You Can’t Beat Us

 

I would hope to think that in this day and age that misogyny shouldn’t be an issue AT ALL. Unfortunately it is and is evermore clear because of the Internet. Now I’m not putting all men in a box here saying that all are misogynists but from reading multiple articles and seeing forums where women express their opinions, especially in online activity and gaming, many are being “shut down” and abused. I believe it has something to do with the anonymity of the Internet. People are able to use an alias and hide behind their computer screen in the comfort of their own home. Another word for this is trolling and it is just simply wrong.

So, this leads to my question, why are women misrepresented in gaming culture? About 48% of all gamers are women (ESA 2014) and only 8.7% work in the gaming industry (Serrels 2013). Why is this? Anita Sarkeesian’s storyis a good example of why women may not want to work in the industry and has something to do with online trolling and misogynistic abuse. At first, I just thought if you wanted to work there than you would and why should a predominately male industry deter you from doing so. But in my lecture with Tanja Dreher (2014), it made me think about the underlying psychological reasons why, such as misogynistic behaviour, most likely not in the work place but hate that may be received online.

To bring awareness to this female online hate, a campaign was created on twitter with the hashtag “#mencallmethings”. It allowed female bloggers, columnists and Twitter users to publicly tell others of daily anonymous hate from others (Dreher 2014). I had never heard of these stories until my lecture and I have never seen them displayed on news channels. I would like to know if this is because possibly news programs are predominately run by men and feel threated by the rising power of women that they choose not to broadcast these stories on free-to-air TV programs.

 

Sources:

Serrels, M 2013, Only 8.7% Of Those Employed In Australian Digital Games Development Are Women, Kotaku, viewed on 15th May 2014, http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/06/only-8-7-of-those-employed-in-australian-digital-games-development-are-women

Entertainment Software Association, 2014, viewed 15th May 2014, http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp

Dreher, T 2014, #mencallmethings: identity and difference online, Lecture, University of Wollongong

Commit Don’t Just Click

“Australian youth’s main focus’ on activism are generally to do with environmental causes, animal rights, anti capitalist protests, anti racial demonstrations and anti war marches. Young people are attracted to the hope and promise of building a new future” (2005).

Due to our politics, it is hard for us youth to get involved in such protests. Our age is the one factors that disables us from being taken seriously. To overcome this, we protest through social media. We use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. to get our message across and to spread word. My only concern with this is that do young people actually really care? Has the ease of hash tagging, sharing and “liking” made charity disposable? Living in an individualist society (2014), it makes me wonder whether people actually commit to such protests. For example, Kony 2012, remember that? Remember the buzz? I will give credit to social media on its ability to bring awareness and attention to a political situation but how many people in Australia got involved physically? I recall seeing one Kony sticker around a whole 3 suburbs. I’m not singling out every young person in Australia as I know there are many that do get involved and I know many that regularly attend protests about Refugee’s.

The term coined for social media activism is “clicktivism” although some like to call it “slacktivism”.”When the small act of token support is very public in nature, people can kind of signal to others that they have already helped the cause they actually arent more likey to help later ” says Kate White from the University of British Columbia (2013). What does social media do for protests other than raise awareness? If you want to make a difference, get involved, commit to the cause, donate. By just liking or sharing something isn’t going to contribute physically in making anything better.

Sources:

Sherrod, L 2005, Youth Activism: An International Encyclopedia, Greenwood Publishing Group

Khorana, S 2014, We Are The 99%, Lecture, University of Wollongong

White, K 2013, Clicktivism: Why social media is not good for charity, SBS, viewed 9th May 2014, http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/11/18/clicktivism-why-social-media-not-good-charity

Sounds Familiar

 

You would most likely say that music and movie remixes are the general feature and foundation of remixing. Although, remixes do not have to specifically rely on technology. We create, learn and assemble products not just music, for example it could be the recycling or remixing of 80’s clothing worn now with a slight twist (Moore 2014). Some may argue that a lack of creativeness may be the cause of the DJ but personally I think it’s a great way of sharing and creating something relatively new out of something pre-loved.

One of the main concepts on remix culture is produsage (Bruns 2010). Anyone these days has access to movie making and music mixing programs such as iMovie and Audacity. It is evermore easy to upload tracks to the Internet for people to download or listen to on websites such as Soundcloud. But by no means does this stop at music, it can continue on to journalism with open source websites such as Wikipedia (Bruns 2010). The Internet, changing technology and the ability to download is what makes remixing so popular and easy. Some remixes and mash-ups even make their way to the Top 40 iTunes charts like the recent (and may I add horrid) remix of Savages “Swing” by Joel Fletcher (2013). One other thing is when artists take other artists songs and remake it and don’t credit them for example Beyonce. Don’t get me wrong, I am a major Beyonce fan and anything she does or says is amazing but her song “Run The World (Girls)”(2011) was a major rip off of Major Lazers song “Pon De Floor”(2009). She didn’t even recognise Major Lazer as a featured artist on the track. Diplo (the creator of the beat) is recognised in the credits of the track, Major Lazer are not directly recognised when the song is aired on radio or music video channels. So, where do we draw the line at music copyright. Although in this case it was legal, to what extent should an original track be credited copyrighted or not?

Sources:

Bruns, Axel (2010), ‘Distributed creativity : filesharing and produsage’, In Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan (Ed.) Mashup cultures. Springer, Wien, pp. 24-37.

Moore, C 2014, Remix Culture, Tutorial, University of Wollongong, 30th April

Fletcher, J, Savage 2013, ‘Swing’, Swing-Single, Hussle Recordings

Diplo, 2009, ‘Pon De Floor’, Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do (CD), Downtown Music

Knowles, B 2011, ‘Who Run the World (Girls)’, 4 (CD), Sony Music Entertainment