Sunday, January 27, 2013

Menu-Driven Identities

I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say that this article is thinking way to much into the culture in the online world. Nakamura spends a good chunk of this piece talking about how navigators do not allow searches with several different identities. For instance, many drop-down menus will only allow a user to select a certain race, when they might identify with several.

The flaw in this idea of having every race listed is the amount of time it would take for a programmer to write a SQL code to reference every single combination of races that could be selected. I don't know the exact number of different ethnic groups in the world, but a programmer would spend their whole life writing one drop down menu. It's a good general idea to avoid conflict, but not very realistic.

It is interesting, however, how Nakamura mentioned that the racial identity of the programmers and designers of a certain website come out in their interfaces. The main demographic of web developers is primarily white males (not that I agree with it, but it's true). So are we saying that they somehow make the web swing more in their favor? I agree with the idea of libertarian rhetoric - information should be shared with the world so that all demographics can be more educated.

1 comment:

  1. How might we reconsider identity as web designers to make more inclusive spaces?

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