Dreamer Easy

1. You may want to add some instructions for using the shopping cart here. (defined in includes/languages/english/shopping_cart.php)

2. Yes! Jesus is alive and you have completed your order!

ETA: The second one is flogging an anti-vaccination book. I didn't mind the Jesus thing, but the killer quackery cost them my order.

Heh. Poking around the Daily Fail site in a search for Doctor Who photos, I found a give-the-governor-a-harumph piece titled "Mother sparks outrage by tweeting as rescue workers try to save dying two-year-old son". Panicking and desperate, I'd probably have reached out to friends and family too, through every medium - phone, email, lj. But naturally, the Fail's readers have been pouring out their bile about wasting time mucking about posting things on the Internet, which prompted a priceless comment: "What the hell are you all doing now?!!!!"

Internet rules and laws: the top 10, from Godwin to Poe

Letting Words Do Their Work: Why the care of language is more important than ever.

WORDCOUNT

The other writing secrets. If nothing else, read James Moran's four words of crucial advice.

Ben Aaronovitch quotes a terribly funny effort by Robert Sheckley to covercome writer's block.

No two days in Smallville are alike. :)

Egad - people keep trying to friend me on Facebook, and I only use it to keep track of far-flung family members (and a handful of others). tbh I seldom look at it and in fact don't read most of my friendses's entries. I need to hide myself in some fashion so people don't feel badly when I utterly fail to friend them!

ETA: *belatedly fiddles with the Privacy settings*

I am far too excited about my first sight of the fail whale.

Couple of quick followups on yesterday's thoughts. On firm, healthy scepticism: the hoaxer who planted a fake quote on Wikipedia and watched as newspapers reproduced it unquestioningly, remarked: "...once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact." (At least, I assume he said that.) On cyberbullying, a researcher says of social networking: "the connection and friendship network that the kids identified were the things that were often protecting against bullying." Much as IRL, of course; bullies seek to isolate their targets and convince them that no-one likes them, but a bullying target with friends to support them is in a better position to resist.

Cyberbullying has been in the news here lately, with two students kicked out of a private school for their victimisation of another girl through texting, email, and a Web site dedicated to spreading hate, rumours, and lies. Usually it's the targets who have no choice but to leave; and better still, in this case, the bullies have left themselves open to legal action. Turns out they're not as anonymous as they think. Give 'em hell, ladies, on behalf of all of us.

Cyber bullies run amok at top school

Mean girls: mother speaks out on Ascham bullying

Web helps nastiness rise to new levels

Turning up heat on web harassment

Big Bad Bully: a Psychology Today article from 1995 explains the basics, focussing on bullying by boys. Hmm, this is interesting: "Bullies, for the most part, are different from you and me. Studies reliably show that they have a distinctive cognitive make-up—a hostile attributional bias, a kind of paranoia. They perpetually attribute hostile intentions to others. The trouble is, they perceive provocation where it does not exist. That comes to justify their aggressive behavior." That certainly fits the indignant "she asked for it" mentality of a lot of ugly behaviour I've seen online.

Everyone Loves a Bully: PT again, 2004. "[Psychologist Jaana] Juvonen thinks that intervention must address a social system that privileges bullies, rather than simply targeting individual perpetrators. 'No matter how you teach bullies to see their world differently, the rewards of the behavior are still there once they step back into the schoolyard,' Juvonen says. Teaching children not to applaud antagonizers by giving them attention can change social expectations and norms. 'Empowering them to intervene in bullying situations would be by far the most effective strategy.'"

Cyberbullying grows bigger and meaner with photos, video "When they put it on the Internet, it's like they took everything and multiplied it by an astronomical number. It's one thing if it's a mean thing that somebody put in my school paper because that's contained within a small area. Only a certain number of people will see that. But when you put it on the Internet, you are opening it up to everyone in the world." It wrecks lives, as Wired magazine details in a report about "the Internet Fury Machine".

Beyond the Schoolyard: stories of cyberbullying in Canada. (David Knight's family are suing the high school which failed to protect him from constant violence. Give 'em hell, mate, on behalf of all of us.)

False rumours spread online by a workmate drive a Korean woman to suicide

UK sites School Bully OnLine and Kidscape have lots of stuff.

Bullying explained for kids aged 6-12

As Good as Your Words?: NYT, 1998. "The studies suggest that when someone says something, good or bad, about someone else, people tend to associate that trait with the person who made the statement. So if someone calls another person dishonest, other people tend to remember the speaker as being less than honest." This presents a bit of a problem for peeps who enjoy ripping others to shreds, especially if they're hoping to make themselves look good.

Finally: I linked to this report last year, but wanted to quote this bit: The Real Scoop on Rumors and Gossip: "It doesn't necessarily matter if gossip is true or not. Its goal is to change and maintain clusters of people, either by shifting around a social structure or spreading ideas about what is normal behavior." (Or, as the Rules of the Internet put it: "Anything you say can and will be used against you. Anything you say can be turned into something else.")

ETA: New Scientist, March 2009: Some schools may be breeding grounds for teen killers: "Shootings appear more likely in schools characterised by a high degree of social stratification and low bonding and attachment between teachers and students. They provide rewards and recognition for only an elite few, and create social dynamics that promote disrespectful behaviour, bullying, and peer harassment." (Thanks for the link, lillibet!)

ETA: Stonewall UK has facts and figures on Homophobic bullying in schools. 41% of targets were cyberbullied. (You don't have to be queer to be a target; I was "Hey, lemon!" for the last two years of high school. Thanks for the link, nyssa1968!)

"Catch rapturous girls' looks on your zipper protuberance."

It becomes ever more obvious that, in a number of ways, I'm a boy. It began when I hung around with my brothers' mates as a teenager. It continued when I came to fandom in my late teens, and when I came to online fandom in my mid-twenties. I didn't think of myself as male. For example, as a young fan, I identified with the powerful female characters in the comics I was reading, including the villainesses. But I didn't really think of myself as female, either. Discussing the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival recently, which has long excluded transwomen who don't "share the experience of growing up under patriarchy", I wondered if I'd qualify as a woman by that definition, lacking so many female experiences: never been raped, never experienced intimate violence, never been pregnant. For that matter, I've only worn makeup a handful of times. Since adolescence, I've dressed like a boy in jeans, T-shirts, and shirts, prompting jokes from cow orkers when I've occasionally turned up in a frock. As a teenager, I had profound crushes on male actors and pop stars, but they weren't shared with other girls. I didn't squee until I was an adult and encountered other fangirls on the Internet.

I've snagged a bunch of academic books about the net, fandom, and women, and have rapidly confirmed something I've suspected for quite a while: online, I act like a man. The way I disagree with other fangirls, sometimes the fact that I do disagree out loud, is a characteristically male style of net.interaction: the "bald assertion", with no attention paid to salving the feelings of the person I'm taking to task or the solidarity of the group, no apologies or reassurances. (I know you're sophisticated enough a reader that I don't have to disclaim that all men don't act like that. Nor that some women do act like that, especially in the middle of a posting about how I act like that.)

Online fandom was long dominated by men, just as the net itself was emphatically male for a very long time. In the late nineties, this began to change, as the proportion of women online caught up with the men. But as Rhiannon Bury points out in Cyberspaces Of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online, many fangirls took one look at the fanboys on Usenet, turned around, and formed their own, private mailing lists. So not only were there actually fewer of us online, we were less visible.

Many of us did participate in both public and private fora, of course: I was part of the SFLAE/BS as well as a noisy participant on the r.a.s.* hierarchy. This meant I was in contact with a lot more female Star Trek fans than I was with female Doctor Who fans (although this changed in 1996, with the arrival of the PMEB). When it came to Who fandom, this only reflected my experience IRL: both Australian and British Doctor Who fandom were majority male (and substantially gay). In the US, Who fandom was majority female, like media fandom in general.

The upshot of this is that I learned to communicate online while surrounded by men. I learned to argue through hard experiences on Usenet newsgroups like soc.men and alt.feminism, which had an overwhelming hostile atmosphere, especially towards women and feminists. Despite increasing contact with female fans, for a very long time my fannish thought and activity was that of a fanboy: discussions about continuity and canonicity and ratings. Unlike the DDEBers interviewed by Bury, I wasn't attracted to shows primarily for the characters, but for the SFnal concepts: I watched The X-Files first and foremost because it was about UFOs and stuff. But again, I never thought of myself as male. When fanboys dissed fangirls, I was in there defending us and our despised activities: drooling, squeeing, slashing, etc.

I'm perfectly capable of acting like a girl online, of course - it's just that I keep forgetting to do it. Although, if anything, I'm more aware of my gender online than off, probably because the net is where I do almost all my interacting with other people. Bury refers to the "dream of disembodiment", the hope that cyberspace would erase differences and make us all equal. But rather than dropping all assumptions, netizens just fell into the assumption that everyone else was White, middle-class, male, university educated, and American. We bring our gender with us into cyberspace, whether we like it or not.

More on this subject as I wade through all these books. Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

(This is the earliest Usenet posting of mine that Google records.)

(ETA: No, this is!)