I found an interesting video on TED about the influence of social media on old gender categories, and I would like to discuss about the topic.
The speaker Johanna Blakley believed that social media will enable to eliminate the biases and stereotypes about gender that we see in the modern media such as TV, games, magazines, etc. New social media such as facebook, attracts more and more people with its fascinating, convenient tools. Users can share what they like and connect with people around the world who have something in common; that is there are no certain category which men/ women are supposed to belong to. Therefore, throught social media it may be possible to research and observe people without old stereotype of gender.
The point is, according to Blakley, it is women that account for the larger area of social media. For example, the time women use soial media gets longer than men in every age category. This means women will have power on social media, and their tastes can be applied to various scenes in our society. As Blakley mentions in her talk, I don't believe women can totally "dominate the social media space", changing the taste of some movies from masculine to feminine. However, I believe this new stream occuring on the social media can change our to-some-extent-male-cantered society.
Gender is, as we learned in the class, formed in society, usually at an early age of life, unconsciously. This hidden viewpoint remains for a long time and more or less dominate our way of thinking about male/ female, and their role in society. If we change the society itself, our viewpoint can change.
I love this piece. I had never thought of that before. Social media can definitely be a good outlet for women and our rights. After all, the social media is a great way to express what you are saying without accusing eyes looking at you. Now there is a problem with cyberbullying and such. This is not safe and can cause worse problems. At the same time women can express their true feelings and perhaps some of the men that are on there can see how women really are and not what their media-made messages point out. Also, in person a guy can say something sexist and you might tell him to knock it off. He may laugh it off with his friends or give you a look like "what are you going to do." On social media you can de-friend that person. The worse that can happen is that you don't have to hear their crap anymore (yay!) or the best that can happen is they can feel shunned. After all, who likes being de-friended? There is something just so horrible about if for those on a media website (don't you hear the complaints on Facebook). My brother was always putting up pictures of scantily clad women on Facebook and saying how hot they were and how he wanted a piece of that. I de-friended him. He's my brother so I still e-mail him every week,but at the same time he realized how upset I was. Since then (supposedly) there is no scantily clad women on his page). Anyways, I do believe that social media can be a blessing as well as a curse. I wish there were stronger laws about cyberbullying though. That way people would be a lot more willing to be themselves on there. Oh well, another thing to work for in society.
ReplyDelete-Rachael Belcher
I agree with the above post and comment, however while reading this it made me wonder: does social media dilute the message? When information is constantly refreshing and cycling, messages often get lost, and social media (such as twitter, which only allows a limited amount of characters) may not be able to fully express the ideas nor convey the feeling necessary to spark an interest in people. I feel like seeing a post about current feminist issues might be overlooked when bracketed by posts about how much "A" loves "B" or how drunk "C" got last night.
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