Proposal for Digital Diversity final project
My idea started with one word: GENDER.
After a bit more thought and searching (and conversing with Julie!) my final project will look at how online spaces reinforce traditional gender roles found in meatspace. Specifically I will focus on social networking cites like Facebook, Myspace, LiveJournal, and Who Likes You?.
If you know of others please leave me a comment so I can check them out too.
There are several aspects in regards to gender roles and my final project and presentation will have a deeper discussion than given here.
Social Networking cites are not all the same. Mysapce has customizable options as well as being able to addmusic that plays when your page loads. Facebook on the other hand uses a template and you can add a photo and customize your tabs and boxes.
Our society is hyper-focused on looks; this is even more important for young girls, and females alike.
Since I am still in the brainstorming phase I have not narrowed down what the parameters of similarities that I am going to focus on.
I am open to any guidance, suggestions, or helpful advice.
oh that was from brittany btw LO
what about gay and lesbian spaces? are you going to include those as well? this, of course, is not specifically “gender” but “sex” (as we discussed in depth in the psychology of women class) but in those spaces, also we have very gender-ized ideas. even in these, users feel they must adequately create the appearance of their chosen sexuality. colors, design, words used are thoughtfully chosen to target whom they wish to as well as creating the image they want to portray. maybe you could browse through a few of these and notice how many gay males, for example, use concepts that are socially accepted as “female” to portray their sexuality (and vice-versa for females). you could go into how the chosen music, font, colors, ect reinforce popular notions of gender even within these crossed and mixed-gendered online communities. just a thought and you’re just the right out-going type that could pull it off.
The first comment I have is that I didn’t think that as a class we have at all been talking about spaces being gender (or race, or class) neutral. If by “we” Brent means “some segment of a utopian society somewhere,” then ok, sure. But the whole point of this course is that culture is deeply embedded in everything, including cyberculture.
So anyway, Sheila, you have a good start. Once you settle on a few use cases (sites of exploration) you will be able to quickly gather data and determine what your argument will be. For the next version of this, work on fleshing it out a little to talk about sources — hypothesize even w/o data at this point and figure out what sorts of sources you could use from that which we have read already. You can save looking for other sources (design-specific, for instance) when you figure out exactly what you’re arguing once you get your data. Expand on all this for blog #9 and you should be good to go.
Agreed, this sounds like a solid and well thought out plan for your paper! I am excited to see what you come up with
So you’re going to contradict the basis of what we have been working towards as the cyberspaces being gender neutral….I LIKE IT
“coo” should be “co,” obvs
This isn’t my real comment, but in a DTC class I coo-taught last spring, we constructed the final project based on research in many social networking sites. You can see the list we used then, here: http://www.wsu.edu/~arola/356/spring09/final.html