User:Mckeok9407/sandbox

Gendered Experiences
Participatory culture lacks representation of the female, which has created a misrepresentation of women online. This in turn, makes it difficult for women to represent themselves with authenticity, and deters participation of females in participatory culture. The content that is viewed on the internet in participatory situations is biased because of the overrepresentation of male generated information, and the ideologies created by the male presence in media, thus creates a submissive role for the female user, as they unconsciously accept patriarchal ideologies as reality. With males in the dominant positions “media industries [engage]… existing technologies to break up and reformulate media texts for reasons of their own”.

Design intent from the male perspective is a main issue deterring accurate female representation. Females active in participatory culture are at a disadvantage because the content they are viewing is not designed with their participation in mind. Instead of producing male biased content, “feminist interaction design should seek to bring about political emancipation… it should also force designers to question their own position to assert what an “improved society” is and how to achieve it”. The current interactions and interfaces of participatory culture fails to “challenge the hegemonic dominance, legitimacy and appropriateness of positivist epistemologies; theorize from the margins; and problematize gender”. Men typically are more involved in the technology industry as “relatively fewer women work in the industry that designs technology now... only in the areas of HCI/usability is the gender balance of workforce anything like equal”. Since technology and design is at the crux of the creation of participatory culture “much can – and should – be said about who does what, and it is fair to raise the question of whether an industry of men can design for women”. “Although the members of the group are not directly teaching or perhaps even indicating the object of… representation, their activities inevitably lead to the exposure of the other individual to that object and this leads to that individual acquiring the same narrow… representations as the other group members have. Social learning of this type (another, similar process is known as ‘‘local enhancement’’) has been shown to lead to relatively stable social transmission of behavior over time". Local enhancement is the driving mechanism that influences the audience to embody and recreate the messages produced in media. Statistically, men are actively engaging in the production of these problematic representations, whereas, women are not contributing to the portrayal of women experiences because of local enhancement that takes place on the web. There is no exact number to determine the precise percentage for female users, in the year 2011 there were numerous surveys that slightly fluctuate in numbers, but none seem to surpass 15 percent. This shows a large disparity of online users in regards to gender when looking at Wikipedia content. Bias arises as the content presented in Wikipedia seems to be more male oriented.