Is there an alternative to Google?
This week’s readings provided a spectrum of the different ways we can analyze digital technology and ethics.
When analyzing digital technologies, we need to include the importance the influence of the biases around tech that are being shaped by men who exclude women and non-whites. I appreciate Noble’s take on how the web is an extended arm of white supremacy, capitalism, heteronormative and hegemonic beliefs. Highlighting how we take for granted and ignore the way the normalization of whiteness and maleness in the domain of digital tech influences us and capital motives by elites. Both media and schools are both concerned with the power of ideas, thus “the films, music, magazines, music videos, television shows, and images and produced by the global entertainment, advertising, and news industries present color-blind racism as natural, normal, and inevitable” (Collins 102). Thus, it is important we push and question our relationship to technology. McMillian touched not his in their article “Teaching Technology: Tressie McMillan Cottom on Coding Schools and the Sociology of Social Media, “
our social networks are shaped as much by things like class and gender and race as they are by our personal interests”. I focused a lot on Nobles reading because I think it is important to not take for granted Google as a main search engine that is biased and influenced by powerful elite groups. The web has been embraced by all age groups and as a tool for networking and exchanging knowledge. It is a main source to many for information and knowledge which shapes the way we see the world and choosing what to ignore. The ways Google reinforces hegemonic narratives and how the web is inevitably white and catered to the male gaze is something to consider when we think about how influences our interactions. It is being used as an extension to maintain capitalism and its belief in this neoliberal age we live in.
Is community control technologies the way to go the way the SPARC article suggested?