IxDA Media Labs Final Project

   If you are unaware, the popular social network, Facebook, requires every new user to provide his/her "sex" during login.  There are two options: Male/Female.  Facebook claims that this selection provides accuracy for their wall posts in order to be grammatically correct.  For example, before a wall post could have looked like this: "John Deere changed their profile picture," with 'their' being grammatically incorrect.  Now the post will say either: "John Deere changed his profile picture," or "John Deere changed her profile picture."  This, however, is only one aspect of what I intend on exploring.
   Another aspect to this change in Facebook is that based on your "sex" selection of either male or female, each user is given a gender-specific avatar with the sex/gender relationship as male/man and female/woman.
   Therefore, I am proposing a project that explores the social constructs of both sex and gender that questions this new form of media: social media and social networking and how this 'new' form of media reinforces very traditional constructs of sex, gender, and their relationships to one another.
   The following images are only sketches of a future interactive project that will be exhibited on the second floor of the Brown building of the Maryland Institute College of Art campus from December 2, 2010 to December 7, 2010.

100% Male

75% Male, 25% Female

50% Male, 50% Female

75% Female, 25% Male

100% Female

Concept: To explore social media/social networking and to question their influence of the socially-constructed generalization of gender/sex relationships.