Internet Culture and Gender

I’m writing this blog with a question, or something that keeps me thinking. So it’s personal, but apparently I want to share it with others anyway.

And that is the thing, where I’m thinking about. This paradox. Why are people ‘blogging’? Is a blog simply an online diary? I don’t think so. Of course, they have some functionalities in common like self-expression and creating order out of chaos. But in my opinion blogging is nowadays more about self-presentation.

This becomes clear when you look at the millions of fashion blogs written by girls. The pictures seem to say: ‘look, this is what I’m wearing, THIS IS ME’! However, is this a real image? Girls at their best, beautiful-looking with gorgeous clothes, smiling at the camera? I think that many bloggers are showing an improved version of themselves. And this is the main difference with a diary, where you can actually write about doubts, weaknesses, fears and insecurities. The private-public separation means probably a real-unreal separation.

But why are it girls/women who are mainly blogging (at least the blogs in which self-presentation is central)? And why do they all seem to look so similar? I have absolutely nothing against the fashion blog itself. It can be a way to express creativity, showing the world unique work and to inspire others. Some of them do this particularly well! But I think that this self-presentative fashion-blogging is for a lot of girls more a kind of search for identity. The fact that many fashion blogs look like each other and that these self-presentations are far from real, shows that this identity is maybe hard to find. A new kind of idealized image seems to prevail on the internet, where boys/men do not seem to suffer that much from. And many girls seem thereby to be trapped in this fashion-blog-culture.

We talked about online privacy and what is public in the web. Usually people think that everything is public in the web.

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We  are living in a transitional phase, scenarios of change are not yet well defined, the web it’s one of the last free space, in internet people are completely free, the virtual world is becoming our real world, the question is why the people are so deeply interested in live in  parallel universe?

Showing ourselves has becoming a way to exist.

Internet world has become the ontological proof of human existence .

People use internet to kill loneliness, the paradox is that people use internet to escape from the  loneliness that internet itself has created  .

People want to feel important,  internet it’s an easy way, it’s a meritocratic world where everyone has a chance,  it’s easy not to feel judged in the web world, for this reason   technology is not the enemy but is a source of new forms of identity, thanks to Internet the concept of Humanity is changing itself.  before Internet era, the simplest conception of the wordl was a  binary conception, there was a dualism in every aspect of life: good and evil; mind body; woman and man, but   only if we think of the multiplicity we can understand the complexity of the power relations that are numerous and complex ,only in this way  we could achieve the eradication of classical vision of the female subject. Probably this is the aim of cyberfeminism eradicate the old conceptions of the world and overcome the dualism to reach a new conception of woman, the identity is becoming more and more complex to follow the complexity of the  world.

Cyberfeminsm and cyberspace is a mirror of the new postmodern world a world without discrimination without differences and without  judgments. We can easily describe cyberfeminism as a new state of mind, a new way of thinking where everyone can overcome the old conception of the human dualism, in internet doesn’t exist the idea of man and woman doesn’t exist materialism, behind the computer screen we are all the same, we have the same opportunity and the same voice. In the modern society is becoming much more difficult to fight for our ideas, or for our dreams, and internet offer an opportunity to everyone, several opportunities and people can decide the best way to use this media, feminism has a new opportunity thanks to internet and thanks to the modern society.

In the beginning of Internet everything was free and an experimentally playground. In the last couple of years Internet got domesticated. Just a few services seems to dominate the Internet, even though there is still experimentally efforts made by users, the majority of the Internet community stuck to certain services as YouTube, Facebook and Google. Finding something on the Internet was in it’s beginning affiliated with big efforts, there were no search engines and by all advantages of these services, as saving of time, we all get to know the same which not automatically always is the best. Especially by holding in mind that the searching results can be manipulated. We often don’t start looking for something by ourself,  sometimes perhaps, but because it’s so much easier to use Google we use Google, or any other service. On the one hand these services helps us to find our way on the Internet, which becomes so huge, on the other hand are we controlled by the big services on the Internet.

Anyhow, what I want to point out is, that even though the Internet offers us still a certain freedom as in it’s beginning, institutions of power and the companies tries to control it and destroy possibilities and opportunities the internet offers to get rid of a gender which is culturally and socially constructed. Cyperspace is immaterial and society tries to define what is female or male often by the body. To be incorporeal in cyperspace perhaps offered a new way to examine what identity is without getting “gendermarked” by your body. But we get forced already in cyperspace to decide which gender we are, e.g. when we sign in to facebook we have to cross if we are female or male, there’s nothing in between. We try to figure out if blogs are gendered or not. We transfer the boundaries of gender which we created in “real” society to cyperspace and as we are forced to ground our Identiy to our gender and our body in the real world the domesticated Internet controlled by the same power structures as in reality, cut our opportunities to create something new. Perhaps is Cyberfeminism a good way to get the experimentally aspect of the Internet back and to get a more non-gendermarked Cyberspace.