Cyborgology ► Pinterest and Feminism, In which an article about Pinterest makes a good point Options

[EricBarbour]

...about Wikipedia.

Pinterest And Feminism

And, no surprise, the tech community, which is still a boys club, has been terrible at writing about how people, especially women, use Pinterest. The site has been used as an excuse to make fun of women, stereotype women as shoppers, dismiss the site as overly gendered and anger some of the feminist blogosphere.

When visiting the site, one quickly notices the refreshing “lack of misogynist content.” Amanda Marcotte states that “the pink and girly exterior of Pinterest works as a jerk force field, keeping the most piggish men away.” Women are using the site and enjoying it and spending lots of time there and that is a good thing.

And even more perspicative:

Take Wikipedia: 87% of its contributors are male; a bigger discrepancy than Pinterest by any count. However, when discussing Wikipedia, it certainly is not the norm to go on and on about how male the site is. Instead, it is far more common for the site to be praised for its “neutral point of view.” Usually-male tech writers describing the male Wikipedia have convinced themselves that the site is neutral and thus useful to all of humanity. Pinterest, on the other hand, is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, dismissed as merely female.

That says a lot. Wikipedia's "culture" is basically misogynistic, as well as delusional (the "neutral point of view" business, which anyone here knows is a load of crap).
Wikipedia is a "jerk" culture, and Pinterest is the opposite. Wikipedia is based on "facts", whatever those are, while Pinterest is meant to be a flexible and open-ended database.

Compare them purely by appearance: Pinterest is very simple, clean, minimal, and functional.
Wikipedia is crammed with useful/useless trivia, argumentation, rules, "policies", and craziness.
27 million pages full of tiny barely-readable text, organized in an utterly arcane manner.

What kind of jerk does Wikipedia cater to? I like to think of the "Wikipedian" as being like, well,
Stephen Wolfram. Incredibly smart, mildly autistic, antisocial, and having little use for women.

Read this. Wolfram plots and analyzes his typing, email sending, other computer work, and phone calling
patterns since the 1980s.
Note the phone plots: the guy starts most of his phone calls exactly at half-hour intervals. Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

That helps to explain Wolfram, a guy that I always found to be an annoying (if brilliant) bastard.
If he were younger, I suspect he would be a Wikipedia administrator and bureaucrat.
(I bet he hates/doesn't understand Pinterest, because it's not "deterministic" enough to be "useful".)

There you are: high-level social analysis of the Wiki-phenomenon.

This post has been edited by EricBarbour: Sat 10th March 2012, 8:29am

[Selina]

YES! 100%

Was it my post before that made you take an interest?

Damn right. The web today is an evil mess. Selina's not the only one who puts a lot of embedded YT
videos up--that music thread is nothing, compared to blogs like Matrixsynth.
(WARNING: do NOT click that link if you have an old or slow computer! The owner loves to post one
YT video after another, most of them garbage. Usually set to play at the highest resolution.)

Using Internet Explorer is becoming almost impossible, and don't ask me about Safari.
I'd recommend Firefox, with Adblock Plus, NoScript (also stops Flash videos),
and Saved Password Editor.

Flashblock is good to have as well because with only Noscript you would have to disable scripts for the entire site which stops stuff like the thread options (subscribe etc), fast reply etc working - It's best to have all 3 of the ones I mentioned installed including Flashblock cos it gives you levels of trust basically - like here, you might want some stuff to work without disabling EVERYTHING and have the option to click before showing a flash vid

You would HATE Polyvoreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (TVtropes has NOTHING) I guess
or Pinterest (lol)

This on the front page of BBC News Tech/Internet section now: Pinterest - hot new network or another Quora?

(BTW, since then I wrote browser security (T-H-L-K-D) too - I know, I'm a freak.)



The crux of it I think is something that a certain (banned from here) sociology professor at MIT also made, that Google Knol's saving face was: That you can have multiple, diverging points of view on subjects, without the need for one to be "the winner".

Compare them purely by appearance: Pinterest is very simple, clean, minimal, and functional.
Wikipedia is crammed with useful/useless trivia, argumentation, rules, "policies", and craziness.
27 million pages full of tiny barely-readable text, organized in an utterly arcane manner.

YES. One of the main reasons I stil bother editing Wikipedia is cos I think whilst it exists in its current form, like it or not it affects the world a lot so itneeds more women having a say in it to be influenced for the better and to hopefully build support for a viable alternative that doesn't suck - it needs to be cleaned up as hell for more normal people to find it easy to use, that isn't so dorky and intricate. Too dorky and intricate for a DOCTOR I know.

It's not friendly to people that actually have social lives, there are too many nooks and crannies for the control freaks to hide away the guts of the system. It hides it from the media, too, it's another reason why I think there aren't many exposes on the nastiness of the covert pushers, the abusive admins, the cabals, of WP. A lot of the stuff we talk about as every day occurrences here most people just never find, because it's a web of sekrit links:

wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=next&oldid=477653330

wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=next&oldid=477043493

Hell, the thinking behind the "canvassing" rule I think was exactly those reason, to keep people split up and stop the wider public having a say, so that individual administrators have more control over "fiefdoms".

We've seen the same here, where administrators are handpicking their "heirs" as if it's some kind of Russia ogliarchy.

This post has been edited by Selina: Sat 10th March 2012, 9:08am

[lilburne]

YES. One of the main reasons I stil bother editing Wikipedia is cos I think whilst it exists in its current form, like it or not it affects the world a lot so itneeds more women having a say in it to be influenced for the better and to hopefully build support for a viable alternative that doesn't suck - it needs to be cleaned up as hell for more normal people to find it easy to use, that isn't so dorky and intricate. Too dorky and intricate for a DOCTOR I know.

It's not social-friendly, and there are too many nooks and crannies for the control freaks to hide away the guts of the system. It hides it from the media, too, it's another reason why I think there aren't many exposes on the nastiness of the covert pushers, the abusive admins, the cabals, of WP.

I still think WP is going to go the way of USENET. One day there were loads of discussion groups on various topics all battling around the trolling and the next they were all on special interest websites and forums. Does anything of interest happen in the comp.lang.* groups any more?

Want information about some wild flower you happen to have seen in the local hedgerow, would you go to WP or some wild flower nature site.

Over time people are going to dump WP and move elsewhere either as editors or consumers of information. The everything under one roof model just doesn't work, ask AOL and Yahoo.

[EricBarbour]

I still think WP is going to go the way of USENET. One day there were loads of discussion groups on various topics all battling around the trolling and the next they were all on special interest websites and forums. Does anything of interest happen in the comp.lang.* groups any more?

Usenet has been dead for at least 5 or 6 years. Most ISPs stopped carrying the traffic. The only way to
get at most of it is via web interfaces like Google Groups. The main use for it seems to be warez--
what little of that isn't handled by Bittorrent or (heh heh) IRC channels.

[Peter Damian]

...about Wikipedia.

Pinterest And Feminism

Wow I never realised that site https://pinterest.com/ existed. It seems to conform to every stereotype that men have of women. It's about cooking, babies, clothes, kitschy pictures of horses, sunsets. None of the comments is remotely critical at all. 'Love this', 'beautiful', 'looks amazing', 'so amazing'.

I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it conforms to every stereotype that men have of women.

[HRIP7]

...about Wikipedia.

Pinterest And Feminism

And, no surprise, the tech community, which is still a boys club, has been terrible at writing about how people, especially women, use Pinterest. The site has been used as an excuse to make fun of women, stereotype women as shoppers, dismiss the site as overly gendered and anger some of the feminist blogosphere.

When visiting the site, one quickly notices the refreshing “lack of misogynist content.” Amanda Marcotte states that “the pink and girly exterior of Pinterest works as a jerk force field, keeping the most piggish men away.” Women are using the site and enjoying it and spending lots of time there and that is a good thing.

And even more perspicative:

Take Wikipedia: 87% of its contributors are male; a bigger discrepancy than Pinterest by any count. However, when discussing Wikipedia, it certainly is not the norm to go on and on about how male the site is. Instead, it is far more common for the site to be praised for its “neutral point of view.” Usually-male tech writers describing the male Wikipedia have convinced themselves that the site is neutral and thus useful to all of humanity. Pinterest, on the other hand, is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, dismissed as merely female.

That says a lot. Wikipedia's "culture" is basically misogynistic, as well as delusional (the "neutral point of view" business, which anyone here knows is a load of crap).
Wikipedia is a "jerk" culture, and Pinterest is the opposite. Wikipedia is based on "facts", whatever those are, while Pinterest is meant to be a flexible and open-ended database.

Compare them purely by appearance: Pinterest is very simple, clean, minimal, and functional.
Wikipedia is crammed with useful/useless trivia, argumentation, rules, "policies", and craziness.
27 million pages full of tiny barely-readable text, organized in an utterly arcane manner.

What kind of jerk does Wikipedia cater to? I like to think of the "Wikipedian" as being like, well,
Stephen Wolfram. Incredibly smart, mildly autistic, antisocial, and having little use for women.

Read this. Wolfram plots and analyzes his typing, email sending, other computer work, and phone calling
patterns since the 1980s.
Note the phone plots: the guy starts most of his phone calls exactly at half-hour intervals. Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

That helps to explain Wolfram, a guy that I always found to be an annoying (if brilliant) bastard.
If he were younger, I suspect he would be a Wikipedia administrator and bureaucrat.
(I bet he hates/doesn't understand Pinterest, because it's not "deterministic" enough to be "useful".)

There you are: high-level social analysis of the Wiki-phenomenon.

Fascinating. Thanks. Pinterest is very pretty.

This post has been edited by HRIP7: Sat 10th March 2012, 9:55am

[EricBarbour]

Mind you, I'm not saying that Pinterest is "better" than Wikipedia, or any less corrupt or idiotic.
In fact, it's so idiotic, you see things like this and this routinely.

It's not unlike a gaming site, neurotic, closed-minded, obsessed with status and insecurity.
Just with photos of scrawny women wearing the latest styles, plus flowers and kittens,
rather than manly man-boys talking about killing things and raping women, and bacon.....

Wikipedia just hides its killing-things-and-bacon part. But it's still got plenty of misogyny.

[Peter Damian]

This http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/201...t-and-feminism/ was full of obscure academic discourse and long sentences, but is easily translated. Essentially, there are two forms of feminism. The first one celebrates cupcakes, cooking, babies, kitschy pictures of sunsets, many different shades of pink, etc, as representing a valid view of reality that is fundamentally different from the view of reality taken by males. Indeed, even the concept of 'reality' is essentially a male one. Philosophy, logic, mathematics etc is simply a male take on the world. This is 'difference' feminism. Difference feminists don't mind the Daily Mail.

'Dominance' feminism takes the opposing view. The reason many women like cupcakes, shades of pink, cooking etc is because they have been forced to by a dominating patriarchal society, and a global conspiracy engineered by a male dominated media machine. Dominance feminists hate and loathe the Daily Mail.

[Cedric]

Mind you, I'm not saying that Pinterest is "better" than Wikipedia, or any less corrupt or idiotic.
In fact, it's so idiotic, you see things like this and this routinely.

It's not unlike a gaming site, neurotic, closed-minded, obsessed with status and insecurity.
Just with photos of scrawny women wearing the latest styles, plus flowers and kittens,
rather than manly man-boys talking about killing things and raping women, and bacon.....

Wikipedia just hides its killing-things-and-bacon part. But it's still got plenty of misogyny.

Mmmmmm. Bacon!

[Selina]

This http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/201...t-and-feminism/ was full of obscure academic discourse and long sentences, but is easily translated.

Doesn't look like "obscure academic discourse" to me, looks like a pretty normal article

Essentially, there are two forms of feminism. The first one celebrates cupcakes, cooking, babies, kitschy pictures of sunsets, many different shades of pink, etc, as representing a valid view of reality that is fundamentally different from the view of reality taken by males. Indeed, even the concept of 'reality' is essentially a male one. Philosophy, logic, mathematics etc is simply a male take on the world. This is 'difference' feminism. Difference feminists don't mind the Daily Mail.

'Dominance' feminism takes the opposing view. The reason many women like cupcakes, shades of pink, cooking etc is because they have been forced to by a dominating patriarchal society, and a global conspiracy engineered by a male dominated media machine. Dominance feminists hate and loathe the Daily Mail.

imdb.com/title/tt0424136/quotes?qt=qt0457068

pinterest.com/pin/67413325642159981

Pinterest is just like any other social media, there's a lot of dumb stuff, sure that well... happens... on any of it ( Lamebook.com ) - most people don't take the medium seriously enough to have serious debates and discussions on it, and it actually discourages it too by the encouraging of short posts, something the founder of Mozilla has noted: Livejournal (T-H-L-K-D)

This post has been edited by Selina: Sat 10th March 2012, 10:19pm

[jsalsman]

One of the main reasons I stil bother editing Wikipedia is cos I think whilst it exists in its current form, like it or not it affects the world a lot so it needs more women having a say in it to be influenced for the better and to hopefully build support for a viable alternative that doesn't suck

I have no idea why everyone with some gripe about Wikipedia doesn't feel this way. There is no amount of complaining which will make Wikipedia's top page views on most topics go down; if anything the Streisand effect takes hold when people start complaining about mainstream sources of information, which Wikipedia became de facto sometime in 2003, like it or not.

Hell, the thinking behind the "canvassing" rule I think was exactly those reason, to keep people split up and stop the wider public having a say, so that individual administrators have more control

Sometimes it seems like I'm the only one who takes IAR seriously, but those of us who do have to sneak around because otherwise we'll get piled on by the vast majority who think it is some kind of a joke.

But why is this a big deal? Why is it not just the reasonably expected bar to working on pages that are usually the top page hits on any given topic? If I want to effect social change through publication, the benefit per effort is still the greatest on Wikipedia, even if I have to sneak around. My unified watch list has several thousand more articles on it than have been edited by any one account I've ever used, and I'm okay with that. It's a reasonable cost of access to a readership far more effective and targeted than any broadcast media.

This post has been edited by jsalsman: Sat 10th March 2012, 10:31pm

[EricBarbour]

If I want to effect social change through publication, the benefit per effort is still the greatest on Wikipedia, even if I have to sneak around.

Is that the "purpose" of Wikipedia, to act as an agent of social change?

Show the rest of us the official WMF policy or rule to that effect. Please.

No wonder they banned you.

This post has been edited by EricBarbour: Sun 11th March 2012, 2:26am

[jsalsman]

Is that the "purpose" of Wikipedia, to act as an agent of social change?

Is education not social change? Is all other meaningful social change not catalyzed by education?

Show the rest of us the official WMF policy or rule to that effect. Please.

No wonder they banned you.

You've been banned, too, right? But you still want a collectivist set of rules to guide and limit you instead of casting them off and depending on your own judgement as WP:IAR requires. Why is that?

This post has been edited by jsalsman: Sun 11th March 2012, 6:27am

[dogbiscuit]

Is that the "purpose" of Wikipedia, to act as an agent of social change?

Is education not social change? Is all other meaningful social change not catalyzed by education?

Show the rest of us the official WMF policy or rule to that effect. Please.

No wonder they banned you.

You've been banned, too, right? But you still want a collectivist set of rules to guide and limit you instead of casting them off and depending on your own judgement as WP:IAR requires. Why is that?

I think that Wikipedia has forgotten that education with an agenda is called propaganda.

I have an urge to Godwin at this point.

[carbuncle]

When visiting the site, one quickly notices the refreshing “lack of misogynist content.” Amanda Marcotte states that “the pink and girly exterior of Pinterest works as a jerk force field, keeping the most piggish men away.” Women are using the site and enjoying it and spending lots of time there and that is a good thing.

One might suggest that WP is the mirror opposite to this. Jerk magnet...

[Selina]

SXSW: As 'Pinteresting' as ever, Spencer Kelly, Click, 02012-03-16

The South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive conference in Austin, Texas. This is the place where startups live and die by how well their ideas can connect with the world's most social citizens.

It was here five years ago that a small company called Twitter first started getting noticed.

One of the trends gathering momentum here is something called curating.

Pinterest is one well known example. Its user base has expanded significantly in the past few months. The idea, you collect the best bits of the web and display them for others to admire your ability to um, collect the best bits of the web. It's basically the modern equivalent of ripping out bits of magazines and saving them for later.

A similar site, Storify, now sports a souped-up Ipad interface, which helps people curate with even less effort by pulling tweets, location check-ins and more from other social sites for re-purposing. Think of curation as a search engine results page, but made by human instead of machine.

Burt Herman, Co-Founder, Storify: "You can have algorithms and try to filter out the best stuff, but curation is all about humans helping to find the best of what's out there and give audiences something they want to read. And I really think that is the important kind of next step of where the web is going."

And it's definitely going somewhere.



Follow the Click team on Twitter @BBCClick. And join the conversation on Google+ or Facebook.

Interesting implications for Wikipedia, probably pointing out a big failure of Commons for example in that their analness over copyright† makes it not fun so people go elsewhere where they aren't constantly under attack, where there's no pressure to conform etc. With Pinterest and such what you are essentially getting is the "Wikipedia complex" of "curating" turning into gamification (T-H-L-K-D):
quora.com/Wikis/Is-there-a-Wiki-technology-with-a-gamification-layer
socialmediatoday.com/tomhumbarger/378607/gamification-everywhere-what-it

gamification is here to stay. Anyone less than 40 has grown up playing video games and have become accustomed to “gamelike” interactions.

I think what you are seeing is people who would otherwise be posting stuff on Wikipedia are going to be more and more sharing it with friends they care about instead on other sites that are less strictly regulated, it's a mass fragmentation of userbase...


† (On the other hand, there's often no attribution of authors on some places too such as that sometimes these new sites like Pinterest are being called illegal in some rhetoric. People have a point though there too, especially when it comes to sites like Tumblr who deliberately make no effort to encourage people to attribute pictures to the original models/photographers/artists in order to get more content put up)

This post has been edited by Selina: Mon 26th March 2012, 3:24am

[Web Fred]

I think what you are seeing is people who would otherwise be posting stuff on Wikipedia are going to be more and more sharing it with friends they care about instead on other sites that are less strictly regulated, it's a mass fragmentation of userbase...

I disagree. The two userbases are totally different, with different outlooks. And to be honest, different IQs.

Social media sites tend to be either about advertising one's business/band/book etc, keeping up with one's family, or doing the online equivalent of texting your mates.

The last two are unlikely to have any interest in something as 'heavy' as an encyclopaedia. The former, well they just get someone like Kohs to write it for them.

I don't believe there is a particularly large crossover.

Which sort of gets to the crux of the matter with Jimbo and Gardner crying out for more editors whilst all the time forgetting about quality always being better than quantity.

Why the hell would WP want Trisha and her mallrat mates editing WP?

[Text]

Why the hell would WP want Trisha and her mallrat mates editing WP?

The hardcore nerd and geek was the main target for computer, internet, and technological paraphernalia up to a few years ago. Now that PCs are "mainstream" and internet connections are fast enough and simple to set up, every average non-nerd with a good social life is expected to be the main target for Web 2.0 products. Who cares about what they write? They just need to write, so that the ad-cash flows in.

[GlassBeadGame]

Why the hell would WP want Trisha and her mallrat mates editing WP?

The hardcore nerd and geek was the main target for computer, internet, and technological paraphernalia up to a few years ago. Now that PCs are "mainstream" and internet connections are fast enough and simple to set up, every average non-nerd with a good social life is expected to be the main target for Web 2.0 products. Who cares about what they write? They just need to write, so that the ad-cash flows in.

It is not like the nerds had much to say either.

[Proabivouac]

…education…is…propaganda.

Let's keep it simple. Academic scholarship is not "education" in that it doesn't purport to be somethng anyone should know in order to be a decent citizen. A scholarly mission is not the same as an "educational" one.

This post has been edited by Proabivouac: Tue 27th March 2012, 5:02am