{"title":"Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of Contact-Tracing Applications","authors":"Paula Kift","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8917136","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world turned to contact-tracing applications in an attempt to balance the reopening of the economy with keeping the virus at bay. But as this article demonstrates, contact-tracing applications not only fail to protect the most vulnerable among us; they also shift responsibility for failing to prepare public-health systems for a pandemic away from governments and onto the individual user struggling to contain its worst effects. In the process, contact-tracing applications change the definition of failure. They also reinforce existing inequalities. Technology in this case not only has politics; it prevents politics. By focusing on contact-tracing applications as an example, the article points to some of the deeper perils of accepting app-based solutions to structural problems.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Public Culture","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8917136","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world turned to contact-tracing applications in an attempt to balance the reopening of the economy with keeping the virus at bay. But as this article demonstrates, contact-tracing applications not only fail to protect the most vulnerable among us; they also shift responsibility for failing to prepare public-health systems for a pandemic away from governments and onto the individual user struggling to contain its worst effects. In the process, contact-tracing applications change the definition of failure. They also reinforce existing inequalities. Technology in this case not only has politics; it prevents politics. By focusing on contact-tracing applications as an example, the article points to some of the deeper perils of accepting app-based solutions to structural problems.
期刊介绍:
Public Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year—in January, May, and September. It is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. A four-time CELJ award winner, Public Culture has been publishing field-defining ethnographies and analyses of the cultural politics of globalization for over thirty years. The journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks. Artists, activists, and scholars, both well-established and younger, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture.