Departing from popular imaginations around artificial intelligence (AI), this article engages in the I in the AI acronym but from perspectives outside of mathematics, computer science and machine learning. When intelligence is attended to here, it most often refers to narrow calculating tasks. This connotation to calculation provides AI an image of scientificity and objectivity, particularly attractive in societies with a pervasive desire for numbers. However, as is increasingly apparent today, when employed in more general areas of our messy socio-cultural realities, AI- powered automated systems often fail or have unintended consequences. This article will contribute to this critique of AI by attending to Nicholas of Cusa and his treatment of intelligence. According to him, intelligence is equally dependent on an ability to handle the unknown as it unfolds in the present moment. This suggests that intelligence is organic which ties Cusa to more contemporary discussions in tech philosophy, neurology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive sciences in which it is argued that intelligence is dependent on having—and acting through—an organic body. Understanding intelligence as organic thus suggests an oxymoronic relationship to artificial.

Departing from popular imaginations around artificial intelligence (AI), this presentation engages in the I in the AI acronym but from perspectives outside of mathematics, computer science and machine learning. When intelligence is attended to here, it most often refers to narrow calculating tasks. This connotation to calculation provides AI an image of scientificity and objectivity, particularly attractive in societies with a pervasive desire for numbers. However, as is increasingly apparent today, when employed in more general areas of our messy socio-cultural realities, AI- powered automated systems often fail or have unintended consequences. This article will contribute to this critique of AI by attending to Nicholas of Cusa and his treatment of intelligence. According to him, intelligence is equally dependent on an ability to handle the unknown as it unfolds in the present moment. This suggests that intelligence is organic which ties Cusa to more contemporary discussions in tech philosophy, neurology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive sciences in which it is argued that intelligence is dependent on having—and acting through—an organic body. Understanding intelligence as organic thus suggests an oxymoronic relationship to artificial

Through a mixed-methods approach consisting of a directed content analysis of five established LGBT+ organizations' use of Twitter and Facebook during a month in 2022, and semi-structured qualitative interviews with social media content producers, the study attempts to understand the role of self-controlled social media spaces in challenging the Uganda society's logics of oppression. The results indicate that self-controlled spaces are not used for disrupting the basis for repression - the local logic of oppression - or its cocoon of collective post-colonial amnesia. Nor were spaces used for re-constructive engaging with transnational and development partners' unwitting impact on global south actors' agency and legitimacy. Instead, with a few exceptions, spaces displayed a conspicuous uniform human rights advocacy rhetoric, and Western identity labels summarized in the LGBT+ acronym. The interviews with social media content producers suggest that the LGBT+ community's dependency on international support may sway actors into what we call performative visibility, in self-controlled spaces. The study concludes that future analysis of Global South based activist's use of social media spaces' affordances including its potential for supporting de-colonialization efforts, must approach use as relational to actors' dependency on key resources such as funding and protection through affiliation.

This anthology contributes to creating awareness on how digital ageism operates in relation to the widely spread symbolic representations of old and young age around digital technologies, the (lack of) representation of diverse older individuals in the design, development, and marketing of digital technologies and in the actual algorithms and datasets that constitute them. It also shows how individuals and institutions deal with digital ageism in everyday life.

In the past decades, digital technologies permeated most aspects of everyday life. With a focus on how age is represented and experienced in relation to digital technologies leading to digital ageism, digitalisation’s reinforcement of spirals of exclusion and loss of autonomy of some collectives is explored, when it could be natural for a great part of society and represent a sort of improvement.

The book addresses social science students and scholars interested in everyday digital technologies, society and the power struggles about it, providing insights from different parts of the globe. By using different methods and touching upon different aspects of digital ageism and how it plays out in contemporary connected data societies, this volume will raise awareness, challenge power, initiate discussions and spur further research into this field.

In data societies, as everyday activities are mediated by digital technologies, individuals are thrown into a digital existence, even if they are not aware of their digital interactions. Digital technologies are not value-free or unbiased. Contemporary discourses about digital natives and late adopters contribute to reinforcing negative stereotypes about older users of digital technologies and influence the design, development, marketing and usage of digital technologies. Such discourses disregard how digital trajectories and personal circumstances influence media use in all stages of everyday life. Hence, occasional digital technology users, and older adults in particular, stand a higher risk of exclusion and loss of autonomy. In this chapter, we briefly introduce ageism and digital ageism in data societies, definitions and previous research as a background and introduction to the following chapters. Our aim is to underline how socio-technical and cultural analyses may contribute to raising awareness about digital ageism in data societies. Only by initiating a discussion may existing power relationships be challenged and contemporary inequalities understood.

Det här kapitlet handlar om människor och medieteknik. I vår tids uppkopplade samhälle är det svårt att undvika digitala medieteknik eftersom vi kastas in ett digitalt mänskligt tillstånd som vi inte kan undkomma. Det påverkar dig, ditt liv och det samhälle som du lever i. Således är det viktigt att förstå - inte bara hur digitala medier påverkar oss som människor - utan även människorna bakom medietekniken, den kultur de kommer ifrån och i vilken de verkar. Jag har forskat på den roll som programmerare spelar för vilken medieteknik som utvecklas samt hur den utvecklas. Men hur skulle man kunna studera medieteknikens människor? I detta kapitel utgår jag ifrån teknikens mänskliga aspekter, hur teknik, samhälle och individ ömsesidigt påverkar varandra, samt ger ett verktyg för hur man kan studera medieteknikens människor utifrån en kulturell analysmodell. Med det här kapitlet som guide kommer du kvalitativt – genom intervjuer, observationer eller textanalys – kunna genomföra studier av medieteknikens människor, samt reflektera över hur teknik, människa och samhälle hör ihop och påverkar varandra. 

This article attends to tensions and negotiations surrounding the introduction and development of a news-ranking algorithm in a Swedish daily. Approaching algorithms as culture, being composed of collective human practices, the study emphasizes socio-institutional dynamics in the everyday life of the algorithm. The focus on tensions and negotiations is justified from an institutional perspective and operationalized through an analytical framework of logics. Empirically the study is based on interviews with 14 different in-house workers at the daily, journalists as well as programmers and market actors. The study shows that logics connected to both journalism and programming co-developed the news-ranking algorithm. Tensions and their negotiations around these logics contributed to its very development. One example is labeling of the algorithm as editor-led, allowing journalists to oversee some of its parameters. Social practices in the newsroom, such as Algorithm-Coffee, was also important for its development. In other words, different actors, tensions between them and how these were negotiated, co-constituted by the algorithm itself.

How do professionals at the forefront of digital technologies perceive their own work? Conducting 39 interviews with programmers around the world I asked them to describe their workday and then reflect upon an ideal workday.  Ideals revolved around the pleasure of solving difficult problems, to disrupt and to innovate, but ultimately to make the world a better place through their work. Many talked about a pleasurable state of “flow” in which they almost merged with the computer (their work tool). The empirical material reveals two interesting differences; one is between freelance programmers and those employed in big tech. Freelance programmers, in general, valued a work-life balance, clearly separating home and office, while big tech employees, on the other hand, tended to be younger (without kids), spending time in offices that blurred boundaries between home and office, providing employees with everything from ice cream parlors to fitness centers. Second, while most programmers looked at their profession as a vocation, programmers growing up in Asia (India and China) approached their profession as a means to a comfortable and exciting life (in terms of salary and working outside of their home countries). From this study, I will suggest that sustainable socio-technical work futures will be shaped around the new, the innovative and the meaningful. Work will, also in the future, be understood as a means to earn a living, but a meaningful one, and meaningful while earning it, as well as flexible and individually adaptable.   

This chapter zooms in on the Silicon Valley, the US centre for innovative technology and home to 2000 technology companies. Inspired by the terminology of Sassen (2014), this chapter will describe how the technology industry has created a system of multiple modes of expulsions of “older” workers – from work relations, workspaces, ideologies and values, as well as digital products and services. The main purpose is to propose a theoretical framework guiding future empirical and critical research into the phenomenon of ageism, as well as other systems of oppression and discrimination in the technology industry. In this chapter, we propose a concept of “Silicon Valley Ageism” which is understood as negative attitudes, beliefs and behaviours towards adults perceived as “older” and manifested in interpersonal relations and institutional practices, as well as their narratives. This type of ageism can affect people already in their 30s. The aim of the chapter is to explore (1) what narratives of “older” age are constructed in Silicon Valley, (2) how this relates to workplace practices in the Valley and (3) how this has a bearing on the products and services coming out of Silicon Valley.