ABSTRACT

The spring of 2020 represented a watershed-moment-in-the-making, as broad, inclusive discussions on how to best cultivate discursive and policy mechanisms towards racial equity presaged a reckoning with America’s vast ethnoracial disparities. However, many of the remediatory actions proposed and thus far implemented have failed to address historic, epistemologically-embedded forms of racism that anchor and validate repressive informatics structures and thereby enable knowledge colonization. Focussing on a social psychological concept of “empathy plasticity”, the critical developmental window in which humans begin to formulate attitudes and dispositions on phenomena around them, this commentary explores how a re-organization of online spaces, such as Wikipedia and social media, can be used to more holistically present knowledge on topics in the realm of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Such a technocratic shift is one means of content democratization and dialectical gatekeeping to ensure our contemporary epistemology acquires and maintains methodological, ideological and ethical merit.

摘要

2020年春季代表了一个分水岭，正在就如何最佳地建立促进种族平等的话语权和政策机制进行广泛的，包容性的讨论，这预见到了美国巨大的种族差异。但是，已经提出并到目前为止已实施的许多补救措施都未能解决历史性的，认识论上嵌入的种族主义形式，这些形式锚定并验证压制性信息学结构，从而使知识得以殖民。着眼于社会心理概念“共情可塑性”，这是人类开始对周围的现象形成态度和倾向的关键发展窗口，该评论探讨了如何重新组织诸如Wikipedia和社交媒体之类的在线空间，可用于在种族，种族，阶级和性别领域更全面地介绍有关主题的知识。这种技术官僚主义的转变是内容民主化和辩证法守卫的一种手段，可以确保我们当代的认识论获得并保持方法论，意识形态和道德价值。