Thursday 5/7 Draft Questions - Paul Druta

1. In "Missed Connections: What Search Engines Say About Women", Safiya Umoja discusses the discrimination caused by racist and sexist searching algorithms. Websites that have more links are given higher precedence in Google's page ranking algorithm, which provides an advantage to larger media corporations that can simply link their various pages together, pushing down more progressive sources. Given the role that media companies themselves take in the suppression of alternative and progressive sources, is the bigger issue the search algorithms themselves or neoliberal-dominated content producers hacking the system?
2. In "Monstrous Children of Pregnant Androids", Micha Cardenas writes that "Androids run on algorithms. Kinship is an algorithm, in that it is a ritual, a set of repeated practices." (29). As someone pursuing a career in technology, what are some ways that we can incorporate this algorithm of kinship into the algorithms that dominate technology today?
3. In her article "How did social media unite and empower DREAMers", Basra Basra writes: "10 years earlier, the undocumented youth did not exist; there were no organizations to drive their interests or networks to connect with one another and create a sense of community." If the issue of immigration is presented as an issue of national protection by the American government, why do government organizations target children who present no safety threat?
4. In "Afrofuturism...", Catherine Rodriguez describes Chicanafuturism as a new way of viewing Chicanaism in the future: "Chicanafuturism explores  the  ways  that  new  and  everyday  technologies,  including  their detritus,  transform  Mexican  American  life  and  culture." (187). This reimagining of the future relates to the new possibilities imagined by other artists such as Girl in a Coma. Are there ever any conflicts in the futures imagined by different Chicanafuturist artists in which the two conceptions of the future might not be compatible with each other? If so, what does this do for audiences?

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