Unqualified Offerings

I’ve been a white guy all my life. Most of my best friends have been white guys. A white guy was best man at my wedding. We have several white families on my street. I have worked for white bosses and with white co-workers and dated white women – even married one. So I don’t want you to think I have any animus against white people as such. But my god can some of us be wankers:

I’m not sure what I think about the Barry Diller/IAC announcement of a black-oriented search engine and content site, Rushmore Drive. I get the content part, of course. I also understand specialized search engines based on need or interest — jobs v. homes v. medicine, and so on. But isn’t there a danger in creating a search engine segregated along racial lines? Does it create more separation? Does it create a new sort of echo chamber? Does it limit the world reached by the search? I would never want to use a search engine aimed at middle-aged, suburban white guys like me; I want the world. And how do they know what is black-oriented content? It almost smacks of reverse red-lining, possibly pandering: How can you tell that a given article would be of more interest to an African-American than others and who’s to say that all African-Americans would look at it the same way? Perhaps I need to hear the problem stated clearly before I can judge this as a solution.

So maunders Jeff Jarvis. The internet is already, among other things, a lattice of semi-permeable echo chambers. As a charter member of the hawkish blogosphere, Jarvis was instrumental in creating one of them. But suddenly echo chambers are bad when black people might have one. Except, and you’d think a web triumphalist like Jarvis would know this already, too late!

BET.com

Blackwebportal.com

Multiple Shades of You

Black Refer

I’m convinced there’s one specific to the Washington DC area that I’ve forgotten and can’t find. And there are surely others I don’t know about because I’m not . . . black. Just like I don’t know all the Jewish portals and social-networking sites or the Latino or Polish-American ones.

Race seems to inspire a fanatical indolence among some right-wing writers. For instance, some of what Jarvis presents as rhetorical questions are more properly real questions, e.g. “And how do they know what is black-oriented content?” Dude, ask someone who can answer. They’re running some kind of algorithm after all. There are therefore discoverable facts about it.

As for the biggest and most mysterious question of them all, why would someone include “a search engine segregated along racial lines?” (Which, by the way, Rushmore Drive isn’t.*) To sell ads. Diller et al probably figure that nobody’s going to beat Google at mass-market paid search now, but that there’s money to be made as a niche player. Is there? Beats me. That’s a real question, not a rhetorical one, and I’m not going to presume an answer and challenge someone to prove my implicit one wrong.

There is something that it is like to be black in the United States. It is overlaid and undergirded with a lot of other ways it is like to be American, human, male, female, geekish, jocky, rural, urban, suburban, young, old, native-born, immigrant, educated, not, so forth. But it is a thing. If there is something it is like to be something, the culture is going to reflect, support and exploit that, online and off. The internet has long since become just another place life happens. Meanwhile, one of my computer/browser combos boots up to iGoogle every day, another to the AIM splash page, a third to Google News. But I don’t stay on any of those pages. Why should I assume that African-American web surfers will be any more inert in their web usage than I am? Why should Jarvis?

Via Sullivan.

—-

* I just ran several searches on it without either virtual or real bow-tied enforcers of Afrocentrism shutting me out. If you search for “roleplaying games” the top results look very familiar to a white gamer – that’s almost disappointing. If you search “comic books,” the first-page results include only three African-American-specific listings – that’s downright crummy. The search engine is better at “superheroes.” But for real grits and shins, you have to search on “Charles Murray.” Man, that is some serious echo-chamberism right there.