Technology Diary – 10/17

As these readings have shown, short hashtags can go a long way. For that reason I will be writing about how Twitter has been both campaigning for women online and impeding them at the same time.

Within Marie Hicks’ discussion of the evolution of coding from a feminine to masculine coding in “Brograms and the Power of Vaporware,” she brings up Twitter networks forming around the hashtags #changetheratio and #onereasonwhy. These hashtag campaigns bring up the gap between men and women in the technology industry. In addition, Courtney E. Martin and Vanessa Valenti’s paper #FemFuture: Online Revolution opened up discussion for taking up on the momentum that is mobilizing the online feminist world. Hashtags allow all these discussions to be easily found on Twitter, with each user getting a stage to speak their mind in 140 characters or less (or more if they write multiple tweets). Hashtags have helped conversations get started, especially when an injustice is brought up and the online feminist world becomes enraged. For example, earlier this year #Steubenbille (and currently reflected in #Justice4Daisy) brought up the conversation of injustice that a young girl is slut-shamed for getting raped while the male rapist is glorified for being a high school football star who cannot do any wrong.

However, hashtags can create the opposite situation, even amongst feminists. This is evidenced by Flavia Dzodan’s “US Centrism and Inhabiting a Non-Space in #femfuture.” Judith Butler’s discussion of labels being “instruments of regulatory regimes” comes into play here as Dzodan believes that the label #femfuture creates an inclusion of white, American-centric women while it excludes women of color and non-American. Additionally, many trending topics on Twitter tend to be sexist and misogynist [See examples here]. Fortunately, it seems that the online community of feminists is always live to fight off these trends!