Gender and Espaces

It is not particularly surprising that gender in relation to espaces should be the focus of study in current academic circles. It seems that with the birth of each type of new technology, gender has the potential (arguably never realized) to become transparent. The telephone could be considered a first step. Though it's often easy to tell if a voice belongs to a man or woman, that is not always the case. It would be possible, at least, to impersonate the opposite gender in some cases. That type of impersonation is also available to web users.

There is clearly no "gender-fair haven," at least in my mind. The closest we get to that is in photos that advertise colleges and universities, since the creaters of such photos are excellent at promoting their colleges as equal opportunity spaces, and that includes race as well. While nearly every college brochure features a multi-cultural and multi-gendered group positively interacting, I very rarely witness such interactions at colleges or universities.

The big question, I think, is if any medium can erase part of one's identity. It can certainly alter aspects of it, but total erasure is probably not possible. Communication is communication, and even if we communicate in different forms (email, phone, chat room, etc.) there are still markers that tell others about us. I've noticed that a person will rarly act differently in a dream than in real life (when arguably we could do anything in a dream). One would not, for example, kill someone in a dream if he/she would not do that in real life. I am not speaking in absolutes here, of course. It's as if there is some subconscious mechanism that censors our actions. The same is probably true online as well, at least to some degree.

Bethany

Web Images

There is a danger in the World Wide Web that Blackmon highlights in her article “But I’m Just White.” That is, racial stereotypes are portrayed there, just as they are in texts. If it’s true that young African-American males have primarily a musical presence on that web (and only that), then students are likely to pick up on the underlying assumptions, consciously or not. It’s important, therefore, to mention that the web is NOT immune from gender or racial stereotypes, even though the web was born in an era when we as a society try very hard to be politically correct and representative of all peoples. If students are working with images on the web, such as Blackmon illustrates (97), I feel it would be useful to note the sheer variety out there. If there is an image of a woman baking bread, there is surely one of a woman playing soccer. If there is an image of an African-American listening to rap, surely there is one of him/her in the role of a lawyer. It’s very easy, therefore, to find opposing images. How hard we have to search might be another story. It would be interesting to discover which images are most accessible. I actually tried typing in African-Americans under Google images, and the majority of the pictures were slave or HIV related. There was one positive photo of a family (4 generations of women, I assume). When I typed in women, I got a huge mix of everything. There were two scantily clad women who looked like sex-symbols. There were women in the Middle East completely covered in their clothing, and there was a volleyball and hockey team from the US. There were also two graphs of women in state legislator positions. It’s apparent that women have made more strides than African-Americans when it comes to representation on the web. I could have my students do a similar search and analysis of why the web is set up this way. Who decides? Who is the audience for the web? These are large questions worth exploring.
Bethany

The Future of Visual Rhetoric

I was surprised to hear that "students don't understand visual rhetoric" from some members of the class, since others seemed to reinforce the idea that students are in fact more visually literate than text literate. Because my 111 class has not focused on visual rhetoric, I am not in a position to comment on their understanding. As Hocks points out, most of use are still teaching ourselves about how to best teach visual rhetoric, especially with computers (203). Multimedia design projects are promising ways to incorporate visual rhetoric into the classroom. If, though, copyright laws become more strict and it becomes difficult to access web images, we as intructors might have difficulty accessing certain information for students. It's already difficult to get music (which is understandable so the artist is protected), and an iTunes download seems to be a viable option.
Multi-media oral presentations are also options for instruction, though I am amazed at the lack of audio/visual equipment available at conferences. We can argue that an oral presentation is good preparation for a conference, but if the universities cannot accomadte new and evolving technologies into their conference presentations, there will be a gap between the potential technological quality of a presentation and the usual oral presentation (or worse, the reading of an academic paper).
It will be interesting to watch where technology goes in the future, as related to conference presentations.
Bethany