The men’s quota was more than met on television Tuesday and not only by the rather binary candidate trio of The smartest person. The man was primarily the subject of research. This is how the VPRO . sent Boss in your own pocket out, a friendly short documentary about men in different stages of their fertility awareness. Because why should contraceptives be a women’s business?
Director Lynn Deen filmed two young men who frolicked and frolicked through Amsterdam, philosophized about unexpected fatherhood and formulated little wisdoms while looking out over the IJ. “Before you know it you’ll have a child, but then you still have to become a father.” A man half a generation older was teased in the cafe about his proposed sterilization, an operation that caused some discomfort among his friends: “I’m going to laugh at you for the rest of your life because you are just less of a man.”
Sophie Frankenmolen investigates how the half and whole man – and especially in his white appearance – is anchored as a norm in our system in the four-part report series Reference Man (BNNVARA), about the standard model human (white, 175 cm long, penis-bearing) that is usually used for calculations. The second episode explored the universe of algorithms. These are filled with knowledge about mainly white men, the group that has left the most information online. The algorithm indiscriminately passes on what it has learned to be ‘normal’. So speech computers have trouble with accents, algorithms give women less credit and ‘deviant’ groups were dealt with harshly in the Allowances affair. A woman tells how she was told at the child health clinic that she was in a separate container because she was only nineteen. A few years later she was (wrongly) summoned to pay back years of supplement.
Algorithms heartlessly reproduce the inequality they have been fed. Frankenmolen heard that they could be made ‘more equal’ by putting in less data about the white Reference Man. Then, for example, the facial recognition software used by the police would work the same for everyone, but less well than now when identifying white people.
Not too much about football
If you want to admire the Reference Man in its natural habitat, you can now visit VI Today on SBS6, where Wilfred Genee, Johan Derksen and René van der Gijp (I didn’t measure them, you know) try not to talk too much about football. Monday it led to a much-watched broadcast that joked about the landing photo of the new cabinet (“there is a gay man in the back row”) and the Dutch national team: “Henk Fräser is only in the dug-out because he has a tan. .” An algorithm would not have improved it.
Incidentally, Derksen thought, he muttered Tuesday, the Monday broadcast “the worst of all time”. This time economist Wouter de Vries was a guest, who spoke about cuts in health care as ‘a big lie’. The problem lay with “the hospital managers.”
The pace of the program was slow on Monday, now presenter Wilfred Genee fired one topic after another at his company, like a football team looking for a fluke: Kuipers, Bergwijn, the cabinet, Van Lienden, corona, fathers and sons, Engel, Feyenoord, Baudet, police brutality, Groningen, Bazoer. A hotseknotsbegoniatalkshow. Derksen started to argue against Mark Rutte (for whom he voted), René van der Gijp played bored with a mouth cap. After an hour the men reached the finish. It was better than yesterday, reviewed Derksen, who decided years ago to be his own Reference Man.
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