I started to go through last week's online workshop, but I never finished it (I looked at Window Live ID, Yahoo! and Second Life, but didn't get around to Lavalife). Since I'm terribly busy at the moment, I'll very likely not get around to to finishing it, so I decided to post my thoughts on the part I did anyway, although they're rather rambly. I thought looking at these three websites threw up some interesting points.
For one thing, in terms of gender, all of the sites presented it as a binary, even though not everyone is born unambiguously male or female. (This, of course, is a common assumption.)
Mostly I noticed that the sites assumed a privileged Western user. For instance, all of them asked for a precise birthdate, but although it's normal for us in the West to know our birthdates, it isn't necessarily going to be true for every user. In the same way, Windows Live ID and Yahoo! both asked for first name and surname, although there must be people on earth who don't have a surname. The choices of "secret questions" on all three sites also had a tendency to assume a privileged Western background, with questions referring to things like the user's high school mascot or favourite place to holiday.
I'm not sure whether to put this down to racism. The kind of discrimination this shows is more in terms of life experiences and knowledge than race. I think I would label it as a symptom of thoughtless racism (if that makes sense), not direct racism - the developers simply assumed that users of their websites would be much like themselves, and didn't think much about how this might make things difficult for other users. In general, it's a fair assumption - but it's a dangerously self-perpetuating sort of assumption, I think. Users will tend to come to websites that cater for "their sort" of people. If websites don't fit them, they will either avoid those websites or fit their identities to the sites' categories.
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