We used to think of online and offline as two different worlds — we had to make an effort to “get online.” But the seam between real life and digital spaces is growing ever-thinner and what comes with that attenuation is the potential to deepen social inequity, according to sociologist Ruha Benjamin.
In her latest book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Benjamin argues digital technologies recreate the same kind of racial hierarchies and segregation we witness in our daily lives. She points out that social hierarchies in the physical world have corresponding virtual ones.
Benjamin adds that it’s inevitable we would build into the technologies that run our phones, drive our cars or keep track of our friends, the same codes of good and bad that govern society.
Full article at: CBC News