Forum Wk 7
This week’s forum topic was “Gender in Music Technology”. A controversial topic indeed, with Ben Probert being the opener for the festivities. Ben posited that one of the biggest gender issues regarding music technology is the lack of female interest. Ben argued that this could be due to social conditioning and conventions. As it stands, the domain of high tech gadgetry does seem to be primarily a male dominated arena. Ben also believes that this could be due to male oriented education systems, where women are not actively encouraged to participate in, leading to a lack of interest.1st year tech student Doug, had a seemingly ill prepared speech, veering off into unrelated tangents, and making gross stereotypes about men and women without any real hard evidence to substantiate his claims. His misunderstanding of the forum topic, and outrageous ideas about the “genetic” differences between men and women led to a heated argument amongst students, particularly from the girls in the class.
1st year student Amy was next, who had some interesting comments to make. She argued that people should be given opportunity base on skill and ability rather that gender. This idea she refers to is a merit based system. Personally I found that Amy’s talk rang true with my view; whether you are male or female should not be of consequence, whether you have the ability and the drive to do the job should be the deciding factor.
Jake wrapped up the day with a video of Bjork. Whilst the film itself was interesting to watch, Jake’s talk did not have a huge impact on me. As most of the points were covered by the previous talks, and by Stephen at the beginning of the class, there was not all that much for Jake to discuss.
Next week’s forum should be interesting as more people discuss the same thing as the people last week. Sweet.
posted by Daniel Murtagh @ 14:39
Comments: 2
