Another one bites the dust

In Johanna Blakley’s video, Social Media and the end of Gender, she tries to make an argument about the end of gender and demographics through the use of social media. However, her argument is hypocritical at best because she tries to reference how demographics aren’t useful anymore, and how she’d much rather know about a person’s tastes rather than their age, but focuses her attention on just women and younger people. In the video she describes how women are leading social media and will continue to dominate over men, which is breaking people down into demographics. The very idea that demographics are not useful, for it restricts the ability social media to monitor people’s tastes and use ads to end gender is incorrect because generally speaking, people in the same demographic have similar tastes. While I can understand where Johanna Blakley is coming from with wanting to break down demographics, it will never happen. People are naturally grouped into their age category or gender because their tastes tend to be generally similar regardless. For example, people in the 18-24 year old category are grouped together because they are college age adults and are going to have more similar tastes than the 55 and older group. While it would be useful for social media to group people into their tastes, it would not work because it would be too difficult, but by grouping ages or gender together, it becomes easier to address those preferences.

            Continuing on, she tries to make the argument that women are dominating in social media, but if she wants to take down demographics and end gender concerns, she should not be concentrating on whether men or women are leading it or focusing on women. For example, she says that more women are going to be hired to deal with social media than men and that younger people (ages 18-24) use social media more. This is hypocritical to her argument because if she really wanted to end gender, then she would not be using demographics in her argument. Likewise, just because women and mostly younger women, are using social media more, does not in fact mean that more women will be hired to work in the social media field, that is just an assumption based on a demographic. If she were so concerned with tastes and not grouping people by gender and age, she would have addressed her argument in a different way that did not include hypocrisy.