purchasing opportunities. All this wandering will likely make you hungry, requiring you to purchase food at the mall. And god forbid you forget where you’ve parked!

Thing: IKEA Assembly Instructions

If you’ve ever purchased furniture from IKEA, you may know all too well that IKEA assembly instructions can be difficult to decipher. IKEA is infamous for requiring their customer to assemble their purchase; in a bid to reduce costs, most furniture comes flat packed, with assembly instructions explaining the process.

BILLY assembly instructions

These illustrations precisely outline assembly steps with accurate scale drawings of the pieces and hardware necessary for each step of the task. The consumer must correctly identify each part and utilize it in the correct way at the correct time. Given this complexity, there is no doubt that these illustrations are highly designed, tested, and optimized before released to the public. In fact, IKEA dubs its instruction designers who are responsible for distilling product assembly into its most basic steps “Communicators”.

IKEA communicators take care to not overwhelm the consumer by making the installation instructions only as detailed as necessary. However, by relying on the customer’s observation and interpretation skills alone, it is possible that mistakes will be made. Of course, if all else fails, there is always the option to pay an additional fee for IKEA’s assembly services!

Now, why – if IKEA furniture requires assembly by the average person – do the instructions use only graphics to convey the necessary information? IKEA’s products are sold in 38 countries across the world. Creating installation instructions graphically eliminates the need for translation. In their mind, the information literacy of the consumer is the only barrier to successful assembly. For some, this is a skill in need of practice.

IKEA’s corporate youtube account revolves around design inspiration and product announcements, inferring that the company’s communicators believe their instructions to be sufficient without tutorial videos. However, countless third-party youtube videos exist explaining assembly for nearly any IKEA product imaginable, with individuals sharing their own experiences, tips and tricks. Through this dissemination of information, individuals help to fill in what they perceive to be an information gap – space that IKEA has left.

Posted on by Lisa Peck 0

Field Report: MoMA PS1 Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair

Moma PS1 is one of the oldest and largest nonprofit contemporary institutions in the United States. It regularly organized an event to promote the museum. In this fall, MoMa PS1 hosted the New York annual Book Fair — Printed Matter. The event was held at MoMA PS1 sprawling campus from September 21 to 22. Printed matter’s is one of the biggest book fair of each year, which is a leading international gathering of artists’ books, celebrating the full breadth of the art publishing community. This annual book fair event draws thousands of book lovers, collectors, artists, and art world professionals. This year is the fourteenth year for Printed Matter to present the NYC art book fair. 

Before I went to the event, I had several questions in my mind, which requires me to find the answer. 

  • Why printed matters?
  • What is the age range of people who go to the book fair?
  • How the exhibitors profit from their issues?
  • What is the reason for people choosing to issue printed books over digital books?
  • How they define “Archive”?
Scene outside of PS1 during the book fair

Regardless of the various digital reading products in the market, such as Amazon Kindle, the population of reading printed books has been descending year by year. Even textbooks are gradually going paperless nowadays. Also, among the teenagers in the 21st century, fewer and fewer teenagers are willing to read printed books. On the one hand, the price of books is always high, which is not friendly to book-lovers. On the other hand, a printed book is harder to carry around than a simple reading tablet.

This year, the Printed Matter event held over 350 booths. It’s a spectacular parade of art, fashion, zines, culture, subculture, color, sound, food, and various performance. At first, this extravaganza made me feel a little overwhelmed because of the dazzling booths. It’s really hard to find the specific exhibitor, ranging from artist collectives to antiquarian booksellers, offering unique publications. In the place of the Fair, there were visitors from different age groups and with different skin colors, but people who purchased the issues, the works, and the books mostly looked older and more knowledgeable. Younger people or teenagers were more thinking of the book fair as a weekend entertained event. 

After finishing browsing most of the booths, I entered a booth with name “The Classroom”. The name was attracted me to walk into the space since I wondered what I might learn from this so-called “The Classroom.” This space is presented by a dutch artist, Ruth van Beek. She walked around and elaborated on her thoughts behind her practice in “The Classroom” to the visitors. The exhibit was a dedicated space that provided reading, screening, informal lectures, and other activities by artists, writers and designers. The program highlighted exciting new releases at the Fair and fosters dialogue around important themes for contemporary art publishing and the broader community. ‘That foster dialogue around important themes for contemporary art publishing and the broader community.’ Ruth described bookmaking as an inverse to creating an exhibition. “Making a book is more democratic. They’re for everyone.” After the talk, one of the audience asked a question that I was about to ask, “Will you ever considered making a digital book?”. Then the response from Ruth really touched my heart. “No”, she replied, “It’s the tactility of the book object.”

“Tactile” is a very appropriate word to describe the fair, and visitors were always encouraged to touch, interact and communicate with makers and exhibitors. After I walked out of “The Classroom”, my attention was attracted by a booth, “Queer, Archive, Work”, with slogans on the banner “This publication is a loose assembling of queer methodologies, with a particular view towards network culture, failure, and refutation.” The keywords, Queer and Archive, made me walk towards the booth. I asked the exhibitors Paul Sollellis who is also the co-publisher of this work, about how does he define “Archive” in his publishes from the view as freelance artists. He told me that archive is a process of gathering and collecting memories from different individuals then putting them together. Paul elaborated the issue he was selling on his booth to me that one package contains works from multiple Queer artists. There are journals, photographs, paintings and collages inside. Following his words, I asked him why he chose to do physical copies instead of a digital one. He gave me a short talk on the philosophy level by saying that this is all about the sense of existence and the weight of things. Everything has its own weight, you will know it only when you feel it. I remembered his face looked very serious, not like a seller who was trying to promote his product. I felt that he really believed that the meaning of existence is all about the feeling, or the “tactility”. 

Paul’s definition of “Archive” reminds me that what make archive so significant to our lives is those archives are always meaningful to someone in the world. Like Archill says in his article, “however we define archives, they have no meaning outside the subjective experience of those individuals who, at a given moment, come to use them.” (Mbembe, 2002) Only the things we are doing contains meaning then there is the significance of existence. So is “Archive” and the printed books. Books have different meanings for different individuals. For Ruth, printed matters because of the facility of the book object. And for Paul, printed matters because the weight of the books is the proof of existence. Then I cannot help but think does printed matter to me and why. This is a question that I haven’t found out the answer.References:

References:

“Paul Soulellis, Editor – QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK.” Printed Matter. Accessed November 3, 2019. https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/53190/.

Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” Refiguring the Archive, 2002, 19–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_2.

Posted on by sofia ni 0

Human Interaction With Audio Tour Guides

As technologies and their capabilities continue to be further developed every day, it is important to observe the ways in which they become integrated with existing forms of and institutions for different types of information. Museums are among the institutions that preserve information and provide the public with access to it, whether art, history, culture, etc.. According to Bates, information can be thought of as, “an objectively existing phenomenon in the universe, which is also constructed, stored, and acted upon by living beings in countless different subjective ways, each way distinctive to the individual animal having the experience” (Bates, 2006). Audio tour guides have been utilized in these spaces for a long time, serving to both provide information, and maintain the integrity of a silent shared space. However, the information that typically makes up the contents of audio tours follows the museum in a single direction, providing all consumers with the same information in the same progression. I see this as an opportunity to use UX design to improve upon an existing way in which information is transmitted in these spaces, and to make museum goer’s experiences more customized to their interests with the use of more specified user interface design and AI technologies.  

To gain more of an understanding of other people’s experiences with audio tours, I conducted an interview with an avid museum goer, Suzanne. Suzanne, who loves consuming information about art and history in many different forms, explained to me that the main issues she has with following audio tours are: a.) an abundance of information, not all of which is interesting b.) a predetermined path through the museum space c.) a pre established pacing based on the length it takes to transfer the predetermined information. From her experience, her critiques can be broken down into dissatisfaction with the current “affordances” of the existing technology into issues of content, use of and transmission through space, and time (Sengers, 2000). For Suzanne, the perfect audio tour would be one in which she could autonomously control where in the museum she would like to be, which pieces she would like to hear information about, and the duration spent at each piece. This idealized vision is similar to what Senger calls the “AI Dream”, or the hope that, with the use of artificial intelligence, technology will be able to take on some human characteristics and make things much more enjoyable and personalized for the consumer, learning what they like and dislike through continuous use and data collection (Senger, 2000). However, when applying Bates’ definition of information as “some pattern of organization of matter and energy given meaning by a living being (or a component thereof)”, how does this conception allow for the “semiosis”, or linking of different components of information, with AI and other technologies that also take on life like characteristics (Bates, 2006)? It is a question for which the answer unfolds as these technologies are applied in real time. 

            For this reason, it is important to look at Yvonne Rogers’ detailed work in theoretical approaches to Human- Computer Interaction. Rogers highlights the fact that many people who are at the forefront of developing technologies, although they are aware of and wish to apply certain theories, often are competing with the race to be the next innovation, and do not always have the ability to develop a technology completely theoretically before it is demanded on the market (Rogers, 2004). Rogers concludes her in depth account of theories with a call for those developing technologies, particularly user interface design, to discuss and research which theories to apply and why. By doing such work, Rogers hopes a more universal language for developers will be created in order to be able to use and integrate these ideas into technology as it is being developed, instead of conceptualizing the effects after users are already engaging with it. After a theoretical framework is established, different decisions can be made to expand and refine the affordances of technologies in relation to what users need and want from said technologies (Rogers, 2004). I believe this is pivotal in order to create user interface designs that are useful and specified to the desires of the user. It is through interviews, like with Suzanne, that developers on all levels of technology can get a better understanding of what people want, where technology can improve, and inspiration for where new technologies should be aiming. In order to more fully develop how audio tours could be improved and what consumers are looking for, it would be very useful to conduct more interviews in museum spaces and work to create a version that takes into consideration all variables that are considered important, and make an audio experience that is catered specifically to each individual user. I hope to be able to continue exploring theoretical approaches to human computer interaction. 

Posted on by Brendon Gabriel 0

User Studies, Harm Reduction, and Queer Resilience

By Lillian Gooden
Looking at the Margins: Incorporating Harm Reduction Into Tech
Presented by Norman Shamas and Afsaneh Rigot of Article 19
Radical Networks Conference, October 2019
Hosted at Prime Produce, NYC

I attended the Radical Networks 2019 conference on a rainy October afternoon. This conference, which centers marginalized and oppressed groups, gathers artists, experimenters, and researchers, and invites them to exchange radical ideas on technology and telecommunications. Conference participants are radical thinkers who want to use technology to help their communities while resisting systems of control and surveillance. 

The sessions that initially drew me to this conference were titled “Media Infrastructures and Racialized Territorial Formations: Perspectives from the South” and “Everything Has A Resonant Frequency: On Crystals, Networks, and Crystal Networks.”

These bore a relation to my term paper, which (as of now) seeks to explore the physical aspects and environmental tolls of the Web’s infrastructure. I came to hear the work of a researcher looking into issues of access for the largely indigenous populations in the warmer, tropical, most remote regions of Colombia in “Media Infrastructures.” I came to hear the insights of another researcher and journalist interested in the supply chain of the minerals that power our communications, from World War II-era radios to smartphones in “Resonant Frequency.” 

Harm Reduction is Radical

But my attention was captivated by Shamas and Rigot’s presentation on harm reduction, entitled “Looking at the Margins.” To set the context, Norman Shamas began with a definition of harm reduction. Harm reduction consists of practices that ensure one’s survival and aim to minimize harm from certain activities, typically those that are illegal. With the aid of a tweet by @ReyBee10 (2018), they frame it as a term that was “was started by sex workers, queer & trans PoC, people who use drugs, people in the streets saving their own lives and all the intersections thereof—not by public health folks.” 

They presented a few examples of community harm reduction practives such as needle exchanges and safer sex education. Central to the idea of harm reduction is the acceptance of pleasure being a normal part of human life. Taking an abstinence-only approach harms by withholding potentially life-saving information. Shamas and Rigot might argue that harm reduction is design justice in motion, as it involves those most affected by structures of domination design their own solutions (Costanza-Chock, 2015).

In addition, Shamas highlighted humanitarian assistance for migrants crossing the desert in the form of providing food and water. Those providing assistance, they said, act in awareness and opposition to structural oppression in that they believe that migrants crossing the border deserve to live. If we are invested in reducing harm, we must shun stigmatization and judgement and work to mitigate risks instead. Harm reduction is inherently radical. 

Harm reduction in tech matters because we currently lack a way to bring in systemic support for people that are being harmed while engaging in certain activities—without stigmatizing them. The presenters brought up two case studies to demonstrate methods of designing harm reduction measures and show their effectiveness. My focus is on the first of the two.

Case Study: Queer Dating Apps in Hostile Societies

Afsaneh Rigot, the second presenter, introduced a case study involving queer dating apps in Egypt, Lebanon, and Iran. In all of these countries, queer people are targets of persecution by government officials and fellow citizens alike. Of course, criminalizing sexuality has never prevented queer people from seeking and enjoying love. They have endured despite the risk of arrest and abuse. 

The team at Article 19 sought to learn about queer dating app users, their needs, and design harm reduction solutions around these needs. Taking a design justice approach, they worked with local groups in Egypt, Lebanon, and Iran to get a sense of the environment on the ground. As they embarked on their research, the team understood that “the full inclusion of people with direct lived experience of the conditions [they were] trying to change” was crucial, to use Costanza-Chock’s words from “Design Justice.”

User Interviews Yield Revelatory Findings

It was established early on that participants in these countries had no interest in quitting their dating apps despite the risks, so proposed solutions had to support continued app use. Rigot pointed out that elsewhere, trainings around risky issues tend to be prescriptive, talk down to users, and fail to meet them where they are. Proposed solutions produced by these sessions fail their users by misunderstanding them and their needs.

For example, the discussion around safety on queer dating apps typically centers on privacy and geolocation. It is often recommended that users disable this feature in order to protect themselves. This advice seems reasonable enough, doesn’t it? 

However, in talking to queer communities in this study, Rigot and Shamas found that surprisingly, geolocation was one of the features that made users feel most secure when chatting with other GPS-located users on dating apps. Many respondents brought up that knowing that the person they were engaging with was someone who lived in their town made them feel safer!

This revelation underscores the importance of learning locally desired applications or service—one of the ethical guidelines for fieldwork laid out by PERCS at Elon University. It is crucial to tailor any solution that you are designing to the specific needs of your user, and to uncover those needs through dialogue and direct engagement. 

The Article 19 team found that devoting energy to developing geolocation solutions would not have been the best use of their time and resources, especially as many users already employed tactics such as GPS spoofing to preserve their anonymity on queer dating apps. Instead, users expressed that they would find it beneficial to have legal resources embedded in the apps they use in the event that they found themselves a target of government surveillance or other abuse. 

In their findings, the Article 19 team also identified a desire for app icon cloaking. Suspected “deviants” in the countries surveyed sometimes found their property, including the information on their phones, subject to search. A queer dating app discovered by a government official could be grounds for penal action. By cloaking their app icons, users might be able to keep themselves safe(r) by disguising, say, Grindr, as something so innocuous as a calendar or calculator app.

Perhaps this reality seems distant from a US perspective, as we live in a country where a queer person can legally adopt children, marry their beloved, and even run for president. However, the reality is that despite our tenuous legal protections, many queer Americans live in daily fear of persecution, discrimination, and violence. Solutions like the above can still be of use even to those who do not live in such overtly hostile environments. Designing solutions for the most  marginalized in society will yield applications that can protect all users. 

Works Referenced:

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. (2018). “Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice.” Proceedings of the Design Research Society 2018. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3189696.

PERCS: The Program for Ethnographic Research & Community Studies. “The ethics of fieldwork.” Elon University. http://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web/org/percs/EthicsModuleforWeb.pdf.

ReyBee10. (2018, Oct 10). “#HarmReduction was started by sex workers, queer & trans PoC, people who use drugs, people in the streets saving their own lives and all the intersections thereof— not by public health folks….respect the origins and beware co-optation..to paraphrase @HarmReduction #HarmRed18” [Twitter post]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/ReyBee10/status/1052975455748452352.

Posted on by Lillian Gooden 0