Courting Culture in Computer Science - Introduction - The Research Center on Computing & Society

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Batya Friedman

Introduction

Computer science is practiced within a technical context steeped in logic, representations, and techniques. It is also the case that computer science has pervasive social consequences: invasion of privacy, worker surveillance, computer-based fraud, automated warfare, to name a few. Thus, it is increasingly obvious to those inside and outside our field that our technical activity needs to be responsive to the social aspects of computing.

To proceed with this endeavor, I shall suggest that computer scientists need more adequately to court culture. I use the phrase – courting culture – to signify a process through which we integrate the technical with the social and ethical, and refine our humanitarian sensibilities in the course of our everyday computing practices. Elsewhere (Friedman & Kahn, in press), I have discussed this process in the context of computer system design. I shall speak today about how we might court such a culture from an educational perspective within an academic institution. In doing so, I draw from my recent experience as Director of the Interdisciplinary Computer Science Graduate Program at Mills College where we have, to some extent, explored such a courtship.

The ideas here are organized around two broad types of educational activities: structured and unstructured. Structured educational activities refer to the explicit curriculum (such as specific courses and curriculum units). Unstructured educational activities refer to the rich background of educational activities that support the structured curriculum (such as communications through electronic mail, departmental colloquia, and faculty advising). Both types of activities are important. I will, however, emphasize unstructured activities for they often go unrecognized when considering the social aspects of computing.

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