How the Book Industry Represented Women

The MissRepresentation movement is both a watchdog and information hub about how women are being portrayed in the media. Today, I saw their video reviewing Hollywood’s  performance in 2012. According to MissRep, Hollywood failed, despite a number of powerful, and I think impactful, female protagonists from this year. Although some people tune into Honey Boo Boo, I am going to firmly hold out hope that more people went out and  saw the incredible characterization of Katniss in the Hunger Games instead.

Regardless, the most interesting part of the video for me was actually the comments section. There was a quite a bit of discussion from Game of Thrones fans about the portrayal of women in the series. Although I have never seen the show, I’m currently two books into the books series, A Song of Fire and Ice so I was intrigued by how that show specifically was a point of contention. Some viewers  made the claim that the story includes a varied portrayal of women, both strong and weak. Others said that the show still objectifies women through old tropes of a woman’s role as a mother and caretaker.

As I read the comments, I couldn’t help but wonder why no one was commenting directly about the books. And that made me go a step further – why did the video and comments ignore the portrayal of women in this year’s top books? Although we have grown to be a more visual culture, this doesn’t mean that men, women, boys, and girls aren’t still consuming thousands of words through news articles, non- fiction and fiction. How does the printed word measure up in their portrayal of women?

Personally, I’ve had the opportunity to read about a diverse array of female characters this year. From the Golden One, in  Ayn Rand‘s Anthem, to an amazing protagonist named Vin in Brandon Sanderson‘s Mistborn Trilogy, to Aliena and Ellen from Ken Follett‘s Pillars of the Earth to Sophie Kinsella‘s latest hilarious lead character, Poppy from I’ve Got Your Number, I’ve encountered multitudes of stories of older and younger women. Although TV has definitely been a major part of my media consumption, it has not been the only way that I’ve engaged with women in the media. Whether the characters were incredibly  complicated or just downright silly, these books offered a diverse range of portrayals.  There was no thoughtless heavy-handed objectification. I would argue that my reading list for 2012, including one of the Game of Thrones series, passed muster.

Unfortunately, one can never generalize from personal experience. Looking at the top selling books in 2012, I’m not so sure this past year can be commended. The top selling book this past year both digitally and in print was EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Although the book has had a tremendous impact on self-publishing, the book industry, and popular consumption itself, I’m not entirely sure what the verdict would be on its portrayal of women. I can’t and won’t judge a book I haven’t read, but maybe we should look beyond movies and reality TV and look at the books that mothers and fathers are passing on to their children. Even though Fifty Shades deservedly won this year’s Popular Fiction Book Award, maybe it also deserves a little scrutiny from an entity like MissRep. Maybe it’s time for people who care about women’s portrayals in the media to examine books at the top of the bestseller lists.

The MissRepresentation campaign does an amazing job of making us take note of what’s on our screens. I wonder who can or will make us take note of the words printed on the pages we hold? Should we even bother? Even though there may be some lingering ideas about the romance of an author spending hours alone, seemingly writing by candlelight to construct a perfect story, people who write for , direct, and produce television care just as much about the work of art they create. If there is a formal organization that takes note of their representation of women, should books have a similar watchdog/commentator? There may be cultural diversity in what appreciate and commend, but there might be a problem if that never fully translates to the bestseller lists.  Media is an all enveloping word for the different ways people communicate and obtain information. Maybe it’s time for books, the oldest form of mass media,  to join its digital brethren as part of the ongoing discourse on how both women and men are being represented.

Profiling the Facebook gamer: Who's buying what and how often? (infographic)

Reblogged from VentureBeat:

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Gaming studio Arkadium has released its latest research findings regarding the behavior of social game purchases on Facebook. Its latest infographic rounds up all of the data and details the who, what, when, where, and why as it relates to players spending money on microtransactions.

" research uncovered some interesting data," an Arkadium representative wrote in an email to GamesBeat, "that provides an insightful look at the items Facebook gamers are likely to purchase, the genre of games that are most likely to monetize, and a greater understanding of the profile of the monetizing social gamer."

Read more… 119 more words

I was always wondering  who pays for online social games. According to Zynga, 1% of all their players actually pay for merchandise. And this fine chart breaks down those stats even further. But I recently read an interesting article on Gamespot that questions whether companies are manipulating that 1% for the entirety of their profits. All things to think about!

RETWEET: Infographic of Infographics

So, one of my recent lifelong dreams is to develop a useful, bright, colorful infographic. That’s why I enjoy posting them. This particular infographic about infographics was both humorous and informative. If you can think it, it’s probably been pictoralized. Either way, the article from Wired and Visua.ly’s chief give some helpful tips to would be designers – like myself.

Either way, I hope this makes you more mindful of the infographics you see in the future!

Leaving A Digital Footprint Online

Here’s an old Storify timeline I created about leaving your digital footprint online. I think it’s still relevant, even though it may be a little bit dated (I wrote this before the Xbox Kinect was released).

1. DIGITAL FOOTPRINT:

   “people leave traces in virtual reality…that are as detailed and predictive as any forensic scientist could hope”
2. Watch Jesse Eisenberg in a clip from The Social Network

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   SocialNetworkMovie

   Wed, Oct 06 2010 11:53:55

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3. Google caches or makes a copy of the Internet everyday – making it nearly impossible to delete what’s on the Internet. The previous statement was true!
4. Longitudinal Data Collection in Second Life

   Department of Communication Stanford University This serves as the online addendum to: Yee, N. & Bailenson, J.N. (2008). A Method for Longitudinal Behavioral Data Collection in Second Life. , 17. Persistent online virtual environments, whether game worlds like World of Warcraft or social worlds like Second Life, provide social scientists with the opportunity to collect longitudinal behavioral profiles from users. These environments allow behavioral measures of interesting variables at th…

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5. The future of digital footprints may lie in face tracking. From the text, it’s been shown that by using special cameras that can see facial expressions that reveal that you’re tired, you can predict accidents and make a better work environment. But it may be more common than that in the recent future.
6. Avatar Kinect for Xbox 360

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   Wed, Jan 05 2011 19:47:38

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7. ACTIVITY: What can people find online about you?
8. Pipl – People Search

   The most comprehensive people search on the web. Pipl finds high-quality results in pages that cannot be found on regular search engines. Free People Search.

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The Printed Book as Candle

It has been a long time since I’ve posted. Even though I still care about technology policy (actually that’s the field I’ll be working in this summer) I haven’t had time to write consistent posts about it this past quarter. But I like to post interesting insights I find on the web so I thought I’d share this quote:

In a speech at Library Journal and School Library Journal’s e-book summit (and referenced by Stephen Roxburgh in our March/April 2012 issue), Eli Neiburger brought up the idea of book publishing as being akin to the candle industry, a comparison I’m liking more and more. Particularly because the combination of candles and printed books means we will still be able to read if the lights go out forever. (Clearly I’ve been reading too many of those teen dystopia series.) But while candles have been replaced by electric light in the developed world, every house has some, everybody uses them sometimes, and you can buy them everywhere. We use candles in emergencies and in celebration. They are utilitarian and glamorous. They can be the center of attention or shine light on something else. They can be life-saving or dangerous. You can light one from another. These are all the things that matter about books, too.

-  From Roger Sutton’s 2010 Ezra Jack Keats Lecture, delivered at the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on April 7, 2011.

I’m a staunch supporter of the printed book. Even though I do most of my reading on my computer, and more specifically online, I still haven’t reached the point where I can consider web content to be “serious” reading. If I want to get “real” reading done, I pick up a book. Or a newspaper or magazine. Yet Sutton’s quote was actually very hopeful to me. Sutton’s idea about glamorous print has probably been sitting in the back of my mind for years. It takes away the guilt that some fiction fans may have for going digital while making us understand that print books will probably never go completely out of style. In the end, I just hope he’s right.

Reading List: Born Digital

There is a huge risk that we, as a society, will fail to harness the good that can come from these opportunities as we seek to head off the worst of the problems. Fear, in many cases, is leading to overreaction, which in turn could give rise to greater problems as young people take detours around the roadblocks we think we are erecting. Instead of emphasizing education and giving young people the tools and skills they need to keep themselves safe, our lawmakers talk about banning certain websites or keeping kids under eighteen out of social networks. Instead of trying to figure out what’s going on with kids and digital media, the entertainment industry has gone to war against them, suing its young customers by the tens of thousands. Instead of preparing kids to manage a complex and exploding information environment, governments around the world are passing laws against certain kinds of publications, making the banning of books look like a quaint, harmless activity. At the same time, we do next to nothing in terms of taking the kinds of steps that need to be taken if we are to address the real concerns facing kids.

- John Palfry and Urs Glasser, Introduction of  their book Born Digital

This book is definitely on my reading list. Not only did they talk to the “digital natives” as research for their work, but they acknowledged the label’s limited scope. Either way, their succinct introduction contains a lot of the reasons why I’m interested in public policy concerning the Internet and information.

Copyright Math and the Institution of Cultural Goods

The latest TED video, where Rob Reid spoke, was hilarious and saddening at the same time. He poked fun at the criteria in which the content industry tries to explain their losses and woes over online piracy.  Even though its complicated and sometimes unclear, I’m sure those numbers came from somewhere rational (rather than ringtone piracy).

The video brought the way that policy makers and industry insiders explain their losses into the limelight. What is still rarely talked about is the expense to the user. Or really potential expense. If a 160 GB Classic iPod is worth $8 billion dollars worth of copyrighted content, how much is it worth with entertainment legally obtained?

I decided to do my own math for this one:

One song is 3 MB and every song is about $1 dollar.  A 160 GB iPod is holds a 163,840 MB of content. If you were to just purchase songs (and ignore the fact that digital storage devices always have a bit of storage used for its own internal programming) it would actually cost and individual  about $54,613 to fill it. This is way lower than the claimed $8 billion dollars but still a large sum for the average iPod owner. Considering how fast Apple comes out with the next generation of their products, if one actually bought a new device every 2 years, they would be paying as much as a house costs to use the device to its full capacity.

Its understandable that the creative producers want to be paid, but Iwonder what mp3 player creators expected when they set the storage capacity for their devices. If one of the greatest features of new iPods and mp3 players (if you ignore the iPod touch which also offers a remarkable suite of apps that all it to have multiple uses) is the growing amount of gigs they can hold, yet it’s unlikely anyone can reasonably expect to fill this capacity before they launch a new device, it makes me wonder about the tug of war in consumer’s minds. They want new greater iPods because they want more space for all of their music, movies, and files. Yet the current system doesn’t allow them to attain those files in a cost-effective manner. Maybe a dollar per song is a little too expensive for a  $250 device that can hold $40,000 worth.Or maybe its unreasonable to market 160 GB iPods like having that amount of content is normal.

Ownership is important. Before, thanks to space and other physical limitations, very few people expected to own 40,000 songs. There just wouldn’t be enough shelf room. Some music buffs would find a way to make it possible, but the average person would have a CD collection of anywhere from 15 – 100 in cases.  40,000 songs on CD (if you allow me to generalize and say that a CD has 10 songs on it) would be 4,000 physical CDs. Besides the pain it would cause to try to find one song in that jumble, it would take up an inordinate amount of space to store them. If that’s not feasible, why does having that many songs on an iPod make sense? Especially if they are all being sold at CD price rates?

We need to defend copyright as an institution. But between the devices offered and the price of the content, consumers may not have the chance to maintain what they believe is their fair share of our cultural goods. The licensing system may help grant people access but its not the same as being able to say you have  the latest print of your favorite book. We created devices that support increased ownership but the current institution for creative content strips it away. At some point, something has to give.

ACTA Infographics

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing research on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, better known as ACTA. There is an ongoing international debate about whether or ACTA will have an irrevocable, detrimental affect on Internet freedom. After studying it, I wanted to see what visualizations were out there concerning this hot button debate. After […]

Does Pinterest Need a Little Diversity?

Pinterest is growing fast. Said to have amassed over 10 million users in just as many months,  Pinterest is turning out to be one of the hottest (if not the  hottest) start-up, web apps of 2012. I’ve been on the site, and as someone who loves food, puppies, and witty quotes, I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time scrolling through the pins. It’s addictive. America’s hooked. And soon, I might be as well.

Image via Wikipedia

That is, I may be hooked on the site when I see more of myself there. After the second or third (or maybe 20th) visit, I realized how little cultural and ethnic diversity there was to be found. Most people just call it a females-interested-in-crafts website, but they forgot to mention that all of those females were Caucasian. Mothers and new brides and shoppers are all sharing ideas and trends that are targeted at other White Americans. None of the ideas are limited to this group of course, but if you take 5 minutes to scroll through the front of the site the odds of you finding a picture of anyone that’s non-white outside the cover of a book is slim.

This really first came to my attention as I was looking at hairstyles. I’m African-American. My hair is short when I leave it alone, but it’s currently in braids. I had seen nothing on the site suggesting styles or tips for my hair type, despite seeing pin after pin of someone curling, twisting, tying, and french braiding long hair. These are the only results I found when I looked up African-American hair.

But this obviously goes beyond hair. There are few distinctly ethnic recipes or designs. Although you can find out how to make popular ethnic foods like mango lassi or dumplings, they all seem like exotic treats. I would love to see other cultures make their own distinct mark with the service.

I don’t blame Pinterest for the fact that there seems to be relatively little racial and ethnic diversity. Pinterest is just a small reflection of the web. It is the first instance where women, who use social media more often than men anyways, have clearly outpaced men in adoption of a new service. But maybe it’s also the first time that its clear that Caucasian Americans also outpace everyone else on the web. Pinterest is a fascinating website, and very gracious of respecting all the websites where their users connect. I’ll continue perusing the pins, but I’ll see if  things change before I request an invite.

Related articles

• How Brands Are Using Pinterest – And What They Can Do Better (readwriteweb.com)
• Pinterest not a pirate anymore, helps site owners disable pins (momecentric.com)
• 8 Ways Pinterest Is Inspiring Projects (mashable.com)

When Memes Attack

We’ve shifted gears from the ‘viral’ era. Culture’s now going pandemic. And there’s just no way to stop it. There was a time when Internet memes were relegated to a small coterie of Internet geeks who cherished their exclusivity, played lots of massively multi-player online role-playing games, and shared images, ideas, jokes and phrases within their community. A new metalanguage was created and cherished by those who could talk the talk. Then the unthinkable happened, memes went mainstream.

via Rajiv Naresh: Meme Wars and the Death of the Underground.