Hey I am facilitating the debate tomorrow on "Posting with Passion: Blogs and the Politics of Gender" by Melissa Gregg.
I did not particularly enjoy this article as I feel it lacked substance and made some rather general assumptions. However, aside from this it did raise some interesting points.
In short, this article is largely concerned with the difference between male and female bloggers, in terms of the content of their blogs and they way in which these blogs are perceived.
Gregg offers two main reasons as to why she belives women do not "politically" blog as men do.
The primary reason being that women "do not have as much time-political blogging requires a lack of interruption from off-line demands" and that they may not have received the previous edication and encouragement to be politically minded. To me, these reasons seem very shallow and presumptous, men aren't as "busy" as women...really? Women haven't been encouraged to political? These explanations did not resonate with me. I would like to discuss this point in the tutorial so if anyone has any original ideas on this point...
When the internet was a burgeoning phenomenon, people naively believed that the internet would be a "gender-free zone". It seems logical to me that gender will transpire from offline to online and that, try as we might, we can never escape the confines of gender. Is a "gender free" internet a future prospect?
Such open expressions of intimate personal lives, especially on live journals, are bound to have repercussions. What might they be? The future of privacy is ambiguous...could our supposedly "anoymous" blogs come back to bite us?
Looking forward to discussing this article in the tutorial.
I had the same thoughts aswell. The article is very shallow and seemed even sexist at times.
ReplyDeleteso here are my thoughts anyways;
I dont think the internet is ever going to be a "gender free zone". its impossible. people want to know who's blog their reading, who their talking to, who's personal life their reading about (whether the author tells the truth about their gender/age/etc is a completely different matter though). The gender of the author makes people either love it or hate it. Whether we want to admit it or not, the world we live in doesn't allow us to not care about gender.
Also, in regards to the privacy issue I agree that the future of it is ambiguous. With social networking sites like facebook/myspace, people post their whole life as status updates and comments on people's walls etc. We live in a society where majority of people want everyone to know what their doing every second. Most people learn more about their friends through status updates than actual conversations. We live in a very self-centered world...whether or not that is a bad thing, I don't know.
Anyways those are just my thoughts...but yeah...
Yeah it's bizarre how you can feel like you know what someone's been doing for the last 6 months, but when you look back you realise you've have barely any contact with them...
ReplyDeleteI also agree that there is no way that the internet can become genderless, everything input into the internet comes from external influence and experience, so of course gender and culture are going to be hugely influential in the communication and social activity on the internet. It doesn't just change with anonymity.