Notes

Would you rather… keep all of your money in a shoebox or have a bad credit rating?

Would you rather… teach yourself new job skills at home, using freely available resources online, or get a degree or other qualification?

Many societies, including Australia, aspire to egalitarianism and liberal freedom. Even societies that have alternative political forms still value individual freedom and choice. Careers are open to talents. We all have learned to value our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and choosing your own adventure. Yet this is a burden also. We each have to achieve the role we want in many domains of society. Equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of outcome. Yet if you don’t want to compete to put points on your society’s scoreboard, what do you do instead? When everything about you is counted, measured, and ranked, and everyone is sorted on to different, unequal tracks, is it better to quit the game or keep playing?

Fourcade proposes that we are entering a new phase of history in which greater and more systematic incorporation leads to even more pervasive and entrenched inequality. Yet in a network perspective, we learn to see the distributedness and heterogeneity of networks through which these social computations are performed. How does a global order of unequal citizenship look through the lens of networks?

Keywords

ordinal citizenship, financial inclusion, agency

Learning outcomes

• Be able to explain how questions of power, agency, and rights shift in light of the centrality of communication infrastructures for social relations and public participation

Padlets for discussion

Links to Padlets on the Week 10 notes pages on this class’s Canvas site.

• My life in a meritocracy: https://sydney.padlet.org/ryanschram/my-life-in-a-meritocracy-a8j9k4lek308n06t
• What is social media: https://sydney.padlet.org/ryanschram/social-media-the-contemporary-ouroboros-dhpci99xh2rix3ce