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It's not just ads though, but also stock images, staged photographs for college admission pamphlets, product pictures on Amazon, etc. (you can always quickly identify cheap Chinese imports on Amazon: they're the only ones with product pictures showing white people using the product).
I'm sure you can probably find white people in ads for euthanasia in Canada, at least.
It's increasingly difficult to find any refuge from the daily barrage of reminders that your society is signaling it hates you and is excited for you and your kind to die off.
Huh. The first few stock images that come to mind are a mixed bag. Harold, old white guy. “Why can’t I hold all these limes,” young black guy. “Distracted boyfriend,” three white people, one of whom is male. Maybe those are just dated?
Googling “stock photo” and looking at the first page of results gives a bunch of white people, mostly solo. The first black guy is playing a saxophone—does that count as stereotyping? There are a few Middle Eastern men, a couple Indians, and a single dog.
So I’m not really seeing it.
I work in video games, you may recall. I've recently been making art for the in-game stories, and for promotional material. It has been communicated to the art team that representing diversity is a requirement in every image by default, with rare exceptions. Diversity means non-white and/or female, preferably both. Exceptions are images depicting individual characters (some of whom are still allowed to be white, but of course are balanced by the requirement that other characters be non-white) or bad guys, who are of course not subject to diversity requirements. Assuming you aren't depicting a villain, white characters are required to be balanced by diverse characters. Diverse characters are themselves, of course, balanced already and need no corresponding balancing.
I'm a little amused that we're still debating whether this sort of thing is happening. It's absolutely happening.
Sorry, I was focused on the stock photo part, which is where the OP didn’t fit my intuition.
I recognize that Representation only gets invoked one way, and that it’s doing so more often now than it did in 2009. Your explanation downthread regarding the risk/reward of pissing off Twitter is convincing.
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Can you describe how these instructions are given to you? Does your manager tell you this directly? Are these commands issued to your whole team from somewhere else?
Every time we made a piece of art that didn't have POC/gender balance in it, our boss told us it wasn't diverse enough and we had to remake it to be more diverse. This complaint never was made for anything involving villains. It took a dozen iterations before we started internally discussing where to put the diversity in a given image during the planning stage, and we still frequently are told that the images aren't diverse enough and we need to add more. Any time we do an early mockup with stock images that aren't themselves diverse, we're reminded that the finished version has to be diverse. I'm indy; the boss tells us directly.
Have you ever asked why?
Video games with more diverse characters don't seem to sell more.
I don't need to ask why. I've sat through a couple impromptu diversity lectures over the years. Both the indy space and Triple-A are completely dominated by progressive voices. The entire gaming press ecosystem is rabidly progressive. Influencers are more balanced, but everyone the boss knows and everyone the boss respects, cares about, and wants to impress are all on one side. You want to show your game at PAX, you want buzz, you want people cheering you on and giving you good press, well, there's a set of beliefs and behaviors that get you that, and there's another set of beliefs and behaviors that definately will not.
I could give more examples, but I'll leave it there for OPSEC purposes.
So it's more a matter of placing the company on the map of 'good guys' or for individuals to make sure that they can keep finding jobs in the same type of companies.
Making a good game with innovative, fun gameplay, interesting visuals and story, compelling characters etc, would definitely make you (commercially) successful as well. Insofar your company is not banned from payment processing I suppose.
Of course that's much harder so the sea of average workers of the industry just go for the low-hanging fruit.
Sure. But while you're doing that, you also want to be a good person, and you want the extra boost of being seen to be a good person, and you definately do not want to be called out as being a bad person, because that could be disastrous.
The fear of failure is considerable. The desire to do anything possible to increase the chances of success is likewise considerable. And that's why I burned a couple days some time ago making art for a progressive fundraising campaign that I absolutely despise and that had zero to do with our product, but that my boss thought might get the company some good press. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
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I assume HelmedHorror is listing the use cases for stock photos where they perceive the problem, not necessarily listing stock photos as a separate category that also has the problem. To the general question of Stock Photos, when I load up the Shutterstock home page, the Explore Popular and Handpicked visuals seems to have eight pictures with humans, and the only white man in the mix is Santa Claus (possible another man but he is too small to tell for sure).
All of your examples seem to be fairly old (5+ years?) memes, which technically started their life as stock-photos but are probably non-central examples of stock-photos, in as much as they are still used today.
Yeah, on further consideration, you’re probably right.
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If you had to search for it, perhaps it's because you're not paying attention when you come across it organically.
Let's try this. I'll go one-by-one to websites from Fortune 500 companies in descending order and see how white or nonwhite the photos of people on their home page are. Sound pretty objective? Alright, let's play.
You get the idea.
The effect is so strong that at some point pictures of single young white urban men in advertising have become gay-coded. Usually if I see such an ad on my commute it's trying to sell me PrEP.
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Is this true?
When I search Amazon for the word 'shirt,' in the first 3 rows on images, 8 models are white, 4 are non-white.
Do you see something different when you search the word 'shirt'? Did you have some other set of categories you were talking about?
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Well, why should your society, given that it hates you and is excited for you and your kind to die off, allow you any such refuge?
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