How I think I want to use my degree and why

 Howdy y'all,

I hope everyone had a good Halloween the other day! It was like a ghost town in my area but I'll just assume it was like that to be festive lol. 

This week, I have been asked to talk about what I hope to use my degree for and I think this prompt actually caught me while I'm at a crossroads. In previous posts as well as in my bio, I have been pretty forward with my intentions to use my degree to develop more STEM and Computing opportunities specifically for students in underserved communities. In my mind, giving a similar opportunity to students in these environments allows for dormant minds to flourish or to give kids who feel like they're too far ahead an outlet. This initiative is still super near and dear to my heart, but recently I've had to take stock of tech culture and its position in a social space and ask myself if I should be working on something else.

I imagine many of you have read the unsettling reports from Facebook (Now referred to as Meta) regarding their internal statistics implying a complacency to violence and bigotry. For those of you who don't know, recently a Facebook whistleblower leaked documents showing analytics that indicate that Facebook is a hub for harsh online culture and is a breeding ground for misinformation and hate. Despite these implications, it appears all Facebook leads have gone to ignore the signs. Now, of course, the whole site isn't necessarily like that (that's actually twitter lol), but I would be lying if I said I haven't seen a relative post something about 5G towers causing COVID-19. The online space created by Facebook, and I would argue social media spaces in general, is really due for an overhaul of transparency. This is not a new cry for this, as Capital Hill has been having a field day ripping these companies to shreds. My concern with this specific call for justice, as well as the greater issue of toxic spaces online, is that it seems many members of top personal be it in tech or in politics don't seem to fully understand the spaces either, and that is worrying.

Given all of this, I think I may actually begin to shift my focus into youth outreach and divert into ethics within the greater IT sector. Calling it by such an elaborate name sounds a bit posh and maybe call to mind an Orwellian nightmare, but in my mind, I would hope to mediate reform of online spaces to ensure full transparency and best practices. I, as someone who is a 'digital native', or someone who has grown up with computers, have to concede that I am painfully aware of this dissonance in implementing good ethical strategy into online development. I wouldn't say that this is anything new, in fact for many programming students this is one of the first things we learn (to work with ethics), yet it is not reflected in our present day. This is a huge undertaking and is in some ways even very abstract, but I think as someone who is always looking for humanity in the situation I have an obligation to spread that in spaces where it is short supply. Right now, that space is online.