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> Because the female body has a history of being productised it, like the Cherokee or Amazon, will always surface within search results as a product before as a

> Because the female body has a history of being productised it, like the Cherokee or Amazon, will always surface within search results as a product before as a person. This sentence summarizes my opinion of that document: It starts with an assertion without any kind of supporting argument and then goes on to make a factually incorrect generalization. While it is easy to see what the author probably meant, it just seems unprofessional and unscientific. The missing comma makes it even more awkward to read. In conclusion, this is a blog post turned PDF. An amusing read and certainly not completely wrong, but nothing to be taken too seriously.

tokai 8y ago
>it just seems unprofessional and unscientific The author is an artist and not a scientist. It is from a multidisciplinary conference where "artists, designers, researchers, technologists from all over the world [...] discuss electronic visualisation technologies in art, design, music, dance, theatre, the sciences and more".[0] [0] www.eva-london.org/eva-london-2018/
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
  > The author is an artist and not a scientist Unless that somehow implies that the document is to be seen as a piece of art, my opinion stands, that it reads like a low-quality blog post.
  - tokai 8y ago
    It is definetly more art than science.
plzHireMeImGood 8y ago
also referencing himself
GuB-42 8y ago
It is a rare occasion where "productised female body" is justified: google charges more per "girl" clicks than "boy" clicks. Still pretty weak by scientific standards. She could also have said that the female body is more valuable, which essentially means the same thing even though it sounds very different.
- have_faith 8y ago
  > google charges more per "girl" clicks than "boy" clicks Do you mean with regard to ads?
claudiawerner 8y ago
I don't think that's a charitable reading; where's the factually incorrect generalization? To be clear, this reads more like critical theory than science, as such the conventions and rules of science do not apply. Similarly, rigor in argumentation in critical theory (and some philosophy) often takes a back seat to communication of exploratory ideas like these. At any rate, the assertion you point out isn't the main object of the paper, but it makes enough sense to hold: we live in a society "that presents itself as an immense accumulation of" commodities, and what can be commodified will be commodified. How do we interpret that claim? I'd argue not necessarily in an empirical sense, since to do so would assume we have tools to measure every phenomenon, and we can't fall prey to operationalism either, which has taken over the social sciences.
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
  > will always surface within search results as a product before as a person How is that statement anything other than incorrect? It only takes a single example of the opposite to prove it technically wrong, and there's more than enough examples out there to really invalidate it even if you consider the "always" as something purely rhetorical and read it as "mostly". In the end, the statement only starts making sense when you turn it into something like "will more often than not surface within search results as a product before as a person", and at that point it really loses most of its impact. If you then consider that this is not really a problem unique to the female body, there really isn't much of an argument left at all. The few (possibly cherry-picked) examples do little to underline this idea and, again, the text fails to even consider or address that there might also be many examples for the opposite. The conclusion I draw from the entire thing is: This one person doesn't like how the internet works and tries to put into words why (and, for that matter, completely fails to convince me of their position).
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    As I said, in critical theory, rigor often takes a back seat to rhetorical argumentation and polemic writing, but the point still obviously contains a lot of truth, not only in the examples she named but I suspect that a great deal other searches yield images used to advertise products or stock images (which are also used to advertise products) or pictures used in blog articles (often used to make money with ads). The author spends a lot of time talking about how this isn't specifically to do with the female body, it's to do with society today as an accumulation of images (c.f. Marx's accumulation of commodities), the commodification of the female form being only one aspect of that, but perhaps one of the most egregious and useful rhetorically, since it is objectionable to many people in the way that less obviously pernicious examples (e.g artwork being commodified) are not. I really think you're missing the point here; the existence of counter-examples does not invalidate the point. For instance, a discussion of power dynamics in sex is not invalidated by the existence of females taking on a dominant role rather than a submissive one. Rather, sometimes the phenomenon can occur due to it rather than despite it. Images that resist commodification do not exist in spite of commodification as a "gotcha" counterexample, it's possible they exist due to pervasive commodification making them attractive. You can already see this with the obsession with "home made" foods sold in supermarkets. I think it's also very uncharitable (and a pretty poor reading) to dismiss critique as "not liking how it works". The point is that the Internet shouldn't work that way.

tokai 8y ago

>it just seems unprofessional and unscientific The author is an artist and not a scientist. It is from a multidisciplinary conference where "artists, designers, researchers, technologists from all over the world [...] discuss electronic visualisation technologies in art, design, music, dance, theatre, the sciences and more".[0] [0] www.eva-london.org/eva-london-2018/

DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
> The author is an artist and not a scientist Unless that somehow implies that the document is to be seen as a piece of art, my opinion stands, that it reads like a low-quality blog post.
- tokai 8y ago
  It is definetly more art than science.

plzHireMeImGood 8y ago

also referencing himself

GuB-42 8y ago

It is a rare occasion where "productised female body" is justified: google charges more per "girl" clicks than "boy" clicks. Still pretty weak by scientific standards. She could also have said that the female body is more valuable, which essentially means the same thing even though it sounds very different.

have_faith 8y ago
> google charges more per "girl" clicks than "boy" clicks Do you mean with regard to ads?

claudiawerner 8y ago

I don't think that's a charitable reading; where's the factually incorrect generalization? To be clear, this reads more like critical theory than science, as such the conventions and rules of science do not apply. Similarly, rigor in argumentation in critical theory (and some philosophy) often takes a back seat to communication of exploratory ideas like these. At any rate, the assertion you point out isn't the main object of the paper, but it makes enough sense to hold: we live in a society "that presents itself as an immense accumulation of" commodities, and what can be commodified will be commodified. How do we interpret that claim? I'd argue not necessarily in an empirical sense, since to do so would assume we have tools to measure every phenomenon, and we can't fall prey to operationalism either, which has taken over the social sciences.

DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
> will always surface within search results as a product before as a person How is that statement anything other than incorrect? It only takes a single example of the opposite to prove it technically wrong, and there's more than enough examples out there to really invalidate it even if you consider the "always" as something purely rhetorical and read it as "mostly". In the end, the statement only starts making sense when you turn it into something like "will more often than not surface within search results as a product before as a person", and at that point it really loses most of its impact. If you then consider that this is not really a problem unique to the female body, there really isn't much of an argument left at all. The few (possibly cherry-picked) examples do little to underline this idea and, again, the text fails to even consider or address that there might also be many examples for the opposite. The conclusion I draw from the entire thing is: This one person doesn't like how the internet works and tries to put into words why (and, for that matter, completely fails to convince me of their position).
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  As I said, in critical theory, rigor often takes a back seat to rhetorical argumentation and polemic writing, but the point still obviously contains a lot of truth, not only in the examples she named but I suspect that a great deal other searches yield images used to advertise products or stock images (which are also used to advertise products) or pictures used in blog articles (often used to make money with ads). The author spends a lot of time talking about how this isn't specifically to do with the female body, it's to do with society today as an accumulation of images (c.f. Marx's accumulation of commodities), the commodification of the female form being only one aspect of that, but perhaps one of the most egregious and useful rhetorically, since it is objectionable to many people in the way that less obviously pernicious examples (e.g artwork being commodified) are not. I really think you're missing the point here; the existence of counter-examples does not invalidate the point. For instance, a discussion of power dynamics in sex is not invalidated by the existence of females taking on a dominant role rather than a submissive one. Rather, sometimes the phenomenon can occur due to it rather than despite it. Images that resist commodification do not exist in spite of commodification as a "gotcha" counterexample, it's possible they exist due to pervasive commodification making them attractive. You can already see this with the obsession with "home made" foods sold in supermarkets. I think it's also very uncharitable (and a pretty poor reading) to dismiss critique as "not liking how it works". The point is that the Internet shouldn't work that way.