You Will Not Guess What Is Inside This Blog Post
I’m bad at clickbait titles. A lot of websites aren’t though. Two that I thought were better than me at using clickbait titles are The Verge and Polygon. If you don’t know what clickbait titles are you are lying. Here are a couple examples from a website you should all know…and hate.
But these guys are showing the injustice that happens every day that some people may not see or notice.
Sure they bring awareness but that’s about all they do. Here is an article that points it out. I like to call it lazy activism. Polygon had a couple articles this week that also show this, video, article. They made a little bit of a fuss over the fact that the new Assassin’s Creed game will have no female assassins in the game because the developer team said that it would take too much time and resources to create female assassins. Whether or not this is true clearly it’s kind of concerning that they didn’t plan for that ahead of time. Polygon then made a post about the lack of female and people of color presenters at E3. All it really does is make people nod their heads up and down about something instead of trying to find the root causes of these issues.
Awareness is good yes. Sometimes people don’t realize the things that happen right under their nose but awareness with out analyzing the root causes or looking for solutions isn’t OK. I read an article on The Verge about the lack of females and people of color employed at Google. 70% of employees are men and 61% of employees are white.
Isn’t this an issue?
Maybe.
Is Google only looking to hire white males?
Probably not.
Then why are their numbers this way?
Because of external factors they have little control over. The number of white males in computer science outweighs everybody else. This isn’t a bad thing. It just shows that the interest from other groups in entering CS may not be that strong or that some groups don’t have the ability to get interested into a subject like CS. The internet is pretty new and computing devices are only starting to become ubiquitous. If you don’t have the money to afford a computer or your school doesn’t have computer classes where would the interest come from? Society thinks that computers are still a guy thing, that most gamers are 13-30 year old testosterone filled, violent males. Girls probably aren’t told computers are cool and only recently are we encouraging girls to explore the world of computing.
So back to Google.
Shouldn’t they try to hire more people besides white males?
If 70% of their applicants are males then it makes sense that there should be more males working at Google. Google probably only tries to hire people that are best qualified for the job instead of people that fill diversity requirements. If you have a candidate that is a white male and he is way better than the other people who applied clearly they should hire the guy. If the two applicants are very close then maybe they should hire the other person instead of the guy. The point I’m trying to make here is that Google probably isn’t racist or sexist. There are still exceptions in the CS field though. There are a lot of articles highlighting sexism that happens at CS companies and in the games field every day. When you mix people that probably have little experience with social situations (read girls) and girls (read girls) then it might get ugly.
So do you want Upworthy to stop existing?
Yes, yes I do.
Do you want clickbait titles to go away?
Yes, yes I do. I want articles that make me aware of an issue and then dig deeper to find the root causes. Give suggestions on how we can fix this issue. Actually work a little instead of just trying to get hits to their website. This also brings up the point. Why does clickbait work so well? I think it’s because people like to feel good about themselves and feel superior to other people.
Look at some TV shows. They show people who may be down on their luck, people in bad situations, or people who are just stupid doing things. People then watch and feel good about the fact that they aren’t those people. That they did something right in their life and those people did something wrong. When you see a video about somebody on TV who clearly is homophobic or racist but says that they aren’t; you feel superior to them knowing that they are on the wrong side of history. That you are clearly better than them for knowing that blacks and gays and women and every minority that a person could be is just as equal as anybody else. This is also just as lazy. You don’t really deserve a cookie for not hating other people. I do want to give you a cookie though because you don’t hate other people and there are still a lot of people that do hate other people but your smugness doesn’t change anything. People with differing opinions still have their opinions and you aren’t helping to change them. If you can’t change their mind then let them die off but make sure it doesn’t spread to other people. I saw a video recently of a women who said racial slurs to a person in his truck after he started it because she said he “scared her children”. Part way through the video the kids started saying the same slurs at the guy. This should not be happening. Racism, sexism, homophobia, hate in general should die with our generation, it shouldn’t be passed on to the next one. We should teach our children respect and acceptance.