Awful article
This has to be one of the most poorly balanced and unintelligent article I have ever read on women and gadgets.
It fails to understand gender dynamics in a typical household, to start with. If you have a typical family, with a computer in the house, how do you know if it is the kids, the dad or the mum creating their membership to download from iTunes, for example? Just because someone may register themselves as male, does not mean that it is always "he" who will use that log in to download stuff. I want to see some proper ethnographic research on this before I believe assumptions made such as "women don't download."
It also fails to recognise that there are millions of women getting on very well with technology - in all its many forms. It also fails to recognise that there are many men too who cannot be bothered with something that is in fact fundamentally poorly designed. If people have to go to a manual to figure out how something works, then design the product better. Don't blame it on gendered stereotypes.
I see women on a daily basis on the Tube nd around the country with cameras, sophisticated mobiles, laptop bags and, above all, ipods.
There are millions of women gamers out there - over 45% of mobile gamers are women. The Sims is ruled by women players.
It has nothing to do with gender. It is about making technology smarter, using simplicity to hide its complexity. It is about better design.
It fails to understand gender dynamics in a typical household, to start with. If you have a typical family, with a computer in the house, how do you know if it is the kids, the dad or the mum creating their membership to download from iTunes, for example? Just because someone may register themselves as male, does not mean that it is always "he" who will use that log in to download stuff. I want to see some proper ethnographic research on this before I believe assumptions made such as "women don't download."
It also fails to recognise that there are millions of women getting on very well with technology - in all its many forms. It also fails to recognise that there are many men too who cannot be bothered with something that is in fact fundamentally poorly designed. If people have to go to a manual to figure out how something works, then design the product better. Don't blame it on gendered stereotypes.
I see women on a daily basis on the Tube nd around the country with cameras, sophisticated mobiles, laptop bags and, above all, ipods.
There are millions of women gamers out there - over 45% of mobile gamers are women. The Sims is ruled by women players.
It has nothing to do with gender. It is about making technology smarter, using simplicity to hide its complexity. It is about better design.
posted by Toe at 3:22 PM
1 Comments:
You're absolutely right about household gender dynamics. My parents both have iPods. My Dad installed and configured iTunes. My Mum however does most of the downloading, P2P as well!
I see more women with iPods on the tube every day than I do men, at work too - some have even bought them because they can use their company desktop with it (and they're not ripping hoards of CD's at work, they're downloading!).
This is really lazy reporting.
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