From Technology Review:
The Worrying Consequences of the Wikipedia Gender Gap
Male editors dramatically outnumber female ones on Wikipedia and that could be dramatically influencing the online encyclopedia's content, according to a new study
There was a time when the internet was dominated by men but in recent years that gap has dissolved. ... So what's wrong with Wikipedia? Last year, the New York Times pointed out that women make up just 13 per cent of those who contribute to Wikipedia, despite making up almost half the readers. And a few months ago, a study of these gender differences said they hinted at a culture at Wikipedia that is resistant to female participation.
Today, Pablo Aragon and buddies at the Barcelona Media Foundation in Spain suggest that the problem is seriously influencing Wikipedia's content. These guys have studied the biographies of the best connected individuals on 15 different Wikipedia language sites. They chose the best connected individuals by downloading all the biographies and then constructing a network in which individuals with Wikipedia biographies are nodes. They then drew links between nodes if that person's Wikipedia biography contained a link to another individual.
Finally, they drew up a list of the best connected people.The table above shows the top five for each of the 15 language sites.
... That's a puzzling disparity and one for which Aragon and co point to an obvious possibility--that the gender gap among editors directly leads to the gender gap among best connected individuals.
Of course, that's only speculation but Aragaon and co call it "an intriguing subject for future investigation." We'll be watching to see how that pans out.
In the meantime, the Wikimedia Foundation has set itself the goal of increasing the proportion of female contributors to 25 per cent by 2015, a step in the right direction but still an embarrassing blot on the landscape of collaborative endeavour.
In other words, to rectify this disparity, women should do more work for no pay. And, perhaps, invade Poland.
>"women should do more work without pay"
ReplyDeleteOf course there is always the possibility of paying minorities for what the majority does for free. And increasing the pay when THE GAP do not disappear do to some phantasmic enemy like innate racism, latent chauvinism, or whatever. Maybe Jimbo should pay some female interns from the foundations funds.
Force them to participate!
ReplyDeleteThose consequences can't be too worrying. I was able to read the entire article without blacking out or throwing up.
ReplyDeleteIf women wanted to write Wikipedia biographies of other women (or, more likely, themselves), then they would. And if they detected a culture there was was "resistant" to their participation, then I'm sure they'd make sure whoever was responsible suffered a fate indentical to that of Larry Summers.
Steve, why do you bring us this absurdity? I mean, these people are stupid geeks with no influence, who cares about their stupid idiotic concerns?
ReplyDeleteWikipedia is too male... geez
I've long said that if we need more women CEO's, we must also need more woman in prison.
ReplyDeleteAnother way to hit the quota would be for more (pre-op) men to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
ReplyDelete:o)
the editor/contributor culture at wikipedia has sporatically been revealed to be quite rotten, and that is no doubt driving away non-neckbeards of both genders.
ReplyDeleteA far better idea would be affirmative action for the rare edits by females. These should trump edits by males, edits by females should be given some sort of virtue rating so that they are more likely to appear in the entry than those of males.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia will be better for it.
Seriously, what's up with all the George W Bushes and Adolf Hitlers. These two are the nodule points between the articles to THAT extent?
ReplyDeleteThere was a time when the internet was dominated by men but in recent years that gap has dissolved
ReplyDeleteWhat does that even mean?!
Ten years ago I was trying to persuade female friends they should use the internet, they could be looking at blogs like isteve, it would be great. Now they are all connected and what do they do? Play Farmville on Facebook or some bloody thing or other.
It looks like all those people who said that Bush = Hitler were right after all.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of technology gaps, I have never seen anyone regret the gender imbalance among car mechanics.
ReplyDeleteAs a society we owe it to ourselves to get about 50% of mechanics to make a career change towards selling clothes, and vice-versa.
Angela Merkel, we're looking to you.
ReplyDeleteAll these connections support Godwin's law as well. I guess everyone really is just as bad as Hitler.
ReplyDeleteI love articles like this. They presumably show women failing to do something the author wants them to do, but somehow the explanation is always that it is men's fault. I recall a similar article years ago about how there weren't enough female engineers. The explanation suggested was that male engineers created a "hostile work environment". If you read the examples, though, you could be forgiven for thinking that "hostile work environment" meant "being unattractive dorks"
ReplyDeleteIf they need a female Hitler, I'll give them my ex-wife's number.
ReplyDelete"Male editors dramatically outnumber female ones on Wikipedia and that could be dramatically influencing the online encyclopedia's content, according to a new study"
ReplyDeleteZapp Brannigan: I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about.
I've seen photos of the "men" at Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteThey ain't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQsNcS3cZb8
ReplyDeleteLet's see if I'm the first one to do this...
"Another way to hit the quota would be for more (pre-op) men to undergo gender reassignment surgery. "
ReplyDeleteOr could we just raise a lot of men as women and call them women. That might be the easiest solution.
You know, white men in decline are a remarkable funny lot.
ReplyDeleteThe current Wikipedia mini banner on the top left of it's home page says this:
ReplyDeleteWikipedia
The Free Encyclopedia
I'm changing it to:
Wikipedia
Worrying and Shameful
I'll be sending these changes to the man in charge and I too will be an editor (this will not help the current gender gap).
But women have to keep the households going, they do all the domestic work for no pay! It still applies, even if a guy is single and living on his own, cooking for himself, etc., he is still doing less domestic work than a woman. I'm not sure how, but I know it to be true.
ReplyDeleteMany women might not have children and now have careers, but they are still chained, magically, to the kitchen which leaves little time for wikipedia.
Besides, wikipedia is for people without a life and losers who can't afford to go shopping.
Buried in here is some fascinating data. I understand that the first four languages listed are English, French, German, and Italian, but I want to know what some of these other languages are. There is evidently a group of people, maybe Russians on the internet, who are fascinated by the lives of William Shakespeare, Napoleon II (!), Kenneth Branagh, and Elton John. Who are these people and how do their minds work?
ReplyDeleteThe other interesting question is that, given the ridiculously high unemployment in Spain, how "Pablo Aragon" (the name seems suspiciously made up) can get a paying job doing this, and where the "Barcelona Media Center" gets funding for this sort of work.
There is a notion, unconnected to a rational purpose, that unless an equal number of subgroups are participating then the group is not viable. We see this in the demand that women be educated in science, employers pay equally regardless of skills, or in the gap between rich and poor. To take the last example; Once you acknowledge someone as poor then the rich would be constrained from earning more according to the thinking. How this improves the lives of the poor is unclear.
ReplyDelete"Ten years ago I was trying to persuade female friends they should use the internet, they could be looking at blogs like isteve, it would be great. Now they are all connected and what do they do? Play Farmville on Facebook or some bloody thing or other."
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell, women are quite active in the home decor/fashion/parenting and of course, gossip areas of the internet. In other words, they seek out information they can put to immediate, practical use in their lives. (Don't ask me of what use gossip is, it bores me to tears. I knew the name of my neighbors' cat before I knew their surname.)
The way I see it, though, being a news and politics junkie does have a very definite, if not immediate, application to real life. This part of the blogosphere has explained all sorts of patterns in daily life that otherwise would have confounded me (e.g, returning to my old stomping grounds and seeing so many non-whites in a formerly conservative, all-white area). That does have an immediate, practical use to me. For instance, I didn't even consider demographics when we were house-hunting a few years ago. Now that will be my first consideration when my husband retires.
I asked an anthropology student years ago if women talking about immediate and concrete subjects and men talking about distant and abstract subjects had to do with the difference between gatherers and hunters. Gathers look at objects near to hand and need to know tiny details about them (e.g., what distinguishes a poisonous berry from an edible one) while hunters need to speculate about what beast is lurking beyond the next hill and formulate a plan for either evading or killing it. Of course, there's overlap but the difference between talking with other women and talking with men is really striking to me.
The really funny part is, and why has the internet gender gap "dissolved?" Take a look at Facebook's and Angry Birds' demographics.
ReplyDeleteGuys like to do things alone on their rooms, which means they will work on useful but non-remunerative projects like Wikipedia. Girls like to do things with other people, which means they like to go to school and work in offices. Women already outnumber men in most classrooms and would easily outnumber them in the full-time office workforce, if women did not also have to take care of children.
ReplyDeleteHas anyone considered the nature of work today in determining labor-force participation? Most contemporary jobs consist of talking and listening to other people, which women like. Men like to make things, hunt things or kill things. For better or worse, these activities are now done by machines.
"I've long said that if we need more women CEO's, we must also need more woman in prison."
ReplyDeleteAlong these lines, another way is to point out the huge disparities in the fields of dockworkers, plumbers, and auto mechanics. When will the glass ceiling finally come down!?
Girl Hitler
ReplyDeleteGo Team Venture!
-meh
Can anyone figure out why Yukio Mishima appears on the least in Japan? And is this a ray of hope for Japan and humanity overall?
ReplyDeleteSo what's with Poland? Two women in the top 5? Thatcher I can understand, in light of recent history, but QE2, also? Poland hasn't struck me as a particularly feminist place.
ReplyDeleteOh - and good feminist Norway - the top article is about that paragon of feminist womanhood, Marilyn Monroe!
Pinterest is female dominated. That needs to be fixed immediately.
ReplyDeletewhy northern whites in 50s/60s fight so hard against southern bigotry? they say cuz they feel sorry for negroes and angry at rednecks.
ReplyDeletebut was it also to stop southern blacks from moving north? if there be bigotry in south, black folks wanna move up north for better life and opportunity. but if things be more equal in south, more negroes likely to remain put.
so it be like paradox. northern 'love' of negroes and helping the negro cause in the south make the south happier place for negroes, which means fewer negroes 'escape' to north for jobs and justice(and robbing northern whites).
it's like if we wanna stem tide of mexican immigration it'd be nice if we could force mex elite to run a more fair system so that all them mexers not be running here for more just life.
There was a time when the internet was dominated by men but in recent years that gap has dissolved
ReplyDeleteI have to concur with Anonymous. Women use one URL: they dick around with Facebook all day. Just like they tend to leave the TV channel locked to wherever they watch Oprah, while men channel surf.
Why do these quota proponents never go for the full 50% for women? They're always "aiming for" some lower percentage.
ReplyDeleteChicks have pinterest now, isn't that enough?
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteJohn Carter the Jimmy Carter of cinema.
The question... why are some really dumb movies--avatard, transgenderformers, etc--successful while other big dumb movies fail?
Maybe John Carter crossed too many genres--like LAST ACTION HERE--, and it was a case of pomo jumping the shark.
I for one do think that historiography would be better if we talked more about the women involved with famous men.
ReplyDeleteBehind a lot of the disasters of history there were calculating hags in the background. That's a story that needs to be told too. By men, though. Women writing about themselves are incapable of objectivity. Sailer's law of female writers applies.
"Can anyone figure out why Yukio Mishima appears on the least in Japan? And is this a ray of hope for Japan and humanity overall?"
ReplyDeleteYou mean the man who slit open his belly along with a young follower? Some hope.
Isn't there chickileaks?
ReplyDelete"Or could we just raise a lot of men as women and call them women. That might be the easiest solution."
ReplyDeleteI think the left is already doing this. Unfortunately, it's not a solution to the worrying problem at hand. Instead, it is swelling the ranks of the aggrieved while not letting PWMs off the hook.
How cunning they are, really.
You notice internet is like a slot machine? Just like people pull on slots again and again--or press buttons nowadays--in hope of something better, people click on links for something 'different' and 'fresh'.
ReplyDeleteSo, someone should design a web browser that works like a pinball machine, making it more fun to randomly go from one link to another. It's all about 'hope'.
If they need a female Hitler, I'll give them my ex-wife's number.
ReplyDeleteThis is really funny! Oh, the imagery!
I remember noticing in the early days of wikipedia that there was a paucity of information about two subjects that interest me - lactation and textile history. Now there's plenty of information on both subjects and it gets better and more nuanced all the time. I seriously doubt it's dudes writing the articles the founders of La Leche League or different kinds of knitted lace.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good example of how sexist the feminist critiques of tech invariably are. It's like only being like a man ever matters to these people. So ok, mostly dudes are editing wikipedia. Who is making money off Ravelry? Who is running giant parenting messageboards? The internet has produced a completely new form, the birth narrative, and the way in which otherwise disempowered women are using the internet to create a discourse of birth is having real, systemic effects in OB/GYN. There has been nearly no serious academic work done on this by exactly the kinds of people you'd think would be excited about it. It's got everything - material conditions being changed by technology, use of language by a interpretive community undermining the power of those who previously controlled the discourse, big bad men oppressing women, and female parts bleeding all over the place. But no. The work is being done on tranny nonsense and whining about how 15yo white girls don't want to study computer programming. BAH.
"So what's with Poland?...Poland hasn't struck me as a particularly feminist place."
ReplyDelete"Springtime for Hitler and Germany/Winter for Poland and France"
Does appointing a proxy government in Greece count?
ReplyDeleteIs there any shortage of female Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, Castros, and Ceausescus?
ReplyDeleteThe work is being done on tranny nonsense and whining about how 15yo white girls don't want to study computer programming.
ReplyDeleteWhile the feminists keep going on about the evils of White Male Technology. Make up your mind. If computers are so bad, then fembozos should be happy that 15 year old girls aren't interested in them.
The obvious solution is to shut down Wikipedia and replace it with Chickipedia, written entirely by women.
ReplyDeleteThus, the Oppressive Hegemonic Patriarchy will be properly emasculated and sent to the corner for a time-out, and we can all get our information properly vaginified.
I can see the first entry...
"Hitler. He was a vegetarian, which is pretty cool, and he was kinda sexy in his way. Those Nazi uniforms are really hot. But he was so hung up on his blondie Eva! He totally needed to get out and date some brunettes and red-heads. Not to mention some vibrant sisters of color!"
All those guys are searched for, probably because people under 30 never learned much about them in junior and high school. You know because of the more inclusive non-dead white male focus of the curriculum. So we now need to move that level of thinking to wikipedia so that no one can escape the proper way of thinking.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at the Wikipedia homepage, there also appears to be a huge ethnic/language gap. Articles in thousands by language vs. native speakers in millions:
ReplyDeleteEnglish: 3907 | 380
German: 1383 | 120
French: 1230 | 115
Italian: 905 | 80
Polish: 887 | 40
Spanish: 879 | 400
There are 10x as many Polish speakers as Spanish speakers, yet the number of Wikipedia articles in Polish still outnumbers those in Spanish.
How come I never hear anyone bitching about the overabundance of female editors in the real word? Or female literay agents?
ReplyDeleteI think you've phrased it aptly here before, it's a familiar story:
ReplyDeletealtruistic white men create something of use to all;
others do not reciprocate, because they show neither the aptitude nor interest;
elite media condemns white men for excusion!
OT Lecture notes from big (gay) Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel's class on startups at Stanford. http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay
ReplyDeleteLots of anti-cant.
"Hitler. He was a vegetarian, which is pretty cool, and he was kinda sexy in his way. Those Nazi uniforms are really hot. But he was so hung up on his blondie Eva! He totally needed to get out and date some brunettes and red-heads. Not to mention some vibrant sisters of color!"
ReplyDeleteNah, with smart fraction, verbal intelligence, and standard deviations being what they are, Chikipedia will be all Jewish chicks. It's too early for them to start fantasizing about Nazis yet. Give it a hundred years.
the article's lead off premise is the stupidest thing ever. yes, it's true, women dominate facebook updating, women dominate twittering, women dominate texting on their cell phones. that makes it SO WEIRD they were not involved at all in creating any of those things. so, so weird!
ReplyDeletewhy don't their use rates match their representation rates in engineering, computer science, and physics?! derp, it must be those discrimmimations!
reality is that while women make up 50% of all users of technology, they created only 1% of it. women are not technology creators. women can dominate driving around in SUVs and watching reality television while being responsible for none of it. it doesn't work "backwards" like that. the primary users of some tech are not necessarily it's originators.
koreans had nothing to do with starcraft, but wow, they sure love it. africans in the US consume the most television, but they make almost none of it.
"I understand that the first four languages listed are English, French, German, and Italian, but I want to know what some of these other languages are"
ReplyDeleteactually english, german, french, italian, but yeah. go here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
and you'll see the 2 letter codes.
the order in the chart is english, german, french, italian, spanish, japanese, dutch, portuguese, swedish, polish, finnish, norwegian, russian, chinese, catalan.
although that is somewhat out of order, using wikipedia's biggest to smallest ranking, and omits ukrainian and vietnamese. catalan is an odd choice, korean would have been better.
"I remember noticing in the early days of wikipedia that there was a paucity of information about two subjects that interest me - lactation and textile history."
ReplyDeleteI remember those dark days too, searching in vain for breast milk suppliers (the largest dealer today is a man named, interestingly, Adolph Hitler) and wondering who invented burlap (it was William Shakespeare).
Sure enough, it's unser beliebte Fuehers Geburtstag and the TV stations and news are full of stories about the guy we still love to hate.
ReplyDeleteWorth noting: people who edit Wikipedia are insane.
ReplyDeleteDennis Dale:
ReplyDeletealtruistic white men create something of use to all;
others do not reciprocate, because they show neither the aptitude nor interest; elite media condemns white men for excusion!
Not "altruistic" but "selfish in a positive way". Most (white) inventors and creators are that way, totally in love with their vocation, and not caring one whit about any society, family, nation, tribe, or hive. In other words, more like Albert Einstein not Albert Schweitzer.
There was a time when the internet was dominated by men but in recent years that gap has dissolved
ReplyDeleteIf by "dominate" you mean "use" then yes, women use the internet a lot more than they once did.
If by "dominate" you mean "create", then no, women still contribute almost nothing to the (ongoing) creation of the internet.
"How come I never hear anyone bitching about the overabundance of female editors in the real word? Or female literay agents? "
ReplyDeleteThere's probably some misogynistic idiot who is doing it right now. Dont' worry, he'd shamed and kicked out if his crime is egregious enough.
As for your question, because they came about after the war with patriarchy, it just shows that women are much better at it than men and therefore the skew is just and proper.
To the victor belongs the spoils and the narrative.
It startles me that so many of the non-English Wikipedias are dominated by Anglophone celebrities. Why does Elton John have a longer article in Russian Wikipedia than Peter the Great or Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Stravinsky or Lenin or Stalin? (And he also has a longer Italian article than the innumerable Roman and Italian geniuses - I had no idea he was so internationally popular.) Why does Elvis have a longer Dutch Wikipedia article than William of Orange or Rembrandt or Vermeer? I give a thumbs-up to the Chinese for actually having Chiang Kai-Shek and Deng Xiaoping in their top four.
ReplyDelete@peterike - "The obvious solution is to shut down Wikipedia and replace it with Chickipedia, written entirely by women."
ReplyDeletewell that sounds like just the site for me! (^_^) (not.)
i miss the good old days of the internet when 99% of the users were geeky guys and ca. 12% of the wikipedia entries were about atlas shrugged. (~_^)
@peterike - "'Those Nazi uniforms are really hot.'"
well, yeah! hugo boss. how could they not have been?
just wait 'til the folks at technology review find out that 99.98% of the contributors at ravelry.com are women! what an outcry there'll be then!!
ReplyDelete"I've seen photos of the "men" at Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteThey ain't."
I'm sure they look very similar to the audiences Steve is staring at when he is at a, too rare, speaking engagement.
Sorry, that's just my inkling.
"The Female Hitler Shortage & other great moments in feminist theory"
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw the title of this thread, naturally a bit from "The Onion" was the first thing that came to mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEtw3XJoJrE
This controversy shows some people got too much time on their hands.
ReplyDelete"Behind a lot of the disasters of history there were calculating hags in the background. That's a story that needs to be told too. By men, though. Women writing about themselves are incapable of objectivity. Sailer's law of female writers applies."
ReplyDeleteOnly disasters? Are men's good deeds and successes theirs alone but disasters must have some "hag" at the helm? Never any noble feminine "leading us ever upward" in the words of Goethe?
Yeah, right. You sound like you'd be real objective. You cover your ass though. Any woman who would object is not objective because she's female so she can't write her own story. Some man has to tell it so it gets told right. Some might say, How bloody arrogant.
Feminists can be wrong and irrelevant these days, and I don't want anymore male Hypatias, ala, Summers, but ever so often I am reminded of why they got started in the first place.
I think I know objectivity when I see it. Starts with basic journalism, really.
And do all you commenters really only know women who only look at Facebook and gossip? Really? If you say so. But sometimes this blog feels like a bog from the dark ages.
I can't deny feeling emotional about this.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I even feel black -- no, not that different; maybe an Eskimo.
Enigmatic words to consider: Ben Rich, retireing CEO from Lockheed Martin, 1993: We now have the technology to take ET home."
Now THAT'S interesting.
"Ten years ago I was trying to persuade female friends they should use the internet, they could be looking at blogs like isteve, it would be great."
ReplyDeleteOK, true story:
I discovered the WWW in, I believe, January of 1995. I saw an unfamiliar icon labeled "NCSA Mosaic" on the desktop of a computer in the computer lab of the college I was then attending. Double-clicked it, was immediately blown away by the whole thing. It was addiction from first sight. I started staying there after classes until late in the evenings reading all that stuff.
Anyway, I very clearly remember trying to describe to the girl I was then seeing how incredibly cool the WWW was, how it was the coolest thing ever. I was extremely clueless about women at that point. She heard me out with a condescending smile.
women of color decreasing the disparity
ReplyDeleteIt startles me that so many of the non-English Wikipedias are dominated by Anglophone celebrities.
ReplyDeleteFrom the paper:
"When looking at these results, it should be taken into account that there is an Anglo-Saxon bias in the
dataset, as we relied on a list of notable persons extracted from the English Wikipedia, and persons from other cultures not known internationally might be missing."
I suspect their dataset has other problems too.
Incidentally, the paper gives a list of people with the most redirects, i.e. alternative names that refer to the same article. Guess who is number one, with the whopping 251 redirects (#2 has only 117).
ReplyDeleteThat's right, it's this guy!
iSteve readers made up at least a dozen redirects for the late dictator of Libya.
ReplyDeleteLots of singers but not mention of movie people.
ReplyDeleteSo, I nominate Lang.
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=6632
Utah Husband Posts Video of Wife Stumped by MPH Math: Is He in the Dog House?
ReplyDelete"If you’re traveling 80 miles per hour, how long does it take you to go 80 miles?...“You are driving faster than a minute a mile,” she says to him. “I would whack 80 in half and that’s 40.”"
The real meaning of MPH- The Original
80MPH.wmv
The real meaning of mph (maybe it's a girl thing)
80 mph question lol the real meaning of mph
Asking the 80 MPH question after watching tosh.o
80 MPH question. Jessica, we'll see you on Tosh.o
RE: The Real Meaning of MPH
The Real Meaning of MPH
RE: The Real Meaning of MPH
80 mph
80 mph the blond
80 miles at 80 mph?
Adam Carolla -- Women Don't Know Anything About Wars
ReplyDelete"One airplane used in ww2?"
"DC10"
Here's a list of them:
ReplyDeletehttp://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/rdcheck.py?page=Muammar_Gaddafi
Pretty impressive.
My favorite is "King of Kings Muammar al-Gaddafi of Africa".
ReplyDeleteI've seen photos of the "men" at Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteThey ain't.
LOL,
There you have it folks.
Wiki guys aren't exciting.
Boring guys aren't even really men.
Got that?
Ugly chicks on the other hand are victims of sexism, er or uh something...
Female dominated enterprises are not creative or innovative or dynamic.
ReplyDeleteAs communism requires a successful capitalist society to cannibalize, feminism requires a successful patriarchal society to parasitize.
"And do all you commenters really only know women who only look at Facebook and gossip? Really? If you say so."
ReplyDeleteI know some women who have computers but seldom go online in their leisure time. Their real-life conversations are entirely about family, friends and relationships. So yes, the real-life equivalent of Facebook and gossip. The ones who do go online email relatives and friends, look up info they need in real life (e.g., recipes), browse Facebook or Google single men to find out more about them (e.g., their salaries).
I'm not aware that any women I know frequent political blogs or just read news online like I do. When I bring up the subject of news, I'm invariably confronted with "I don't watch the news" or "I haven't kept up with that". I am one of the few in my circle of female acquaintances who does not have a college degree. Of course, all these white middle-class women, as good citizens, plan to vote this November. Most will vote Democrat.
"But sometimes this blog feels like a bog from the dark ages."
It does to me, too. But I focus on its content rather than its commenters. People driven from their work for their non-violent beliefs or having bounties placed on their heads based on misinformation does seem rather medieval, doesn't it?
"I discovered the WWW in, I believe, January of 1995. I saw an unfamiliar icon labeled "NCSA Mosaic" on the desktop of a computer in the computer lab of the college I was then attending. Double-clicked it, was immediately blown away by the whole thing. It was addiction from first sight. I started staying there after classes until late in the evenings reading all that stuff."
ReplyDeleteGosh, I wish I'd known you. I discovered the WWW a year earlier. I was 39 and some male grad students kept telling me about it and about how much info there was on it. Then I starting dating a guy who got a computer for work. WOW! I'll never forget how thrilling it was to go on the World Wide Web for the first time. (The first thing I had him do on it was find a map of Europe so I could delete France.) But we broke up and except for occasional glimpse on friends' computers, I had to wait till 1998 to have ready access to one.
"Anyway, I very clearly remember trying to describe to the girl I was then seeing how incredibly cool the WWW was, how it was the coolest thing ever." I still remember how thrilling my guy friends' descriptions of it were to me. Heck, I still marvel at it today.
I was extremely clueless about women at that point. She heard me out with a condescending smile."
Join the club. I've been the lucky recipient of over half a century of condescending female smiles.
@James Kabala:
ReplyDeleteIt startles me that so many of the non-English Wikipedias are dominated by Anglophone celebrities. Why does Elton John have a longer article in Russian Wikipedia than Peter the Great or Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Stravinsky or Lenin or Stalin?
You point is valid but overstated. Elton John does NOT have longer article. Saved as plain text, file sizes in KB: Elton John - 166, Peter I - 314, Lenin - 535.
The reason is, of course, Anglophone dominance in pop culture and the awesome power of American MSM. Post WWII USA made it all possible.
Kylie said: But we broke up and except for occasional glimpse on friends' computers, I had to wait till 1998 to have ready access to one
ReplyDeleteWhy wait??? In 1994 (when I started with Mosaic), for $1.5-2K one could buy a Pentium 100 with Win 3.11 and a modem. Every major city already had a dial-up ISP (AOL in worst case scenario, I think). That's all it took to get online and get Mosaic running! The Net was a rich and fascinating place already then - Usenet in particular. In 1995, there was even less of an excuse: Win95 came with TCP/IP built-in and Netscape was available. Other than the awareness of the "information superhighway", nothing's changed fundamentally between 1995 and 1998. Why couldn't you ask your friends to help you with computer?
"Female dominated enterprises are not creative or innovative or dynamic."
ReplyDeleteTell me again why the GOP suffers from a gender gap?
"Why wait??? In 1994 (when I started with Mosaic), for $1.5-2K one could buy a Pentium 100 with Win 3.11 and a modem."
ReplyDeleteWay out of my financial range at that time. I was living in the basement of the business that employed me and feeling lucky to have a job and a roof over my head.
"Why couldn't you ask your friends to help you with computer?"
My friends were all in similar financial circumstances at that time.
Matthew said...
ReplyDelete"Female dominated enterprises are not creative or innovative or dynamic."
Tell me again why the GOP suffers from a gender gap?
Are you trying to say that the GOP is creative, innovative, and dynamic? Hell no.
"Are you trying to say that the GOP is creative, innovative, and dynamic? Hell no."
ReplyDeleteRotfl. The problem for GOP when it comes to creativity and energy is Jew gap and Gay gap. Dems have more Jews and gays, and so more creative stuff.
"Female dominated enterprises are not creative or innovative or dynamic."
ReplyDeleteBut it's the natural enterprise of female beauty that inspires so much of male creativity and innovation. If men didn't have the hots for women, they wouldn't go to such lengths to make so much money and do great things.
But woman-inspired creativity among men may be waning. In the past, western men looked up to women as goddess figures to revere, honor, and worship. Now, with the
ho-ization of women, the only thing most men think about women is 'let me grab your ass' and 'come here and suck my dick'. A kind of passion to be sure, but when pornographic feelings are allowed to wallow in such animality, it doesn't inspire anything higher.
I mean I can imagine some guy writing a beautiful ballad about Greta Garbo. But some stupid porn skank?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous - I just went by the provided chart; I didn't bother to go and do firsthand research. Thanks for restoring my faith in Russian interest in their own history.
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/dvTe1-a6Pdo
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