Discriminav
“Discriminav” is a dark bit of humour from Talkshow with Spike Feresten:
Via GPS Tracklog. This skit is teh funny, but what it describes is also totally possible: all you’d need to do is mash up census data with driving directions.
In the same vein, Charlie White writes on Gizmodo that this isn’t quite farfetched. “Honestly, aren’t there some areas of your town you’d rather not drive through in the middle of the night?” he asks. “Our GPS system proposed a route through the most crime-ridden area of a large American city at 1 AM last weekend, and we were wishing our GPS unit were aware of crime statistics. Maybe Discriminav is not that far from a real product after all. Behind comedy lies at least some truth.” Leaving aside, of course, the too-common conflation of crime, class and race.
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The Map Room is a blog about maps by
Definitely pretty funny!
What’s fascinating though is that at the original site the comments talk about crime and avoiding the ghetto when in fact there is no mention of crime in the video!
They also ignore the scenes with the African-Americans avoiding the potentially racist NASCAR event, and the old lady who didn’t want any Koreans.
Just goes to show that you can watch something and interpret it totally as something else and how race is part of that.
ubikcan on October 24, 2006 at 10:07 PM