Those of you who know me personally know that in another aspect of my life I write about technology. I get to play around with a fair number of gadgets in order to review them and it’s a very cool job, generally. There are very few times when the ABW in me is activated by something that happens in the course of my tech writing, and when it does I’m often conflicted about where I should best express my concerns. Is the issue best discussed on theangryblackwoman.com or on my personal tech blog or even on my work tech blog? This time I’ve opted for ABW not because this issue is particularly anger-making (it’s more annoying), but because I feel like the readers here will discuss it more thoughtfully than those more tech-minded.
A few months back I reviewed a slew of digital picture frames all in a row. I had to set them all up and evaluate whether they made good gifts for grandma and grandpa. All of the frames came with some starter images to show you how the slideshow bit works before you put your images on, which is pretty standard. But as I set each frame up, I started to notice that all of the images that came pre-loaded were of white people. White families, white adults, white kids, white white white1.
Now, I realize that this is not all that different from regular frames (next time you’re in a Target or Wal-Mart or something, go stroll down the frame aisle. If there are pictures of people in them, chances are they are white people) but for some reason this struck me particularly as I was setting up these digital frames. I kept thinking: are there no brown people of any ethnicity available in stock photo bins? Or do they not even think, just choose the first pictures of happy people they see and put them in?
Then again, companies often control every aspect of a product down to the number of water drops on the image of a waterproof phone to ensure it doesn’t seem too waterproof and thus fool customers (yes, this is a real issue that came up once). Hard to believe that the photos pre-loaded on all of these frames weren’t mulled over and specifically chosen by someone.
I was reminded of this again when I posted on my work blog about good family holiday gifts and wanted to mention the frames. I was so sick of only finding images of frames with photos of white people inside that I went and found some brown people and photoshopped them in.
The reason this annoys me yet doesn’t really anger me is that it smacks not of malice or prejudice, but of unconscious privilege and blindness. Do the people who choose the images for the frame ever stop and consider that a Black or Latino or Indian or Native American family might buy the product and might appreciate if the pre-loaded photos maybe looked something like them? It’s a small thing, but would indicate to me that someone at the company was paying attention to the fact that not only white people exist in the world. And since the frame usually comes with 4 – 10 images on it, you can satisfy a whole slew of people by showing families of different races and ethnicities and also just mixed groups of people having fun and being together.
I guess I wish that people were more thoughtful. This is, I’m sure, far too much to ask.
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Footnotes
- I can’t be sure if there were only white people across the board because I’ve sent some of the units back, but about the third one I paid close attention and only saw white folks.
What’s funny is that in the world of corporate and educational stock crap, the opposite is true.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=stock_photos
Note: Maddox is your typical troll, throwing around racist language because it’s “edgy”.
But when marketing to the public? Suddenly it’s all cute little blond kids.
From a production standpoint, having single photographs of ‘just brown and latino and indian’ would not make sense, only if you have specific setups for these markets. For example, in Germany the groups you describe are very low minorities of the buyers. Which probably also is what you can see in other areas of the planet. One of the reasons why office stock images from the States are useless for local usage – they portray too much multicultural of the wrong kind, multicultural in our society is a different mix.
As such – and that is the point where you are absolutly right – it would make sense to have a more multicultural approach, similar to mom / dad grandparents with kids | hobbies etc, to please enough customers.
It probably just takes a bit of effort and searching for them.
@Nic0le
Speaking of “specific setups for these markets”:
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/26585/microsoft-photoshop-polish-site-mistake
I’m sure everybody remembers that mess.
I don’t know if this is on topic, but I have recently been noticing more black people in television commercials. I don’t know if this is me noticing, or a change in the commercials (or in when/where certain spots air). I especially noticed the ad, I of course forget what it’s for, with a black father and son at bath time (it’s got to either be for soap or for cotton). Anyway, the towels and other stuff in the room are very white and the dad and son are so happy and cuddly. It’s a really nice image. But I haven’t noticed digital picture frames specifically.
This could almost be a theme of the day when taken in conjunction with the video that just hit Buzzfeed: “HP’s Racist Webcam”. The video demonstrates that the new HP webcam face recognition/tracking software apparently can’t ‘see’ black people: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM.
One positive: when the robots are wiping out humanity, they will leave black people alone, due to being unable to recognize them.
Jesus. “Better off Ted” had this as a joke. Apparently reality and humor are closely bound.
I wonder if it’s not something worse, a reflection of racism in the market – that consumers of all colors will buy all-white-faced picture frames, but a significant part of the market won’t buy frames that show mixed groups or people of color.
Beth, there’s a funny response to that here: http://blog.laptopmag.com/hp-webcam
well, not so much funny as “oh wait, this is due to bad software design.” still :)
I used to have a job that involved making factsheets for a nonprofit. I tried to be sure that the people in our factsheet photos reflected the world we live in and so was “diverse.” Trying to find stockphotos of POC –especially happily frolicing in nature is EXTREMELY HARD. So much so I thought about going to Flickr communities and asking people to post them.
In Australia, I’ve been finding it interesting to observe ads of this kind. The more technological the item is – such as a digital camera or photo frame – the more likely it is that there will be at least one Southeast Asian person in the picture. Car ads and anything involving the internet seem to always have Token Asian Person now, but some ads have a majority of Asian people with a few white people. This is definitely a trend of just the last few years, though! A quick glance around the photo frames for sale in my workplace (pharmacy) shows at least twenty with just white people, two with Asian couples, one Asian baby and three mixed white/Asian groups, all exclusively female.
Aboriginal kids almost never appear in ads (with the occasional exception of “one Aboriginal kid, one Southeast Asian kid, maybe one Indian kid, three white kids with different hair colours, we’re so diverse!” kinds of ads). I’ve never seen an African kid in an ad, although African-Australians are a fairly recent group of immigrants.