Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters
(Katharina Reinecke, Princeton, £30)
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There's been much discussion of the biases inherent to Al, facial recognition and other technologies, but as Reinecke explores in Digital Culture Shock, what's often lacking in such conversations is an appreciation of the challenges posed to modern technology by deeply entrenched cultural norms around the globe.
In Rwanda, where internet connections are subject to frequent unplanned outages, people take the opportunity of the Wi-Fi going down to socialise with friends and neighbours.
Or take driverless cars, and consider how helpless those vehicles trained on urban roads in the USA would be in Egypt, owing to the vastly different styles of driving.
Then there's Naver - the most popular internet search engine in South Korea, which operates in a very different way to Google.
Reinecke takes us on a tour of these and other knotty cultural quandaries we don't think about as often as we should, while proposing a few solutions along the way.
This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.