Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
WiCS Seminar – Programming Marginalization and Violence
January 26, 2017 at 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM
| Location: | 5345 Herzberg Laboratories |
| Audience: | Anyone |
Rena Bivens, Carleton University
Abstract: This talk explores the role that software plays in enacting culture and regulating our lives. Social media companies are eager to brand their software as neutral – simply a technology – but this strategy hides the important design decisions that these companies make about how data is collected, archived, and monetized. I will invite you to think about the particular capacity that software has to shape identity categories by discussing two of my recent publications. I will begin with a ten-year history of Facebook’s software and user modifications, as they specifically relate to gender, including the 2014 introduction of 58 new gender options (e.g. genderqueer, agender, gender questioning, two spirit). Then I will investigate the ten most popular English-speaking social media platforms to explore identity categorization from two different subject positions: as a new user registering an account, and as a new advertiser creating an ad. I’ll consider where gender shows up as a category and how that category is defined and deployed. Overall, I will use these examples to explore the values and assumptions that are ‘baked’ into software, how particular programming and design practices become habitual and valuable, and how software plays a role in defining what we understand as ‘normal.’
Bio: Rena Bivens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.
Rena’s research investigates social media software, gender, and journalism practice. Critical communication and media studies, science and technology studies, and feminist and queer theory inform this work.
Her current projects include: programming practices related to gender; social media moderation practices related to misogyny, transphobia and racism; mobile phone apps designed to prevent sexual violence; and the role of social media in the work of ending gender-based violence by non-profit organizations.