Taking Action
Good for you for taking time to listen and learn about digital marginalization. Now it’s time to take action. Below are three interactive side quests to help you go deeper into some of the topics we have just covered. If you want to be even more hands-on, we are also giving you some tools you can use to advocate better in your context.
Side Quests
These side quests are interactive websites or other digital experiences that help reinforce the ideas covered in the previous two lessons. These focus on how bias and inquality are present in digital spaces, and how marginalized people and groups have different experiences online . . . and what we can do about that.
Parable of the Polygons
Available in 15 languages, this interactive simulation demonstrates how small individual biases can lead to large-scale divisions, even when everyone seemingly prefers diversity.
Playing with happy and sad shapes, the game shows how preferences can lead to segregated communities. It also shows how undoing this takes action, not “neutrality.”
Source: Nicky Case, an independent creator who designs digital activities to explain complex ideas.
Stopping Online Hate
Breaking Down the Social Media divides is a practical guide from WACC Europe that helps people counter online hate and promote respectful digital dialogue. Based on the principles of communication rights, the guide includes case studies and strategies to help you or your organization stop different forms of online hate.
The guide focuses on the experience of migrants, refugees, and other marginalized groups.
Source: WACC Europe, a regional association of WACC Global
Survival of the Best Fit
This short game helps players understand how algorithms used in hiring people for jobs can amplify human bias, even when designed to be “neutral.”
The game invites players to experience how machine learning decisions, which are based on past data, can be discriminatory.
Source: Survival of the Best Fit, designed by students and alumni from NYU Abu Dhabi. It was inspired by their Politics of Code class.
Tools You Can Use
Privilege Wheel Test
The privilege wheel is a visual tool that helps you see how different parts of your identity might impact your social power and privileges. It can show how things like your race, gender, and economic class impact how much power you have in your context. This online tool asks you questions and produces a clear visual map of where you have privilege and where you do not.
Source: IDRLabs, a community of independent researchers and creators focused on individual differences research.
Digital Defense Playbook
The Digital Defense Playbook, by Detroit Community Technology Project, is a hands-on guide designed to help marginalized communities protect themselves online. The handy guide has interactive activities combined with community-based strategies. The playbook focuses on topics that directly impact marginalized communities in the United States, like surveillance and access to digital technologies. However, the strategies can be adopted to many contexts.
Source: Detroit Community Technology Project is a grassroots organization that develops and uses technology rooted in community needs to foster digital justice.
Digital Inclusion Cards
This set of cards can be downloaded and printed for use in workshops, or simply to provide inspiration for activities you can do to increase digital literacy and inclusion in your community. The cards can help you identify some of the basic barriers people are facing in going online. More advanced activities, like creating avatars and learning coding, will help people expand their digital horizons.
Source: Good Things Foundation, is a United Kingdom charity dedicated to digital inclusion and equality.
Congratulations
Nicely done! Your hard work has paid off and you are equipped with the knowledge and tools advocate for marginalized people and groups online.
We’ve touched on how different parts of your identity impact your digital experiences, how you can create more inclusive digital spaces and use technologies in ways that are appropriate for your culture and context. Click the button below to head to the next session. Learn how digital technologies can be used for harm and destruction, and what you can do to stop that.