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Earlier this week I mentioned to my friend S.bot
that I was going to write about the fact that
many people thought that the Black web browser,
Blackbird, was racist.
A little background. Blackbird is a web browser,
created and operated by 40A, Inc., a company founded by three
African American entrepreneurs, Arnold Brown II,
Frank Washington, and H. Edward Young, Jr.
On Tech Crunch, Robin Wauters describes it saying,
The
browser displays a pre-set news ticker on top, pulls in news content
from Google News that might be of interest to African-Americans, and
features a section with video content from online TV sites like
UptownLiveTV, NSNewsTV, DigitalSoulTV and ComedyBanksTV. Other than
that, there’s a lot of integration with the most popular social
networks, a ‘Black Search’, preset ‘Black Bookmarks’, etc. There’s also
a ‘Give Back’ program that streamlines donations to a number of
non-profit organizations (Blackbird intends to donate 10% of its 2009
revenue to these partners as well).
Here is the Blackbird pitch,
Because we know the 20 million African Americans online need tools to build and foster community now more than ever.
Because we know that 85% of African Americans prefer online news and information from the Black perspective.*
Because
we know that you are twice as likely to be among the first to discover
new trends and use advanced technology compared to the general
population.**Source: PEW Internet and American Life Project 2004
By trade, my friend S.bot is an Information Architect,
so she is far more comfortable with trafficking in data
than I am. I like data too, but more for sociological purposes,
but this discussion show me that she is the rare breed that is a
high level aerial thinker that understands technology, business,
user experience.
While I initially was going to just focus on whether Black Bird was
racist, the more I spoke to her, the more I became interested
in the convergence of race, data and capitalism on the internet.
She likened a Black web browser to someone deciding
which library she could go to. I responded saying that
there are Black libraries, and that Black libraries
have more Black stuff then regular libraries, so what is the
difference?
She said the internet is different. The issue is about
data and searching. Her question, was who is search
whom and for what purpose? I didn't get it because I was thinking
about it on a one to one search level. What she was referring to
was who is searching whom in a more institutional sense.
On the blog Open Anthropology, Maximilian Forte, clarified two things
about Blackbird. The first issue that he addressed is around
unexamined racial assumption's about other web browsers
such as Google, Firefox and Explorer. The second
issue is about the assumed racial "neutrality" (if there is even
such a thing) of other web browsers. Forte writes,
There
is no claim here that any of the other browsers are inherently “white.”
What seems obvious is the desire to create what is, in a sense, a
pre-loaded portal that immediately directs users to African American
content online, linking them with other users at the same time in some
cases.
Perhaps
the problem is that of invisibility generated by assumptions, that the
very conception, selection, design and layout of elements on a browser
come out of a North American, white, “geek” cultural stratum, and that
therefore to many white, middle class, North American users the
cultural assumptions remain invisible, the browser appears normal,
intuitive, self-evidently rational, etc. I have some sympathy for this
argument (not that I think that Blackbird was designed to address this
argument even remotely).
Once S.bot mentioned to me that it was about the data,
I immediately thought that the
