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Zeynep Tufekci |
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Zeynep Tufekci |
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About Me |
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Zeynep Tufekci, Ph.D. zeynep at umbc dot edu |
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I'm a visiting assistant professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. I've been involved in research on the digital divide and gender, race and social class at the University of Texas at Austin, where I completed my Ph.D. I am fascinated by how technology and society co-evolve. I'm also especially interested in questions of harm from intended consequences of technological developments, rather than just unintended consequences. For example, I wonder about how the rapid pace at which voice-recognition, natural langage processing and diagnostic systems are being developed is going to impact the structure of the labor market. I think we have seen just the tip of the iceberg in that realm, in terms of social consequences. I’m also interested in sociality in general and how technology fits into it all. I think that, as people, we like to imagine ourselves as a solitary lion hunting in the tall grass, or a lone cowboy riding into the sunset. In reality, we are deeply social creatures. Ironically, the combination of our sociality and our intelligence means that our best is better than anything else out there in the natural world, and our worst is unimaginably worse. I have lived in many places around the world, including Europe, U.S. and Turkey. I do cherish the outlook one gets from moving from place to place so much, especially as a kid, even if it is not the easiest thing in the world. Probably because of that experience, I’ve always been very interested in how and why people live and think the way they do. I always feel awed by how similar people are all over the world, and yet so different. I used to be a computer programmer (writing code mostly in C), and even have an undergraduate degree on the topic from Turkey. But I stopped being a programmer many years ago and decided that I’d rather study the social side of technology. (My apologies, thus, for the atrocious design of this web page. I used MS Publisher because I needed to get something up quickly. It’s kind of funny that I took so long to put up a proper web page, being an ex-programmer and all. There is a saying in Turkish that goes “a candle is darkest right around it,” meaning that sometimes people are not useful for themselves and those closest to them for the very thing that is their specialty. Anyway, I just looked at the code this program generates, and ugh. Just ugh.) |
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To contact me: |
