Revision summary
New media can be masculine in ownership, design culture, and violence. Walby, Connell, and Collins travel to platforms. Harassment and the gaze reinforce old honour. SHG groups and protest naming show partial reconfiguration. Comment: hierarchies are rebuilt more than dissolved; struggle continues. Digital divides by sex and rural location remain.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
New media names platforms, phones, and user-generated networks. Feminist scholars argue that design, ownership, and online violence remain masculine, so hierarchies of gender, and often caste and class, are rebuilt in code. The claim is strong. It is not the whole of every chat group.
Body
Why “masculine”
- R. W. Connell’s masculinities and Sylvia Walby’s cultural structure travel online: who codes, who funds, whose body is the joke.
- Early internet cultures prized a hacker-bro style. Platform firms remain male-heavy in power, if not in user counts.
- Donna Haraway’s cyborg was a hope of reconfiguration. Much Web 2.0 practice looks more like Laura Mulvey’s gaze in a new machine.
Reinforcement of hierarchies
- Trolling, non-consensual images, and rape threats police women’s speech. That is old honour in a new feed.
- Algorithms amplify sensational harm. Informal women workers on phones still face unpaid care, as time-use shows.
- Caste and racial hate pages use the same tools. Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix fits the comments section.
- Attention markets commodify intimacy, which Marxist feminists read as another extraction.
Reconfiguration that the sentence underplays
- SHG WhatsApp groups, Dalit women’s writing, and #MeToo-style naming opened publics that print gatekeepers shut.
- Ann Oakley’s point that the interview is a relation also fits: users are not only victims; they are co-authors.
- Access gaps remain: Census digital divides by sex and rural location.
Comment
- The argument is right about ownership, design default, and violence.
- It over-claims if it says no reconfiguration occurs. Struggle is the better word than freeze.
- New media is masculine as a structure of power, not as a biological user majority.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD NM[New media] --> OWN[Masculine ownership design] OWN --> HIER[Gender caste class] USE[Counterpublics] --> CRACK[Partial reconfiguration] HIER --> POL[Policing of speech]
Conclusion
Feminist scholars are right that new media often reproduces masculine and other hierarchies through design, firms, and harassment. Haraway’s reconfiguration remains a project, not a delivery. Indian SHG and protest uses show cracks. Comment: structure holds; it is not sealed.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Discuss the concept of circulation of elite
Next question on this syllabus topic (2019 · Q7(c)). View answer →
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Are most users men?
Not always. Masculine names the power to set terms, not the headcount of accounts.
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Does anonymity free women?
It can protect. It also shields harassers. Structure is not solved by a fake name.
Same topic · past papers
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2019 · Q2(c) · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
What is 'reserve army of labour' ? Present the position of feminist scholars on this -
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