Word Cloud: How Toy Ad Vocabulary Reinforces Gender Stereotypes. Preamble (Added April 12, 2011).
Thanks so much to everyone who has weighed in on this post. I am adding this preamble to address two main points of criticism that I should have discussed in the original post. First, there is the point that the ads use vocabulary to reflect the nature of the toys and not necessarily gender, that regardless of the target audience a toy about fighting will naturally include words about battling while a toy like an Easy Bake Oven will not. While this is absolutely true, my intention here was to use the toy vocabulary to show the nature of the toys marketed predominantly to boys.
The inclusion of the girls’ list was just to show contrast.
TV3. The Guardian. HERALD. Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011. It’s impossible to imagine the web as it is today without Steve Jobs in the story.
Even something as seemingly simple as proportional width fonts might not exist were it not for Jobs and Apple, to say nothing of the WebKit project and dozens of other contributions. Through it all Jobs and Apple always managed to keep the focus on people. Computers, useful as they are, are nothing without people. The web is the same. The web is about people. Occupy Wall St: New Zealander Arrested on Brooklyn Bridge. Occupy Wall St: New Zealander Arrested on Brooklyn Bridge Emir HodzicOctober 3, 2011 As I was having my morning coffee on Saturday, ready to go out and join the Day 15 of Occupy Wall Street, the last thing I expected was to spend the Saturday night in jail.
But that’s exactly where I ended up together with some 700 demonstrators, surrounded by huge numbers of police and arrested on the iconic Brooklyn Bridge in the largest arrest operation on US soil in decades. And this a day after about 2500 people marched on the Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan to protest police brutality, pepper sprayings and unprovoked arrests from the week before.
But, in comparison, all that was minor disturbance compared to what was about to take place.