Women on the Internet/Social Media etc.

Though it was one of the "skim" pieces for this week, I really connected with the Catherine Buni article "The Unsafety Net," and think it pairs nicely with the "Women Not Welcome on the Internet" piece (which I believe we've also read/discussed previously in this class). I think a lot of people tend to forget about the vastness of the internet and how far social media reaches when we become too focused on our own social bubbles. It's unsettling to think that, just because we don't follow someone or aren't looking at their page, they aren't looking at ours. Like the Facebook page that was discovered in the "Unsafety Net" article, there are dark and scary places that exist because of the capabilities of the internet that the average person wouldn't even imagine. It's almost analogous to the average woman living in a big city; she has to avoid the dark alleys and obscure times of night in order to get from point A to point B safely. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work, and these places lurking in the shadows (of the internet, at least) are still functioning, producing hateful and threatening content that's hard to report, delete, or monitor due to certain social freedoms. That's why I was upset to read that when this woman reported the page "Men Are Better Than Women," she was waved off and the content was labeled as "controversial humor;" kind of like the way sexual harassment is handled in real life.


On a different note, I also like the "Social Media is Not Self-Expression" article, though I found it a little dense to read and so I'm not sure if I understood the whole point clearly. But, what I took away from it is the very obvious differences between how a person expresses themselves online versus in-person. Because social media is so accessible and immediate (perhaps too much so), there is less filtering or censorship involved in what we choose to post to the public, and sometimes people associate a person entirely with whatever they Tweet, which is probably nothing like who they are in real life. I could say I'm guilty of this, as are a lot of people whom I know/used to follow (I'm on an indefinite social media detox). It's why cyberbullying and catfishing are now so easy; there is a certain freedom that comes with unmonitored public posts that allows you to exist as an entity entirely different from who you may really be.