Lisa Nakamura – Laboring Infrastructures (talk, 30m)
This lecture talks about empathy and VR, and the opportunities it has to become a medium that allows people to feel more emphatic towards different culture and events. One of the things that I heard and can’t imagine doing, is listening to the audio and witnessing the tragedy of Trayvon Martin. However, having the ability to bear witness of such tragic events, could help a lot of people grow more empathetic towards a different community. However, she also states that one of the downside is sacrificing privacy.
Would you be comfortable being filmed for a VR experience in your own home?
Safiya Noble – Algorithms of Oppression
This lecture talks about how the search algorithms display some kind of bias towards those of color. The talk also mentions how around 60-70% of people believe that these search results contain factual data, and how this can lead to prejudice due to misinformation. She also mentions how no one cared when these biases were present when it was regarding women of color, but now that it has affected the presidential election, everyone cares about it.
How can we sort out fake news from real news? Why do some topics raise more controversy than others?
Ruha Benjamin – Race After Technology (talk, 20m)
Something I found strange was when she was talking about how racism is productive. Something that I remembered was that the video we watched in Ben’s class where the facial recognition software wasn’t able to detect an African American man. The design for technology should be changed so that it can allow everyone to utilize it efficiently.
What are some possibilities of eliminating racism in the tech world?