Kartikeye's Essay

This class has been an extremely important addition to my degree here at UW. As I approach the end of my four year degree and joining the tech industry working on projects with people in this class and talking about class material with my discussion members has made me realize the value a diverse set of backgrounds brings to the technology industry. In this class, we have studied and read about topics within technology that are very important and relevant for what the industry is today and they definitely shape ideas, values and thoughts of people that work in the technological space.

Through our final project, we decided to make our own rendition of the Harvard Implicit Bias test, from what we discussed in the discussions the test was not a good indication of bias in the technology industry. We decided to focus on analyzing how discrimination on the basis of color, gender and educational background changes the technology industry today. For our survey questions, there are no right or wrong answers. I definitely felt that the group that I chose was really helpful. Everyone in my group came from diverse backgrounds, brought up important, interesting and insightful questions.This helped in our remote paired programming sections as we were able to help each other out with their problems as some of our group members did not come with technological backgrounds. Their contribution and motivation towards this project made the process of working on it much easier. As a group we made use of important technologies that are currently used in the industry and helped in some ways replicating an atmosphere of working in a team at a large tech company. For example, we made use of Github for code collaboration, Outlook for communication, Bluehost and then Netlify to host our website and google cloud for textual collaboration and analysis. Our analysis of the survey results proves how people of different demographics have different opinions on intersectionality in technology and IT.

One of the most important concepts that have stuck with me from this class is that of Hegemony. Hegemony can take many different forms in a modern workplace, such as the control of certain technology or the uneven distribution of resources and opportunity among diverse groups of individuals. The dominance of particular technologies or platforms in a technological workplace is one way that hegemony may take shape there. In a technology workplace, hegemonic situations must be identified and addressed since they can stifle innovation and restrict some individuals from engaging in and contributing to the field. On reading more about Hegemony online, I found a paper om hegemony on social media and implications of sustainable communication, that talks about how misinformation campaigns distort the line between facts and falsity on social media platforms and how there has been a profound shift in the way that us social media users consume information The paper further talks about hegemony in social media and implications of sustainability communications.

The readings and the discussion based format of this class has been extremely helpful in keeping me interested in what we were learning here. After reading or watching lectures of this class, I would look forward to putting my ideas forward in the discussion section.