The Curious Case of a Black Browser

Cultural Values as a Predictor of Technology Use

André Brock

The University of Iowa

Browser = Internet

Browser for Black People = ???

Blackbird (Mac)

TECHNOLOGY

Artifact

Practice

Text

Belief

PUBLIC PERCEPTION

BrowserIndividual

UniversalWhitenessWestern Culture

cultural product

Software Artifact

Browser

Critical Race and Technoculture Theory

Interface Analysis

Examination of implicit and explicit cultural features/mechanics

Discourse Analysis

Associations between cultural identity and technological identity

Analysis

Blackbird (Mac)

Blackbird - features

custom Google Search

News Ticker

Give Back

custom video channel

Local job/business search

Google Search: “Black Girls”

BLACKBIRD Search: “Black Girls”

Racial Technoculture

Techcrunch

Ars Technica

BlackWeb 2.0

Roney Smith

The Angry Black Woman

Around-Harlem.com

Discourse

“No one is going to convince me that Google is White by default unless you want to argue that being simple, quick and useful is “white”. LOL. The thing is that from an ideal perspective when a user logs onto the Internet they are starting from a “unified” and “unfiltered” position and choose to navigate toward targeted content. The difference here is that someone has developed a “tool” that controls and filters the “experience” right from the start. They’ve found a way to create a segregated experience.

Mainstream Blogs

“If Obama starts doing all kinds of nutty stuff, will a standard search return news articles and criticism and the Blackbird search censor such things?”

“so it comes pre-loaded with links to Public Defenders, and tips on how to beat weapons charges…Great”.

“If the browser, as the article states, skews results away from potentially more informative and authoritative sources of information in favor of those that are more culture centric, then it really is doing it's [sic] users a disservice.”

Mainstream Blogs

Blackbird isn't about "walled gardens" or "separatism" - it doesn't take you to some blacks-only internet, it doesn't wipe your harddrive if a white person tries to use it, it's a product designed to appeal to the needs and wants of blacks. You can disagree with the viability of this model (which I do) but there's nothing wrong with the motivation

Mainstream Blogs

It is true that if one is very interested in African-American perspectives on news and social issues, one has to be savvy in the use of search engines, which do not cough up those results without good Google-fu…As a white person with an anti-racist ideology who is interested in reading from Black perspective, I would have downloaded and used the browser just out of curiosity.

Black Interest Blogs

“I don’t need anyone helping me find Black content...How is my web experience enhanced by letting Blackbird filter information through their

browser?“

Black Interest Blogs

Conclusions

The Digital divide is insufficient to understand the information needs of minority users

ICTs frame and configure discourse

lessons for cultural design of ICTs

lessons for online communities

André BrockSchool of Library and Information Science

Project on the Rhetoric of InquiryThe University of Iowa

andre-brock@uiowa.eduhttp://uiowa.academia.edu/AndreBrock