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By Arielle Lana LeJarde, Carlos Mejia, and Nicole Taniguchi
Author: al160380
The Evolution of Gender through Pokémon
A game that I grew up on was Pokémon. Starting on the gameboy color, I then moved onto the gameboy advance, but stopped playing the game due to outdated consoles, until it finally became an app that we all know as Pokémon Go.
This game is a perfect example of how the times have changed and the games evolved with it. It started off as the main character being a boy. You would have no choice of which gender you could be. The mom, gym leaders, and different types of pokemon catchers were all women. But it was a male dominated game with the Professor, main character (you), and the arch nemesis all being men. The dialogue that comes with the women are usually pretty sexist, also. And a lot of the time they only appeared one half of a couple.
The creators heard the complaints and added an option to be a female trainer. I never complained about having to play as a guy trainer, but on the other hand, it did subconsciously make me feel more accepted. Maybe more girls than just me were playing the game!
However, one problem I have with Pokemon is that it isn’t racially diverse. One can argue that the characters are Japanese so they are all lightskinned. But as an internationally popularized game, it should be more racially inclusive. This is problematic! Nakamura gives one reason by saying “cybertypes stabilize a sense of a white self and identity that is radical fluidity.” It’s another example of westernized beauty, and doesn’t give enough representation for people of color.
Schaap gives a reason for this. He says, “An enormous amount of work goes into developing fantastical virtual environments, life-like animated avatars, and artificial intelligence routines for computer-controlled characters, but the mechanics animating these worlds and shaping the tools and conventions for social interaction in them are, mostly implicitly, based on our everyday commonsense understandings of how the world works. These understandings are formalized, reified, and encoded as the natural way of doing business in virtual environments, while the social implications of this process remain largely invisible to developers and users alike.”
Then, Pokemon Go came. You could be anyone (as long as you have a smartphone and the app) and catch Pokemon. You didn’t have to choose a character because you, yourself are the character. Of course, the app is a lot different than the game that you can play on a console. But it just goes to show how great Pokemon has been at making the game an all around inclusive activity!
My questions for you are:
- When you make an avatar, do you make one that is similar to you, or completely different?
- For women, would you be more willing to play video games if it were more catered to you? What can companies do for you to have more access to play these games?
(Featured Image Source: Twitter)
Social Media is Affecting Our Relationships
I think it’s about time we start taking social media more seriously. As a Millennial who has built a career on writing about relationships, it’s frustrating to hear the phrase “it’s just social media. It doesn’t mean anything”
Social media is in our present, but I believe it’s significance in relationships will only get more prevalent in our future, and we will realize then how important our actions on social media actually affect them. I would like to see individuals take more responsibility on what they post, how they treat others, and their actuals in the virtual reality as well as real life experiences. Just because it’s online – it doesn’t mean your actions hurt less.
Let’s take cheating, for example. Cheating through text, snapchat, instagram, or Facebook is still cheating. Your actions aren’t justifiable just because it was online rather than real life.
I hope in the future, we can take the effects of social media more seriously and how it can affect the people who we are close to in our day to day relationships. This is especially important because everything is public – posts, likes, and relationships. Our friends, families, and even strangers are our audience. So if we hurt someone, or are hurt by someone by something posted online, it is something others can also see. It can be humiliating.
But if we are more conscious of our actions online, as we are in real life, we can make relationships so much easier.
My questions for you are:
- Has social media affected your personal relationships negatively or positively?
- Have you ever take any precautions on what you post because of a significant other?
Enemy of the Status: Being Watched On Social Media
As much as we attempt to hide about ourselves online, unless we cease to use major social media apps and websites, no matter how many times we click “private,” our information is out there. And when we agree to the terms and conditions (of course, after not having read them), we’re doing it all willingly.
On Facebook, they have my photos, personal information, thoughts and feelings that I provide in statuses and messages, and even information based on the external applications I link with the site. There are some apps that even FORCE me to link my Facebook to even have an account in the first place! Looking at you, Tinder and Spotify.
With all this information we give Facebook, it can actually predict our future. But is it really Facebook’s fault that we are easy targets of their advertisements?
We use it because everyone else is using it. We want what everyone else has. And if we don’t?In, ‘Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy” Mark Andrejevic replies, “the further point to be made is that exploitation is not simply about profit, but also alienation” (283). If we don’t use it – we’re technically not a part of the functioning, modern society.
But like I said before, we give it willingly. Even after we found out that the government is, in fact, watching us and we’re becoming real life versions of Will Smith in Enemy of the State.
But if I was thinking of it in terms of Michael Foucault’s disciplinary society, the consequence of not being a part of the heard is more of a consequence rather than potentially being watched.
My questions for you are:
- Would you rather be watched than be alienated?
- Some people refuse to post photos of their children on the internet for safety. Some people vow never to turn on their locations for an app. What is one hard-no rule you have on the internet?
I Am Whatever You Say I Am
by Arielle Lana LeJarde
Growing up in the age of the internet to others may seem weird, but for people like me and my friend Sheila Harrison*, it was just the world we were brought into.
As a creative writer, Harrison was the perfect person to interview. The internet was full of endless possibilities. We could be whatever we wanted and nobody would know. Sure, it’s a little different now and we’re more easily traceable, but growing up in the ’90s was a different story.
*Name has been changed for protection. Interview was edited for length and clarity
L: What social media platforms and apps they have used now and in the past?
H: Myspace, Facebook, Espin, Instagram, Lushstories
L: Lushstories? Never heard of that. Can you elaborate a little?
H: Wellllllll, it’s an erotica type thing.
L: Interesting… So do you always use your real name or do you have any aliases?
H: I usually use my real name. I don’t recall ever changing my identity online. I had sort of aliases, but those were just usernames. I would sometimes use my middle name if the person I was talking to was a stranger as a way to separate myself from the individual so they couldn’t look me up. That’s also why I never gave my full name.
L: You say you’ve never changed your identity, but how about any online personas you may have subconsciously created to play out something exciting or try something you couldn’t have anywhere else?
H: I did kind of create a persona when I was on different platforms. I was myself on the standard Facebook/MySpace pages, but on the more niche websites, I tended to act more innocent or more daring. On Espin, which was like a pseudo dating site for teens I often acted cooler than I actually was. I was still being myself, but not who I was at school. When talking to older men on sites like Lushstories, I pretended to be more innocent because I noticed that for some reason men take pleasure in corrupting girls, so I played along until I stopped caring about what men wanted. Online it was easier to be myself because people didn’t know my economic background or stereotype me based on my race, mostly because I don’t think many people know you can have green eyes and be Latina. [Editor’s note: Which is both true for Harrison] I could be myself which most people considered white. So most of the experiences were the same, I didn’t really lie about my life only about sex.
L: Do the digital personas they construct help you cope with problems or just end up creating new ones?
H: A little bit of both. I found it helped me figure out a little who I was by playing out different aspects of myself, but it always got complicated with men and feelings. Online I was basically poly, but in real life, I was generally alone and feeling a bit guilty for kind of lying to them. I stopped around senior year of high school because I got way too involved with three guys online and decided this was not for me. From then I didn’t talk to anyone online for a few years. Now I’m one of those people who deletes and re-downloads dating apps at random. In the end, I’d say I learned to balance it a bit better.
I definitely related Harrison’s story to Turk’s article “Aspects of the Self.” Gordon was 23-year old college dropout who created different characters to be more confident, witty, or sexually daring. It ultimately led to Gordon’s engagement. Turk says this is because “there is relationship among his different personae; they are each an aspect.of himself.”
My questions for you guys are:
- The internet and catfishing are so prominent in our culture so much that there is a stigma on online dating. Do you think there are any positives to the online dating culture and ultimately being able to “hide behind a screen”?
- Have you ever had a real life role-playing experience that changed your outlook? What is the benefit of putting yourself in other people’s shoes?
I Have a Boyfriend, Thanks To Tinder
Like most millennials, I live and breathe social media. I can’t eat an expensive Restaurant Week meal without posting it on snapchat, I can’t see a beautiful sunset without posting it on Instagram, and I can’t really be friends with someone if it’s not “Facebook official.”
Source: Arielle Lana LeJarde
I’m in a relationship, but ironically enough, 99% of my time on Reddit is to frequent a subreddit dedicated to singles needing help with online dating. I was single when I first subscribed, but I guess as a self-proclaimed “Michael Jordan of dating apps,” I continue to stay a part of this online community.
It made me think of a discussion we had in class about how social media has changed the quality and quantity of our interactions. My classmates argued that social media has, in fact, ruined it because it has made our generation much more awkward in real life. Sorry, classmates, but I strongly disagree. Like Couldry’s social oriented media theory that hones in on the “processes that media constitutes and enables,” social media can definitely be used to help as long as you use it in the right ways.
With the invention of dating apps, people like me who can be super shy when it comes to approaching people in real life, can gain the confidence to message people and be more charming online first so that when I finally do meet with someone in person, those jitters are calmed down.
Social media has given me confidence in my abilities to be witty and charming on the spot, not only online, but in real life. Without Tinder, I probably would be dating the guy I’m dating now.
Two questions: 1) Why do you believe that social media is making us less of social animals than more, if its sole purpose is to interact when we’re not face-to-face? 2) How do you think social media has affected the power relations amongst those our age?