SI’m a willing Boomer. In the sense that I try to adapt to social media and try to learn to juggle the various apps but with results that often arouse affectionate laughter from my daughter.
I use the computer as a more modern typewriter and I regularly forget key words and access codes to updates that would improve, so I am told, the quality if not of my life at least of my digital daily newspaper.
To be honest, technology often bores me with its repetitiveness but I don’t give up because I want to understand and remain within a complex, wonderful but also very insidious world, which has entered our democracies with a straight leg, putting at risk even female achievements that now seemed established.
Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
Luckily there are those who also studied for us like Silvia Semenzindigital sociologist, researcher and feminist activist, and can explain to us with fossil-proof competence and dissemination ability like me the political, economic and philosophical functioning of the most hidden recesses of the internet which, even if it is apparently populated by women, in reality it is the undisputed kingdom of gender stereotypes and of an ideological system that is leading to the restoration of patriarchal power and what is called the “male chauvinist awakening”.
“The Internet is not a place for females” by Silvia Semenzin (Einaudi)
I find your book The Internet is no place for females (Einaudi) urgent and necessary to enter the digital jungle. The author, starting from a personal experience as a teenager fascinated by social media, leads us through the dawn of a computer system that was created by women, then transformed over time into a territory managed almost exclusively by men and by algorithms that are never neutral but imbued with sexist prejudices.
The same ones we thought we had chased away from the door of real life and who “sometimes return” like in a horror film from the window of the internet. Examples of this are the new online communities of “incels” (involuntary celibates) who meditate revenge because they feel “condemned to loneliness due to a cruel, selective and predatory female sexuality”.
Studying these phenomena and finding political and institutional answers is the meritorious work of Semenzin, who it does not limit itself to denouncing but to suggesting solutions, inviting all women to take technology back into their hands and repopulate it with alternative imaginaries. «Because imagining another network is not utopia: it is the first act of power, and it is from here that the future begins».
All articles by Serena Dandini.
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