Category: Culture

Categories
Diversity

The Gender Ghetto

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The sun is out and I’m heading out to get pictures of flocking birds while I can, weighed down by three cameras, six lenses (including one 300mm), and various stands and other accoutrement.

Speaking of flocking, the email conversation yesterday that led to the G Quotient posting, ended up generating an interesting conversation, at least among the women on the group. And a few men, but most of the men on the list were noticeably silent. Normally I don’t like to reference external communications in this weblog because it makes it seem like I’m going, “I was there and you weren’t! Neener, neener!” But in this case, yesterday’s conversation should have taken place on the weblog in the first place, and hence the move.

The power of weblogs is that anyone can have one and post their thoughts online. There is a true democracy at work. However, a democracy isn’t always the best form of group organization within a heterogeneous body. What happens is that the majority tends to hold all the influence.

Supposedly within weblogging, women form over 50% of the webloggers, and yu would think that they then receive 50% of the links. However, what I’m finding, at least in the weblog circle that I tend to traverse on my daily prowls, is that links to women occur much less frequently than links to men. I’m not talking blogroll links; I’m talking about links to posts, with associated commentary.

No big deal, you say. After all, anyone can have a blog and yadda yadda ya.

The big deal is that if within the new semantic web we talk about, we’re saying that the link is where meaning arises and discovery occurs — so what happens when 50% of the population receives 25% of the attention? Or more specifically, what happens when women, to get more of this attention, form groups of webloggers linking to each other, but get scant attention from the males hereabouts? My friend Sheila had the perfect word for it — the women are effectively becoming ghettoed.

I wrote in an email yesterday (edited to fit this format):

If it’s through links that we discover each other, and within the new web, the semantic web we’ve discussed recently it’s through the link where meaning is discovered, then what happens when women are not linked? Or are only linked within certain contexts? This isn’t necessarily about individuals; this is about how women are ultimately being ghettoed online, by link and by association. Or lack thereof.

It shouldn’t matter who we link to, and how we frame that link, but it does. Can’t we be honest enough with ourselves about this?

Baldly stated, women are second class citizens in weblogging, and this classification is enforced through links. We can say good writing is all that matters, but thats the same as saying there’s less women in the technorati 100 because women can’t write. Or if politics is the issue, then women never talk about politics. I don’t see this within my own reading.

But do we talk about these things differently, in such a way that male writing has more appeal? And since men have most of the link power, like goes to like? I don’t know. Would be a fascinating study, wouldn’t it?

The buzz sheets, who cares, but influence, yeah I care about that. And not only are women not as represented, but the women who were in the sheets have been dropping. About the only ones rising are the warbloggers — so maybe this is really about politics.

As Kevin pointed out in my comments, at first glance women may not seem as represented in the buzz sheets, but if you start looking at all of the group weblogs, there are more women then first appears. So I went snooping among the Technorati Top 100.

First, I found that only about 55 of the Top 100 are weblogs in the true sense of the term. I also found that people don’t update their blogrolls because more than one site had moved and the link was dead (what does that say about the Top whatever sheets that we see? That blogrolls are more a matter of habit than use?)

Secondly, my reaction was: who are these people? I have never heard of several of them, but then a quick look at the writing showed me that they’re primarily within the ‘warblogging’ domains, and I only visit these circles when I’m feeling particularly pugnatious. There was also more than foreign language weblog (which I put into other if I couldn’t determine the gender) and several LiveJournal weblogs.

However, doing a count and placing weblogs into male, female, both, and other, I came up with the following counts:

Male – 38

Female – 7

Both – 3

Other – 7

Feel free to check my facts. Even if all the others resolve to female, which I don’t think they will, women are represented in only 31% of the top weblogs — and that’s throwing in the influence of the women in the group blogs.

The Blogging Ecosystem seems to have a better distribution of women to men, but closer inspection shows that women are still badly underrepresented in the upper ranks.

Why? If we do link to women less than men, why?

I know for myself that coming from a technology background, I tend to link to other technologists and most of them are men. Or at least, that’s what I thought. What I’m finding is that there are a lot more women technologists online, but they don’t necessarily get the focus or the attention.

Hmmm. Now, why is that?

I wondered if it was because men tend to write about specific uses of technology, which women tend to talk about the human influence of the technology. After all in the semenatic web discussion recently, that was my contribution.

(Which so traumatized the Guys of Geek that they’ve since spent their time since comparing each other’s….early geek experiences.)

But then there’s Julie Lerman’s .NET blog (good lord, do you see how few women there are that are .NET bloggers?), or Scripty Goddess. Betsy Devine did the code thing today, with an interesting segue into The Graduate.

However, one big difference is that the women technologists rarely venture into technologies that are, bluntly, focused around one of weblogging’s Big Dogs — Dave Winer. In fact, aside from myself, the only women I know of who have waded into RSS or Weblogging APIs or Atom or any of these discussions has been Dorothea Salo and Liz Lawley and I believe Betsy and Meg Hourian have also in the past. If there are other women involved in these discussions I don’t know of them because they’re not being linked!. I only know about Dorothea and Liz because they’re part of my neighborhood, not because they’ve been linked by the tech community overmuch.

Hmmm. Now why is that?

Here’s a thought: Perhaps its because neither of them calls Dave Winer an asshole enough to generate attention. In other words, its not that women aren’t talking tech, it’s that few women are joining the religous battles about technology, and it is these that generate the buzz.

In fact, if you look at many of the top linked women webloggers on all the the lists you see three significant factors that could explain their prominance:

1. The weblogger is an early adoptee, for instance Meg Hourihan, Rebecca Blood, and xeni at Boing Boing.

2. The weblogger is emotionally charged, many times pugnacious.

3. For all, the weblogger has been linked more than once by one or more of weblogging lodestones, people with significant influence.

The early adoptee women tend not to be pugnacious, but the women entering the weblogging circles after the initial founders to tend to be. I don’t mean this in a negative sense — just that they have strong likes and dislikes and few inhibitions about expressing them.

Most importantly, though, and a characteristic shared by all the women is that they are linked, sometimes frequently, by one or more lodestone weblogs — Scripting News, Boing Boing, Instapundit, Doc Searls, and Jason Kottke, give or take another lodestone weblog or two.

(The only weblogs that defy this characteristic is the LiveJournal weblogs. If anything, true weblogging democracy is demonstrated within the LiveJournal weblogs more than within any other inner circle within weblogging. )

Do women then have to take on the guise of handmaiden to the gods of virtuality to be an influence?

This then returns me to my original thought about links and influence, and the gender ghetto. Yes weblogging is open to all and anyone can publish online, but one’s reach, one’s influence is directly related to how much one is linked. You may be an inspiration to your circle, but if you circle has three readers, your influence is not as great as someone linked by a thousand readers.

Most times this isn’t an issue — who cares if you’re linked or not as long as you’re satisfied by your readers and what you write, and I agree with this. But what happens as weblogging becomes more influential in politics and social reform? Women’s voices have not not been heard as loudly as they should in these areas in the past — is this same lack of influence now going to be taken into the communication media of the future?

Think about that picture of President Bush signing the new abortion law and you all wrote, “Look there are no women present.”

Are women linked less because our voices are different? Are we not as confident when making our assertions and are therefore less quotable? Are we not as aggressive in our opinions, and therefore less interesting?

It could be that women in weblogging share much with our sisters in ancient Japan, where women wrote in one language while men wrote in another and Women’s Writing was tantamont to being a derogatory statement. But it was the Women’s Writing that survives to today; perhaps this new form of Women’s Writing will the only writing that survives into the future. We know that quality of writing or subject matter is not a factor in any of this — quality exists across gender, and subject matter ranges far and wide with both sexes. Perhaps our influence will stand the test of time.

But then I look at that photo of all those men standing around the President signing into law a bill that could effectively condemn some women to death; I think about women’s lack of representation as tech workers and CEOs in this country; women being denied equality in education, employment, health care, and even justice in other countries; women being stoned to death for adultery while men screw with impunity; and I am not content to be an influence in a thousand years.

I want to be an influence now.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

What’s your G Quotient?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I initiated an email discussion today that ended up focused on women and weblogging. Without going into particulars, I challenged the members of the group to find their G Quotient, or Gender Quotient:

For the last one hundred posts, count the number of times you linked to a male weblogger, and the count of times to a female weblogger.

For each link, what was the context?

Was it:

  • Political (not weblogging political, but politics in the real world)
  • Metablogging
  • About sex or romance
  • Environment (family, friends, home, pets)
  • Professional (about a person in a professional sense)
  • Technology (related to computer tech in some way)
  • Scientific (physics, math, biology, medicine)
  • Academic (formal studies)
  • Writing (about literatur or weblogger as writer, not including linguistics)
  • Linguistic
  • Other art (including music and photography as well as performance art, painting, and so on)
  • Issues of self, including a person’s exploration of what makes themselves or other people tick
  • Religious
  • Cultural
  • Historical (about history)
  • General (none of the above

Supposedly there are as many or more women bloggers than men. Do we link to women webloggers are much as men? Does the context change? In other words do we link to women on more humanistic issues, and men on professional or tech issues?

Do we care?

Are webloggers Martians?

Categories
Connecting Semantics Weblogging

The value of human on a humanless web

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

David Weinberger responded to my discussion yesterday about semantic web compared to Semantic Web:

So, if the semantic web means only that we’re learning to understand ourselves better on the Internet, or even that we often adopt similar terms and rhetoric, then, yes, the Web is constantly semantically webbing itself. And if the semantic web means that we are formally knitting together, in an ad hoc way, the various standards we’re adopting, then, yes, the web is semantically webbing itself.

But, I don’t think this is what most people mean by the Semantic Web. I think they have two other implications in mind.

The Semantic Web that David writes about is the one that begins with the vision outlined in the now famous Tim Berners-Lee article whereby in the future, the Web will speak to our machines, and the machines to the Web, and we will be tenderly enfolded into a world where intelligent bots will find solutions to our day to day problems at the flick of the button.

According to those who design it, for this utopian Semantic Web to come about David writes, two things must happen: the web forms one single information space that bridges the stubborn individuality of culture and language; and standards must not only continue to propagate across this space, when they combine the synergy results in something new, and utterly different. Marvels of automation… as he refers to it.

But, David continues, as did Clay before him, we can’t form a complete information space, nor will our standards ever combine because history and experience has shown us that none of this will scale; or if it does, it will only be at the expense of the richness of the human experience.

So if the Semantic Web cannot be realized, will we then have to settle for my semantic web, with its simple increments of functionality based on a growing use of standards? Well, yes and no.

Yes, in that my view of the semantic web is one that has already started, and is in use today when I go out to Bloglines and see who has done what recently. This semantic web is already here, and can only continue to expand. But no, in that David misreads what I say, and focuses on the standards, when I was focusing on the rewards.

Years ago when computers dominated entire rooms we knew that someday we would be able to communicate with a computer as if it were another person. We would be able to express emotion and innuendo alike and it would not only understand, it could reciprocate in kind. Of course, as we matured and our computers became more sophisticated, and as we explored the capability of the human visual system or the complexity of human linguistics, we began to realize that our hopes for a true artificial intelligence will never come about. It’s not because of our limitations in technology that this dream won’t be realized – it’s because of we began to realize that the richness of the human experience did not arise from our strengths, but from our failures.

We humans have an amazing ability to adapt to new situations, to accept new learning, and to grow to meet new situations. But this adaptability comes with a price: our memories are chaotic storehouses based on faulty chemical reactions easily influenced by external factors such as drugs, or emotions. I can tell you about a day sitting in my second grade classroom near the window, and I know it was Spring because the window was open and I could hear a mower running outside and smell the newly cut grass – but I can’t tell you what we were discussing, or even what I learned that day. The memories are there, or we hope after youthful experimentation that the memories are there, but we can’t pull them up because if we are marvels of adaptation, and creativity, we are the pits when it comes to efficient memory retrieval.

Later today I will visit several conservations areas in parts of the state where I’ve not been before to take photos of birds, and I will be able to walk down strange paths and adapt to the changing nature of the path because I can sense the change through my eyes – but if I walked at night, without a flashlight, I would be helpless because I am dependent on my eyesight and can’t see in the dark.

Over time, as we experimented with artificial intelligence, most computer scientists began to realize that what we didn’t need from computers is human intelligence and capability – after all it’s easy enough to create humans, one just has to have sex – but computers that partner with us, each providing what the other can’t. We need computers that store bits of information we can retrieve easily because we can’t depend on our own frail memory. Computers that can travel paths on distant planets, and adjust to the changing environment, true; but ones that won’t be looking up and marveling at the strange new world around it; becoming reminded of a song heard once years ago and then suddenly bursting forth into that song because they cannot help but sing it.

The Internet and the Web were both originally designed to facilitate sharing of information from many different machines at once. At least, when we look at the topology of the Net that’s what we see – machine connecting to line to router to router to line to machine in a vast interwoven threaded void of wire and plastic and chips. But the Internet and the Web did not come about because we needed computers to talk to each other; it came about because we humans wanted to talk to each other. To share our data, and our services, and our lives.

I am limited to a physical existence in one place at a time, which at this moment is St. Louis on a Tuesday morning in November. However, thanks to the Internet I am also in Boston, and Georgia, and South Africa, and the UK. If you read this in a month’s time, I have even transcended time. The laws of physics may limit my physical self, but they can’t limit my experiences because we have partnered with computers and technology to thread the gap between the real and the virtual.

I am a simple woman with simple wants. I read Tim B-Ls vision of a Semantic Web, with its Web talking to my machines, and its machines talking to the Web and intelligent bots being able to work through issues of time, location, and trust and arrange Mother’s treatments with a minimum of fuss and effort on Lucy and Pete’s part, and I will admit there is something about this story that leaves me cold. Not the sharing of calendar information over the Net – we have that now. Not the accessing of relevant information about various hospitals and plans in the surrounding community, because we have that now, too. It was the fact that in this vision, the global “I”, that semiotic “I”, is missing.

“Mom needs therapy? Oh no! Well, we’ll work together and make sure she’s taken care of!”

In this picture, I search for available plans in the area and then call the hospitals and I talk to the people to see if I can trust them to take care of mother; neither I nor the sister of I is so busy as to begrudge the time taken. Nor am I so incapable that I can’t click a button on a volume control, or turn a knob, and lower the volume without the stereo being wired to the Web. Or my toaster.

(Perhaps after twenty years in this field I am turning into that Luddite that I (no this is me now, not the semiotic I) accuse others of being because they resist the use of RDF.)

When I talk about my poetry finder, David sees this as nothing more than a simple growing use of standards, and it does seem as if my vision, my semantic web, is nothing much beyond this. There are no vast reaches of interconnected communication between machines, no extraordinary leaps of intuition in the software that runs between them, little to awe inspire one at first glance. Nothing to statistically analyze, no power distributions to chart.

Find me poems where a bird is a metaphor for freedom. It doesn’t sound very sexy, does it?

My semantic web does not seek to enhance the communication between machines – it seeks to enhance the communication between people. My hope is that someday in St. Louis I will be searching for the perfect poem that uses a bird as metaphor and you, the semiotic you, in your home in the UK or South Africa or Georgia, sometime in the past will have put online this poem you wanted to share, which uses a metaphor for bird, and through time and place and differences in culture and gender and language and interests, we will connect.

This blows my mind. This leaves me weak at the knees and brings tears to my eyes because of the absolute beauty and serendipity of the act. But from a technology standpoint, it doesn’t ring anyone’s chimes, does it?

When did we start valuing technology over that which the technology enables?

I was thinking last night as I tentatively went out among the tech weblogs again,
when was the last time that a discussion in a comment thread within these weblogs end with words, and not code?

We talk about how the Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it. We sometimes forget, though, that it is people who act as routers in this case, not machines.

We attend conferences because we want to experience the discussion in person. or at least, this is what we say, and I remember conferences and sitting in the back so that I could watch people’s reactions to the words, or look into the speaker’s eyes and see their enthusiasm, and let their voice wrap around me with equal parts hope and wisdom. But in this day of ever growing uses of technology, we aim our phones at each other as if they were lances and this a tournament of pictures; we put up our laptop lids to act as shields to work through, and we don’t look at each other in the eye or watch each other’s reactions as we listen to the speaker. No, instead we write down what the speaker is saying and others in the room read this and they, in turn, write down about the marvel of reading what you’re writing, as you’re in the same room, and we say, isn’t this wonderful?

Personally, I find it sad. And lonely.

David, and Clay Shirky and others, write that the Semantic Web can never happen because it can’t scale; it can never hope to encompass the richness of the human experience enough to reach the synergy needed to burst forth in a blaze of automated glory. If we continue in that direction, what will happen is that we’ll have to adapt to meet it rather than it adapt to meet us. I agree with David and Clay.

However, when I see my semantic web, my simple semantic web, viewed as nothing more than an increased use of standards implemented with the most mundane of technologies, with results that aren’t all that interesting, I’m not sure that the Semantic Web, in all its automated glory, won’t happen someday.

Categories
Connecting

On authenticity and friendship

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

One last note about the tax board member and weblog writing, if for no other reason to clarify that it was not the IRS I was referencing – it was the California Franchise (tax) board. I was reluctant to mention the name for some reasons I didn’t want to get into, but I wasn’t comfortable with the continuing misunderstanding that it was the IRS.

In the comments associated with the post Shhh, Bill Kearney in his usual sensitive and tactful way writes:

This is nothing new. As McNealy said, you have no privacy, get over it. I’m always reminded of Claude Raines’ role in Casablanca when I hear this sort of thing “shocked, shocked I say to hear…”

The only difference here is the realm of physical expression usually kept people from making fools of themselves to too wide an audience. Now that it’s world-wide the potential’s much greater. Is this the fault of the technology or the people? Are they lesser fools if they’re not on the world-wide stage? Greater if they are?

To me this just raises the question of personal integrity to more sharper focus. If one could succeed behaving in a manner that would cause them discomfort if revealed should they expect to get away with it? If it was just chance and a small audience that coddled their notions shoudl the larger audience hide itself from them?

If someone’s going to be ‘out there on the web’ they need to know what that means. To pretend otherwise is foolish, at best, but most certainly naive.

What’s next, someone blogging their house got robbed because they blogged about going on vacation?

I don’t think any of us are surprised, per se, when someone from the ‘outside world’ mentions they read our weblog. Still, as Stavros writes, to be boggled, even a little, when your public journal is revealed to be just that – entirely public – is neither foolish nor naive.

Was I surprised? There are details of the conversation with the tax board that I won’t repeat, but yes, in the nature of the conversation I had with her, I was surprised. More than that, I was made very uneasy. In some ways, in the course of everyday chit chat, talking about everyday things, I felt that I had came close to incriminating myself – in a situation where no crime had occurred. So, yes, I was surprised.

Francoise and Mary bring up the fact that the pages I’m deleting are in Google cache, and in the Wayback Machine. True, if any government agency or other organization wanted to dig, I imagine that at least for a while, they could find this information. But before we jump into a situation where an Oppressive Regime has overcome our country and we have to flee with 7 favorite books, a little perspective here: I am not the CEO of Enron. I am not that important.

It makes sense for the tax board member to put my name into Google and do a bit of reading. It makes less sense that she would spends hours, days even, trying to find cached data or go through the Wayback Machine.

Now if I had been the CEO of Enron, I could see this happening. Of course, I couldn’t image Kenneth Lay having a weblog. Can you imagine the entries:

The wife and I are going to dinner tomorrow night at that new Italian place. I’ll be sure to let you know how it is. We’re also looking into taking a very long vacation soon. Some place out of the country, hopefully warn with no extradition treaty with the US.

I decided to swindle millions from the company shareholders, today. Oh, and the cat isn’t feeling well.

No, I’ll delete the old records, and be more discrete in the future – because I don’t like hearing that information come up in conversation, not because I am guilty of a crime or loss of integrity – thank you very much. But I won’t go any further in my efforts, because I am not guilty of a crime.

I think it was Jeneane, though, that brought up the most interesting aspect of this whole incident. She also writes in her weblog:

Just to clarify something: We’re not talking about a public journal being read by the public in this instance. We’re talking about what you’ve written in public within your weblog, which, HELLO, could be fact or could be fiction, being used by the government in their financial assessment of you and what you may or may not owe them.

Not sure about you or Shelley, but I’m just thrilled to know that the IRS is a valued reader of this blog, just as I’ll be thrilled to have a chat with the HMO folks over the phone one day, indicating that they’ve read every sentence I’ve written about my daughter’s asthma, and would like to deal with me financially based on the pixel trail I left behind.

And what if I told you it’s all a lie? What if I told you I made it up? What if I confessed she’s never wheezed in her life? What if I say, that was all an experiment to guage the interest of my readers on specific topics, or, if I declare that I was doing research? Or, that it was ENTERTAINMENT, not necessarily fact?

The issue of telling the truth or not has been discussed before, but lets face it, the fact that we now know that government agencies are for a fact reading our weblogs, how does this impact on our writing?

Can you imagine what most would make of Oblivio’s weblog?

Every A-list blogger that can get themselves into print is talking about the honesty of the voices in weblogging; how weblogs are personal journals; Weblogs are impressions and facts written by real people. Now imagine what happens when the weblogger pushes and pulls the truth, just a little – just to make things more interesting?

What if I had talked about this great job I found that’s paying me six figures? What the tax board is hearing is that I’ve had not the best of times and would like to make payments for the corporate tax owed. What’s going to happen when what I write in this weblog is not consistent with what I say is happening in ‘real’ life?

Of course, none of this is ever going to happen to you. You’re never going to have what you write brought up by a creditor or government agency. Or friend or family member or boss. You never bitch about work. In fact, you never mention it. You never write on impulse. Your writing is impersonal and completely risk free.

Must be dull to be you.

Speaking of authenticity, a note of thanks to two authentic ladies who have been above and beyond good friends, particularly this week for reasons that I think I’ll just keep to my own bloody self. Jeneane and Sheila, thank you both.

Categories
Connecting

Being Deliberate

Joseph Duemer has taken an innovative approach to the comment spammers: he’s billed them.

The spammer, who sounds as if he’s two sheets shy of a load, fights back by emailing a complaint against Joe to his employer, the President of Clarkson University. (Joe is a professor at Clarkson). Joe, not to be daunted, then calls the comment spammer and speaks to him, directly, on the phone. I’d like to take credit for Joe’s deliberate choice of action on my recent weblog post, but Joe didn’t need the advice – he had already decided to be deliberate in his actions with comment spammers.

I don’t ever want to hear people say that the ‘user’, that mythical beast we techs arrogantly use for any and all unwarranted assumptions and design decisions, is passive and lazy and uninterested in what happens to them in their online environment. Weblogging has shown me that even the most technophobic of people (and Joe is not technophobic) wants to take advantage of the goodies, to understand why bad things happen, and to have control of their environment.

Now does everyone see why I started the For Poets sitse? These poets, they kick butt.