Today I read about Kishonna L. Gray's article on "intersecting oppressions and online communities" which went into further depth about online presence and racialize oppression happening online. As someone who frequently played Call of Duty on Xbox back in it's prime during the years of 2009-2014, there were many instances I can recall of racial incidents happening. Due to the anonymity of being online, it "disinhibits people" meaning that it takes them out of reality, so they do things that they normally wouldn't do if they were actually being looked at. According to Gray, anonymity is the "principle factor" for why there are these problems online and cyber bullying because it allows people to misidentify themselves with their real world self.
Gray discusses how on Xbox live they use racial profiling through audio. So, for usual social cues on race to identify a stereotype, it's how they talk or react which makes people profile. In real time, this leads to a lot of bigoted commentary and also sexist and homophobic commentary. Anonymous spaces of the internet "compel users to disclose personal information about themselves" and a lot of people in these Xbox spaces do this because they figure they have no idea who they're talking to so nothing actually matters because nobody would be able to identify them. From studying results they found that a majority of black women were the ones experiencing inequality after they talked to white males. In my opinion, you need to find a way to have the option to filter out your voice or maybe find ways to filter because if you say the word such as "fa***t", "qu***" or any offensive word like that you should be banned. There needs to be a better algorithm because for the past twenty plus years now there has been a problem in these gaming chat rooms.
“Intersecting Oppressions and Online Communities.” Taylor & Francis, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2011.642401.
Hey David,
ReplyDeleteI had the same thoughts when it came to the Gray article. I feel like the idea of anonymous activity is incredibly problematic to online communities. I have first hand witnessed this behavior and there is really nothing that can be done sadly. I found it interesting that there needs to be a better way to filter out hateful language from these spaces. You also mentioned a better algorithm needs to be put in place. Personally I would argue that it needs to go further than this. It always seems that there are workarounds for these people using sexist and homophobic commentary. I would argue that we need human moderators to be more prevalent and screen these messages. Then maybe the online community could be a bit more healthy.
Hi David! I had similar thoughts on the Gray article. Something I have never thought about (likely because I'm white and haven't had to) was the racialization of video games through audio. It's important to have a diverse crew of voice actors for video games so that every player can relate to the game in a more intimate way by having a character who resembles the way they speak. I think having an algorithm that can filter out words in chat rooms is a good start, but I think players should face stricter consequences like being banned from playing for a certain amount of time, or even having their profile kicked off the game all together. I think it's unlikely that these things would ever be brought to fruition though as the companies want people to play their games and removing their profiles is not a way to promote that.
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