The social stream on March 8 was filled with stories of women portrayed not just as mothers or wives, defined primarily by their place in the home. The stories were complex, as was the larger definition of women woven by these stories read together. In the cacophony of our era of self-broadcasting, a simpler narrative could not hold. For that, I think we should all be grateful. As a woman, I certainly am.

With both Happy International Women’s Day and Felicidades Mujeres among Twitter’s top trends, millions of stories were shared online, eliciting reactions that often added further nuance. Through social sharing, the conversation widens, reaching people who perhaps had never before entertained a certain position or hadn’t considered it deeply enough to compare it to their own views and respond.

We now each have millions of nuggets of information fed to us daily that, depending on our information consumption approach, can narrow or broaden our worldview. We are what we eat, in literature as in food. As Chimamanda Adichie beautifully illustrates in the TED video “The Danger of a Single Story,” a young Nigerian writer who has only read British and American children’s books will populate her own stories with blue-eyed children playing in the snow.

Adichie argues for a multi-threaded narrative that allows us to see stereotypes and move beyond them to have a fuller emotional response, a reaction beyond pity, for example. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete,” Adichie says. “It robs people of dignity.” While she does not mention social media, it struck me that she is advocating the kind of narrative that social media, especially when used with curiosity and the technological tools to facilitate curation, has made easier for us to compose.

One technological forum that capitalizes on this potential is Women on the Verge, founded by Tucsonan Ana Lewis. It reaches some 10,000 people through social media and facilitates conversations primarily among women about personal experience, self-improvement and professional advancement. It is about being supportive and nuanced and breaking stereotypes, and it has grown wildly in popularity. “It showcases how true this concept is — how ready we are for it,” Lewis said.

Also giving me hope is the recent viral sharing of the #KONY2012 video. There are certainly problems with the video — significantly, its lack of nuance — but the bright spot is that tens of millions of people watched a half-hour video about a devastating African war that has long been ignored outside of its geographical zone of suffering. With a click, millions of people were invited to care, and they did, at least enough to pass on the video.

Admittedly, millions of people watching a video does not stop a war. But it could add aspects to the narrative. It could begin a conversation. Through the conversation could grow empathy, the baseline for better human interaction in all of its forums.

Ana Lewis, founder of Women on the Verge

Ana Lewis always wanted a sister. As an adult, she found herself gravitating toward women’s groups for support in her personal and professional lives.

A web designer who works from home, she especially sought an online community of women, and she found something like that in the now-defunct online bulletin board Pleiades, which was targeted at women in technology and business owners who work from home.

In 1999, she designed what she was looking for and soon got 60 or so emails from women who wanted to be included. The problem was that they had to be manually entered into the group.

“The technology for what I wanted to do just didn’t exist yet,” Lewis said. She shut the online community down, unable to juggle managing the site on top of her other responsibilities.

A decade passed, and Lewis realized the time was right. The technology now existed to create the online conversations she craved, and the need for women to have a supportive and entirely un-catty forum in which to explore self-improvement was just as acute.

In 2009, Women on the Verge was resurrected, this time starting as a Twitter account. The website now gets more than 1 million hits a month from all over the world, and more than 200 women contribute blog posts, video blog posts and participate in a radio show. Women on the Verge is active on just about every social network out there, and @womenontheverge on Twitter now has more than 10,000 followers who exchange views on the monthly topics Lewis offers as talking points.

“We really do want to support each other,” Lewis said. “We’re really trying to break the stereotype” of women as catty and competitive. A Hispanic women in the field of technology, Lewis knows something about breaking stereotypes, and she’s passionate about helping other women do the same.

The success of the site “showcases how true this concept is and how ready we are for it,” she said. Many of the community members are authors or women in the field of technology, including Tucsonan Jessica Northey, who with more than 313,000 followers frequently makes it onto lists of Twitter powerhouses.

Participation in Women on the Verge is free, and the site is ad-free. In celebration of International Women’s Day today, the community is talking about sisterhood and how to build a supportive community. International Women’s Day, as well as Felicidades Mujeres, is trending on Twitter. That seems clear evidence that the community is growing.

The page — like the seed library, which opened Jan. 28 — is new and still growing. It now has 254 fans. Hernandez’s method is propelled less by premeditated strategy and more by an intuitive sense of who her audience.

“The project just really invites community. It’s about community,” Hernandez said by way of explaining what drives her social media use. “We are just really wanting to engage the community.”

One way that she does that is to post a lot of photos. She uses her iPhone to snap photos of small and often little noticed gardens, as well as volunteers hard at work repackaging donated seeds into quantities more appropriately sized for a single person.

“I think it’s really important to acknowledge the faces involved,” she said. “People respond to visual things.”

The project involves a compelling mix of new and old technologies. The seeds are held in old card catalogs, long overshadowed by electronic databases. But electronic databases are key to promoting the project and ensuring its popularity. What is being promoted is not simply the library or sharing or even biodiversity, but also a renewed awareness of our agricultural past, Hernandez said. She herself is a new gardener.

Much of the funding the library received as part of the project went to buying books about gardening and seed saving. The seeds, which are all heirloom and open-pollinated seeds, were donated by local gardeners or seed companies.

So far, the promotion strategy seems to have worked. Hernandez says about two-thirds of the more than 6,000 seed packets in the library have been checked out and, she hopes, planted. Right now, librarians are encouraging people to get started, but eventually they will have to focus more on the return end of the check-out equation. “The idea is that it becomes over time self-sustaining” as people return seeds from their plants to the library and established gardeners continue contributing, Hernandez said.

The Facebook page was recently affected by the new Pima County social media guidelines, about which I hope to post more soon. The Pima County library branch pages now bear the county seal as part of the page’s main image, and employees posting to the page are called out by name in the Info section. There is also a link to Pima County’s social software commenting guidelines.

This is the second in my irregular series on Facebook pages maintained by Tucsonans.

1. Rockin’ Gourmet – Live From Tucson

It’s a project intended as an “indie twist on the Food Network.” The idea — spearheaded by Jamie Laboz and Cristina Williams of The Modeens — is that bands play live and share their favorite recipes. The Cleavers, The Cordials and Aaron Gilmartin have been featured so far, with only one episode and one “snack” posted. The videos are fun to watch and well edited, and it seems like there’s a lot to work with in the Tucson music/food scene. I look forward to more. You can watch the videos on Facebook or on their YouTube channel.

2. Tucson Urban Gardener

The couple behind Powhaus Productions — Jared McKinley and Nadine Roselle — are now at work on a plant-focused blog, a blog for “plant-freaks.” The subtitle is a pretty clear indication of the tone. I’ve found the posts thoughtful and thought-provoking, among them this one about the potential of dog poo in compost (really!). They, and I, also love video.

3. Seed Library of Pima County Public Library

A super cool convergence of old and new technology: card catalog drawers filled with paper envelopes of seeds, an exchange, an electronic publicity push. On the Facebook page, you can get seed-related literary quotes, photos of seeds entering their drawers and seeds sprouting in soil, and updates of the library system’s gardening-related events. The library branches are also active on Twitter.

4. Kuisine by Kathy

Our very own TucsonCitizen.com food blogger and Facebooking pro! Check out her page for photos, writings and recipes. Her taste runs Midwestern meets Southwest, although she’s just back from the Caribbean and says she gathered some recipes while she was away. Stay tuned for what she cooks up next.

I read Janet Paskin’s story The Velvet Rope in the Columbia Journalism Review this month and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Basically, she lays out the primary reason journalists like to see their name in print — they get paid more for it. This is, for me, a point of frustration.

I like to think that good journalism is not a thing of the past. I like to think that the web is where it’s going to be at for journalism for the foreseeable future. If the industry is serious about online and good online journalism, it needs to back that up with money.

Yes, yes, I understand the laws of supply and demand. I understand that there is lots of content online that is supplied for free or cheap. News organizations are floundering to identify a business plan that works in a drastically disrupted market, and it is money that news organizations are primarily after. Good journalism, in the list of priorities, comes in a distant second.

It seems to me, though, that this is a moment in which resolve is needed. A mentality shift is needed. Instead of outlets using the online-only status of a story as a reason to pay a reporter less, they should pay reporters an equal amount. If the work is of the same caliber, why not? It does, after all, cost less to publish on the web. This shift in pay and status seems to me an important part of the necessary industry shift. Major outlets — that’s right, New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker — should take the lead.

As I was curating TucsonCitizen.com’s Twitter feed during the State of the Union address last night, I noticed that President Barack Obama’s seemingly uncontroversial statement that women ought to receive pay equal to men coincided with a lot of Twitter chatter about women — three specific women, in fact.

One woman who was the subject of much discussion was Gabrielle Giffords. There were many tweets about how her hug with the president brought them to tears. There were also many tweets about how great she looks in red. There were a lot of tweets about the first lady, Michelle Obama, most of them about her crisp blue dress and later, about who designed it and how much it cost. There were several tweets about Hillary Clinton and her appearance – to what degree she had aged, the appeal of her outfit, the wisdom of wearing a headband.

This chatter, at least in the #SOTU feed as I observed it, far outweighed any substantial conversation about these women or their public role. In the context of Obama’s statement, I found it especially disturbing. It’s not that I am against observations of appearance or fashion. In high school, I aspired to be a fashion designer. I do think how one presents oneself is important. But the volume of the how-she-looks chatter struck me as a symptom of the larger problem: Women are still judged disproportionately by how they look, even accomplished women with important policy roles.

Sure, House Speaker John Boehner was the target of a fair amount of superficial chatter about the darkness of his tan and the color of his tie, but there was about an equal number of observations about his behavior, his policy positions and political strategy. The same was not true in regards to three of the high-profile women present that night.

For a broader look at the Twittersphere reaction, check out 10,000 Words’s State of the Union infographic.

]]> http://tucsoncitizen.com/social-citizen/2012/01/25/state-of-the-union-reaction-on-twitter-with-eyes-on-women/feed/ 0 http://tucsoncitizen.com/social-citizen/2012/01/20/ethnic-studies-petition-goes-viral-on-social-media/ http://tucsoncitizen.com/social-citizen/2012/01/20/ethnic-studies-petition-goes-viral-on-social-media/#comments Sat, 21 Jan 2012 01:01:49 +0000 Carli Brosseau http://tucsoncitizen.com/social-citizen/?p=201
The battle over whether Tucson Unified School District ought to allow students to enroll in a Mexican American studies course as anything but an elective has been simmering for months inside the legislative and judicial systems. Students and activists were stirred up about it, but few others seemed to pay all that close attention. But when TUSD’s board voted to end the Mexican American Studies program and began taking the books used to teach those courses out of classrooms, protest erupted.

TUSD denied that its reaction could be fairly characterized as banning books (in TUSD Governing Board President Mark Stegeman’s own words here). Nonetheless, people on the street were talking about what does or does not constitute a book ban, what is or isn’t American and what does or doesn’t spur learning. What was an Arizona issue of limited national interest became an issue that got the attention of people, especially literary people, across the country. Books, we all seem to agree, are important to learning. (Some would take it a step further and argue that they may be a key ingredient in surviving one’s childhood, to cultivating imagination and a sense of opportunity. I can attest that they were for me.)

Once the narrative that books and free speech are good and book bans are Orwellian got established, outrage spread. It was social media, which some describe as itself a threat to general literacy, that helped to fan the flames. Presente.org, which describes itself as a national organization to amplify the political voice of Latino communities, created an online petition, and it has been tweeted and retweeted with incredible speed. What real-world manifestation the social media indignation will take is to be seen. Here’s a small taste of what the feeds looked like today.

The University of Arizona alumnus saw an opportunity for a business that put all the tools necessary for workers to cooperate from disparate locations in one place. Services include a private, encrypted workplace, 100 Gigabytes of storage and sharing and web conferences for up to 200 people, not to mention an aggregated calendar. It also offers a “bird’s eye view” feature as a way to keep track of status updates and clients.

YourOfficeAnywhere.com is both a web and mobile app, and it uses encryption on par with financial services companies and defense contractors. “Our chief technology officer works for a defense contractor,” Hartwig said by way of emphasizing the seriousness with which he views security.

Although Tucson may at first seem an inauspicious place to launch a tech company, Hartwig said he intends to stay. “We’ve found incredible talent here,” he said. “We would like to remain in Tucson.”

To access an audience outside of the Old Pueblo, Hartwig and his team have relied on revenue-sharing deals that allow YourOfficeAnywhere.com to make use of the marketing channels of large associations such as the National Association of Wholesalers, which has 32,000 members.

With an increasing number of people working from home, Hartwig’s strategy seems timely.

The idea is that you may not have time to volunteer or cash to hand over, but you probably do a fair bit of web searching. (You’re reading this blog post, after all.) Why not ensure that some piece of the revenue produced  goes to a good cause?

The technology that Tucson Arts Brigade is using comes from GoodSearch, a search engine that donates 50 percent of its sponsored search revenue to charities and schools designated by its users. The search is powered by Yahoo, and the money donated comes from advertisers. The idea was the brainchild of Ken Ramberg (the founder of JOBTRAK, now a division of Monster.com) and JJ Ramberg (an MSNBC anchor and the former director of marketing at Cooking.com). They figured diverting some of the $8 billion search engines make yearly to charities would be a good idea, and they created the technology to help make that possible. Since the company’s 2005 launch, lots of charities have come on board.

The toolbar is no panacea for nonprofit fundraising in a down economy, but it is easy. GoodSearch makes the stats available so you can track your impact in your chosen charity’s revenue. Tucson Arts Brigade has received $244.43 through GoodSearch since it started using the service in December 2010.

In this season of giving, however, this is probably one of the easier ways. That’s why, although administrators have been quietly using the technology for years, they sent out an email blast about the technology only more recently.

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Jodi Netzer, the group’s outreach and marketing director. “We’ll see what happens.”

Netzer is especially excited about GoodShop, an online shopping service that sends a percentage of every purchase to a designated nonprofit.

If you’re going to do it anyway, why not send a little love to a cause you believe in?

Note: The initial post said that Tucson Arts Brigade began using the service in 2007. In fact, the group began using it last year.