An attempt at using mass media data to analyze the political economy around some key ICTD policies in India

Sen, Anirban; Chhillar, Priya; Aggarwal, Pooja; Verma, S P; Ghatak, Debanjan; Kumari, Pinki; Agandh, Manpreet Singh; Guru, Aditya; Seth, Aaditeshwar

doi:10.1145/3287098.3287108

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Governments in theory do exclusively want to meet social objectives, and that too in a democratic manner, but tight interlocks also exist between governments and companies, and capital has often succeeded in shifting the state’s priorities away from social objectives (Sen et al , 2018; Stiglitz, 2012). For example, governments like to use technology as a means of imposing greater control and coordination of the population with a high modernity assumption of bringing social good, even though such initiatives have often disempowered the people and reinforced inequities (Scott, 1998), and capital in its constant search for new customers ingeniously provides such technological innovations to the governments (Sen et al , 2019). The governments too are no less opportunistic, and governments like in India have effectively used information systems to mould public opinion not only for their own populist agenda but to also endorse a vision of bringing social change through technology while obfuscating the scenarios when it leads to harm.…”

Section: Motivations Challenged By Organizational and Political Situatednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

A call to technologists to ensure that responsible outcomes arise from their innovations

Seth

2021

JICES

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to encourage technologists, those who design and manage technology systems, to collectivize and get closely involved in defining the priorities of their organizations, their countries, and the world, so that responsible outcomes can arise from their labour. Design/methodology/approach The author examines this problem from three viewpoints: From a design perspective about what is missing in most design practices to build information systems that undesirable outcomes still happen; from an ethics perspective about how to incorporate values in building and managing information systems; and from a political economy perspective about why ensuring responsible outcomes from technology is not easy. The author describes several limitations faced by technologists in achieving this, ranging from gaps in the design methods in use currently, a piecemeal approach to following ethical principles in the design and management of technologies, influence of the organizational culture and structure and the wider political economy of technology itself. Findings The author suggests several measures to address these challenges and conclude with a call to technologists to collectivize and engage politically to influence their organizations and governments to invest in meaningful objectives for a just and equitable world, and design and manage the solutions in ethically consistent ways. Research limitations/implications It is argued that a new paradigm of information systems is needed for digital platforms, which is grounded in ethics-based guidelines that should be followed by the designers and managers of these platforms to help ensure responsible outcomes. Practical implications Having such a paradigm is especially important in today’s winner-takes-all digital platform era because these platforms are governed by only a few people; therefore, it is imperative to build guardrails to responsibly manage these platforms, and to have technologists who design and manage these platforms to play a role in their governance. Social implications Information systems have the potential to alter power relationships in society, and it is suggested that they should be designed to empower the weak. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is a unique perspective that draws from his personal experience as a researcher and practitioner designing technologies for social good, and examines the problem from many different viewpoints.

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Section: Motivations Challenged By Organizational and Political Situatednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

A call to technologists to ensure that responsible outcomes arise from their innovations

Seth

2021

JICES

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“…This corpus contains more than 5 million articles. In prior work, we used this corpus to study media bias in the coverage of several important economic and technology policies in India [32][33][34].…”

Section: Mass Media Datasetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our methodology is generic though and can be applied to other categorizations as well, for example, to categorize districts based on health or income or education variables, and then understand the pace of growth in these categories. In parallel, we have also built a large corpus of news articles from six primary English language newspapers in India, since 2011 until now, consisting of all articles published on a daily basis [32,33]. The district location of these articles is obtained through an entity extraction method, and the media corpus thus serves as the source of qualitative data to understand the different development patterns.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Scope of Using News Articles to Understand Development Patterns of Districts in India

Gupta,

Saifi,

Verma

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Understanding what factors bring about socio-economic development may often suffer from the streetlight effect, of analyzing the effect of only those variables that have been measured and are therefore available for analysis. How do we check whether all worthwhile variables have been instrumented and considered when building an econometric development model? We attempt to address this question by building unsupervised learning methods to identify and rank news articles about diverse events occurring in different districts of India, that can provide insights about what may have transpired in the districts. This can help determine whether variables related to these events are indeed available or not to model the development of these districts. We also describe several other applications that emerge from this approach, such as to use news articles to understand why pairs of districts that may have had similar socio-economic indicators approximately ten years back ended up at different levels of development currently, and another application that generates a newsfeed of unusual news articles that do not conform to news articles about typical districts with a similar socio-economic profile. These applications outline the need for qualitative data to augment models based on quantitative data, and are meant to open up research on new ways to mine information from unstructured qualitative data to understand development. CCS CONCEPTS• Computing methodologies → Machine learning; • Applied computing → Computing in government.

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“…Is the world really becoming a more responsible place by paying attention to ethical concerns that arise from the purely profit-making and shareholder value maximization perspectives of the firm? Floridi suggests that this may is happening due to the increased observability brought about as a result of the information age [64], although media propaganda and rent seeking corporate-government relationships may succeed in countering this [65,76]. If this is really true though then distinctions for profit-based enterprises Vs non-profit donor funded enterprises, or whether they are doing social good or not, may not be necessary going forward.…”

Section: Why Does the World Need Different Kinds Of Enterprises?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another example is Whatsapp which has evaded any regulatory action on the problem of fake news, and has not undertaken any serious efforts itself to address the issues [78]. It seems that politicians, media, and companies alike, not only work together for collaborative gains but also paint an emancipatory and aspirational picture of technology, which drives rapid uptake but often leads to undesirable outcomes [32,76]. The question this raises then is whether democracies are strong enough for people to be able to shape the political economy to create institutions that can place checks and balances on private and public enterprises alike [79], to ensure that responsible outcomes arise from technology and social good is pursued as their only ethical goal [32,71]?…”

Section: Why Does the World Need Different Kinds Of Enterprises?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Elusive Model of Technology, Media, Social Development, and Financial Sustainability

Seth

2020

Socio-Tech Innovation

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We recount in this essay the decade-long story of Gram Vaani, a social enterprise with a vision to build appropriate ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) for participatory media in rural and low-income settings, to bring about social development and community empowerment. Other social enterprises will relate to the learning gained and the strategic pivots that Gram Vaani had to undertake to survive and deliver on its mission, while searching for a robust financial sustainability model. While we believe the ideal model still remains elusive, we conclude this essay with an open question about the reason to differentiate between different kinds of enterprises -commercial or social, for-profit or not-forprofit -and argue that all enterprises should have an ethical underpinning to their work.

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An attempt at using mass media data to analyze the political economy around some key ICTD policies in India

Cited by 7 publications

References 23 publications

A call to technologists to ensure that responsible outcomes arise from their innovations

A call to technologists to ensure that responsible outcomes arise from their innovations

Exploring the Scope of Using News Articles to Understand Development Patterns of Districts in India

The Elusive Model of Technology, Media, Social Development, and Financial Sustainability

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