‘Networked feminism is a phenomenon that can be described as the online mobilization and coordination of feminists in response to perceived sexist, misogynistic, racist, and other discriminatory acts against minority groups. This phenomenon covers all possible definitions of what feminist movements may entail, as there have been multiple waves of feminist movements and there is no central authority to control what the term “feminism” claims to be. While one may hold a different opinion from another on the definition of “feminism”, all those who believe in these movements and ideologies share the same goal of dismantling the current patriarchal social structure, where men hold primary power and higher social privileges above all others. Networked feminism is not spearheaded by one singular women’s group. Rather, it is the manifestation of feminists’ ability to leverage the internet to make traditionally unrepresented voices and viewpoints heard. Networked feminism occurs when social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are used as a catalyst in the promotion of feminist equality and in response to sexism. Users of these social media websites promote the advancement of feminism using tools such as viral Facebook groups and hashtags. These tools are used to push gender equality and call attention to those promoting anything otherwise. Online feminist work is becoming a new engine of contemporary feminism. With the possibility of connecting and communicating all around the world through the Internet, no other form of activism in history has brought together and empowered so many people to take action on a singular issue.’
Tech is taking ‘the covers off’ social issues while feminism is now becoming the perpetual adoration of the female intelligentsia. Technology has certainly opened our eyes to the plight of women and girls around the world. Consider the impact social media had on galvanizing international outrage after the horrific and deadly gang rape of a young Indian medical student, or the power of Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, an advocate for the right of girls to an education, who was targeted and shot by a gunman, and who has since become an international heroine.
“Technology has definitely taken the covers off a lot of social issues when it comes to women,” said panelist Tara Hughes, senior director of technical product management at Turner Broadcasting, CNN’s parent company. “I think it’s provided a voice for the voiceless, so we wouldn’t know some of the things that were going on in countries like India or (in) the Middle East if it wasn’t for some of those social networks.”
Is feminism the new racism, the dishwater of imagination? Is prejudice still the new education between the haves (knowledgeable boys, guys and men) and the have nots (girls and women), the soft domestic animal shamed if she is not a goddess. Technology is not gender neutral. Domesticity is not gender neutral. Feminism is not gender neutral. Art is not gender neutral. Feminism must confront the danger zones, the assumptions of the lives of women. It is technology that is influencing the intelligentsia of women for the most part today. Daughters doing what they did in a disembodied space, a personal space that is filled with images where men hate women for their emotional maturity and intelligence.
What about the future of feminism, tech, generations of girls to come? Is it always going to be masculine, primed for a man’s brain, a man’s brain cells clicking away? What is fundamental is that women are becoming just as smart as men are if not smarter.
There are women against feminism but there are more women who are in praise of it, who worship and appreciate their physical bodies, their independence. In the end feminism, humanities, the digital divide, there is and will be enough potential for it to develop alongside each other.
‘Networked feminism’s impact is somewhat limited because not everyone has access to the internet. According to Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the executive editor of ‘Feministing’, a popular feminist blog, “we tend to forget the women who aren’t online – there is a digital divide – and I think that part of the feminist movement should be focused on reaching out to people face-to-face doing community work, doing international work. A lot of people are online but not everybody, not by a long shot.’
Slacktivism (sometimes slacktivism or slackervism) is a portmanteau of the word’s slacker and activism. The word is usually considered a pejorative term that describes “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little physical or practical effect, other than to make the person doing it feel satisfied that they have contributed. Slacktivism can be defined as the act of showing support for a cause but only truly being beneficial to the egos of people participating in this so-called activism. The acts tend to require minimal personal effort from the slacktivist. The underlying assumption being promoted by the term is that these low-cost efforts substitute for more substantive actions rather than supplementing them, although this assumption has not been borne out by research.
Many websites and news platforms have integrated social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter into their interface, allowing people to easily “like”, “share” or “tweet” about something interesting they saw on the Internet. People can now express concern about social or political issues with nothing more than the click of a mouse, raising the question, what is actually being accomplished by these “likes” when very little thought or effort is required?
Slacktivist activities include signing Internet petitions, joining a community organization without contributing to the organization’s efforts, copying and pasting of social network statuses or messages or altering one’s personal data or avatar on social network services. Research is beginning to explore the connection between the concept and modern activism/advocacy, as groups are increasingly using social media to facilitate civic engagement and collective action.
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS describes the term “slacktivist”, saying it “posits that people who support a cause by performing simple measures are not truly engaged or devoted to making a change”.
There are millions of feminists out there today. Hundreds of mental sketches, mental sketches about the role that technology plays in the lives of ordinary women, exceptional women, extraordinary women, brilliant women, mothers and daughters all in certain support of political activism whether they vote or not. Governments may not have found solutions of philosophical consequence, writers’ movements in Nigeria are moving towards the memoir, there might not be inspired peace in the four corners of the globe but girls have options. Girls go on pilgrimages into the guidebook, the ebony and ivory, the psychoanalysis, the psychological framework, the history of the wilderness of Europe and America. Girls have the otherworldly guidance to the kitchen table wisdom of their mothers and grandmothers on their side and that is their guide to the unveiled male brain.
When it comes to the affections of intellectualism, there is a hidden telepathy in creativity, the scarcity of a female mind being suppressed by successful, powerful men, intelligent men who minded the materialist in likeminded women who were their equals, in the synchronicity of the vanity of that savage impulse. For the man subjugates the woman’s movement, thinks his essays are far more superior, that it signals ‘humanity’. Technology is never going to bypass even the African feminist. There will always be advancements in technology, in footprint of climate change. Someday technology may even surpass humanity. The intersection and perspective, the knowledge and networking of technological advancements made in social media will affect feminism in the long run as well but not in the way that you think it will. In the eighties it was debate, in the nineties it was a perspective that no one wanted to own up to although there were feministic parameters, in the new millennia it was another wave of feminism, modern feminists who were more technological savvy than their counterparts in previous decades were.
There is what I call ‘evolutionary displacement’, a creative outlet for the modern feminist and the African feminist which goes to say that there are integral theories that are a ‘kindergarten’ work in progress of paradigms of indigenous knowledge systems. Intelligence in women is no longer an illusion, no longer abandoned memory work. The intellectual woman is no longer an argument, no longer Darwin’s argument. Her sensations are no longer trivial. Spiritual poverty no longer has an inner voice for the female intellectual. Now that all women are awakened to the fine art of the accumulation of the pessimism of social media, sexual violence is being taken to a new kind of virtual level kind of phase/playing game. There is no kind of Jane Austen society that exists today in the universe. Even less a Dorothy Parker society to a lesser extent. But the feminist is more comfortable in her skin. The Goth is more comfortable in her skin amongst.
It is necessary to look at the violence, the waves in the shallows of this hallucinatory reality, modern society demands that women become more technologically-savvy alongside their male counterparts, Do intelligent women take themselves a seriously as men take themselves? The African feminist’s life is an unexamined life. The onset of the nature of life is symbolism, the consolation prize instrumental in demonstrating the female property is the sensibility of intuition. What is feminism and what in the world does technology have to do with it? Feminism is an abandonment of the vibrations that alters the relations of the biochemistry of childhood into adolescence. Both, by establishing specificity, flatters intelligence, are learning curves, emotional and independent of each other. Both are liberating. Women are gifted since ancient times, since fighting for contraception, the vote, and the encouragement of the suffragette movement. Women are oracles, and at the end of the day a woman’s work is never done.
Self-awareness comes with pain (what does technology have to with that. It is where the introvert and the extrovert, the inhibited intellectual and the exhibitionist meets) but it also comes with futuristic technological advancements to be made. Here is a self-portrait of a machine or robot who we think has no sense of intuition but has a ‘narrative’ or ‘text’ running through it of his own volition that although it cannot think for itself it has science, it is coded, and it has an energy, a personal velocity. It is the creative hand in hand with the advancements in technology who will imagine our future, alongside feminists, female intellectuals and women who are as smart as men, who fought their way to think the way their fathers did or who are smarter than the men they know of, work with or socially interact with or engage with or relate to. It has always been men who has inspired the female intellectual since she was a child and not a woman. Not the mother figure in her life.
The mother figure is a miserable failure to the girl child who wants expression (to express herself), the girl child that wants to be part of a collective but to also be seen as an interloper in modern society. The girl child is fascinated with her older contemporaries. She is always re-enacting scenes from the introduction to her father’s acute sense and sensibility, his culture, his pride, his prejudice becomes part of her psyche, whatever arrogance or anticipatory narcissisms, neuroses that her father portrays it will become part of the girl child’s psychological framework. She writes to liberate herself. She thinks to liberate herself and the miserable failure of a mother does not write, does not think. This is strategic on the part of the girl child. To distance herself from her ‘miserable mother’ who is most probably tired (with a household to run, a husband and children underfoot), sad (because she has no energy, no time for herself), lonely (because she has simply no one to talk to about the things on her plate, she is having to think about the performance about it all when it comes down to it), and depressive (too many things on her mind).
The values of a man have been ingrained in her since childhood, that all book-knowledge is powerful. That was the case with me. What can women share with each other? Education, stories about childbirth, fertility and motherhood. I am not in any way saying that is the case with all women who decide to write as a lifelong career, go into academia, become a feminist (a feminist is ‘being’, it is a kind of humanity, you do not become a feminist, in the end to me it is a small triumph). Aesthetics on the other hand is a panorama, a cordoned off view of explorations, perspectives, small little triumphs, A feminist is a little-known landscape to the mother. There is a crossroads when it comes to the world of tech and the world of the feminist. If you are a feminist you are not only making a statement that this is your identity. You are either a feminist or an egoist or both. You have a lack of an ego, it is also a lecture, my hairstyle, my clothes, my dress, my attitude, the films that I watch and who I choose to love you are saying you are feministic and that it is not a phase. How can technology save women, save feminism, save the girl children? Education can save women, save feminism and save the girl child?
The girl child who grows up to become a writer or a feminist or an intellectual projects what her father projected, what the men around her as a child projected whether they were alcoholics or mentally ill or had beautiful, artistic hands and kind eyes even though perhaps she felt abandoned or neglected by an absent father, even though she had a mother who showed her a world of life. I write the way I write because my mother was the one who abandoned and neglected me. She was the miserable failure who was tired, sad, lonely and depressive. Harsh words but then not every one’s life is a Disney fairy tale. The girl child embroiders fantasia, but when it comes to tech another world opens itself up unto her of biblical proportions and she becomes a Moses, Jonah, a Noah, an Elijah, and a Daniel. Science and education can do that to you. Literature and existential phenomenology can do that to you. Make a radical out of you. Decorative imagery can make tech look pretty. Dealing with tech and feminism is easy, retouching critiques. It is not for the boys anymore.
