Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of Contact-Tracing Applications

IF 1.1 2区社会学 Q2 ANTHROPOLOGY

Public Culture Pub Date : 2021-05-01 DOI:10.1215/08992363-8917136

Paula Kift

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.

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不跟踪:接触追踪应用的反政治

为应对COVID-19大流行，世界各国政府转向接触者追踪应用程序，试图在经济重新开放和遏制病毒之间取得平衡。但正如本文所展示的，接触者追踪应用程序不仅无法保护我们当中最脆弱的人;他们还将公共卫生系统未能为流行病做好准备的责任从政府转移到努力控制其最坏影响的个人用户身上。在此过程中，接触追踪应用程序改变了失败的定义。它们还加剧了现有的不平等。在这种情况下，技术不仅具有政治;它阻止了政治。通过以接触追踪应用程序为例，本文指出了接受基于应用程序的结构性问题解决方案的一些更深层次的危险。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Public Culture Multiple-

CiteScore

2.10

自引率

6.70%

发文量

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.