Download - Blackbird presentation
The Curious Case of a Black Browser
Cultural Values as a Predictor of Technology Use
André Brock
The University of Iowa
Browser = Internet
Browser for Black People = ???
Blackbird (Mac)
TECHNOLOGY
Artifact
Practice
Text
Belief
PUBLIC PERCEPTION
BrowserIndividual
UniversalWhitenessWestern Culture
cultural product
Software Artifact
Browser
Critical Race and Technoculture Theory
Interface Analysis
Examination of implicit and explicit cultural features/mechanics
Discourse Analysis
Associations between cultural identity and technological identity
Analysis
Blackbird (Mac)
Blackbird - features
custom Google Search
News Ticker
Give Back
custom video channel
Local job/business search
Google Search: “Black Girls”
BLACKBIRD Search: “Black Girls”
Racial Technoculture
Techcrunch
Ars Technica
BlackWeb 2.0
Roney Smith
The Angry Black Woman
Around-Harlem.com
Discourse
“No one is going to convince me that Google is White by default unless you want to argue that being simple, quick and useful is “white”. LOL. The thing is that from an ideal perspective when a user logs onto the Internet they are starting from a “unified” and “unfiltered” position and choose to navigate toward targeted content. The difference here is that someone has developed a “tool” that controls and filters the “experience” right from the start. They’ve found a way to create a segregated experience.
Mainstream Blogs
“If Obama starts doing all kinds of nutty stuff, will a standard search return news articles and criticism and the Blackbird search censor such things?”
“so it comes pre-loaded with links to Public Defenders, and tips on how to beat weapons charges…Great”.
“If the browser, as the article states, skews results away from potentially more informative and authoritative sources of information in favor of those that are more culture centric, then it really is doing it's [sic] users a disservice.”
Mainstream Blogs
Blackbird isn't about "walled gardens" or "separatism" - it doesn't take you to some blacks-only internet, it doesn't wipe your harddrive if a white person tries to use it, it's a product designed to appeal to the needs and wants of blacks. You can disagree with the viability of this model (which I do) but there's nothing wrong with the motivation
Mainstream Blogs
It is true that if one is very interested in African-American perspectives on news and social issues, one has to be savvy in the use of search engines, which do not cough up those results without good Google-fu…As a white person with an anti-racist ideology who is interested in reading from Black perspective, I would have downloaded and used the browser just out of curiosity.
Black Interest Blogs
“I don’t need anyone helping me find Black content...How is my web experience enhanced by letting Blackbird filter information through their
browser?“
Black Interest Blogs
Conclusions
The Digital divide is insufficient to understand the information needs of minority users
ICTs frame and configure discourse
lessons for cultural design of ICTs
lessons for online communities
André BrockSchool of Library and Information Science
Project on the Rhetoric of InquiryThe University of Iowa
[email protected]://uiowa.academia.edu/AndreBrock