"Where men shape technology, they shape it to the exclusion of women, especially Black women" Safiya Noble
You might think that something like a search engine allows for equal access to information. Yet looking deeper into how we discover things, there’s
a culture of racism and sexism impacting what we find.
Based on years of academic research, Safiya Umoja Noble’s book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, looks into the internet’s biases and how it acts as a machine of oppression.
This month, we'll talk about what the author found and discuss how these findings can inform how we do research.
Don't have time to read the whole book? We get it! You have lots of reading to do this semester already. If you could read one chapter, we'd recommend Chapter 1: A Society, Searching: (pp. 15-63).
Click on the following link to read the eBook along with us.
Below, you can find short video summaries of Chapter 1 with some discussion prompts to ponder as you skim through this chapter.
