Blind inclusion: new technology designed for the margins

Abstract

Consumer electronics enter the consumer retail market as virtually old products. While new technologies emerge faster, smaller and lighter than its predecessors, there are many people around the globe who have never owned or accessed many of the electronic products so-called mainstream consumers take for granted. The people without access – the have-nots in the Digital Divide – are often ignored in conversations concerning physical and intellectual access to new technologies, and are largely explicitly ignored during the production and manufacturing process. Using a collaborative research method called swarm, I interrogate a myriad of new technology products, endeavors and partnerships at an ephemeral site to investigate what efforts computer developers and manufacturers are taking to address the needs of un/under-represented populations – racial and ethnic minorities, undereducated, poor and working-class people – persistently disregarded in a rapidly paced technophilic society.

Keywords:

• Digital Divide
• collaborative methodology
• Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
• consumerism
• ethnography
• exclusion
• race
• social class
• swarm

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Barb Brents and Donovan Conley for encouraging me to participate in the swarm scholarship project. I am grateful for the support and collaborative writing process that I shared with the other authors of this issue. I am also thankful to all the swarm participants. This paper would not have been possible without the collective's enthusiastic exchange of ideas and information.