For my blog post I would like to talk mainly about chapter 4 in Reed's Digitized Lives which is titled "Is Everybody Equal Online?" In this chapter Reed visits the issue of whether we are treated equally in the online world and refers mostly to race and gender. He comes to the conclusion that we are not treated equally online or anywhere because there will always be discrimination and cyber bullying. So far we do not see these problems ending any time soon especially within the online community. The reason is, there is really no way to stop everyone in the world from making these decisions to contribute to cyber bullying. Also, there is a lot of stereotyping that apply online as well as in real life because people still post discriminatory jokes such as Blonde jokes or jokes about African American women's attitude or the way they dance. This also ties with sexism such as women being used as sex symbols in a lot of online games, memes, and comics, etc. These are some of the reasons that Reed explains why we are not treated equally on the Internet.
Race is still a very important issue that is not getting any better, for example Reed even mentions in this chapter of the book that the online world is primarily white-created simply by default. Even though this is unintentional it is a serious issue and in my opinion the Internet needs to be more welcoming to other races and cultures. I think this can be done by expanding the variety of languages that can be possible to input on a computer. The fact that the keyboard for all computers are in English shows that white people or anyone who can speak the English language are more privileged and have more access than those who cannot speak English. I think this is a large contribution to lots of people not having Internet access, because they do not know the English language.
