#yingya

like yes wool of winter , yes I know you had to resort to a plan to revenge your kin , yes I know the bishops left you and the others to rot.

In Oudshoorn, Rommes and Stienstra’s paper, they have mentioned about how designers’ gender or any other types of social identities might influence their design; in other words, how designers’ gender identity could shape the design practices in information and communication technology, which may turn out to prioritize male users. If we consider technology users as the most active element of “technology practice”, their role in design of technologies should receive widespread attention. From my perspective, in each of the three technology-practice aspects (organizational, technical and ideological or cultural aspect) technological users can be either the target or the initiator of such type of practice; therefore I assign a vital role to users in technology practice. Given this reason, I agree with the authors that if technology designers would like to ultimately develop something to everyone, they should carefully consider the dynamics (e.g., gender, race) at play at micro and macro level. Designers should not take their own preferences and skill as the main guidance. In stead, they should examine the users interests and competences of users. Most importantly, “configuring” users as everybody is not a proper strategy to handle the diversity of users.

Frankly speaking, I am not an active social media user. Comparing the most popular social media site people use daily, Facebook could be the one I use most frequently. Though my using experience is to some extent limited, I still have noted some of the ways that designers’ perspectives shape the design. Regardless of the content of individual posts shared by different users, majority of the scroll bars embedded on the website are about facts or activities, for instances, news feed, messages, events etc.. This has brought me to think about the language and communicative styles of male and females discussed by previous scholars. Tannen (1990) used “rapport” and “report” styles to differentiate women’s language from that of men’s. According to her, women have the rapport style through which they use language to maintain the relationship with other interlocutors; while men have the report style so that they are more likely to communicate factual information. Considering scroll bars references and the information we are able to share on Facebook. I cannot help thinking it is more about factual information, though we still have some of the ways to interact with others such as like, comment and share. If this were true, would it be fine to see, maybe it has the tendency to prioritize male users since they are more likely to share factual information?