Concerning the potential of females to make an impact using either mass media or the newer media, Ann Tyler would presumable give the same answer. Women have historically been important socially and in media regardless of what the linear historical record might suggest. This capacity to alter and change history is not limited to the past technologies, but will continue in the present and the future. I am sure that Tyler would extend this influence and capacity of women to political potential.
It seems that the mass media of the decades preceding World War II, were usually a reflection of an elite society. The change in media had not been the number of people who actually had control and influence over the content of media, but rather a shift in how many people thought that the media was a reflection of themselves: whether it really is a reflection, is debatable. Turkle explores how the virtual world offered by the MUDs might have a similar problem: “if the politics of virtuality means democracy online and apathy offline, there is reason for concern” (244). The new medium is not free of any of the fears that centered on other media. The idea that virtual life, just as older forms of media, may only work to alienate the masses and keep them from participation is a worry for Turkle. She also paints the scenario of how new media could become a modern day social Panopticon; hardly a pleasant thought. However, new media also has the hope that came with the older media. “Today many are looking to computers and virtual reality to counter social fragmentation and atomization; to extend democracy; to break down division of gender, race and class; and to lead to a renaissance of learning” (245). Turkle relays how the ability to be anyone in a MUD, say someone from a different gender, can give some insight into their perspectives; that it might be a way to simulate walking in someone else’s shoes. The problem then, is knowing how much of it is simulation and how much is real life. A man can understand some of the outward social problems a woman might experience in the virtual world, but he can never understand all of the physical and emotional aspects encountered in the real world. It is wonderful that we can gain some knowledge from simulation, but only if we understand that this knowledge is extremely limited. Turkle emphasizes that the fact that the virtual is not real is what makes it all the wonderful things that it is: an escape, a demonstration against the real world, a learning experience. However, the lack of embodiment and real world implications also means the virtual world is lacking something, and I think that something is meaning, although Turkle never says so. But in the end, I think that is why all of her examples of the virtual world doing good involve “a permeable border between the real and the virtual” (246). The things she likes about virtual worlds is the psychological compensation and political criticism which according to Turkle, “give precedence to the events in the real world” (249). The virtual world is a great escape because it can be made perfect through programming. However, using it as a permanent escape isn’t practical. We still have to live in the real world. So I think the implication is that we have to use the virtual world and then understand if and how it is applicable to the real world, just doing the first is not necessarily harmful, but it also is not helpful.
I like that you point out that most of our current understanding of who/what types of people have been influential in history has largely to do with who was in power in those periods. Those with control of the media, whether due to political control, class (those in a higher class had the means andthe time to write histories and produce media), or intellectual, wrote the chronologies of their times. So if, for instance, those writers attribut the finding of the double helix structure of DNA to Watson and Crick, and ignore Rosalind Franklin, then how are we to know, decades later, about Franklin's role, unless we find some other written record?
ReplyDeleteI like that you point this out because I think it highlights another reason why new electronic media have potential power for these writers. Anyone who can access a computer (whether their own or in a public library) can write something and post it on the internet. Although it would be naive to say that political and social powerplays are absent from the internet, there is no one gender, race, etc. that has complete control of it. It opens up access to and production of media to a greater variety of people. So even if not everything posted on the internet is intelligent, there is less a chance that phenomena like the role of women in computer programming will simply be forgotten; the internet provides a platform to disseminate knowledge that is ignored by the culturally, politically, etc. powerful.