- Mark Twain
My research examines the ideologies, social imaginaries, and identities that are built into technologies as well as the worlds that produce them. I ask how beliefs about what technology can do and who should use it take material form in devices, platforms, programs, and pedagogies, and then how those beliefs shape the identities of the people who make, use, resist, or are excluded from them. I come to these questions as a former technology worker, using theories and methods from anthropology and communication. My work sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and science and technology studies. Across studies of families, college students, hackers and makers, immigrant communities, schoolchildren in the Global South, and the technology 'world' (Becker, 1982) itself, I have found that technologies embody ideologies, and they confirm and reinforce the worldview and self-image of the people who built them while rendering others invisible.
My primary methods are ethnography and archival work, supplemented when useful with surveys, technical analyses, and similar. Grounded in theories of 'culture' from the Birmingham School (e.g. Stuart Hall 1973, Raymond Williams 1958), I study the vernacular cultures of my participants as sites where sociotechnical power is negotiated. I take participants' worldviews seriously, including those of the technologists I critique, and avoid treating companies and communities as monoliths. The anthropological maxim to "make the familiar strange and the strange familiar" is at the heart of my research: I want to sensitize those inside technology 'worlds' to their own ideological assumptions while also empowering those marginalized by the same.
Current Research Projects:
The Social Imaginaries of Silicon Valley (2017-present). The technological industries of Silicon Valley provide more than products to the world. They shape the way we work and play, how we value ourselves and others. They shape not just how we live, but how we think we ought to live. How can we describe the social imaginaries (Taylor, 2003) of this powerful region? How do they relate to past and current alternatives, and how do they interact with contradictory and complementary imaginaries? Do they enable industry leaders to see and respond to those in Silicon Valley and beyond? Do they recognize the daily experience of growing inequalities and entrenched forms of discrimination? Whose experiences are seen and whose are unrecognizable in a worldview that is digitized, on-demand, automated, machine learned, surveilled, self-driven? These are just a few of the practices that embed values and distribute resources towards some and not others. New systems of value emerge with rapid cultural shifts in how we eat and move, live and love, see and be seen.
James C. Scott's (1999) book Seeing Like a State describes how modern states are good at knowing in a specific yet quite narrow manner. Efforts to regularize, rationalize, and codify the world, such as map-making and census-taking, do not encompass the messy realities of life on the ground. Scott argues that the particular ways that states "see" then lead to weak civil societies and authoritarian governance. We explore whether these concepts about statehood are also useful for studying other regimes of power, particularly the industrial region known as Silicon Valley.
The very use of the term "Silicon Valley" is, of course, political. First applied to post-WWII semiconductor companies in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and San Jose--whose sprawling suburban campuses, clean rooms, and superfund refuse sites displaced the fruit orchards that had blanketed the region in the century before--"Silicon Valley" has come to occupy a powerful place across the San Francisco Bay Area and around the world, both materially and symbolically. Animated by massive tides of capital and global flows of employees and knowledges, its success is the baseline by which other technology hubs around the world are judged. Like modern states, Silicon Valley attempts to regularize, rationalize, and codify the world to make it legible to machines and technological practices. Often, this willfully ignores local practices and historical precedent in favor of universalism, institutional "disruption," and beliefs of exceptionalism. It is our aim to examine the ethical and value-laden judgments these social imaginaries imply, who they leave out, and what they mean for questions of social justice.
Selected output:
The multiple definitions and histories of algorithms: The term 'algorithm' predates the digital computer by over a thousand years, with an etymology traceable to the Islamic scholar al-Khwarizmi. How broadly might we usefully define the term today? Are contemporary algorithms a necessarily computational phenomenon? What does the explosion of discourse about algorithms in popular culture in the last decade mean?
Algorithms as more than computation: What does it mean to study algorithms as myth, narrative, ideology, discourse, or power? In what ways can these approaches contribute back to concepts and questions within computer science, data science, and big data initiatives?
Algorithms as specifically computational: What kinds of applications and activities are now possible given certain developments in computational infrastructure and theories of computation, such as big data, deep neural networks, distributed computing, or 'microwork'? What are the social and theoretical implications of these developments?
The practices and materialities of algorithms: Just as many in the interdisciplinary field of science studies advocate for a focus on the local practices and material artifacts which produce and sustain scientific knowledge, what kinds of work is done to make algorithms computable, and what are the material effects of algorithms?
Living with algorithms, quantifying the self: Algorithms pervade daily life and we experience their reach and impact almost anywhere, not just while working at a computer. How can we better understand how far-flung domains are being reshaped by algorithms? What are the consequences of big data and the quantified self in the everyday and in civic life?
Hackers, Computers, and Cooperation: A Critical History of Logo and Constructionist Learning. CSCW 2018.
Worship, Faith, and Evangelism: Religion as an Ideological Lens for Engineering Worlds. CSCW 2015.
Information Determinism: The Consequences of a Faith in Information. The Information Society.
Making or Making Do? Challenging the Mythologies of Making and Hacking. Journal of Peer Production.
Algorithms in Culture (2016-present).
A foundational concept in computer science, algorithms--loosely defined as a set of rules to direct the behavior of machines or humans--have shaped infrastructures, practices, and daily lives around the world. We explore the implications of their development and deployment in politics, media, science, organizations, culture, and the construction of the self. This understanding has become ever more pressing in both academia and public discourse. This research area contributes to the burgeoning field of "algorithm studies" that takes algorithms as an object of cultural inquiry from a social scientific and humanistic perspective. Though not an exhaustive list, these questions guide our inquiry:
"Algorithms in Culture," a special issue of Big Data and Society.
Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action, 1500-2000. Oxford University Press, 2023.
"Prestige and Prejudice: How the Interplay of Recruiting Work and Algorithms Reinforces Social Inequities in Software Engineering." CHI 2025.
Countercultures of Technology Use (2008-present). This project explores countercultures of technology use, especially among students and families, which have enriched our understandings of screen time, multitasking, technology in learning, utopianism in education reform, the digital divide, and non-use/techno-resistance. Across the numerous disciplines that investigate the relationships between humans and technology, most research focuses on technology use and technology users. User studies, usability metrics, techno-determinism, socio-determinism, user-centered design, participatory design, end user programming, user appropriation, technology adoption, diffusion of innovations, technology and development: such research overwhelmingly focuses on people using technology.
This project seeks to problematize this focus by turning our attention to those who are left out of these use-centric models. Focusing explicitly on the limits, refusals, and countercultures of technology use can function as a dialectic maneuver, an inversion that provides a novel perspective on, and potentially fuller understanding of, the complex, multifaceted relations among society and technology. We seek to explore these relationships and their broad ramifications rather than simply to transform non-users into users. Studying countercultures of technology use in its many forms can highlight sociotechnical configurations that may be overlooked due to a singular focus on technology use.
Selected output:
"Technology Non-Use," a special issue of First Monday.
"'Connected Learning' and the Equity Agenda: A Microsociology of Minecraft Play." Winner, Best of CSCW 2017.
"Managing Mobile Multitasking: The Culture of iPhones on Stanford Campus." Nominee, Best of CSCW 2013.
"Making Love in the Network Closet: The Benefits and Work of Family Videochat." Winner, Best of CSCW 2010.
My first monograph details the history, results, and legacy of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. I analyze the laptop OLPC designed, explaining how and why it remained charismatic to many across the technology world despite its many shortcomings. I examine the cultural history of OLPC, its founders, and the MIT Media Lab, concluding that developers' imaginaries of the "hacker" children who were meant to become obsessed with the laptop reflected American cultural ideals and their own privileged and idiosyncratic middle-class childhoods more than the childhoods of their intended beneficiaries in the Global South. I then provide a detailed account of the day-to-day use of OLPC s laptops in a well-regarded project of 10,000 laptops in Paraguay, based on seven months of ethnographic observations, 154 interviews, and quantitative data analysis of test scores and breakage logs, conducted in 2010 and 2013. I observed that children there showed more agency in either rejecting the laptop or retrofitting it for media consumption than those concerned with the project s cultural imperialism thought -- but that their use was instead shaped by transnational media corporations. I situate my observations in the history of Latin American hacker culture to show why it was especially charismatic there and what cultural forces shape its future. My results show how technologies like OLPC s laptop become "charismatic" and what the consequences of charisma can be. Reaching fifty years into the past and across the globe, I provide insights on utopian design, technology's mythologized role in childhood, and the fine line between education and entertainment.
I am using the same lens of "technological charisma" to examine how the charismatic promises made about generative AI systems are mobilized to secure resources and foreclose resistance, and who has been left out of these charismatic promises.
Selected output: The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child. MIT Press, 2019.
Past Research Projects:
The Social Uses of Personal Photographs (2004-2007). The goal of this study was to understand the social uses of personal photography, including emerging cameraphone practices (prior to the release of the iPhone) as well as practices with other photographic devices. A secondary goal is to develop and refine methods for understanding the uses of -- and resistance to -- emerging technologies, based in social science methods and understandings, particularly STS and cultural studies.The Technology and Poverty project (2004). In collaboration with Stanford D-school, Digital Vision Fellows, and Ricoh Innovations, this project aimed to understand the ways that economically disadvantaged communities in the United States and beyond interact with social service and governmental organizations.
Remote Usability Methods (2003). Funded by Distributed Mentor Project, with the UrbanSim group at the University of Washington, this project investigated whether remote usability studies can acheive the same results as local studies, and if not, what is lost and why. Though remote usability studies are common enough in the field, little published research has been done to explore how their results compare to local usability studies.
Ambient Displays (2001-2003). Funded by CRA CREW, Intel Undergraduate Research, and David Scholar programs at UC Berkeley, this project designed and evaluated ambient displays to make residents' conceptions of the health of their city more visible and concrete. Ambient Displays are ubiquitous computing devices - often embedded in interesting artistic objects or everyday artifacts - that provide a constant stream of peripheral information.
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