I am certainly aware of the fact that women tend to have less time for doing things outside of housework and taking care of men and children. Even an elderly gay man who dislikes women will have women willing to drive him to church and other events, and bring him meals.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175829/tomgram%253A_astra_taylor%252C_misogyny_and_the_cult_of_internet_openness/
Posted by Astra Taylor at 7:53am, April 10, 2014
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We’ve got a special offer for you today. Below, you’ll get a taste of Astra Taylor’s new book about the Internet as a system for inequality, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. (Musician David Byrne, no less, praises her “inspiring insights” and calls her book “beautifully written and highly recommended.” As is obvious from her intro, Rebecca Solnit also considers it a milestone book.) For a donation of $100 to this website, Taylor will sign a personalized copy of the book to you. And believe me, since TomDispatch is not exactly Google and takes no advertising, every dollar you give really does help keep us afloat. Check out our donation page for more details on the offer. (And one note: Taylor is, at the moment, on tour with a band. She won’t be back in New York to sign books until the 23rd, so be patient and it will come.) Tom]
----- [see link above to take advantage of their offer]
The Internet arose with little regulation, little public decision-making, and a whole lot of fantasy about how it was going to make everyone powerful and how everything would be free. Free, as in unregulated and open, got confused with free, as in not getting paid, and somehow everyone from Facebook to Arianna Huffington created massively lucrative sites (based on advertising dollars) in which the people who made the content went unpaid.
-----
And at a certain juncture, she turns to gender. Though far from the only weak point of the Internet as an egalitarian space -- after all, there’s privacy (lack of), the environment (massive server farms), and economics (tax cheats, “content providers” like musicians fleeced) -- gender politics, as she shows in today’s post adapted from her book, is one of the most spectacular problems online.
-----
As a start, in the perfectly real world women shoulder a disproportionate share of household and child-rearing responsibilities, leaving them substantially less leisure time to spend online. Though a handful of high-powered celebrity “mommy bloggers” have managed to attract massive audiences and ad revenue by documenting their daily travails, they are the exceptions not the rule. In professional fields like philosophy, law, and science, where blogging has become popular, women are notoriously underrepresented; by one count, for instance, only around 20% of science bloggers are women.
-----
Many prominent women have spoken up about their experiences being bullied and intimidated online -- scenarios that sometimes escalate into the release of private information, including home addresses, e-mail passwords, and social security numbers, or simply devolve into an Internet version of stalking. Esteemed classicist Mary Beard, for example, “received online death threats and menaces of sexual assault” after a television appearance last year, as did British activist Caroline Criado-Perez after she successfully campaigned to get more images of women onto British banknotes.
-----
Those posting with female usernames, researchers were shocked to discover, received 25 times as many malicious messages as those whose designations were masculine or ambiguous.
-----
Over the last few months, a number of black women with substantial social media presences conducted an informal experiment of their own. Fed up with the fire hose of animosity aimed at them, Jamie Nesbitt Golden and others adopted masculine Twitter avatars. Golden replaced her photo with that of a hip, bearded, young white man, though she kept her bio and continued to communicate in her own voice. “The number of snarky, condescending tweets dropped off considerably, and discussions on race and gender were less volatile,” Golden wrote, marveling at how simply changing a photo transformed reactions to her. “Once I went back to Black, it was back to business as usual.”
-----
It’s not that women and people of color aren’t doing innovative work in reporting and cultural criticism; it’s just that they get passed over by investors and financiers in favor of the familiar.
As Deanna Zandt and others have pointed out, such real-world lack of diversity is also regularly seen on the rosters of technology conferences, even as speakers take the stage to hail a democratic revolution on the Web, while audiences that look just like them cheer. In early 2013, in reaction to the announcement of yet another all-male lineup at a prominent Web gathering, a pledge was posted on the website of the Atlantic asking men to refrain from speaking at events where women are not represented. The list of signatories was almost immediately removed “due to a flood of spam/trolls.”
-----
In a similar vein, collaborative filtering sites like Reddit and Slashdot, heralded by the digerati as the cultural curating mechanisms of the future, cater to users who are up to 87% male and overwhelmingly young, wealthy, and white. Reddit, in particular, has achieved notoriety for its misogynist culture, with threads where rapists have recounted their exploits and photos of underage girls got posted under headings like “Chokeabitch,” “Niggerjailbait,” and “Creepshots.”
-----
No comments:
Post a Comment