Racialization of technology use in stock images (Pt. 1)

While reading Lisa Nakamura's chapter titled "The Social Optics of Race and Networked Interfaces in The Matrix Trilogy and Minority Report" in her book Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet I decided to investigate the depictions of futuristic technology and interface use available online.

A preliminary Google image search returned the following results:

Sample of results for Google image search "futuristic interface touch"

This is a small sample of the results I found. The lack of racial diversity in this screen cap reiterates the prevailing whiteness of depictions of technology (especially imaginary futuristic types of technology). 

In her chapter, Nakamura examines the depiction of interfaces/interfacing offline as part of digital racial formation. Her sites of analysis include the three Matrix movies and Minority Report, as well as depictions of race and technology by Apple in their Ipod commercials. Nakamura describes the qualitative differences in depictions of African American use of technology (see the contrast between use of technology by the characters in the multicultural Zion vs. and characters that are a part of the Matrix). Even though these depictions are providing much needed representation for African Americans, they rely on stereotypical images that reinforce the conception of technology as a white domain. 

As you can see in the above screen cap, many of the images are actually stock images. The tags that are used for stock photography online provide a great tool for investigating the commercial depictions of race and technology usage. Many stock photography sites allow for you to narrow the results of a keyword search by restricting results based on the race of the model/s in the image. A further investigation was in order. Shutterstock.com returned tons of results for the keywords 'futuristic' and 'interface,' and had the race restriction option, so I decided to center my analysis there (though I assure you that the results would be similar for other major stock photo sites).

The search for images that featured people and were tagged with both 'futuristic' and 'interface' returned 755 results. This is a screen cap of that search:

Shutterstock's Futuristic Interface (People)

In the first page of results, there was one image of a woman coded as "Asian," a man coded as "Arab," and a few images with ambiguous (though still relatively light), potentially non-white users that were not coded in terms of race/ethnicity.

'Asian' woman

'Arab' man

Unspecified race/ethnicity

When the search is restricted to images with models that have been coded as "Caucasian (White)," 629 results were returned. These results look much like the original search (without any racial coding).

Futuristic Interface (Caucasian)

The search for images with either Black or African American models returned zero results.

'Futuristic Interface' (Black)

The results for 'futuristic interfaces' that include Asian/Asian American models provided a greater number of results. However, these results were visibly different from those including white models (I will discuss the qualitative differences in technological/futuristic stock images of Asians in another post).