I'm Sarah Cooney and I'll be presenting riding the bus in Los Angeles creating cultural micro
exposures via technology. One of the things that initially drew me to the HCI community
is that so much of the work is socially focused. The community cares about social justice,
about helping people and the environment, and trying to make the world a better place.
I especially appreciate that we reflect critically and work on bold and important
topics like feminism, race, heteronormativity, and postcolonialism to name just a few.
But not all places and people are ready for these bold ideas.
Recently due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I returned to my small rural hometown,
population 3500, 97.5 percent white, predominantly English speaking, and largely Christian,
for a period of several months. In the midst of a pandemic, a racially charged summer,
and a contentious election season (in the middle of a swing state no less), I began to reflect on
my experiences. Specifically the experiences that had laid the groundwork for my own pluralistic
worldview, and the experiences that had made it so different from those surrounding me.
In this paper I introduce the term cultural micro-exposure to refer to small brushes with
the everyday realities of a culture or lived experience that is different from one's own.
It was these experiences, small, subtle, I realized during my reflection that had
shaped my world view as much, if not more than, any grand moments or adventures. These are the
kind of subtle encounters one might have riding the bus through the streets of Los Angeles,
walking the streets of New York City, or visiting an international tourist destination
with others from all over the world. It is being surrounded by people who don't look like you,
don't speak like speak like you, don't worship like you, etc. The kind of experience largely
unavailable in my tiny hometown. The kind of experience that I was privileged to have through
my education and travel experiences. This led me to consider how these experiences might be
made available to people in places without access to a diversity of people and cultures
and without the same privileges that I enjoyed. Being a computer scientist, I asked myself
How can cultural micro exposures be created using technology?
In the paper, I first review prior work in conveying cultural experiences using technology
noting how prior work is largely insufficient in creating micro-exposures mainly because
it is very focused on explicit experiences as opposed to the more subtle experiences,
and it often lacks the sense of humanity necessary for a cultural micro-exposure.
I then share several of my own ideas for creating these experiences
from cross-cultural learning experiences using video chat to connect people across the world to
augmented reality to create virtual citizens to add diversity to places in which it is lacking.
I then review some of the ethical considerations including who gets to to create this technology
and tell the stories and what it means to project one's pluralistic worldview on people who may not
appreciate or want to have that view. However, I largely leave the question open as a point
of departure for further discussion on how we might create these kind of subtle experiences
opening up the HCI community to a larger community. Thank You!