CFP: Digital inequality and automated decision-making workshop

While digital inclusion is not a new research topic, with studies of the digital divide, its dynamics, and impacts extending back to the mid-1990s, recent events—bushfires, and the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions—have brought it into sharp focus.

In fact, every move to digitise and automate the services and interactions we take for granted in our daily lives increases the potential for digital exclusion. These processes multiply problems associated with the inability to access, make use of, and afford the digital technologies and services required to meaningfully engage with contemporary life (Thomas et al., 2021).

Restrictions to in-person connections with people and services have emphasised the persistent link between social and digital inequalities. Those who are unable to navigate platforms for social connection or work, new modes of QR access to venues and services, or manage their personal vaccination status through linked health and identity documentation are literally locked out. Similarly, there has been a forced acceleration of digital transformation for many institutions, businesses, services, and non-profit organisations.

As we move further into the new era of pandemics, there is wide recognition that, as Ellen Helsper puts it, digital engagement is ‘a continuous process—a scene of constant struggle’ (2021: 1).

With automated systems increasingly mediating decision-making across many domains of the digital society, the ‘scene of struggle’ is widening and deepening. Concerns about digital inclusion and exclusion are in this way exacerbated by automation. The continued uptake of automated decision-making (ADM)—with these decisions in part based on data derived from digitally included participants—raises specific questions about the consequences of digital exclusion:

• How does digital inclusion (and, by extension, how does digital exclusion) inform how people experience ADM?
• Whose digital practices are informing ADM, and whose are left out?
• What might a focus on digital inclusion and exclusion tell us about how institutions can promote responsible, ethical, and inclusive ADM?
• How might machines such as recommender systems consider digitally excluded and non-users?
• And what data models, processes, and capacities does an attunement to digital exclusion reveal?

With ADM systems barely explainable by their creators, we see yet another frontier opening up for forms of digital exclusion and inequality.

We are particularly concerned with identifying and thinking through questions of digital inclusion and automated decision-making that may presently be tangential to dominant fields and debates, and are especially keen to hear from scholars working in fields beyond media and communications. In doing so, we aim to create a generative space in which we can draw out the implications of digital inclusion for broader concerns.