I found the Rickly piece interesting first because of reasons she states up front — our own anecdotal evidence about gender divides in the classroom. I’ve taken a lot of online classes, particularly creative writing classes that depended on a message board structure for critiques, and taught classes as well online as well, in which I’ve used chat rooms as well as message boards, and because I’ve often paid attention to the gender breakdowns of student respondents in online discussions, I was very interested in the comparisons I could draw here. Particularly revealing was the notion that women who were classified as more feminine were quietest, which matches my perception of and experience in all class types, but also what she said about women helping conversation along rather than actively participating. I’d really like to see research on that in message board settings, particularly with multiple replies to one thread — true conversation, replicated there as best as it can be — if women are responsible for most of the posts help revive conversation that is limping.

As for the other study, oh did I have questions and thoughts. First, that women were less likely to respond to opposition bears out in other spheres (women are less likely to resubmit to a creative journal that rejects them while asking for another submission, for instance), but I wondered about women receiving multiple answers to open questions. I wanted the quality of those responses analyzed, because I wonder if there were any dogpiling effects.

*Also, Sam, note that Dale Spender is mentioned here. We should have known!

In “Feminist Interventions in Electronic Environments,” Mary E. Hocks asks a question or two I think we have some answers to at this point, seventeen years later: “Can a hostile environment–a legal definition of sexual harassment–actually develop on public electronic forums? What exactly is at stake if harassment occurs in a nonwork environment?” (112).

Yes. Yes, the web can be a hostile environment. And plenty of things are at stake, not only for individuals but for everyone.

As so many of the examples Pamela Takayoshi gives in “No Boys Allowed: The World Wide Web as a Clubhouse for Girls,” the female is usually the marked category. The separate, cordoned off section. That marked-ness involves so many risks and so much discrimination, though I think things are getting better.

Today it seems like feminist interventions are not only about women, but gender equality across all kinds of spectrums.

I wonder, can the kind of art project expressionism stuff Sullivan spends so much time on count as a form of feminist intervention, to use Hocks’ term? Is the above image an example, in some sense?

The uniqueness of what Sullivan describes (though it does seem much less unique now, given how deep we’ve sunk into web technologies and online communication since the 90s) does give it a lot of conversation-changing power, I think.

So how do we use that?

Examples that come to mind:

all the hashtag movements, like #yesallwomen, where everyone can share stories
these comic/articles like this one, that seem so personal
what else can you think of?

postsecret also came to mind for some reason. it’s more a collection, and made up of analog stuff, but still it seems to fit with Sullivan’s vision.

an activity for us:
Create either an autobiographical or activist hypertext piece about something, maybe related to your research interests, maybe related to your teaching themes, or other topics from our class. It can be really short and small–an image, a tweet, a post, or some quick combination using Storify or other similar tools. As Sullivan describes it, these should be “hypertexts that produce both a personal and social transformation” (30). To also fit this into Hocks ideas, it might be cool to fit your piece into an existing conversation outside of our class. What existing issues/debates/etc. could you respond to?

Before I get into things, I just need to say that I’m absolutely tickled to see the term “grrl power” in Takayoshi’s journal article. Tickled, I say.

Something that really jumped out at me was how the term “grrl” interacted with the procedures of the popular web searches at the time (Lycos, Altavista, etc…tiny gods, it’s been a while since I’ve used Altavista). Inspired by this, I decided to see how Google handled the search terms listed in the article “breast cancer” and “girl websites,” and was pleasantly unsurprised that modern search has a bit more nuance than early search engines when it comes to finding pages. The term “grrl” was in use before these women’s websites were created, but I wonder how much of the term’s continued popularity and use on the web was driven by the sloppy search procedures of early web indexes.

This gets me wondering about modern indexing procedures and whether there are women’s spaces online now that manipulate those procedures to carve out their own space. One idea that comes immediately to mind is Tumblr, in which the methods of interacting with others is the share, the love, and the embedded comment reply. I’m wondering if there is something about these procedures that makes the site particularly friendly women or if that was driven by some other force. I don’t know enough about the history of Tumblr, but it might be interesting to delve into this a little further.

Though all of the pieces pulled my eyes open to the narratives of women and technology, Takayoshi’s piece was especially gripping. Actually, it was saddening. I immerse myself in the scientific side when it comes to my research, with my metaphorical lab coat, glasses, and gloves because I’m often told these “feelings” don’t matter. You can’t generalize feelings. And yet, I wonder why not when narrative after narrative after narrative suggests otherwise.

“This cultural sign communicates a well known story – neighborhood boys building a secret club, maybe in a tree house and refusing membership to little sisters and other girls.”

If you pause and reflect on experiences, experiences that are valid and worth being noted in research, you’ll notice the patterns speak truth: Every little girl has been told no – you can’t do that because you’re a girl. Maybe the no was subtle, maybe the no was overt, but the volume of the no doesn’t take away from the impact of it, the ripples that will later well up into waves of insecurity and self-doubt.

“These young women’s activities and experiences with the World Wide Wb clarify the negotiations young women make in gendered terrains and suggest areas for further research on the relationship between women and technology.”

How many times have I looked to a male colleague to fix something related to my laptop, to teach me how to do what he can do (to do it for me), because I simply thought I couldn’t. I want to do X,Y,Z, but that involves too much technology – the smart side of technology. Or I observe my male students taking over a project that involves building a website while making the girls do the writing, because writing is feelings and technology is building.

“Including girls’ voices in the professional scholarship introduces perspectives that might otherwise be ignored or not understood.”

Ah. Scholarship. In an attempt to break away from the cement blocks of assimilation, I notice that most of my field is dominated by men. Narrative is less appealing because narrative is feeling. Men don’t narrate; therefore, scholarship shouldn’t either.

“Women in this culture know too well how worn down one can feel repeatedly fighting oppression over time”

…self explanatory.

I’m really fascinated by Sullivan’s discussion of hypertext as a space of feminist praxis, and this discussion also has me thinking a lot about the manner in which hypertext might also challenge the way we think about narrative due to the fact that “hypertext is not a nonlinear form but a multilinear one” (33). And the manner in which this multilinear form converses with a feminist engagement with literature further troubles the boundaries of these conventions: “Feminists and other postmodernists have pointed out that traditional literary conventions privilege the unified text…However, fragmented narratives are being produced by feminists who want to counter the idea that texts are unified and self-containing” (35).

As such, I wonder how the open-endedness, the fragmentation, the multivocality, and the multilinearity of hypertext might allow students to engage with other modes of writing and communication. And I also wonder what other narrative forms we might also consider that might also make use of multilinear processes. I wonder how this all might speak to the types of narratives and writing processes that may be privileged, and I also wonder how expanding our understanding of narrative might allow us to see narrative structures in other spheres or spaces.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what Hocks mentions regarding embodiment in digital spaces and theorists’ ambivalence regarding how we think about the body in such spaces: “This ambivalence about both escaping and reifying our real bodies and identities in relation to virtual environments, I believe, marks a fundamental characteristic of electronic environments and becomes the site where feminist interventions make a difference” (108). I wonder, here, though—can the body ever really be erased? Can we really escape the body in virtual spaces? Do we want to?

I was really surprised to read in Sullivan about fragmentation in writing being a particularly feminist notion, but it also made a great deal of sense in keeping with everything I experienced in the creative writing sphere, and while working for literary magazines and observing trends there and in workshops. There is so much resistance for and against particular types of narratives, and while I’m not sure we’re still within the breakdowns Sullivan offers us, there is still a lot of tension between the stripped-down narrative (often masculine) and more structurally experimental narratives. Before I start listing and categorizing writers, because I can think of dozens of exceptions as I type that, let me instead consider my experiences in teaching narrative of multiple types to students. Right now, my students are writing memoir, and one student in particular, a young man, is struggling to braid two narratives and it’s so hard for him to see how that looks on the page because he wants to write one unified piece… but his story isn’t unified. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this, but as I look back, particularly in thinking about my creative writing classes, I have observed more willingness to move around in a narrative from female writers than from male, who stick more closely to the linear progression (regardless of who is making the “better” choice for their work). Thinking about where that comes from is particularly useful for me now, as a number of my students dabble in code and similarly structured hobbies and pursuits. Relating a moving, shifting narrative to web browsing or something similar, or even the creation of web content (next time!) offers some very interesting ways of thinking about how to break that down in relatable ways for students. I wonder if I can have them track their own web behaviors and what we might learn if we do. Off topic, I think, but today’s readings definitely have me thinking.

Work in pairs and identify a woman with a Wikipedia (or alternate wiki) page that works in industry or academia. Considering the constraints of writing for Wikipedia, or an alternate wiki space, come up with an outline for a study that would enable you to report how the woman you identified use a particular technology in their work. That is, what types of observations would you carry out, what interview questions would you ask, and what types of texts would you analyze?

Chapman Mode: Try to conduct this activity using only resources available physically through the library.

question for Dr. Sam: have we been reading (and will we continue to read stuff) in roughly chronological order? 

some of them seem so old, partly because we’ve been talking about all these issues and things for so long now… gender is a thing. and it matters. and it’s political and personal and important. technology is enmeshed in this lots of ways. but so what? and what can we do about it? well, Brady Aschauer goes over what some people have been doing about it. I liked the turn in her historical overview, here where she says, “Dissatisfied with simply noting these patterns, philosophers, historiographers, sociologists of science and technology began to plot the reasons for the patterns along the axes of historical neglect and material misuse. Searching for the hows and whys of gendered work led them to recover and reclaim two distinctly different types of women’s experiences with technology” (9). seems a good beginning. research is always political too, though. and I’m glad she also eventually recognizes and critiques the essentialism in some of the research there.

it’s also cool that she discusses writing as a technology, and rhetoric as a technology. I don’t think we talk about that enough.

—

as a postscript: oh boy would this Chapman fellow be even more worried about our attention spans now, after thirty years of this internet thing. and who knows what he’d say about mobile devices.

I also don’t know if his print/visual divide is valid anymore. tv and newspapers are both old fashioned at this point. 

I’ve only ever done research using a computer – the computer tells me where the books are in the library; the computer tells me where the online articles are; the computer tells me which school has the book(s) I need tomorrow; the computer tells me that Amazon is cheaper than the campus bookstore; and, when the computer fails to tell me anything, the librarian (often a female) tortures the World Wide Web into submission. Once I have the information, the knowledge, regardless of where it was retrieved from, my professors help me piece it together. I do remember, though, using an encyclopedia in primary school, and reading through the dictionary so I could “sound smart” during my second grade class discussions. But that was only because I didn’t have access to a computer until I was in the 8th grade, and then I don’t recall having access to one at home until maybe high school, and I didn’t have my first personal laptop until I was a freshman/sophomore in college (that was 9-10 years ago). There’s something about being able to be comfortable at home with a cup of coffee while you do your research, and I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom – us youngins aren’t losing out because we didn’t have to walk 5 miles in the snow to get an education; perhaps we take it for granted that information is at our finger tips, but hasn’t that been the goal since the creation of mankind? Wasn’t that the plight of Adam and Eve – a hunger for knowledge that surpasses all limitations?

Regardless, I do think it’s pertinent that students are taught how to flesh out this knowledge – we can’t believe everything we see, read, hear, or even feel. I can’t say how many times I’ve called someone an idiot on Facebook because they posted a satirical piece and started a war between fools. Look up your sources people. Perhaps that’s the potential pitfall of the World Wide Web and access to everyone’s thoughts and feelings at all times: no one knows what’s true anymore, no one critically thinks about what they’re reading before they hit the share button, no one considers the counterargument before hitting the paste button. We share knowledge like it’s sloppy seconds, with no will regard for where that knowledge originated, who thought that, who said that, why and how did they come to this conclusion. It’s all just hand-me-downs now.

I usually have a pretty deep appreciation for the perspective of luddites. The Lee Adamas of the world do much to temper the irrational enthusiasm for the new shiny of whatever technology tends to be making waves at the time. As much as I am enamored by technology, I understand that too often we try to throw technology at our problems without thinking about what new issues may arise.

However, I took particular interest in and disagreement with Chapman’s claim that “the nonlinearity of the reading experience, the widely acclaimed hypertext, undermines logical patterns of reading and thinking. The linearity of a written text is not a limitation, it is its glory” (249). Now, again, I’m all for linear texts. I think they absolutely have an important, fixed place in knowledge-making and I would never want to see linear text completely abandoned. On this, Chapman and I agree.

However, Chapman is mistaken that linear methods of thinking, reading, writing should be the privileged method. Nonlinear thinking allows us to find unintuitive connections between concepts or phenomena that purely linear, logical lines of thought would ignore out of convention. Nonlinear reading allows us to resist the designed nature of the linear text and approach it in ways that encourage alternative perspectives on the ideas presented therein. Hypertext allows us to approach text in a way that prioritizes individuals’ personal styles and allows one to think critically about how best to approach the text, since the writer is no longer leading the reader by the nose. Nonlinear writing forces the writer to consider the myriad ways in which their text may be accessed, which should (if the design is good) make the writer more cognizant of how their text is arranged.

So, yeah. Hypertext doesn’t privilege linearity. Big deal. Wanna fight about it?