Home X: Making the World a Better Place

Well, at least google.

On Monday night of last week, while putting together the intro slide-show for class, I discovered that if you put the term “African ingenuity” into google, it would ask, “Did you mean: American ingenuity”. I initially entered the phrase as part of a search for the URL to a dope website, called Afrigadget. I couldn’t remember the URL but I could remember their tagline: “Solving problems with African ingenuity”. Here is a screen-shot from my search on January 22nd:

Complete with “American Ingenuity” sponsored links:

After I showed the slide in class Tuesday night, I emailed the screen-shot to 10 or so of my colleagues on the OpenLab discussion list. 3 hours later it was posted on boingboing.

Google has since removed the evidence that they ever put their punch card in their mouth on this one. Though, on the first page of the search, they do link to blogs that covered the “African Ingenuity” story.

I included the screen-shot in the class presentation on Tuesday mostly because it’s a real dramatic backdrop when you’re talking about the similarities and differences between DIY technologies and motivations in rich and poor countries. Both real and perceived. But, I don’t think google’s suggestion is a form of algorithmic apartheid or even an easter egg left by a racist developer. More likely, it’s a naturally occurring data visualization of our language bias and presumptions regarding Africa and it’s role in technological innovation and ingenuity. Google’s suggestion is a mirror image of our attitude in the rich world toward the poor. Our biased search tendencies indicate that we are at risk of not understanding and even possibly obscuring Africa’s role in the history of technology. What is at risk if we do? For one, we will miss those underlying commonalities and shared lessons that run through the innovative uses of technology across the economic divide (refer to Afrigadget if you have any doubt). And two, we risk misunderstanding our own role in the global history of technology and ignoring the lessons of the twentieth century. One thing is sure: we don’t need computers giving us more bad suggestions. That’s one resource we already have in great supply.

January 30th, 2007

Entry Filed under: Posts, Culture