Welcome Sixth Week Class. This Week, Discussions.

¶ … Welcome sixth week class. This week, discussions. The discussion asks read articles "Who Am I?" "Gender Gap Cyberspace." After reading articles, asked compare contrast articles. Then, asked insights gained evaluation improve draft.

Comparison: "Who Am I?" And "Gender Gap in Cyberspace"

According to socio-linguist Deborah Tannen's essay "Gender Gap in Cyberspace," using the computer is a fundamentally gendered experience. Although both women and men use computers in today's society, they do so in different ways that reflect the fundamental orientations of the genders. Men are interested in getting the most powerful computer, winning at computer games and exhibiting their technical mastery by fixing 'bugs.' Women use mediums such as emails to build relationships. The Internet does offer the ability for the genders to bridge communication chasms. But the anonymity of the Internet is also more supportive of the male desire to engage in aggressive, verbally-directed combat, since common social niceties are not observed and women are often afraid of such environments.

For Tannen, gender is the lens through which she interprets everything. Biology is destiny, although she does not see this as necessarily a negative thing. Women, she says, only care that the computer works, they do not care how it works. However, this facile glossing of how the genders use computers effectively shuts women out of understanding a technology that will grow more and more important in the future. Tannen says she just wants the computer to 'work,' but knowing how to work computers is what 'work' is, versus increasingly obsolete soft skills like the word processing and emailing which Tannen says are her primary interests.

Not caring about how a computer works renders women dependent upon men to fix and understand their machines. And it also ensures they may not be eligible to get the highest-paid jobs in the new economy, like that of a computer software engineer, because of their ignorance of computers. Tannen takes a curious pride in her ignorance that seems to reflect some of the worst stereotypes about femininity. "Much as I'd like to use it to do more, I begrudge the time it would take to learn" (Tannen 13). Computers are too hard! Math is hard!

Unlike Tannen, commentator Demetri Martin takes a far wider, more all-encompassing view of his personal identity. "I am a man. And I am a former baby and a future skeleton, and I am a distant future pile of dust. I am also a Gemini, who is on the cusp" (Martin 2011:1). Rather than trying to make generalizations about a particular group from his personal experiences like Tannen, Martin stresses the inability of social categories to fully encompass what is uniquely human about him. In contrast to Tannen, who constructs a fairly linear argument about her lack of computer knowledge, positing a neat contrast between male and female ways of knowing and relating to cyberspace, Martin executes a Walt Whitman-style stream of consciousness, in which he celebrates various aspects of himself. Although some aspects of his identity could be stereotypical, such as the fact he is a man, others are very unique and particular to himself. "I was Student and Key Club Vice-President and Queer Bait" (Martin 2011: 1).