Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Discrimination

I opened a page of quotations from Richard Rohr, an acknowledged "guru" of mine and often read by devoted thinkers in my own congregation. His quotations are pithy and relevant to everyone who cares about the future of Christianity and the future of the world.
What struck me was at the bottom of the page. The website designer [Brainy Quotes] has chosen to incorporate a list of clickable links to other "related authors." The list includes: John C. Maxwell, Joel Osteen, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Charles Swindoll, Charles Stanley, Robert Schuller, and Dwight L. Moody.  None of these men bear the slightest relationship to Richard Rohr in outlook or sentiment. The only relationship I can think of is that all are readily quotable because of their large body of searchable text available on the internet and the fact that they are all self-identified white male Christian clergy.  The differences between Richard Rohr and the rest are vast and important.
I take it that the web designers don't have a clue.  Maybe they don't care. Promoting the site as "brainy" doesn't begin to capture the ham-handedness of an algorithm that throws all these authors into the same pot as "related."
My concern is that people have handed over their discrimination job to a vast "cloud" of algorithms that purport to do something about analysis and communication, but that really only magnify the poorly-informed biases of the algorithm writers. This is why I am dedicated to discrimination, that is, the ability to tell the difference between truth and lies. It does make a difference.

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