Mad's Big Bloggy Think-fest: part 2

This post carries forward from my blogiversary post. I think this series is going to be a five-parter but I'm not sure yet. I will make sure each post stands alone sose you don't have to wait on a cliff-hanger--or so you can say "to hell with her" and wander off. I also plan to keep out of the blog-theorizing conversations that have sprung up since I started this because I want to get my ideas out as they were first formed and then I plan to join the cross-commenting fray.
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Way back in December of 1993, Tim Berners Lee was sitting somewhere in Switzerland finally noticing a little uptake on his recent invention: HTTP protocol and free browser software to make it all work. Me, I was in the computer lab at library school feverishly finishing up a term paper entitled, "The Electronic Bookmobile: Librarians on the Information Superhighway." (Yes I was that geeky. Don't even ask about the paper I wrote the year before entitled "Finding the "Me" in ManageMEnt. Geek-a-palooza with a side of bun and shush, that's me.)

Anyhow, in this paper I looked at a whole bunch of things but mainly I was trying to articulate a way in which the female-intensive (i.e. 80% of librarians are women) and feminized (i.e. when people think librarian, they think bun, shush, service, caring... all the adjectives that define a profession as womanly) profession of librarianship could meet the myriad of public service issues raised by the internet. At the time, I was tech-savvy. I could gopher and ftp with the best of them. Heck, I had even used the finger command so that I could send a Pine message to a friend. Make sense? Of course not. Most of you were trying to figure out which end was up on your first tampon back in '93*. I keep telling you I'm old. I remember being one of the first in my peer group in the spring of '94 to surf the early, early web. I had to walk three miles through snow up to my waist to get to it.

The paper I was writing relied on state-of- the art feminist research--research by the likes of Dale Spender and Cheris Kramarae. It was the kind of soft-sociological research that played into strict notions of identity politics. Most of it looked at the gender gap in computer use that was appearing to a startling degree in children as young as nine. Boys, the research argued, were drawn to the computer 1) because of the way the technology had been masculinized, 2) because computer science offered the model of the single student learning independently, and 3) because boys were drawn to the action and violence of video games that almost inevitably featured male protagonists. Girls, on the other hand and so the argument ran, learned better in groups. Their knowledge was often social, contextual, and participatory. Surely the world of the computer would never be for them. We had to fight, fight, fight to break down these barriers. And lest you think I am being flippant in those last two sentences, let me assure you that educators took notice of this kind of research and policies were enacted to address the problem.**

As part of a female-intensive profession whose sacred mission from the great god Dewey was to protect and dispense all forms of knowledge, I was, no doubt about it, quaking in my boots. How could we ensure equitable access to technology? How could we make sure that women (and other non-mainstream groups) did not become the information-poor? These were deep and troubling questions in the early 1990s, especially since Al Gore (yes, warm fuzzy Al Gore) and others were pushing for a full-on capitalist exploitation of the technology. The internet was like an arms race back then only the stakes were for corporate dominiation not military prowess. Libraries and other public institutions felt a valid threat.

Now here I am 13 years later--a mommy blogger of all things. Who'da thunk it? And you know what? This whole mommy blogging gig is a lot like how those early feminist researchers described the poor ill-fated girls--except for the computer bit. As a group, we have used the computer to create a social, contextual, participatory affiliation that helps us learn about all manner of things and move forward with our lives better equipped than we would be without it. In our wake, we are leaving a dense trail of information: the minutiae of our daily lives, early biographies of our children (who will all be famous one day), theories on life, motherhood, art and politics. Stories of emotional and physical survival. Conversations. Treatises. You name it. We have taken the seemingly mundane--what many (not me) would call the idle prattle of play group--and turned it into an evolving, documented record of what it was like to be a mother in the early years of the 21st Century. And yes, I will strongly state the caveat here that we are primarily white, middle-class, urban, women in the West. That is a huge caveat and I hope to come back to it in a later post.

In the late 1990s I worked on a feminist literary history project. One of the components of this project was a detailed chronology of women's lives in the British Isles. Some feminist historians said that we were wrong-headed to take this on. Chronology, they argued, was an outdated mode of history because it spoke only of "significant events." History, proper history, needed to reflect a more granular view of the world. Feminist history, we were told, needed to concern itself with the price of bread not with the succession of monarchs for it is the price of bread that has had the greater influence on women's lives. And so our project set out to create a chronology that would include important details from the lives of women--like the price of bread. The only problem was that this kind of information is rapidly lost to history. The minutiae of the domestic has not really ever been part of the historical record. Until now. (and yes there are big caveats here that my last post will address)

Ask yourself, "what are we doing in the blogosphere?" Is it not revolutionary from this standpoint? Sure, we aren't getting together and marching in the streets but we have effected a significant change to how (some) women interact with each other, with the computer, and with the historical record--and all of this has happened in less than fourteen years. That's somethin', if'n you ask me.
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* OK, a goodly number of you were born within 5 years of me but some of you were in grade school when I was finishing up that paper. That knowledge can't help but make a gal feel old.

** In fact, a recent article in The Walrus suggested that such policies, those catered to girls' ways of learning, went too far and we are now dealing with a generation of tuned-out boys. I'm not sure I agree with this but the point is repeatedly raised.