Date: 16 Apr 93 14:16:40 BST (Fri) From: mikeh@gn.apc.org Subject: File 3--LTES Article -- The author Responds BACKGROUND: An article of mine was published in the Times Higher Education Supplement, a London-based weekly newspaper largely for people working in UK universities, earlier this year. It was made possible partly by the generosity of net-people with their comments and feedback; in return I mailed the text which I had submitted to people who had requested it. A copy was incorporated in the CuD digest without my knowledge. I make this clear purely as a legal caveat, because I am now in the embarrassing position of having inadvertently breached my own copyright. Indeed, next week (Apr 22) I shall be sending the THES a piece on the implications of electronic publishing for copyright and the ownership of intellectual property. Brief (1k?) comments on this would be extremely welcome. Please indicate whether they may be published with attribution, without, or not at all, and in the first case give your full name, post and institution/location. I am told that there were a large number of responses to my piece, and that many took exception to my humorous quotation of the lite Xmas _Economist_ piece, which described the Internet as a "conspiracy" alongside the Masons, Opus Dei and such. The only responses which I have actually seen were those from Larry Landwehr and the response to this from Jim Thomas, who invited me to respond. The article itself: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I began drafting a net-style response to Larry, with quotes: > ... just like in a conversation with a religious zealot, the > feminist dogma just had to surface ... -Oh dear, I thought, reading this. The "men-are-persecuted- by-feminists" dogma, so tediously common on the Net, just had to surface. This exercise in turn became tedious. I am a freelance writer on science and technology, with a special interest in the social and political implications of the new communications technologies. So please bear in mind that my writing is quite different to academic writing or to net articles. I was asked to write specifically on the "invisible college" issue, and originally to do exactly 1500 words; I got this extended to some 2300. It is extremely interesting as a writer to compare the responses to the printed article and to the electronic version: indeed, I destined to appear on paper, to keep the temperature down. _If_ the net is an invisible college, who may it exclude? Last year, for a quite different article in _New Scientist_, I counted the apparent geographical location and apparent gender of some 300 news-group articles (most in sci.*). Some 97% had US addresses and over 90% of those with identifiable given-names were male. Many fewer than 97% of all scientists work in the US and fewer than 90% are male; empirically, there's an issue to investigate here. I made it clear that this was not a scientific survey. Last week, before being asked for these comments, I was working up a proposal for just such a survey: run the "From:" line of every news-group posting for six months or a year past the ISO 3166 country codes and past _Naming Baby_, and see what falls out. Would people on the net object to this? Please take it for granted that I understand the statistical limits on interpretation of the results. Please tell me if someone else is already doing this. It is extremely interesting that Larry complains: "why is it that every expert cited is a woman?" I count seven women quoted, seven men, and two anonymous (one of whom I know to be male, and one of whom is an _Economist_ journalist...). In a 2300-word article, 500 words discussed possible reasons for the under-representation of women on the net. All the people I quoted on this specific issue were women. I did what I usually do to find commentators: call busy people whose work I respect, selected regardless of anything except their work, to suggest other researchers who will have time to comment. All those I came across working on the issue were, for some reason, women. I always welcome further contacts. I suggest that Larry's complaint points to a "threshhold" phenomenon -- the subject of an extensive sociological literature. For example, when a neighbourhood is changing racial composition, up to about 5 black kids in a grade-school class of 30 are fine; over 10 in 30, and the class is perceived as being "majority minority". It is plain daft that Larry calls on CuD not to publish pieces such as mine. I am not, for the record, in favour of censorship. I did not call on anyone not to publish anything; and I've so far resisted the temptation to publish on paper the proportion of net resources devoted to distributing flesh-GIFs. I did consider Cheris Kramerae's concerns about harassment worthy of quotation as one view among several. My personal view is that "the calendar on the workshop wall" is a form of harassment, the effect of which is to contribute to the exclusion of women from mechanical engineering and so forth. I admit I should have made it clear that the "direct equivalent" I was writing about was leaving flesh-GIFs on women colleagues' screens -- but I was already over-length and past deadline when I realised I needed quotes to substantiate that it does happen. And had I obtained those quotes, the tabloids might have run off with the story... and then... So, in Larry's view, for me to quote women suggesting that the under-representation of women on the net might possibly have something to do with puerile activities here is to invite censorship; therefore he demands that my piece not be published. Shurely shome mishtake? (Sorry, Americans, that's a Brit journos' catch-phrase.) I appreciated Jim Thomas' thoughtful and tolerant reply to Larry. Jim clearly has more patience than I can muster these days. I regret that he and I have had to put effort into explaining that it is appropriate for articles to appear on the net which are critical of some features of its current, and I hope temporarily aberrant, state. I find it deeply ironic that we have had to do so in response to an article which so vehemently invokes the First Amendment. If the net is, as Larry hopes, and as I hope, to expand "into the mainstream of human culture", it will be forced to recognise that there are many cultures out there which are quite different to the various cultures now reflected in here. I'd like to conclude by provoking a new argument. One issue which CuD readers in particular will have to face up to is this: the First Amendment concept of an _absolute_ right to freedom of expression is, in my experience as a citizen of the rest of the world, grasped by very few people out here. Only in the USA, that is, is there a widely-held belief that it's worth a person's effort to struggle for anyone's right to forms of expression which that person finds repugnant. I have been flamed before for asking "why is stupid speech protected?": this frivolous question was a serious attempt to raise the issue of protecting the _content_ of speech. I repeat: I am not in favour of censorship. I have no personal oracle to inform me what content is worthy of protection: the point is that the question _makes_sense_ in many non-US cultures, where relativism is less rampant, where there is a residual sense of community and of values (some of which I do find repugnant). I have heard reports that the US tobacco industry donates large amounts of money to the ACLU to promote the "pure" First Amendment position. I have no reason to believe these reports, but their _existence_ and the fact that some clearly give them credence intrigues me. I live in a country where the Prime Minister is suing two magazines for libel because they reported and thoughtfully analysed the existence of rumours that he had had an extra-marital relationship -- rumours which had been alluded to repeatedly in the daily press, so discreetly that many uninformed readers will have believed that there were two, separate, mini-scandals. If the Prime Minister succeeds in his suit (and thereby closes the irritating magazines), the ACLU will be in a position to sue me in the UK for libel over the first sentence of this paragraph. It is issues such as this -- the suppression of political comment -- which the drafters of the Amendment clearly had in mind and which exercises people out here. Few here really bother about the free expression aspect of the Mappelthorpe (sp?) exhibition in DC or the current attempt to suppress "adult" (i.e. puerile) movies beamed into the UK by satellite. To be honest, no-one's getting very publicly worked up about the Prime Minister either. And, to start another row: (C) M Holderness 1993. By which I mean: I've spent four hours writing this; writing is how I pay my rent. I reserve all rights to sell any of these words for reproduction on paper or in any other form; it may and will be freely distributed as an Internet article. My feminazi witch friends are cooking up a special hell for anyone selling my efforts for personal gain: in the alpha- test Hades you spend all eternity in an IRC session with Dan Quayle or Fidel Castro, whichever you detest the more. M Holderness; mikeh@gn.apc.org; I speak only for myself. Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253