It's all about the dots.

My reflection and life philosophy.
Fair warning: I abandoned grammar some hours ago and am now going for broke.


I honestly loved this class. I know I dropped off the face of the earth halfway through and was kinda craptastic about regular upkeep but I still loved this class and I loved the chance to really examine something I see as on the rise and important- blogs in the context of activism.

I see the human spirit as having so much potential. My entire life philosophy is based on the painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat. This idea doesn't make a lot of sense until you know what the painting is made of . The painting is made up of tiny individual dots of paint, millions of them. There isn't a single brushstroke on the canvas.

My theory is that life is a canvas and each of us is a blank dot. As we live our lives we fill our dots up. We can either have our dots be beautiful and contribute to the end result being beautiful or we can contribute to the painting being ugly. What will your dot look like? What can we do to make the dots around us more beautiful? What can we do to make the whole painting more beautiful?

I also feel that each act in our lives is a dot within our dots. Our lives add up to those things we accomplished and those lives we touched and those people we loved and were loved by. All of these things are part of the picture.

It's hard to create change more than a few dots beyond yourself but with blogging and the internet we are starting to reach a point where entire portions of the picture are able to shift quickly to being more beautiful, more loving, more accepting. The ideas and changes and words move quickly across the globe.

In this class I enjoyed reading as people grew and changed and became more comfortable with themselves as bloggers. I'm excited to see where everyone goes from here. The potential is just mind blowing.

I want to thank everyone for being supportive and amazing and really building a blogging community. It rocked and I hope everyone continues their blogs because I'll keep reading them...




PS: I apologize if "the dots" analogy got long winded and weird and incomprehensible. I'll try to explain it more clearly at a later date.

You guys rock!!

Wikipedia = Legit

blog response....?

When doing research for my response to the Dating a Banker Anonymous reading I stumbled across a blog entry about the use of Wikipedia in academic settings. My professors always make a point of telling our classes to never use Wikipedia. Most academics refuse to use it as any kind of source. Unfortunately for them the new generation of students have grown up wired and understand the benefits of making the knowledge of the world OpenSource.

The ability to build something like Wikipedia which now has sourcing and notifications if information seems dodgy, is utterly astonishing. By building it in the public domain and making it publicly accessible then all of a sudden the ability to instantly add new pop culture pheonmena, update information, add statistics, and tweak and finetune vast quantities of information instantly. How freaking cool is that?

I love this particular blog post because it addresses the four major arguments against using Wikipedia and effectively neuters them. It's worth a read.

The post is here at the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities blog.


In short: We Win!!!

Teh Intarwebz, they are awesome: a reading response

If I'm numbering correctly this should be week 4 in reading responses.

I will not lie; I had to google the word "foment" to find out exactly what it meant because the image in my mind had more to do with coffee than activism.

In thinking about spaces used to generate and promote activism and participation the first thing that comes to my mind is the internet. The techniques and finer points may vary but the basis of so much social organizing and debate is based on the internet.

I could bore people with the specifics but if you look back at my post Infinity and beyond from March you will see an image which is a graphic representation of the internet as of sometime in 2005. The entire world is connected instantly and with the meteoric rise of Google the information is no longer difficult to access.

Blogs like Feministing, Racialicious, Jack and Jill Politics, and others are able to use the internet to stay on top of information and keep up with their communities. They also have the ability to use seach engines like Google and Yahoo! to draw more readers to them. The way the blog system is built with reciprocal linking, blogrolls, and instant sourcing via hyperlinks is inherently designed to grow.

I don't at all doubt the ability of bloggers and vloggers like Sarah Haskins and Smart Girls at the Party to use the frameworks of Web 2.0 to their advantage.

I will say that many of these people have the Howard Dean campaign to thank for this framework as they were the first to prove that it could be done on a national level. Despite the fact that Dean did not win the primary, his campaign manager Joe Trippi's book The Revolution Will Not be Televised explains how Dean's campaign which was based heavily on web support and participation succeeded in proving that political challenges could be brought directly to the people. Suddenly political organizing and activism was no longer people in high places talking at people it was webmasters and bloggers talking to and with people.

The same is true of activism. For so long activism was something that lobbyists did: someone set the agenda and a limited group of people were sent out to do something about it. Feedback was complicated, difficult, and extremely limited. When web 2.0 concepts were introduced the model was changed so that people are now often given direct links to contact people in places of power and let their opinions be known.

Getting something done is generally a question of knowing how to properly disseminate your information. Should you use Twitter or Facebook or a more complex tagging system for your blog?

In working on the obama campaign I watch some of the most amazing things happen using Web and communication resources. Canvassing and phonebanking organized over the internet. Peopler could print their own lists without ever having to come in to our office. Sometimes organizing can be spontaneous and other times Webmasters and bloggers such as those at Feministing can encourage their audiences to get involved thus spreading a cause far quicker and further than word of mouth or other conventional methods such as chalking a campus or flyering a neighborhood could.

I think that the claims made in the articles are valid. Everyone has a voice and deserves to have that voice heard. Attention needs to be drawn to certain issues. A huge benefit of using the web for organizing is that people are not limited in the content they choose to work with. They are not sending out a topical newsletter that will require all 15 articles to be based around the same things. Each post can be hugely different, organizing efforts can be very specific and targeted. This can, in some ways, streamline the processes surrounding organizing.

This blows my mind

check out twistori. It's based on what people are saying on twitter at any given moment. so amazingly cool. Keep in mind that twitter has roughly 5 million active users from all over the world. It gets pretty random.

http://twistori.com



Just click on one of the words on the left and enjoy.

I love the internet.

Reading Response 1: It's a long one. Get some popcorn.

Because I can't come up with a better title than that...

Reading "Blog This! An Introduction to Blogs, Blogging, and the Feminist Blogosphere" "Women in the Blogosphere" and "Blogging Busts Out" was interesting because I often only read a few lines before some random thought or response was evoked.

I'll be honest about how difficult it is for me to organize my thoughts and responses especially to "Women in the Blogosphere". It's hard for me to read the article while also thinking in terms of history. The article was written around April of 2005, almost four years ago. In web terms that's a millennium! Those four years were enough time for the Republicans to peak in power and then begin to crumble like a biscochito. Myspace followed suit and has given way to Facebook which has in turn begun fighting it out with Twitter all of this overshadowed by the rise of Campaign 2.0 and now White House/Government 2.0.

The world changed so much and I believe the blogosphere has changed in many ways as well. I understand that the majority of the top blogs aren't run or written mainly by women but every blog in the Top 5 of Technorati's Top 100 Blogs list has at least one regular contributor who is a woman. Even this is ignoring the number one spot: The Huffington Post.

I suppose my biggest argument that women have the ability to weild just as much power -if not more- than men in the blogosphere is simply Arianna Huffington. Arianna is a blogging Goddess in so many ways the first of which being that she founded The Huffington Post which may not seem like much until you look closer.

Not only is The Huffington Post a blog for Arianna, it also hosts blogs for hundreds of other people including big names like Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Barney Frank, and (before she moved to MSNBC) Rachel Maddow. During the campaign season The Huffington Post became a huge go-to resource for political news and information as it had real time front page updates the instant something new happened. Even after the election The Huffington Post has remained a big name in news, big enough that Sam Stein of The Huffington Post was called on to ask a question at President Obama's first press conference.


Another personal blogger-of-note is Ana Marie Cox, founding editor of Wonkette. When most people think of snark and satire they think of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert but in the blogosphere political snark and satire are very much the territory of Ana Marie Cox. During her time as Editor, Wonkette was THE blog for DC news and gossip. When Cox left many people continued to follow her and still follow her after she has moved from Wonkette to Swampland to Radar and is currently at Air America.

My point about Arianna and HuffPost as it's informally known is that a blog founded by a woman is one of the most powerful blogs in the world. If there is ever doubt cast on Arianna or her abilities it is almost always based on political ideology rather than any sort of chops. Similarly, Wonkette's having been headed up by a woman had little effect on its credibility.

It's not just the prominent figures either. Having worked behind the scenes on the computer end of the Obama campaign I can vouch that many of the "new media" people I encountered were women.

So much has changed about the internet and the blogosphere since 2005 that it's kind of hard to compare the web as it exists now to the web as it existed before. In 2005 cyber-activism was in its infancy. In 2008 cyber-activism helped win the presidency. Now it's 2009 and we have proven that effective organizing and support systems can be created over the web. My biggest question is what will we do with them?

Fun Fact: The person who broke the "bittergate" story was a citizen blogger (someone who is not a memeber of the traditional press corps) and woman named Mayhill Fowler. She was blogging on HuffPost and her story rocked the traditional media elite to the core, not because of what it said about Obama but because it was broken by a woman in the crowd with a tape recorder, not a press badge.

Is it wrong that I think "rationale" is a boring word?

I don't for a moment blame people who use it; I understand that there aren't really any other options as far as nouns encompassing an explanation of controlling principles of opinion, belief, practice, or phenomena but I always feel slightly cheated when I see it, like someone needed a word for this and just said "I know! I'll just take 'rational' and put an 'e' on it! Brilliant! No one will ever know." We have a big language can't someone come up with a better word?

I will put my qualms with the word "rationale" aside to now explain, well, the rationale of my blog.

I suppose I can't claim that this blog will be strictly topical as I know myself and my inability to focus on anything that is not directly in front of me or shiny. I will say that my blog won't be limited to women's rights because I find it to be cissexist to argue for the equal rights of one particular gender without including those people who are alternative, trans, or non gendered. Equality should apply across the board.

As a "woman" who feels more gender queer than femme my blog will most likely focus on what it's like to be in a female body unsure of what it means to be a woman or a man and where I fall in respect to the dominant gender dichotomy. There is also the question of how the feminist movement feels about transgender individuals at the movement.

There are big questions I want to ask like:
Do women's rights include individuals who are MTF?
What about FTM?
What about individuals identifying as Gender Queer?
Is it feminist for a woman to actively seek to be submissve to a male a-la "Secretary"?

As a woman with multiple health problems I would also like to look at the way women's health is handled including the way treatment of PCOS is handled in relation to gender and feminism, the way mental health issues are handled, Doctor/Patient relationship dynamics, and other aspects of healthcare in relation to gender and feminism.

I also desperately want to look at women in politics (or lack thereof) and how some of them, like Senator Claire McCaskill of Missourri are using technology to reach their constituencies more readily.

Fun fact: Out of the 99 people serving in the US Senate (Minnesota is still being indecisive) only 17 are women. Think about that for a second 17 of 99 and the 100th will be male.

Fun fact part II: In the more than 200 years The United States of America, and subsequently the Senate has existed we have had a total of 38 women serve as Senators. One of them served for only 24hours.

Those two facts are stunning in the jaw-dropping-WTF?! sense.

Anything you think I might want to consider adding?
I *heart* feedback. (If I try to use the less-than-three version of "heart" the XML/HTML get's really wonky.)

Infinity and beyond

The way the web is built completely blows me away every time I try to really wrap my head around it. It's like trying to think about the size of the universe and then something beyond that.

I'm going to throw down a HUGE g33k reference now and invoke the japanime films and cartoon series "Ghost in the Shell" based on the manga of the same name. One of my favorite aspects of the GitS (Ghost in the Shell) universe is their conceptualization of the future of the web. It's all very sci-fi and bizarre but the gist is everyone has the capability to link directly to a massive net via a neural implant referred to as a cyberbrain. There is a visualization of the net that is shown in multiple episodes and consists of many linked minds sharing ideas and information. As a complete G33K I find these images strangely moving and beautiful. My real point in bringing up something as bizarre and obscure as GitS is that we have no tangible proof that the web exists, that it connects people across continents. It just does.

Think about that for a second. There is something that is a near living entity as it depends entirely on living beings to create and update and change it. It connects millions of people around the world and it just works. It is never the same from instant to instant. It is music and visual art and movies and arguments and manifestos of every variation and breaking news. That little icon on your desktop gives you access to almost the entire world. This may not seem like much but when you're someone in need of a community to belong to and be accepted into then it is everything.

I am Bipolar II. It's the less severe sibling of what people normally think of when they hear the word "Bipolar." Interestingly I had more issues coming to terms with being Bipolar than I did coming to terms with being a lesbian. I spent a years struggling with mental health and then my diagnosis. It wasn't until I discovered a web community known as "The Icarus Project" dedicated to providing people with Bipolar Disorder resources about treatment options, outlets for creativity, support in difficult times, and information in general. It was through this community that I came to understand that having Bipolar Disorder doesn't mean you become a disheveled homeless person screaming at a trash can outside of McDonald's the minute you have a manic or depressed episode. It gave me the confidence enough to own my illness and start doing something about it. And the community is still there anytime I need them.

It's not just me. It's women who've had abortions or transgender kids or activists or women who are pregnant or transgender individuals who are pregnant or people living in Gaza.

One of the reasons I enjoy the term "the net" is because if you fall a net will catch you and many times the internet provides the information and resources to help you save yourself. Not always, but often.

In using the web and blogs in particular people aren't limited to sharing a message or an idea with just the people in their community or people they call or the people they can get to read a pamplet or news article in a paper. People have the means to organize movements across countries and around the world using just an idea and some web savvy.

How crazy is that?