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Pro-White Technology: So what?s new?

 
ProWI 2018-01-27 08:42:09 

Oops! Norm will have a bird with this.


Just a few months ago, Ava Berkofsky explained something that shouldn't have been revelatory, but was: how to properly film black skin. Ms. Berkofsky is the director of photography on the HBO show Insecure and she used a number of lighting and makeup techniques specifically to make sure the black cast looked their best.
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But the exclusion of people of colour exacerbated the growing sense that the way in which technology is designed carries an unconscious set of choices that, very often, reflect the makeup of the people designing it, or otherwise reproduce existing inequalities.

There are clear reasons the app worked far better for white users. Firstly, the database on which the app relied is part of Google's Cultural Institute and only had access to a limited selection of works of art – many of them European portraits from the 18th century – thus narrowing the potential matches. And because the rapid rise of tech has, for obvious reasons, occurred in the West first, there has been a generally greater focus on scanning and making databases of Western art, further making matches more likely to favour people of European descent.



The choices made in the design of particular apps and social networks thus form part of a broader structure that affects how we as individuals relate to the world. It is also an increasing problem as decisions get automated. Just recently, Google's algorithm for classifying photos tagged two black people as gorillas – to which Google responded by simply removing gorillas from its database



But the history of the world is itself out of balance – biased, distorted, imbalanced. Just as Virginia Woolf imagined Shakespeare's sister and what history may have looked like without the oppressive erasure of patriarchy, the knowledge that both we and our technology have to draw on reflects the one-sidedness of our history and all of its many prejudices: classism, misogyny, colonialism, heteronormativity and no end of other, very real "isms." If the databases we form to teach technology or sort information draw on history with no accounting for its slant, then it is doomed to merely replicate it.


Technology is thus not some neutral conduit through which we communicate or learn. It is instead a mediating layer that constructs reality in a particular way



We are living through a moment of reckoning for technology. In the past couple of decades, the digital era has represented an upheaval of historic proportions. As we have rushed headlong into our screen-based future, however, we have overlooked that what drives tech is not merely the promise of some gleaming, pristine utopia hovering just over the horizon, but instead the muck of history and its legacy of avarice, prejudice, violence and erasure. Just as filmmakers are now learning to manipulate light, so too must tech learn to shine and direct its gaze in new ways – uncovering and challenging the deep biases that lie beneath so that the future may, in a manner unflinching and honest, be a little brighter than the darkness of today.

 
Drapsey 2018-01-27 12:58:15 

In reply to ProWI

Ok, I'll relate two incidents.

1st:

Back in the mid to late 80s while working as the lone black person at a computer software firm on long island, I was 'recruited' to pose for a promotional group picture. The photographer protested vehemently. In the end I was included in the series of pictures but only after the photographer left and returned with new lighting equipment.

He later pulled me aside and explained the difficulty of providing optimum lighting for mixed 'complexion' photography.

2nd:

In later years when those automatic hand dryers were first introduced in public bathrooms, I attempted to use one of them at an airport. I said attempted because it just wouldn't work for me.

Some white guys saw what was going on and after a good laugh one of them provided assistance in flashing his hand across the dryer so it would turn on for my usage.

They later got it right.

 
JayMor 2018-01-27 13:54:59 

In reply to ProWI

I like this subject but can't make time now to post, except to say that I always thought some of my old co-workers at JBC-Tv, namely the lighting techs, could have done a geat consulting business here.

But Massa Pro, Jah Jah is expecting and answer from you on page 2 of the Harry Belafonte thread. LOL.

--Æ.

 
Norm 2018-01-27 14:48:33 

smile

" ... unconscious set of choices ..." is probably very close to the truth.

My problem with "white privilege" is that many ethnic groups, including Blacks, allow their own kind an unfair "x privilege". Mugabe, Idi Amin, Saddam, etc, were all doing this.

So discussions on "x privilege" very often amount to hypocrisy.