My topic is exploring the boundaries of transgender athletes in cisgender sports. My hypothesis is that hormone levels is best method for determining which gender category an athlete belongs in. Therefore, hormone therapy for a year is a good method (the current olympic standard) to allow transgenders to compete in the correct category.
I drafted an infographic shown above which summarizes my preliminary research. I created a timeline highlighting the major changes made to the subject throughout history in sports. In addition, I researched the hormones and types of therapy these athletes undergo to change their gender in the eyes of the olympic committee. The only problem with hormone therapy however, is that not all countries have access to it.
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My project is exploring how we determine whether transgender athletes can compete in cisgender athletics.
A lot of people complain about the information we provide to Facebook and other social media sites being sold to private companies as marketing research. Here is my simple answer: let them do it! Why? Well that is as simple as the fact that they are providing a free service (the social media platform) and deserve some type of compensation for their work. If that comes in the form of my activity on their platform than that is a lot better than me paying monthly to use their service like I do for a music streaming service. To put it in perspective, if Spotify, a leading music streaming service, offered a free version of the service and all they needed in compensation was to be able to sell to companies what music I listen to I would be happy to agree to that instead of the $60 fee per year.
Christian Fuchs argues in his essay, "The political economy of privacy on Facebook" that we as social media users are providing free labor to the companies who sell our data for profit. I argue that labor implies compensation of some type. In this case, our compensation is free access to the social media platform rather than having to pay for it. If this was a physical service such as a yoga class or a painter coming to paint your house, would you complain if they gave a free service in exchange for you filling out a survey? I certainly wouldn’t. Both parties benefit because I save money and the yoga instructor or the painter gain valuable information on how to acquire and further please future customers. Therefore, the compensation for their labor comes in the form of information not pay. This is analogous to the business model of leading social media platforms such as Facebook. The desire of a person to be better than their parents is traced back to the beginning of modern psychology. As the world gets smaller and smaller with regards to culture integration and cosmopolitanism, an emerging way for people to express differences from their parents is to be globally cultured. For example, people in a third world country may watch American movies and read American books to show that they are more “first world” than their parents. On the flip side, American children may watch Japanese Anime or drink Chinese herbal tea to prove they are more globally cultured than their parents (Henry Jenkins III, Pop Cosmopolitanism). Another interesting point to consider is how these individuals interpret foreign media compared to their parents. For example, those individuals in a third world country are excited by foreign media while their parents might find the material offensive or propagandas. Similarly, individuals from the United States who fought Japan in World War Two probably would be very disappointed to hear that their descendants are watching Japanese television programs.
This radically different bias between one generation is proof of the power that media has over our preconceived notion of the world around us. Henry David Thoreau wrote about transcendentalism which requires removing all states of pre-conceived bias which he called lenses. Thoreau states, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” In this case individuals and their parents look at the same piece of media, but see radically different pieces of information based on their pre-conceived biases. This makes me question what ideas the United States Government has deeply embedded in my head that make me interpret media in a radical manner. Per Jenkins, power is divided into four main categories: economic, cultural, political, and psychological. By that definition the United States has extreme power over the entire world through their cultural influence. Hollywood out produces any foreign media hub and many aspects of American pop culture have diffused into other parts of the world due to the cold war. The cold war is an interesting example to consider when analyzing this definition of power. The United States and the USSR battled to become the world’s superpower and the United States won and are now the world super power. However, what is not considered in the definition of power above is military power. When I was first taught the history of the cold war I was lead to believe it was about creating the military industrial complex and the arms race. Whichever country has the bigger military and the stronger weapons would win the war. However, military strength has nothing to do with global power. The United States won the cold war because it out produced the USSR economically, had more widespread cultural influence, a larger political domain, and a stronger psychological grip on the globe. When YouTube was created in 2005 videos were amateur made, and narcissistic in nature. However, as the site gained popularity, publishing videos proved to be a lucrative use of time. Videos became more popular to make as well as view and what defined a good video became clear: originality. If the video had a new idea than it caught on and become "viral." As time went on originality started to be not enough and editing, quality, and production value became more important. Today, what started as an amateur video publishing website has become a staple in the entertainment industry. However, in recent years the paradigm of what makes a video viral has shifted back to authenticity rather than production value. People seem to gravitate toward YouTube videos rather than mainstream media because they feel publishers are relatable on YouTube. Consequently, there is a causation between authenticity of a video and it going viral, but rather only a correlation between production value and a video going viral. This made me think about why people like certain music videos, movies, and television programs over others.
Most music videos are professionally made, with high production value and experienced staff to make the production perfect. If people are gravitating toward authenticity rather than professionalism, than will the aspect of authenticity carry over to the rest of the entertainment industry? Since a service such a Netflix costs money to see television shows and a site like YouTube is free is that why YouTube is popular? With YouTube red coming out (a paid version of the site) coming out to let people block ads on YouTube it should be interesting to see if more people subscribe to Netflix for professionally made television and movies or YouTube red for more relatable content without advertisements. |
Max BrownA student athlete passionate about biophysics and identifying cancer drug targets. ArchivesCategories |