What’s wrong with this picture?
In the Oct 24, 2005 issue of Time magazine, there is an article featuring a round table of some of the leading trendspoters in technologies.
Here’s the group: Tim O’Reilly: publisher and technology advocate Esther Dyson: editor of technology newsletter Release 1.0 for CNET Networks David Brooks: author and New York Times columnist Clay Shirky: writer and technology consultant Mark Dery, author and cultural critic Moby: pioneering electronic musician Maclom Gladwell: author and New Yorker writer
Notice anything other than Gladwell’s egg head fro?
Where are Africans? Folks like Omar Wasow Only one woman? Was Xeni busy? Most of these folks are based on the east or west coast. Anyone from the Asian tech powers of Japan, China and Singapore? Is India in da house?
Just as Dare pointed out when he returned from the Web 2.0 conference, the ‘leaders’ in the field that appear at conferences and in articles are white, middle class, college educated and mostly male.
This presents a clear case where bias comes into play yet we don’t acknowledge that it is a bias. Not saying we need to have a limit or a minimum on the ethnicity of presenters but rather we need to make sure we don’t forget anybody.
My question for the week is how does the bias of ethnicity along with those of geography (most of these folks live on the coasts in major urban centers) impact the views these people give?
