Pronouns are not a fad. The idea that everyone should be very publicly announcing their pronouns IMO is a fad that won't last for more than a few years as a mainstream phenomenon. I do understand the motivations to do it though.
Pronouns in profiles is at least four years old is some mainstream contexts [0]. I'm unsure that it is a fad because on the internet there can be very little other signaling of someone's gender.
Keep in mind that many languages are inherently gendered and to ask someone "what did you today?" for example in Polish, you need to use the right gender. Answering anything will also reveal you gender.
Well, in the internet no one knows you're a dog. Some women used to answer using masculine conjugation as a default, to avoid their gender to distract from the things they did or had to say. Some men did the opposite to get attention or more eager responses.
I know it's inconvenient and to some may be considered even insulting as a suggestion, and I don't think it should be the norm. However, it's still a choice you're free to make.
This seems like the ultimate manifestation of old adage "there are no girls on the internet." I suspect that females (especially those not in the tech industry) tend to overwhelmingly hold accounts in their real name, whereas the vast majority of pseudonymous posters are men. It makes a lot of sense from a social conditioning perspective of communication: that females tend to be more relationship-focused whereas males tend to be more object-focused.
As a result, for girls, getting misgendered under a pseudonymous account is seen as danger that comes with the territory. And of course they take it in stride, because that's just what women do all the time.
Only if you declare yourself masculine or feminine, doesn't go any further. Someone could be non-binary and declare themselves more feminine than masculine
I don’t think people expressing their identity markers online is going to stop happening anytime soon. Gender is a pretty fundamental part of most people’s identity.
The fad in question doesn't concern how closely people identify with their gender in real, normal life. It concerns their aptitude to announce their gender prior to any online interaction whatsoever.
> ...[N]etworks like Friendster, MySpace, YouTube, and, later, Facebook and Twitter were dissolving the boundaries between social groups that had long shaped personal relations and identities. Before social media, you spoke to different “audiences” — family members, friends, colleagues, and so forth — in different ways. You modulated your tone of voice, your words, your behavior, and even your appearance to suit whatever social “context” you were in (workplace, home, school, nightclub, etc.) and then readjusted the presentation of yourself when you moved into another context.
> On a social network ... all those different contexts collapsed into a single context. Whenever you posted a message or a photograph or a video, it could be seen by your friends, your parents, your coworkers, your bosses, and your teachers, not to mention the amorphous mass known as the general public. And, because the post was recorded, it could be seen by future audiences as well as the immediate one. When people realized they could no longer present versions of themselves geared to different audiences — it was all one audience now — they had to grapple with a new sort of identity crisis.
I think its too early to declare it a fad. It hasn’t been around long enough en masse to know whether that’ll be the norm, or disappear yet. We’ll know in a year or two.
Yeah, there’s a reason they don’t describe the (far more common) public announcement of religious affiliation a fad, even though that’s far beyond social media profiles and even goes to people wearing weird jewelry. It’s just that that’s a form of identification that confirms to the commenter’s political goals.
Yes, but the speed at which the behavior spread (at least on Twitter) was clearly a sort of viral phenomenon, and certainly looked like a fad. Maybe it'll stick around if it's useful to enough people, maybe it won't, maybe application designers will figure out a way to include it in the user's avatar or encode it in some aspect of how a user's name is displayed, rather than overloading the friendly-name field or whatever Twitter calls it.