COMING OUT COLORED™

The 'Implicit Association Test' - Perceptions, and Coming Out Colored

Folks are talking about something called the "Implicit Association Test," or IAT. The discussion I saw on television focused only on how Blacks, whites and Asians - in the U.S. I think? - perceived Blacks and whites. There seems to have been no test or discussion of how the same groups perceive Asians, compared to their perceptions of, say, ("non-Hispanic") whites compared to American Indians, or Latinos/Hispanics who are people of color (which seems the vast majority of Latinas/os. I'd like to address this when I have more information and time. The IAT also raises issues of the transmission and 'contagiousness' of perceptions including some perceptions of "race" as well as how perceptions - positive and negative - spread and are spread deliberately, and what we can do about this when we take responsibility and choose to change images we're promoting.

 

Veteran photographer Chester Higgins' book of images, Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging

'The Semantic Web' - Scientific American online

Digging into the archives of Scientific American magazine, here's an article from May 2001 on the continuing evolution of the WWW's ability to comprehend what we mean (via keywords): "The Semantic Web" . "... A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities."

Pings from the Blogosphere: 'Owukori' (Sokari Ekine) on Global Voices

How many of us are actually spending some of our waking hours planning exactly how to bridge the digital divide with ... West Africa's Niger River delta region, for example? So let's cut through some of the "DD" generalities and get down to specific places, communities, and people. Global Voices online is "an international effort to diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world, and developing tools, institutions and relationships to help make these voices heard." GV's 29 March entry features Ethan Zuckerman conversing ('skyping'?) with Sokari Ekine, aka Owukori, author of the blog, “Black Looks - Musings and Rants by an African Fem”. Zuckerman: "It’s easy to get the impression, reading most popular weblogs, that all bloggers are white American males obsessed with technology. If that’s your impression of the blogosphere, you’re reading the wrong blogs."

Zuckerman continues, Sokari Ekine is "a Nigerian feminist, human rights activist and scholar who blogs from her organic farm in ... Spain ... Sokari and I caught up via SkypeIM last week, talking about women’s rights in the Niger delta, the difficulty of convincing activists to blog, and her personal path towards becoming one of Africa’s most prominent and widely cited bloggers. ..."

Sokari's new blog - Afrotecnik "focuses on technologies to bridge digital divides in Africa," and she's published a new paper on her research in the Niger Delta region: “Women’s Responses to State Violence in the Niger Delta”.

"...there's a colored person on t.v.!"; "Blogging While Black" Monday @ SxSW

A couple of thoughts here as George Kelly (AllaboutGeorge.com blog) and colleagues prepare for Monday's "Blogging While Black" panel, 11:30am-12:30pm, at SxSW in Austin, Tx...  I hear some folks have asked "why does it matter whether a blogger is Black?" And I concur, with another question: Why does it matter that we all still need to breath oxygen while blogging?? These are things that just are. Some of us reading this are righthanded, and I'm a [Black, female] lefthanded person writing this. So for me it does matter which side of the keyboard the mouse is on, yet so many of us are inconvenienced by known & unknown others who always and only connect mice - & usually on a short bit of cable - on the righthand side of a keyboard. In conducting one's daily life all over the world there are quite a few "inconveniences" - and far worse - that lefties notice that most righthanded people do not.  Now on to the search for Black Americans on U.S. television in the 1950s, 60s, and today. For most of the 1950s and shown in re-runs into the 60s, about the only regular place to find Black Americans on daytime U.S. t.v. was a show called "Amos 'n Andy." It was a comedy. Ha ha ha. For some reason, Black American stories disproportionately are lumped into "comedy." In spite of how skewed it is to constantly laugh at an entire population of people and to perceive them only as 'amusement' or as objects of derision, I enjoyed that show although I didn't yet realise the U.S. and global situations of discrimination and exclusion facing Blacks and other people of colour. And yet I do not think it should be impossible to view Amos 'n Andy publicly (i.e., keep it banned/entirely off the air). I think it should be available for public purchase - and preferably shown in situations where there is study and critical discussion of the show's incredible stereotypes. In the 1950s and 60s most American families gathered together every evening around a single family television and watched the same program[me]s... completely different from our viewing/living habits today. The big difference for Black Americans was that when we gathered around the t.v. we virtually never saw anyone who looked like us. And when a Black person finally did show up on t.v. every now and then, the family member who happened to see the apparition would literally shout to tell everyone in the house to come and see - "There's a colored person on t.v.!!" I'm neither joking nor exaggerating.

My guest blog contribution on Meshforum.org

Over at Meshforum I've just posted a short blog, "On Connecting Networks." It is my first contribution to Meshforum's own blog discussion before the conference happens in Chicago in May. Your reader feedback to my two cents is welcome.

"Blogging While Black" [Monday, 14 Mar] at South by Southwest

I guess it's better to be a week early than a week late, since Blogging While Black is happening next Sunday, March 13 - Monday, 14 March - at SxSW in Austin, Texas. So we wish all participants and audience 'due diligence' in their appointed tasks, and much luck attending to the task at hand. Maybe Coming Out Colored can be present and accounted for for BWB 2006. Thanks again to all involved: George Kelly of All about George - and also Negrophile - most definitely for keeping us in touch. We send a big DC thank you to you, George! Recapping, Lynne d Johnson of A Day in A Life will moderate; also participating are brutha blogger Tony Pierce and Monique Judge of monique + coffee and haiku. Along with Jason Toney of the aptly named blog Negro Please, and Tiffany B. Brown of tiffanybbrown.com. Sistuhbloggers Ana Sisnett and Cecily Walker Kidd (@ Not Formica) will be live in the audience. So forgive my being a week off, but today I really do have babies in my lap.

Mapping & understanding Social Networks

We're checking out Valdis Krebs' social network analysis website. Looks like info shared here might be promising...

ISA in Africa 2006, MeshForum 2005 & CSCW 2004

The Corante organisation and Hothouse are sponsors of MeshForum 2005 May 1-3 in Chicago. Registration is 5-thousand dollars (yes, $5,000) for any number up to 3 persons attending together. Also posted on MeshForum's website:

The Assoc. for Computing Machinery's 2004 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) also was in Chicago last November. Gary M. Olson and Jim Herbsleb were co-chairs.  ACM has been around since 1947, and CSCW's next meeting is in 2006. Topics have included issues of work and working relationships, and also "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate communication, coordination, cooperation and even competition."

The World Congress of the International Sociological Association will host a Social Network Analysis session during its July 2006 meeting in Durban, South Africa. Anyone interested in presenting should send a proposal to the relevant session chair by October 1st, 2005. Christian Steglich at Univ. of Groningen, Netherlands, seems to be the person responsible for organising the social network analysis session.

Online Social networking conference - now online

There's still time to join the Online Social Networking conference now going on online until 23rd February. I hope to check out a bit of it; sounds interesting, although many of us don't see social networking primarily or only as another business.

This online event - "OSN2005" - is self-described as "... a summit for all those interested in working with social networking processes, tools, and media. In addition to attending many workshops, panels, and presentations by leading experts and practitioners, attendees will have the opportunity to be part of a community with a significant role in defining the future direction of online social networking. If you want to help shape this industry, come to OSN2005..."

Personal networking: degrees of separation - 6, or sometimes fewer

Published in 2000 these notes on Jon Kleinberg's work are a bit dated but still useful for those of us who haven't much background on networks.

Meanwhile I contend some of us are closer than six degrees.

From the Cornell website: "We all know it's a small world: Any one of us is only about six acquaintances away from anyone else. Even in the vast confusion of the World Wide Web, on the average, one page is only about 16 to 20 clicks away from any other. But how, without being able to see the whole map, can we get a message to a person who is only "six degrees of separation" away?

"A Cornell University computer scientist has concluded that the answer lies in personal networking: We use "structural cues" in our local network of friends. "It's a collective phenomenon. Collectively the network knows how to find people even if no one person does," says Jon Kleinberg, assistant professor of computer science, who published his explanation in the latest issue (Aug. 24) of the journal Nature. ..."