Caveat Lector

Back when academia was the chief target of the more caustic aspects of my nature, I caught some flak for it from fellow bloggers. There’s a difference between disagreement and flak. The difference is that disagreement allows me on the playing field, so to speak. Flak questions my right to weigh in at all, my stature to judge, the terms in which I frame the discussion.

And I hate it. Flak jumps onto my forebrain like a tick on a dog, sucks blood and doesn’t let go. I feel like crap for weeks, no matter what else is going on, or how ludicrous the flak. Yes, I am a wuss, that’s quite right.

Last week I was catching flak from two directions. One, over conference finance: “shut up and go away, you whiny bitch, the system works fine if you play it right and you can’t change it anyway.” Yeah, okay, whatever. I’ll bide my time on that one. I think things are going to change with or without me; I had meditated explaining just why I think that, as it pulls together a number of recent CavLec threads including Five Weeks, but hell, no percentage in it, really. This is me shutting up and going away.

Two, the eminently predictable: over what men can do to improve the social experience of the Internet for women. That flak was private, and no points at all for guessing the allegiance of the flak-thrower. If you know my history, it’s that obvious.

The substance of the flak was that “geekland” was a stereotype and a slam, and I didn’t have any right to do that if I was asking for women not to be stereotyped and slammed. I’ve heard this one before. It’s still playing tick on my forebrain; I got a ton of linklove for that post from all over the place (including places I’d never heard of and that had never heard of me), and still that one criticism feels fifty times more salient. I don’t buy it, but I don’t know yet why I don’t, so… there that is.

Sometimes I think that if I could just adjust my personal salience meter, the world would feel like a much friendlier place. Haven’t managed it yet, and may never, so my apologies to you all for the wallowing in self-pity.

Which is over now, because the other thing that happened was an outpouring of grace and kindness from various corners of the web. I didn’t ask for it, having largely kept my self-pity to myself until now, but oh, it was welcome and well-timed, and I appreciate it more than I can say.

An email I read this morning sealed the deal, and I’ve asked permission to reproduce part of it here, but haven’t heard back yet, so you’ll just have to wait. Trust me, though, this one’s worth waiting for.

Thank you. I am grateful, very much so, for the friendship and respect I have found here.

Peripherally, I’ve been tracking Twitter-talk that’s crossed my radar. A lot of people have been decrying it as trivial time-wasting. This being what was said about blogging as well, I wasn’t convinced. So I signed up and gave it a whirl. (My username is eminently guessable; same one I use on LJ.) I was curious about the affordances, and the userbase, and the use of it.

See, I tend to think that we don’t use stuff that’s useless to us. So what is the use of Twitter? Is it a game? A social tool? If the latter, what sort? Is there social status to be gained or lost, or gamed? Is it communicative? Of what?

(danah boyd would be much better at this kind of analysis than I am—and now that I look, she’s said her piece already. But I guess there’s room on the ’net for rank amateurs.)

My first impression, which I haven’t quite managed to decide whether I still agree with or not, stirred me to go look up a bit from Tehanu:

“Will you be about the house?” she asked him, across some distance. “Therru’s asleep. I want to walk a little.”

“Yes. Go on,” he said, and she went on, pondering the indifference of a man to the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must not be far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking…

(A moment of silence for the appreciation of remarkable beauty in writing. Right. Onward.)

It’s definitely nowhere near as simple as “Twitter is a woman’s tool for maintaining social connection.” Of the ten Twitter “followers” I picked up yesterday, three are men, and I haven’t seen anything anywhere indicating that Twitter has an anomalous gender breakdown compared to the rest of the ’net. But something is lurking in that, something that indeed concerns the care and feeding—and just plain awareness—of where our social connections are… in time, in space, in mental-space, in okay-space.

I, for example, pay a lot of attention to where my husband is. He mentioned shortly before the move that he needs new glasses, so when our HMO’s provider booklet finally got here, I found out where they’d moved their optometry center and what bus lines go there and gave him the information. It’s just a thing that I do. Pay attention. He, on the other hand, had to be reminded last night that I’m in San Antonio most of next week. Without value-judging here—he doesn’t pay attention to where the people around him are, it’s just the way he is. And he’s not alone in that. A lot of people don’t, and to them, Twitter is indeed noisy mindless trivia; how could it be anything else?

For those of us, like Tenar, who do or must pay attention, Twitter (something like RSS, and I’m not sure it’s coincidence that Twitter put in RSS feeds by popular request) simplifies the task of maintaining that awareness. Who’s up, who’s down, who needs help, who can give it, who’s traveling, who’s bored at home, who’s in crisis, who’s out to lunch. I was thinking yesterday that it’d be nice to get my husband on Twitter, so that I wouldn’t feel a need to chase after him wondering what he does all day… but the flip side of that coin is Ged: because my husband, like Ged, doesn’t see importance in paying attention to others’ cues, he doesn’t see the need to emit cues of his own, so he wouldn’t use Twitter, any more than he’ll blog (and I’ve tried to introduce him to blogging; it didn’t take).

I suspect without proof that Twitter would confuse and perhaps overwhelm my husband, actually. Much more information than he’s got the mental-social interface to process. For me (though I suspect I am not typical owing to general social deafness), building and maintaining that interface involves guesstimating where the normal range is for the people I know and care about, and a steady process of scan-and-forget for most of the information that passes by indicating that they’re still in that range. When they’re not, I can see it and react.

I occasionally see people withdrawing from the blogosphere or from other social-software interactions on the grounds of “too little brainspace!” Well, yes. Tracking all this stuff does take brainspace; for me it frankly takes practice, because I’m like my husband in not being born to it. I’m not surprised all the detail gets to be too much to take in or react to. It’s all in the importance one places on this particular style of maintaining connection—and if that importance is not much, Twitter must be a hellpit indeed.

The problem with Twitter as a tool in the sense that I have outlined is the reciprocity assumption that danah boyd talks about a lot. If there’s an implicit obligation for me to friend all my followers (which I have not in fact done), then suddenly the presence information I do want to track is mixed in with a lot that I don’t, and utility vanishes into the maw of diminishing returns.

I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one. Invisibly following someone (so that they would not have to reciprocate) is much too close to stalking to seem tenable. Getting rid of public Twitter friendslists eviscerates the tool’s discovery system. Perhaps a LiveJournal-like system of allowing a user to split friends into groups without the awareness of those friends, such that the user can track one group of “real friends” while still being able to save face and friend all followers, would do the trick. Twitter would have to be careful to let all @ messages to a given user through in all that user’s group views, though (even @ messages from someone who doesn’t belong in a given group view), or the jig could be up.

Whew. That’s a lot for a first impression. Sorry.

My second impression, which I spent a lot of the day fishing for, was that Twitter has a very IRC-ish feel—short messages, informal register, many-to-many communication, even down to lack of capitalization. Some of the complaints I’ve seen about Twitter being too much information too fast, or about seeing only half a conversation, hint that some Twitter users are making it into an ersatz group-chat mechanism. (Not my group, incidentally. Such use of Twitter is not universal.)

But where IRC is divided quite sternly and inescapably into well-defined groups on the basis of shared interest, Twitter is an atomized web of friendship-clouds (ugh, horrid mixed metaphor, but I hope you see what I mean) that may or may not overlap much. It’s divided by individual affinities, not by group interest.

And that’s interesting. No, hang with me a second while I explain. An oft-leveled criticism of the blogosphere is that it’s a bunch of echo chambers, like-minded people loudly agreeing with each other while ignoring or antagonizing dissent. Removing the political overtones from that assessment (because I think they’re unnecessary and overblown) leaves us with “a bunch of largely non-overlapping interest groups.” Which I think is a fair description of IRC, or Usenet for that matter.

I’ve never thought that a fair description of the blogosphere, though, and I don’t think it’s what Twitter is, either: both are built around individual affinities, which span interests and interest groups alike. I admit my current Twitter follower/friend groups don’t support my own assertion, being mostly librarians. Still, I do overlap with my friend Rana’s group too, and if I stay with Twitter, there will doubtless be more such overlaps, because I myself am such a miscellany. And what’s more, I found myself surfing Twitter through a trail of other people’s friendslists into areas without a single known face, something that’s impossible to do in IRC without the abrupt discontinuity of actually changing rooms and subjects.

So I find Twitter intriguing and yes, even useful. I can imagine it being useful organizationally, even, as an internal tool for tracking interruptibility and busy-ness and the flow of work—if (and this is a big, huge, colossal if) the individuals in the organization all place value on both tracking and being tracked. It only takes one recalcitrant to break such a system, and I would think that imposing it from above would be a complete non-starter.

As an informal grassroots tool, though… maybe. Perhaps. In some organizations, especially geographically-dispersed ones.

I don’t know whether Twitter is a fad or a stayer, either. Right now I’m not even sure that one’s callable. I don’t even know whether I’ll stay; I have my own fairly stark limits on social-interaction brainspace, and plenty of other ways to keep up with folks who matter to me.

I’ll be watching, though, because I’m still curious about interest-delineated versus affinity-delineated tools. My vague, sloppy, unverifiable impression is that the social internet has been slowly tilting toward the latter, while retaining a healthy share of the former. Time will tell whether there’s anything in that.

For those of us who (like me) are absolutely terrible at picking out color palettes for websites: an image-based palette generator. Give it an image, get back two palettes (built with web-safe colors, too; nice touch) that will work with that image.

I tried it with the Morris background to CavLec, and what I got back was so gorgeous as to make me ashamed of what’s here.

Strikes me as something that would work with presentation palettes, too. If I weren’t nearly done with the San Antonio presentation, I’d feed it a few bus photos and see what I got back.

Via Blogula Rasa.

I reproduce this email, written in response to this CavLec post, with permission from its writer. At her request, I have changed her name where she references it, and elided or omitted parts that could be personally identifying. I have also added a few paragraph breaks for readability. I have not otherwise changed her words.

You don’t know me at all, but a friend pointed me at your “What some folks can do, if they choose” post, and it’s important to me. I’m a youngish woman (about to turn 27) in computers. I’m actually in the third generation of my family to program professionally: my grandmother was one of the first… programmers, back when it was a low status (and thus female) technician-type job. It’s clearly better for me than it was for her, or for my mother. I don’t have to fight to overturn an official policy that women will get less pension than men. It’s not assumed that I’ll go to a business meeting in a strip club.

Instead, there are subtle things. Every interviewer comments on my gender. Some coworkers have opened meetings with “Gentleman… and Mary”. More than once. I’ve had an interviewer ask me if I were married and if I had or planned to have kids. (Illegal, but not something I had sufficient energy/interest to pursue.)

I’m relatively butch-presenting, and I’m fairly sure that that’s helped me, that being [tall], stocky, and low-voiced has made me more acceptable to those around me. I know that not all of my gender presentation is natural — some of it is from early and extensive exposure to Golden Age science fiction, where men fixed machines and piloted rocket ships, and women came out of gumball machines…

Strangers will always have shallow gender-based conversations with me in professional settings. I will always end up in small talk conversations that boil down to “So you’re a woman, then. There are so few women in this field.” from people who aren’t interested in doing anything to fix that themselves.

My husband is more extroverted and more well-known in a subfield I’m interested in, so I’ve gotten one or two comments implying I was at user groups for his sake, not for mine. I get to wonder how many similar comments don’t make it past the internal censors of more diplomatic people.

The Kathy Sierra thing also hit me hard. I was deeply interested in user interfaces and human-computer interaction at the end of college. The career she’s being driven out of is one that I once would have considered a dream job. She’s not being driven out of it because her ideas are bad, or because technology has shifted faster than she can keep up, but because she dared to be a public woman. I find that both abstractly depressing and deeply personally terrifying.

I’ve been trying to speak up about things that bother me. It’s depressing when, by and large, the result is shocked incomprehension. A few of my male friends get it, but an alarming number really don’t think there’s anything wrong with having the entire poker-game conversation be about how having sex with a penis-having person means you’re more worthless than pond scum. These weren’t cloistered men who hadn’t seen female people since they were in diapers — all but one of them were married to women. One of them now has a seven-month-old daughter, and still makes prison anal rape jokes over family dinners, except when I ask him to stop. One of them is my husband.

I’m doing my best to remember that hard work and persistence often do make things better, as generations roll by. Right now there are few technical women, and pretty much all of them (without false modesty) are the cream of the crop. There aren’t female equivalents to the good-enough-but-nothing-special men. I’m still a dancing bear as much as I am a kick-ass debugger, a process-improver, someone who can offhandedly make a temporary backup system that works. In my head, the latter qualities should be far more relevant to my employability than my being a Mary instead of a Timothy, even though all of them are on my resume. If I can’t have a world like that for myself, it’s comforting to think that maybe I can help build one for baby Kathy and baby Lillian, and for all the other kids that I don’t know.

One of the definitions of privilege is that those who have [x]-privilege have the choice of ignoring [x]. I’m white; I can ignore race, or read about it, or become an activist, as it suits me. I can change my decision from day to day. I can stop thinking about race if other stuff becomes more important to me. I will never be allowed to stop thinking about gender.

I’m sorry that this meandered so much. Thank you for writing the essay. Thank you for setting out, clearly and concisely, something that can be done. Thank you for pointing out the amount of effort that it takes to pit yourself against “just a joke”s and “just talk”. Thank you for telling me that it’s not trivial meaningless oversensitivity, and that it’s not all in my head.

Another thing that every techie regardless of gender can do is let women in tech tell their stories in their own words, and then listen to them. There really isn’t any excuse for “shocked incomprehension.” I’ve heard many such stories, because I am perceived as a sympathetic ear. Funny thing is, people think I’m angry on my own behalf, but on the whole I’ve had it pretty easy. The stories I’ve heard, though!

And the stories I’ve read. For more on women like “Mary”’s grandmother and the early history of computing, let me recommend the article “When Computers Were Women” by Jennifer S. Light (Technology and Culture 40:3, pp. 455–483). Project MUSE has it, so if your institution has a subscription, you’re golden.

My thanks and admiration to my correspondent for her sincerity, her eloquence, and her courage.

I have a deck of 32 slides that’s lookin’ pretty sweet, with enough patter and notes to keep me going a good long time.

And, bus metaphor? Run into the ground, stomped repeatedly with hobnailed boots, and left as roadkill. There is a series of slides in the middle with backgrounds from Texas library web pages, though, so it isn’t all buses, I promise.

The slide with the pigs, though… you gotta be there. The slide with the pigs is hilarious.

If I am not to deliver said talk in the nude, though (and believe you me, nobody wants that), I had better go pack. It’s going to be super-nice in San Antonio next week!

DSpace workflows are great if all I have to do is throw a leash over a collection. I love them for that.

For everything else, they’re awful. Try explaining them to someone sometime. I’ve been adminning DSpace for close to two years, and even I still have to look up how they work. There are these three steps, you see, and in step one… It’s ungood. If you don’t believe me, read the docco for yourself.

Three review steps, fine, seems sensible. Groups of epeople, fine. Just don’t hard-code limits in what the epeople can do at a given step! That’s desperately confusing, and unnecessarily limits what can actually be done with DSpace workflows. (Why shouldn’t there be a single step at which reviewers can accept/reject and edit metadata and futz with files? I dunno, but the system doesn’t allow it.)

There’s occasional talk on the devel list about jettisoning the homegrown workflow system in favor of another open-source workflow library of some flavor or another. I’m all in favor, having just revised the collection-creation form at MPOW six times running because I can’t settle on a lucid way to explain the system to people…

I walked down to Monroe Street yesterday to run a few errands. It was one of those forehead-slapping “oh yeah, so not a Christian” moments, because several of the places I wanted to go to were closed tight as drums. Did return my library books and fill out the pantry via Trader Joe’s, though, so it was not a write-off.

(Trader Joe’s is a weird place. It’s too mainstream for a real crunchy-granola store; there’s no bulk buying, and the product selection is disturbingly tame. But at the same time, it’s too vegetarian-friendly and self-conscious for a regular grocery store. I wish the South Side had a real crunchy-granola store, but I really should shut up and be happy about all the great ethnic groceries.)

Half a block or so from the turnoff to home, I saw a muskrat trundling around in someone’s front yard. They’re smaller than you’d think from seeing them in the water; my monkeybrain tends to fill in more ’skrat than there actually is when I see one swimming with just its nose and tail visible. Poor ’skrat scuttled underneath a parked car to escape me, so after peering underneath because I just couldn’t help myself (I think they’re cute, okay?) I kept on going.

This morning, in sharp contrast with last week’s blustery fit, was so calm that the bay was reflective as glass, and the busy muskrats left yards-long wakes behind them. Playing my standard game of spot-the-loon, I saw one sailing serenely as only a loon can in mid-bay, and another fishing closer to Brittingham Park.

The fishing loon saw the sailing loon, and flapped-and-paddled its way across the water not serenely at all toward it. I stopped, not sure what to expect—loons are impossible to tell apart by sex at a distance, so if those were two males, a territorial battle was in the offing.

But no. Fishing loon settled its wings carefully, and then the loons ducked their heads at each other a few times in that shy courtship ritual they have, and sailed peacefully on in opposite directions.

And I went on my way too, smiling.

When I booked my plane ticket for this trip, the first itinerary that came up had a 42-minute layover in O’Hare. “Ha bloody ha,” I muttered. “Not likely.” And I picked a different itinerary with a longer layover. See, I know O’Hare.

And I was right. Ground stop delayed arrival; if I’d been on that 42-minute layover I’d never have made it. But I did, and even had time to grab a bagel by way of lunch.

Baby in front of me on the long flight; fortunately, it was not one of your screamy sorts of babies, so it and I got along fine. (It liked being winked at; couldn’t quite imitate the deed, however.)

Mirabile visu, my luggage even got here with me. If I can avoid spraining something else while I’m here, it’ll be a darn good trip.

One of my (sadly few) virtues as a conference speaker is that I am an incredibly cheap date, being vegetarian and teetotalling and not overly fond of snooty dining or haute cuisine. I happily dropped by the mall food court and had a quite decent slice of stuffed spinach-and-artichoke pizza with salad and a drink for a third the price of an entree in the hotel restaurant.

And now, happily ensconced in the Historic Menger Hotel (you must not forget the “Historic,” Best Beloved), I’m going to go clean up, run over my slides one more time (I snazzed ’em up a bit with some transitions on the plane), and go to bed.

San Antonio is not a city for early risers. I’m just sayin’.

I strolled down Commerce St. to tourist-trap central, picked up a little breakfast, and then stopped in at the Spanish Governor’s Palace. “Palace” is overstating things rather, but it is a nice place, and must have been quite palatial in the 18th century. I was considerably amused by the letter asking His Excellency to please kindly deal with the matter of two mules, owner unknown.

The best part of the palace is the garden out back, which is shady and flowery and peaceful and wonderful. I caught sight of a butterfly flitting about the flowering trees, watched it for awhile, and then saw motion out of the corner of my eye and turned my head expecting another butterfly.

Nope. Hummingbird. Female ruby-throated, I think. I can recommend this as a way to start one’s day. Especially when it’s a gently warm and brilliantly sunny morning, perfect for sitting out in a garden in a light sleeveless dress and sandals, and it’s snowing like crazy back home at that identical moment. Not schadenfreude, no—just relief, really.

“El Mercado” is a total tourist trap, but such is life in a big city. I looked around a bit (few things worth looking at, like decent guayaberas), left, and went back to the hotel by way of La Villita, which is also a tourist trap, but with more interesting architecture.

I was privileged to have lunch with Necia Wolff and Suzanne Sears, the former of whom is a warm and gracious human being, and the latter of whom gave me half a dozen ideas for my talk…

(… yes, I am one of those horrible people who edits slides until the absolute last minute, which is why they aren’t up yet, though they will be…)

… which I was able to quickly pop in while sitting in Michelle’s preconference. It was good to see librarians with laptops in the room. Honestly, more librarians should have them than actually do. I almost managed to sneak in a really horrible meta-Twitter joke, but I was just a smidge too late.

On the way for post-preconference drinkies with Michelle and one of her coworkers, we ran into Michael “Tame the Web” Stephens and Jenny “Shifted Librarian” Levine on the Riverwalk, which was fun.

And now I’m back in my room pampering somewhat tender feet (haven’t worn those sandals in ages, feet aren’t used to ’em) and pondering evening plans. Good times.

Oh, and while I’m opining—the exhibit floor at TXLA? Is GINORMOUS. You can’t measure that thing in football fields, it’s so huge. (It’s not open yet; there are hall windows upstairs that look down on it.) I’m almost scared to go in, for fear I’ll get lost and never be seen again!

I had a bit of trouble forcing myself out of bed this morning, but there was absolutely no way on $DEITY’s green earth that I was going to miss a talk by Isabel Allende. No way, no day, nohow.

Sra. Allende turned out to be a slim, dark-haired, lovely woman dressed in a loose, elegant plum dress, whose every gesture held grace and whose stream-of-consciousness talk ranged from Thurberesque family anecdotes to uninhibited (if self-deprecating) raunch to frank sharing of personal and political pain. It was a bravura performance by a brilliant talent who speaks as lucidly as she writes, and I’m privileged to have been there.

I won’t mention which presentation I stopped in at next, because, um, it actually wasn’t very good—it’s rather shocking, how little information can be spun out into over an hour’s talking. Part of it is (again) the lowest-common-denominator pitch necessary at non-specialized conferences (my presentation is no different; it assumes nothing), but part of it, I’m afraid, was just plain laziness on the presenter’s part.

If nothing else, I do try to prepare well, and be engaging without wasting too much precious presentation time on gimmickry.

So I skipped out early and hit the exhibit hall, which I found more than a little intimidating, though not at all uninteresting. After that, I went to Suzanne Sears’s govdocs talk, which was chock-full of all kinds of crunchy information goodness. The University of North Texas is indubitably lucky to get her; she’s my kind of librarian, smart and passionate and au courant.

Hadn’t eaten all day, so I popped across the street to the food court again (in preference to vile overpriced nothing-vegetarian exhibition-hall concessions). I was flagging a bit by then, so I didn’t make it all the way through the Texas Bytes talk, but I did get to hear Bill Moen, who’s a good advocate and an engaging speaker.

After a brief nap-collapse in my room, I wandered down to the Riverwalk for dinner, getting through some fine manicotti and another seventy-five pages of the book I’m due to review. Up over my head I heard some bird fussing; looking up, I saw half a dozen neat-footed gray herons with red eyes and prominent yellow blotches on their heads who turned out to be Yellow-crowned Night Herons, close cousins to ol’ Nycticorax at the National Zoo. They’re nesting; I counted two nests, and there may well have been others I didn’t see.

’Twas a good day, and if I sleep better tonight than I did last night (which I daresay I will; I laid off the caffeine today), I should be in good shape for tomorrow’s talk.