Yahoo fails to truly shine

Beginning at birth, we essentially, in part, become a product of our society. Our very actions, likings, and tendencies are influenced by socializing agents that perpetually surround us. Socialization, though beginning in our infantile stages, continues to persist throughout our lifetime. At every stage within our lives, our thoughts and actions become tempered by more overt influences such our family, friends and teachers. However, there are also some less obvious instances that seem to chisel and refine our behavioral nature. We are often, in fact, influenced and socialized without our direct knowing. The internet search engine mogul, Yahoo, recently evidenced this less overt method of socialization via the highly accessible world wide web.

On Monday, Yahoo launched a site geared specifically toward women between the ages of 25 and 54. According to yahoo, this female demographic has been underserved by the company’s current properties. Yahoo stated that women, are essentially, “the caretakers for everybody in their lives,” further going on to say that “they didn't feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them- as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter.” Yahoo, though they insist that they were targeting the entire female demographic, however, failed to acknowledge the fact that today’s women between the age of 25 and 54 are also heavily involved within the work-place. In neglecting to include the working woman in “the whole them” category, Yahoo indirectly implies, and only reinforces, the age-old belief of a more domestic woman—one who remains relegated as the caretaker and homemaker.

Therefore this particular Yahoo site tends to only influence and hegemonize the more antiquated notion of a women. As traffic moves through and about this website, they will indirectly be influenced in their ways of thinking of women as merely the parent, spouse and daughter. It will impose onto its visitors, the notion that women as the parent, spouse and daughter is the norm, and perhaps even a model of woman to strive to become. Though this mere fact will not be made explicitly apparent to the site’s visitors, the messages and inferences that can and potentially will be made after visiting such a site tend to support this acute notion of a woman, thus imparting more subtle messages that only strengthen and socialize women and other visitors to think in this very way.