Digital Exclusions

By some of the links I have put up today, you can tell I have been catching up on my blogospheric meanderings. I just finished reading a post by Bob Geiger and I laughed out so loud I had just had to write about it.

In Here's How Fringe I Am, Fred Thompson, Bob describes his fringieness. Here's a sample :

• Attended my son's middle-school orientation. He's "graduating" from elementary school this Thursday -- though, oddly enough, exhibiting few signs of being a "fringe element" despite having me for a father -- and on that day, our lunatic activities will center around taking many pictures of him and his friends and going for ice cream afterwards. I personally plan on ordering the Cookies and Communist Crunch.




• Volunteered at a local community clean-up effort to rid our town of the trash spawned by a predominantly-Democratic community that clearly hates America. Went to weenie roast afterwards… Put catsup on my hotdog to show how much I despise American values.

My favorite :

• Took my son to the driving range with me. While we whacked golf balls, we discussed our lack of family values and my little boy stunned me with this question: "Dad, why haven't you been divorced a bunch of times like Fred Thompson and the other Republican presidential candidates?" "Now son," I said. "Senator Thompson's only been divorced once. You're thinking of Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich."

Of course, I can not not quote the punchline : So that's about it. I only regret that we didn’t have time to burn an American flag this week.

Harrumph!

Wikipedia shows its colors with the death of Steve Gilliard and they are white and pink and and ivory and peach.

There is an astoundingly racist discussion going on in Wikipedia on the subject of whether Steve Gilliard should be included in Wikipedia. I have added my two cents to the discussion after I read this:

He was definitely widely cited by his peers, in the liberal blogsphere and therefore meets the notability requirement. If Atrios, Markos, Josh Marshall are all citing him, I think he should remain.

So as long as white, male bloggers like Markos Mooulitzas, Josh Marshall and Duncan Black quote you, you are opened the gates of notability. Anybody else, no matter how important they are to the blogosphere, is kept out.

Unless, of course, you publish a book --and that's only if the book is by a major publisher with wide distribution.

So somebody like me, Chris Rabb or BrownFemiPower, Jill Filipovich or Lauren Bruce are out. Barbara O'Brien, Jessica Valenti are in.

Lynne D. Johnson and George Kelly maybe are in if their companies push for the page. If they won't, then they're out as well. Lindsay Beyerstein could be included and so Amanda Marcotte given they are quote by 2 of the 3 BWM gatekeepers.

My background is in literary analysis and philosophy of language --I actually read Lakoff for the first time 20 years ago. Still find it funny people in the lefty blogosphere think he is the second coming of Christ

Anyhoo ... let's get a bit more granular here.

Let's start with the title of our panel :
Is Cyberspace Colorblind? Addressing Race and Class Online

Right there we have an interesting juxtaposition. Why are COLORBLIND and RACE lumped in with the word CLASS? From a semiological point of view this is particularly significant.

Without trying to develop assumptions of intent, from a semantics point of view it at least shows that grammatically, the organizers look at race not as a BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE but as something associated with CAPITAL. Or, in the world of web 2.0 should we call it CAPITALS - social capital, political capital, technological capital, financial capital.

The issue here then is what do we mean by :
1. Race
2. Class

And to tie it in with the technology aspect of the conference, we need to further define :
3. Cyberspace
4. Online

That would then pose the interesting dynamic of the word
5. Colorblind

Most Web 2.0 technologies have been developed from a cultural dominance standpoint. It is all in English and not just any English but the US English keyboard format.

To those of us who have international switches on our keyboards, it is obvious the US keyboard format is the dominant grammatical expression of the web --a dominance that was not obvious when publishing online meant using a WYSIWYG application like DreamWeaver.