notes from the {gendered} revolution

I don't like talking about gender politics.

It's not because I'm not interested. It's not because I don't see the value of engaging with social issues tied to gender and identity. It's not because I don't have tons to say about these issues.

It's because most of the time, I feel marginalized by the rhetoric of gender, identity, and belonging. I feel like this rhetoric is talking about someone else--it certainly doesn't represent my values, needs, or beliefs. And I hate feeling marginalized. I hate feeling unnoticed. So I'd much rather not show up to the conversation than feel like nobody's interested in my needs.

Let me try to explain why by backing up a step to explain why I'm writing about this issue at all.

It came up in a conversation about a recent seminar with Leah Buechley, an educational researcher who directs the High-Low Tech research group at MIT's Media Lab. Buechley's recent work focuses on computational textiles, and a big chunk of her focus is on embedding conductive thread and circuitry into clothing.

There's sewing involved. And when sewing gets mashed in with computation, smart people start talking about gender.

you have to watch this vlogpost

file under: world's most awesome 16-hour vlog project


This link to pure awesomeness comes to you courtesy of my buddies, Jeffrey Kaplan and David Phelps. If you care about literacy or the learning sciences, you will die of joy.

who you calling 'we'? Part 2: Peggy Orenstein version

I, good little revolutionary that I am, have been reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Some of my colleagues find this fact cute. Cute like this: "Oh, lookit Jenna getting all outraged again. Now she's even carrying Freire around with her. That's so cute."

That's okay. Other cute things include: anteaters and baby pterodactyls.

Reading Freire can make a guy excessively aware of anything that gives off even the faintest whiff of colonizing tendencies: Actions or words that ignore, dismiss, or (intentionally or unintentionally) distort or misrepresent the interests of oppressed groups.

A good recent example of this is Peggy Orenstein's recent New York Times piece Stop Your Search Engines. The piece, which focuses on "our" struggle to control overwhelming levels of information inundation, offers a peek into how even the best writers so often end up re-colonizing marginalized voices by treating personal issues as if they were universal concerns. It's a common trend in writing about new media, which coincidentally happens to be the topic of Orenstein's piece. She explains that, much like the irresistible urge of the Sirens' call in Homer's The Odyssey, the internet and the knowledge contained therein can drain "our" spirit, energy, and very lifeforce away. "It is heartening," she writes,

that the yearning for learning is the most powerful of all human cravings (though it applies equally to obtaining the wisdom of Zeus or the YouTube video on how to peel a banana like a monkey). Yet the sea surrounding the Sirens was littered with corpses. Can increased knowledge really destroy us?

Well, yes.... [T]he trap is more of a bait and switch: the promise is of infinite knowledge, but what’s delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same. In that sense, Homer may have been the original neuropsychologist: centuries after his death, brain studies show that true learning is largely an unconscious process. If we’re inundated with data, our brains’ synthesizing functions are overwhelmed by the effort to keep up. And the original purpose — deeper knowledge of a subject — is lost, as surely as the corpses surrounding Sirenum scopuli.

There's a lot of "we"-ing and "us"-ing in this article. The piece, after all, is part of a regular feature called "The Way We Live Now," a feature intended to represent personal approaches to larger cultural issues. And this is exactly what Orenstein attempts to do. She cites Fred Stutzman, the inventor of an internet-blocking application called Freedom, as saying that "we’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud." (emphasis mine)

The internet, Orenstein argues, "has allowed us (emphasis mine) to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing 'everything that happens' and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones. (emphasis mine, emphasis mine, emphasis, emphasis mine)

We sure do spend a lot of time talking about what the internet means to us, don't we? I've been as guilty of this as the next guy--it's a nice rhetorical move, a way of enlisting allies around a cause and demonstrating an awareness of cultural trends.

It also silences people who aren't part of the "we" in question.

One of the most exciting aspects of the internet as an information and communication source is that it offers the promise of real revolution: of tools for dancing along with and in resistance and opposition to dominant cultural forces. We feel inundated, overwhelmed at times, by information, but when information is necessary, useful, and used it feels anything but. They--people who, for example, have used Twitter as a tool for revolution; who have used cellphones to document the most abominable acts of cruelty and degradation; who have used news sites and blogs and forums to gather information they couldn't otherwise access--are less likely than "we" are to feel like limits must be set, like too much knowledge is a dangerous thing, like "self-binding" is the only path to true productivity.

Pervasive among members of dominant groups, writes Paulo Freire, is a fear of freedom: a fear that liberating the oppressed--making possible true conscientizacao, or critical consciousness and the will to resist oppression--will threaten the status quo.

"We" would do well to remember that the internet serves many purposes, some revolutionary and others not, but the leisure and reflexivity with which many of "us" approach consistent internet access is a long, long ways from universal. It's the old Tree of Knowledge issue again: Eating the apple only constitutes a fall from grace if you had the luxury of grace in the first place.

liveblogging the Home Inc Conference: keynote speaker Alan November

From Alan November's website:

Alan November is an international leader in education technology. He began his career as an oceanography teacher and dorm counselor at an island reform school for boys in Boston Harbor. He has been director of an alternative high school, computer coordinator, technology consultant, and university lecturer. He has helped schools, governments and industry leaders improve the quality of education through technology.

His opener:
"I used to think I knew the truth. I don't know it anymore. So whatever I say is only good enough to criticize."

Here's why, according to Alan November, we've been able to spend over $10 billion on putting technology into schools over the last decade without making any gains on learning. He pulls much of his arguments from Shoshana Zuboff's 1989 book, The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power.


1. The real solution isn't bolting technology on top of what we used to do. November pointed to Zuboff's notion of "automating," which is the process of using technology to automatically transfer information. "When you automate," November said, "at best, you only get incremental improvement. Not surprisingly to me, you often get a decline in quality.

According to November, connecting our classrooms to the Internet has lowered the quality of education int he U.S. Plagiarism has skyrocketed. "Everywhere I go," he said, "teachers complain about how students are taking the easiest route to learning" through copying and pasting and other plagiaristic approaches.

2. The real issue isn't technology; the real issue is control. We have teachers and administrators controlling learning and we need to ask how well (or poorly) that serves the needs of the learners.

Here are the solutions November offers:


Zuboff's notion of informating: Giving people access to information they've never had before. "I've been to schools that are technology-rich and information-poor. Teachers don't have the right information at the right time to do the right job. Students don't have the right information at the right time to do the right job. Parents do not have the right information--ever, hardly."

Identify new opportunities for collaboration. This is, according to November, a mark that you're beginning to use technology well.
"The one-room schoolhouse was a great idea. We need to go back to that. The very structure of the school system is what's in the way. That structure is a control model."

If you do those two things well, November argued, then more and more people become self directed. They don't need an organization to tell them what to do. That's the ultimate skill, according to November.


"One of the most important questions we need to ask is: Who should own the learning?" Since technology is typically used to reinforce teacher control, we need to think of new strategies for using technology to shift control over learning toward learners and, November argues, parents. He argued that the best thing schools can do is to "build capacity in every family as centers of learning.

"But I can say this until I'm blue. i don't think anybody's going to do this--because it falls outside of the boundaries of the current collaboration people have."

Time? Money? Energy? "It's all red herrings," said November. "It's all about control!"

November says the biggest technology from his perspective that can help lead to a shift in control is Skype.

my thoughts on November's keynote:
It's refreshing to see his energy and enthusiasm about rethinking the use of technology in the classroom. I worry, though, that his stance on transferring agency to the family could just shift the control issues from the schools to the family structure. In brief, it's not just control that makes schools worrisome institutions; it's the colonizing effect of middle class values on members of non-dominant classes and ethnicities. Collaborate with families and you get the same old divide we've been seeing for much more than the last decade. Middle class kids will get inculcated with middle class values, which we know lead to success; lower class kids will learn a different set of values, thereby reifying the divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Add to this the increasing influence of new media technologies--and the participation gap that Henry Jenkins has pointed to--and this concern becomes even more vital.

Control, after all, is much less simple (and simplistic) than we try to make it appear. Add to that the fact that institutional control has nuances that aren't easy to talk about in the keynote structure.

"If you don't have the right mission," November said, "it doesn't matter what technology you have." Yes, and we need to consider the broader (if tacit and unexplored) mission of the American education system.

state of the blogosphere 2009: the kids are all right

I've been following technorati's 2009 state of the blogosphere report with the level of interest you might expect from someone who spends the vast majority of her free time blogging. Much has been and will be made of the following statistics, culled from technorati's survey:

• Two-thirds are male
• 60% are 18-44
• The majority are more affluent and educated than the general population
◦ 75% have college degrees
◦ 40% have graduate degrees
◦ One in three has an annual household income of $75K+
◦ One in four has an annual household income of $100K+
◦ Professional and self-employed bloggers are more affluent: nearly half have an annual household income of $75,000 and one third topped the $100,000 level
• More than half are married
• More than half are parents
• Half are employed full time, however ¾ of professional bloggers are employed full time.

These statistics are worth mulling, as they point to a disturbing trend toward the mainstreaming of what was previously a counterculture form of communication. Others have begun exploring this in depth.

What interests me most at the moment, however, is the statistic on journalistic credentials. According to the report, 35% of respondents have worked in traditional media formats, including newspapers and magazines, radio, and television. Compare this to the less than 1% of the entire American work force employed in traditional media fields.

And one more statistic before we dive into analysis: Of those who identified as having employment history with traditional media sources, 72% are no longer employed by a media outlet. This means that just over one-fourth of the bloggers surveyed are formerly affiliated with traditional media outlets.




Why does this matter? Because it points to two interesting and important trends among bloggers: They have had more exposure to traditional journalistic ethics than does the average American; and they are disproportionately drawn to blogging as a news circulation format. This is, in my view, a double smackdown to those who fear that the shift away from traditional news sources will lead to a decreased quality in reporting.

journalistic ethics, carried over
As I've explained before, I'm a former newspaper reporter whose paper folded after a long slide toward decreased advertising revenues. Not all of us who worked at that local paper were journalists, exactly--our crew included two sales reps, two assistants, a circulation manager, and various part-time employees--but everybody at that office embraced a deep commitment to honest, responsible information delivery. It kind of came with the territory.

Journalism is guided by an ethical framework--what we might call an appreciative system--that's undergirded by intellectual rigor, critical curiosity, and chronic curmudgeonry. Though this commitment is move visible in its breach (which is in part why Jayson Blair became a household name), it's a big piece of what drives so many people into traditional journalism even as its dying gasps turn into death rattles.

disproportional representation: paid journalists become voluntary journalists
Old journalists never die, they just get de-pressed, har har. In fact, the thriving popularity of blogs and their potential to reach a vast--indeed, potentially almost infinite--audience is by my lights part of what draws us traditional media curmudgeons to new media. Though I can't speak for all traditional media-affiliated bloggers, I can tell you that I was drawn to journalism because I believed in its power, believed in its transformative potential. I believed, even before I could articulate it, in the power of a free press in a democratic society. That's free as in speech, not as in beer.

Now, as a blogger, my understanding of "free press" has changed: When I talk about the power of a free press, I now mean free as in speech and as in beer. This does not, contrary to common belief, mean that I believe we can sustain a thriving communication system without funds; I just don't believe that the people should be required to pay for information. I have elsewhere delineated between 'news' and 'the news' and discussed various approaches to funding that may be more sustainable than the current system, so I won't go into that here; instead, I only want to submit that for many traditional-media types like me, blogs offer what a career in journalism did, only more so. More communication of ideas, more potential readership, more opportunity for direct conversation between the writer and her readers. News can be broken, immediately, to overwhelming impact, via blogs; ideas can be offered, discussed, and modified; a reading public can be mobilized to act.

There are those who will (and do!) argue that unpaid citizens will never be willing to commit to reporting on local, national, or international news without pay; or that even those who are willing to do so will offer substandard, biased, or useless content. These charges may be true, but only of a subset of the online journalistic population. For the rest of us, our commitment to delivery of high-quality, well researched and useful information has never been higher or more valuable--essential, really, to a democratic society built on a presumption of freedom of speech and of the press.

update on bigot Jan Moir

First, I want to show you this fantastic video I snagged from the Online Journalism Blog. If you're like me, you're not thrilled about the notion of sitting still and watching a 3 minute video, but I promise it's worth it.



The video was embedded in a post by Paul Canning called "Jan Moir is a Heterosexist." If Canning and I were to follow the advice of the video above, we would write things like:

• Jan Moir's column was heterosexist (or homophobic, depending on your take).
• Jan Moir's column adopts a heteronormative (or homophobic, depending on your take) approach to gay rights.
• Jan Moir's argument promotes homophobic (or bigoted, depending on your take) attitudes toward gay rights.

Nope, I'm going with the old "Jan Moir is a bigot" approach. It's not that I think the advice in the above video is wrong; it's just that Moir followed up the bigoted assumptions espoused in the column in question with an Official Statement that rejects the notion that the piece espoused bigoted assumptions. Here's her statement, in full:

Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions.

However, the point of my column-which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read - was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all. Yes, anyone can die at anytime of anything. However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately's death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.

The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned. On this subject, one very important point. When I wrote that 'he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine', I was referring to the drugs and the casual invitation extended to a stranger. Not to the fact of his homosexuality. In writing that 'it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships' I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

Mischievous in the extreme? Really? Let's return to the scene of the crime, where Moir writes:

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.

It is important that the truth comes out about the exact circumstances of his strange and lonely death.

Ok, so let's be clear on the association Moir is making here: The only thing that these three men have in common is that all engaged in relationships with men. Michael was arrested for public indecency; McGee, after a long struggle with depression and addiction, committed suicide; and Gately was in an apparently happy relationship with his husband, Andrew Cowles.

And, by the way, it's not at all clear what the death of McGee has to do with Gately's death, though for some reason Moir thinks the two events together "raise troubling questions about what happened" on the night that Gately died.

What the hell does the suicide of a young gay celebrity have to do with the death, apparently of natural causes, of another young gay celebrity?

Moir's column was homophobic; but her defense of the column, when a public mea culpa would have been the appropriate action of someone who--as she herself declares--has in the past publicly supported civil partnerships, takes things one step farther. Her column presents a bigoted argument; and her follow-up self-defense presents her as the bigot she is.

• Jan Moir is heterosexist (or homophobic, depending on your take).
• Jan Moir is heteronormative (or homophobic, depending on your take) about gay rights.
• Jan Moir promotes homophobic (or bigoted, depending on your take) attitudes toward gay rights.

Additionally, her writing skills are fairly abysmal, though I suppose that's another argument for another day.

bigot update

file under: for the love of god shut the hell up, you homophobe

Last week, Irish pop singer Stephen Gately died at age 33; preliminary reports point to acute pulmonary edema, or a fluid buildup in the lungs. Gately was young and presumably otherwise healthy, so of course it makes sense for us to reach for an explanation of his terribly untimely death.

Daily Mail columnnist Jane Moir has her theories, and every theory she offers assumes something sleazy. "Whatever the cause of death is," she writes,

it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered.

And I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy.

What's the sleaze of this particular story? Well, Gately was seen dancing at a nightclub with his husband several hours before his death, and they left the club with another young man, who was at the apartment at the time of Gately's death. It also appears that Gately smoked cannabis in his apartment before he died. None of these, just to be clear, are considered to be contributing factors to Gately's death. Not the presence of the young man, not the marijuana in his system, and not the fact that he was gay.

Moir is clearly one of those ignorant people who are on the prowl for proof of what they assume is true: that gays are sleazy sexual perverts. Every sentence of her column points to exactly this.

Gately was on vacation with his husband of three years, Andrew Cowles, when he died, yet Moir calls his death "lonely." There was no sign of foul play, no evidence that Cowles or the young man they brought to the apartment played any role in Gately's death. No evidence that Gately died of a drug overdose. No evidence that he died of AIDS or any other sexually transmitted disease. No evidence, at least so far, of the slightest bit of sleaze. In fact, Gately's mother insists that her son died from a genetic heart condition. Yet Moir still finds reason to assert that

Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.

I have a couple-three things to say about this:

1. Nobody is arguing that gay couples are any more likely than straight couples to get this partnership thing right. To be crystal clear, there is no happy-ever myth of civil partnerships. There is only the premise that gay couples have the same rights as straight couples to make an honest, legally recognized go at a committed relationship with the person they love.

2. George Michael hasn't cornered the market on unconventional approaches to sex and relationships. Lots of people of all orientations take an experimental approach to their sexuality. And guess what--when that experimentation takes place between consenting adults, and when all parties involved approach their interactions safely and maturely, it's none of our damned beeswax what they do. And besides,

3. We're well past expecting gay couples to prove they're 'just like' straight couples. It's ignorant and homophobic to presume that for gay couples to "earn" their right to marry they have to prove they're not as perverted, dirty, and disgusting as some straight people think they are. It is, in short, ignorant and homophobic to assume, despite preliminary evidence to the contrary, that when a gay man dies young the circumstances must be sleazy.

Oh oh oh! and one more thing:

4. If we're going to use celebrities as spokespeople for a sexual orientation, then I bring you:

• Roman Polanski (for raping a 13-year-old girl)
• David Duchovny (for uncontrolled sex addiction)
• Jude Law (for cheating on his wife with their child's nanny)
• Woody Allen (for cheating on his partner, Mia Farrow, with Farrow's daughter)
• Charlie Sheen (for multiple documented 'encounters' with prostitutes and a failed marriage as a result of addiction to porn)

Of course nobody would take the actions of these celebrities as proof that all straight people are perverts. And there's no reason to act differently when it comes to gay celebrities.

I'm so goddamned tired of homophobia. I'm tired of people like Jan Moir acting as if hateful, despicable, and cretinous attittues toward homosexuality and gay marriage are perfectly intelligent, thoughtful, and rational. Even if the final reports point to what Moir would consider 'sleaze,' the fact that she didn't need that evidence in the first place tells us exactly what we need to know about her: She's a bigot, pure and simple, and her vile attitude toward human rights is despicable and, thank god, woefully outdated in an increasingly warm, accepting, and tolerant society.