Listics

Cultural biases run deep.

Look for the Netroots conference and you’ll find coverage in the New York times Politics section. Look for BlogHer and you’ll find it in the women’s pages, the New York times Fashion and Style section.

Erin Kotecki Vest has already commented on this in her own space, Queen of Spain, and via the Huffington Post, but I thought I’d try to amplify her observation. Erin is, after all, a woman and so she is likely to be a bit shrill about these matters. (The humor impaired are invited to leave now.)

Kara Jesella, author of the New York Times piece on the 2008 BlogHer conference writes for Fashion & Style. Her March 27, 2008 article centering on a vegan strip club in Portland and addressing larger issues of sexism in the vegan/vegetarian community was in Fashion & Style, not Entertainment, Politics, or Health. Her article about MomsRising, Mom’s Mad. and She’s Organized (2/22/2007) did NOT appear in the Politics section.

Her article about librarianship (that linked to Jessamyn West’s librarian.net) did not appear in the Arts section, the Technology section, nor the Science section. It appeared in Fashion & Style. And her article about women’s clavicles did not appear in Health. Ms. Jesella’s work is bound for the Women’s Section at the New York Times, a section that they have renamed “Style” in a bow to political correctness without a gesture of respect for the cultural shift that mandated the name change.

Eventually, of course, the women’s movement dribbled off the back pages and into the news. Women at major papers and magazines filed class-action sex-discrimination suits. The ever-dependable housewife market collapsed. And so, in 1969, The Washington Post transformed For and About Women into the much-copied Style section. The Los Angeles Times introduced View in 1970, The Chicago Tribune started Tempo in 1971, and The New York Times made the transition with its Style pages several years after that. [emphasis added]

I’ve written about this subject here recently… “The New York Times on Web Girls.” Not much has changed since then. Writers on “the women’s beat” (usually women themselves) place their work in the Style section of the New York Times. BlogHer attracts writers on “the women’s beat.” A good NYT Politics story could have come out of BlogHer. A good NYT Technology story could have come out of BlogHer. A good NYT Business story could have come out of BlogHer.

Of course a NYT Business story did come out about BlogHer on July 17th. Headline: NBC Universal Posts $5 Million on BlogHer.… And another NYT Business story contained references to BlogHer: Slumber Parties Go Digital. In fact BlogHer public relations has managed to position their press release material in a lot of publications, but there remains the nagging question of why the serious business and technology writers aren’t in the room covering the BlogHer story as it unfolds. Could it be because the women tech writers don’t want to cover women per se, and the men tech writers might feel less than comfortable in the room? Perhaps, but if that’s the case then there are a lot of writers missing some dynamite feature stories.

Technorati Tags: blogher, jory des jardins, lisa stone, elisa camahort, gabrielle anwar, kara jesella, erin kotecki vest, healthy clavicles

Halley cracks me up today with a proposal for a china/tech mash-up that will bring YouTube to the table.

Technorati Tags: halley suitt, dinnerware not shanghai

As I watch him pulling the chickens across the floor, I’m reminded of last night’s dominant dream… Turner was helping from England and we had charts of the currents in th elakes, not a Lake Ekalake thing exactly, but somehow a modeling for the Atlantic, and as I pulled the cord to drag that suitcase across the ocean floor it became obvious to all of us that the weight of the cord itself would cause it to fray and snap. So we patched in some canvas hose, strong material, much like the fire hoses you see coiled in hotel halls in the movies, the type of hose strong enough to hold an action hero as he bails out of the 13th floor window and drops a few floors to come crashing back into a room where a lady, carefully coiffed and wearing a white dress, is eating cake, and her eyes grow round and her mouth does too as she utters an “ohhhh,” expressing her surprise to see a stranger there.

Cathy Wilkes in a 1920’s get-up

So I pulled this suitcase across the ocean floor and naturally it got hung up on the mid-Atlantic ridge and the cord snapped anyway. Later, to continue the experiment, we dropped the suitcase west of the ridge, but as Turner pointed out there was no practical advantage to be gained by a method that required us to start past the middle. Still we experienced a feeling of success since we were able to beach that sodden suitcase on the shore of the lake here.

as if her work is coated in some slick substance that allows it to slip past the critical barrier, taking up residence in the thoughts of her audience unmediated

Influenced by my favorite emerging bondage art blogger, I checked out Paul Ford’s six word reviews of 763 mp3s from South-by. Sadly, Fucked Up appears not to have provided a track.

Ford says,

I wanted to like more of the rap here, but I became very tired. Everything was either about acquiring material goods (which includes women), or, alternately, about how all other rap is about acquiring material goods.

Wow, I thought, the rap he sampled is navel-gazing recursiveness like so much of blogging. I read on:

On hearing my nth predictable song about how hip-hop is predictable, it struck me that I was witnessing individuals engaged in a formalist exercise where the form itself is the only appropriate lyrical subject; thus rap is, in some ways, the blogging of music. (This is happening to “indie rock” in the Strokes/Killers/Libertines mold, as well.)

The best of it all is Akala, a grime artist from Britain, particularly when he delivers the line in his song “Electro Livin” (not included here, but from the same album) “We are sad for things we cannot have/But we are not sad for Baghdad.” It reads as political naivete but he performs it with redeeming authority.

…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17).

The quote above is from an article by Stephanie Rosenbloom, who writes for the New York Times Fashion-Style section(s). The article’s placement makes Mary Hodder angry. Hodder says,

So when they interview people like Doc Searls or [Loic LeMeur] or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion.

Can you tell I’m pissed? WTF?

While she has a point, she could make it more judiciously. Working for the Fashion-Style section, Rosenbloom has written loads of features like this on the quotidian emergence of webby trends. One of my favorites was on Atoosa Rubenstein’s Alpha Kitty YouTube series inspired by the book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B, and Back Again.” In that article, Rosenbloom asks regarding Rubenstein,

Can this old-media veteran make it in the virtual world, where so many others have stumbled?

One thing going for her is that teenage girls are more socially active than boys online and are more likely than boys to participate in blogs, bulletin boards and chat forums, according to Packaged Facts, a division of MarketResearch.com.

I think that’s the point she was sharpening with the article that put Hodder’s knickers in a twist.

*** UPDATE ***

Mary Hodder has revised the post at Napsterization, deleting the reference to Shirky and referencing instead Loic LeMeur. She’s also temporized nicely to include assurances that her post wasn’t “about David or Loic or Doc (all extremely supportive of women in tech, btw)….” She goes on to say, “My point is that the NYTimes puts men who talk tech and trends or social impact in tech/biz, and women who code web art / pages in fashion.” I’ve left a comment asking if she’d care to share the reasons for that update. My comment remains in her moderation queue.

I think I understand why the four females featured (ages 13, 14, 16 and 17) aren’t found yet in the Technology section with Doc and David; but, the feature itself is well placed to pick up a readership of young females who — we hope — will have their techno-interests validated and affirmed by their peers in Rosenbloom’s story. Rosenbloom acknowledges,

But even though girls surpass boys as Web content creators, the imbalance among adults in the computer industry remains. Women hold about 27 percent of jobs in computer and mathematical occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In American high schools, girls comprised fewer than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2006, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2000 to 2005, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

It should be obvious to even the most committed feminist that spreading the word about the disparity, giving it the widest possible exposure, including in the Style-Fashion sections of the newspaper, is a positive gesture.I’m glad that people writing on the fashion beat are clued in to what’s happening in pop tech. Mary Hodder should be glad too.

Technorati Tags: whoa, no money quote from danah boyd, wtf

For the girl who already has her little pony: Accessorize! Accessorize! Accessorize!

The Glambo Signature Series “My Little Pony” M4A1 carbine with forward handgrip and AN-PVS4 night vision sight. This fully functional weapon fires standard 5.56mm ammunition — great for those AR-15 fans with extra ammo lying around the house or even extra parts! (Note: the full-auto selection has been disabled in this model in favor of three-round-burst. This product cannot be shipped to California.) The perfect way to introduce your little princess to the wonders of nocturnal wet-work!
A bargain at only $1,147.95! (Compare to stock M4’s at $1,300.00!)

And if “My Little Pony” isn’t the semi-auto for you, there’s a fully functional “Hello Kitty” Kalashnikov available with a hand crocheted pink shoulder stock muffler!

And what girl wouldn’t love the Lady Di .460 S&W handgun? “The most beautiful woman in the world on the most powerful handgun in the world.” I’m not sure but I think you can get the Rainbow Brite reloader set-up to load 300 grain .460 magnums, just what you need for a flat shooting “big game” perimeter of 250 yards and a ten inch kill circle!

FACEBOOK!!!

FACEBOOK!!!

FACEBOOK!!!

FACEBOOK!!!

What Would Jesus Buy?