Over the years various people have said in different ways that I’m too girly to be a geek and too geeky to be a girl. However, I am both a geek and a girl – a geekgirl. And I’m merely one of the many geekgirls around the world.
Every single geekgirl is precious. In my opinion every single geekgirl should be made to feel welcome and included into our community.
We should be saying to each and every one:
“Welcome geekgirl, you’re here at last; we’ve been waiting for you”.
Instead in Australia, if you call yourself a geekgirl, you might experience a public rebuke (as I did not so long back) like this:
All this is because a woman who was a pioneer who inspired many of us in the early days of the web says that she is the only geekgirl.
In fact Rosie registered a trademark for the word geekgirl in 1995. Since then, instead of welcoming all the new geekgirls who followed, she has defended ‘her’ word vigorously.
At first I was surprised and then angry at having someone telling me I couldn’t use the term geekgirl in casual conversation. So being a fan of civil action, I looked up Rosie’s trademark, found it to be limited to “Publication of electronic books, magazines and/or multimedia both online on a communications network and on recorded media including optical disks and magnetic media”, and I thought I could register a trademark outside that scope and then make the term freely available for everyone to use. I’ve now realised that this approach didn’t really communicate my intent.
I have never met Rosie nor communicated directly with her. I bear her no ill will or animosity. I do not presume to intuit her motivations in any of her actions.
It has been reported to me that Rosie is selling t-shirts with the word geekgirl on them – good on her! The more women in the world wandering around with that word emblazoned on their t-shirts the better. Perhaps she can launch out into other garments and knick-knacks too?
But I do call upon Rosie to set the geekgirls free to use these two plain English words that describe them – geeks who are girls.
There is a good model already existing in the open source community for trademarks to co-exist with community usage. A great example is Fedora – where they allow community usage of the word Fedora as outlined here:
“Noncommercial and community web sites
In the past, community members have inquired whether it is permissible to show support for Fedora by:
• placing the Fedora Trademarks on a personal web site or blog to support Fedora
• making a page on a social networking web service to support Fedora
• linking to Fedora from a wiki to provide information or show support for Fedora
The guidelines relating to such usage are set forth in this section.
It is permissible to use the Fedora Trademarks on websites to show your support for the Fedora Project, provided that:
• where possible, the design logo hyperlinks to the Fedora Project website, http://fedoraproject.org/, or if that is not possible, the site includes a prominent link to the Fedora Project website at http://fedoraproject.org/.
• the site indicates clearly that it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Fedora Project; in addition, where possible:
• the site must include the text “This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Fedora Project” prominently on any page that includes the Fedora Trademarks, and
• if the Fedora Trademarks appear in a page header or any area that is designed to be presented on more than one page, the notice must also be designed to be presented on all of those pages as well. (i.e., if the Fedora Trademarks appear in a site-wide header, the informational text must appear in that header or an identically site-wide footer.)
• the site does not use visual styling that could be confusing to viewers or visitors as to whether the site is hosted by or on behalf of the Fedora Project”
[Source: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines#Noncommercial_and_community_eb_sites at 28 May 2010]
Come on Rosie, isn’t it time for you to set your geekgirl sisters free?
Darryl Adams, government worker and internet tragic, argues that social media is just another tube – and ‘social media experts’ merging it with advertising are getting it wrong.
Senator Ted Stevens (R Alaska) was lampooned for his infamous “The Internet is a series of tubes” speech.
He may have been onto something.
One thing that many people on twitter do is promote social media, and their “skill” in navigating it professionally. They heap praise on companies and high profile people who “get it” (that is, use it in a way they feel is appropriate) and lampoon people and companies who “don’t get it”.
For me, social media is just another channel available on the internet, another tube you will.
Look at Twitter as an example. You send 140 characters at a time to every user. Other members of the twitter community can chose to focus on your “tweets” by “following” your profile or by filtering via search teams or “hash tags”.
Is it hard system to learn? Not really; it is Simple Message Service (SMS) on steroids. You’re sending an SMS out to the wild. The effort is for other people finding your messages and focusing on it (again by following or searching).
So Twitter is a data pipe. To make it useful, the users tune it by adding and removing users based on the content or belief systems. Users are filtering the content to suit individual taste.
Facebook is the same. You select people you want to follow and groups you wish to get information on. The people you follow have an option to allow or disallow access to their data, and you have the same control (leaving aside the distressing tendencies of Facebook violating privacy for profit).
Now if you’re supplying content, the skills needed to get your content consumed is the same as most over media. The good news that there is demand for any type of content, from serious political and social debate to fart jokes. The bad news is that you need to make your content appealing in Social Media so that people can actually find it. There is a whole industry that specialises in doing just that: the Advertising Industry.
And for me, that is the issue. Social Media experts are not promoting the technology, or teaching people the skills to develop their self filtering skills. They are trying to merge advertising with social media. By selling social media as another advertising outlet they seek to tap into the large amount of cash the industry commands. By charging for advice on how to promote your content, they seek to expand the people viewing it. This to me is the wrong way. User count is a broken metric, as I would prefer 6 engaged followers than 6000 passive followers. Using number of followers looks impressive, but follower count is meaningless if the content in not what they are after. Too many followers and your content get swamped again, this time with a high noise to signal ratio, buried under a plethora of messages. If I want to produce content, the users who gain value from my content are the people I want following me.
Social Media is just another delivery system of content. It is a progression from email, IRC and websites that create networks of people, with an added bonus of having an outlet that is totally unfiltered. And companies like Google and Microsoft realise what the unfiltered content of social media is worth. These are the companies who will use the data in search, in advertising delivery, in focusing and fine tuning on user needs and desires.
There is no good or bad way to use Social Media. Social Media is a pipe. The value for users is to filter to suite their tastes, and the value for companies is to aggregate and analyse.
But the internet is not a truck. Wise words, Senator Stevens.
Darryl Adams is a government worker and internet tragic. A former IT worker, he still pines for the days of IBM keyboards that go CRUNCH and the glow of green screens.
He can be found on on Twitter, blogging here or on Facebook.
N.B. The views expressed here do not reflect the views of his employer, the ATO.
In this guest post, Tim Burrowes, editor of Mumbrella, responds to Laurel Papworth’s recent post on cyberbullying.*
The story of my experience begins last Saturday morning at 8.30am when my mobile started ringing. It was the first of several calls, emails and DMs from friends to warn me there was something on Laurel Papworth’s blog that I needed to see.
What I read with increasing alarm and (I confess) hurt was a 5000+ word diatribe. I admit I started to shake a little as I read it, which I did my best to hide from my girlfriend. It’s certainly the most personal attack about myself I’ve experienced.
(By the way, do not see any of this as a complaint about the treatment I received – journalists give it out and it’s never very edifying for them to complain when they take it. This is simply about putting the record straight.)
But the words chosen were calculated to inflict maximum damage to my reputation. I was, she alleged, a cyberbully because over the previous year on Mumbrella I had regularly criticised her dance-on-the-grave views on “heritage media” and mocked some of her more extreme moments.
She listed every single post written on Mumbrella that had even peripherally mentioned her, as evidence that not only were we cyberbullying her, but that I was a cyberstalker too. She claimed that she had never attacked me,
The attack came in waves. She tweeted and retweeted her post to her 20,000+ Twitter followers. She @messaged bloggers with bigger followings than her own, presumably in the hope that they would reply and take it to a wider audience. Others told me that she had privately messaged them and asked them to retweet it. She’d emailed the link to a selection of industry people. She urged advertisers to not support our site.
The post concluded with a message urging anyone reading it to retweet it.
As a keyword stuffed piece of SEO, it was exquisitely written. It was clearly designed as a Googlebomb designed to connect the words Mumbrella and bully. Looking at Google she’s had some success with that.
All while I was still in bed. It was certainly a well planned and executed campaign designed to ruin my name. It is of course a deeply unpleasant thing to be labelled a bully. And much like being accused of being a racist, it’s very hard to respond to in a convincing way.
For the record though, let me try. When your adversary has just as much influence and audience as you it’s a debate. It can be vigorous, it can be grumpy, it can be downright bloody rude. But it’s not bullying to honestly disagree with someone’s publicly expressed ideas – even to poke fun at those ideas if they’re the ones who put them out there for debate.
More on that later, but for now, let’s go back to the beginning of the feud.
The first thing I need to be clear about it is that I started it. I was the first to openly criticise her.
I found her blog entertaining but used to find the regular attacks on technology journalists grating. Journalists she disagreed with were labelled as “linkbaiters”. It was a tactic she would later apply to me.
“ Mumbles always misses the main story & goes for the “if it bleeds it leads”. Antagonize a human being, get a quote, lead with it.”
“*curious* do you really think Mumbles has the depth to write a post like that? I mean, not a press release with gossip?”
And so on throughout the year.
Which was okay – she was entitled to her view and to comment on my professionalism.
There were a couple of odd incidents too. At one point I was in the audience at an event. Without my knowledge, she took a photograph of me and posted it online with the message: “it’s Tim “Mumbles” Burrowes of Mumbrella. Heh.”
Stalking behaviour? Of course not. I found it a bit odd, but it didn’t make me think I was being stalked.
I, meanwhile, was regularly writing, both seriously and playfully, about some of her (in my view) more foolish pronouncements. Obviously I was seriously antagonising her.
Where she really started to put the boot in was in a comment on a news.com.au blog posting in which she effectively suggested I had some sort of corrupt PR relationship I was hiding from my readers.
She suggested I’d “sold” the conference idea to my “agency mates” and the venue.
I’d moderated an event about Twitter as a favour to the agency involved – there’d been no fee. For a journalist though, that’s a pretty direct attack on their integrity.
“Mumbles is establishing a “snark” blog – a negative groundswell or anti-PR site. By that I mean, he copy and pastes press releases and tacks on a negative comment or puts a negative spin. If he’s really pissy, he takes a tweet to 30 people, out of context and spins it into ‘anti -news’. This can be amusing, outraging, provoking, engaging, and I’m not suggesting that there is no place for such a blog, but that we need to recognise it for what it is – no surprises, there is a long history of linkbaiting in media.”
By that time it had become a team effort. Papworth’s partner Gary Hayes, an occasional poster, began to comment more regularly suggesting Mumbrella was an invader or that I did not understand social media.
Papworth uploaded to YouTube a video of her giving, in my view, a particularly misleading presentation at Media140 in which she appeared to be arguing that unlike bloggers, editors positively encourage errors. I took the piss.
In language that was to become familiar, Hayes posted: “I am seriously beginning to pity Tim that, like a school ground bully, he has to pick on Laurel this way. I suspect it’s because she has come to represent the social media ‘camp’ and is an easy target for him. His fascination also borders on stalking.”
Meanwhile, the fights Papworth was beginning to pick with others on Twitter began, it seemed to me, to take place more regularly. In short succession, there were rows with @stilgherrian, @shepherd, @scottrhodie and @warlach.
When I wrote about one of those incidents, Papworth claimed on Twitter, it was because of misogyny:
“Why does @Mumbrella always post negative inane things about me? *puzzled* Is that cyberbullying? He does it to women in general, no?”
(To answer that point – I suspect I’ve annoyed many, many people – but of both sexes in roughly equal proportion.)
Others were also beginning to notice the fights with those who questioned her.
One of the commenters agreed, suggesting that Papworth’s own behaviour “verges on bullying”
When Papworth responded, she turned back to Mumbrella, claiming: “Mumbrella has been blocked for about 6 months for consistently bullying me online and Mumbles now blocks my comments on his blog AS IS HIS RIGHT.”
Which isn’t true, by the way. I’ve never blocked her comments.
There have, of course, been other exchanges.
The reason I’ve gone into the level of detail I have is to make the point that this has been a two-way street
Through her Twitter following and blog readership, Laurel Papworth has the power to give as good as she gets. Indeed, she’s escalated all of this from a robust (very robust) debate on the rights and wrongs of social media into something much more deeply (and painfully) personal.
The comment stream in her posting about me went mostly in my favour. Some posters pointed out that we were both at fault (which is a fair enough view). But few who looked properly at her claims would accept that it was bullying. A few suggested that her own behaviour amounted to bullying, to which she replied:
“Call me a bitch – but not a bully.”
More than one pointed out that by attaching herself to the issue she was doing a disservice to those who are genuinely bullied.
I’ve so far held back from writing anything myself. Most of the advice I’ve been given has been one of two things – to either say nothing, or to sue for libel. Personally I’m not much of a fan of journalists taking that latter course unless they’ve no other choice.
But on Friday came the final straw.
She posted: “I (sic) just been asked to speak at a Government conf on cyber bullying and cyber rascism (sic) to address these issues. It’s in a couple of weeks. Will keep you posted.”
Funnily enough, it’s a threat she once used on another journalist who’d annoyed her: “Oh and someone tell him I am presenting at PANPA on Wednesday – you know, the conference for media proprietors and CEOs of newspapers, opened by Kevin Rudd? Sheesh. Noice case study for my preso ”
That promise to speak at the conference is to me a signal that she’s not taken on board any of the many comments pointing out that that’s not what she has experienced. And she’s not going to let it go. Which is why I’m responding.
To avoid any suggestion that I’m rigging the debate by putting it in front of my larger audience, I’ve sought a neutral space and offered this as a guest posting to the Digital Citizens blog.
So let me spell it out.
Laurel Papworth has built herself up as a social media expert, and as a Twitter persona called SilkCharm. When you constantly publish your thoughts, you put them up for debate and criticism.
Mumbrella writes more about this subject area than any other outlet, so of course, Laurel Papworth crosses our radar regularly.
She’s highly polarising.
Laurel Papworth and her partner Gary Hayes can and do criticise Mumbrella. They’re entitled to do that.
And when I criticise her ideas, even when I’m scathing in the way I do it, it’s not cyberbullying and it’s certainly not cyberstalking. And the same is true when they attack me.
This feels like an attempt to swat an annoying critic through a character assassination.
It was a tough week. At Tuesday’s Digital Citizens event, everyone I chatted to was sympathetic, but they all wanted to talk about it and I didn’t really enjoy being defined by her words. As I say, it’s a deeply unpleasant thing to say about someone. I hope my family never sees it.
So here’s what I suggest. Let’s all stop calling each other names and stick to debating the issues. Let’s do it thoughtfully, angrily, amusingly, cleverly or even rudely. Let’s be vigorous, or even scathing when we talk about these ideas. But let’s not get personal.
Tim Burrowes
*N.B. A member of the Digital Citizens organising committee, Scott Rhodie, is mentioned in the article. Scott had no part in the creation and submission of this article.
Digital Citizens strives to remain impartial, but we believe serious issues merit frank and open discussion.
Providing a neutral space to connect, learn and share is part of our remit.
With that in mind, we announce “Points of View”, a series of guest posts addressing topical, interesting and occasionally confrontational subject matter relating to the internet, new technologies and social media.
We welcome feedback, respectful debate and submissions for posts and articles on any relevant subject.
There were a couple of odd incidents too. At one point I was in the audience at an event. Without my knowledge, she took a photograph of me and posted it online with the message: “it’s Tim “Mumbles” Burrowes of Mumbrella. Heh.”
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