The software-sorted society

One of those ideas that makes you jump, by drawing clear attention to something that you already knew, without having appreciated its significance.  Specifically, when you interact with a service online or by phone there may be software in action that mediates how you experience the service: by sorting you.  Live in a high income postcode? Get routed to a sales person more quickly than if your IP address makes you look as if you come from a less promising area.  On record as an awkward customer or "time-waster"? Then wait in the queue.  These issues are being examined by Steve Graham in a British Academy Readership Project: Rethinking the digital divide: the software-sorted society.

And from the same University of Durham research group is Multispeed cities and the logistics of living in an information age, a project that is examining the differences in how different communities use and interact with technology. E-print of 2005 paper by Stephen Graham and Michael Chang .

Comments

[George]

Thank you for this equally interesting and depressing piece. While I always saw sorting as a means of targeting offers to high spenders, the obvious corollary of denying service to the marginalised hadn't struck me until now.
G

[Don Presant]

Hi Seb:
Check out Simon and Anna Grant's preliminary investigation of ethics and eportfolios [70 kB PDF] from EIfEL's ePortfolio 2006 conference. They discuss a pro-active approach to demonstrating your ethics just as you would your skills (moral skills?); not quite the same thing, but the first few slides should resonate.