Social networks: The demise of gender?

Posted on | December 14, 2007 | 2 Comments

Feminist Media Studies is asking for work in progress and short debate pieces inspired by researching Web 2.0. In particular, the editors ask:

How do we theorize gender in the context of the rise of participatory, interactive internet interfaces, such as social networking sites, blogs and even e-governance? What implications does the rise of social networks on the internet, such as Facebook, Orkut, Myspace etc have on feminist approaches to media and the internet starting from Donna Haraway’s cyborg? How empowering are these new media “architectures of participation” that enable new forms of many-to-many publishing? Are web-based communities truly different because, as Manuel Castells suggests, they operate in a new “space of flows”?

Because the articles only need to be 1500 words I’m wondering what to focus on with my submission. Something that’s struck me lately that I mentioned last week at our roundtable is how the techno-fix obsessions of gadget bloggers and Getting Things Done gurus seem so oblivious to the structural forces affecting experience beyond the priorities of the cubicle. Treated as relics of popular culture, these sites operate in a realm far removed from the critiques many feminist or cultural studies theorists take for granted.

For example, I Want Sandy is just one of a range of productivity innovations promoted on these blogs designed to make highly employable men even more ‘free’ to focus on being ‘creative’, while women – virtual or actual – take care of the administrative and immaterial labour in the work and home spaces around them. Of course women can make use of these applications as well, but if this is the case, why employ aesthetics that harness some kind of nostalgia for a 1950s division of labour?

The concern here isn’t simply that the figure of the willing assistant is female by default, it is that there is an implicit hierarchy created around what is a trivial and what is a serious use of one’s time. This hierarchy then returns in assessments of the worth of various forms of online community: when the ‘wealth of networks’ quite literally cannot be translated into a pay rise or a better job. But by excising these maintenance aspects of one’s life to the background in order to focus on work, what kind of functioning human – of whichever gender – are we advocating? How to understand this desire for pure efficiency as anything other than a mimetic response to the capacities of computing technologies themselves?

Writing the ‘gender’ chapter for Uses of Blogs I found that the loudest versions of feminism in the blogosphere came from those that profess a white, liberal, middle-class, college-educated politics. It was as if feminism only had one RSS feed, and the issues to mobilise around – abortion, better media representation, more women keynote speakers on the high-tech conference circuit – had quickly reached an appropriately radical consensus.

All of these issues are of course important, but my interest in social networking sites is how they allow us to start a conversation about the complexity of the power relations that currently shape identity, especially in the workplace. These include:

- the flattening of hierarchies
- the ‘presence bleed’ (my sound-bite for the day) from the office to elsewhere
- more openness and more surveillance, from friends as well as people you just happen to know
- improvised etiquette for a system that rewards addition but provides no script for subtraction (leading to)
- peer pressure beyond the schoolyard age bracket
- identity maintenance and mood broadcasting
- productivity and popularity auditing, etc. etc.

They also let us speculate about the character traits that flourish or flounder in contexts of compulsory sociality*: the lurker vs. the butterfly, the sceptic vs. the joiner, the private vs. the public profile… and all the awkward and thwarted gestures in between.

Thinking this through I’ve also started to wonder whether blogger-pundits’ regular derision of Facebook – including knowing predictions of its demise – has something to do with the fact that the default affect of the site has proven so cloyingly positive. This challenges the more negative modes of narcissism, nihilism, cynicism or bombast that have been the hallmarks of many an A-List blog, and perhaps too easily became the only way of credentialing appropriate participation in Web 2.0.

Though you wouldn’t know it from much of the commentary, the rise of social networking is at least in part an overdue form of recognition for the affirmative, relationship-building skills that women have developed over time, often through media consumption and technology use. Feminist scholars need to determine whether this shift brings any accompanying changes in institutional empowerment, or social networks instead help to assuage the position of the many who still remain outside the circuits of privilege that continue unabated in the off-line, Old Boys’ network of so many professions.

How this fits in relation to histories of net politics is interesting to consider, too. It seems little coincidence in retrospect that one of my most significant Australian feminist heroes describes Facebook as a fabulously utopian space, when her work did so much to voice womens’ struggle against relegation to the realm of everyday life, whereas some of Web 2.0’s greatest scholarly enthusiasts cannot stand Facebook because of its conformist corporatism.

I certainly welcome comments on this before I commit anything to print…

* Wow, didn’t I see some of those at the Staff Club at lunchtime today! Next year I will have to be better prepared to document all the end of year functions around town so that I can write the great Australian riposte to The Office Christmas Special. Take it easy out there, people.

Office Kiss

Category: Gender, Research, Web(log) Stuff, Work

Comments

2 Responses to “Social networks: The demise of gender?”

  1. Mel
    December 18th, 2007 @ 10:09 am

    Yesterday I read a New York Times article about “presence bleed”, only they called it “white space” and couched it as a really positive (read: productive) development. I prefer “presence bleed”.

    I think what you need to concentrate on is the emphasis on efficiency and consolidation that these gadgets and social networks place. It’s about making you into, as you say, a kind of technology yourself – you feel like you have to STEP UP to the pace the technology allows/implies.

    In some ways this is similar to compulsory workplace sociality, where you feel like you have to STEP UP to the participatory demands/affective disposition of the workplace.

  2. melgregg
    December 19th, 2007 @ 2:18 pm

    Mel, do you have a link for the article?

    You will be pleased to know ABC employees are part of my study of workplace culture ;-)

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