Text as Mask

Image taken from http://tigersports-news.com/news/index.cfm?Content_id=11196

I'm going to post a section of Danet's "Text as mask: Gender, play, and performance on the internet" because I thought this portion of it was particularly intriguing to me.

"Because people can type in their pajamas in the middle of the night, it is easy for them to pretend to be someone else. According to Turkle (1995),
You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You can be the opposite sex. You can be more talkative. You can be less talkative ... you can just be whoever you want, really.... You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. It's easier to change the way people perceive you, because all they've got is what you show them. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words. (p. 184)
Although there are social and cultural constraints on individuals' behavior, for women in particular, this medium is potentially very liberating. Not only is appearance neutralized, but the software generally guarantees to those who type that they will be "heard" without having to compete for the floor." (136)

Is this a good thing or a bad one? Does hiding behind these text masks put our female role models in the shadows even more? Just because you have the ability to lie and be whoever you want doesn't mean it's always the best solution. It might be liberating on the sly but it's not really getting females any further along with the bigger issues of stereotyping and promoting females to enter into the IT field. I think it may be even conveying a negative image that the only way a female can succeed is to pretend to be male, which is utterly ridiculous and terrible. So I agree that Turkle is right that this happens in the online environment but not that is necessarily a good thing for females. I want to hear them scream I'm amazing and successful and female!

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Danet, B. (1998). Text as mask: Gender, play, and performance on the internet. In S. G. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting computer-mediated communication and community (pp. 129-158). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.