V-Day is going to do a San Francisco Premier screening of “Until the Violence Stops” on January 28th. This is a benefit screening of the film that premiered at Sundance. If you believe in ending violence against women, this is a good way to help out. Attend the screening, support women and help raise money to end violence worldwide.
TICKETS AVAILABLE BY CALLING THE BRAVA THEATRE – 415-647-2822
When i was 14, i learned what it meant to be deceived by someone i loved. I saw lie after lie unfold in front of me in complete horror. It clicked and, since then, lying is about the biggest sin you can commit in a personal relationship with me. I’ve always told friends and lovers that i can get over cheating/chaos/anything, but i can’t get over lying, so just don’t magnify stupidity with cruelty.
Deception has so many levels. All too often, people lie to themselves, convince themselves of their lies and by the time they lie to you, they genuinely don’t believe it’s a lie. (Anyone see the State of the Union?) It’s all a matter of perspective, right? I’m certainly not innocent of this.
But there’s something so painfully demoralizing about feeling enthusiasm fade to exhaustion as the pieces of an intricate web of deception through avoiding the truth unfold. It’s not as cruel as an intentional lie, but it’s impossible to feel any form of trust or respect at the other end. ::sigh::
Sometimes, i amaze myself. When i saw that BoingBoing was nominated for a Bloggie, i scanned the list. I didn’t even think to look for any of the blogs that i’m involved with. Later, i was talking with Cory and he made some remark about how we’re up in the same category. I looked puzzled and he informed me that misbehaving was up for a Bloggie.
How funny. It never even dawned on me that our venture into hellish conversations around gender & tech would be recognized, but i have to admit that it brings me great joy. So, if you support us, please go and vote!
Of course, not entirely sure how it’s working, but it is pretty.
I’m still shocked that so many people read my musings here. I also know that most people who read this don’t post. Yet, if you keep coming back, you must be interested in some cross-section of the topics that interest me. So, now i have a question for you…
What books have changed your perspective on the world? What books do you think EVERYONE must read?
And, more importantly, for those of you who see holes in my arguments, what would you recommend to fill them?
It was 1996 when my friends and i started getting attacked online for being queer. Before that, in our niche of the cyberworld, we were invisible to everyone but ourselves. It was a public space, welcoming to all queer folks. It was a safe space by the virtue of shared values, ideas and the underlying goal of supporting one another. There were no walls; it was safe through underlying social norms. But it was destroyed because rigid barriers are necessary to keeping hate outside.
We eventually escaped to the eGroups of the world before fading into oblivion. In 2001, i popped into various queer communities, talking to youth about their experiences online. They recalled stories that horrified me. Stories of older men preying on them, stories of the Christian right telling them that they were going to hell. Always on the search for safe space, these kids didn’t have what i valued so much about the online world in high school: inadvertent safe space, simply by being, sharing, supporting. Even in gay.com, they felt afraid. This saddened me.
I’m in awe of the networks of queer LJs that i see. I know that i don’t see all because much of what is shared is for friends-only, but it gives me great joy to realize that kids are finding new ways to construct semi-public safe space and support one another through the process of grappling with one’s identity. Yet, i know that what i see is only a limited segment of the digital queer youth. I wonder how kids feel about coming out online now, how they find that safe space, how they create friend groups out of nothing. It was so much easier in the 90s. All you needed was access to IRC, Usenet or BBSs. Of course, only a fraction of kids were online then.
When we started getting attacked, i felt the need to defend us, to maintain the safe space. But online, speaking to your attackers is like speaking to a blank wall. You can’t possibly defend yourself because they’re against you at their very core. Topics like queer identity and abortion will never go anywhere online. People aren’t willing to hear one another. Eventually, i gave up, exhausted, saddened, depressed. Since then, i haven’t engaged in debates online; i’ve only lurked. When i wrote to a mailing list, it was almost always neutral material: information about an event, a reference, whatever.
And then, my journals became blogs and read by an audience that i don’t know. And i got invited to help out with other blogs. Suddenly, i had to address a flurry of email and comments about what i wrote. Most of it was curious, supportive. But then again, it was rather unbiased. Yet, every time i write anything with an opinion on it, or truly want to work out a dilemma, i get attacked or the ideas do. I can take it far more when the ideas are attacked, but i truly hate the anonymous emails telling me that i’m a terrible person.
I continue to be reminded that blogging is not a safe space for me. There’s no common understanding, common ground. Even when i build up the gall to post what’s on my mind, i’m deconstructed based on what’s not said. My blog is not an academic paper. I’m not reflexively positioning myself every time i post. I’m not fleshing out all of that which i feel should be assumed simply because this is MY blog, MY post. I take a lot for granted and i only wish that people would realize that these posts are constructed in the context of me. I’m not trying to be a journalist; i’m not trying to address an unknown population from an unknown position. I’m trying to share my thoughts, ideas, life from my perspective.
While i may feel attacked here, in my own digital home, i feel outright demolished at misbehaving. Unlike many group blogs, this one has an identity. It’s a blog about women and tech. It’s a blog by women involved in tech. It’s a blog by thinking women who think, say, and create far more than a few posts a month on the site. There is an unspoken context. These are things that i take for granted. I try to keep posts short, but in doing so, i fail to lay out the framework and thus i’m attacked both for what i say and what i don’t say. Instead of creative suggestions, “perhaps you forgot this,” i usually see you’re wrong/foolish/inappropriate. Sometimes i wonder if we created misbehaving as a tool to increase our masochistic lashings. It’s certainly not a forum for interesting conversation in a safe space.
One thing that we’re missing as disconnected souls reading each other’s words is a shared social structure where we can intuitively understand when to critique and when to support. The blog world too easily lends itself to a forum for attacking each other, purportedly to critique ideas. How often are anonymous critiques truly constructive? How easy is it to tear apart someone you don’t know? Stanley Milgram learned that ages ago… if you feel like your responsibility is to critique, you can do so infinitely, regardless of how another might feel. And the further removed you are from witnessing the horrific reactions, the more you can continue on. Sometimes, i think we’re all a bit sadistic.
But it truly saddens me that blogs aren’t safe space. They don’t sit in a context; they don’t have a set of shared norms. And sometimes, it’s just simply not fun to constantly fight for the right to speak from your own perspective. It’s in moments like this where i remember why some people have no desire to speak up, no desire to fight. I remember asking my mum why she didn’t run for office; she laughed and reminded me that not just anyone is willing to be put through the ringer for the chance to spend every day being hated.
I continue to reconsider whether or not i should blog, or if i should only post uncontroversial material. While i’ve met some amazing people this way, i’ve also seen the increase in my insecurity about sharing what i know. Yet, often, my attackers are anonymous and i should know not to take them seriously. I can intellectually tell myself that it is foolish to let them affect me, but anonymous attackers hurt my soul even more so than actual people. With actual people, i can have a conversation, attempt reason, understand where they’re coming from. Anonymous attacks are just there, unable to be addressed personally, unable to find resolution in me. I will never forget the girl who asked me why i blogged, why i wanted to be a public target? I still can’t answer her.
“why can’t all decent men and women
call themselves feminists?
out of respect
for those who fought for this” – Ani DiFranco
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the umbrella term “blog” – quite unsuccessfully at times. Who blogs? How do you categorize blogs? Why should you categorize them? For example, bloggers may see LJ folks as part of the blogging world, but not all LJ folks would agree. How do we address this?
Well, Liz and i were lamenting. Bless her for a good idea. As much as this conversation can go round-and-round online, it’d be most interesting to have a good RL conversation about the topic.
Plot 1: Bring the interested Etech folks together to have an interesting conversation. Although i realize that this will be dominated by a particular kind of blogger, hopefully we can get folks thinking outside of the box for a bit.
Plot 2: Hold a workshop at a conference where we can attract a more diverse segment of bloggers/journalers.
Plot 3: Do a bit of ethnography as necessary
Plot 4: Publish our findings.
So, if you’re interested in this conversation, come join us at ETech!
On the visualization thread, i was psyched to see “Social Circles” – a tool to watch mailing lists. I’m just a bit wary of how it is set up, given that it asks you for a mailing list to watch. I’m also a bit weirded out that i can see the converation patterns of other people in other mailing lists. I think that it is a bad bad bad idea to assume that all mailing lists are meant to be public.
While my blog was down, i was stoked to see Clay write about visualizing social networks. He references a great, albeit older (2000), overview article about visualizing social networks. In comments, folks also bring up Tamara Munzner’s thesis.
I’m in awe of all of the efforts to visualize social networks, but not surprisingly, i have my biases on this topic. The big question for me about visualizations is WHY? Most answers to this question fall into two camps: to efficiently understand massively complex data sets or because it’s cool. Both are super valid reasons, but the approaches that evolve almost always focus on visualizing data for some outside third-party, unrelated to the data. Of course, all of us who do visualize are also obsessed with visualiing our own data, but we don’t count. Although we weren’t able to deploy our visualizations to too many people, Fernanda/David and myself/Jeff were interested in what it means to visualized data for the people visualized. What would people do with these artifacts? How could ethnography be done with such tools?
The folks at Info@Vis! emphasize four basic elements of social network representations: presence, identity/affiliation, interaction, and communication. Personally, i find it peculiar that there is no discussion about the audience of the visualizations. Perhaps they are presuming that they are only visualizing for social scientists. But, even for social scientsits, another purpose of visualizing data is to engage those being visualized. It operates as a mirror and having that artifact provides you with such a grounding artifact upon which stories can be told.
Although i was unable to go to Hawaii to present out paper, Fernand tells me that it was quite well received there which makes me super happy.
So, as you may have noticed, my blog has been down. For a while. In typical danah style, i managed to figure out how to break things in a weird configuration that tormented everyone. So, you see, the CGI processes on MT last for a long time, taking up a lot of memory and time. Due to a really bad situation with spam bots who were running CGI scripts on my server, the admin decided to limit scripts, figuring that anything that was running too long was probably a big bad ugly mistake or a cruel bot. They weren’t prepared for MT. Or for my use of it as i tried to merge two blogs and rebuild >1000 entries. Oops. So, down and down the spiral went.