[iDC] On Silence / Off Silence

[Anne Balsamo]

Meeting Trebor f2f last week at the DIY Citizenship conference in Toronto
provided the occasion for me to tell him how much I appreciate the iDC list.
I explained why I read only and don¹t post. In response, he suggested that I
write a short note documenting my silent presence in case it might encourage
others to write as well.  That¹s the context for this message.
 
Wayback in the early days of the wild, wild usenet west, I got flamed
viciously in the course of a discussion about women on the net.  This was
part of the phenomenon in the daySbeing able to survive verbal bullying was
the cost of admission to participate in online conversations on cyberpunk,
hacker culture, futurenet, vr. What made it particularly uncomfortable for
me was that I had made a decision not to be anonymous in my internet
contributions, believing (maybe naively) that signing my name was a way of
being ethically responsible and accountable for my intrusions into public
discourse.  So it wasn¹t just the bullying that put me off of posting
publicly, it was also that the risk of exposure and accountability was
unbalanced. 
 
In the decade or so since that initial foray, I simply did not care enough
or trust enough to post. Coward that I may beSI rarely update my status on
FB not because I¹m an excessively private person, but because I¹m just not
as witty or fascinating as those in my friendship network. <grin>
 
But now I¹m facing an interesting dilemma.  In a forthcoming book I write
about the ³ethics of multi-disciplinary² collaboration.  One of the ethical
commitments I argue for is the notion of ³intellectual confidence²Swhich is
a companion to another commitment that I describe as ³intellectual
humility.² Scholars who study language and power might recognize the
gendered logic of these statements, and indeed this is one subtext of my
discussion of the ethical commitments that structure (or should) successful
cross-disciplinary collaborations (involving humanists, scientists, artists,
designers, and engineers).  While there are many instances that contest this
assertion<the Amazons, Riotgrrls, and "third-wave feminists"
notwithstanding<I still see a gendered dynamic playing out in girls/women¹s
engagement around technology: girls still hang back.

(This was evident as recent as two weeks ago in the raucous exchanges that
unfolded at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona.)
 
Indeed as was discussed at last week¹s DIY Citizenship conference in Toronto
there are many who attest to the fact that ³gender² remains a barrier to
technological participation.  The thing that disturbs me about this
assertion is that gender = girls/women. This assumption leads to the subtle
suggestion that there is something wrong with them that needs to be fixed.
I think it is important to figure out how to analyze and talk about this
phenomenon without making the problem ONLY about girls/women¹s ³lack of
confidence.²  This was my intent in elaborating an ethics of collaboration.
Without being sweepingly essentialist, I wanted to outline the kind of
behaviors that I believe are useful to develop in the service of creating
successful collaborations.

I¹m wondering what other people might have to say about this, which is why
I¹m off silence now.  ;-)
 
Anne Balsamo
University of Southern California