Titstare

Last updated

Titstare is a fictional mobile application centred on pictures of men staring at women and their breasts. It was introduced at a 2013 hackathon at TechCrunch's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, California by two Australian developers. [1] Titstare became the subject of public controversy, with the skit being described as symptomatic of sexist attitudes in Silicon Valley's startup culture. Conference organizers later apologized for the misogynistic presentation.

Contents

History

Background

TechCrunch, a technology news website, was established in 2005 and acquired by internet giant AOL in September 2010. [2] The acquisition was seen by AOL as a move towards solidifying its position as a provider of technical content and was announced at the 2010 edition of the annual conference sponsored by TechCrunch, [2] known as Disrupt. [3]

Disrupt events, generally held early in the fall of each year, are conclaves which bring together representatives of startup companies, industry insiders, and interested others for presentations and networking, typically also including the opportunity for collaborative hackathon sessions. It was at Disrupt 2013, held in San Francisco, that Australian programmers Jethro Batts and David Boulton debuted their new tongue-in-cheek mobile phone app, Titstare, described by the pair as "an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits". [4]

On Sunday, September 8, the duo delivered their rehearsed one-minute-long presentation – a series of mild breast-related jokes and puns – tying in with their humorously intended product. [4] This generated a mixed response from the assembled crowd, running the gamut from indignation to uncomfortable laughter to genuine appreciation of the "twisted kind of standup" intended by the presenters. [4]

Reaction

Titstare was accused of adding to the institutionalized sexism, known as brogrammer culture, in the American tech industry. Response was immediate and primarily negative; journalist Abby Ohlheiser wrote that the app's intent, the agglomeration of photos of men staring at partially clothed female cleavage, effectively trivialized the right of women to consent. [5] After he defended the app against allegations of misogyny on Twitter, Business Insider Chief technology officer Pax Dickinson was forced to resign. Dickinson later wrote an apology, which was published on VentureBeat. [6]

Much of the criticism appeared on Twitter, with one representative tweet stating, "There goes my attempt to teach my 9 [year old] girl how welcoming tech industry is to women." [4]

Apologies

TechCrunch was immediate in issuing a public apology for the Titstare presentation, as well as one for an offensive masturbation app presented later in the day, deeming the presentations "misogynistic" and declaring:

Sexism is a major problem in the tech industry, and we’ve worked hard to counteract it in our coverage and in our own hiring. Today’s issues resulted from a failure to properly screen our hackathons for inappropriate content ahead of time and establish clear guidelines for these submissions. Trust us, that changed as soon as we saw what happened at our show. Every presentation is getting a thorough screening from this hackathon onward. Any type of sexism or other discriminatory and/or derogatory speech will not be allowed.... We are sorry. [5]

The creators themselves took to Twitter with a speedy apology, stating "sorry if we offended some of you, very unintentional. Just a fun Aussie hack." [5]

Commenting on the affair in The Guardian , journalist Amy Gray faulted conference organizers, whom she presumed knew about the content of presentations beforehand based upon mandatory pre-convention uploads of personal and project information. [1] Gray felt the Titstare affair emblematic of a duality in the tech world, which was on the one hand perfectly meritocratic in theory, while in practice being an industry which "runs on privilege, with sexist and juvenile behaviour based on gender stereotypes being routinely displayed". [1] Co-editor of TechCrunch Alexia Tsotsis said that the presenters did not include the name of their app in the presentation list. [7]

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 Amy Gray, "'Titstare' App at Techcrunch: Women in Tech Deserve Better," The Guardian, Sept. 8, 2013.
  2. 1 2 Campbell, Caroline; Ryan, Eoin (September 28, 2010). "AOL To Acquire TechCrunch Network of Sites" (Press release). AOL Inc. Archived from the original on 2 October 2010.
  3. ↑ According to Betsy Morais of The New Yorker, the Disrupt convention takes its name from a phrase from the 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clay Christenson, indicating a shattering of old markets and the creation of the new. See: Morais 2013
  4. 1 2 3 4 Morais, Betsy (9 September 2013). "The Unfunniest Joke in Technology". The New Yorker. Condé Nast. Retrieved 12 December 2023.
  5. 1 2 3 Abby Ohlheiser, "Meet 'Titstare,' the Tech World's Latest 'Joke' from the Minds of Brogrammers," Archived 2015-12-08 at the Wayback Machine The Wire, Sept. 8, 2013.
  6. ↑ Miller, Claire Cain (April 5, 2014). "Technology's Man Problem". The New York Times . Retrieved August 15, 2014.
  7. ↑ Hu, Elise (September 11, 2013). "Sexism In The Tech Industry Takes Center Stage". NPR . Retrieved August 16, 2014.

Related Research Articles

Engadget is a technology blog with daily coverage of gadgets and consumer electronics. It has been operated by Yahoo! Inc. since September 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hackathon</span> Event in which groups of software developers work at an accelerated pace

A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. They are often run using agile software development practices, such as sprint-like design wherein computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, product managers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on engineering projects, such as software engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Calacanis</span> American businessman

Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TechCrunch</span> American technology news website

TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.

Social television is the union of television and social media. Millions of people now share their TV experience with other viewers on social media such as Twitter and Facebook using smartphones and tablets. TV networks and rights holders are increasingly sharing video clips on social platforms to monetise engagement and drive tune-in.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">App Store (Apple)</span> App distribution platform by Apple Inc

The App Store is an app marketplace developed and maintained by Apple Inc., for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS SDK. Apps can be downloaded on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, and some can be transferred to the Apple Watch smartwatch or 4th-generation or newer Apple TVs as extensions of iPhone apps.

TokBox was a PaaS company that provided hosted infrastructure, APIs and tools required to deliver enterprise-grade WebRTC capabilities. It did so primarily through its proprietary OpenTok video platform for commercial application.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Instagram</span> Social media platform owned by Meta Platforms

Instagram is an American photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social networking service, available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 25 languages including English, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.

GroupMe is a mobile group messaging app owned by Microsoft. It was launched in May 2010 by the private company GroupMe. In August 2011, GroupMe delivered over 100 million messages each month and by June 2012, that number jumped to 550 million. In 2013, GroupMe had over 12 million registered users.

Google Cast is a proprietary protocol developed by Google for playing Internet-streamed audiovisual content on a compatible consumer device. The protocol is used to initiate and control playback of content on digital media players, high-definition televisions, and home audio systems using a mobile device, personal computer, or smart speaker. The protocol was first launched on July 24, 2013, to support Google's first-generation Chromecast player. The Google Cast SDK was released on February 3, 2014, allowing third parties to modify their software to support the protocol. According to Google, over 20,000 Google Cast-ready apps were available as of May 2015. Support for Google Cast has since been integrated into subsequent devices, such as the Nexus Player and other Android TV devices, as well as soundbars, speakers, and later models of the Chromecast. Consumer devices that natively support the protocol are marketed as Chromecast built-in. As of October 2017, over 55 million Chromecasts and Chromecast built-in devices have been sold.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BillGuard</span>

“BillGuard” was a personal finance security and productivity company. Its mobile and website application scans credit card and debit card transactions, alerting users to possible scams, billing errors, fraudulent charges and hidden fees.

Hoppit is a personalized search engine. It was founded by Steven Dziedzic and Emad Saghir in 2011 and headquartered in New York, New York. It was acquired in 2013 and is now a part of XO Group, Inc.

"Brogrammer" or "tech bro" are slang terms for stereotypically masculine programmers. Brogrammer is a portmanteau of bro and programmer. It is often used pejoratively to describe toxic masculinity and sexism in the technology industry, but some programmers self-describe themselves as a brogrammer positively as a word for "sociable or outgoing programmer", and it also tends to represent a subculture within the greater tech industry. An example sometimes cited of targeted advertising toward "brogrammers" is an early Klout hiring advert posted at a Stanford University career fair as "Want to bro down and crush some code? Klout is hiring." The company later described it as a joke and as an unfortunate misstep.

Sexism in the technology industry is overt, subtle, or covert occupational sexism which makes the technology industry less friendly, less accessible, and less profitable for women. While the participation of women in the tech industry varies by region, it is generally around 4% to 20% depending on the measure used. Possible causes that have been studied by researchers include gender stereotypes, investment influenced by those beliefs, a male-dominated environment, a lack of awareness about sexual harassment, and the culture of the industry itself. Margaret O'Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington, in 2019 concluded that Silicon Valley is uniquely influential locale that is shaping our world. But she points to problematic failures regarding diversity. Male oligopolies of high-tech power have recreated traditional environments that repress the talents and ambitions of women, people of color, and other minorities to the benefit of whites and Asian males.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">StartupBus</span>

StartupBus is an annual technological startup competition and entrepreneurship boot camp, described as a Hackathon, created by Elias Bizannes in February 2010. The competition is held across a 3-day bus ride where contestants or "buspreneurs" compete to conceive the best technology startup. The competition seeks to attract young top talents to compete, to search for the most innovative startup conceived by the groups, where the winners are determined by a panel of judges. Starting from February 2011, it has gone through many iterations in various continents from 2011 to the present day, with the first in Austin, Texas and subsequently in North America, Europe and Africa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tracy Chou</span> American software engineer

Tracy Chou is a software engineer and advocate for diversity in technology related fields. She previously worked at Pinterest and Quora with internship experience at Rocket Fuel, Google, and Facebook.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MailTime</span>

MailTime is a mobile messenger application for iOS and Android devices, developed by MailTime Technology Inc. in 2013. The application is known as "email messenger" which integrates the feature of email and text messages. MailTime operates on a freemium model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cooper Harris</span> American entrepreneur and actress

Cooper Harris is an American entrepreneur and actress. She is currently the CEO & founder of Klickly, a payments platform, based in Venice, California. Harris had a career as an actress on such TV shows like Young and the Restless and As the World Turns, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tristan Harris</span> American computer scientist and businessman

Tristan Harris is an American technology ethicist. He is the executive director and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.