slides for guest lecture on platform perspectives, digital labor, and the digital divide

A few months ago, some colleagues reached out to ask if I would be willing to record a guest lecture for our library science program’s LIS 600: Information in Society. In particular, they were interested in having me record something for a week on the digital divide. I am conversant on that topic, but it’s not an area of specialty for me, so I was unsure about it until I realized that some of the readings for that week touch on topics like platform design that I am really interested in through my work on social media communities.

With that in mind, I put together a presentation starting with my love for Franco-Belgian comics, continuing into questions of “who benefits” from my buying them on Kindle (I have a pretty good collection, but Jeff Bezos is the one who gets to fly to space), and then introducing the idea of digital labor as another way that digital divides are exacerbated on platforms, even if those platforms can accurately be said to benefit their users as well. I’m starting to ramp up my reading on digital labor for another project, so I’m very aware of how superficial this guest lecture from six weeks ago is, but I feel like I did an okay job of introducing students to some of these ideas.

In the spirit of public scholarship (and teaching), I wanted to share a link to the slides that I used for the guest lecture. (As a quick aside, apparently some of my Hugo tinkering this summer broke the way that I host class slides, and I had to do some quick maintenance before I could finish this post!). Anyway, the slides will open up in your browser, and if you hit p, you’ll bring up my presenter notes, which will be much more informative than the slides alone.

• macro
• Work
• digital divide
• platform perspective
• platforms
• digital labor
• Elon Musk
• Jeff Bezos
• Amazon
• Kindle
• comics
• BD
• LIS 600
• Gas