If we have a 'top women in tech' list, shouldn't we have a 'top men in tech' list too? So joked a panel moderator.
Isn't that equal? Sure. Absolutely. I say go for it.
Incensed? So was a great majority of the audience at the Girls in Tech chapter launch in London last Friday. A female audience member raised her hand and said that it was an inappropriate joke because joking about privilege only condones it.
The conference organisers quickly said that they had no opinion on the matter beyond that men were as welcome at Girls in Tech events as women, indeed they were encouraged, and that they supported equality for both genders.*
I thought back to a dinner table discussion at Thinking Digital a few days before in which a fellow delegate and diner said that he hadn't even noticed that half the speakers were female.
I think the women in the audience was wrong, we should have a 'top men in tech' list. Let me tell you why:
These incidents typify, for me, two things: the difference between British and American feminism, and the hang-up with real gender equity.
"What I teach in my classes is that the evolution of media sees control of the story move away from the teller, and towards the reader or listener.... Although TV set things back a bit, deconstruction and post-modernism came to the rescue, giving us all the ability to take apart what we see, and dissemble the many messages being piped into our living rooms and brains....Of course, they were only foretelling the advent of the Internet, which turned the whole mediascape – the primary landscape of alternative media creation – over to us. Now, at least in theory, we are as capable of creating and disseminating a message as anyone else."Douglas Rushkoff, Reality as Subversion *
Yes, but...
From the discipline of Digital Storytelling we know that the relating of a story is a process of creation, regardless of whether or not the person telling the story is actually filming it themselves and that the telling of the story is often more purposeful for the teller more so than for the audience (Lambert, 2002).
This possibility for web3.0 everyone keeps going on about -- the reflexivity that participatory web2.0 offers us in terms of the evolution of apps and computing via the internet, isn't terribly new. we're just noticing it again, that's all.**
an act of journalism isn't a reporter writing down and reporting what someone says, but "allowing a person to tell their own story" (from the 1 minute clip below from the Melissa Harris Perry Show)
those are good marching orders: as journalists, our job is to enable people to tell their own stories.
“Hack weekends” churn out a lot of creative, disruptive ideas that are always left to languish into digital oblivion. I think this is indicative of a systemic focus on process -- which is great and has lead to great processes driven innovation -- but which has resulted in a general lack of actionability. As the ‘like’ function in social media is often criticised for failing to turn liking into action, so have hack weekends by and large failed to turn good ideas into great ideas that active change.
GSJ12 London(Global Service Jam, annual event) innovated on this by offering a prize of MakeSense consulting to carry the projects onward into investment to the two top services designed. Whilst this is only advice it offers further links to networks with investment possibilities to turn the ideas into viable businesses.
We need more like this.
The two top teams this year were “Snapbooks” and “Peekr”; I am incredibly enthusiastic about both (and will say that those two and “What’s Next” were my favourites throughout the weekend).
No one has stolen Ronson's identity. @jon_ronson is an infomorph fleshed-out with Ronson's own Wikipedia page by the folks at Philter Phactory*. Ronson quickly contradicts himself in this piece to camera (and it's interesting that the Guardian let the clip out cut that way, isn't it ;), first saying that "it isn't even very good" but then backtracking "ok, I do have a thing for lemongrass." Yes, and that's the point. He's just annoyed that it's plausibly him.
I've written about weavrs before and what makes them so interesting to me is how they can reflect back ourselves at us and what we therefore are able to learn about ourselves through that reflexive process. Weavrs can be used as reflective devices:
If you program an "alter-ego" (the weavrs tag line) with your interests and emotions, it will reflect back at you data from the web that is similar. If we look at this data through the lens of 'how mainstream does that make me?' you'd be interested to find out, I think, how many things that you think are 'unique' about you actually aren't.
Or put another (less depressing) way -- the weavr can explicate how much of your identity is a composite of others interests, identifying for you those touch points that you share with varying communities of interest.**
If the weavr based on Ronson is based on his Wikipedia page, something he didn't write but others wrote based on the media he has left in the infosphere, then uses the general infosphere to select media to somewhat flesh out a likeness of Ronson in @jon_ronson -- isn't that interesting ;) Who are we but composites of data from society? How much of us is really us, from inside, how much is outside? How much do we actively choose and passively absorb?
No one has stolen Ronson's identity; he's placed who he is in the public domain. Moreover, there's a good argument to be made based on his own argument that he's stolen his own identity.
And therefore, is @jon_ronson less of a persona than @jonronson?
*(in the interests of full disclosure, I have worked with them in the past)
**(if it makes you feel better, I can offer you several existential texts that maintain that there's something unified underneath your iterative-self behaviour that is inherently you, eg Christian Smith, What is a Person, for starters)
I caught something interesting in this recorded panel of TechCrunch's Techonomy Conference earlier this month:
About 12.36 in economist Erik Brynjolfsson says that the skills gap between the median worker and the lowest quintile has increased in the last few decades:
That's a familiar disparity to me, but not in a US context, but from China. Chinese Universities are graduating students unprepared for the job market: for the job market that their country has imported with numerous multi-national companies. That's why above a certain skill level companies operating in China must import talent from North America and Europe. in China only 68% of university grads are actually employable. (there's an excellent paper here from Foresight research)
It's interesting that in the UK as well as the US (in which the economists on this Techonomy debate are based) both have high and rising levels of youth unemployment. I know that when I finished my master's degree I was completely unprepared for my job. I had to seek out training courses in simple digital literacy skills.
This is why digital literacy is so important, what education the digital age and the internet can offer. It's important that we rethink education and job training programs. I still think university is important, I maintain it's about the process, about the journey rather than the destination. Nevertheless, simple digital literacy allows us to keep up with technology growth. It's more important because our education systems can't keep up.
Last year I covered a conference: the "Mens' Gathering" -- a conference for people interested in or working on something called 'Mens' Work'. It is a movement that asks what a man's role is in the modern world, and how that role manifests itself in societal institutions: home, work, school, the community, what have you.
This week I'm headed to the National Men's Conference in Brighton for research on a future documentary.
Journalists don’t cover a topic unless it’s important to them. Indeed, many journalists become experts on subject areas and even campaigners as they cover topics over a lifetime.
I wouldn’t cover this area if I didn’t have self interest in it, some personal identification within the topic.
But as I came to write this post it’s not that I found that I couldn’t, but that I shouldn’t put all the details here in the open for you. You see, it’s not just my story to tell and the person -- the reason-- this is mostly about is still alive and whilst there’s very little chance you’d probably ever run across him I know that putting that much personal detail online (as much as my life is open to the public on social media) would be extremely uncomfortable for him. So I won’t.
But do feel free to ask me in person and I will tell you.
I’ve also written this post because I know that there are people I will meet today who will go away and want to look for my website and figure out who I am, why I should be wanting to make a documentary about Men’s Work. I wanted to have some kind of answer for them.
Beyond what’s above there’s this: I’m a woman and I’d like to find a partner one day. I need these stories to be told because this is important work that these Men are up to. I believe in that nothing exists in a vacuum; we are all part of society so of course feminism had an effect on men and not just the one we like to talk about -- rights for women -- but something else, something unintentionally harmful, something we must deal with.
Moreover, what if the still disparity in wages, in rights, what if women have pushed feminism and LGBT community have pushed as far as they can go, what if the answer is this Men’s Work that will take it the rest of the way and finally fully equalise the relationship between genders, between sexualities?
Isn’t that a question worth asking?
But you all expect this from me, by now, right? Because that’s sort of my ‘brand’: make sure you’re asking the right question first, above all.
Wow! Am I lucky I don't work in an office and have to deal with office politics and beauracracy! I did once, didn't go well; don't really feel like trying it again.
I went for a day of "deep listening" which kind of got thrown out the window first thing when I decided to initiate a discussion on why I was there: using digital storytelling skills (or digital literacy skills) in business.
The reaction was tentatively positive but reservered. In a positive working environment that was beginning to or had already reduced the levels of or the solidity of a hierarchy, it was perceived that it would be accepted, even a good thing. But where hierarchy still reined, with lots of politics, and self-interests and no ownership then it was perceived as something dubious, a bit like "big brother." Sure, I can see that. The last thing I want is to create another case where someone's webcam flicks on by remote to make certain they are at their computer and working.
Two other concerns arose:
1. There is an older generation that just won't do it, any of it. @oraruth laid into me about this and had an excellent suggestion, one that has the potential to create deep, values based relationships between employers and (especially increasingly project-based) workers: mentoring, pairing an old hand with the bright young thing.
N.B. in this case, it is important to work with the old hands to get them to build confidence, as research shows that it's a myth that older people can't pick up new things. Slowness and response time only decrease when you think they should rather than that actually being the case, it's all about confidence in your abilities (see C. Davidson, 2010).
2. The trust/self-awareness hurdle is the first one to be bridged; i.e. the first stage in social media is to realise that what you have to say matters. How do you get someone to realise that?
Any thoughts on that last one? What do we think out there?
[image credit: Creative Connection artists drawings; my photo]
I want to thank everyone at the unconference yesterday for welcoming me and for their enthusiasm about my Rethink Work project.
You can download my notes from the day here (.doc file).
June 5, 2012 
