Women's Experience and Cyberpower in the Commercial Cyberspace: The Case of hercafe.yam.com
| Autor: | Yang, Shu-Mei, 楊淑媚 |
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| Rok vydání: | 2003 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 91 While past studies on women’s uses of the Internet frequently show that women indeed feel empowered by the senses of aggregation and mobilization in feminist-oriented websites, most women actually participate in virtual communities and utilize services in female-targeted commercial websites instead of feminist-oriented websites these days. This research thus focuses on exploring the possible realization of cyber-empowerment in female-targeted commercial websites from the standpoint of women’s online experiences. A case study on hercafe.yam.com, a popular female-targeted commercial website, is conducted. Research results indicate that first the structural elements of the female-targeted commercial website is mainly composed of contents and user rules. Among a variety of contents provided by the website operator, virtual community especially attracts relatively large amount of members to the website and thus presents huge earning potential for the website. Second, women’s cyberpower may be realized at individual and collective levels. At the individual level, women tend to maintain their self-identity, challenge traditional sense of hierarchy based on social status, and participate in the process of constructing shared information space in the online world. At the collective level, women’s cyberpower is attained on the one hand through the joint construction of social rules as well as the achievement of the senses of aggregation and mobilization in the continuous interactions, and on the other hand through the interchange of knowledge and personal experiences and further form the dynamic informational space of flows. Even though women overall are empowered somewhat in the online world, the sense of empowerment is hardly transferable to their lives in the real world. Third, in terms of the dynamic relationship between women and the website, at the social level, because virtual community mandates certain degree of social order, women need to relinquish certain rights and freedom in exchange of social stability maintained by the website operator. At the imaginary level, although women’s cyberpower is somewhat constrained by the limited freedom of speech, privacy rights and intellectual property rights in the virtual community, they may still retain autonomy in choosing whatever information they want and resisting gender stereotypes implied in the design of websites. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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