xarkGirl

Twitter, Google and other life-altering cuteness

So Peggy Noonan has an interesting piece on the Iranian election sitch, touching on the role of technology in a revolution. She, rightly so, notes that technology such as Twitter and YouTube only intensify and encourage the sentiments of people, they don't create them.

Well, gee. Information still plays the role of information no matter what delivery system it's in.  Remember how the printing press made something of a stir?  We humans are social creatures. It's why we are the dominant species. Better delivery systems just widen that society. We expand ourselves.

I do take exception to her closing call for more serious names for technology inventions, as she complains that Google, Twitter and Facebook are "baby talk." I call bullshit on that. We geeks don't need -- as xarker put it -- "borrowed gravitas." We don't make the same distinctions that the generations before us did between what we're told is serious and what we see as serious. More like what is useful and what is not useful. Need to be aware of and need to act on.

What's the value to me of video from Iranian protesters versus knowing that traffic is backed up on I-26 and I'll never make it to my job interview on time if I go that way? Arguably Iran is more "serious" in terms of global politics and the meaning of life, but I need that f'n job. The two pieces of information are not comparable, yet the delivery system is. I get both in real time. Does it matter that "Twitter" sounds kinda cute?

Sexism and Sarah

With a Southern, Catholic mother who work for the anti-ERA movement while at the same time telling me over and over that there were no limits but my own on what I could accomplish, I have a paradoxical relationship with feminism.

My mother, like many women of her time, was worried about the ramifications of "equal = same" legislation.But it was not a fall-in-line, unthinking position. She's no shrinking violet. She made some courageous stands in the '70s South. She allowed me to be absolutely color-blind in my choice of friends and refused to attend functions -- even ones I know she really wanted to go to -- at the country club where blacks were not allowed memberships.

I have always struggled with that same equation. If "equal" does not mean "identical," why does it feel that way so often? That getting ahead somehow requires being less of a girl or that being a girl meant accepting a subordinate role?

I am becoming increasingly belligerent in my disgust for the residual work-place sexism that relegates women to being lieutenants [PDF] and cake-bringers. In my neck of the woods, the glass ceiling is 2-inch thick Plexiglass.  

I favored Obama, but, as a woman, I was absolutely appalled at the double standard in the treatment of Hillary Clinton.  My gawd, the beating she  took over a moment of honest emotion. The ludicrous, insulting obsession with her personal appearance. Her defeat sparked a new wave of discussion about women and sexism. On the heels of hordes of disenchanted women voters, in walks Sarah Palin.