Road Weary
It’s been a weird few months. Obligations without end. I finally ran down yesterday and had to sleep. I think it had something to do with driving to and from Norman, Oklahoma from Ft. Smith in one day. Eleven hours driving on the road, and then three more hours passengering back to Little Rock with my girlfriend driving. Today I’ve got more work than I can possibly do in one day to do, which will be followed tomorrow by 9 or 10 hours worth of driving to San Antonio.
I must be getting old or something. I used to love this sort of thing. I wrote some notes tonight for a presentation at the CCCC’s conference. I’m participating in a SIG on blogging with Scott and Krista and what seems like a cast of thousands. Ten minutes worth of presentation. I wonder how you can say much of anything in that time?
My focus has shifted a lot since I tagged along on the proposal for this SIG. I am no longer all that concerned about “blogging.” What interests me most is the impact of technology on discursive practice. That took me back to photography, and away from all of the nonsense about electronic discourse. Of course it leads back, but it gets there via a very circuitous route.
Looking at the statistics from the Pew Internet and American Life survey, I begin to wonder why people make so much of the race/class/gender disparities in new technology. I think if you surveyed the impact of the telegraph, the proportions would be just as astounding. I suspect it was primarily affluent white males that initially sent and received telegrams. This is surprising how?
For that matter, I wonder what the statistics are on vehicle registration? I’d bet that there are probably more cars registered to males (due to the vehicle=penis equation) than women. The problem is that this sort of statistical evaluation of the impact of technology hides the real disparities that do exist. For example, I remember thinking when I was flying last week: “Why so few male flight attendants?” I only saw one on four flights. Given that the flight attendant is pretty much a waiter (of which you will find many in earth-bound restaurants), how come more males haven’t entered that particular job. It’s probably because the stereotype of “stewardess” as a female profession persists, even in the age of budget air travel. Perhaps, more significantly, why didn’t I see any female pilots? Something tells me that something of a “good-ole-boys” club still exists there. It’s as if these gender/class disparities sometimes get frozen when an industry is new. That would tend to suggest that the fate of women in technology is similarly constrained given the history of computers.
It’s as if the newness of any technology places a magnifying glass over preexisting disparities and blows them out of proportion. It takes a lot to overcome that. The fate of women writers in the nineteenth century seems a case-in-point. Writing was a poorly paid profession, and yet it was at least moderately accessible to women. They were, however, judged by biases that had no basis in fact. Perhaps what’s needed is some sort of Internet recruitment to level the playing field. I suspect it is already underway. As more disparate cultures come online (the Pew report is exclusively American), the more even the road should become. Funny, though, that this hasn’t happened in the airline industry. Maybe it’s still a class thing. I don’t know.
The only thing I know is that my small neighborhood is probably inordinately skewed towards women (I tend to prefer their writing) and has a large foreign constituency. So when people talk about how lily-white things are in the states, I tend to think “really?” even though I know it’s true. I seldom find myself driving on white roads; they’re usually black or tan.
