The implications of our online lives as been in my mind since I first sat in awe of my first online community, Electric Minds. Over the years I have seen great good, but even greater swaths of harm. I’ve never thought it was all about the technology. Nor have I experienced technology as some neutral platform upon which we act. Technology is NOT value neutral. And everything that is wrong cannot be blamed on technology. Today a piece by the brilliant danah boyd nailed it. (And read the whole thing. It is superb. It leaves us with the question, why aren’t we centering children in every aspect of our ecosystem. Tech is not the solution.)
The problem is not: “Technology causes harm.” The problem is: “We live in an unhealthy society where our most vulnerable populations are suffering because we don’t invest in resilience or build social safety nets.”
By all means, go after big tech. Regulate advertising. Create data privacy laws. Hold tech accountable for its failure to be interoperable. But for the love of the next generation, don’t pretend that it’s going to help vulnerable youth. And when the problem is sociotechnical in nature, don’t expect corporations to be able to solve it.
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, as you can see from the time stamp on this Twitter screen grab. The issue of safety in group interactions comes up so often and I feel this little devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. I can’t claim to make a space fully safe. And we can ask ourselves to co-create “brave space.” But there is never certainty.
I would love a different take, a different language around how we convene without doing damage to each other. In these post-election days here in the US, and two days after a child was shot at a local high school here in Seattle, I wonder a lot with a bruised heart.
I’ve been a part of the wide-ranging and many-noded Liberating Structures network for many years. It has connected me to many remarkable people. One of them was the amazing Tim Jaasko-Fisher. LS founder Keith McCandless introduced me to Tim (I can’t remember where) and later recommended me for some support Tim was looking for.
Right away I was taken by Tim. A lawyer by training and a dedicated advocate for child welfare by practice and passion, Tim showed me a whole new side of the legal profession. To watch him deftly weave networks, facilitate groups who were not necessarily all on the same side, nor interested in group process Tim was offering, was quite something. Tim embraced the wicked questions inside of all of us and inside himself. Sure of his way and open to other ways. Fierce advocate for kids and collaborator within a challenged child welfare system. Open to simple solutions like protein before family court hearings to keep everyone on an even keel, an approach he and his amazing wife, Dr. Kristin Allott. Even from a distance it was clear this was a remarkable partnership and Tim glowed when he introduced me to Kris.
I had the joy and pleasure to work a few times for and with Tim. They were always learning moments. To see how he viewed something and approached it opened new perspectives for my own practice. I am ever grateful.
I will miss Tim. We all will miss Tim. The world has a hole it in left by Tim.
I am a member of The Well and one of the conversations/conferences I follow is called Hawaii. The above article was shared a while back and I continue to be moved by this article in Aperture magazine. Photographer Franco Salmoiraghi has taken pictures in Hawaii for decades. Not all of those are shared publicly because they are sacred to Hawaiian’s and their culture. There are things that are, by protocol, sacred. Images that are ONLY for native Hawaiians.
I remember working overseas many years ago and heard someone talking about my style and approach as that “casual American disregard of protocol and devaluing the role of the formal.” Guilty as charged and I often perceived that those protocols just slowed things down and did not amount to much. And from one perspective, that felt pretty accurate.
What I did not see nor school myself on was where protocol was, in fact, sacred, and when it was just a way to consolidate and preserve power. Or when it was both. Or neither. So when I read the article above, it opened up a new window through which I am now taking a longer peek. No conclusions here, just appreciation for another view.
I recently downloaded Northwest Health’s “Disability Justice: An Audit Tool” at https://www.northwesthealth.org/djaudittool# – it is a quick, free download. From the website their description:
Disability Justice: An Audit Tool” is aimed at helping Black, Indigenous and POC-led organizations (that are not primarily focused around disability) examine where they’re at in practicing disability justice, and where they want to learn and grow. It includes questions for self-assessment, links to access tools, organizational stories and more.
While white facilitators aren’t the target audience, this is a terrific and more broadly useful piece. For me it stems from Intersectionality, one of the ten principles of disability justice. Intersectional work is one of the essential practices we all need to learn and use, especially those of us who call ourselves facilitators. While the checklist is organizational oriented, it is great food for thought and ACTION.
First, what is disability justice? From the tool:
Disability justice is a term and a movement-building framework (i.e. a way of envisioning the ways people can organize around and think about disability) that centers the lives and leadership of disabled Black, Indigenous and people of color and/or queer, trans, Two Spirit and gender nonconforming people. To paraphrase Patty Berne, disability justice leader and co-founder of DJ performance and political collective Sins Invalid, disability justice steps into the “cliffhangers” left over from the disability rights movement.
Disability Justice: An Audit Tool
I was particularly taken by Patty Berne’s description about the cliffhangers left oer from the disability rights movement. It make me wonder about how we overlook something because we are focusing on something else we think is important. I reflect upon my feminism as a white woman and how it so thoroughly distracted me from racism for so long.
If we are not intimately involved in the issues of disability rights, we can forget about it. Time for action.
The action I put forth to myself is to read, journal and reflect upon the tool to identify first where I have an am falling short on disability justice in my life and work. It has been gratifying to see how many people have started to pay attention to things like access issues in online meetings, so that opens the door a crack for more and more fundamental changes. The checklist can help me go deeper. Thanks, NW Health and all the individuals who created this tool.
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