Date: 16 Apr 93 14:16:40 BST (Fri)
From:
[email protected]
Subject: File 3--LTES Article -- The author Responds
BACKGROUND: An article of mine was published in the Times Higher
Education Supplement, a London-based weekly newspaper
largely for people working in UK universities, earlier this year.
It
was made possible partly by the generosity of net-people with
their
comments and feedback; in return I mailed the text which I had
submitted to people who had requested it. A copy was
incorporated in the CuD digest without my knowledge.
I make this clear purely as a legal caveat, because I am now in the
embarrassing position of having inadvertently breached my own
copyright. Indeed, next week (Apr 22) I shall be sending the THES
a
piece on the implications of electronic publishing for copyright
and
the ownership of intellectual property. Brief (1k?) comments on
this
would be extremely welcome. Please indicate whether they may be
published with attribution, without, or not at all, and in the
first case give your full name, post and institution/location.
I am told that there were a large number of responses to my
piece, and that many took exception to my humorous quotation of
the lite Xmas _Economist_ piece, which described the Internet as
a "conspiracy" alongside the Masons, Opus Dei and such. The only
responses which I have actually seen were those from Larry
Landwehr and the response to this from Jim Thomas, who invited me
to respond.
The article itself:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I began drafting a net-style response to Larry, with quotes:
> ... just like in a conversation with a religious zealot, the
> feminist dogma just had to surface ...
-Oh dear, I thought, reading this. The "men-are-persecuted-
by-feminists" dogma, so tediously common on the Net, just had to
surface.
This exercise in turn became tedious.
I am a freelance writer on science and technology, with a special
interest in the social and political implications of the new
communications technologies. So please bear in mind that my
writing is quite different to academic writing or to net
articles. I was asked to write specifically on the "invisible
college" issue, and originally to do exactly 1500 words; I got
this extended to some 2300.
It is extremely interesting as a writer to compare the responses
to the printed article and to the electronic version: indeed, I
destined to appear on paper, to keep the temperature down.
_If_ the net is an invisible college, who may it exclude? Last
year, for a quite different article in _New Scientist_, I counted
the apparent geographical location and apparent gender of some
300 news-group articles (most in sci.*). Some 97% had US
addresses and over 90% of those with identifiable given-names
were male. Many fewer than 97% of all scientists work in the US
and fewer than 90% are male; empirically, there's an issue to
investigate here.
I made it clear that this was not a scientific survey. Last week,
before being asked for these comments, I was working up a
proposal for just such a survey: run the "From:" line of every
news-group posting for six months or a year past the ISO 3166
country codes and past _Naming Baby_, and see what falls out.
Would people on the net object to this? Please take it for
granted that I understand the statistical limits on
interpretation of the results. Please tell me if someone else is
already doing this.
It is extremely interesting that Larry complains: "why is it that
every expert cited is a woman?" I count seven women quoted, seven
men, and two anonymous (one of whom I know to be male, and one of
whom is an _Economist_ journalist...).
In a 2300-word article, 500 words discussed possible reasons for
the under-representation of women on the net. All the people I
quoted on this specific issue were women. I did what I usually
do to find commentators: call busy people whose work I respect,
selected regardless of anything except their work, to suggest
other researchers who will have time to comment. All those I came
across working on the issue were, for some reason, women. I
always welcome further contacts.
I suggest that Larry's complaint points to a "threshhold"
phenomenon -- the subject of an extensive sociological
literature. For example, when a neighbourhood is changing racial
composition, up to about 5 black kids in a grade-school class of
30 are fine; over 10 in 30, and the class is perceived as being
"majority minority".
It is plain daft that Larry calls on CuD not to publish pieces
such as mine. I am not, for the record, in favour of censorship.
I did not call on anyone not to publish anything; and I've so far
resisted the temptation to publish on paper the proportion of net
resources devoted to distributing flesh-GIFs. I did consider
Cheris Kramerae's concerns about harassment worthy of quotation
as one view among several.
My personal view is that "the calendar on the workshop wall" is a
form of harassment, the effect of which is to contribute to the
exclusion of women from mechanical engineering and so forth. I
admit I should have made it clear that the "direct equivalent" I
was writing about was leaving flesh-GIFs on women colleagues'
screens -- but I was already over-length and past deadline when I
realised I needed quotes to substantiate that it does happen. And
had I obtained those quotes, the tabloids might have run off with
the story... and then...
So, in Larry's view, for me to quote women suggesting that the
under-representation of women on the net might possibly have
something to do with puerile activities here is to invite
censorship; therefore he demands that my piece not be published.
Shurely shome mishtake? (Sorry, Americans, that's a Brit journos'
catch-phrase.)
I appreciated Jim Thomas' thoughtful and tolerant reply to Larry.
Jim clearly has more patience than I can muster these days. I
regret that he and I have had to put effort into explaining that
it is appropriate for articles to appear on the net which are
critical of some features of its current, and I hope temporarily
aberrant, state. I find it deeply ironic that we have had to do
so in response to an article which so vehemently invokes the
First Amendment.
If the net is, as Larry hopes, and as I hope, to expand "into the
mainstream of human culture", it will be forced to recognise that
there are many cultures out there which are quite different to
the various cultures now reflected in here.
I'd like to conclude by provoking a new argument.
One issue which CuD readers in particular will have to face up to
is this: the First Amendment concept of an _absolute_ right to
freedom of expression is, in my experience as a citizen of the
rest of the world, grasped by very few people out here. Only in
the USA, that is, is there a widely-held belief that it's worth
a person's effort to struggle for anyone's right to forms of
expression which that person finds repugnant.
I have been flamed before for asking "why is stupid speech
protected?": this frivolous question was a serious attempt to
raise the issue of protecting the _content_ of speech. I repeat:
I am not in favour of censorship. I have no personal oracle to
inform me what content is worthy of protection: the point is that
the question _makes_sense_ in many non-US cultures, where
relativism is less rampant, where there is a residual sense of
community and of values (some of which I do find repugnant).
I have heard reports that the US tobacco industry donates large
amounts of money to the ACLU to promote the "pure" First
Amendment position. I have no reason to believe these reports,
but their _existence_ and the fact that some clearly give them
credence intrigues me. I live in a country where the Prime
Minister is suing two magazines for libel because they reported
and thoughtfully analysed the existence of rumours that he had
had an extra-marital relationship -- rumours which had been
alluded to repeatedly in the daily press, so discreetly that many
uninformed readers will have believed that there were two,
separate, mini-scandals. If the Prime Minister succeeds in his
suit (and thereby closes the irritating magazines), the ACLU will
be in a position to sue me in the UK for libel over the first
sentence of this paragraph.
It is issues such as this -- the suppression of political comment
-- which the drafters of the Amendment clearly had in mind and
which exercises people out here. Few here really bother about the
free expression aspect of the Mappelthorpe (sp?) exhibition in DC
or the current attempt to suppress "adult" (i.e. puerile) movies
beamed into the UK by satellite. To be honest, no-one's getting
very publicly worked up about the Prime Minister either.
And, to start another row:
(C) M Holderness 1993. By which I mean: I've spent four hours
writing this; writing is how I pay my rent. I reserve all rights
to sell any of these words for reproduction on paper or in any
other form; it may and will be freely distributed as an Internet
article. My feminazi witch friends are cooking up a special hell
for anyone selling my efforts for personal gain: in the alpha-
test Hades you spend all eternity in an IRC session with Dan
Quayle or Fidel Castro, whichever you detest the more.
M Holderness;
[email protected]; I speak only for myself.
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