Ack! not another techer... For someone who didn't go to tech, a large chunk of my social life seems to involve people who went there. Thanks for the positive feedback on our discussion as well. Probably the overdeveloped upper body on the male models a similar form of exagerated secondary sexual characteristics as what happens to the female models. I think the stereotype of the proper look for a guy, is the triangular upper body. My biggest issue with the rather restrictive set of "beautiful/handsome" images offered to people is the pressure that it places on people to conform to those ideals. A huge amount of effort is expended among women to try and fit the currently fasionable body. I'm beginning to realize that it's strongly worth questioning the assumption that it's okay for someone to go through surgical alteration and needing to develop an eating disorder in order to conform to an unrealistic standard. It reminds me of a twilight zone episode where there's two male forms and two female forms, and everyone is transformed into one of them when they reach a certain age. An example of that in reality, I went to a concert some time ago where there were quite a few people in their late teens really early twenties. I was shocked at how uniform they all looked. They were all following the same standards for clothing, hairstyle, makeup, etc. It would probably be noticably healthier for everyone if media showed a large variety of possible ideals of attractive. To take your quake example, what would you do if they actually had a more reasonably balanced male model that actually represented what you'd like to look like and/or could at least identify with? And congradulations on being polite, a long time ago I came to the conclusion that to live in a nice, respectful world, everyone needs to behave nice and respectfully, therefore if I behave that way, we're one step closer to such a place.
I think the article did a good job listing the reasons... Though how many men really know how unrealistic those standards are, how many of them have gone under the knife to fit the stereotype, how many have tried to squeeze themselves into too tight clothing so they can be stared at?
If we're going to talk about how traditional hetero couples use each other. The man expects a pretty trophy wife who can bear children and rescue him from his inability to take care of himself. (My father definately had the inability to care for himself thing going... before my mother he lived on tuna fish sandwiches and grapefruit.) Now the traditional woman is looking for a guy that she can manipulate into trying to provide her with a stable environment and pleanty of status symbols since she's not allowed to go do anything on her own. So the guy is being objectified for his ability to get stuff in the world. (Let's see, wasn't there some show called who wants to marry a milionare recently?) So the traditional model you've got everyone using everyone else, gee what fun... let's through some random bits of everyone manipulating everyone else too, and just a dash of no one being able to communicate the hopes, dreams, and fears to each other either. No Thanks! I'm happy being a feminist/humanist. I don't want to be used, nor do I want to use my partner. One of the things I like about being involved in same-sex relationships is that there's some level of equality in them and less opportunity to for manipulation. But I've been in opposite sex relationships that have been rather equal as well (with more progressive guys though). So are you going to get all bitter and unhappy when some chick tries to use you as a source of free money? It's what you're setting yourself up for.
From a media standpoint at least the games are showing something different than mass culture... which tends to push for thin tall somewhat athletic looking women. So at least now there's a choice of unrealistic overly sexualized images for women to identify. Our culture as whole defines women in terms of their appearance. So it make sense that games would put more effort into the appearance of female characters--that's what the current culltural imperitive is. Mass media is also doing the same thing with constructing an unrealistic and idealized female form to sell product. Though in the case of most of the beauty industry it's in their best interest to define the ideal woman as something that is unobtainable by most women. So in effect the computer gaming industry is just repeating the typical patern objectification and reinforcing the requirement that a woman must be good looking to have worth. I just read a book called "The Body Project". It documented the change in restrictions on american girls lives from the victorian period to now. The frightening thing was diaries of girls in the 1880's talked about resolving to be a better person in terms of personality characteristics, being chaste, paying more attention to her studies, helping those around her Diaries of girls today talk about hating themselves because for being fat, when in actuality they're underweight. Incidences of eating disorders are climbing among all ages of girls, even among 8 and 9 year olds. Kinda frightening that there were actually advantages to being a woman then as compared to now. (Though I'm not willing to go back...) One interesting detail is the marketing machines that have really helped develop some of this self-hatred is beinging to turn on men as well...
Being a woman, I do prefer the characters I play to be female it makes it a bit easer for me to identify with them. One reason I stopped playing as many games as I did is I got annoyed with games always assuming that the player's male. Now at least there's a choice.... albiet a choice that reinforces the cultural message that a woman has to be beautiful to have any value.
Microsoft managed to gain enough financial resources to become a monopoly, even with virtually no copy protection on any of its products--Even with charging obscene fees for its software (providing an excellent motive to try and pirate their stuff) people still kept paying.
I was reading through the manual to one of loki's games, and in the end, the authors asked for people to boycott copy-protected software. Their argument was that people had a fixed budget to spend on software, and if no one else was doing copy protection, then the users would pay for the software they liked the best. However if stuff was copy protected, the copy protected stuff would get paid for first.
However one key point is from this is even without copy protection, a good chunk of the population still pays for the digital media that they like.
I suspect that most people would willingly cooperate with a company that shows that it respects and trusts its customers far more than a company who forces everyone to conform through heavy handed power trips.
I guess these corporate types haven't read "The evolution of cooperation" by Robert Axelrod which does a good job of proving that (as long as there's a good chance of a future interaction) the best strategy is to respond in the way that they treated you. On the whole people do tend to respond in the way they're treated... so as the megacorporations continue to try and amass power and exploit the population, eventually the people will get fed up and react. (Think seattle and the WTO)
The only remaining question is how long untill we've been stepped on long enough that we finally act?
A long time ago I was reading through some GNU software and they were pushing another organization called "The League for Programming Freedom". I managed to find their web site at http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/ However it looks like the organization isn't doing to well. "Getting a domain name might not be a priority until the LPF has an actual committee to take it forward". The organization really is a good idea and we really should be pushing to turn it into a decent lobby organization, or perhaps the EFF should branch out. Though for letter writing/emailing you get your representatives address info here. I'd really recommend sending them something. Remember to be polite and to include the address you're registered to vote at. (If you're not registered you should be.) On the list of recent news that had this little tidbit "02 Sep 99: Lucent gets patent on sine/cosine table lookup" Hmm... hasn't that one being done by hand since, say shortly after sine/cosine were invented? diane
This topic is a popular one on a mailing list for women in the computer industry known as systers http://www.systers.org If I remember correctly the major components they list are lack of encouragement in school for girls to be interested in math/science, and lack of mentors/role models for girls to model themselves after. Another friend of mine mentioned that some schools are experimenting with segregated boy/girl classes, and although unpleasant on a number of ideological levels, the girls math/science scores had climbed 30%. There's a reasonable body of research to support the claim that boys get more attention from their teachers in class then girls do. As for the role model component, one friend of mine who attended caltech back when the ratio was 1 woman to 7 men (it's now down to 1 to 3) and then went off for an optical computing PhD. She's so used to being in a pure male environemnt, that she doesn't even recognize if she's the only woman in the room--and more importantly this doesn't bother her. Oh yes, and I looked through the list of debian developers and there are a a couple of female looking names in there, and then some I can't recognize... so I'd have to say that there are women involved in open source.
My usual reaction is stick it to the Man, don't let them have any access to anything about me. But then I remembed a book I'd read recently "The evolution of cooperation" which argued that in a situation where the players have a reasonable probability of interacting again in the future the optimal strategy (At least for the prisoners dillema) is to assume to be nice, and then respond in kind. (Tit-for-tat)
This theory does explain why people in large cities tend to ignore those who need help while those in small communities are more likely to help each other.
The components needed to force cooperation were a relatively equal power distribution, and a good chance of meeting each other again.
Having privacy on both sides limits the urge to cooperate. The problem with the eCommerce site is it's really only one way privacy, the corp has some level of privacy (with respect to what they're doing with the data their collecting, who they're selling it to, etc), while the average user has very little. Additionally, and more importantly, the corp has much more power then any individual user. So there is little incentive for the corp to be cooperative.
It might be interesting to require that the corp to disclose as much information about itself as it collects from users. Though the power imbalence would still exist.
If not that then a consumer review web site where people can post the results of interactions with particular corps. By having some way of maintaing a list of how a company has performed the corp would have to cooperate more fully in order to protect it's reputation, and thus it's continued existance. This would even the playing field between the corp and the users.
Though of course after aguing for this I still really don't want them analyzing my life to figure out the best way to manipulate me--unless they manage to figure out that I've made the personal comittment to refuse any form of push advertising.
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Ack! not another techer... For someone who didn't go to tech, a large chunk of my social life seems to involve people who went there. Thanks for the positive feedback on our discussion as well. Probably the overdeveloped upper body on the male models a similar form of exagerated secondary sexual characteristics as what happens to the female models. I think the stereotype of the proper look for a guy, is the triangular upper body. My biggest issue with the rather restrictive set of "beautiful/handsome" images offered to people is the pressure that it places on people to conform to those ideals. A huge amount of effort is expended among women to try and fit the currently fasionable body. I'm beginning to realize that it's strongly worth questioning the assumption that it's okay for someone to go through surgical alteration and needing to develop an eating disorder in order to conform to an unrealistic standard. It reminds me of a twilight zone episode where there's two male forms and two female forms, and everyone is transformed into one of them when they reach a certain age. An example of that in reality, I went to a concert some time ago where there were quite a few people in their late teens really early twenties. I was shocked at how uniform they all looked. They were all following the same standards for clothing, hairstyle, makeup, etc. It would probably be noticably healthier for everyone if media showed a large variety of possible ideals of attractive. To take your quake example, what would you do if they actually had a more reasonably balanced male model that actually represented what you'd like to look like and/or could at least identify with? And congradulations on being polite, a long time ago I came to the conclusion that to live in a nice, respectful world, everyone needs to behave nice and respectfully, therefore if I behave that way, we're one step closer to such a place.
I think the article did a good job listing the reasons... Though how many men really know how unrealistic those standards are, how many of them have gone under the knife to fit the stereotype, how many have tried to squeeze themselves into too tight clothing so they can be stared at?
If we're going to talk about how traditional hetero couples use each other. The man expects a pretty trophy wife who can bear children and rescue him from his inability to take care of himself. (My father definately had the inability to care for himself thing going... before my mother he lived on tuna fish sandwiches and grapefruit.) Now the traditional woman is looking for a guy that she can manipulate into trying to provide her with a stable environment and pleanty of status symbols since she's not allowed to go do anything on her own. So the guy is being objectified for his ability to get stuff in the world. (Let's see, wasn't there some show called who wants to marry a milionare recently?) So the traditional model you've got everyone using everyone else, gee what fun... let's through some random bits of everyone manipulating everyone else too, and just a dash of no one being able to communicate the hopes, dreams, and fears to each other either. No Thanks! I'm happy being a feminist/humanist. I don't want to be used, nor do I want to use my partner. One of the things I like about being involved in same-sex relationships is that there's some level of equality in them and less opportunity to for manipulation. But I've been in opposite sex relationships that have been rather equal as well (with more progressive guys though). So are you going to get all bitter and unhappy when some chick tries to use you as a source of free money? It's what you're setting yourself up for.
From a media standpoint at least the games are showing something different than mass culture... which tends to push for thin tall somewhat athletic looking women. So at least now there's a choice of unrealistic overly sexualized images for women to identify. Our culture as whole defines women in terms of their appearance. So it make sense that games would put more effort into the appearance of female characters--that's what the current culltural imperitive is. Mass media is also doing the same thing with constructing an unrealistic and idealized female form to sell product. Though in the case of most of the beauty industry it's in their best interest to define the ideal woman as something that is unobtainable by most women. So in effect the computer gaming industry is just repeating the typical patern objectification and reinforcing the requirement that a woman must be good looking to have worth. I just read a book called "The Body Project". It documented the change in restrictions on american girls lives from the victorian period to now. The frightening thing was diaries of girls in the 1880's talked about resolving to be a better person in terms of personality characteristics, being chaste, paying more attention to her studies, helping those around her Diaries of girls today talk about hating themselves because for being fat, when in actuality they're underweight. Incidences of eating disorders are climbing among all ages of girls, even among 8 and 9 year olds. Kinda frightening that there were actually advantages to being a woman then as compared to now. (Though I'm not willing to go back...) One interesting detail is the marketing machines that have really helped develop some of this self-hatred is beinging to turn on men as well...
Being a woman, I do prefer the characters I play to be female it makes it a bit easer for me to identify with them. One reason I stopped playing as many games as I did is I got annoyed with games always assuming that the player's male. Now at least there's a choice.... albiet a choice that reinforces the cultural message that a woman has to be beautiful to have any value.
I was reading through the manual to one of loki's games, and in the end, the authors asked for people to boycott copy-protected software. Their argument was that people had a fixed budget to spend on software, and if no one else was doing copy protection, then the users would pay for the software they liked the best. However if stuff was copy protected, the copy protected stuff would get paid for first.
However one key point is from this is even without copy protection, a good chunk of the population still pays for the digital media that they like.
I suspect that most people would willingly cooperate with a company that shows that it respects and trusts its customers far more than a company who forces everyone to conform through heavy handed power trips.
I guess these corporate types haven't read "The evolution of cooperation" by Robert Axelrod which does a good job of proving that (as long as there's a good chance of a future interaction) the best strategy is to respond in the way that they treated you. On the whole people do tend to respond in the way they're treated... so as the megacorporations continue to try and amass power and exploit the population, eventually the people will get fed up and react. (Think seattle and the WTO)
The only remaining question is how long untill we've been stepped on long enough that we finally act?
A long time ago I was reading through some GNU software and they were pushing another organization called "The League for Programming Freedom". I managed to find their web site at http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/ However it looks like the organization isn't doing to well. "Getting a domain name might not be a priority until the LPF has an actual committee to take it forward". The organization really is a good idea and we really should be pushing to turn it into a decent lobby organization, or perhaps the EFF should branch out. Though for letter writing/emailing you get your representatives address info here. I'd really recommend sending them something. Remember to be polite and to include the address you're registered to vote at. (If you're not registered you should be.) On the list of recent news that had this little tidbit "02 Sep 99: Lucent gets patent on sine/cosine table lookup" Hmm... hasn't that one being done by hand since, say shortly after sine/cosine were invented? diane
This topic is a popular one on a mailing list for women in the computer industry known as systers http://www.systers.org If I remember correctly the major components they list are lack of encouragement in school for girls to be interested in math/science, and lack of mentors/role models for girls to model themselves after. Another friend of mine mentioned that some schools are experimenting with segregated boy/girl classes, and although unpleasant on a number of ideological levels, the girls math/science scores had climbed 30%. There's a reasonable body of research to support the claim that boys get more attention from their teachers in class then girls do. As for the role model component, one friend of mine who attended caltech back when the ratio was 1 woman to 7 men (it's now down to 1 to 3) and then went off for an optical computing PhD. She's so used to being in a pure male environemnt, that she doesn't even recognize if she's the only woman in the room--and more importantly this doesn't bother her. Oh yes, and I looked through the list of debian developers and there are a a couple of female looking names in there, and then some I can't recognize... so I'd have to say that there are women involved in open source.
This theory does explain why people in large cities tend to ignore those who need help while those in small communities are more likely to help each other.
The components needed to force cooperation were a relatively equal power distribution, and a good chance of meeting each other again.
Having privacy on both sides limits the urge to cooperate. The problem with the eCommerce site is it's really only one way privacy, the corp has some level of privacy (with respect to what they're doing with the data their collecting, who they're selling it to, etc), while the average user has very little. Additionally, and more importantly, the corp has much more power then any individual user. So there is little incentive for the corp to be cooperative.
It might be interesting to require that the corp to disclose as much information about itself as it collects from users. Though the power imbalence would still exist.
If not that then a consumer review web site where people can post the results of interactions with particular corps. By having some way of maintaing a list of how a company has performed the corp would have to cooperate more fully in order to protect it's reputation, and thus it's continued existance. This would even the playing field between the corp and the users.
Though of course after aguing for this I still really don't want them analyzing my life to figure out the best way to manipulate me--unless they manage to figure out that I've made the personal comittment to refuse any form of push advertising.