A legacy from the 1930s activists that has carried into today is the fight for gender and racial equality. The Long Civil Rights Movement, or Long Civil Rights Era as it is depicted in Ritterhouse’s introduction, asked the question of whether African Americans would be a present part of the democracy of the country in the future. 1 This was the beginning of the decades-long fight for equality as 1930s era regulations consistently kept African American people out as beneficiaries of governmental organizations.
Algorithmic criticism is said to be an important concept for the consumers of digital media, as we need to remain aware of what these programs are actually computing. O’Neill, in the video reviewed in class, referenced the idea that algorithms are generated by the opinion of a human which is then embedded into code. As a result of the human component, the algorithm is inherently biased.
In O’Neill’s Ted Talk, she mentions a current issue surrounding the normalized use of algorithms in the hiring process within the country’s biggest companies. Her example, Fox News, spoke to a problem in which their computer program is set to hire professionals who exhibit certain qualities and skills that they deem desirable. However, this has caused friction in the case of gender equality because Fox has promoted largely men in their recent history, which led the algorithms to weed out potential female employees, as they were not the ones promoted, thus they did not have the sought after traits. This concept of equality was a large focus with the Feminism and Popular Front groups as well as the issue of racial equality.
Similarly, Noble, in Algorithms of Oppression, speaks to this same issue, but highlights its presence in popular entries in search engines. In this piece, African American women are said to face discrimination for both their race and their gender, and that this is evident when searching for a simple term about their defining characteristics, and the result is not much more than questionable and offensive results. 2 An important note that the author makes is that we as consumers do not even take notice of the wrongdoings of the media in these circumstances until it is forcefully brought to our attention.
