I have a thing about old letters, images, tawny browns, and filtered light. They remind me of times gone by and the first stirrings of a history written for women, about women, by women. Women’s domains no matter how they are parsed were, and largely still are, focused on the home, and relationships among family and a close community. Legacy of any individual woman depended upon artifacts, often fabric ones, and works created in a woman’s lifetime, letters and diaries, that were displayed or archived by those that remembered her or those who were shaped by her.
Embroidery samplers created by young ladies to showcase their skill with a needle and thread, as well as appreciation of home and their piety, are often the only medium for their words to echo on after a life is over.
Only two hundred years ago in the United States education and literacy had yet to become routine for the average women, and writing supplies had only just come to be priced such that common people could afford paper, ink and the time needed for writing.
It is easy to forget that mass communication is a most recent development. For centuries histories were carefully composed and facts sculpted to fit an agreed upon narrative. The information that fed and fueled our society and informed our actions and decisions was closely controlled by very small numbers of individuals until but a historical heartbeat ago.
Newspapers and other periodicals increased the amount of information regularly added to our knowledge base at an unheard of rate in the last 150 to 200 years. Propriety shaped much of the content of these publications and filters were everywhere.
In the last 15 to 20 years real personal publishing developed in both print and electronic forms. Digital information transmission and storage allowed for the generation and consumption of data at a scale unimagined even a decade ago. The size of the dark web of criminal and underworld activity and deep web of information behind firewalls is unknown, but what is available on the open, indexed web is, by itself is creating not only more information than ever before, but of a type never previously collected: the bits and pieces of women’s lives that are creating the first level of a women’s history. The legacy we are writing is not only unique, it is expanding into a new territory. Both the map and the territory are co-evolving.
As some of the women who are creating this new cultural information, online writers, we have tremendous influence over the very nature of this new thing we are building and the trajectories that will be built upon it beyond our lifetimes. This new type and level of influence over communication is fortuitous as several constants of the physical world and humanity’s place on that world for the last many centuries are morphing in unpredictable fashion. We need to be able to anticipate and react in novel ways as the processes of life on Earth transform in the time of an eye blink.
We may not be able to anticipate what the future will be, but we have opportunity to influence the changes that are transpiring before us, and to do so with an openness and a balance that has not been available to us for millennia, if ever.
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Day 8, The Letter H, April A to Z Blogging Challenge
Googling Gaia
Women and Communication
Women have been the indexers and organizers of human life for, literally, ages. Google is attempting to mimic the natural process of organizing and accessing information about what we do, what we want, based on a more natural model that takes social relationships and context into account. Real attempts at tapping the structure of the semantic web are probably integral steps in the creation of it. It is all very heady stuff and we are not yet up to the task knowing what we are doing.
But… women have already changed the web just by creating content with mommy blogs, social networks, e-commerce, and Pinterest, Instagram and on and on. We first teachers of human language are uniquely positioned to consciously take advantage of creating content for the web and providing gateways to it because we have already been doing something like that since before the dawn of civilization.
Of course savvy men can do the very same thing, and if they do take process building into account as well as product manufacture, they could also be successful.
Get your nuance on women! Escalate your quality content creation, create what you know, and do it well, it is the content Google wants. We are the change we have been waiting for. I think women are uniquely well positioned to take advantage of core data within the ever evolving web – what web gurus call the semantic web, the ever more nuanced and context sensitive search algorithms.
Women understand context and know how to balance competing priorities. Women understand that comments are actually conversations. Women also know when someone is trying to hose them. Women create the daily stories that accumulate into culture change. The semantic web is attempting to recreate the way we humans understand things. Women are experts at this.
For at least the last several tens of thousands of years women have raised up new generations of humanity to prioritize sustenance, dangers, and recreation. A critical mass of women are now using the web to organize and orchestrate their daily lives. Women have been creating blogs, networks, and bazaars and markets via the web for the last decade in a way that used to be done via the telephone or in person at a community gathering point such as a church, or market. Daily life has come to the internet. Who better to create and utilize daily life through the web than the women who have always tended to daily life, through the nuanced interplay of education, shopping, cooking, cleaning, budgeting, care-giving, record keeping, clothing, shelter, family and community communication.
Basic Google History
Google rose to prominence and finally dominated the market a couple of years into the new millennium. Checking your page rank on Google became as common place for individuals with web pages as checking the number of hits your website received. Almost immediately search engine “professionals” emerged from the primordial info slime and the 21st Century’s first group of snake oil sales persons integrated themselves in amongst the few real SEO professionals. Lots of people who pass themselves off as experts are con artists, but most SEO sellers are just well-intentioned people who do not know as much as they think they know. Real SEO requires staying on top of what are essentially trade secrets – the proprietary algorithms that are used to fuel web search.
What are called link farms and content farms were some of the major problems for the search engine companies. Link farming attempted to create higher rank or search page result listings by trading or selling links that would increase a site’s supposed credibility or authority as at one time incoming links were treated as valid reflections of the authority and influence of the site. Linking just to increase links inflated the number of links while decreasing the worth of a link.
Search engines, such as Google, began to do battle with link farms mid-decade into the ’00s. Link farming slowly withered as search engines began to cut the weight links had in search, and content was declared king. Then sites had to have content or articles or blog posts to rank highly in search results. Content rather than links then began to be farmed, or more accurately ranched, as major content farms used two main strategies to produce content for sites that would fake out the search engines.
One type of farm hired individuals to write lots of stuff for very little money, so the quality was not that great, but the quantity of the content was enough to feed lots of sites, many actually used regurgitated content. The content farms then sold to sites so that the sites would have lots of fiber for the search engines to digest.
Another type of farm hired people to write posts and articles that seeded keywords at just the right frequency in pieces that did not even have to make much sense. This was done because keywords are used in meta tags and should be reflected in the content that the meta-tags describe. This was the juncture at which content became confused with key words.
Now we entered a new focus phase for search engines. I like to think that while content could still be king, the power behind the thrown has been recognized, and she is queen in all of her contextual glory. It is good to be the queen, in the Mary Englebreit sense of the word., because all those cherries and patterns, color, attitude and relationships are what matter in the process of getting the searcher connected to the information he or she wants. Social authority is the new buzzword for search. To rank well in the brave new world of search you need have quality content and that translates, according to the word on the street, to often updated, non-keyword seeded content that is accessed by important people.
The “important people” aspect of the new search is reflects the increasing awareness of the heavy hitting nature of social media. The recommendations of people you trust, as measured by your info stream and whether you actually interact with them is the “new” and secret ingredient of Google search.
High Level Similarities
Some folks, such as the women who started the BlogHer network, Lisa, Elise, and Jory, were paying attention long before Google began to pay attention and these savvy women had launched conferences and networks based on a feminized understanding of information in the digital age. Sites that foreshadowed the coming changes, which some people are only now “getting,” and all the concomitant changes to search that have resulted reflect what I like to think of as the feminization of the internet.
Rephrasing this, Google, as a search engine company, tries to outmaneuver scam artists whose sole purpose in life is to get you to look at stuff in which you have absolutely no interest. Deceptive ads, promises of free prizes, and manipulation of search engine results are three of the most common ways such “marketers” do this. This practice gives real marketers who work to deliver a good product a bad name, but be that as it may, everyone does want your attention on the web. So while some of us may be expressing concern as we mull privacy problems, at the very same time, some things Google is doing are very much in our interest as women, household managers, content creators, and savvy private and public consumers of information. Google appears to be using relationships and networks (of both creators and consumers) in the algorithms that determine what the authority is of individual chunks of information on the web. And women are the mavens of communication and relationship networks.
Women understand context and know how to balance competing priorities. Women understand that comments are actually conversations. Women also know when someone is trying to hose them. Women create the daily stories that build most our culture. The semantic web is attempting to recreate the way we humans understand things. Women are experts at this.
Deciding to work together to build a globally linked, and interactive, organic network to store and access a cumulative wisdom of generations so that new challenges can be met by new generations is just the sort of new intelligence that a Gaia -concept system would have her children build.
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Day 7, Letter G, April A to Z Blogging Challenge
Family and Friendship in Legacy
When I announced to people that The Women’s Legacy Project was launching in the near future I wrote:
I think I have found the connecting thread within and between my interests, writings, academic & educational areas of dalliance: women, information and legacy. At first glance my interests may appear to be all over the place, but that is not quite the case.
Culture and demography delight me. I grew up memorizing genealogies and visiting cemeteries as though they were historical parks. The rather strange relationship I had with my mother fostered my early and ongoing interest in both the enabling and limiting constraints of women’s information systems, including the lack of historical depth in maternally linked information. The feminine divine inspires me and the continuously added nuances to the exclusion of women as players in the “major” religions of today disturbs me no matter what the type of fundamentalist group doing it.
Whether it be the stuff of a trunk in the attic or truck bombs in the neighborhood, women are concerned about the legacy we leave to our children. I have been an independent scholar for many years. While it surprised me to find legacy as the connecting theme in my writing, it should not have. My father loved history and valued what community over time could fashion. I am a cultural anthropologist by training and well-versed in the semiotic concerns of American Pragmatism.
Some of the recurrent topics in my writing over the years:
- American Women’s History
- Women’s Culture
- Women’s Information
- Feminization of the Internet
- Life’s Work
- Blogging as Women’s History
- Women’s Legacies
- Mother Earth and the State of the Planet
- Genealogy and Personal History
- The Creation of Meaning
- Tools and Toys
- Demography and Cohort Personality
- Peace and Social Justice Movements
So I am fashioning a site and a project called the Women’s Legacy Project.
Can a project last for decades? That is my intention for this one. It is not about my legacy, I have my memoir for that. This project is beyond blogdom. It derives from and extends beyond:
- the meetup group I have coordinated for three years
- the network of women writers and travelers of a certain age I have met and grown to trust as friends over the last seven years or so
- the wisdom I gained as I cared for my mother as she passed away in her home at age 92 and then watched as my brother, who began showing signs of dementia around the time of her death, and from which he died within a few short years, mishandled everything for her
- my knowledge and awareness of cultural processes that I see unfolding, developing, and filling new niches around me at an ever-escalating pace
- my desire to share information with those who might find it useful
Family and friends are the stuff of my own legacy. Mothers, fathers, brothers shaped me and all that I might leave behind one day. But friends, from childhood, mentors that became friends, and the wonderful and inspiring women I have met via writing connections in the last decade have influenced me just as greatly albeit in very different ways than family.
We take bits of the stories and lives of all those people we meet and incorporate them into our selves. When we give of ourselves to others, we give them a bit of all the souls who have touched us up until that time. When I view legacy this way it conjures up an image of a web of interconnection, of life energy and information that stretches out between the past and future the world touching a person and interweaving all the lives that have influenced another life in some small way.
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Day 6, The Letter F, April A to Z Blogging Challenge
Dreams of Strength and Wisdom
For the fourth day of the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge I am giving you a bit about my dreams and views on history and legacy.
Sometimes things seem to align. There is a wisdom brewing. It is an interconnected women’s wisdom.
Many of us writing on the web write from monikers real or imagined, or somewhere in between, somewhre out in cyberspace, that are suggestive of a midpoint, midlife, although I think we all know that the midpoint of our lives is apt to be behind us unless we live to be over 100.
I cannot speak for the other women, but I know that for me I have been thinking about the ending of individual lives and how we personally feed into the human legacy. I realize that I might be a bit young to be thinking about what we leave behind, but I guess I tend to be an outlier in most things. As an anthropologist I am intrigued by what we as individuals add to the nebulous collective of knowledge and structures and rules that we call culture. Recently facing the reality of probably losing another brother in the near future brought the theoretical into the world of personal, practical, nitty-gritty reality.
I am 57. I am an elder of the Late Boomer Cohort within the so-called Baby Boom Generation. Sid Vicious and I were born within a week of each other and I have taken on the comparison as a mantle so as to show that Punks obviously delineated something significant breaking away from our older Hippie brothers and sisters. I try to use female examples wherever possible, but I have not found an easily recognized icon of my own gender that fits the bill as well as Sid does. Patti Smith rose up in the rock world at the same time as Sid, but she is one of the oldest of the Boomer Gen. I guess that shows that women of the Boom couldn’t sneak through the cracks into the new cultural paradigm until a critical mass of change burst through the barriers and opened a new ecosystem, or at least a new niche, defined by a new level of open communication and personal determination.
Women began to really come into their own when reliable birth control allowed larger and larger numbers of women to direct the course of their lives more than at any point in human history. The later born boomers are the women who were just becoming sexually active as Roe v. Wade was decided. The 1970s were where the trends of the 1960s became real in the lives of the culture as a whole. The last half of the Boomer Generation are the first women to have had self-determination for all of their adult lives. We are also the first group of women to have a level of comfort with the interconnectivity that the online world brings with it.
This is a shift of seismic proportions that is still playing out as human culture works this development into the mix. Women who are of an age to become a wise woman, an elder, to sit at the grandmothers’ counsel right now have perspective that was impossible to fathom even a generation ago.
The balance of power is shifting. Let us continue to work toward wisdom, as the women elders we are developing into have more important work in preservation of the world and humanity, as part of that living system, than any generation has faced. We are up to the task. We are finding our way, making our way.
Strength and wisdom guide us.
Crafting Legacy
Hey Crafters, you were way ahead of the curve where legacy is involved, both technologically and visually.
The legacy we build is the legacy we leave. The love that is poured into an activity with a child or for a loved one can sometimes be felt in the object long after it is crafted.
This is why mothers often have a box of treasures on a shelf somewhere that is filled with lumps of toothpick incised clay shapes and pages of construction paper covered with crayon squiggles.
It goes in both directions.
What you craft is a visual and tactile embodiment of caring. Taking the time to make something beautiful is not only a creative outlet in a life that may or may not have other creative outlets, it is symbolic, and when shared, conveys a personal meaning a purchased gift may not be able to convey.
Crafting often celebrates the processes that have always been infused with love for the people who will enjoy the fruits of those labors.
If you make bread, or sweets with daughters, sons, and grandchildren and talk to them about making pasta, or setting the table for Sunday dinner, or gathering eggs with a grandparent or relative when you were small, you crafts little hooks of meaning and experience upon which the child can latch memories of family, and food, and working with relatives, and family friends, for the rest of their lives.
What once might have been absorbed into life matter-of-factly when we were all creatively engaged in living during more agrarian times, can still be experienced though it does take a bit more planning. The memories we make and the information we share in doing so are well worth the effort.
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Post 3, the Letter C, Blogging from A to Z April Challenge
The A to Z of Women's Legacy
In the blogging world, the month of April is for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge.
Not only is participating in the blogging challenge a great way to land a few eyes on new posts, but a great way to find cross-sections and niches of writers. For many women the blog has taken the place of what were called “ladies magazines” from the 19th through early 21st Century, and for other it has taken the place of letter writing, diary keeping, or journaling. These modes of communication did not belong to women alone, but they were ones at which women excelled.
This challenge provides us, in our new venture, a great opportunity to blog about the basics of Women’s Legacy in 26 articles or posts that cover some of the basics concepts behind this new twist on what it is to be a whose family is raised, if she ever had one of her own. We will be presenting many of the things that women do after any children they might have had are adults and are venturing into the land of creating lives separate from the family in which they were raised. We are much more than this, but let us start with the basics.
This post is primarily an advance view of April posts, the topics we are covering this month from A to Z.
April 2015
1 The A to Z of Women’s Legacy
2 Bibliography and Biology
3 Crafting Legacy
4 Dreams of Strength and Wisdom
Sunday the 5th is a day off
6 Evoking the Essentials
7 Family and Friendship
8 Googling Gaia
9 Her History
10 Incidental Information
11 Juggling Jackets and Hijab
Sunday the 12th is a day off
13 Kindred, Kith and Kin
14 Labyrinths, Lace, and Limitations
15 Mothers and Others
16 Names and Naming
17 Oceans and Amniotic Fluid
18 Paper, Scissors, Stone
Sunday the 19th is a day off
20 Quills, Quests, and Quilts
21 Restoration, Revisionism and Reframing
22 Selfish and Selfless Genes
23 The Travails of Triumph Are Not Trivial
24 Über Ubiquity
25 Virtuous Vulvas
Sunday the 26th is a day off
27 Women’s Wisdom
28 Xs and Ys
29 Yin, Chi and Yoni
30 Zealotry, Zaftig and Zami
This list is a simple adumbration of topics.
Legacy, especially women’s legacy, seems to lend itself to A to Z coverage, as once an trace of a woman’s life was apt to be found in the needlework samplers stitched and signed to display textile and needlecraft skills of a young woman, often with alphabets and numerals showcased.
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Post 1, the Letter A, Blogging from A to Z April Challenge