Length: 600-800 words
Worth: 20% of your Final Grade
Final draft due: by email, Monday Nov 18th

In your first assignment, you learned to write about the user communities for whom a particular object you chose to analyze was or wasn’t made. In class, we worked on how you might further consider the labor contexts of objects of this type of analysis, thinking about their social effects on the people who make or use them for work. And for your most recent assignment, a literature review, you’ve done some research about a topic in your field. You’ve articulated a problem, asked questions, done research, and organized a synthesis of the current literature.

Genre

For this assignment, I’d like you to write a document for a choice of audience — either public or professional — for the purpose of informing that audience about your literature review topic. You will have the choice of writing either a public-facing explainer article or a memo to your colleagues in a professional setting.

Either of these will center around a single social justice issue associated with your topic. To start thinking about these issues, we read an essay about the lives of supply chain management employees using a particular algorithmic process, and we talked in class about the fungible employees performing Facebook content moderation. To get you thinking further, some more examples of tech and justice issues might be:

  • gender/race gaps in representation
  • workplace monitoring and surveillance, including algorithmic management
  • search engine, information access, and database biases
  • machine learning biases, including biases of model training
  • interface biases (e.g., colorblindness, gender categories)
  • issues of infrastructure access

I’ve also appended some broader domains in tech in which justice issues play a large role, in case they happen to be related to your topic.

It will be your task to bring one issue into the context of your literature review topic. Depending on your topic, this may require you to do a bit more research than you have so far in order to do justice (pun intended) to the particular issues about which you’d like to inform your reader. (If you are really having trouble here or decide you don’t like your topic, please feel free to pick a new one; however, please also understand that this will require you to get familiar with a totally new topic in not very much time!)

Assignment Requirements

You have two choices for this assignment. You will not be required to explicitly tell your “actual” reader (me) any information about your audience, but it should be clear to me what values your implied reader (your audience) holds based on the rhetorical choices you make — more on that below under each option.

In either case, I will be looking for:

  • A clearly indicated choice of audience, either by your choice of publication (in the case of the explainer article) or in the “To:” field (of the memo).
  • Appropriate style for your choice of genre. Please use an appropriate level of jargon for your audience, based on their degree of expertise in your topic. Please also consider syntax here: do you want long and tangled sentences, or short and concise ones? Explicit metadiscourse or signaling clauses? What level of hedging, and how?
    • You to generate interest in your topic for that audience.
      • Explainer: Unlike with academic articles, which scholars are likely to read if it contributes something new, your explainer article is unlikely to be read and not passed over unless you attract their attention. You’ll need to make your problem relevant, explaining or implying why the reader should care. Consider how the provided examples do this. Some may use a human-interest dimension, a narrative, or some well-chosen and contextualized statistics. Because these pieces are short, this happens very quickly!
      • Memo: Your memo should start by making clear some issue, either within your chosen work environment or more broadly in the field/industry. Otherwise, your reader will not know how it applies to them, and would probably right past the email or throw it away. Again, this happens very quickly at the beginning.
  • Attribution of sources in style appropriate for your choice of genre.
    • Explainer: It is very, very unlikely that an explainer will have a works cited section. Some may provide a list of further readings on the topic. Some longer explainer documents use footnotes, but yours need not.
    • Memo: Done well, a memo generally does not use footnotes, endnotes, further readings, or a bibliography (note that even Damore’s footnotes are for the most part explanatory rather than citational).
    • Instead of formal citation, use in-text strategies we’ve gone over in class, like signal phrases, to bring in your supporting material.
    • If you happen to use an image from elsewhere, please be sure to provide the source in a caption underneath the image.
  • your adoption of the formal conventions of the genre
    • Explainer: Consider the features that the model articles and documents use. What patterns emerge? Headlines? Bylines? Teaser lines? Subheadings? Use of hyperlinks?
    • Memo: Please include “To:”, “From:”, “Subject:”, and “Date:” fields.

Public Audience: Explainer

Explainer articles take a small piece of a bigger social issue that readers may not understand and break it down. Some examples of explainer articles can be found here and here. The focus of an explainer is on what people need to know about the topic, rather than on proposing solutions (that would be more appropriate, say, to an opinion piece).

Even though you’re writing for a “public” audience, remember that, really, there is no such thing as the “general” public (even the broadest kinds of public writing, like newspapers, seem to be written for groups that share certain values or beliefs). Who are you aiming for? What is their age range and cultural background? What kinds of literacies do they have? What magazine or newspaper would you hope to publish it in? While it’s not required reading, I’ve uploaded a chapter from Penrose and Katz on writing for public audiences. You could also consider the for Data and Society reports, especially the Explainer ones, as models for local level conventions; be aware, however, that your article will be much, much shorter.

Professional/Co-op Audience: Memo

In addition to informing a predetermined professional audience on a specific situation or topic related to their work, this sort of memo provides analysis and/or recommendations. We’ve already encountered, and analyzed together, an example of a questionable internal memo on a justice issue early in the term: the James Damore memo circulated within Google.

Remember that in our hyper-networked world, an ostensibly private memo is, to some degree, potentially public. How will that knowledge affect how you compose your memo? (How did we say the Damore memo’s features might reveal that it anticipated public uptake? You might return to the DeVoss and Ridolfo reading on “Rhetorical Velocity” here when thinking through this issue.)

Appendix: Current Tech Justice Domains

  • facial recognition surveillance
  • criminal sentencing algorithms
  • prison reform with GPS tracking anklets
  • healthcare system interfaces
  • online harassment (e.g., Gamergate)
  • net neutrality
  • social media content moderation
  • spread of disinformation
  • internet access/infrastructure
  • link rot
  • cross-border data flows
  • vote counting technologies
  • utilities infrastructure (e.g., Flint, Puerto Rico)
  • supply-chain management & consumer infrastructure
  • AI & self-driving cars
  • bioengineering
  • renewable energy (e.g., wind, solar, chemical)
  • fracking
  • prosthetics
  • robotic weapons