APrIGF 2020 | A Virtual Experience: We made lemonade out of the virtual lemon! [Manju Chen]

While in a face-to-face meeting, one can pop in and out from different sessions taking place at the same time as one wishes, or even stay in one room and follow another session virtually on her laptop or mobile devices, the same is not as feasible for virtual participation. Although all sessions were recorded, it it still very different to attend in real-time and be part of the dialogue than watching the recordings. I guess this is another downside we will have to bear with for virtual meetings. 

Technology and tech companies siginificantly shape the ‘digital reality’ we live in now. It was not a surprise that several sessions aimed to take a deeper dive into the role of internet technologies in our sociery. 

In the ‘Not just 0s and 1s’ session, all panelists emphasized the importance to engage and consult stakeholders when developing and implementing new technology, especially apps and services that claim to ‘protect’ the minority groups, for example, women. Most minority groups, as the panelists pointed out, don’t feel ‘protected’ or ‘more safe’ but rather ‘being monitored’ by such technology. The sharings were enlightening and alarming, and I wholeheartedly support all panelists’ messages. 

However, I fear every now and then that we are only talking in our echo chambers. Most of the things they said I already knew and agreed. On the other hand, and for people who simply brush away female empowerment and the intrinsic difficulties of being a woman in the current society as nonsense/whining, are we really reaching to them when we talk about ‘women’s safety’ and how we should ask women before ‘protecting’ them? How do we have a real–not superficial, not talking ‘over’ each other–conversation with those who conflate ‘being watched’ with ‘being safe’? How do we make our points more accessible for those who already bought into the idea of ‘surveillance = safety’?

During the session of ‘challenges in establishing multistakeholder collaborations’, some very noteworthy interventions happend in the chat. I want to echo and highlight the diffidulty of youth participants participating in internet governance forums: the youth community share a feeling that they (we) are, in a way, sidelined in supposedly inclusive, multistakeholder internet governance discussions. The fact that there is a youth IGF aside from the ‘main’ IGF solidifies the ’segregation’ of youth and the ‘adults/professionals’ in IG discussions. I would argue that youth is as entitled as any adult to participate fully and professionally in the multistakeholder process.

The main idea I picked up from the ’Tech Giant’ session is that we should reject the binary discourse of  ‘it’s bad tech or no tech’. We have every right to demand technologies that are sustainable, human-centered, privacy-by-default without compromising our control to our own data.