Monday, May 29, 2006

Gender Identity

This weeks reading deals with gender and identifying gender. This weeks author John Edward Campbell, a self proclaimed gay male, talks about gay males in IRC chat rooms (IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, which has decreased in popularity over the past few years, however, it does still exist the most commonly known program used for IRC is mIRC ). While it has decreased in popularity a /list command on one of the servers shows nearly 25000 chat rooms availible to join (although many of them only had one user). To be honest, I found some of what Campbell was talking about to be very confusing. I guess I didn't realize that there were people of a specific gender who had difficulty identifying themselves a specific way. Apparently I don't follow the news closely enough some days, way back on May 3rd the Boston Globe reported that the Vermont Senate had approved a bill that "would prohibit discrimination based on someone's gender identity or expression". The story can be found here and may also contain a reference to this author. I just don't see this as a problem worth government intervention. I found many of John's arguments to be very intersting but, I just don't get where he is going. I also see an inherient problem with IRC and how chats work in general.

Chats can be very ambigious. Typing something to someone can contain many different meanings, you have to really, truely know the person you are talking to, to be able to have a "real" conversation with a person. Let me use a personal example, my girlfriend and I met at my church, but she was only home for a short period of time before heading back up to school in Seattle. We decided to chat over AOL Instant Messanger. The first few times we talked it was rather difficult to determine mood and tone of comments but after we began to get to know each other personally the moods and tones began to show and come through clearly. I wonder if John was careful with this fact, he admits he only personally knows 2 of the subjects. I think he might want to look at this a little more closely. That's all I have for now. Thanks