Women and Gender Studies

Posted: January 4th, 2023

Women and Gender Studies

Student’s Name:

Institutional Affiliation:

Women and Gender Studies

Introduction

The effects of the digital era across several aspects of the contemporary society are clear. Yet, the impact that the internet has on memory and functions in regards to gender remains a key topic of study. In human history, the internet is the most extensive and highly adopted technology.  Internet has enhanced the growth of social media platforms. According to Firth (2019, p.121), social media has completely re-shaped the way in which people interact, consume entertainment and media, search for data, as well as manage their relationships and social networks. Internet access as facilitated by smartphones has become ubiquitous and portable to the level where the world is considered ‘online’. Anna Reading in her book evaluates how the technologies adopted in the 21st century like mobile phones, the internet, and social media are changing human memory and how it relates to gender (Reading, 2016, p.2). Every era brings with it new technologies that affect human memory. In the book, she studies the manner in which globalized cultures are transforming the memories of gender and gender of memory by looking at several case studies in the globalized world which she calls ‘globital age’. This paper seeks to justify the validity of Reading’s claim that social media has influenced the gendering of memory.

Discussion

To understand the role of social media in transforming the gendering of memory, it is important to look into the past and evaluate Anna Reading’s thoughts on mnemonic technologies. Over the years, mnemonic technologies have transformed from people using pens to write manuscripts to the use of computers to write and print books in large-scale, and from engraved art to mass film production.  With the advent of computer technologies, intermediated memories have shifted to capturing, storing, and sharing both public and private memories through digital devices and platforms like mobile phone and social media sites (Perrin, 2015, p.53). Each technology according to Reading (2016, p.4) extends the human body the same way mnemonic technologies extend an individual’s memory. Today’s technology facilitates visual memories meaning that the human brain is extended by the internet.

Memory practices and mnemonic technologies are socially established and are distant from ever becoming gender-neutral. Female employees worked as machines in the 1930s, where they performed numerical functions, however, the introduction of advanced technological innovation changed how they performed their work (Reading, 2016, p.7). Technologies such as VR and AI are transforming storage and memory through digital platform provides the chance to develop better forms of mobile phones. Whereas other aspects of digitization are innovative for human memory, social and mobile technologies have made the most impact, thus influencing large numbers. These technologies have become the heart of peoples’ daily lives compared to computers. 

‘Globital memory’ as explained by Reading means that human memories easily and quickly travel from a person to a platform, in this case, social media, and from local to the whole world. New mnemonic technologies also create new prospects and challenges for inequality in gender. Some historical gender practices like patriarchal retaining where women take their partners’ surname or the historically recorded gender privileges, activities, achievements, and exploits of men and boys are mediated routinely into public and private memories in manners that women and girls are not (Reading, 2016, p.16). However, with social media, how memory is captured, recorded, and distributed is changing and so are memories of gender.

People can create, amass, and distribute mediated recollections in the globital memory. People have switched from diaries and use different digital platforms to explain their views. Photographic albums have now changed to social and mobile galleries on mobile phones. Today, the internet consumes a significant amount of people’s attention each day (Perrin, 2015, p.58). As a result, most people spend time on their smart-phones, which have reduced the digital divide as middle and lower nations are also connected.  Globital memory is, therefore, becoming an action field that entangles people within masculine capitalism. With mobile phones, internet connectivity, and social media, people’s mediated memories are created and prepared to mutate, travel, and at the same time stack the past together in adventurous ways.

Ways in Which Social Media Transforms the Gendering of Memory

Daily Life

Online picture sharing sites, social networking, and the use of mobile phones have unequally altered the documented story of everyday family life. The innovative technologies present new potentials for what people remember about their daily lives. A research carried out by Lindsey (2015, p.36) revealed that women use their phones to take pictures on prosaic life moments and share with their partners. For instance, an image of an empty bowls may depict food given or about to be served to children. A picture of a child taken to play in the park represents a daily routine for the parents showing the love and care given to that child. The imaged memories described above were rare since people took pictures during important occasions like naming, holidays, and weddings.

News vs Friendships

Studies reveal that men are inclined to using social media to search for information, whereas women use the platforms to connect with other people. Also, when men log into social media sites, they are in a way seeking for new connections, whereas women focus on sustaining the already build relationships. Facebook undertook an investigation that revealed that many of its female users use the site to share more subjective concerns like relationship and family matters (Park, 2016). The company analyzed approximately 1.5 million status updated by users and grouped them in categories. Every subject was then assessed depending on audience reactions and gender preferences. The outcome of the investigation revealed that women and men not only have preferences in particular topics, but female topics like family fun and birthdays received more likes from other subscribers, while those topics said to be male like deep thoughts and sports aroused more comments.

It is impossible, however, to deduce that women do not have the desire to give remarks on the conceptual concerns enough to distribute them. A reason why a female Facebook user can be more uncommunicative is negative comments. Undeniably, women tend to receive negative and abusive feedback when they express their opinions on social media (Park 2016). This was supported by a Twitter experiment that was carried by Martin Belambelam- a British Journalist.  He subscribed on Twitter with a parody account and guest-tweeted as different female and male celebrities. When he signed up as a woman, his account gained many offensive comments including misogynist ones. The negative reception or feedback women get on social media put so many of them off and even deny many the chance to use the platforms without any fears of being intimidated.

The Feminist Memory

The globital epoch while causing social inequalities and gendered divisions has also enabled new types of radical memories to marshal action around inequality matters. Some of these activist groups have drawn attention to issues of abuse and injustice among young girls. These girls have been mistreated, sexually abused, humiliated, and used for forced labor while still in orphanages, asylum, churches, girls’ home, and government organization (Burger, Henderson, Kim, & Zarrella, 2011, p. 1303). Those who survived in the 1970s and 1980s have used digital media avenue to air sensitization programs and to reflect on what they encountered, which attract the attention of the whole world.

            The globital memory also has a negative impact whereby deep mining is involved to acquire resources used in the manufacture of phones to ensure that digital memories are made possible. Globital memory does not value the green economy and neither is it cheap as it exploits the poorest parts of the world at the advantage of the planet (Reading, 2019, p. 298).  People should not forget where mobile phones and other virtual devices go once disposed of. Majority of the e-waste in the world is processed in China with children and women working in those areas for low wages. They breathe in toxins due to the burn of the digital devices to make it possible to retrieve the precious metals. These children and women will not have a memory of Facebook as an enjoyable network but will see it as a damaging platform.

The selfie Impact

Based on what women and men like to discuss on social media sites, the choice of social media platform used varies. Most female social media users prefer visual or image-oriented mediums, whereas men incline towards text-oriented platforms (Handyside & Ringrose, 2017, p.349). Social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Pinterest have a higher number of female users; with digital discussions, some forums attract large audiences (Handyside & Ringrose, 2017, p.349). Overall, social media is gendered as there are several social media options where women and men engage in different subjects and consume social media itself as a gender function.

Women, on the other hand, are drawn to sharing and producing content. According to Albury (2015, p.1736), the answer behind the stated argument lies in the traditional role of the family whereby mothers in the society have been responsible for taking pictures of the family and storing them for memories. In this context, Instagram is said to be a contemporary extension of the historical female role that started with photography popularization. In this sense, it is possible to understand why women take and post more selfies online compared to men (Albury (2015, p.1737). Men who take many selfies to post on social media are considered to have psychopathic or narcissist personalities.

Public Death

Social and mobile technologies have caused changes in news collection and public witnessing. Outrages can be unconcernedly witnessed using mobile phones and posted on social media, with pictures showing state domination and terror attacks circulated locally to internationally within minutes or hours (McLaughlin, 2017). The phone is also used for collective witnessing, with some organization using them to witness and record challenges that people go through. Through social media, girls and women have gained a position in the global media (McLaughlin, 2017). For instance, a seven-year-old girl, Bana Alabed, was able to tweet about Syria bombings and her experience during the chaotic period upon which the story was picked by global mainstream media. Another female social media user posted on Twitter displaying her feelings and concerns about the Israeli Defense Force bombing raids, and her thoughts prompted media stations to interview her.

Pregnancy and Birth

Gendering and gender memory has transformed over the years through the influence of medical imaging, especially the obstetric sonogram. Since the technology emerged, feminists have criticized how it indorses a Hobbesian human perception where the fetus is secluded from humanity (Reading, 2011, p.378). Today medical institutions give fetus images for profit to parents who then display them through social media channels. Initially, a gender-neutral baby was the ideal, but with technology, parents want to know the gender of the child then share it to the public through what is known as ‘gender reveal’. Also through the sonogram, heterosexual partners are able to connect with their children and use it to remember their future story of their gendered baby, superseding the physical natural memory held by a mother.

Social media also shapes how parents remember the loss of the child or a pregnancy. Earlier, people did not hold miscarriage memories but virtualization today enables them to share the foetal image with the rest of the world (Reading, 2010). Memorial websites or pages have been created that are devoted to the stillborn babies or those babies that died after they were born (Reading, 2010). The natural, personified grief and memory about pregnancy losses have today become a socially fixed on-screen image, whereby grief is shared and socially networked.

The advanced technology aiding in monitoring the unborn is unequally reached and dispersed irregularly. Although sonography is an obstetric healthcare schedule, many women in the country side have underprivileged reach to this care (Reading, 2010). Even in the richest economy, minority groups are less likely to have an ultrasound or even get it in their final semester (Reading, 2010). These types of unborn gendered narratives as therefore globital- virtually uneven mnemonically- due to economic disparities. The unequal reach and distribution of such technologies calls for quick intervention to ensure that everyone benefits from the innovations that transform childbirth experiences.

 Critical Analysis

The evaluation illustrates that social media plays a vital role in facilitating the gendering of memory, an awareness that calls for the creation of more access to social media as well as awareness on how to express ideas that cause discomfort on the various digital platforms. Creating more opportunities such as lowering taxes on electronic gadgets such as computers, tablets and smartphones that access the internet   and enhancing internet connectivity may enrich people’s appreciation of women’s role in so many areas (Chidgey 2018). Increased access to such resources will enable women to become more flexible in the way they express their everyday encounters, habits, emotions, ideas and beliefs concerning past incidents and how they appear now (Chidgey 2018). The political leaders must intervene, as well as technology firms to enable women access social media avenues to express their ideas in a way that does not have adverse economic impact on them (Chidgey 2018). Nonetheless, such interventions will only bear fruits if they are accompanied by adequate sensitization on the most suitable ways of expressing ideas on social media.

Such awareness programs are necessary because with the escalating concerns of cybercrime, so many unsusceptible internet users are at great risk of becoming victims. The awareness programs, therefore, should address issues such as cost, societal perception of using social media to express ideas, formation of groups on social media and security among other fundamental concerns. Creating effective measures to facilitate how social media advance gendering of memory will create a society where equality prevails, and where the past gendered inequalities do not have adverse effects on current and future practices (Chidgey 2018). Also important is that the discussions on gendering of memory will expand from the common topic of man being superior to women and expand to other pertinent matters touching on sexuality such as sexual orientation and how the variations between heterosexuals and homosexuals caused much debate in the past, and continues to draw varying view (Chidgey 2018). Certainly, social media serves as a vital tool for transforming gendering of memory, but this may only yield the anticipated outcome through adequate planning and investment.

Conclusion

Social media plays a substantial role in the technologically savvy world. Social media platforms not only facilitate global networking but also connect nations within a matter of seconds through easy dissemination of opinions and news. Just like any other media forms, gender subjects can have positive and negative impacts on the society. Considering that more women form the higher numbers of social media users compared to men, it is reasonable to assume that this type of media has a significant influence, both bad and good, on gender issues. From the above discussion, it is clear that globalized technologies implicate and mediate memories in significant ways. This translates to new constraints for the enlargement of media and disparity in gender. Furthermore, it forms new ideas or different gendered recollections to be empowered to achieve better results.

References

Albury, K. (2015). Selfies| selfies, sexts and sneaky hats: Young people’s understandings of gendered practices of self-representation. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1734–1745. Retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/3132/1396

Burger, J. D., Henderson, J., Kim, G., & Zarrella, G. (2011, July). Discriminating gender on Twitter. In Proceedings of the conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (pp. 1301-1309). Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2145432.2145568

Chidgey, R 2018, Feminist afterlives assemblage memory in activist times,Palgrave Macmillan,

            London. 

Firth, J., Torous, J., Stubbs, B., Firth, J. A., Steiner, G. Z., Smith, L., & Sarris, J. (2019). The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry, 18(2), 119-129. Retrieved https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20617

Handyside, S., & Ringrose, J. (2017). Snapchat memory and youth digital sexual cultures: Mediated temporality, duration and affect. Journal of Gender Studies, 26(3), 347-360. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1280384

Lindsey, L. L. (2015). Gender roles: A sociological perspective. Routledge. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=qjjbCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=How+social+media+defines+gender+roles&ots=U4lI65CfSv&sig=h3h2zQ3-ZMpJc_VlICG-h1fU3PI&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=How%20social%20media%20defines%20gender%20roles&f=false

McLaughlin, C. (2017) ‘Memory, place and gender: Armagh stories: Voices from the Gaol’, Memory Studies, doi: 10.1177/1750698017730872.

Park, G., Yaden, D. B., Schwartz, H. A., Kern, M. L., Eichstaedt, J. C., Kosinski, M., … & Seligman, M. E. (2016). Women are warmer but no less assertive than men: Gender and language on Facebook. PloS one, 11(5). Retrieved from doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0155885

Perrin, A. (2015). Social media usage. Pew Research Center, 52-68. Retrieved from https://www.secretintelligenceservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/PI_2015-10-08_Social-Networking-Usage-2005-2015_FINAL.pdf

Reading, A. (2010). Gender and the right to memory. Media Development, 2. pp. 11-14

Reading, A. (2011). Memory and identity. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(4) 377–378. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1367549411404719

Reading, A. (2016). Gender and memory in the globital age. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=lhwDDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=Gendering+of+memory+has+been+transformed+by+social+media&source=bl&ots=pwaa7lmstJ&sig=ACfU3U2Yvx-fIdsE5KwsYmkny3ciSU6Jjg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjB-MuQ3JjpAhWpDmMBHfTUCLcQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=Gendering%20of%20memory%20has%20been%20transformed%20by%20social%20media&f=false

Reading, A. (2019). The female memory factory: How the gendered labour of memory creates mnemonic capital. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 26(3), 293-312. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506819855410

Tamboukou, M. (2016). Gendering the memory of work: Women workers’ narratives. Routledge. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=NpukDAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Ways+in+Which+Social+Media+Transforms+the+Gendering+of+Memory&ots=UzRHPU5voG&sig=arUs1nEeFZZMUvnZvFauVa7CJ-o&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Ways%20in%20Which%20Social%20Media%20Transforms%20the%20Gendering%20of%20Memory&f=false