Reading Annotation Blog 2.4

 In North American society, taking away women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, French Canadians, Native peoples, Asian Americans, lesbians and gay men, people with disabilities, anyone who is not Christian, working class and poor people, and so forth, one is left with a very small “core.” An image that shows the complexity of these overlapping categories is that of a huge Venn diagram with many sets limited by Boolean ANDs. The white AND male AND straight AND European AND Christian AND middle-class AND able-bodied AND Anglo mainstream becomes a very small minority . . . , and each set implies what it is not. The implication of this image is that not every person, not every discourse, not every concept, has equal weight. Some discourses simply wield more power than others.28

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression : How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, New York University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wsu/detail.action?docID=4834260.
Created from wsu on 2023-03-02 02:15:24.

The Digital divide is a huge topic in the modern day and age. The categorization and classification systems used on modern search engines and users of social media has frankly gone out of hand in certain ways. Bringing back something we've discussed in the previous chapters of this unit, the algorithms' biased searches can be such a factor contributing to the digital divide; But it isn't just algorithms, social media users and online news outlets also use such categorizations and classifications of certain minorities and groups of people on a daily basis, and I think even trying to categorize people is wrong it is own way. Sure we can categorize most under male, female, maybe their age or race, but having ALL people in that category be often described under certain adjectives is just wrong. For example, can all male people be classified as uncaring? Can all females still be considered less intelligent than males? Given the example provided in Algorithms of Oppression, chapter 5, shown below:

I think that this matter has been getting worse over the years. Personally, I think the human race is too wide of a spectrum to easily classify and group everyone under certain categories under such wide pretense is frankly too much to ask of anyone, any group or just might be impossible to achieve