On search ...

First of all, I apologize. This entry may be a bit disjointed because I have a lot to say, but my fingers have been painful and stiff for several days so I can't "say" it. (One of the dangers of being a little too "digital native" is osteoarthristis after two decades of LOTS of typing. This warm/cold dry/humid changing weather isn't helping any.)

First observation, re: "Google defies US over search data". Haven't we been here before, ala various ISPs (Internet services providers) that refused to hand over customer data to government requests?

Speaking of Google: I was disappointed in Google when they agreed to create a censored version for China. I think they did some mighty big rationalizing to come to the conclusion that providing disinformation or hiding information was less "evil" than not providing a search service at all. This was definitely a business-first decision.

[Interesting Triva bit: At Texas State, we have both a search engine and something called a "site index" for the Texas State web presence. (Site indexes were much more common about 8 years ago, as a list of all the pages in a web site - an alternative to navigating by use of searching.) Past surveys and focus groups show that faculty and students at Texas State are much more likely to use search engines, while staff are much more likely use the site index, known link paths or bookmarks.]

Chapter 3 of Web Theory was interesting and thought provoking. I appreciated the history of communication models as applied to the web. I could have restated the quote from Morris and Ogan in terms of anthropology and challenges to the central questions of that disipline, namely the concept of culture. (Or for psychology and the concept of self and identity.) The conclusion of a "loose web" model made me think that perhaps the greatest challenge the Internet poses for various disciplines is that it presents a more three dimensional challenge to everything we've thought about previously. It can be both this _and_that all at the same time or time-shifted.

The question of the social implications of web searching was posed. I wish I could find and link to the article I wrote about it in 1999 ("Privacy, what privacy?") for ProjectCool.com but even the Internet Wayback machine doesn't have it. How ironic. In it I tried to point out that many of the same sorts of privacy issues (at the time) were regularly a challenge for women in the off-line world, Internet or no Internet. It's gotten a little more complicated since then. Still, when I get advertisements sent to Mr. Fazia Rizvi, or military paraphernalia catalogs because I purchased loose leaf tea online, I gotta take my invasion of privacy with a grain of salt. Sure, it's easier for them to get a lot of information about me. It's also much easier for me to make that informational picture a bit, well, inaccurate.

This was also the first topic that got my gender issues flag a-waving. I really have to view the Pew report with a large, healthy, indeed STRAPPING degree of skepticism. It begins like this:

The internet was dominated by men in its early days, but by 2000 and continuing on to today, the user population has been evenly divided between men and women.

My issue? Researchers and journalists covering the Internet throughout much of the 1990s based their conclusions on what they saw in public spaces of the Internet (BBSes, USENET, listservs anyone could join, and open MUSHes and MUDs) and on returns of survey information that were solicited in these same open spaces.

Why is that a problem? Well, it's something I'm trying to point out in my Thesis. These same researchers and journalists did not have access to the "private spaces" of the Internet where a lot of women congregated - unadvertised, private email lists, or "approval required" women-only spaces. There were a few exceptions (Julian Dibbell's work for example) but the vast majority simply did not have access, or did not get deep enough into cyberspace to, in my opinion, get an accurate picture of its demographics.

In fact, this isn't that terribly different from what was common in anthropology in the mid-to-late late 19th century. Male researchers focused on what they could see, what they deemed important (through conscious and unconscious bias) and what they had access to - rituals and behaviors of men. Female anthropologists of the late 19th century and early 20th century start to point this out.

Over and over again I heard women during the early 1990s declare "we are here!" in response to the accusation that the Internet was a male-dominated playground. Women studies researchers, on occasion, sought women out, but often only to extract stories of harassment by men, rather than what many of the women wanted to talk about - how they used the Internet to promote human connections. A report saying the same nearly 10 years later just gets eye-rolls from these same women, "I could told you that 10 years ago but nobody wanted to listen."

Stereotypes abound, and having been on the receiving end of grossly inaccurate reporting, it leaves me highly skeptical of bias. (Ask me about the "infamous" Newsweek article ...)

The observations also don't take into account expectations of social roles and how that plays out in women's access to the creation of technology and content versus the maintenance of relationships through the medium.

Oh, I could say so, so MUCH more, but my joints are killing me.