Life in the Network

Okay, so the name's not Mario, it's Mailliw02, which is William and 20 backwards. My Meez is a girl, cares about her hair, dresses up, and likes to show herself off. She is also in front of an anarchy symbol which I thought was perfect being that I am in Washington, D.C.

I think it is amazing that so much study goes into all of this. Before I knew the Cyberliteracy book and Turkle's chapters existed, I could not have even thought about so much brainpower going into the equivalent of "women's rights on the Internet". Now that I have found it, I'm kind of intrigued. Because most everything is laid out in text, or at least the Internet started that way, it seems it is easier to put different spins on things, and take things out of context. At the same time I now realize there are some real gender issues on the web that I have not thought about. I just think that sometimes people take it to the extreme.
One thing that I thought was amazing to study was Gurak's analysis of gender swapping near the end of the chapter. I didn't realize we could breakdown what a person was so easily by gender. While I'm sure there are exceptions, it seems we can learn a lot by the way people type, like in "Joan's" case, where a man was trying to be a women, but was much more aggressive than most women. "Men, even when disguised as women still exhibit classic male traits." (Gurak, 80) While this is of course true, I think she takes it to the extreme when she says, "Cyberspace is not cut off from the everyday sexism of the regular world" (Gurak, 81). I would argue that it is. If a man goes into a chatroom and starts sexually harassing a woman, it may have nothing to do with him being sexist in "real life". Just as women can step out of character to be men, men can step out of character to be women, I think both can step out of character to be sexist. How do we know that "Joan" wasn't a very shy male in real life, who would have a heard time approaching a woman? At the same time "Joan" wanted to really be a powerful overbearing male, so he went online to try and engage women in sex by being smooth and coercive. Women could do the same thing, be very powerful in "real life", and like to be submissive. While Gurak tries to tell us to stop the stereotypes on the net, I think she herself is creating her own while trying to fight for women's rights. While I think there should be equality on the web and would agree that "fake-lesbian syndrome" (from Turkle) probably occurs, the authors do not do a very good job of stepping out of their issues at hand (women's rights) and looking at what women want men to be, which I think has a lot of influence about how men act. I don't have any studies at hand to back me up besides my own observations, but I would argue that women like men who are confident. One way of doing this is to be cocky, while there are other ways that do not get the point across as easily (like being modest AND confident at the same time), so it is easier for men to be dominant and cocky and respected by women in my opinion. Because I don't want to further open up that can of worms, I will stop there, but I just want to make sure that we understand that these two readings are both written by women, which is fine, but they aren't doing a very good job of gender swapping.