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doberbutts · 5 years

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can you talk about your experiences as a poc in the dog world? do you think you've been treated differently?

The sender of this ask messaged me privately to explain what they meant, which was a little different than how I took it, so I’ll answer both;

How I took the question:

In completely honesty, either because I’m already fairly choosey about the people I willingly spend my time around or because I’ve been fairly lucky... or both, existing as a PoC in the dog world hasn’t been overly hard for me on a surface level. Basically what that means is that I’ve yet to be denied a dog, access to training or an event, mentorships, whatever due to my race(s) as a factor. Additionally, in person, there’s very little outward aggression and surprisingly little microaggression happening within earshot or to my face. I’m not saying things are or are not said behind closed doors- I’ll never know. But when it comes to face-to-face interactions, since the crowd I run with is already fairly socially aware, racially charged problems have been relatively minimal. Once again, I’m very choosey on who I choose to interact with on a regular basis, so definitely do not take this as me saying doberman people or IGP people or service dog people or whatever are all living in liberal woke paradise because that is definitely the furthest thing from the truth. I just don’t interact with those people on purpose, and keep whatever I have to do with them fairly minimal.

However... online is very different. I remember at one point I had made a negative comment on a political thread, on a forum where most people (myself included) only show photos of their dogs, not themselves or any other identifying information. I was given a long spiel about them blacks and back in my day and we used to call em negros but now that’s offensive I guess in reply, to which I simply responded saying that I was black and perhaps if the user had known that they wouldn’t have responded that way. The user then switched gears, said something about my inability to handle a working dog (note: Creed had been home with me all of a single week and I had not once complained about anything to do with him) and hoping to see me fail so they could laugh in my face... and I found out later went so far as to email both my breeder and the owner of the sire to tell them to repo my dog because they’d clearly made a mistake placing him with me. This was very eye-opening for me because prior to that exchange, that user and I had known we were on different political sides but had been fairly cordial with each other regardless.

Most people who’ve been around this blog since the beginning will remember the time I was called a card-carrying member of the KKK because I had a slave, my service dog Creed. Many will remember various interactions where my race has been used against me in an argument that had nothing to do with race. And I delete almost all of the racially insensitive to outright inflammatory asks I get on a daily basis from trolls and known problem-starters. So I can’t say everything is golden in my experience, but I would say that the anonymous nature of the internet emboldens those who would otherwise keep their racism to themselves.

And, of course, the very fact that I have to navigate life in such a way that I have to carefully curate my experience or else risk someone spewing shit out of the wrong hole, but that is less a “dog world” thing and more a “life as a PoC” thing.

How they meant it: regarding the problem of high euthanasia rates in the south-eastern US and the phenomenon of PoC commonly being afraid of dogs, as well as possible socioeconomic issues

Being that I don’t live in the South and also refuse to for a wide myriad of reasons, Maryland was close enough and it was hell tyvm, I can only answer some of this issue.

First- the assumption that it’s mostly a socioeconomic issue is absolutely there. The south-eastern US is populated mostly by farmers and the descendants of the people who worked the land in the past. Loose, roaming dogs are a common thing there, as are dogs kept intact due to either lack of funds (also why heartworm and rabies continues to be a problem) or the lucrative ability to simply make more dogs for cheap instead of going out and buying one (also where the densest overpopulation and highest euthanasia happens in this country). Add on to that the fact that to many people, dogs are a tool for a job and not a living breathing animal that actually needs care or fall under this pervasive idea that they must live out all of their natural instincts including roaming freely, breeding indiscriminately, and hunting/killing whatever’s in their path, and you have a recipe for a lot of unwanted dogs and not a lot of places to put them.

Second- I wouldn’t say that PoC being afraid of dogs is necessarily tied to high euthanasia rates in the South. Many Southern PoC have dogs, of all shapes and sizes. Many Southern PoC also fall into that socioeconomic niche in the above paragraph. I would say high euth rates are more tied to a lack of funding (you can thank governments for that), a lack of willing adopters (which is cheaper- finding a litter of puppies on the side of the road and taking one home, or paying 50-400$ for a dog at a shelter), way too many dogs being taken in vs actual space to put them (and low cost clinics only solve the "funds for neuter” problem, not the "hey I can make 8 free dogs in only 2 months and maybe sell the ones I don’t want for some extra money” problem), and broad-brush breed restrictions (even in areas without BSL, if you’re poor you might not own your own property, which means you’re renting, which is harder to do with pit bulls and far easier to do with yorkies).

Then you add the non-dog-related problems these people face (of course exacerbated for PoC)- if they can’t feed themselves, if they can’t afford their own doctors, if they can’t afford housing, if their car breaks down... all of these things cost money, and if you’re operating on limited funds, you have to make a hard choice between yourself, your family, and your dog. The dog frequently loses. Note that the highest intake and euth rates happen in already very poor communities in the South, and the more wealthy the area, the less of a problem this is. This is not accidental. I have personally gone hungry to make sure the dogs are fed and vetted when I was at my poorest. Not everyone can make that choice. There’s this hope that if you give the dog up, the shelter will find someone who will take care of it better. Things don’t always work out that way.

Then you have your regular irresponsible dog owners- the people who’s dogs are untrained, aggressive, heartworm positive, on their 8th litter, constantly loose, etc. (obviously I have no problem with accidents, responsible management of aggressive and intact dogs, ethical breeding, etc) These people exist everywhere- proof of that is that I’m in New England, in a fairly wealthy area, and I still adopted a Chihuahua from someone who couldn’t afford/be bothered to feed, vet, or care for their animal. However, in my area, loose roaming dogs are very minimal. Even in our poorest nearby cities, the ACOs find maybe 5-10 dogs per week and most are adopted out the second their stray hold and health checks are up. Someone’s irresponsible with their animals and causes a problem that rescues need to clean up? There’s plenty of space for them. Compare that to an area that gets 50 loose dogs in per day and then try to add more dogs from these irresponsible owners. You run out of space, eventually. This is where the 3-day turnaround and dogs that get euthed the second they come in the door is most common, because they frankly don’t have enough room to spare.

I talk a little about the phenomenon of PoC (predominantly black PoC) being afraid of dogs here. Personally, I don’t think it’s connected, but I could be wrong.

#Anonymous #asks

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mojput-mypath · 4 years

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Social Media Addiction Anxiety

Have you noticed that feeling of a slight “down” when your social media post doesn’t work as well as another that was somewhat a hit? The silly little thoughts coming up saying – maybe I should have taken a better shot angle, or put my hair more to the side? Have you? Have you noticed going through your day with having a constant little reminder at the back of your mind – oh, would this be a good picture? Would this make an interesting story? And missing out on REALITY on the way?

I've been having this nagging feeling, a subtle guilt-trip from inside, for some time now. Then I noticed the guilt is becoming more, and suppressing it was harder. So, I did the obvious thing – I blamed others for what I felt was my own problem. I started noticing that it is not only me spending endless minutes combined together into hours and days of LIFE on social media; even my partner, who is somewhat ignoring his phone a lot of the time, I noticed, is spending time in front of screens for nothing in particular. And me – well, it’s my job, isn’t it? I have an excuse.

Then I watched a film. A film that told me everything I felt was true and WORSE. ("Social Media Dilemma")

I knew the film would just confirm my ideas, but it did more, it revealed the harder truth. I heard something about privacy in the last years and once, some time ago, removed myself completely from an online service, and then came back to it, ignoring the knowledge I had about these services. Since then, I have been putting a lot of effort into making myself resist all the hooks of the virtual world. But, I do have an addictive personality. It's just fact. I had to and have to be extra careful.

So, to put my heart at ease, I did a lot of “cleaning” of the feeds/emails/messages I received, and kept removing content that I found disturbing, repetitive or irrelevant. I kept blocking “spammers” (those lovely people that just feel like sharing everything they see online and assume it would be interesting for you too). I added the screen time app to see how much time I spent on screen. I ignored the evil numbers looking at me, saying I do spend too much time on screen. I also started using a service to tell me it’s too late in the evening or too early in the morning to look at the screen. I even used the app limit, for watching TV more than 2 hours. Somehow, I turned all these reminders telling me I’m spending too much time on screen - off.

I started noticing that I also like to take the phone to the toilet. I wanted not to take it, but I kept going back, half way down the hall, for it. I felt ashamed, but I ignored that too.

One of the things that made me really begin to make a change was the behaviour of my step-daughter after we let her use our phones for a bit. After half an hour/one hour on the phone she was restless, annoyed at us, and refused to do anything creative, refused to spend time in nature and refused everything else for that matter. The cause-of-grumpiness pattern was obvious.

Then I started to leave my phone at home when we were going out, just to “get rid of it”, because I knew if I took it - I would keep staring at it – in the lift, in the car, searching for something “important” while in the shop, checking a map to see where we should be going…

The statistics (and I really like statistics) told me I had around 10 hours of screen time PER DAY. 68 hours in the last 7 days. That I get around 700-900 notification PER DAY on only one chat service. That I pick up my phone on an average of a 100 times per day!

And I thought getting grumpy for nothing was strange. Why on earth am I grumpy most of the time? Surely not because my nose is stuck in online content?

Three things that were confirmed by the film, struck me like lightning. One: the services are designed for you to keep checking them. In spite of me turning off message counts and notifications for most services I use, the one or two I was using, kept coming ALL THE TIME. I also realised I keep checking work messages at 11 at night, at 5 in the morning. Just to see “what is going on online”. The answer is simple: NOTHING. Only time-wasting is happening online. MOSTLY. 99% of the time. We are not machines that can process all this data! Our brains are limited. We are impressionable.

I noticed also the creepy commercials that I felt at times are READING MY MIND. I ignored even that, because I liked the products. Here we come to number two: The services keep showing me nice things, things I like, things I need. Things that make me feel SAFE and COMFORTABLE. And I want to feel safe and comfortable, also feeling I am in control of what I am seeing, by blocking everything that does not feel safe and comfortable. Like, for example, in the world – things are not always safe and comfortable, and it is nicer in the phone world than out THERE (where the TRUTH is). I feel a little like a conspiracy theorist writing every other word in CAPITALS. Even conspiracy theories, I heard, are a product of evil reptile control, making us put the truth in a make-believe context, so the actual truth can be hidden by turning facts into mockery, making the truth into something designed by delusional people.

We’re all sitting out there, with our heads in screens, ignoring life itself, but living in our own little safe virtual worlds, which AI algorithms have created for us – based on GAZILLIONS OF DATA sources, freely given by ourselves, that are taking note of our subconscious behaviour.

And three: once the man-made “algorithms” are set loose in the virtual systems – no one can predict how they will mutate in human hands (riots, hate acts etc.). Also, the social media reptiles can FINE TUNE or completely MODIFY real-life social conduct. The film said so! It said that by tweaking the currents of human subconscious acts, societies can shift their preferences, ways of thinking and ultimately behaviour. As fast as pressing a button!!!

We don’t have to wait for the MATRIX/1984 futures to arrive – THEY ARE HERE.

I am now figuring out a way to stay connected to the work I am doing online, how to make use of the services and make money on others being gullible. Also hoping that the services we provide are healthy for people. Double standards! But, as my dad always said: we live in society, not in the forest. If you want to live with wolves – go ahead, bye.

What I did for my digital detox:

1. TURNED OFF ALL badges, message counts, notifications on phone & computer 2. Replaced my browser and search engine with ‘safe’ ones that do not collect your browsing data 3. Logged out of all services, actually I did a reset of privacy data on my phone and turned off location services and denied mic & camera access for 97% of apps 4. Deleted all except one social media app (work reasons again) 5. Stopped using Facebook for news and communication and kept it only for work, which I intend to reduce more 6. Deleted my personal Instagram account 7. Kept 2 services for work communication

What I still want to do: 1. Transfer my email account to another server, with better encryption policies 2. Get online storage that has better security 3. Stop using google/facebook services for logging in for everything.

If there are any suggestions you would like to share with me, I am not available on social media :D I'll set up a point of contact that I feel comfortable with soon and will let you know here on the blog.

Also, you might have my number, call me. We can have a real-life chat.

#social media #freedom restriction #privacy policies #protect your data #artificial intelligence #personal blog #opinion

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biofunmy · 5 years

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Women In Rural India Are Defying Their Communities By Going Undercover On Facebook

Aleesha Nandhra for BuzzFeed News

Seema Sinha never imagined that a Facebook account might ruin her chances at an arranged marriage.

“Do you have a Facebook account?” her would-be mother-in-law asked her, starkly, at her matchmaking ceremony.

Nervously, Sinha — who asked not to be identified by her real name — replied that she did; she used it to keep up with her extended family, to comment on their pictures, and sometimes to post pictures of her own.

Her prospective in-laws said they had no tolerance for such activities. To be considered as a bride for their 25-year-old son, a civil engineer, she would have to delete her Facebook account. “We can’t have a daughter-in-law who makes a public display of herself out there,” she remembered them saying.

Sinha’s parents didn’t want to lose the match. So under pressure from her parents, she buckled and deleted her account. A month later, she was married. And soon after that, she was back on Facebook, this time with a fake name and an image of a clear cerulean sky as her profile photo.

“Nobody knows I’m there,” she said. “Not even my husband.”

“When a girl uses Facebook, our whole village looks at her differently.”

Sinha lives in Charkhi Dadri, a town of 50,000 people 75 miles west of India’s capital, New Delhi, in the state of Haryana, known for having one of the lowest female-to-male ratios in the country due to selective abortion of female fetuses, a culture of gender segregation, and a patriarchal social structure.

For women living in these parts of the country, using social networks like Facebook comes with real risks of being socially outcast. While Facebook may have an image problem in most parts of the world for handling data carelessly, spreading fake news, and inciting violence and genocide, male leaders in these parts of India dislike it for an entirely different reason: It gives young women a platform to post pictures, put themselves out there, and meet young men.

Across rural India, young women are accessing Facebook under false identities, using the names of Bollywood actors or other made-up monikers, and sometimes even posing as men — violating Facebook’s policy against “pretending to be anything or anyone” — as they seek a place in modern digital life. (Facebook declined to comment on such apparent violations.) Their discretion doesn’t stem from an everyday eye for privacy but from a fear of the harsh social consequences of being outed as a woman who uses Facebook.

Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News

Bhagwan Das Pradhan, head of Bara village council

“When a girl uses Facebook, our whole village looks at her differently,” said Bhagwan Das Pradhan, council head in Bara, a village of about 4,000 in Uttar Pradesh full of sprawling, sun-baked fields and squat, old-fashioned houses with courtyards in the center. “They think she’s too loose, too forward, for her own good.”

This is a broadly held view in parts of India, and one the reasons Indian Facebook is dominated by men. In fact, 1 in every 4 of Facebook’s 240 million Indian users are women, according to a 2016 report from UK-based consultancy firm We Are Social. And overall, only 3 of every 10 internet users in the country are women, according to data in a report released last year by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, a telecom industry body that counts both Google and Facebook as its members.

“There are multiple factors responsible for the gender divide that we see today, including access to resources and social norms,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement that outlined the company’s various initiatives to bring more women online, including #SheMeansBusiness and #SheLeadsTech, and working with NGOs. “The internet is the invisible force driving advancement for women around the world.”

Vidushi Marda, a legal researcher who works with Article 19, a UK-based human rights nonprofit that works on issues of free expression online, said while it’s increasingly difficult to stop women from using social networking and the internet as mobile phones go mainstream, the social taboo keeps these women from using the platforms to their benefit as the rest of the world (and their male peers) does.

“They don’t get the same return on the investment that they put in these platforms that you and I do,” said Marda. “In the short term, at the very least, I think these women are fighting a losing battle.”

Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News

The village of Bara, Uttar Pradesh, India

In Bara, a recently married 21-year-old woman who did not want to be named told BuzzFeed News her in-laws made her shut down her four-year-old Facebook account. She was eventually allowed to create a new one, but she cannot post to it without the approval of her husband and her in-laws.

In the village of Salarpur in Uttar Pradesh, home to about 10,000 people where open gutters flow on both sides of narrow, unpaved streets, locals told BuzzFeed News about a 20-year-old couple who met through Facebook and eloped in 2016. The village council ordered villagers to shun them when they returned a year later, and they had to apologize dozens of times before they were forgiven.

And yet more than a dozen girls from villages in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh told BuzzFeed News that they still use Facebook — just not openly.

“Sometimes I think I want to just use it to assert my identity on the internet,” said Manasi Saxena, an undergrad student from the village of Salarpur, Uttar Pradesh. Still, she uses Facebook under a false name, and has a picture of a bright yellow rose as her profile picture. “Mostly, I just want to be there because I’m furious with the double standards: All my male relatives are allowed to use it, and nobody says anything to them.”

“I want to just use it to assert my identity on the internet.”

Saxena uses Facebook the way so many others do: to socialize with friends and relatives, and to keep up with news. She is also part of a couple of dozen study groups to prepare for entrance examinations for higher studies. Her wall is full of generic quizzes (“Which cute animal are you?”) and links to Bollywood stories from the Navbharat Times, a popular Hindi news website.

She follows a now well-established set of unspoken ground rules for using Facebook as an Indian woman from these parts of the country: no full names; no checking in or location sharing; and absolutely no pictures of themselves, anywhere. It’s not for paranoia either.

Juhi Tiwari, a Salarpur resident who recently graduated, told BuzzFeed News when she first opened her Facebook account three years ago and put up a profile picture of herself, a boy from a neighboring village stalked her. “Once he showed up at my college,” he said. “He followed me everywhere for months.” Finally, she deleted her account. A year later, she opened a new one — sans profile picture. “Communities are tight-knit in these parts,” she said. “The last thing you want is everyone in the village knowing that a strange guy is obsessed with you and stalks you on Facebook.”

Other women accessed Facebook from a trusted male cousin or a brother’s phone and limited their activity to lurking on other people’s profiles, and occasionally liking something. Sometimes they created profiles using male names.

Gitesh Jindal, a 20-year-old undergrad student studying business at Charkhi Dadri’s Kedarnath Aggarwal Institute of Management, told BuzzFeed News about a man who once struck up a friendship with him on Facebook. After a month of correspondence, the man revealed his true identity: He was actually a woman from Jindal’s neighborhood. “She wasn’t sure she could trust me to not take screenshots if she put up her real photo and misuse them somehow,” he explained.

Facebook is aware of that for some Indian women, safeguarding their image is a must. Last year, the company rolled out a feature called “profile picture guard” exclusively in India that prevents people from, among other things, screenshotting profile pictures from Android phones, which are the most popular smartphones in India.

“In our research with people and safety organizations in India, we’ve heard that some women choose not to share profile pictures that include their faces anywhere on the internet because they’re concerned about what may happen to their photos,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

But the profile picture guard works only in Facebook’s mobile app. It doesn’t work in a browser, it doesn’t prevent screenshotting profile pictures from desktop, and it doesn’t protect images posted to a Facebook album or wall. More than a year after Facebook rolled out the feature in the country, none of the women BuzzFeed News interviewed across three villages in two states had heard of it. Facebook did not respond to questions about this feature.

In its statement to BuzzFeed News, Facebook said, “Integral to people’s interest in connecting and sharing, and our mission of giving people the power to build community, is that people, and especially women, feel safe to connect in meaningful and profound ways.”

Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News

The town of Charkhi Dadri, Haryana, India

Experts say that the social taboo on women using the internet and Facebook specifically comes down to a single factor: controlling their sexuality.

“What mobile phones and Facebook in particular gives these girls is some space and agency, something that they rarely get in their real lives offline,” said Bishakha Datta, cofounder and CEO of Point of View, a Mumbai-based nonprofit that helps women in rural parts of the country exercise their “right to a voice,” including online. “There is a real fear that social networking will help girls choose who they want to get into a relationship with. It’s a fear of girls turning into independent, sexual women.”

India’s patriarchs cite the “bad influence” of social media and the internet on women’s lives as a reason to keep them away from it.

Raju “Don” Sain, a daily wage laborer from Bara, said that he’s terrified of not finding suitable grooms for his three daughters, ages 16, 18, and 19, if anybody finds out that they talk to men through Facebook. “They can use it after they get married if their husband allows it,” he said. Sain declined to let BuzzFeed News interview his daughters.

“The internet is bad because it has blue films,” a member of the Salarpur village council who is a father to two daughters, 16 and 17, and a son, 14, told BuzzFeed News, using a common Indian phrase to refer to porn. “I see no reason why women should use it.”

“It’s a question of their family’s honor if somebody takes their pictures and misuses them in any way.”

Aakash Tawar, an MBA student from Charkhi Dadri, has more than 500 friends on Facebook, but fewer than 50 of them are women. His Facebook wall is full of selfies and pictures of men. Young girls shouldn’t use Facebook because it invites unwanted male attention, Tawar said, a consequence he described as “just natural.” His classmate Pravin Jangda said it’s riskier for girls to use Facebook because “it’s a question of their family’s honor if somebody takes their pictures and misuses them in any way.”

Even indirect participation by women is frowned upon. Reena Yadav, a high schooler from Bara, told BuzzFeed News that after her brother posted a picture of the two of them together, members of her extended family called to ask him to take it down because she was in the photo.

India’s patriarchs find the idea of young women using the internet unsettling, say experts. “So for them, it’s very much about controlling and supervising young and unmarried women’s internet access,” said Anja Kovacs, director at the New Delhi–based Internet Democracy Project, an organization that works on issues of free speech, democracy, and social justice on the internet. “One of the big things that they’re scared of is seeing how the internet is a tool for empowerment” she said. “And with Facebook, in particular, they are also scared about things like people misusing the pictures of their daughters and sharing them elsewhere.”

A young woman putting herself out there on Facebook, therefore, doesn’t sit right in some parts of states like Haryana, for instance, where women traditionally cover their faces with their saris in front of family elders and male strangers.

Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News

This gender divide on the Indian internet is no surprise for big tech companies like Facebook and Google, which have been trying to get millions of people in emerging markets like India online. Google, for instance, runs a program called Internet Saathi in more than 200,000 Indian villages where it trains women to use the internet and smartphones (and, by extension, Google’s products). The women Google trains then go on to train other women in their villages.

“Sociocultural barriers like women not being allowed to use the internet were a key barrier when we started,” Neha Barjatya, who heads the program for Google in India, told BuzzFeed News. “The conventional thinking in these areas was that the internet wasn’t a place meant for women.”

Yet the response rate to the Internet Saathi program was low — women in patriarchal parts of the country weren’t allowed to travel far beyond their homes; some were discouraged from attending. So Google started putting smartphones on handcarts to gently introduce them to the women there.

Things have slowly changed: The share of internet users is now 3 in 10, up from 1 in 10 in 2015. Still, “There’s still a long way to go,” Barjatya admits.

Point of View’s Datta said tech companies need to fix other fundamental issues before they can narrow the gender gap. “Internet culture sucks sometimes,” she said. “There’s trolling, abuse, and harassment, and those aren’t things that people — and especially women — from India who are coming online for the first time in their lives have any experience dealing with. Connecting the next billion doesn’t mean that you just dump them into what can often be this toxic space online.”

Meanwhile, the ever-quickening pace of innovation and globalization means new ways to discreetly socialize are always emerging. “Have you used TikTok?” a smiling Saxena asked BuzzFeed News, referring to the Chinese app that’s sort of a mashup of Vine and Instagram and is becoming a huge hit with young people across India’s smaller towns and villages. “Nobody in my family knows about it yet. I love it!” ●

CORRECTION

Jan. 08, 2019, at 20:03 PM

Haryana has one of the lowest female-to-male ratios in India. An earlier version of this piece reversed the ratio.

CORRECTION

Jan. 13, 2019, at 18:54 PM

Anja Kovacs was misquoted in an earlier version of this post due to a transcription error.

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