Safiya Noble – Algorithms of Oppression (talk, 45m)
Noble is talking about her book Algorithms of Oppression, about a campaign using “Genuine Google Searches” meant to draw attention to how women and women of color are marginalized through Google searches. The top searches showed a lot of derogatory behaviors towards women. A similar discriminatory algorithm in Google is when someone searches “three black teenagers” vs. “three white teenagers”, where when you search black teenagers, you will see images of criminals, whereas when you search for the white teens, you would get stock photos of generic white teens. Google would try to save face by fixing their searches, but there’s an issue of bias (like putting white criminals higher up in searches). Noble goes into a bunch of different ways in which Google has discriminated against people through its searching. I wonder why the search queries appeared this way, and how the algorithm was swayed in this way. Also she demonstrated how searching “____ girls” often shows really sexualized images of women.
Also, in 2015 during the Obama Presidency, searching the N-word would bring up the White House which is insane.
My thoughts for Discussion:
– Noble says that 66% of search engine users think that results produced from search engines are fair and unbiased. Why do so many of us blindly believe this? Are search results the same for everyone? What influences what appears in the search results? How can this influence public opinion? Has it done so in the past?
– Do you think your opinions on things are influenced based on the things you search for, and what kind of things do you think would be the most harmful if they were influenced?
– Is it even possible for developers to make precautions against the search engines being racist since they are not inherently racist?
– Why do you think that searching for girls vs. searching for boys produces hyper-sexualized images and results? Do you say “girl” instead of “women”? What are your thoughts on this? Why don’t people say “boys”, but more often say “men”?
– Do you think that frequency of searching racist search queries equate to racism? There seems to be a loop in which there is a lot of material online with racist ideologies, which brings more visibility to these ideas. Then, they will show up in the search engine more frequently, which may begin to perpetuate racism. Do you think there is a way to break this loop?
Ruha Benjamin – Race After Technology (talk, 20m)
Benjamin talks about how the tech industry can make it easier for people to take a stand in their beliefs. She also talks about a project called “The Innovation Project” which tried to use algorithms to predict at risk youth in the cities, which created so much backlash that a coalition formed in resistance to it called the “Stop the Cradle to Prison Algorithm Coalition” which tries to obfuscate existing algorithms’ bias towards marginalized groups. I thought this was pretty interesting — I think that it’s much easier to become aware of certain events, but it’s harder to take a big part in them because people become lazy.
Lisa Nakamura – Laboring Infrastructures (talk, 30m)
Nakamura talks about VR in her speech. Something interesting that she mentioned was how “feeling good about feeling bad” was a feeling that was specific to VR, and how VRs are essentially films despite a lot of people considering VR as “experiences”. People are using VR to put the viewer in the experience of marginalized people so they are able to experience these marginalizing events. I thought it was interesting how she talked about how VR was created to teach people to feel a certain way, to “hack” your body to make you feel more empathetic.
VR could potentially be used in pretty dangerous ways. Could different media like games and movies also “hack” your brain to make you feel certain ways?
If we watched all movies from a first-person perspective, then could we call them “experiences”? What about video games? Are they more like films or experiences?
Introducing race into VR “experiences” causes us to feel GOOD about feeling bad about these race differences. Why do we feel like we are supposed to feel these emotions? How much work and what kind of work would go into making this kind of experience to influence peoples’ feelings?