Have we progressed?

I went to the leadership weekend this Friday where we were all divided into groups. We had to do an exercise where it had to be decided amongst us and we had to save lives of some people on the basis of a brief description about each of them. There was no gender specified in any case except for one with an Asian American Woman. The rest were just descriptions like ‘a young leader’, ‘a drug dealer’ or ‘a cheerleader’. Without having realised it ourselves, we were pointed out on how we referring to all of them as ‘he or she’. It is amusing how a  group of nine people spontaneously assumed ‘a young leader’ to be male and the cheerleader to be female, even though the genders were not mentioned anywhere. 

       

          Why did this happen? This is what has been instilled in us by media and other means since the very beginning- so much so that it comes to us naturally that anything which has to do with more power or control over others, involves males, and anything that has to do with aesthetic, or secondary tasks, involves females. Girls are always associated with toys like barbie dolls and kitchen sets which imply that women are meant to dress up, look pretty and cook. On the other hand, boys are associated with lego toys, mechanic sets and doctor sets. What if the girl was smarter than the boy? There is a fair chance that she would still be paid less than him in the future. 

          

          The struggle doesn’t just end at discrimination. It goes on to the point of harassment. When a woman takes the liberty to express her opinions online (because freedom of speech is too much), she gets questioned, or maybe even threatened. Word on the internet travels fast. People may or may not agree with her, but they definitely cannot accept the opinion just because it came from the ‘submissive’ sex. They may even end up at her doorstep to work the threat they gave her-as in the case of the actress Felicia Day who recently posted about Gamergate and was harassed to the point where she said,” I haven’t been able to stomach the risk of being afraid to get out of my car in my own driveway because I’ve expressed an opinion on the internet that someone didn’t agree with.”

         The world may have made a lot of progress in a lot of fields, but what good is all the progress when we are not even just and fair? Why does a woman have to be harassed every time she has to debate with a male? Why does a little girl have to wear a dress and play with dolls? Just because she is a girl?

Digital Activism

Back in the days, the only means to spread information about various things to the world was through newspaper, television or by word of mouth, which was very slow and ineffective, if you compare it to what it is now. News from one country reaches the people of other countries even sooner than it goes on the news channels-that’s how fast it has become with all thanks to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Because of this, activism has also taken a different form altogether with faster news travel and the fact that everyone has one common ground when it comes to promoting activism online, also known as digital or online activism.

                Digital activism usually has a great impact towards the movement and is mostly done through mobile phones, social media, micro-blogging, blogging and online petitions. Even though sometimes, the action to a situation needs to be taken in person, digital activism plays a huge role in getting the initial action started or spreading awareness about the situation. But, as mentioned in Digital and Online Activism, “Where digital activism enjoys the biggest success is when it is used as a complementary tool to offline action or is used as the introductory method to encourage people to engage in offline action.” This is true, and it has been tried and tested in various incidents, one of which is the case of the story of Ukrainian Uprising (http://digital-activism.org/2014/02/the-story-of-ukrainian-uprising/) which was an ongoing wave of protests and digital activism always had a big hand in it. The protests started with an aim to force the government of Viktor Yanukovych to sign an EU trade deal. Alongside offline protests and rallies, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook kept inspiring and motivating the people until his government fell and he went into hiding.

As a person who doesn’t usually read the newspaper, I find digital activism useful because I stay aware about what happens around the globe even without reading the newspaper. In the kind of lives we have today, most people can’t support the causes they want to offline, and digital activism just makes it super convenient for them to show support by the click of a mouse. What more do we want?

              

Privacy and identity online

            A week ago, I was shopping for some tools on Amazon and it automatically gave me a million suggestions about other tools that I could buy. Surely, I could have used them, but how did Amazon know? A lot of these websites keep a track of our previous searches and make a virtual image, or profile, of us. As a result, we may have different profiles or personalities according to different websites, just as “Hamlet presented a different self to almost everyone he met" as mentioned in the article ‘Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between’.

     All the random quizzes we take on Facebook (I would be in Gryffindor if I were in Hogwarts, just FYI) and all the endless games that we play create these good-for-nothing apps that keep sucking and selling out our data to these virtual profiles that we create over the years. So, even if our settings are very restricted for others, we unknowingly expose all that information we were trying to hide to the entire world.

      A few years ago when I used to spend literally my entire day on Facebook, I had made all my pictures visible to only my friends. One day, I found this other account with a different name but all of my pictures used as theirs. Someone was impersonating me. I did manage to get that account deleted, but that incident made me think that maybe everything is not as it seems. Maybe we do lose control over things as soon as we put them online, privately or not. 

      To prevent all that from happening, we need to keep cleaning out and deleting those useless apps that we feed by the click of our mouse. We need to keep a check of who all and what all applications or websites have access to everything we don't want them to. Then again, it needs to be done every once in a while. Do we even have that much time to remember cleaning out all this periodically? Do we have the time to protect our own online identity?

Who are you online?

       I started taking this digital literacy class at FIT this semester because I needed to learn how to establish myself online. According to me, to be successful in today's world, an online presence is very important. I used to be socially active on Facebook, but then college happened and I started changing my display picture once in a year and a half with almost no status updates. I would occasionally look up a few people on youtube and watch their videos just for fun, and that was it.

      Taking the Online Privacy Test made me realise how much of our information could be out there without us even having a hint about it. But as said in 'Understanding you Online Identity', "Your online identity is not the same as your real-world identity because the characteristics you represent online differ from the characteristics you represent in the physical world." Your online identity that has been built up over the years, might even be the exact opposite of how you really are.

      When I took the test, the first thing that I came across was a silly slam book account that I had created in 5th grade and totally forgotten about. There was this other link that couldn't be opened because the domain had expired, but I'm glad it had expired because that link had my phone number in it somehow. There were a couple of my pictures which I had used as my display pictures on Facebook in the past years, which was expected. There were also a bunch of my pins from Pinterest, and a link to my recently set up Linked-in and about.me accounts.

      The thing that caught me off guard was when I tried to look myself up on Duckduckgo, and it led me to a page called Yatedo with all of my information in some other language, maybe French. It had my picture, my name, my home and school address, my relationship status, my boyfriend's information, everything. It had basically all the links I had come across while conducting the test all in one place in addition to some new ones. There was something about an Instagram post of a long lost friend that I must have liked recently. It also showed an option for people to be able to contact me. One thing I'm glad about being there was a link to my (supposed to have expired) grade sheets from my last school (I'm shamelessly proud of them).

      While the internet makes everything easy for people around the world, it does create a lot of problems too. The fact that all these functions keep going on at the same time amazes me. How one website keeps recording your data by making a pseudo profile, and shows you things according to what you have preferred in the past, or how one website takes out your data from another website and makes a new website altogether out of it is beyond my comprehension. It does make me wonder, though, if it is even safe to do anything online now. What exactly does being cyber safe mean?