By K. A. Laity
Somehow a weird collision of events sparked a realisation for me - or really it was a reaffirmation, I suppose.
When you add together the narrow escape from tragedy dramatised in Lone Sherfing's An Education, the inescapable tragedy that was the University of Alabama in Huntsville shooting and the head-scratching success story of mixmaster/plagiarist Helene Hegemann - "There’s no such thing as originality anyway, there’s only authenticity" - with the news that social media supposedly means big opportunities for women, you get an equation with a solution so convoluted that Schrödinger's cat just hid in the litter box.
The internet -- and not coincidentally, social media -- are supposed to take away the stigma of gender assumptions by allowing us to relate immediately without that bow in the hair or tie around the neck.
But as we saw with the debate around the revelations of über-macho blogger James Chartrand that he was really a she, the jury's still out on whether we have really been able to let that go. Even the Mashable piece on the opportunities for women in social media focuses first on women as consumers who now have the power to give more accurate feedback about their shopping habits.
Yippee.
Yes, the piece goes on to suggest that women also have opportunities in Thought Leadership, but sometimes the internet feels like one more place where women can expend their energy and still not get paid. Is Seth Godin really that much more savvy than these thirty Tweeters, or do people just trust a guy with good graphics? For every Dooce there's probably thousands of mommy bloggers who don't make a penny.
The worst thing about the Hegemann saga is that while there are going to be some people who affirm that this is just a 'generational' shift, there are plenty of people who still think ownership of one's own words don't really matter, that they can get something for nothing. It is not a generational thing.
Trust me: when I put it to my students in terms of imagining that I might turn their blog posts for our Writing for New Media class into a thinly veiled novel with their names changed, they had no trouble saying they would be upset and er, litigious.
So it's not a matter of generations but it might give fuel to people who think that our words on line don't matter so much. Moreover, that they shouldn't have to pay anything for them. Admittedly, we're all accustomed to the internet being free, that "information wants to be free" and after all, why should WE be the ones to pay for anything?
It's all part of that equating the ephemeral format with ephemeral content. But our words cost us. And our words should be paid -- but so often aren't. And they aren’t valued or credited, Fraulein Hegemann, or respected and it seems, even more so if we are women. We need Guerilla Girls for Facebook and Twitter, giving us the real statistics and the disparity between the number of times "cool guys" get retweeted and hip chicks do.
I suspect we'd just howl in despair if we did have them. But don't lose hope: "There's always the Civil Service."
Image via the Guardian coverage of Crash at the Gagosian