Digital Media and Information in Society/Student Journals/Reese02/Feminists Theory Phonograph

First, I would like to cover what Feminists Theory entails. Feminists' theory, according to ChatGPT, is an idea that encompasses the arguments of gender and where women play a role in society. It looks at gender equality with a feminist mindset.

As far as how it would look at the Phonograph, it can be split up into different areas. One such area is music; with the introduction of the phonograph, anyone could obtain copies of music and listen to them as many times as they wanted. The phonograph gave people the ability to capture audio in time and play it back. With this in mind, looking at the feminist theory view of it we see a new/more heavily enforced idea of gender stereotypes. One example is how the recorded music was marketed to males and females. Females were marketed music defined as feminine or sentimental as opposed to classical or instrumental music that would be marketed to men.

These stereotypes not only applied to how it was market but also how it looked. The album covers where different based off of who the target audience was. It ranged from pictures of elegant women to men in strong and powerful poses. this imagery was used to further push the market and gender stereotypes on the people buying the records.

In terms of the feminist's theory and its view on the phonograph we can see how it affected genders differently and how everyone learned to interact/identify with different aspects or genres of it.

Important quotes from source (The source mostly talked about the negative effects of the phonograph and telegraph and the conspiracy of their early days): "It appeared in a number of satirical sketches as a secret informant, often in battles of the sexes and usually with spouses turning it against one another."

" Even more troubling, evidence in the form of photographs and audio recordings persisted and, in the case of the former, could be easily reproduced for public consumption."

"Even more, recorded sound could be used as a tool for identification as well as audible evidence of one’s thoughts and deeds."

References:

ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/share/a6f3de64-db0d-4593-aebd-87db19eca966