Cyberfeminism

Hello everyone,

This blog is a response to the task assigned by Professor Dilip Barad sir as part of a thinking activity in which I would like to share my understanding of the videos.

What is Cyberfeminism?

'INTERNET FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH - CYBER FEMINISTS ARE FIGHTING FOR A NEW REALITY'  

When feminists are talking about bodies, they are almost always talking about violence and power as well. In the world that we live in, our bodies are not our own, and this is no different on the internet. Digital bodies then become a term that we can use to reclaim the necessity of consent on the internet.

The Digital Defence Playbook: Community power tools for reclaiming data(link is external), written by community activists Mariella Saba, Tamika Lewis, Tawana Petty and Seeta Peña Gangadharan, illustrates this concept beautifully.  Through simply walking through a physical space with other participants and powerfully imagining different places, we expressed how our bodies physically and psychologically reacted to the repercussions of a digital age in which our images and data are being harvested for corporate gain and government repression.

Sanjuan Mejia said that “technopolítica” or “technopolitics” is a term that can help us to understand what is the role of technology in an increasingly dangerous political context around the world and in a digital era. “We should think about how technology should be helping our movements to reposition and strengthen ‘offline’ movement organising.”

Basically Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, methodology or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, exploring and re-making the Internet, cyberspace and new-media technologies in general. The foundational catalyst for the formation of Cyberfeminist thought is attributed to Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto", third wave feminism, post-structuralist feminism, riot grrrl culture and the feminist critique of the alleged erasure of women within discussions of technology.

After reading a word like Cyberfeminism , many questions arise in our mind like, What is the aim and what is the way they go to reach this aim? Who is fighting for what kind of rights? And what role does the internet play? 

From the very beginning technology is usually male centric and we observed that mostly women are not that much aware about that but men do. Cyberfeminism takes feminism as its starting point, and turns its focus upon contemporary technologies, exploring the intersection between gender identity, culture and technology. This technology gives women the power to express their ideas to  develop new business  models, which has to be rational, visionary, and practical in order to get things done. 

Linking the terms “cyber” and “feminism” produces a crucial new formation in the history of feminism and of the e-media. Each part of the term necessarily modifies the meaning of the other. “Feminism” has been understood as a historical and contemporary-transnational movement for justice and freedom for women, which depends on women’s activist participation in networked local, national, and international groups. It focuses on the material, political, emotional, sexual, and psychic conditions arising from women differential zed social construction and gender role. 

So basically cyberfeminism is about the condition of women in social or digital media. Movement of Women in society we called it Feminism but in digital World we called it cyberfeminism. As technology developed, the condition of women on social media became more terrible or questionable as they portrayed women. As we always observe that technology is the field where people think that it is only for men and women are not able to work there , they don't have much knowledge about it or kind of Idea or belief that it's not for women to work.  Another thing we found is that on many icons of social media where they portrait women more sexualize to attract the people or men but we never found male icons like that. In many cartoons also we can see that kind of figures which are questionable.

Cyberfeminists asked: Could we use technology to hack the codes of patriarchy? Could we escape gender online?

Ted.ed talks:-

In this video, the speaker talked about AI - (Artificial intelligence) . She started her talk with a question: How many decisions about you have been made by artificial intelligence?  And how many of them are based on your gender, race or background?

 So as we know technology working on code or algorithms. Algorithms are always used to make decisions about who we are and what we want but AI makes decisions on which show we watch more and what we update on our Facebook account. 

Now everything is decided by algorithms like how we pay our car insurance, what products we should use or whether you get that job interview or how good your credit score is. But fact is that these all decisions are being filtered through its assumption about our identity, race, gender or age.

 She gave an example that if AI is helping us to hire a manager, then most managers are men so AI learns that men are more likely to be programmers than women. They reach the conclusion that men make better programs than women. This kind of bias is not okay but still AI became the above to all the law.

But the good thing about AI is that it's totally in our control we can set right ethics and values in AI. And we can do three things,

1- We can be aware of our own biases and machines around us.

2- We can make sure that diverse teams are build this technologies.

3- We have to give it diverse experience to learn from it.

According to the speaker when you work with technology and you don't look or work like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk then your ability must be questioned, and then she gave an example - when she logged in herself and put her photo then she got comments like , ' What makes you think you are qualified to talk about AI? , What makes you know - you know about the machine and then she wears a different style of clothes and uses a name which doesn't reflect her identity and then she didn't get any such comments and was able to work on it.

So to make AI better - we should call people from all backgrounds who can write and tell the stories and help to create the personalities of AI. people who can solve the problem - people who face different challenges and people who tell us what is a real issue we need to fix. When people from different backgrounds come together then use of technology might be limitless. Less racist Roberts, less machines that are going to take our jobs and more about what technology can achieve.

Second Video:-

In this video speaker talked about the nature of biases in human and in machines too, as she told that biassed are unconscious and sometimes it's necessary because it is survival techniques but our unconscious lead us to make biassed decisions and assumptions, and AI don't able to remove it by themselves in fact in many circumstances AI is as biassed as human nature. But in today's time computer scientists and Al company leaders are aware about that and working to find a solution but it doesn't seem to be an easy fact.  Human shapes the all the program and if we make AI as human then very soon we lose the control from Al. 

So in both the videos the speaker mostly talked about human nature as biassed and coding which is set by humans according to their nature and both the videos are solution oriented in which they talked about how we could make better AI for the future and can control biassed systems. Today, feminist activists are claiming that digital rights are human rights, too.  When cyberfeminists are saying that digital rights are human rights, they are creating subversive solutions and alternative realities. They are building the human rights framework with a digital perspective and the digital architecture that we need for the future that we desire.

Conclusion:- 

Information and communication technologies are meant for all people and women have to be an equal beneficiary to the benefits delivered by the technology, and the products and processes, which materialise from their use. Women require information mainly pertaining to educational opportunities and research, career advancement, matrimonial, health as well as infant care facilities, entertainment, legal provisions against sexual harassment, domestic violence and social injustice. Cyber feminism focuses on the impact of new technologies on the lives of women and the subtle gendering of techno culture in daily life. Feminists utilise the web as a crucial tool for connecting women all over the world in order to overcome

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