Safiya Noble And The Deep Lab Summary

Is the Internet fair? It connects us with information and keeps each other updated on our lives. Large corporations such as Facebook and Google see the Internet as a way to profit. But their motives bring into question the ethics behind their exploitation of Internet users. As companies use the Internet to make money off of consumers, we are being exploited and misrepresented. Information Studies professor at the University of Southern California, Safiya Noble argues that Google controls the landscape of the Internet by controlling online narratives about real people. She draws specific attention to the portrayal of black women, showing that Google’s algorithms represent black women as objects and girls. In addition to Noble’s work identifying problems with the Internet, the Deep Lab Project both raises additional

For context, Deep Lab is a week-long project where female coders, artists and visual thinkers came together to find solutions to the Internet’s problems. Safiya Noble and the Deep Lab Project participants/speakers discuss problems of security, exploitation, dependence, and misrepresentation on the Internet. The Deep Lab Project continues this discussion with solutions supplied by selected Deep Lab participants. Safiya Noble writes an article in the InVisible Journal called “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible”. Noble writes about the dependence that the world has on search engines, citing the “near ubiquitous use of search engines” (Noble, “Google Search”). She elaborates on this idea of Google’s monopolistic stronghold over Internet searching in a video lecture, “Challenging the Algorithms of Oppression”. She states that societies shift in how the word “Google” is used from a noun to a verb shows our