Judith Donath is a designer, computer science researcher, artist, and writer whose works ask fundamental questions about our interaction with new technologies and addresses the need for critical thinking and discernment. In 2014, she published The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online.
Donath has been always passionate about how communication technologies change society. Judith Donath synthesizes knowledge from urban design, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science to create innovative interfaces and virtual identities. She writes books and articles analyzing this process, creates artworks critiquing it, and makes objects and applications designed to change it for the good. Talking about her recent book, she said “My book The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press, 2014) looks at how interface design shapes online identity and influences behavior. It is a manifesto for balancing transparency, engagement, and innovation – and a manual for designing radically new social interfaces.” She was the former director of the MIT Media Lab’s Sociable Media Group, where she and her students created many pioneering and influential online social applications that have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Currently, she is an advisor at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and is working on a book about technology, trust, and deception. She received her doctoral and master’s degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and her bachelor’s degree in History from Yale University.
The rapid growth of all social media and news platforms marks a new era of doubt. But the internet has always been bombarded with deception dating back to the web’s earliest days. In a 1998 paper, Judith Donath detailed the effects of trolling, misinformation, and disinformation on online user groups. The problems are too familiar even 20 years later:
“A troll can disrupt the discussion on a newsgroup, disseminate bad advice, and damage the feeling of trust in the newsgroup community. Furthermore, in a group that has become sensitized to trolling—where the rate of deception is high—many honestly naïve questions may be quickly rejected as trolling … Compared to the physical world, it is relatively easy to pass as someone else online since there are relatively few identity cues … Even more surprising is how successful such crude imitations can be.”
Even as the web first blossomed at the time this paper published and more people gained access to the internet, these concerns largely stayed below the surface. But the last decade when we saw the dominance of the internet and the consequences of it, online falsehoods become the real danger. According to Greater Good Magazine, the number of Americans who see the opposing political party as a threat to “the nation’s well-being” has doubled since 1994. This deepening polarization has predictable results: government shutdowns, violent protests, and scathing attacks on elected officials. And the reason partly because of social media. Since Trump’s election, Judith Donath didn’t hesitate to once again stress the importance of understanding the social dynamics of deception and the role technology plays in establishing or undermining trust.
Currently, she is writing a book about technology, trust, and deception. Deceptive technologies have been easily accessible like anonymous chats, deepfake, faked profiles,… but others such as ubiquitous surveillance and surreptitious data tracking promise to eliminate it. In this upcoming book, she wants to examine the role honesty and deception play in an individual’s life and the importance of understanding the economics of honesty that have shaped how we communicate before deciding whether we want to embrace or reject these technologies.
Work cites
Donath, Judith. “Judith Donath.” Berkman Klein Center, Berkman Klein Center, Sept. 2020, cyber.harvard.edu/people/jdonath.
Donath, Judith. Judith Donath, 2017, vivatropolis.com/judith/.
Martineau, Paris. “Internet Deception Is Here to Stay-So What Do We Do Now?” Wired, Conde Nast, 30 Dec. 2019, www.wired.com/story/internet-deception-stay-what-do-now/.
Baylist, Shaylon. “What’s the Future of the Internet – and Society?” Technical.ly Philly, 13 Feb. 2020, technical.ly/philly/2020/02/13/whats-future-internet-society-world-affairs-council/.
DE-WIT, LEE, et al. “Are Social Media Driving Political Polarization?” Greater Good, 16 Jan. 2019, greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_social_media_driving_political_polarization.
