In this first week’s class, the most memorable thing that came across for me was the notion of being able to shed things such as race, gender, or class on the internet. The internet is a place which gives us the ability to hide who we are, yet people still make assumptions based on the things we say, and make assumptions about who we are. Furthermore, these traits which we could supposedly shed are a part of our character, a fact which shapes who we are. Even if we have the ability to present ourselves as we see fit, our traits effect our behavior, and how we see others.
A question which came to me in class is ‘what can we do about privilege, on an individual scale’. The reading comparing straight white male to the lowest difficulty setting was made to speak to the privileged class, informing them of the issue, while attempting to avoid putting blame and being offensive. I do believe it is important to inform people of the issues that the less privileged face, but that still leaves the question: What’s the next step? The issue has complicated roots, and the solution would likely require a large amount of thought to find.
For the future, I would like to learn more about how our cultural operating systems affect our behaviors, and the behaviors of others. To understand our issues as a society, it could be helpful to understand a multitude of perspectives, and connect them together in order to identify the causes of the issues we face. By figuring out why things work the way they do, we would likely get closer to understanding how to remedy the disadvantages that some people face.
Our readings from Whitney Phillips in a few weeks will explore your first question, about how even when we seem to be anonymous our traits and perspectives are still visible. I’ll look forward to your thoughts on it when we get there.
Your second question, about what comes after the acknowledgment of privilege, is a thorny one – and one that I think many people are struggling with right now when US culture is going through a moment of some mainstream attention to such things. An answer I find useful is to think about how privilege can be something that you use, that you leverage in order to work toward a less unequal world or to lift up people who are less privileged than you. That’s what Scalzi was trying to do in his post, I think, though Nakamura makes the point that he’s still holding on to his privilege even while leveraging it.