“Are you online?” I was watching You’ve Got Mail the other night and smirked a little at this particular line. To these characters (from just 10 years ago), being online meant having an email account and apparently visiting chat rooms. That was it.
Now, if you’re online, chances are, you’re more than one place online. Chances are, you’re plenty of places online.
A number of Shameless staff members are off to the Women Action Media conference this weekend in Boston. We’re looking forward to meeting up with fantastic feminists from all over North America in a three day media/feminist geek out. Check out the WAM! homepage to see who is liveblogging the conference, or follow the #wam09 hash tag on twitter to get all the updates!
A couple of months ago I pledged to blog for Ada Lovelace Day, an initiative put forth by Suw Charman-Anderson, digital rights activist, journalist and blogger. The initiative seeks to challenge the notion that women are absent from science by shedding light on women who have excelled in science.
To go into all of Franklin’s achievements and ideas would require a textbook rather than a blog post, so I will focus only on two areas: her assertion that technology is a practice rather than an accumulation of objects and her theories on a feminist scientific method.
As Jayme Poisson tells us in “Mothers of Invention” (Shameless, Fall 2008), Countess Ada (Née Byron) Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers. In fact, her programs, written for friend Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, pre-date the existence of the machine itself, since Babbage died before it reached completion. Both a bleeding edge technician, and the purveyor of Romantic-Era vaporware, Lovelace was a pioneering expert in the novel field of computation in the early parts of the 19th century.
This week Suw Charman-Anderson, angered by yet another set of fairly juvenile activities centred around women, geekiness and objectification, made a pledge that she would write about a woman in technology she admired on March 24th. That date strikes me as being like, the distant future, but assuming I remember, I will certainly come up with someone I can profile from the canon of my personal acquaintances.
For those of us involved in youth media or technology, the last few weeks have been all about the results of a 3.3 million dollar research project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation called Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Culture. The project was carried out by investigators at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley. The purpose of the research? To discover and learn about what young people are doing when they hang out online, doing what researchers like to call “informal learning” and what the rest of us usually refer to as “playing”, “hanging out” and, if we have an assignment due, “wasting time”. During this study dozens of research projects looked at teenagers’ use of MySpace, YouTube, Neopets, gaming sites and more.
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Luddites is the Globe and Mail‘s take on the research. For a more nuanced discussion, here is a video of Mizuko Ito, lead author of the study, talking about the findings.
Before I get to commenting on the Women in Linux HOWTO, I think it is ten past overdue o’clock that I get up a post on free software, open-source, closed-source, and maybe just a teensy bit on why people hate Microsoft.
This could go on and on and on: the arguments and positions are complex. Each one of these subheadings could easily be a whole post, or book (and they are).
I’ve been warned that trying to skim over these topics is begging for trolls. I hope to appease the trolls by saying that this is just a taster, a teaser, a CliffsNotes version. (And that you are welcome to use the comments to add your own thoughts and links).
I am a Victim of H8 is a Facebook photo album created by Gary Shay. Each of the images is of the same slogan, and the idea is that people should tag the images with the names of everyone they know who is negatively affected by Prop 8. Presumably this includes self-tagging.
It’s true, “GenderAnalyzer” told me so.
I even took a pic of the form results so there is proof. Next time anyone accuses Shameless of being say… a harpies nest of left-wing feminist reactionaries, we can easily fire back with “yeah but we write like men, so whatever, talk to the pen!”
Shameless writes like a boy. Who knew. (Miriam Verburg)
Apparently I also write like a man, or pick manly topics, or use manly sentence structures, or have a masculine vocabulary? Who really knows (sigh). From a quick scroll of the last few entry topics on Shameless we’ve written posts on:
Oddly both Feministing, and Blogher, were correctly attributed to the ladiezzz. So the theory that this weeks emphasis on politics may have gotten us onto the other team fails, as a quick glance reveals that those two US-based blogs are even more heavily weighted with political content.
(And yes of course it’s silly that ‘political’ writing is considered more masculine, I don’t make the stereotypes I just write about them.)
Good morning to all you Saturday surfers :). Today I’d like to bring some attention to this troubling article from yesterday’s Globe and Mail - Faceless no more: Social networking comes with a price.
The basic premise is one we are familiar with: “Young Canadians share too much information online and they don’t understand the risks involved - or care about their privacy.”
“During a two month-long investigation, The Globe and Mail tracked more than a dozen Canadians through their open social networking profiles, and used freely available web tools to build detailed profiles of each individual user.”This not just a speculative moral panic, the Globe actually went and stalked some young Canadians, all in the name of privacy? Whatever sells your paper, right?
The real problem however is not the data-mining (although as far as I am concerned that’s pretty creepy), it’s how the gender of the youth providing the data is framed. Let’s call it the “the naive sex kitten” versus “wild party animal” bias.
Because it’s Friday, and because I have a big old crush on Eddie Izzard, here’s some YouTube therapy for when your relationship with technology gets that ‘not so fresh’ feeling:
Plus: What you need to know before volunteering abroad and excerpts from She's Shameless!
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