#tricia wang

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Jack replied to Tricia Wang & Crumb!

[kenyatta]

The Underground Efforts to Get Masks to Doctors

With supply chains gone haywire and the government doing little, ordinary citizens have organized to keep health-care workers protected.

With supply chains gone haywire and limited help forthcoming from the government, ordinary citizens have started volunteer networks around the country, forming what one enlistee referred to as “a last-minute bucket brigade.” Get Us PPE, one of the largest groups, estimates that it facilitated the delivery of some one and a half million masks in April alone. Smaller groups—amorphous, and nimble on their feet—have been built from webs of real-life connections made manifest in Slack channels, WhatsApp groups, and endless 2 a.m. Zoom calls. Often, there’s no formal hierarchy, just a rotating crew of bleary-eyed volunteers: teachers, coders, lawyers, artists, historians, and the recently unemployed. “There are dozens of these groups working across the country,” Megan Ranney, an E.R. doctor and a founder of Get Us PPE, told me recently. “We need every one we can get.”

As Aminlari recovered from the virus over the course of a month, a friend of hers put her in touch with one such volunteer effort, known as Last Mile PPE. Founded in New York, Last Mile groups have sprung up around the country, including in Los Angeles, where Aminlari first made contact. She began coördinating her mask-sourcing efforts with the L.A. branch and soon founded her own, in San Diego. She sees it as a temporary but necessary solution to the problem of P.P.E. shortages. She doesn’t like to speculate on why the gear isn’t getting to doctors on the front lines. “I just know what the end result is,” she said. “We don’t have it.”

I’ve been quiet about this but my partner @triciawang​ has been working with a group of volunteers to build an ad-hoc organization to confidentially and securely get PPE into the hands of frontline healthcare workers who are most at risk.

Usually this means workers in units doing intubations, workers in nursing homes, nonclinical workers, and workers in low income communities. 

Many of these workers have had to request PPE anonymously because hospital systems have threatened to fire doctors and nurses who speak out about the lack of PPE. From what I can understand of the issue, hospitals’ potential concerns include possible accusations of breach of patient confidentiality, lawsuits over negligence, or dips in their stock price. The result for many workers, though, is that they show up to their jobs with a greater risk to their personal safety than what is necessary. Many have fallen ill. Some have died.

Our tiny apartment in Bed Stuy (and many like them around the country) has been turned into a 24/7 operation for sourcing masks and face shields, processing requests from healthcare workers, and coordinating deliveries. Our hallway is a warehouse. Every surface of our living room is covered in order forms and post-it notes. We’ve set up a white noise machine to help with concurrent Zoom calls. In my very minor support role, I’ve taken over all of the cooking and dog walking duties. I’ve also ordered a ton of whiteboard paint.

What started as a temporary, two-week project to help hold things over until the federal government got their act together (Narrator: “They haven’t, possibly on purpose”) has turned into a longer term effort with tremendous need but no clear end.

More on the project here. If you’re in a position to donate money go here.

[kenyatta]

Society and institutions both normalize. They’re always trying to figure out how to fit people and things and ideas into boxes. That’s essentially what quantitative data does. It gets rid of context to normalize a data set to make it fit into a set of numbers. Institutions do that too. They take a set of things that are fuzzy, like human interactions, and they try to put them in a box. There can be a lot of value in normalizing, but it can also be really dangerous, especially when you don’t stop to ask: why are we doing this? What happens to the things that don’t fit in the boxes? What happens to the people who don’t fit into the institutions or who aren’t represented in the data set. Are they made invisible? Who and what is being excluded?

People Are Your Data: an interview with Tech Ethnographer Tricia Wang

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Tricia Wang sobre el Big Data y el Thick Data

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Opinion: You Can Learn Something From The People Of Wuhan

Media has focused on the top-down, authoritarian response in Wuhan. But the way ordinary citizens handled the crisis should be replicated across the world.

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ELASTIC SELF

"In [Tricia] Wang’s theory, a network like Facebook, which enforces real name registration and consists of a person’s friends and family from time immemorial, encourages bounded use. It’s like the small town you never left, the grammar school class you couldn’t pass out of, the first dead-end job. It’s a network mired in past and present, and by its nature it enforces a limited sense of identity and expression.

By contrast, something like Tumblr encourages unbounded use. It allows you to experiment and play. It’s the big city, and each new tumblelog you create is like a new bar or neighborhood where you can try on a new self and see how it fits. In one instant you can be a pug lover, reblogging the best animated GIFs of the flat-faced dogs. In the next, you can dive deep into the Go Pro snowboarding community and post snaps from your latest run.

Hence Wang’s notion of the elastic self. Like rubber bands, when we step into Tumblr we can stretch and reshape ourselves into different configurations. Each new hat we try on stretches the rubber band just a little bit further, and over time it might evolve into a new configuration. This allows for remarkable opportunities to explore different potentials of self and self-expression."

From An Xiao Mina’s The Social Ties That Unbind (via @kenyatta )

[kenyatta]

@triciawang

[kenyatta]

A Harvard researcher says meeting strangers online is actually great for kids

Young people often gravitate to spaces where they can’t be watched.

In some ways, this shouldn’t be surprising. Young people have always gravitated to spaces where they can’t be watched. Adults also have a tendency to seek out strangers. “It’s why adults like bars,” she says. “Or sometimes you sit next to that person on a plane who tells you their life story.”

And despite adult fears, Wang says teenagers are adept at using their own language to quickly determine whether or not they should trust a stranger—in China, whether someone is from the government and, in the US, whether they’re a troll or an adult.

Socializing with unfamiliar people online allows teenagers to adopt different attitudes or sexualities—for girls to take on a male persona if they’re feeling judged in online games, for example.

And this identity shifting means that, unlike adults, who tend to view what’s published online with a sense of permanence, teenagers are looking for ways to discard old accounts. “They don’t have the expectation that anything lasts forever online,” says Wang.

“Adults conceive of strangers as dangerous, but they’re a very important component how young people use online,” Wang tells Quartz.