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January 28, 2010

Upcoming Mary Gray talk on on "Out in the Country: Youth, Media & Queer Visibility in Rural America"

It used to be the case that all of the queer youth living in rural America ran away to the city to find others like them. The Internet has dramatically changed this. More and more, rural queer youth are building out networks of other queer rural youth, helping generate a rural queer identity. Think about what this means for the health and safety of queer youth. Think about what this means for the future of tolerance.

It is with great pleasure that I will be hosting Mary Gray at Microsoft Research on February 10 to discuss her latest book: "Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America." Mary is going to talk about her findings so that we can get into a fun conversation. This will also be a great opportunity to connect with queer scholars and activists throughout New England so please join us for an evening of fun!

OUT IN THE COUNTRY: YOUTH, MEDIA & QUEER VISIBILITY IN RURAL AMERICA
February 10, 2010 from 6:30-9:00PM
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, MA
http://marygray.eventbrite.com/

Talk Description:

Join acclaimed author, Mary Gray as she discusses her latest book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press), which examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media--particularly the internet--play in their lives and political work.

Drawing on her experiences working for close to 2 years in rural parts of Kentucky and in small towns along its borders, Mary will map out how lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and their allies make use of social media and local resources to combat the marginalization they contend with in their own communities as well as the erasure they face in popular representations of gay and lesbian life and the agendas of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups.

Against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America LGBTQ youth and their allies visibly—and often vibrantly—work the boundaries of the public and media spaces available to them. This talk will explore how youth suture together high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, and the web that construct spaces for fashioning their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline or rural and urban experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term 'queer visibility’ and its political stakes.

Register today to join the discussion! After the presentation, Mary will be available for book signings. http://marygray.eventbrite.com/

About Mary Gray:

Mary L. Gray is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research looks at how everyday uses of media shape people's understandings and expressions of their social identities. She is the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999). Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press) examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media--particularly the internet--play in their lives and political work.

Category: gender & sexuality

Tags: queer culture youth internet event

Posted by zephoria at 2:50 PM | Comments (1)

January 25, 2010

Public by Default, Private when Necessary

This post was originally written for the DML Central Blog. If you're interested in Digital Media and Learning, you definitely want to check this blog out.

With Facebook systematically dismantling its revered privacy infrastructure, I think it's important to drill down on the issue of privacy as it relates to teens. There's an assumption that teens don't care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways. When teens argue that they produce content that is "public by default, private when necessary," they aren't arguing that privacy is disappearing. Instead, they are highlighting that both privacy AND publicity have value. Privacy is important in certain situations - to not offend, to share something intimate, or to exclude certain people. Yet, publicity can also be super useful. It's about being present in social situations, about chance encounters, about obtaining social status.

Once upon a time on Facebook, participants had to be a vetted member of a community to even have an account. Privacy was a deeply held value and many turned to Facebook because of the ways in which it protected them from making public mistakes. This was especially core to youth participation. Parents respected Facebook's attitudes towards privacy and, in a shocking moment of agreement, teens did too.

Slowly, things have changed. Most recently, Facebook made it possible for users to make Facebook content public (presumably to compete with Twitter). When participants signed in, they were asked whether or not they wanted they wanted to change their privacy settings. Many were confused and just clicked through, not realizing that this made their content more public than it was before. This upset some legal types and Facebook was forced to retreat, making the status quo the default instead of tricking folks into being public.

Recently, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg made comments that amount to "the age of privacy is over" as justification for why the company has decided to get with the times and make things more public. This prompted me to rant about Facebook's decision.

Social media has enabled new forms of publicity, structures that allow people to connect as widely as they can build an audience. Teens are embracing this to do all sorts of powerful things. But they aren't doing so to eschew privacy. They are still keeping intimate things close to their hearts or trying to share content with narrow groups of people. It's just that, in many situations, there is more to be gained by accepting the public default than by going out of one's way to keep things private. And here's where we see the shift. It used to take effort to be public. Today, it often takes effort to be private.

While Facebook has justified its decisions by citing shifts in societal expectations, they are doing a disservice to those who value Facebook precisely because of its culture of keeping things more close. It's not so much that posting things on Facebook was ever private; no teen sees the Wall as a private space. It's that the default was not persistent, searchable, and scaled to a mass degree. Just because teens choose to share some content widely does not mean that they wish all content could be universally accessible. What they want is a sense of control. And what Facebook is doing is destabilizing the system in a way that complicates control, especially for teens who are most vulnerable of having content go down on their permanent record.

Category: youth culture

Tags: facebook privacy

Posted by zephoria at 9:48 AM | Comments (3)

January 19, 2010

whose voice do you hear? gender issues and success

Growing up, I loved to debate. With anyone. My debating tone used to drive my mother batty because she thought I was yelling at her. Exasperated, I would often bark back that I was simply debating. Over the years, I realized that my debating tone is one of such confidence that people believe me to be stating facts, not opinions. My mother interpreted it as yelling; my classmates interpreted it as arrogance. I also began to realize that it was the same tone as that of my male peers. I never apologized for my opinions, never deflated them with "I may be wrong but I think..." I asserted. Confidently. And loudly.

Why am I telling you this? Clay Shirky's "A Rant About Women" has provoked all sorts of conversations in the blogosphere and on Twitter. And Tom Coates rightfully pointed out that one interpretation of Shirky is the problematic encouragement of self-promotion and lies. While a lot has been said on this topic, I feel the need to speak up and say more. Because, as I said, I'm loud.

I'm terrible about self-promotion. I get all squeamish about the whole thing. I'm dreadful at throwing my name into the ring when there is an open call for something that I want. The idea of nominating myself for an award makes me want to vomit. And I'm TERRIBLE about taking compliments; I blush and run away. But there's one thing that I'm damn good at that has gotten me pretty darn far in this lifetime: speaking confidently. I can walk into a room and be a ball full of butterflies and speak assertively. I sound like I know what I'm talking about even when the voice in my head is having a panic attack. And the weird thing is that, because I'm a woman, people read my assertiveness either as arrogance or expertise, even when I'm just stating my opinion. Why? Because women don't do that. Women don't talk like that.

There's nothing that upsets me more than deception. As a teenager, I had my world spun apart by lies. So you're not going to find me engaged in trickery. But what I've found is that people interpret my assertiveness as dishonesty and this still baffles me. It's as though, because I'm a woman, if I don't apologize for every thought I have and I'm proven wrong, I must've been lying because I convinced someone of an untruth. Confidence, when misinterpreted, can be interpreted all sorts of problematic ways.

Amidst the questions of women's assertiveness, we must also call into questions our interpretations of the messages they put forward. Cuz many women are immediately labeled "bitch" the moment they speak with the kind of assertiveness that would be considered average for men. And that double standard also sucks. If I'm honest with myself, I've definitely gone out of my way to look young and cute and fuzzy and lovable in order to avoid that label. And to smile even when I don't feel like smiling. Because, in many environments, if I look as serious as I feel, my message does not get across. Of course, this can also be a costly signal because plenty of other folks have dismissed me for being young. I've found that it's a sin to be young in academia while it's a sin to be a serious woman in the tech industry. Needless to say, my identity development is mighty confused.

As Tom rightfully pointed out, there are many layers on top of this. It's easy to move into a binary of Men vs. Women, but race, ethnicity, nationality, accent, sexuality, religion, class, and any form of cultural background you can imagine play into this at every level. Just look at the biases you have when you're interviewing someone of a different background... the expectations you have. And imagine what they're experiencing trying to give the right impression when they know they're being interpreted along a standard that they cannot possibly live up to. If you need to think about this issue a bit more and don't want to read scholarly materials, there's Gladwell. I have the privilege of being white, a native American English speaker, being able to speak geek and academic and street speak depending on context, being able-bodied, and relatively attractive in a heteronormative way without being too attractive. But I can imagine plenty of configurations and impressions that would automatically be rejected. We can't forget about those folks.

While I strongly support any and all efforts to get women to speak with confidence about what they do and who they are, assimilation won't get us to be where we should be. Far too many academic women tried this, a practice that I always thought of as out-manning the men. It was a survival mechanism for them but dear god it's terrifying. We don't want that in other industries too. What we want is diversity.

Diversity is one of those sticky terms that people seem to boil down to creating a Benetton ad. Diversity isn't about some magical collection of five differently colored skin tones. It's about bringing different perspectives and backgrounds to the table and creating an environment that values what can be gained from different voices who've taken different paths. Skin color (or gender performance) is often interpreted as a reasonable substitute for this and, for many reasons, it has been historically. But bringing in a woman whose attitude and approach is just as masculine as the men isn't going to help your team break outside of its current mindset. They key is to bring people who think differently than you. Of course, that's darn tricky. Because you need need similarity AND diversity to be successful. But this is a rant for another post.

In thinking about creating parity, we all need to look around and account for our biases. Whose voices are you listening to because they're the loudest or the most like yours? Are you going out of your way to seek out people who approach the world differently than you? Everyone needs to make an effort to make visible what has become invisible.

At the same time, I do think that we also all have a responsibility to make an effort to get our voices heard by people who are different than us. This is especially true for women and other marginalized populations. Sure, it's a burden to have to speak back to power over and over and over and over again. But that's also a valuable skill. Making a conscious decision to break expectations tingles at the soul, but the doors that are opened can be awe-some.

I would love to see more women stand up and say "me!" and I vow to continue to help younger women assert themselves. But let this not push the onus entirely to women. We need men as allies, men who both encourage women to speak up and who consciously choose to spotlight women who are talented. But, more importantly, we need men (and anyone with privilege) to consciously and conscientiously account for their own privilege and biases and to actively work to highlight and embrace diverse voices of all kinds. Your interpretation of others is just as (if not more) important in creating change as their efforts to impress you. The privileged cannot expect the disenfranchised to assimilate, as tempting as that may be. And even if that were possible, it wouldn't give us the society we want anyhow.

"i am not an angry girl / but it seems like i've got everyone fooled / every time i say something they find hard to hear / they chalk it up to my anger / and never to their own fear" -- Ani Difranco

Category: gender & sexuality

Tags: women gender voice

Posted by zephoria at 5:42 PM | Comments (25)

January 16, 2010

Facebook's move ain't about changes in privacy norms

When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that 'the age of privacy is over' (read: ReadWriteWeb), I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am. The logic goes something like this:

• People I knew didn't used to like to be public.
• Now "everyone" is being public.
• Ergo, privacy is dead.

This isn't new. This is the exact same logic that made me want to scream a decade ago when folks used David Brin to justify a transparent society. Privacy is dead, get over it. Right? Wrong!

Privacy isn't a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It's about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It's about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me "public by default, private when necessary" but this doesn't suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

Let's take this scenario for a moment. Bob trust Alice. Bob tells Alice something that he doesn't want anyone else to know and he tells her not to tell anyone. Alice tells everyone at school because she believes she can gain social stature from it. Bob is hurt and embarrassed. His trust in Alice diminishes. Bob now has two choices. He can break up with Alice, tell the world that Alice is evil, and be perpetually horribly hurt. Or he can take what he learned and manipulate Alice. Next time something bugs him, he'll tell Alice precisely because he wants everyone to know. And if he wants to guarantee that it'll spread, he'll tell her not to tell anyone.

Facebook isn't in the business of protecting Bob. Facebook is in the business of becoming Alice. Facebook is perfectly content to break Bob's trust because it knows that Bob can't totally run away from it. They're still stuck in the same school together. But, more importantly, Facebook *WANTS* Bob to twist Facebook around and tell it stuff that it'll spread to everyone. And it's fine if Bob stops telling Facebook the most intimate stuff, as long as Bob keeps telling Facebook stuff that it can use to gain social stature.

Why? No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of "free." It's in Facebook's economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process. Of course, it's in Facebook's interest to maintain some semblance of trust, some appearance of being a trustworthy enterprise. I mean, if they were total bastards, they would've just turned everyone's content public automatically without asking. Instead, they asked in a way that no one would ever figure out what's going on and voila, lots of folks are producing content that is more public than they even realize. Maybe then they'll get used to it and accept it, right? Worked with the newsfeed, right? Of course, some legal folks got in the way and now they can't be that forceful about making people public but, guess what, I can see a lot of people's content out there who I'm pretty certain don't think that I can.

Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we've changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn't be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don't have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they'd like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don't think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don't want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?

Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don't have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That's the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn't dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?

Don't get me wrong - folks have the right to enter the public stage. As long as we realize that this ain't always pretty. I will never forget the teen girl who thought that her only chance out was to put up mostly naked photos online in the hopes that some talent agency would find her. All I could think of was the pimp who would.

There isn't some radical shift in norms taking place. What's changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn't mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn't mean that folks who live their lives in public don't value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.

If we're building a public stage, we need to give people the ability to protect themselves, the ability to face the consequences honestly. We cannot hide behind rhetoric of how everyone is public just because everyone we know in our privileged circles is walking confidently into the public sphere and assuming no risk. And we can't justify our decisions as being simply about changing norms when the economic incentives are all around. I'm with Marshall on this one: Facebook's decision is an economic one, not a social norms one. And that scares the bejesus out of me.

People care deeply about privacy, especially those who are most at risk of the consequences of losing it. Let us not forget about them. It kills me when the bottom line justifies social oppression. Is that really what the social media industry is about?

....

Read also:

• Michael Zimmer's "Zuckerberg’s Remarks Aren’t Surprising, Nor New, Nor True"
  
• Craig Kanalley's "Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg"
  
• Marshall Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Privacy Debate: What You Need to Know"

Category: facebook

Tags: facebook privacy

Posted by zephoria at 5:55 PM | Comments (28)