shin1068111's blog

The creation

I am a computer programmer. My programming history goes all the way back to when I was in middle school. I only used my computer to play video games just like any other kids, but I got bored at them really quickly because I would hack and change the programming codes of the gaming system so that I would win the game every single time.

I was gifted. No one has really taught me a lot about programming, but I feel like I knew what I was supposed to do. I communicated better with computers than with humans. Maybe it’s because the computer functions and coding sequences always floated around in my head.

The Creation

I have been working on this project for the last five years when I am at home. My goal was just to create a virtual friend whom I could actually have a conversation with. It might seem little strange for a lot of people that I am creating a virtual friend when I could just go out and make new friends, but I was never really good at socializing with other people.

I have tried to get over my problem by just trying to talk to others, but I have embarrassed myself so many times that I figured it would be less painful to just stay home and play with my computer instead. However, I sometimes miss having someone to talk to.

In one of the panel discussions in gender and technology class at Bryn Mawr College, each student represented a group whose lives or work circumstances shaped, or were impacted by, an interesting intra-action of gender, information, science, and/or technology. Among the represented groups, there were several students who represented group of people existing in cyberspace. Cyberspace, which is also known as virtual world, is defined by Wikipedia as a “genre of online community that often takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects.”

First day of class, the gap between gender and technology seemed so large that most of the students in my gender and technology class had trouble describing the interaction between them. However, we have learned that technology has served an important role in altering gender in the current society by reading articles on sex roles in virtual society and medical procedures such as hymenoplasty. Before discussing the interaction between gender and technology, I believe it is important to talk about how my initial thought about gender and technology. Before taking this class at Bryn Mawr College, I, personally, did not have a good idea of gender and was being ignorant about it because I did not know about the complexity of the subject.