In reality, though, many of the innovations of the digital economy have been propped up by an underpaid, underappreciated, and an unacknowledged class of people who Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri describe as “ghost workers” in their book Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019).

On Thursday, July 9, at 12:30 p.m., Fordham’s McGannon Center will host a webinar with the authors to discuss these largely unknown members of the global workforce.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will feature Gray and Suri explaining how they used extensive interviews and data analytics to show that this often unsupported workforce is essential to such things as geolocation, online payment systems, and content moderation, as well as fixing glitches and gaps in everyday systems we all rely on.

Olivier Sylvain, the director of the McGannon Center and a professor at Fordham’s School of Law, said their findings are especially relevant to contemporary concerns such as Facebook employees’ pushback against the company’s laissez-faire approach to misinformation and work stoppage efforts at Amazon in light of concerns about COVID-19.

“It isn’t just about the people who power Amazon Mechanical Turk, or the gig workers who drive Uber cars. It’s also about laborers in Southeast Asia who are finding the parts that go into the Amazon Echo, and it’s about the content moderators in India who are reviewing traumatic images of child abuse so that we never have to see them when we open our News Feed,” he said.

Sylvain said he’s most interested in hearing Gray and Suri talk about the ways that companies keep these workers’ stories out of the public eye, not so much by denying their existence as by touting the miracles of artificial intelligence.

“When Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress in 2018, and people were worried about the manipulations of elections, his answer was, ‘We’re going to have AI solve this and make sure we don’t have disinformation on Facebook.’”

“That is laudable, and I hope that it works, but it is incomplete. The managers that run these companies and the labor they hire are just as important, if not more important, in deciding how the systems work. I don’t think they’re trying to block the information; I think there’s just a mismatch in the words they ascribe to the technology and services, and what’s actually going on.”

After Sarah Roberts, Ph.D., an assistant professor of information studies at UCLA, and Lilly Irani, Ph.D., an associate professor of communication, science studies, computer science, and critical gender studies at the University of California San Diego, share their reactions to the book’s findings, the day’s session will shift to the work that Kimani Paul-Emile and Sam Roberts, Ph.D., associate professor of history and of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University, have done in the health care industry.

Paul-Emile, a professor of law and associate director of Fordham Law School’s Center on Race, Law, and Justice, has spent years studying how race and inequality affect health care workers, a group whose challenges have only been heightened since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nurses and nursing assistants often provide behind the scenes care to patients, but don’t always enjoy the types of workplace protections as other workers, said Paul-Emile.

“It’s been an open secret in medicine that some patients reject their healthcare provider based on race, religion, or ethnicity, said Paul-Emile. “While this biased patient conduct is disproportionately directed toward Black providers, in the age of Covid, there have been increasing numbers of patients saying, ‘I don’t want that Asian nurse,’ due to bias and unfounded fears of contracting the coronavirus.”

Paul-Emile explained that patients have the right to refuse treatment.

“But the health care worker also has employment rights that need to be respected. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects employees from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, ethnicity, or religion. So when these instances occur, it can be really difficult to discern what to do,” she said.

There’s also the fact that COVID-19 has sickened people of color and the poor at higher rates than other demographics.

“Initially there was discussion about whether there was something biological or genetic that predisposed these groups to be particularly vulnerable to the virus, but it quickly became clear that the disparities stemmed from how our society is structured. Many people in these communities are the first responders who are put in positions where they’re more likely to be infected by the coronavirus,” Paul-Emile said.

“That’s opened the door to very important conversations about structural inequality and race.”

The Oct. 4 event centered around University of Virginia Media Studies Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Facebook Global Civic Partnerships Manager Crystal Patterson, investigative journalist Julia Angwin, and Fordham Law visiting professor Danielle Citron ’94 also participated in a panel discussion moderated by Fordham Law professor Olivier Sylvain.  Fordham University’s McGannon Center, which Sylvain directs, presented the event.

Read the full story at Fordham Law News. 

Two books, Low Power to the People (MIT Press, 2014),  by Christina Dunbar-Hester and The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014), by Elizabeth Losh co-received the Donald McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Technology Research.

The award carries with it a $2,000 prize that will be split among the winners. It is the first award issued under the center’s revised mission—to foster understanding of the ethical and social justice dimensions of media and communication technologies.

Previously, said Alice Marwick, PhD, director of the Gannon Center and assistant professor of communication and media studies, the center’s mission had focused on government policy.

“This new focus allows us to look at things like Anonymous, cyberbullying, the use of Yik Yak and Snapchat, and all these cutting edge research topics that are beyond just the policy aspect of communication research,” she said.

The two books chosen for the award exemplify that shift, Marwick said.  She applauded Low Power author Christina Dunbar-Hester’s approach to writing about the practices of an activist organization focused on procuring lower-power FM licenses in the 2000s.

“She worked with all these activists and went to all these events where people are putting up a radio transmitter tower, or they’re putting together a workshop to teach people how to solder,” she said. “This kind of ethnographic approach to understanding technology is very much the cutting edge of communication scholarship.”

On the other end of the spectrum is The War on Learning, a critical look at the life cycles of education technologies like smart boards, which are promoted by administrators and technology companies, but not teachers. Rather than decrease inequality, they often exacerbate existing problems in education, she said.

Marwick said both books exemplify the kind of research that students will explore in a new digital technologies and emerging media major, scheduled to be available, pending state approval, through the Department of Communication and Media Studies in the fall of 2016.

“In both cases, you’re looking at books where ethics and social justice are front and center of the questions that are being asked, but the authors are doing it in ways that are more subtle and nuanced than saying that the FCC should incorporate this policy, or the government should fix this problem. Instead, they’re really looking at how these things play out in practice.”

Benkler, the Joseph M. Field  ’55 Professor of Law at the Yale Law School, is a leading advocate of the use of blogs and other modes of participatory communication that offer citizens more means of self-expression and information-sharing. His book explores the political, cultural and economical implications of this type of new media environment.

“Wealth of Networks has already proven to be an enormously important book and promises to continue to be influential for years to come,” said Napoli.

The Donald McGannon Book Award honors the best in book-length research in the field of communications policy. The award carries with it a cash prize and is named in honor of Donald H. McGannon, Esq. (FCRH ’40, LAW ’47), former CEO of Westinghouse Broadcasting.  Previous winners include Investigated Reporting (University of Illinois Press, 2005) by Chad Raphael, and Prometheus Wired (University of Chicago Press, 2001) by Darin Barney.

Fordham’s McGannon Center was founded in 1986 to conduct, support, reward and disseminate research on communications policy and ethics, with special emphasis on the public interest. More information about the McGannon Center can be found at its website.

“The Federal Communication Commission’s decision to relax media ownership regulations is deeply inappropriate,” said Rice, the luncheon speaker at the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center’s two-day conference examining diversity and localism in the media industry held in Pope Auditorium on Dec. 15 and 16. “So, if we accomplish nothing else over the next five years, let us keep the playing field safe” from media giants.

Earlier this year, the FCC approved new media ownership rules raising the national ownership cap from 35 percent to 45 percent, possibly opening the door for a few companies to gain ownership of a majority of the country’s television stations. The new rules also lifted a ban that prevented a company from owning a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same market, except in the smallest markets. Critics of the FCC’s actions fear that local media outlets, and the varying viewpoints they present, will be greatly diminished.

“Diversity and localism are central to the effective functioning of our media system,” said Philip Napoli, director of the McGannon Center. “Access to diverse sources and content is essential to a robust marketplace of ideas. Media content and services that address local interests and concerns are essential to the welfare of local communities.”

Many of the conference’s featured speakers—who are leading academics, activists, advocates, policy makers and media professionals in the field—expressed concerns that the recent policy decisions by the FCC neglect the importance of promoting diversity and localism in the industry.

Ernest Sotomayor, president of the board of directors of Unity Journalists of Color, equated the declining number of local broadcasters to a profound “disconnect to the community,” where media outlets are typically not representative of local communities and interests.

Mara Einstein, assistant professor of media studies at Queens College, said that the economics of television, which is reliant on advertising income, is mostly to blame for the industry’s subpar track record in diversity. Television executives, she said, shift industry resources away from diverse interests and toward a centrist, mainstream position to maximize viewership and earning potential. She further concluded that the industry needs “improved regulation, rather than no regulation.”

Napoli concluded, “Without attention to diversity and localism principles, we risk having a media system in which the range of viewpoints available is narrowed, and in which the opportunities to convey ideas to large audiences are available to only a select few speakers.”

A final report summarizing the research and ideas presented at the conference, as well as recommendations to foster diversity and localism in the media, will be released by the center next spring.

The McGannon Center promotes ethical and socially responsible communication policy and practices through research grants, awards programs, and an annual series of roundtable conversations, colloquia and lectures. Named after the late Donald McGannon, a Fordham alumnus and former general executive and chairman of the board of Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, the center opened in 1986 at Fordham. McGannon’s dedication to ethics and socially responsible communication policy are the foundation of the center’s operations.