Digital Democracy readings
This week, I was especially struck by the resonance of the readings with Peggy McIntosh’s famous essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” McIntosh’s point is that racism occurs not only in the ways that specific groups are underempowered, but also how other groups are systematically overempowered by being encouraged “to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal.” Moreover, McIntosh is attempting to highlight how ordinary, everyday experiences are emblematic of systemic racism.
These points were illustrated clearly in Safiya Umoja Noble’s description in “Missed Connections: What Search Engines Say About Women” of using Google to search for websites devoted to “black girls”; the preponderance of pornographic sites reveals how black women’s bodies are objectified and commodified in ways that white men’s and women’s bodies are not. Similarly, Andre Brock’s essay “‘Who Do you Think You Are?’: Race, Representation, and Cultural Rhetorics in Online Spaces” highlights the ways that African American expression is policed (by whites as well as by other people of color) in online communities. Finally, Noble’s essay “Geographic Information Systems: A Critical Look at the Commercialization of Public Information” shows how these individual examples are part of much larger (and more sinister) patterns, where millions of ordinary users share their preferences, searches, and distinguishing characteristics to corporations, who mine it and sell it as Big Data. Using technologies developed by governmental projects (public $) and relying on individuals sharing their private data, corporations rake in huge profits — while claiming the “objectivity” and “neutrality” of their search results (that then perpetuate the damaging stereotypes and further cultural-technological disenfranchisement Noble warns of in her example of black girls seeking positive representations online). These essays reveal the profound challenges posed by Big Data, both in the realm of cultural representations and with regard to access to (and the uses of) technology.
– Jolie A. Sheffer, Assistant Professor, English & American Culture Studies at BGSU