When my daughter was young, she used to get a big kick out of hiding under a blanket and sneaking up on us. She thought we wouldn't see her because she couldn't see us. I guess even adults play this game: "What you can't see, won't hurt you." That's why many of today's policies are geered towards obvious discriminations like the color of a person's skin or gender. But, there are stil hidden factors that never get highlighted that do affect the quality of life for people. We are a society geared towards "image" and what it represents. And this in effect, makes us myopic towards things that aren't easily distinguished through differences in image.

Guy Debord speaks of this in his book:"The Society of the Spectacle." Although, I found the format a difficult read, it was still worthwhile in concept. Guy believes we are a society of the spectacle, accustomed to image and gearing our entire society on only things we see. This is how we identify value in something or not.

Google is beta testing a search algorithm that now will rank pages based on accessibility standards as well as content. These accesibility standards are not based on image, but rather, on how well a site is coded for handicapped individuals to access and text. Blind people who surf the web often use machines to read text off the web sites. But, if a site is all images, they end up reading image tags all day! Quite a frustrating experience! So, here we see a little of that shift going from only an image-based society to something deeper which is more egalitarian to everyone.

There is a search engine marketing firm, called Usweb.com, that specializes in search engine optimization, including web accessibility standards. They note that certain sites will fall in rankings as Google unrolls this new algorith while others, like .gov and .edu sites will increase ranking. Another bright point: Blogs will also increase in rankings since they are mostly text!