User Interfaces

My background is in literary analysis and philosophy of language --I actually read Lakoff for the first time 20 years ago. Still find it funny people in the lefty blogosphere think he is the second coming of Christ

Anyhoo ... let's get a bit more granular here.

Let's start with the title of our panel :
Is Cyberspace Colorblind? Addressing Race and Class Online

Right there we have an interesting juxtaposition. Why are COLORBLIND and RACE lumped in with the word CLASS? From a semiological point of view this is particularly significant.

Without trying to develop assumptions of intent, from a semantics point of view it at least shows that grammatically, the organizers look at race not as a BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE but as something associated with CAPITAL. Or, in the world of web 2.0 should we call it CAPITALS - social capital, political capital, technological capital, financial capital.

The issue here then is what do we mean by :
1. Race
2. Class

And to tie it in with the technology aspect of the conference, we need to further define :
3. Cyberspace
4. Online

That would then pose the interesting dynamic of the word
5. Colorblind

Most Web 2.0 technologies have been developed from a cultural dominance standpoint. It is all in English and not just any English but the US English keyboard format.

To those of us who have international switches on our keyboards, it is obvious the US keyboard format is the dominant grammatical expression of the web --a dominance that was not obvious when publishing online meant using a WYSIWYG application like DreamWeaver.