Gender and Technology Spring 2009

Another insight (from Cat:)
the  extraordinary degree to which
students have come to know-and-learn-from
one another in this class…. read more…

The mantra of HHGTTG applies to multimedia projects too. Although not everyone is panicking and none of you really should, I do recognize that this project is very open-ended and very different from what many of you have encountered in your college or high school careers. First I want to remind you of my post that explains a little of how I put my projects together–although you definitely do not have to do something like what I did. Second, I just wanted to post a few of the ideas that people have tossed around with me in individual conferences. Anyone who wants to add to this should feel free to.

• A collage/poster which may be put together with Glogster or may be literal cut and paste around the idea of online/offline identity.
• A movie using Xtranormal or something like it to emphasize the contrast between human and machine.
• A journal-like presentation about a game character, using screenshots from the game itself.
• A powerpoint-based image presentation around the idea of the way women are represented in games.

These are just a few of the ideas that people tossed around and they may have morphed since we had our conferences. In the “More About Multimedia” post, I linked to Alan Levine’s 50 Ways to Tell a Story wiki that links to many multimedia tools. The first 10 or so are standard powerpoint-like tools, many of which allow you to upload a PowerPoint presentation and it turns it into a web-based slide presentation or even a movie. Since many of you are familiar with PP and how it works, this is a good option. Don’t let the technology be a barrier. It’s great if you try something new, but if it’s keeping you from sharing your ideas, use something else that you’re more comfortable with.

Other possibilities:
(this one from Baibh–>):
There is a program on most windows machines called Windows Media Maker which edits video and sound (it takes most .avi and .mkv files, but it will not take quicktime).

(this one from Melanie’s search–>): Mosaic Maker…

So my best friend is also a mawrtyr and her boyfriend is absolutely addicted to WOW. He is online for hours and hours on end, he sets up raids and has 6 characters that he has each levelled to 80 (the highest I believe). I’ve mentioned him before but in an informational context, he’s guided me through WOW and has led to me to level 10. It was so interesting the other day when we were talking about goldfarming cuz he had mentioned something earlier about an experience he had recently had but he didn’t use the specific “goldfarming” term. About 2 weekends ago I visited him at his apartment in Philly and he was the angriest I had ever seen him. I of course asked him why his mood was so sour and he replied “f*ckin WOW!” I immediately rolled my eyes and just asked,”What is it this time?” He then told me how someone had hacked into his guild’s account (filled with gold that the players can use to gain equipment etc.) and stolen all the money and then proceeded to sell it to get real capital. I think my jaw dropped to the floor. Hacking in WOW? Identity theft in a fantasy world? This was hitting too close to home. And with our recent discussions about the occurrences online having a “real” effect in the “real world” I found all of it a little freaky and I also felt sad. Here is this guy who devotes his efforts to being the best player he can be and it all gets taken away in 3 seconds. He saw WOW has a haven/ safeplace and that security has been destroyed and he was heartbroken. 

I felt soooo guilty for making fun of the game after this. He used to devote so much of his time to playing that his girlfriend would get so frustrated and shout “YOU CAN’T GROW UP TO BE A SHAMAN!” and I suppose he’s realized this now. I suppose someone’s utopia is another’s dystopia and that utopia can so easily become a dystopia and their dystopia can become another’s utopia and the cycle continues. WOW (utopia), I don’t understand (my dystopia), gets hacked (becomes dystopia to player), hacker sells for money (hacker’s utopia). As a math major I can’t help but see the cycle this presents. Will the cycle eventually reach a limit where everything is a utopia or worse a dystopia but no utopia to become of it? This is worrisome.

P.S. I also vote for option 3 for the tech presentations.

I’ve been thinking lately, we spent the past few weeks talking about video games and Second Life mostly. Like Anne, I felt somewhat relieved when we started talking about the effect of our gaming on the world. One of the reasons why Gold Farming is so disturbing to me, and maybe more disturbing than other sweat shops, is it’s based on seemingly nothing. Money is earned through interacting with moving images on a screen. Gold is created in the game, and then translated into real money – like exchanging Canadian dollars for American. But, other than this exchange, the game itself is not real in a physical, tangible way.

But there are engenderings of technology other than video games, and I’ve been wondering about those. We have mostly talked about things which are manifested on a computer or online, and seem to create an entire other world separate from our own, and we’ve blurred that distinction a lot. But there’s a lot of other gendered, contemporary technology out there. I’m curious about how things like gym equipment or cookware are differently gendered, and what effect that has on the world. Especially when you think about who has access to what – it’s much easier to get a solar cooker in the US than in the Sudan, but they would be of much more use there than here. I don’t think I have a solid point yet about this, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about!

I watched a new special on the history channel over the weekend, called Life After People. Essentially, the show digitally illustrates what the world will be like 1 day, 1 year, 3 years, 9 years, 50 years, etc etc. After people are no longer living on earth. This show proposed that just one day after people, every power plant shuts down– we need people to maintain them. The lights are off, and technology as we know it is on the decline. This episode in particular was about what will happen to the bodies that are left behind: mummies, cryogenically frozen embryos, cryogenically frozen people, and human DNA altogether. I was so intrigued, I’ve changed the topic of my multimedia project completely; I will be focusing on the technology that humans have used and are currently used to “cheat death”. Many researchers agree that humans have an immortality drive that drives us to find ways to live the longest, preserve our genes, and preserve our species, by any means possible. Life After People also showcased a literal Immortality drive. Richard Garriot, the game developer that coined the term MMORPG with Tabula Rasa and Ultima, has created an Immortality Drive, or a microchip that is encoded with the DNA sequence of a few carefully chosen individuals. This list includes: Physicist Stephen Hawkins, Comdeian Stephen Colbert, Venture Capital founder Tim Draper, and Playboy Playmate Jo Garcia. Quite the… eclectic mix.

Are these the people that are agreed to influence our society now? or are these people that someone honestly believes should be what we leave’behind’ as a trace of humanity? Garriot, who traveled to the international space station to deliver the drive, has said that his hopes are that the next generation of beings that follow our existence will encounter these DNA sequences and be able to clone humans, thus extending humanity. Although this is an outrageous thought, which apparently a LOT of money has been put into, I can’thelp but think that its all a big joke. I guess the aliens will have the last laugh either way…

In completely unrelated news, here are some pictures I took of a feminist bathroom I encountered today.

Apparently the last one was cutoff, it said “When God created men she was only experimenting”

hmm… next time I visit this restaurant I will definitely make an effort to sneak into the men’s room and see what their artwork is like…

Alex’s comment brought up something which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately- the permanence of what we’re putting out there on the internet. I have one screenname that I tend to use for anything and everything I sign up for online, and I never really gave it a second thought. The other day, my mom (who knows my screenname from AIM) called me and said, “Hey, I Googled your screenname and all this stuff started popping up. Are you registered on all these sites?” I hadn’t thought about the fact that anyone who knew my “secret internet name” could just search it and find practically every site I had ever registered with. Now, I’m pretty rigorous about changing privacy settings to make myself unsearchable or hidden. But some of the sites that were popping up on the search were places where I had (or thought I had!) deleted my profile. And yet, there they were! You really can’t delete everything on the internet, and, as my mother has clearly demonstrated, you can’t keep people out of your business either. Now, I don’t really care that my family and friends can find me on Shelfari and see all the books I’ve ever read, but it’s weird to me that I’m now unwillingly associated with different sites that I’d rather not be anymore. In this internet age, you really can’t avoid signing up for most things. I guess the lesson I’ve taken away from all this is to be more creative with my screennames from now on, because it really is there forever.

So… with all this thought about selves and the representation thereof, I’d like to bring up inheritance. This may sound odd, but if we go with the argument that each avatar we create is a bit of ourselves, then what does that mean? It means that we’re making kids? Clones? Do these avatars have rights, and are they separate entities? Just some food for thought.

Maybe we are only that one electron that slides through time and space. (All IS one and one IS all?)

For those of you who’ve read Bruce Coville, I say only this: “POOT!”

Out of the blue yesterday, a personal epiphany about the self popped into my mind.  I realized that I don’t think the definition of a person’s ‘self’ necessarily includes physical attributes and/or other inalienable facts (i.e. race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc).  I believe the self can be greatly influenced by these things, but is not necessarily equal to them.  My understanding/definition of the self is focuses more on a person’s actions and how/why they decide to take particular actions.  In order to fully explain/define a person’s self, I would need to know exactly how they would act in every possible situation/dilemna.  I don’t even think it’s possible for a single person to think through every situation and fully explain their self to another person.  (This doesn’t mean I believe a person can’t know their own self.  In fact, I think it’s very possbile; for example, people who have discovered themselves through past experiences are able to easily judge how they will react/act when faced with a dilemna/situation/choice.)  But back to the notion of trying to present a true reprsentation of yourself to another person: Can it be done given my sense of self?

Anne asked us in class about our physical representations of ourselves.  It was this question that ultimately led me to the above epiphany.  I was at a rugby tournament, in my usual jeans and t-shirt, getting sunburned, screaming vehemently at the players on the pitch.  I thought: wow, I wouldn’t want a potential employer to see me like this.  That’s when it occured to me how unfair it is to judge a person’s entire self based on one aspect of it.  After not thinking about it for several hours, the above epiphany popped into my head and really helped me make sense of the conversations we’ve been having about the self.

Every presentation of our selves in the ‘real’ world is just as much one side of our selves as any representation of our selves in a virtual setting.  In that sense, I think I agree that we should be held responsible for things we say and do online (not in the same exact way we are in real life, but in a similar way at least).  In class the other day, my small group discussed a Savage Love letter that discusses meeting a stranger online to fulfill a date rape fantasy.  Savage responded to the letter by advising that both parties print out hard copies of emails that discuss consent and a chosen safe word and that any encounter be audio-taped for proof of the safe word being spoken or not.  These emails and audio recordings are obviously admissable as evidence in court and, in the context of our class discussions, they may also be considered virtual/real world representations of the self.  This is just one of many real world examples of people being responsible for what they do and say in virtual spaces, including through email, in Second Life, etc.  I don’t agree with some of the things that have been used as real world evidence, and do support a strong degree of privacy online and for an individual’s personal electronic devices, but if we are responsible for the actions of our physical representations in the real world and there is little conceptual difference between our physical representations of our selves and our virtual representations of our selves, then how can we be less responsible for our virtual actions?

I forgot to write about this article I read in Time magazine last weekend. This Time article discussed Facebook and perspective college students. Apparently many colleges are getting on facebook to attract potential students. especially with the extra things they offer. Also, groups have been started to share where you got in and where you did not. It seems to me that Facebook just keeps expanding.  I am not sure how I feel about this, but I think this is going too far. Shouldn’t some things be kept private? Why should all these colleges prostrate themselves on facebook? It seems they all want to tell everyone how technologically advanced they are, making them more desirable.  I think it’s cool that they have certain extras, but shouldn’t the focus be academics? Facebook seems to have become a necessary social network. Is it considered a virtual world or just a virtual profile? I think it has become a social world, since you can now interact with colleges, people from around the world, and play games. One thing that I do find disturbing however, is that it has also become a place to grieve. I had never considered it before, but over the summer a friend of mine died and her profile remains. It has become a “memorial” to her in the virtual world. Apparently our reality selves can die but the virtual ones will live on. It just creeps me out.

Anyway, I am not saying Facebook is good or bad.  I just find it curious that within the last five years it has grown so much, permeating almost every aspect of my life.

I think using the blogs for class has been very beneficial. It has given people the chance to express themselves in a variety of ways in and out of the classroom. Another benefit to the blog is how everyone around the world has access to the blog. Even though the number of outside participants has been few, people are still able to look in and comment on the blogs we write. As a class studying real world gender and technological practices it is both beneficial and necessary to have outside input.

I think one of the long-term effects of this blog will be on students themselves. I think after this class many of the students will continue to blog in another Bryn Mawr class. If not for a class then maybe just for fun out on the World Wide Web or even start their own blog.

Using the blogs within this class has allowed our class to cover a large variety of topics that have interested everyone. Without the blogs I think class discussions would be lacking in terms of material and substance. The blogs allow people to persue there outside interests and present them to the class for further discussion.

I was thinking about all the things we talked about relating to our avatars for the last two weeks or so. It had turned out that a lot of us tried to make our avatars look like ourselves as much as possible. I was wondering what people do/did when it came to naming their avatars – do they make them sound like their real names as much as possible, or the other way round? What makes them choose to do whatever it is that they do?

My own avatar on Second Life was called Mars. Sounds like a really random name that might have to do with some obsession with the planet maybe, but not really. Mars is kind of a shortened form of my already somewhat short name, Marwa. Some of my friends used to call me Mars back in school. While I did not want to give it my real name to my avatar, I also was hesitant about giving it a name completely different from my actual name. I am not quite sure why. I think that I felt that the name had to resemble me in some way too, not just my avatar. Hence, Mars.

Even in real life, if I am ever in a situation where someone asks me my name but I am not comfortable giving it to him/her, the fake name I almost always use is Maria. Even when I know for certain that I don’t want to give my real identity, I change only one single letter from my real name. I can never pick a name that does not start with the same letter as my actual name, and mostly go with a name that has the same first three letters at least. I don’t really completely know why I do that. Am I the only one who likes to have a name similar to her real name? Are there other people who feel that their names have to resemble themselves too?

Thanks for the mind-stirring post and article, George! This is going to be kind of a comment/response to George, plus some other things I’ve been thinking about.

The “Dude, You’ve Got Problems” article reminded me a lot of the Pro-feminist Men group I enacted a while back. As I discussed, one of the goals of this group was to expand the definition of “masculinity” to encompass many ways of being  a “man” — to bring pluralize “masculinity” to recognize varying “masculinities” (which interestingly this blog’s spell-check is red-underlining for me as not a word).  And that’s exactly what Judith Warner is discussing in her article.  She’s saying that boys will call each other “fags”, “homos”, etc. as an insult, even if the name-called boy isn’t homosexual but rather has “feminine” (and here we have the technology/contsruction of the word “feminine” to match the subject of the societally defined “masculinity” I was just mentioning) characterisics or interests.

That being said, Warner shifts her focus away from the possibly more obvious, but no less real problem that boys would call each other “gay” as an insult.  This brings in ideas about the technology of linguistics, the naming of things, of labeling, of separating and segregating (“gendering” in another sense of the word) certain people.  In short, it reminds me of middle school and high school when certain people used the phrase “that’s so gay” to mean essentially “that’s so stupid”.  This technology read more…

Last class, we talked about the implications of the games we’re playing. I read an article recently in the New York Times about the “iPhone gold rush” in the current rough economic times… basically, people who have lost their jobs and are struggling to support their family and mortgage payments are turning to the iPhone and hoping to make a steady income by making a successful iPhone application.

Read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/fashion/05iphone.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=iphone%20gold%20rush&st=cse

On another note, I was remembering a video game I used to play a lot as a kid. I didn’t grow up with television or video games, except when I went to Chinese School every Saturday morning. It was always held at this one student’s house and during our “recess,” all the kids would rush into the TV room and play Super Nintendo. We used to play this game called Street Fighter… and now that I think about it, it was extremely racial. We would pick a character and if we played single-player, then the character would fly to different countries to fight other characters and each one represented a certain country and would appear very stereotypically ethnic. Even the backgrounds were very stereotypical. The USA guy was blonde with a crewcut in army fatigues and he fought on an army base. There was only one female character, Chun Li, from China. She looked exactly like an anime character and was dressed rather provocatively with her bare legs showing. If she won, she would jump up and down and giggle. Every single kid in my Chinese School class always chose her as their character. I’m not sure if it’s because she had an amazing kick that was unbeatable and she always kicked ass or whether it was because she was Chinese and we identified with the racial aspect… I don’t think we even realized that she was the only female character.

This year I did not participate in the “Day of Silence,” a day where the LGBTQ community and allies keep silent for a day as a protest against the bullying and harassment of students, especially physical violence and verbal threats. I wish that I had, however, after reading The New York Times

Words hurt. They hurt the people who are the victims of daily torment from bullies. The bullies themselves get hurt by being close-minded, constantly negative, and victims of their own personal situations (as I personally believe that bullies tend to be the people who need a lot of help).

Bullying can happen to a lot of people and it comes in many different forms. Unfortunately, bullying can also be a way of reinforcing stereotypical gender expectations. The words “gay,” “faggot,” and “homo” as insults affect not only the LGBTQ community but the whole spectrum of people in an exceedingly fashion. This especially affects young boys who show any signs of feminity who do so “by being emotional, seeming incompetent, caring too much about clothing, liking to dance or even having an interest in literature” (Warner).

The article “Dude, You’ve Got Problems,” by Judith Warner, starts with the recounting of the suicides of 11-year-old Carl Walker-Hoover from earlier this month and 17-year-old Eric Mohat, who killed himself last year. Both were the victims of verbal abuse from bullies who called them fags and gay, and for reasons which were completely unrelated to their sexuality.

As Warner puts it,

The message to the most vulnerable, to the victims of today’s poisonous boy culture, is being heard loud and clear: to be something other than the narrowest, stupidest sort of guy’s guy, is to be unworthy of even being alive.

It’s weird, isn’t it, that in an age in which the definition of acceptable girlhood has expanded, so that desirable femininity now encompasses school success and athleticism, the bounds of boyhood have remained so tightly constrained?

I have to say, I think my worlds are colliding this week.  There was a new patch for WoW.  We’ve been discussing gaming for the last few weeks.  Last night, a rerun of the Simpsons episode where Marge becomes obsessed with a game like WoW was on, and then this morning, there’s an article about two business professors who go to the Game Developers Conference.  Since we were discussing the implications of gaming yesterday, I thought this quote was particularly pertinent:

Gaming, serious and casual alike, can promote a culture of empathy. During one of the very first sessions the speaker presented a selection of quotes from young gamers. One young gamer said that gaming made him emotional. He felt hardened by reality but games allowed him to release emotions that would have otherwise remained dormant. Rather than desensitizing our youth, games are allowing students to explore what Will Wright, creator of the Sims franchise and Spore, called the “possibility space.” Every game has a beginning and end but today’s advanced games allows each player to create a unique path while seeing, experiencing, and perhaps even feeling the consequence of their decisions.

The authors go on to discuss what higher education can learn from games.  One of the things they suggest is that higher ed can and should create possibility spaces for students and move away from older curriculum, changing with the needs of their students (as gaming companies do).  It occurred to me that that’s what we’ve tried to do in this class–the whole class is really envisioned as a possibility space.  We’re not always successful, perhaps, but it’s also up to each student to create possibility spaces for themselves, using the content and discussions from this course and others to open up new ideas and opportunities.

Earthland Realms – World of Warcraft also WoW in d… – GMX Video