Gender Trouble

In Tanja Carstensens’ article “Gender Trouble in Web 2.0: Gender Relations in Social Network Sites, Wikis and Weblogs” Carstensen states that some of the main issues with web 2.0 is if feminist ideals are as equal to masculine ideals in today’s social and blogger sphere world? With these new technological advances has it made an impact with identity in social media? Is it harder to tell if someone is really who they say they are?

                  In the beginning of the article it Carstensen states that with the amount of research that has been involved in the understanding of gender equality in this cyber world that women are viewed differently depending on  the age group. Though, the internet has been labeled as a man’s domain girls in their late teens to early adulthood actually participate in more social networking than the men of their age and therefor have a major tool for voicing their opinions and making a stand for gender equality.    

                  Now something that had made national attention in 2010 about a major issue with gender identity on the web was the movie, Catfish. Now a regular seasoned show, Catfish introduced to the general public that you can’t always believe what someone post on the web about their gender. The premise of the whole thing is to point out that social media, even though it has brought society a great amount of resources, has also given people the ability to play out alternate lives with other users on the web. I find this personally as frightening information. I’ve always known that I should always be careful about what kind of personal information I put on the web but, just the thought of starting conversations with people and believing them to be who they say they are only to find out it is all a lie physiologically terrifying.  I know one can avoid such a misfortune by only talking to people who you actually know personally on the web, which is how I go about my social media. Yet, there are still thousands of people who just don’t seem to understand that just because someone says they are male or female it isn’t always true.

                  That brings us to another issue in society; homosexuals in social media. It is true that on some social media sites they only allow the user to state if they are male or female, or interested in men or women. Specifically with these kinds of social media sites we can only see what the webpages wants us to see, which blinds us from the actual truth. Thankfully this is not the case for all social media site especially Facebook and MySpace which allow the user to say, “Not sure” or even for relationship statues, “complicated”. So my question is even though some social media sites allow multiple identities for users to access will we ever be able to differentiate someone’s identity on the web honestly? 

Sorry guys, I was having technical difficulties getting these blogs up...