8. Social media and the end of gender.

The talk “The end of gender” by Johanna Blakley is about the importance of the social media in the construction and deconstruction of demographic categories. To this day, companies describe us in social media investigations using the concept of “demographic box”, which means we are divided in certain ranges of ages that determine our tastes, habits, etc. and everything is done by that presumptions. She thinks that this point of view is now obsolete, because the use of technological tools has given us the means to bypass and construct new ways to escape those demographic boxes. Things likes lying about you age, gender and income make difficult to determine demographic boxes. Nonetheless, companies still use this method to categorize people because that is how they determine the ads in social media.

Blakley thinks that the way to really understand and have more powerful information about people is by “taste communities” (groups of people not determined by demographic boxes, which tend to have similar tastes).

Also she explains that world statistics say that women outnumber men in the use of technology, and even thought this will cause effects like more employment for women and a more female driven social media; in reality they will be responsible for stopping these old “chesse” categories that are imposed on us through demographic boxes.

She ends her speech arguing that the real importance of knowing about social media and what entertains people is because it has a huge impact in our lives, for example, with a better mental health, social interaction, among other things.

Even though I think that what she says has some truth in it, I believe that the main point of the speech was bad-driven. I thought that she was going to talk about gender regimes (which are the actual discussion for “the end of gender”) but the only thing she talked about  was mutual tastes. Sure, it true that tastes are not related to gender (and much more if we are talking about technological social media), but that is not the only thing that defines our gender: our behavior, our interactions with other people, the way we dress, our actual standing about some controversial aspects of our culture (like the hate to transsexuals, the acceptation of homosexual, pansexual and bisexuals, etc.) are important, and they are not even said in her speech. The actual name of her talk would have been “the social media and demographic boxes” because that’s all she talked. To end this entry, I would like to quote a phrase that was said in the comments of the video, regarding the outnumbering of women in the use of social media that expresses what I think and is a topic that she didn’t care about: “what difference you make is not about how much you use it but HOW you use it. Not how much you write but WHAT you make”

Well, thanks for reading, see you next week.