Going Beyond Good: Computing4Good Considered Harmful

My colleague, Beki Grinter, has just posted to her blog her concerns about the term Computing4Good that I’ve written about previously (e.g., how could education not be “good”?).  I really like her issues about religion (is it good or is it so important, complex, and worthy of study that we are naive to use that label?) and about how others view us for labelling something “good.”  (I guess this is what faculty with blogs do when on furlough — write posts!

Third, there’s an intellectual risk. Words like good (and modern FWIW) suggest a naivety about the intellectual agendas that frame our research. The research communities who are the targets for the products of our intellectual efforts as well as the source of our intellectual inspirations, have developed a rich understanding the transfer of technologies from one place to another. … Intellectual discussion within these communities does not begin or include good (bad or evil), but focuses on the rich detailed interactions of these contexts and how they are embodied in technologies and the methods, practices, theories and commercial contexts in which those systems are made, as well as how they flow from their source to their destination, and then how they are not just adopted but appropriated into people’s lives.

via Going Beyond Good: Computing4Good Considered Harmful « Beki’s Blog (there’s an original name).

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