“Mr” WordPress
Was exploring ways to access info on the g&t site a little and ended up looking at comments people made. The first one, I noticed, seemed to be an automatically generated comment by the blog company itself. It was titled “Mr WordPress”, which I thought was quite interesting in relation to our discussion about technology as masculine culture.
CLICK ON THIS IMAGE TO SEE WORDS LARGER. Technology portrayed as masculine by the fictional "Mr WordPress". The WordPress Company uses this poster-boy as their automatic comment-generator .
Here the blog company, which is really just called WordPress was referring to itself in “person” form using the masculine abbreviation “Mr”. Probably this is related to the historical English use of masculine words to refer to more global words (eg “mankind” for “humankind”, “he” for a person of unspecified gender) which I do find problematic. But it seemed very interesting that the company was talking about a technological entity (the automatically generated message sender) as male.
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Natasha:
Just to add a little something to chew on: there is no WordPress company. WordPress is a piece of open-source software developed and maintained by a community of volunteers. The decision to make the intial blog post & author male, therefore, was made and has been maintained by the community at-large … which makes it all the more interesting, imho.
–R
Thanks for sharing
As far as I can tell though, if it is successful, all you will get is a different parametrization of the “Landscape”, an infinite number of complicated qfts, corresponding to the infinite number of complicated “string vacua”.