Blog # 5 Embodiment- Bodies in Cyberspace

When it comes to the Internet today, it is a place that everybody from around the world can connect and communicate with each other as long as they have access to Internet. As a result, certain companies like pornography have taken advantage of this freedom of communication and have become one of the leading developers of the Internet industry. Actually, when thinking about it, it is no wonder that porn has been a motivator. With the porn industry having access to the Internet, they are able to take their business and spread it further out to people. This industry also gets its supporters from users, mainly men. Our expectations of the Internet which is supposed to be free is now responsible for expressing the men’s desires of sex.

When it comes to men’s desires, the Internet has a way of facilitating a portion of their desires. When I think about men’s desires, what comes to mind for me is the three things we want most which is sex, money and power. As a man, I can understand that. However, while men do have desires like that, I also have a desire to be able to get an amazing job and be able to support myself and for a possible family. The men who are looking for prostitution probably are desperate for sex or they have issues with strong independent women today.  While thinking about it, the Internet is just one of the many ways that pornography has spread. Before the Internet, pornography was seen in magazines, pictures and even VHS’s.  Men would also go to rental stores to rent pornography out. All of these types of media including the Internet have given the image of hyper-sexualized women. As a result, gaining the supporters from mostly men of different ages from college to businessmen. According to the Hughes’s article “The Internet and the Global Prostitution Industry” (Cyberfeminism, 1999), the Internet Entertainment Group (IEG) recorded that the proportion of buyers of women over the Internet are 90% male, 70% living in the US, and 70% being between the ages of 18 and 40. What this says about men’s desires and expectations of real women is that they need to be subservient and compliant to any and all their demands.

The term embodiment refers to someone or something that is a perfect representation or example of an idea. For this case, there are men out there who are looking for women that embody the expectations that can satisfy their desires. With the Internet showing women being hyper-sexualized, it also shows the men’s desire on how women should act. While most men are only thinking about these desires, I would like to believe that I am not part of that norm. Women are not to be considered property to men just to satisfy the sexual desires. Speaking for my own desires, I hope to find the right women for me one day and that she will like me as well. Overall, this shows that the global prostitution industry has more power and leverage than the lawmakers that try to regulate it.

Blog # 4 The World in www.

After watching the Office Tigers, I have to say that it is interesting to see how a business works as it is outsourcing out of America to boost businesses and have lower waged employers to do the busywork of the corporation. Also, it shows how globalization continues to expand in businesses. I have to say that the topic of out-sourcing was presented to us differently than I thought. I had a general idea about the outsourcing topic before I saw the Office Tigers, but I was able to understand it more from watching the documentary. In the video, I was also surprised to see how hard the employees at the Office Tigers work. Compared to how much we work, they are working a lot harder in my opinion. Some of the workers there are working 24 hour shifts. As for myself, when I was working as a lifeguard, I would usually work for 3-4 hours a day for only a few days a week. Like most people, I try to get as many hours to work as I can so that I’m able to get a bigger paycheck. However, asking me to work for more than 18-24 hours a day, that is asking a too much for me to do. It shows just how much hard work the Office Tigers put in for their jobs.

When it comes to technology, it happens to play a big role in globalization. The reason is because it is used all over the world. It is because of technology that we have been able open the doors of many different possibilities like communicating and being able to business overseas.  An example would be the Office Tigers, which is an American owned company in India. With many major companies working in third world countries like India, this brings up the issue of cultural imperialism. For instance, the people at Office Tigers have to tons of training sessions that teach them how to speak “global English” (image below). They do this in order to remove the trace of their accents when they are on the phone with clients from the U.S.

Technology also plays in the part of cultural imperialism. As new technologies become available to people, we tend to leave the older models behind in order to get the new ones. Drori mentions in “Global E-Litism” that new technology is “simultaneously a global unifier and a global divider”.  Meaning  that even though the advances in technology in the global communication aspect are meant to bring people around the world closer together, most of the world still does not have access to this kind of technology because they do not have the means to use it. As the major technological countries continue to develop new technology that they have access to, the lesser countries are left behind still trying to reach the same access of technology as they have.  It is my opinion that we should allow the third world countries to catch up with us so that they are not that far behind the rest of the countries.