feminism

As many of you already know, the Cyborgology editors decided to throw a conference called Theorizing the Web. The conference will be in College Park, MD (just outside of Washington, D.C.) on April 9th. Today we are excited to announce the program for the conference and attach a flier that we hope you all can distribute to those who you think might be interested.

As you will see, the response was terrific. We built 14 panels out of the 56 papers we accepted (from the over 100 submissions). There will be three invited panels (on feminist activism, race, and methods). There will be two symposia (one on the role of social media in the Arab uprisings and another on social media and street art). There will be two plenaries (one by Saskia Sassen and another by George Ritzer). And we are excited to have danah boyd deliver our keynote.

If that was not enough, we have plenty of art-related surprises in store for those who attend. We have invited artists of all types to display and perform art specifically tailored to the themes of the conference. This will be one busy carnivalesque day for those who love technology and/or theory!

The program is found here: http://www.cyborgology.org/theorizingtheweb/program.html

Last, a flier for the conference [.pdf here]. Please distribute widely!

TtW2011 Flyer

 

The debate over the extent to which the design and infrastructure of the Web privileges certain demographic groups is not new, but, nevertheless, continues to be important.  Perhaps, most attention has been given to the way traditional gender hierarchies are reproduced by the masculine infrastructure of the Web.  Cyborgology editor Nathan Jurgenson, for example, has previously covered the Wikipedia’s bias toward masculine language.  Saskia Sassen warns “it may be naïve to overestimate the emancipatory power of cyberspace in terms of its capacity to neutralize gender distinctions.”

In an NPR interview this week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales addressed the masculine bias of Wikipedia:

“The average age [of Wikipedia users] is around 26,” Wales says. “We’re about 85 percent male, which is something we’d like to change in the future. We think that’s because of our tech-geek roots.”

While the organization’s acknowledgment that the gender disparity on Wikipedia is promising, Wales seems to address the need for making the site more inclusive to women only from a marketing perspective.  Sociologically speaking, there is a far more important reason to attract women to Wikipedia.  Feminist sociologists have long argued the the types of knowledges that men and women produce are fundamentally different (in no small part due to their distinct social experiences).   As Wikipedia is increasingly accepted as the primary source of collected human wisdom, it is important to ask whose voices are being left out, and as such, what ways of thinking are absent in the conversation.  For Wikipedia, design and accessibility are not merely questions of customer service, but, in fact, have profound epistemological implications.

Last week, Kokoro Co. Ltd. released video of the latest iteration of its work in robotics, taking another step in the process of bridging the “uncanny valley”—the idea that the closer that robots and other non-human objects approach to looking authentically human, the stronger a reaction of revulsion, fear, or mistrust they inspire in their human observers. Kokoro is well-known in the robotics field for creating lifelike humanoid robots capable of recognizing and mimicking human facial expressions and body language. You may recognize the Kokoro name in reference to the I-Fairy, a humanoid robot that presided over a wedding in Japan last summer, and the Geminoid project, where customers can have themselves reproduced in silicone and wire.

The Actroid-F (the ‘F’ stands for female) robot was built and programmed to monitor patients in a hospital setting. Currently, programmers are teaching the robot to mimic patients’ facial expressions, and to recognize the differences in their smiles and grimaces. The result is a very lifelike robo-nurse that can be used to monitor the feelings and needs of hospitalized patients. On the surface, this seems like a good idea; we already use machines to monitor patient vital signs and administer life-saving medicines, so why not use machines to monitor patient morale? more...

check out this great comic about sexism on the web and the issues with calling it out [via Feminist Philosophers]