Gender and Technology |
This course is offered in the ITI major at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. In this course, we use readings, writing and class discussion to: +Understand feminist critiques of science/technology. +Understand strategies for thinking about technology as it affects everyday life. +Develop a critical analysis of a public policy area in technology that has consequences for gender. +Recognize the importance and processes of innovation as they impact gender in technology-based industries. +Engage in informal study groups and team projects to foster opportunities for students to interact creatively and productively. +Identify the barriers to the recruitment and retention of women in technology industries. +Develop recommendations regarding strategies to overcome barriers in the workplace. |
The article deals with the ethics of virtual reality. LamdaMOO is an online community and multiplayer game where users can interact with one another. It emulates real life where you are represented by an avatar that you have the ability to customize based on your personal preferences. The main conflict occurs virtually when one of its users, Mr. Bungle, forces sexually explicit actions upon other users. The controversy causes a debate on the seriousness of that users actions. The article brings to attention the debate between real life and virtual reality.
Question: Do improper actions hold the same weight and consequences when performed virtually as when performed in real life?
This study examined the relationship between social networking sites and social capital. The study was done at Michigan State University where 286 students were surveyed. Social networking sites work to support and maintain existing social ties and the formation of new relationships. The site that was focused on was Facebook due to its heavy usage and technological capacities that connects online and offline communication. The study focuses on three types of social capital which are bridging, bonding, and maintained capital. Bridging capital are relationships that are considered as weak ties which are loose connections and only share useful information with one another. Bonding capital are relationships where individuals are close with each other emotionally such as friends and family. Maintained social capital is how people are able to keep or maintain social connections as life changes around them.
The findings were that there is a positive relationship between certain kinds of Facebook usage and the maintenance as well as the creation of social capital. The researchers found that the participants used Facebook to keep in touch with old friends or acquaintances from high school and to maintain or strengthen current relationships. Those who did not use Facebook as much reported a lower bridging social capital compared to those who used Facebook more intensely. There was also a positive relationship between bonding social capital and high self-esteem, satisfaction with university life, and intense Facebook use. For maintained social capital, the researchers found that Facebook intensity predicted higher social capital.
While this was just one study, the findings suggest that social networking sites help maintain relationships as people move from one community to another as well as building new ones. These connections may help in terms of future jobs, internships, and other opportunities.
Question: Do you think the social benefits of social networking websites like Facebook outweigh the negatives? How have social networks contributed positively or negatively to your life since high school?
This article deals with the uses of social media within subcultures, and
how they are used to maintain secrecy within these groups. In particular,
this study focuses on the punk rock subculture in New Brunswick and how
they use social media to organize basement shows without attracting
unwanted attention from law enforcement. While common social media sites
such as Facebook are used to advertise these shows, they generally do not
contain all the information required to find the show (in most cases, the
location of the show is left out) so that authorities cannot easily track
down where shows will be held. The missing information is transmitted in a
more direct manner, usually face-to-face communication, a phone call, or
SMS.
This subculture also takes advantage of older forms of social media such
as message boards. While they are not as popular as other social media
sites, message boards allow for closer moderation of posts and users so
that information remains secure.
One important point that the article makes is that social media sites are
used to keep the secrecy of these events, while also being the means to
relay this information to many people at once. While there is a danger of
police using a false identity to try and get information about these
events, social media can be used to try to determine a person’s real life
identity in order to see if they should be included in the selective
community.
Question: How does identity tourism affect how information is shared
across social networking sites?
Related to one of our texts on social media drama. As one of our classmates explained: Earlier today I saw this music video by Five Finger Death Punch for their song Coming Down. I saw it after the Amanda Todd YouTube video and the similarities were very strong between the two videos. It seems as if Coming Down was about Amanda Todd, but just a little bit broader.
In Gender Circuits, Eve Shapiro begins chapter 2 with an example of an online game called Second Life. When you begin the game, Shapiro points out that you need to pick an avatar in order to continue this game. She chose her avatar as someone who looks a bit better than herself in real life. As she began playing this virtual world she realizes that the world had many diverse avatars and was not limited humans: there were fairies, animals, hybrids and inanimate objects. She points out although Second Life seems as though it is very different from real-life society, however, it does not. In fact it does the opposite: it mirrors the inequalities that are present in real-life society.
Eve Shapiro discusses throughout the chapter on how the internet, (online communities, virtual worlds) affects real-life society as well as how real-life society affects the internet. She mentions how the internet is place where both people’s real and false identities can exist. The internet allows users to do identity work without having to reveal their real identities and feel safe to privately do their identity work. Another point she makes is that not all identity created online is reflective of the user. Reality is more complex and “the diverse array of online identity assertions have a variety of relationships to offline embodied selves” (95).
Another point Eve Shapiro points out that both online and real-life selves have a dialectical relationship because online selves shape their real-life selves as well as their real-life selves shape their online selves. When people become part of an online community or become part of the virtual world, people sometimes create stories to explain their online selves and how they created the character. As people tell stories within a social context, it displays who they are, helps figure out who they are through these stories. Sometimes this also changes due time for example, in high school Eve was part of theater so she had identified herself as part of Theater group but when she was in college she changed her major to Sociology which shows her identity changed over time.
Shapiro also points out that the internet has significantly changed the transgender community as well as the GLBT community. When times were difficult to express, they were able to effectively protest and speak up their minds through the Internet which made a bigger difference then when they protested on the streets and in person. They were able to gain support, speak up and debate without prejudice online better than in public.
In the chapter, Shapiro discusses how the internet sometimes are no different that real-life inequalities and stereotypes. Sometimes, people have to prove themselves since in real-life people look down on them or question their masculinity such as for nerds. Sometimes people have to change their identity online for the purpose of trying not to get discriminated because he/she is overweight, ugly or of different race. She also points out that Second Life, for example, has a typical stereotype. When one tries to create an avatar, there were not many different skin color tones or different sized clothes (now they have changed that) so the majority of the avatars were white, skinny and male.
Question:
Do you think there is a way to prevent inequalities and stereotypes in the Internet without creating false identities? Do you think the inequalities and stereotypes online are more severe than in real-life?
This video is a personal account on what had happened to Amanda Todd before she took her own life.
She told us the story about how one simple mistake followed her forever. She teaches us the important lesson of how once something is online, it will never been unseen. Amanda became a victim of cyber bullying that transformed into a physical one. She fell into a deep depression and implementing self hard and several attempts at suicide. The online threats got worse when people would actually post comments and pictures encouraging her to go through with it. Amanda’s struggle with anxiety, depression and rejection eventually to her suicide.
She was only a sophomore in high school when her life ended.
Question: Should there be some sort of censorship system where users would not be able to say such awful things on the internet? Shouldn’t there be consequences for posting such hateful comments and/or pictures? Is there a system for that? Will there ever be one, and if so, how would we police that?
a new specialization and certification program - Game Production and Innovation.
For those of you writing papers related to video games, I polled a bunch of my friends who do research in that area and asked them for suggestions on journals and articles that might come in handy. Here’s what they had to say, including links when I could find them in a cursory search:
Also, my friend Aaron had the following suggestions:
Resources for women in the work place:
And here are some sources for general statistics on the work force:
The article opens up by describing modernism as a visual style and describes it as the changes that were implemented in the early twentieth century. Modern design, as described, has two faces: the public face which represents the Machine Age as rational and the private face which represents the creation of products to facilitate the changes of the human body. Bathrooms and kitchens are the two primary examples that the articles discusses as having gone through the most change during the century. While the modern bathroom represents the acceptance of the germ theory disease and the desire to maintain cleanliness in the home, the modernized kitchen represents an attempt at optimization that did not quite catch on, but did show how an efficient workspace was trying to be implemented. The idea of the ?consumer economy? is also mentioned as the mass selling of cheaper goods that reflects the wage-earning consumer class as the dominant population at the time. The changes in the bathroom and kitchen represent this consumer-based population as a cycle of ingestion and waste. A common theme that was mentioned in the article was the portrayal of women in commercials and advertisements as a body to which to market its products to. This idea was described further in the form of a question regarding the mechanization of the home and whether it liberated women from unnecessary work or put more pressure on them to maintain the standards of cleanliness.
QUESTION: Do advancements in the home represent the norms that are placed upon women or do they represent a desire to become more efficient at performing everyday tasks?
It has been a social norm to see certain tasks within the home associated as “women’s work.” Lupton digs into the roots of the American household with a look at men, women, appliances and more. Machines within the kitchen do work that cultural define men vs. women. It is believed that the self is manufactured, defined by products bought for your house. Women were viewed as the “chief purchasing agents” that were the main users of consumer products for the household. Men on the other hand were the driving force for design, invention, entrepreneurship and more. While men went to work, women maintained, cleaning and used consumer goods, becoming targets for advertisement.
Industrial design added the styling of planes and trains to consumer products to create emotionally appealing commodities. This in turn drove women away from wage jobs because of the domestic ideal to become workers of jobs for neatness, courtesy and personal service. During a feminist movement by Betty Friedan who critiques consumer culture, Marshall McLuhan writes a book “The Mechanical Bride,” depicting the female body as “a machine like aggregate of detachable, interchangeable parts” as a form of “sex and technology.”
As advertisement continues to transform tools into appealing commodities that promise to satisfy emotional and material needs, packaging, branding and design from certain companies become household names such as Hoover. Their description of the Hoover vacuum illustrates how it will “sweep your rug and give (a women) all her heart desires.” Labor saving devices continue to come a long way as washing machines advertise to do all the work but a user of this device still needed to load, sort and fold. At this time however, advertising calls for women to embrace housework as a “natural calling.”
Women begin to break away from this however, as women for hire becomes a big field of work at the turn of the century. These women for hire work on laundry for families as a preference to live-in maids because they set own hours and tended to their own families. This becomes a prototype of postwar cleaning woman, turning housework in an invisible underground economy.
Despite the emergence of washer, dryers and irons, housework seemed to dwindle while both men and women worked into the 70s and 80s. The issue at hand continued to be men and women balancing chorus throughout the house as women would come home to a “second shift” burden of housework.
The question I have is: Despite all the inventions of household products to aid our everyday lives, there is an endless cycle of chorus that might not be evenly distributed. Is socially expectable for women to do certain chorus while men do others? Should they be doing the same work? Is there a technology that could be invented to address all chorus in the household to break the social norm? What features would it have?
