Posts by Finn Higgins
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Having said that, I consider the lines "Elvis, was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me..." to be superb beyond belief so I can't even call consistency in my defence!
It's even better if you're doing the Do The Right Thing opening credits dance over the top of it...
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Joe - yeah, I have a friend in Germany who plays in a reggae band. They're very popular! Record contract 'n all. Seems to be all the rage around his neck of the woods.
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Nanoplanet - I don't think you're really on strong ground telling somebody to butt out on a forum they paid for the development of and who pays for the servers that host it. Tze Ming would be well within her rights to expect discussion of her posts to be polite and considered, but claiming that polite - if notable - disagreement with her views represents "a disproportionate amount of shit" is facile. People aren't disagreeing because she's a girl, it's because they think she's wrong. Or is the fact that she's a girl so overwhelmingly important that we're to ignore the content of her posts or the strength of her arguments? I mean, isn't it cute - a girl! Posting on the internet! Wow. Please note, easily confused, that I'm being sarcastic.
Anorak - What? How the hell is it hijacking a thread to disagree on an issue? Hijacking would be if the subject had been diverted. At no point has anybody attempt to diminish what happened to Kathy Sierra, or to state that it was acceptable. However, opinions over how to best prevent such problems ocurring in future vary. Reducing what I presume to be my posts to a facile mockery in miXeD CaSe is cheap. If you've got something to say to me then quote me and reply to what I said, please.
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Russell, my point about the similarity is not in the style of the abuse, it's in the severity. As I recounted earlier, I've seen somebody subjected to that kind of abuse inside the last year who is white, male and otherwise fairly nondescript other than having an involvement in an activity that is controversial in certain circles. Photoshopped pictures? Yup. Home address? Yup. Sexual threats? No. But that's more to do with the fact that such threats are generally not as psychologically harmful to males than females - otherwise I've little doubt they would have been in there too. Instead they just threatened his mother, and the abuse included calls made to his home. The police were involved. The whole thing was kept private, as he is notable in certain circles and he would rather keep his public image related to what he does than what has been done to him by others.
When I saw the Kathy Sierra case hit the blogs, my immediate reaction was “oh, somebody’s decided to go public with their experience”, not to be utterly shocked that such things were occurring. Because I’ve seen it happen. And since my only experience of seeing it unfold has been targeted at a male victim it seems bizarre to me to treat the broader issue as primarily one of male-on-female aggression. Other stories posted in this thread have included examples of homophobic abuse and women abusing women. I don’t doubt that women are at higher risk of being targeted online, but it seems a waste of a good opportunity to do something about the whole problem if Kathy Sierra’s experience is treated as a gender issue alone.
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Jesus you people are fast. Don't you work?
A few things at a time...
Andrew Llewellyn - me too with the hand-delivered god-bothering, but replace "SPCS" with "Destiny" and "Dom Post" with "Herald". That was about the point where I started making sure I'd considered the likelyhood of any real benefit before using my real name in public forums. I still use it, but only in environments where I tend to think the readership are likely to be reliably sane.
Heather - no dispute from me that gender discrimination exists and is common in our society. But my viewpoint on the issue of online harassment is that it's a practical issue with practical solutions. It happens because people put their names and channels of communication out there in public, which is a choice that you do get to make. Yes, being a woman makes you a higher profile target and that's not fair. But the problem and the available solutions are identical to those faced by anybody else who's the target of abuse online - often those holding controversial opinions. As such I don't see that raising the problem as a gender-specific issue is going to address any practical solution. If somebody could outline to me how exactly it would solve the problem then I'd be thrilled to listen, but it strikes me that the time would be more fruitfully spent discussing approaches to creating online forums where such problems can be integrated into the design considerations and minimised. I'd like to see the problem solved as much as anybody, but feminist blog days seems about as likely to solve it as, say, a good word from Bono.
Tze Ming - I think your misunderstanding lies in the fact that you believe it possible to self-deprecate other people.
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However the thread has been skewed in various directions, the Take Back the Blog blogswarm is a symbolic online event to express solidarity with female bloggers who have been subjected to harassment, intimidation and threats of violence. If Finn really doesn't get that... well, wow - I'm sorry too!
Thanks for removing the context in the quote.
I don't get the idea of a symbolic online event to exclusively express solidarity with female bloggers who have been subjected to harassment etc, when there's plenty of bloggers who aren't female who're victims of the exact same behavior. Why arbitrarily restrict your solidarity? What's that supposed to symbolise? I'm not a fan of dividing up society by gender, and this seems like a division being made when the problem is wider. Does your solidarity exclude Islamic men, who're the subjects of far worse abuse on the internet than women, collectively, in mainstream political discourse right now? If so, why?
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Hence the vulnerable note in Finn's post above. Finn seems to want to sound a "me too" idea in his story about his friend, and "it wasn't me" in response to the whole discussion that Tze Ming has raised. Finn, everyone here knows it wasn't you, and I suspect that most people here, like me, were saddened, even appalled, by the account you gave us of what happened to your friend. Here's the thing - making it clear that you don't support what is happening, doesn't stop it happening.
Good god. On the one hand we have long posts about how the use of masculine adjectives to describe prose is all tied into gender politics, on the other hand sounding a "vulnerable note" somehow provides a world of subtext for you to read all manner of conclusions from.
You know, I don't really put enough time into the posts I write to justify reading between the lines to quite such a depth. I'm a pretty shallow guy. If I was sounding "vulnerable" perhaps that was just an attempt at being polite given I'm a) new here and b) commenting in a thread where gender politics is seemingly being forcibly inserted into anything in sight, whether it fits particularly well or not?
If I raised an example it was not to demonstrate that I'm a jolly nice fellow, it was to demonstrate that abuse is abuse, regardless of gender - if you put your opinions and your real-world credentials on public display and the wrong people take a disliking to you they can be very, very nasty to you.
My point being: The actions are the same, the situation the same, the results the same. So why treat the problem differently just because the recipients of the abuse are female? Why talk of "Taking back" blogs for female audiences? I don't get that, sorry. Either you're interested in the problem of online abuse/stalking regardless of the victim (and viable social and technological solutions to the issue) or you're not - I don't see that being specifically and exclusively interested in the problem for a particular group of victims is a very practically useful position, sloganeering aside.
Shorter: What Juha said.
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B Jones & Tze Ming,
Thanks for the responses. I'm going to quote and reply to B rather than Tze, but I'm trying to engage both if you catch my drift...
Yes, and treating the problem in purely people-vs-people terms misses the point that a lot of the threats take on a specifically gendered tone, when assholes go bad.
That's true, when gender is available as an identifiable angle of attack. But when it isn't then the same threats take whatever form can be calculated to be the most damaging based on what is known about the victim, who they are and what they value. That gender is used as an angle of attack is reprehensible, but no less so than the use of known family, sexual orientation or painful personal history, for example. That gender is used is a reflection of wider society, but the use of gender as either a criteria for choice of victims or a weapon of attack is not the problem. The problem is that people are looking for victims and weapons, and that the systems exist which allow them to do so with impunity.
If you're visibly female and on the internet, you're more likely to run into assholes. I can't remember the citation for it, but a study on AOL with a female, neutral and male-named created accounts on a chat board, found that female names attracted 10 times more nasty comments than male ones.
While studies like this are interesting in relation to the environment and demographic studied, I think it's an obvious and serious error to consider "the internet" or "the web" a homogeneous mass to which such studies can be universally applied. AOL or any other chat service != The Web, which in turn has little direct linkage as a whole to the world of blogs and commenting. And indeed with respect to discussion of issues surrounding bloggers and writers it's arguably a bit like trying to apply a study on male/female behavior in nightclubs to a senior citizen's bridge club.
I'm willing to accept that there are environments online where, as a woman, you're not going to feel particularly safe exposing your real-world contact details. But that should be rather obvious - there's plenty of environments online where I'm not comfortable exposing mine as a white male, musician, voter to the left of the political spectrum or non-Christian, for example. Society has never allowed any individual to enter every arbitrary grouping without discrimination, regardless of whether that individual is white, yellow, blue, green, male, female or both. It's a nice idea, but the world doesn't work like that for anybody.
There are any number of reasons that people are targeted or victimised in different environments. I've spent time in a lot of different parts of the internet in a lot of different discussion contexts in the last decade or so, and they're frequently dramatically different in the way they manage dispute, allocate power and status and handle minority demographics. There are some communities I've been a part of where you'd be eaten alive for the slightest gender bias, yet where other points of contention release the most unbelievable abuse. Are they superior situations just because the abuse doesn't revolve around gender? If your answer there is yes then we've maybe found a fundamental point of difference.
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Well, after a long period of lurking this thread actually convinced me to register an account on PA.
A few points.
The internet is, by its nature, probably the most equal-opportunities system you could imagine. You get a choice as to how you present yourself, what gender or race you adopt etc etc. But without a doubt, the treatment you receive is modified by that presentation - if you present yourself as female you will be treated differently than if you present as male. So I'm not about to claim that there's no differential in treatment of men and women online, or that life as a whole is free of discrimination.
But - and yes, there is a but - threats of violence and aggressive stand-over tactics are not something that is exclusively restricted to women online, or I'd argue something that is even directed more at women than men. In discussing the problem I think it's largely a nonsense to talk about it in the context of "making the internet safe for women", as that rather excludes all the other, non-female people for whom it is similarly unsafe. An acquaintance of mine in the US went through something similar in the last couple of years. He's in his mid teens. Through an activity he was involved in that had some degree of controversy in his field he got a lot of exposure, both online and in traditional media. As a result of that exposure he got to see both the good and the bad side of having a presence in the public eye: Firstly, he got offered a lot of opportunities not usually available to somebody in his age and situation. Secondly, he got subjected to violent personal abuse in a variety of internet forums, and acquired crazy (male) stalkers who started threatening him and his family with violence via the internet, phone and mail. This is not something that is exclusively targetted at women. Tze Ming's piece amused me a little when I got to the quote from Joan Walsh about "Men who hate women on the web". In all honesty, with the entire subject of gender removed it described exactly how this - male - acquaintance of mine was treated. It's not about men who hate women on the web, it's about assholes (who tend to be male) who hate people - anywhere. How that hatred is delivered tends to vary depending on the gender it's being targetted at - threatening to rape men tends to be less effective, so other threats are used that are intended to elicit the same response - but if you ask me the question "How do we make the internet safe for women" is really just a wider question of "How do you protect people with public visibility from the utter bastards out there"
Trying to cast the problem in purely men-on-women terms seems to be ignoring the fact that the problem is not that narrow.