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
Evoking Essential Information
Sometimes you need to talk to others in order to corroborate or elicit information about a topic or person. sometimes you need to sit yourself down and collect and organize your thoughts and the information with which you want to work.
This post deals with how to elicit information from yourself.
I strongly suspect that you do have a body of information with which you want to work, or are working, or you would not be here on this page of this site.
So today for the fifth installation of my attempt at the A to Z April Blogging Challenge I am sharing some of the tools I have found most beneficial when I am trying to determine just what is essential to me or essential to the project on which I am working. The most essential to me is the mind map.
Mind Maps
I love diagramming, mapping, flow and organizational charts, taxonomies, and generally moving things around in little labeled boxes. Why? Because I am a collector. I collect ideas, projects, and components for these ethereal future ideas without even meaning to do so. I am just a clutter magnet. Some would call it scattered, I call it creative and multifaceted. But because of this I use mind maps to help me see all the aspects I have thought of about a concept. For example, the following mind map relates to the Women’s Legacy Project. This is my no means complete.
What I might do next is color code the various nodes so that the digital components were blue, printed components are green, and nodes that are of a different type, such a nodes that are people, could be purple. A different style of type, and the color of the type can further show similar elements across the branches.
There are free and professional versions of mind map software. But you can do this with a pencil and paper as well.
The other go to mapping tool I use is a simple grid that allows me to examine two aspects of an idea or process to see the strength and or completeness of concepts composing the idea.
Matrix / Grid
Action Priority Matrices are what these matrices are now called in the business world. This is often where effort and impact are the two traits compared vertically and horizontally to see what high effort, high impact projects in the plus/plus quadrant make for long term projects, what low effort but high value projects can bring quick rewards.
I was first introduced to the use of this tool to compare the presence and absence of words to describe all aspects of a situation or state.
I find the activity of writing for online consumption to be a bit of a Catch 22. The best way I have found for looking at why bloggers are so often dismissed as not a real writers can be shown by drawing a matrix overlapping dimensions of writing and publishing in the online world. From this mapping you can see that we have not yet created perfect words to describe these states. But if you plug in celebrity for a category that might be better described as person who is online, famous, or a media personality without having great subject authority you can see the categorization is getting at expertise attributed to creators with traditional or large scale publication.
I encourage regular old-fashioned list-making as well. But when the elements of list seem to need further processing or examination to make similarities, differences and nuances of the elements of the list apparent, there are a wealth of tools that can help to expand or focus understanding of the topic we want to organize, present and preserve.
First World Problems
On a recent weekend I spent the morning thinking about women, education, empowerment, information, fundamentalism and the tremendous power we fortunate women who have access to social media and the time to use it are frittering away. I am not lecturing, I am as guilty as anyone.
First of all, I do not expect every woman to want to be political. I understand that politics is man’s game, that is, a game where the rules were created by men. Our current political system is derived from previous systems and those trace back to territorial and resource protective strategies as old as human communities. Rancor is ever-increasing, and it was not great to begin with.
I really do understand wanting to stay out of the fray. To live a functional life I have to manage my stress level quite carefully. Bumping over a stress limit can send me into a fit of tears and fight/flight behavior that is nearly impossible for comfortable folks to fathom. I have learned to recognize these very thing lines between acceptable and melt down levels fairly well and only veer off course a couple of times a year.
Some of this may be my basic constitution that infused my personality with a toughness and resilience long before any trauma and situational stress triggering of post traumatic stress reactions ever came into play. But maybe I learned to be tough after living through nasty situations and breaking through barriers in my path.
But all that said, I expect women who are aware, intelligent, and informed to do everything they possibly can to help others who do not have the luxury of time and money to spend on activities that do not directly support food, shelter and basic hygiene in their lives. Most of the world is hungry, has no access to clean water, water with which to wash, nor access to toilets.
If I can keep knocking away at the problems as I see them and keep crafting solutions as best I can, almost everyone can.
In basic anthropology courses I took when I was an undergraduate, I was exposed to the concepts of environmental degradation, climate change, and that pandemics and starvation are likely to emerge when ecosystems, if not the entire biosphere, begin to fluctuate and exhibit crazy flip-flops looking for a new balance. No guarantees that humans will be around when a new balance emerges. That was a long time ago. We’ve known. Those of us who understood have not been silent, and are not silent now, but most of the women I know, even the really smart ones, avoid thinking about unpleasantries of what life will be like in a decade or two.
We can change things. But we have to act. Now. A major opportunity exists in form of elections next month.
I personally believe if enough of us decide to write about making intelligent choices in this election, in light of current events, that we can have a significant influence on how our women readers think about the issues and get them to the polls. I will be writing pieces about ebola, fundamentalism (as in ISIL,) infrastructure, community, and scientific/critical thinking. I hope these will give others ideas as to how they can frame issues.
Let’s do it.
Friday Finds! Infographics, Tools, and Experience
The following two graphics are my seminal finds for the week. I hate using that word, seminal, but sometimes it is the correct one to use. Unfortunately the word oval has another meaning or I would be promoting that as a better word to describe items or ideas that are seeds for novel conceptualizations.
The first one, the conversation prism, may look like a color wheel at first glance, but it is much more layered and contextually rich with information about relationships between elements of common digital communication tools. Look at it, download it, study it. Most infographics do not actually add value or information to the subjects they depict. This one does. The linked site is well worth bookmarking and then checking out for updates every once in a while.
Malcolm Gladwell irritates some with the cultural condensations from which he spins off his books, but I adore ideas, patterns, and playing with explanations for correlations between the two. Thought is good. Observation is good. Reasonable conjecture is exercise for the mind. So I like Gladwell. His Tipping Point was best, in my opinion, but Outliers points out some generalizations worthy of note as well.
To become an expert takes lots of work. Success is more fickle.
I Am Daddy's Girl
Can you be a Daddy’s Girl by default? No one ever called me a daddy’s girl. I was not best friends with my mom either. Afterthought at best, and more accurately, an accident, that is what I was to my parents who in their 40s had an unplanned and unwanted fifth child. Me. A daughter after four sons and a nine year gap after the last son.
Rather obviously I would say, “No, I wasn’t that close to my mom but I didn’t default to Daddy’s girl.” And that is why I thought for the longest time that I wasn’t close to, or much like, my Dad.
Half my life ago, when I was in my late twenties my dad died. He had an inoperable brain tumor of the type that farmers who used insecticides in the 1950s often developed. He also had lung cancer from chain-smoking cigarettes. He was 71. Born in 1915, he grew up expecting to do great things beyond the little farming community not so far from the lake that still bears our family name. The Great Depression hit before he became an adult. Still he tried for far more than what the family tradition said he would be, a farmer, and maybe a minister. He ended up being a farmer, but not for lack of trying to be something else.
He first saw the big bad world on excursions from the very rural countryside of Indiana to Chicago to deliver bootleg liquor as a kid runner. He was the equivalent of today’s kid on the corner selling crack I suppose. His stories of his youth were riveting for a little kid like me to hear. My favorite was the time he told the city people with guns in the big black car where the old abandoned farmstead they were hunting for was. They stopped and asked him about finding the over-grown lane as he was walking along an old gravel country road. He found out at supper that John Dillinger robbed the Warsaw Bank earlier in the day. Or the stories of how his route for delivery of bootleg liquor included a stop for Billie Sunday whenever he was at Winona Lake. They were great stories and these were the tame ones.
He told me about the original land of the area, swamps that once existed on the spots where there were now housing developments, and how when he was a kid you could go there and hear the ghostly cries of unwanted newborns given to the murky depths, because for a hundred years of our local history, that is where girls who were in pregnant got rid of their unwanted babies. I didn’t doubt him. No one digs around in swamps. A lake might give up its secrets, but not a swamp.
Smart and a bit rebellious, he wanted to attend college and study history, but that was impossible. My grandfather had lost several of the farms he owned and worked and there was no way any money would be put into college. Dad wanted to pitch in the Big Leagues, but threw out his elbow too many times on his way to the Minors. He tried boxing, but he had a glass jaw.
As I age, I find that I know more and more of who he was because I find myself looking out at the world through eyes that see things very much like he did. None of my brothers had any interest in attending college. At least one of them turned down an athletic scholarship. I always just knew I would attend some sort of college. He was and I am analytical, look to cultural for behavioral clues, believe that patriotism is participation, love the complexity of living systems.
- Dad loved ancient history, I became an anthropologist.
- Dad lobbied in DC with his Farmer’s Union colleagues; I went to DC many times to work with CodePink, and other groups for peace, equality, and justice.
- He was a story-teller; I am a writer.
- He was a sad and angry man; I suffer from depression.
- He volunteered as a fireman and was active with the conservation board; I have had many public service volunteer roles.
I realize now, almost 30 years after his death, that I am more like my father than any of my siblings are or were. I so wish I had been able to know him after I came to know who I really am. My daughter was born 5 years after his passing. He never knew that I married a professor. He never knew that I “took in” every word he ever said in my presence even though we never “talked.” His retelling of Leviticus as dietary ecology for the North African desert, his talking about the books of the Bible, his discussions about how there is a need for hedgerows and crop rotation, and his tales of community reaction to the plagues of influenza when he was a kid; these all informed my view of the world more than he could ever know. But maybe he knew a bit of our similarity. He talked because he knew I listened.
My father gave me so much of the information from which I built my world view. I miss him. But have more than memories. I now know he tried to instill the best of himself in me through the sharing of his stories, perspectives, and dreams. I think he succeeded.
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Note: I go into much more detail about the complexities of growing up in a family riddled with mis- and lack of communication in the book I am writing about medical child abuse. In this post I have patched, abbreviated, and pieced together bits from a chapter about my dad. It may not hold together completely, but it has a sampling of the essence of my relationship and feelings about Dad.
#Father’s Day