15-20 Minute Paper
Safiya Umoja Noble, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of African-American Studies Faculty Affiliate, Graduate School of Library & Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
Technology and its narratives are shaped by and infused with values and are not the result of the actions of impartial, disembodied, unpositioned agents. This study on Google demonstrates how women of color are often expressed pornographically in search results. Grand scale Google-positive narratives, without critique, largely serve to depoliticize the ways that systems of power are embedded in the technology practices of commercial search engines. This research, conducted through content and critical discourse analysis, reveals pornographic bias in Google searches on various women of color identities. By looking at small data sets on racialized and gendered identities like Black girls and women, Asian girls and women, and Latinas, and reading closely the results surfaced by Google, much can be learned about the ways that trillions of web pages are indexed and managed on the web.