provocation- to search or not to search

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?

Project Photo/Public Pedagogy

My goal for my project is grounded around ideas about placemaking. I am interested in using photography and other art mediums to co-construct knowledge and create alternate representations of minoritized communities through their eyes. The ‘written word’ used in academia in inaccessible to everyone especially the people who are used as ‘subjects’ in scholarly research. Photography and art is an accessible way to communicate. My hope is to create an art project that is co-constructed with people in minoritized communities, possibly including students too, since they are usually left out decision making processes. An example of a project I have been thinking about is giving participants or colleagues, disposable cameras so they can take pictures of what ‘place’ means to them. As well as the possibility of creating a mural with people living in gentrified neighborhoods. The premise of both ideas is to highlight ways marginalized communities can create a photo or mural project to combat injustices. These projects promote democratic participation as well as a form of resistance against the rhetoric that they are just bystanders during the process of gentrification for instance. I hope to learn more about critical media literacy and public pedagogy to help me create a mural project or memory project using photo collages. I am also considering a website to showcase the project/s. My overall goal is to utilize. I believe images can represent how we read and record our worlds, and highlight surface knowledge that may be overlooked or not understood by outsiders.