DB Roundup

Everyone’s responses this week were really great, in particular there were so many good analyses of the biases displayed through Google image search results, and what kind of impact that has on people conducting the searches.

Isha’s search for ‘cute children’ prompted her response of “Mostly all are white children with an exception of maybe three pictures, but even those children are very light skin or have features similar to white children.” The result of this results disparity “creates an unrealistic standard that only people who are similar or are white are better looking than all.”

Victoria found that the search results for ‘beautiful women’ to be dissapointing because “they did not show not even one female with no makeup on. In today’s society people think we have a standard of beauty, which persuades women to change their own looks to fit this standard. These results just add to the reasonings of so many women having insecurities because the beauty standard still exists.”

Nicholas noted about the search results for ‘lead singer’ didn’t show the types of results expected, saying “many of the photos looked like lead singers in rock groups. I expected other people to come up as lead singers. Take The Supremes for example. Diana Ross was usually the leader of near every song, so I expected them to be there.”

Zoom Meeting

Just a reminder if you want to drop by all or some of the (optional) Zoom meeting tomorrow between 11am-12:30pm, we’ll be talking about Google and algorithmic bias. If you need the link to the meeting, please email me.

Weekly Readings & Assignment

This week’s readings feel very relevant to our current moment: misinformation, disinformation, and viral ‘fake’ news. The readings are available on the course schedule, as is the week’s DB prompt, which is due on Thursday this week.