“Sergei didn’t know HTML, and he really wasn’t all that interested in learning. What he was really passionate about doing was building a search engine, was building a product that worked. And so he put together the homepage as a way to get the service up and running as quickly as possible. In many ways the Google homepage that you see today – in some respects you could claim that it was almost a happy byproduct of laziness on his part.” – Jen Fitzpatrick, Engineering Director, from her presentation, “The Science and Art of the User Experience at Google.”
The title of this blog is “The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films”. The reason I chose this title is because after 20 years of being a commercial artist, I’ve come to believe you can’t understand why someone makes the art the make without understanding the environment in which they do their art-making.
The writing on this blog has tried explain the commercial, legal and social environment within which erotic films are made as a way of trying to explain why most films dealing with explicit erotic subject matter have such easily identified characteristics, both technically and in their thematic approach to the material.
I’ve written about the tools that are used. I’ve written about the underlying economics. I’ve written about the legal and quasi-legal limitations on distribution. I’ve written about the misinformation that is endlessly promulgated when mainstream media outlets try to sex-up their pages with porn stories.
When I uncovered the shocking disparity between how Google’s [SafeSearch] filter treat [penis] vs how it treats [clitoris] and words that it finds problematic has made me curious about environment under which the SafeSearch filter was create. How was it that Google so cavalierly discard [clitoris]? How is it that this has gone addressed? How do the attitudes about sexuality that can be inferred though such an omission effect other aspects of Google business operation?
Viewed through that lens, this presentation from Jen Fitzpatrick, an Engineering Director at Google. is instructive.
The Science and Art of User Experience at Google
I think it’s also useful to reread this passage from Matt Cutts blog. Matt Cutts is the Google engineer who wrote SafeSearch, and now heads Google webspam team:
“As the head of Google’s webspam team, I prowl around some pretty hairy places on the internet. Almost every day I encounter hacked pages, malware, porn, and generally scuzzy pages. The security model in Google Chrome is much stronger than most other browsers I’ve used. I’ve surfed through hundreds of seedy back alleys of the Internet over the last several months, and Google Chrome has safely kept me from being infected or affected by the junky web pages I encounter.” (emphasis mine)
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Google is some sort of amazingly sophisticated company, filled with the most amazing people that ever worked in information technology. Maybe that’s true. I’ve met a few Googlers, and they’ve generally struck me as above average in intellect and sophistication.
But that doesn’t change the fact that is that Google is a company filled with people. Google’s search algorithms are written by people. “SearchSearch” was written by people. Google’s webspam identification and suppression tactics are written by people. People with their own quirks, blind spots, and judgements about what’s important and what’s a distraction.
It’s also important to remember that quirky, idiosyncratic decisions can have long lasting effects. In his efforts to find a reason not to ban James Joyce Ulysses, Justice Woolsey used the phrase “intent to arouse.” 80 years later, this “intent to arouse” is still market as the dividing ling between “legitimate artistic inquiry” and pandering; between expression that must be protected and work that must be suppressed.
This is not a theoretical concern. We’ve had our DVDs seized by customs officials in Germany. We’ve had our DVDs removed from store shelves in Australia. Here in the US we’ve had retailers decide they can’t carry our work for fear of prosecution. Film festivals that have tried to screen our films have been threatened with fines and their programers threatened with jail time. In one instance police actually raided a film festival where “Ashley and Kisha” was schedule to play to prevent the film from being screened.
These are the realities of the world in which we make our films; and when Google excises [clitoris] from their SafeSearch returns – whether out of prudery, expediency, ignorance or laziness – they reenforce these realities. When Google classes explicit sexuality as just another variety of internet malware, they reenforce these realities.
Google is a private company with no obligation free speech, and no obligation to strive for “fairness” or “equality” in their search returns; and they are certainly under no obligation to advocate for my vision of sexual equality and liberty.
But whether they like it or not, Google has become a powerful force for how our culture takes shape in this new searchable age. Where will Google’s influence be most keenly felt? Along the margins; at the edge of new ideas and minority opinions, arenas that require nuanced judgements, and a gentle hand.
So far, where sex is concerned, Google has failed. To date, Google’s approach to [clitoris] and other erotic words, and erotic website, has been, at best, thoughtless and clumsy.
Because of the shame and secrecy that surrounding sexuality, it’s an area of expression that attracts more than it’s share of asocial and antisocial entities. The task that Google faces separating bad actors from honest participants in the marketplace of ideas in undoubtably challenging.
But Googles current approach favors coded language and pranksterism over candor. It grants undue deference to already established voices, while disproportionately penalizing those who are already marginalized.
In Google quest to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” Google treats sexual information and expression as acceptable losses in it’s mission to achieve it’s goal. The zero “safe” returns result for [clitoris], [nude], [erotic], etc. is accepted as collateral damage in Google’s ongoing war on spam, and that war on spam has (inadvertently, I hope) become a war on sex.
Can Google do better? Maybe. Will they try? I hope so.
