Raw Thoughts On 'Is Cyberspace Colorblind?'

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.

We can say that the Web 1.0 was possible thanks to applications like DreamWeaver because they took the UI (user interface) of MicroSoft's WORD application and smoothly transitioned the multi-language publishing capabilities of MSWord into an HTML-producing interface.

Web 2.0 applications like all blogging software lost that paradigm. You could not ASCII code easily a diacritic in web-based publishing platforms like Bloxsom, Blogger, MovableType or Drupal. You still can't really --unless you have control over the extensibility of the platforms and add widgets like FCKEditor or TinyMCE.

I have been asked in interviews from Spanish-speaking publications why, as a former Latin American scholar who mostly published in Spanish and Portuguese pre-blogging, do I write almost exclusively in English. Well, I write in English because I have to. I could not output the amount of writing I do if I had to HTML-Ampersand every single accent and/or diacritic needed in order to write grammatically correct in Spanish and Portuguese.

For Latinos and Latinoamericanos using computers in the US, it's an issue, and it's a barrier to entry. Six Apart has been at the forefront of creating language specific iterations of their services --and that would not have happened had the company not been structurally from the beginning one focused on using diversity as a market opportunity.

So there are structural nuances hard-coded in the technologies that we are using right now that are about creating what I like to call "Digital Exclusions".

In my SXSW presentation of "The Digital Ethnorati", I proposed parsing out issues of prejudice and marginalization online into two contextual paradigms.

There are the overt and obvious forms of marginalizations that are the product of social choices. So you have the biliousness of sites like Free Republic, Little Green Football or the growing anti-everything that continues to spring in sites like DailyKos and Fire Dog Lake. You also have issues of targeted marginalization that happens when women, queers and people of color get harassed or even stalked just for being women, queers or people of color.

Then there is the not so obvious forms of digital exclusion. Those are the ones I am most interested in.

These forms of Digital Exclusion do not presuppose an obvious intent to harm. There may be no intent whatsoever, by the way. But because there is a materiality to what we do online, these Digital Exclusions can be traced and documented.

Here's an example of that : Bloglines.

Many people forget that one of the first "white boy's club" of the blogosphere didn't come from a blog; it actually happened on a blog aggregator called Bloglines.

A lot of early adopters like me used the service to quickly skim through the, back then, over 100,000 blogs that were being published in 2003. (Nota Bene : Now the number is up to 65+ million blogs).

Mark Fletcher, the founder of Bloglines, has repeatedly said that he needed a better way to keep up with his interests, and so the idea of Bloglines was turned into a business model.

The New Net Architects, Part II - Mark Fletcher

Mark Fletcher: I started Bloglines to create tools for myself. I was personally struggling with managing tons of online information, and keeping up to date on all of my interests. I was trying to monitor over 100+ web sites and having to revisit them time and again to determine if any new information had been posted or updated. I was investing a lot of time and felt like it was starting to run my life.

There is a more pointed article at The Media Drop, Q&A: Mark Fletcher of Bloglines that deals with Fletcher's needs as a business model.

You have to remember : Everybody who signed up to Bloglines were automatically signed up to Mark Fletcher's list of interests. The Bloglines 100, I think is what the company called it. So you had 'regular people' (and, I'd like to put huge quotation marks around regular, btw), lumped in with Wired and BBC News. And 90% of the blogs were technology oriented.

Why is this significant?

The popularity of Bloglines was twofold. On the one hand you had an online service that helped people cope with "the tons of information" that was exploding into what we now call the blogosphere. We cannot deny it did it's job and rather well.

Yet, if we give a more nuanced look at Bloglines success, it would have to be one as a point of reference for trends happening on the web. The sites that mattered made it to the Bloglines 100 (now it's 200) --and all historicity of how they got there was completely obliterated once users started subscribing to those sites, making them popular, without necessarily knowing that it all started with the founder's list.

To add to the brilliance of the top 100 schema, every single aggregator that was developed around that time iterated, with slight differences, the same exact list. So, for example, NetNewsWire, the feed reader developed by Ranchero Software, also had a select list in their sotware pre-loaded --although you could request to have your blogs to be reviewed and added to their list at no extra charge.

(Now that I am writing this, I may have to add that Fletcher's list well may have been a response to the blogroll that became the Technorati 100 ... but I can't find any reference right now as to when Technorati was founded --I want to say 2001 but I may be wrong).

I bring this particular example as a way to describe how digital exclusions can and do happen due to the way online services or even software is developed. And when these exclusions happen because a group of people are establishing themselves as THE producers of value online --and positioning everybody else as just consumers-- it impacts the marketability of those who are not on these lists of 'trendsetters', 'influencers' or 'movers and shakers'.

It's not just traffic that is impacted. The social, political, financial and technological capital of those who are excluded from these lists is significantly impacted.

Links are what the web are made of, not web pages. What made the web revolutionary was HyperText Markup Language. So it was not just the ability to create page that changed the human dynamics online --it was the ability to create material connections to other pages, the ability to LINK, that became revolutionary. So much so, that I don't know if anybody remembers the days in which online publications like The New York Times prohibited "deep linking". What that meant was that they saw it as a threat to their online business to have outsiders linking to specific pages on their sites instead of coming through their gatekeeping "portals". And so many commercial sites would redirect traffic from individual articles to their front page OR, even better (technologically speaking), close up content through the use of web frames.

There are many, many more subtle and nuanced ways of looking at how the development of specific web and digital services have contributed to the creation of all sorts of digital exclusions --and how they are problematic once you throw in the words "race" and "class" into the mix.

So I hope this panel at least will look more at how digital exclusions happen online and have the conversation then include the issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, ability, et cetera.

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