{"id":191,"date":"2008-04-29T22:44:43","date_gmt":"2008-04-30T03:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/punyamishra.com\/2008\/04\/29\/gender-gps\/"},"modified":"2008-11-10T22:48:08","modified_gmt":"2008-11-11T03:48:08","slug":"gender-gps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/2008\/04\/29\/gender-gps\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender & GPS"},"content":{"rendered":"

During our recent NY \/ New Jersey visit (during the kids spring break<\/a>) I had the first opportunity to drive a car equipped with a GPS system. It was a case of love at first sight. I got back home and bought myself a Tom Tom right away. <\/p>\n

I used this unit extensively during my recent trip to Purdue<\/a>, and it was a life-saver, though it did mess up after it got me right next door to my destination and instead of taking me there, placed me on an infinite loop. I finally broke through that vicious cycle by shutting it off and asking a pedestrian. <\/p>\n

But this post is not about the efficacy of GPS units but rather about how we make attributions to technologies. For instance, both these units use a female voice and yet I noticed that I tended address it as “he” — as in “what did he say again?” My kids noticed this discrepancy, which led to a fascinating discussion on how we make attributions (as to whether these attributions are true or false, is at some level, not the relevant to this discussion). <\/p>\n

As to why my attributions go so against common sense (regarding it as a male even while the voice is female) we discussed that as well. It seems to me that I am responding to the Tom Tom as a voice of authority or knowledge and thus am making some sub-conscious gender attributions based on that. This “male teacher or leader” effect is so strong that it drowns out the countervailing attribution based on the gender of the voice. <\/p>\n

Finally, as I have been using the Tom Tom more and more, I am sensing a shift in my thinking. Increasingly the female voice is becoming the dominant “cue” instrumental in “locking me in” on my attribution of gender. I guess the GPS unit lost some of its “authority” and “credibility” when I realized that it was not error free as I had thought it to be. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During our recent NY \/ New Jersey visit (during the kids spring break) I had the first opportunity to drive a car equipped with a GPS system. It was a case of love at first sight. I got back home and bought myself a Tom Tom right away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,33,5,13,29,34,27,8,49],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/punyamishra.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}