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Learning and growing following the Digital Good Network Summer School, Debbie Ball

Debbie Ball writes about her experiences following the 2023 Digital Good Network Summer School. Published 4 November 2024.

The 2023 Digital Good Network cohort, University of Sheffield June 2023

I am writing on the eve of a welcome return to University of Sheffield for AoIR 2024, and it feels like a good time to write this appreciation of attending the inaugural Digital Good Network summer school in June 2023. The University of Sheffield will be forever linked with my incredible three days at the Digital Good Network Summer School, where I learned a lot about how to express myself as an early career digital media researcher.

Lauren Scott (L) and Debbie Ball (Middle) at Lukasz Szulc’s lecture June 2023.

The biggest benefit of attending the Digital Good Network was to help me find the full confidence to talk about my PhD thesis in design features at University of Westminster in public. This has taken me longer than expected to do: I returned to academia as a mature student, which involved resetting my head and moving from the comparative backstage of working in music PR and digital marketing. For the best part of two decades, I earned a living channelling the artistic visions and voices of others. It took me ages to learn how to do that for myself! I can’t think of a better environment to learn how to do that than within the inspiring community of likeminded researchers I met at Digital Good Network, similarly pushing for good outcomes for society through their work.

Debbie Ball post-Going Global Music Summit keynote 1/9/23. Photo by Dave Simpson.

The ways in which this newfound confidence manifested itself included hosting a keynote at Going Global Music Summit about our hopes and fears for the advent of AI and music creation in Auckland, New Zealand late August 2023. For which I gratefully received funding for my trip from British Council NZ and Pacific, something I still can’t quite believe that it happened…! I overcame another first earlier this year when I was interviewed by The Guardian, offering my take on the many social difficulties we encounter when posting about politics and sharing trends I’d observed on Instagram and X.

Screenshot from the Guardian

Another rewarding experience at Digital Good Network 2023 happened during a workshop to devise a public engagement activity. As part of a group with two excellent scholars, Nai Lee Kalema from University College London and Diyi Liu from Oxford Internet Institute, we devised an Instagram Explore algorithmic auditing activity that I have – with Nai and Diyi’s permission – developed as part of my auditing design features methodology. In the short term, we won the workshop task – and as pictured below – were awarded a very valuable prize 😀

The prize for winning the public engagement exercise!

Overall, it’s incredibly heartening to join an early researcher community who share the same concerns about technology’s multiple and widespread effects on society, the details of which can become heavy, despairing and disempowering. Against the odds, our community will keep pushing for positive change. And while we’re not outright rejecting Silicon Valley’s products, instead we’re looking at how these could be modified and used in more equitable ways to achieve social good. This is what was most inspiring about attending the Digital Good Summer School. That we can try to achieve better, autonomous interactions for users through our work.

For now, the current technological turn towards AI doesn’t seem to equal social progress. Instead it perpetuates the same systemic inequalities mediating user experience and mining people’s data for enormous profit. For example, has OpenAI remedied its data source processes for ChatGPT? Who wants to go for a ride in a Cybercab, when 2.4 million Teslas could be recalled for safety checks to its Full Self-Driving operating system? Is the new rush to adopt AI products in risk of replicating the same errors of social media (Sanders and Schneier 2024)? For every flawed new product launch, I am reassured there is a visible cut through from digital media academic communities and policy advisers informing global governments about essential reforms for Big Tech’s troubling practices. To end on a more positive note, state actors in ultimate control of societies destinies are apparently grasping that there must be effective regulatory scrutiny on the tech industry which results in effective legislative change. Hopefully the recent US Department of Justice anti-trust ruling against Google’s manipulation and monopolisation of the search market will be a harbinger for effective change and will start to level Silicon Valley’s disproportionate dominance and power over society.

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