NOTE: Before reading the text you may consider that “male” in here means something powerful both for men and women: as a great feeling. This is not a sexist opinion, since we can apply everything I wrote for men and women. The main source (except for the image) is my brain.
Men tend to feel powerful when they have a
good tool to show people or when they use it even if the tool is not useful. This
can be noticed when we compare people who have a newer technology device,
as the newest cellphone, with those who have a bigger and heavier tool to work with,
as the best hammer in the market. In both cases they may feel better with those kinds of equipment, even if they are completely different types of technology.
Thinking about the “new technology”, from
nowadays, as cellphones, laptops, HD Television etc., it is possible to see that
each day we have a behavior that is more common in our society: teenagers “need”
to have a great cell phone to show their colleagues, instead of learning from
their parents how to handle a hammer or a screwdriver. If they do not have
the best device, they are going to be considered a child. It can be the
On the other hand we still have a
generation, maybe X generation or some before that, that wants to work with drilling machines or bucksaws, maybe because for
them it is a pleasure to know that they are capable of dealing with problems
that can be fixed by them or even that they are completely talented to build
something. It is probably a reward to show it to everyone, maybe that is the reason why we still have a few "Home Depots" around the world, and they are always full of people building their own furniture, houses etc.
 |
| Logo from the band: "Tool"¹ |
Yes! In both cases they feel male! That is the word, male! And it is really interesting that we still have such different parallels in a society that is constantly taken as high tech (even though we have tech hammers). Do men really need an apparatus to feel important or more masculine? It is curious to think that "an extension of ourselves", as Marshall McLuhan said, can help us (men, women) to arrange an identity. We can try to be good people, have the best job - but in today's society what is important is to have the newest tool.
Source:
¹ ¹Unknown Author. (Unknown date). File
Tool Logo Early, 25 October, 2005. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tool-logo-early.jpg
Interesting discussion, Mabel.
ReplyDeleteIn fact McLuhan used to categorise technologies in a similar way. However, his typology was hot versus cold depending on how many media were involved in a given technology or how interactive they were or how much "interpretation" there was in a given media.
When you boil it down you can see that these are essentially the same thing. A technology that is multi media requiring interaction is likely to also require interpretation.
To McLuhan... the further you moved along the spectrum to multimedia/interaction/interpretation... the colder the media became. So he saw movies as hot (you sit there and watch but don't talk) but television as cooler (you can talk and interact). Books were considered very cool because they require a lot of interpretation.
If you are interested have a look at the Wikipedia article for McLuhan. It is pretty good.
Robert
But the thing is: no matter what technology is that we have, cool or hot... We maybe don't talk anymore, we don't have to interact to each other, because we have our tech device... right? Or at least this is the way many people think today! Unfortunately!
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