There have been a lot of transitions for me during the past 18 months. When I started blogging, I had no connections to any of the “names” in this medium. I was an isolated academic in Rochester, NY. Any ‘fame’ I’d accrued professionally was limited to the library field. I was headed down a professional dead-end, not having published or presented in far too long, teaching one web design class after another without a larger context into which to place the material.
When I discovered blogging, it was an amazing, exciting thing for me. It pulled together my grad school interests in what was then called CMC, my teaching interests in web technologies, and my love of writing. It provided me with a never-ending stream of new and interesting ideas from people who wrote daily about the topics I was most interested in.
I had no idea when I started blogging that there was a “who’s who” of blogging…or, more to the point, I probably knew it was likely (what field—academic or technical—doesn’t have its stars, its big names?), but I didn’t care. I was interested in reading and writing and discussing, not in reputation or rank or buzz.
Very early on in my reading, I stumbled on Joi Ito’s blog, and left a comment. And then I blogged my irritation with the entry that I’d read. Joi could certainly have ignored me, but he didn’t. Instead, he stopped by my brand-new blog and left encouraging comments—the first comments I’d ever received. It was just what I needed to build confidence in the medium…a sense that someone outside my local circle of friends and colleagues was reading what I wrote.
That experience with Joi was then echoed in my interactions with other well-known webloggers—from Shelley Powers to Mark Pilgrim to Halley Suitt. But in each case, I reached out first, by commenting on or linking to their sites. I didn’t always agree with them, but when I disagreed, I tried to do so in a polite and respectful manner…and, for the most part, so did they. Over time, reciprocal links brought more people to my site, and many of those readers enjoyed my writing enough to come back.
A year ago, I spoke out here about the underrepresentation of women at tech gatherings—especially gatherings related to the new social computing technologies that I was most interested in. But I did more than complain…I backed up my complaints with proposals to conference organizers. First Kevin Werbach for Supenova, then to the program committee at Etech. And they said yes. Imagine that! And now, seemingly all of a sudden, I’ve gone from way, way outside the inner circle to embraced and accepted by those within it. At no point have I felt that I had to censor my ideas or my approaches. At no point have I felt that my presence was based on anything other than my ideas and my willingness to ask to be included.
I say all of this because over the past several weeks, I’ve noticed an awful lot of negativity being directed towards Joi, as well as towards other people who I’ve grown to respect in this field, like danah boyd and Cory Doctorow. The arguments seem to me to indicate a resentment towards these folks because they’ve achieved some degree of fame or recognition, and because they are part of a visible and supportive community. And as a result, people like Shelley Powers and Dave Winer are accusing Joi (and danah, and Cory) of using unspoken authority to pressure others into conforming to community beliefs.
Shelley wrote “If community causes you to alter your writing—not to say something you think should be said, or to write a certain way to get attention—then you are betraying yourself as a writer.” And in a comment to one of Shelley’s posts, stavrosthewonderchicken wrote “It’s not about community any more, if it ever was, for some of the more visible amongst us, I don’t think. Unless by community they are referring to the intersection of their legions of acolytes and their semi-closed network of peers - the same people that they hang out with at these silly conferences that people talk so much about.”
That just makes me angry. How dare either one of these people pass judgment on the sense of community or friendship that’s developed among the people they’re criticizing? I have watched Joi reach out and befriend so many people—very few of them among the digerati that seem to irk Shelley and her readers so. But they don’t bother to look closely enough to see any of that. They paint anyone who counts themselves part of this growing community of people with an interest in the sociology and technology underlying new technologies with the same brush. And in the process, they diminish all of our voices. I fully expect that I’ll be dismissed by them as simply another acolyte—and that the irony of that dismissal will be completely incomprehensible to them.
Not interested in the research and projects presented at conferences like ETech, or AoIR, or Media Ecology? Fine. Every academic and professional field has people who find it a waste of time or an orgy of navel-gazing. But the level of venom and animosity being directed at people who I’ve seen to be welcoming and encouraging to so many newcomers, and whose circles are so clearly inclusionary, indicates to me that this isn’t disinterest. It’s resentment. It’s entitlement. It’s a reverse form of exclusion—if you’re part of “them” you’re not part of “us,” and we’re the only ones who really understand the medium.
When I’ve complained in the past about similar lacks of civility in discourse at and around misbehaving.net, I’ve been accused of betraying the name of the site—as though “misbehavior” necessarily involved unkind, hurtful behavior, and that such behavior should be privileged simply because it’s disliked. Bullshit. There are many kinds of misbehavior, and many ways to break rules without deliberately lashing out at others. And I don’t like seeing this kind of attack mode, these dismissals of real people and real friendships and real communities, go unchallenged.
Theresa Nielsen-Hayden, someone whose writing I enjoy and respect, wrote to a mailing list recently that a particularly odious poster to a site failed what she called the “benevolence test” :
In my view, some degree of derangement is acceptable if the person has the “plays well with others” virtues: kindness, cooperation, forbearance, truthfulness, etc. It’s one of the best reasons I know to cultivate them, because temporary or long-term derangement is something that can happen to any of us. When your ability to make judgements is impaired, what you have to fall back on are your habits. Kind and helpful people retain their ability to socialize a lot better than the chronically splenetic, choleric, and bilious sorts.
On the one hand, I often feel as though it’s best to ignore people who fail that benevolence test. On the other, I don’t want the corrosive idea that any community that includes well-liked and well-respected people is necessarily tainted and repressive to take root without some push-back.
(Updated 2/19 to include attribution to Theresa Nielsen-Hayden)
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