Social networks in the media and the erasure of women

I’ve seen mentions of Diaspora* popping up all over my feeds this week.  It seems like a great project, but I have a few issues with the media attention it’s getting.  The New York Times piece I quote below is only one example out of many.

Working with Mr. Salzberg and Mr. Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20 — “four talented young nerds,” Mr. Salzberg says — all of whom met at New York University’s Courant Institute. They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. “In our real lives, we talk to each other,” he said. “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”

A teacher and digital media researcher at N.Y.U., Finn Brunton, said that their project — which does not involve giant rounds of venture capital financing before anyone writes a line of code — reflected “a return of the classic geek means of production: pizza and ramen and guys sleeping under the desks because it is something that it is really exciting and challenging.”

I’m really excited to see Diaspora* in action, especially in light of this missive on why gender is a text field on the service.

That being said, I think we should be clear about some things.  These 4 boys are not the only ones creating open source, non-hierarchical social networks.  Dreamwidth has been offering an alternative to Livejournal for quite a while now.  The Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit dedicated to the preservation of fan culture, is doing the same thing around a very different type of interaction with the Archive of Our Own (and other projects still in the works).  Both of these are run and coded primarily by women, many of whom are invested in teaching other women how to code.

An open source alternative to Facebook is likely destined to get more media attention in our present moment, with The Social Network still on the radar.  But that doesn’t mean that what women do is less deserving of press time.

Let’s not lose sight of these immense achievements made by women in light of 4 cute computer boys from New York.

Parisian Tarzan exhibition may not be great, but at least it gets us thinking

Reposted from my now-defunct comics blog.

 

The show has been wildly popular.

Its organizers cogitate, with Gallic élan, on Tarzan’s proto-environmentalism; his philosophical roots in Rousseau and the 19th-century nudist movement; his literary antecedents in Kipling and H. M. Stanley; and his mythological reliance on the stories of Hercules and Romulus and Remus. The exhibition also makes hay about the first words Tarzan uttered not in ape grunts but the language of civilized men:

“Mais oui,” the young Lord Greystoke said.

And of course there is also the sex angle. “One can expound as much as one likes in scientific speeches about his mythical and universal nature, but one always gets back to the fact that Tarzan is a half-naked guy saving white-skinned young women, lost in the jungle and wearing their party dresses, from the claws of vicious gorillas,” noted Libération, the newspaper, in its review of the exhibition. “It’s all about torrid eroticism.”
— “Tarzan Show Sets Parisians Aflutter“

I got excited when I saw this NY Times story about an exhibition of old Tarzan comics and film clips at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, and then sad when I realized how few comic strips the article reproduced. The slideshow does feature some great old film posters and wacky stills.

Apparently, the show itself isn’t too great, at least in terms of presentation:

The show is a mess, truth be told. It has wonderful drawings from bygone comic artists like Burne Hogarth and Hal Foster, and it means to use Tarzan to help dissect how Western pop culture has (mis)interpreted the non-Western “other.” But it’s displayed in cramped galleries at a museum whose theatrical, heart of darkness installation of non-European cultures as diverse and unrelated as Inuit and Cameroonians — in meandering ill-lighted spaces connoting primitive, spooky peoples — is of a piece with the antediluvian ethos of the original Tarzan.

The article itself, however, at least uses this as an entry point into talking about racism in both the comic strip itself and the historical context out of which it was born:

The highborn “killer of beasts and many black men,” as Tarzan unfortunately described himself in “Tarzan of the Apes,” was conceived just before World War I by Burroughs, a former gold miner and cowboy, in a climate of American expansionism, late colonialism and institutionalized racism.

Before he died in 1950 Burroughs published about two dozen Tarzan potboilers, his fictional character becoming an increasingly fantastical figure, speaking a dozen languages while battling the teensy Minunians and dinosaurs. An easygoing guy with a fondness for golf who settled in what came to be called, thanks to him, Tarzana, Calif., Burroughs never bothered to set foot in Africa, which is why Tarzan also faced off against Asian tigers and killed lions by wrestling them into a full nelson.

Wikipedia has a little more on the topic here (though it may make you headdesk — I’m not responsible for any injuries).