Journal 5 – Claire H – Designing Humane Tech

For my identity category, I picked gender but specifically focused on the feminist movement that has been happening since the early 1900s, and even before then, but is still happening today.

Identity Supported

This image is the Times cover from the Person of the Year for 2017. The winner was the silence breakers for the #MeToo movement. I picked this image because having a major company, such as Times magazine pick this as their Person of the Year shines so much support and light on the movement which is largely a female movement.

This image is a scene from the movie Legally Blonde. I picked this because Elle Woods is a feminist icon for most women and this scene in particular is when Elle really realized who she was as a women and it’s extremely empowering so everyone who watches it.

This image is of Michelle Obama giving a speech. I picked it because she is touching on some of the topics of sterotypes that most men have towards women, some of the key words they use to demean us but she spines them around and empowers everyone.

Identity Unsupported

This image is a poster from the beginning of the suffrage movement, but it’s an anti-suffrage poster. I picked it because it shows that men think that a woman’s job is cleaning and that it’s below him to be cleaning and that if woman have rights then he would have to do “woman’s work.”

This poster is a very recent poster found in America. I picked this image because it shows that men still aren’t understanding what feminisms is and clearly aren’t supporting it.

This image is an old anti-suffrage movement comic. I picked it because it is showing that men think that women can’t do anything because they are too busy baking a cake. That all they care about is that.

Part Two:

When I was reading and re-reading the second part of this assignment, I couldn’t really think of anything because I was trying to think of something virtual something fake but then I started to think about how I prefer to watch YouTube over TV or Netflix because it seems more real to me. It’s real person in their everyday lives, just filming it. Or is it. YouTube has been around for about 14 years and in those 14 years we have seem many famous YouTubers come and go. With that being said it makes me question if those people are displaying their everyday lives in their vlogs, or if it’s all a scam. Below are thumbnails of some “day in my life” vlogs.

All of these thumbnails show happy people and almost portray a perfect life. That is a lot of what these videos are like but we truly don’t know if they are actually happy people or if they are just putting on an act for a vlog. We know that putting on an act does happen because of the “YouTube Burnout.” This is something that a lot of YouTubers have finally been talking about on YouTube. How they started their channel and loved it at first but then it became a job and they feel like they always have to put on a smiling face for everyone. That they feel like they can’t show their true emotions anymore. How they are going through a rough time but feel as though they can’t show it on YouTube because then their “perfect life” would be exposed. Below are some thumbnails from famous YouTubers that admitted to being burnt out.

With these very famous YouTubers talking about this, it just shows that although it wasn’t intended for this purpose, YouTube is very much a place where people can put on a show, where they can have a fake life. It allows them to show only parts of their life that they want to and they can even fake some of it.

Journal 5 – Claire H

Join In