I submitted my review of this book to Teach Secondary magazine, an educational magazine in the UK. The first review below is what the magazine published. The second one is what I actually wrote! In substantive terms there is little difference between the two, but you may find it interesting to see what the editor altered.
Published version
Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters
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(Katharina Reinecke, Princeton, £30)
There's been much discussion of the biases inherent to Al, facial recognition and other technologies, but as Reinecke explores in Digital Culture Shock, what's often lacking in such conversations is an appreciation of the challenges posed to modern technology by deeply entrenched cultural norms around the globe.
In Rwanda, where internet connections are subject to frequent unplanned outages, people take the opportunity of the Wi-Fi going down to socialise with friends and neighbours.
Or take driverless cars, and consider how helpless those vehicles trained on urban roads in the USA would be in Egypt, owing to the vastly different styles of driving.
Then there's Naver - the most popular internet search engine in South Korea, which operates in a very different way to Google.
Reinecke takes us on a tour of these and other knotty cultural quandaries we don't think about as often as we should, while proposing a few solutions along the way.
This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.
My original version
These days there is much discussion about the inadvertent in-built biases of technologies such as artificial intelligence and facial recognition. But the problem runs much more deeply and widely than that. What is lacking in many cases is an appreciation of how very different cultures are in different parts of the world.
For example, if the wi-fi were to “go down” while I’m writing this review, I would be extremely discombobulated, as would many of us. In Rwanda, however, where the internet is often subject to unplanned outages, people take the opportunity to socialise.
Even in the field of driverless cars, those trained on urban roads in the USA would be virtually helpless in Egypt because the style of driving is so different.
Even the South Korean’s favourite search engine, for instance, is very different from that of Google. Cultural differences represent a knotty problem to solve, though Reinecke suggests some solutions.