Without a Yard

What do KISS, IKEA & Muslim women have in common? Unfortunately there’s no snappy punchline, it’s just an excuse to weave a nerd narrative through a bunch of interesting news stories.

I’m sure by now you’ve got your Oshawa B&B resos, relieved to hear the city’s glam-rocker residents’ KISS ARMY allegiance wasn’t in vain. The band ran a straightforward prove-how-much-you-love-us online contest, which was styled like a petition, requiring city residents to submit email addresses, & promised a concert for the winning city (regrettably it was a KISS concert).  After the band announced the winning city, they published a tour schedule that did not include Oshawa. Now, it doesn’t take Columbo to examine a tour schedule & discover a gap that is geographically & schedule-wise able to accommodate a ‘secret’ show or ‘by popular demand’ second night in a venue (Hello Wilco, Welcome to Massey Hall x2!).  Nonetheless, the interwebs’ hyper hypos have an irrepressible impulse to stretch their harnesses.  The city was up in arms, thousands joined Facebook protest groups, locals became ‘representatives’ on news outlets, fansites heaved & a PR maelstrom ensued.  Can’t completely blame unnerved fans for their reaction, but it proves that an online ‘petition’ campaign banking on engaging region-specific communities must reach all stakeholders clearly, consistently & concurrently – online & in ‘public’/mainstream media messaging – or face the wrath of multiple red-dye-tongue-waggings.

From KISS to kisses, The Times’ Freakonomics blogger Steven Dubner references gay rights kissing protests in Salt Lake City (or ‘IRL’ – in real life) in a fantastic quorum post called ‘How Much Do Protests Really Matter?’.  It’s a great long piece that highlights some of the most effective protests throughout history – & puts the KISS KRAP, ridiculous IKEA font fiasco & the ultimate online overreaction of #AmazonFail (of which Shirkey’s blushing reflection is the best) – into perspective.  Kent State, this ain’t. Aside from totally dismissing the online flareups, what can be gleaned from recent issues that’ve made their way into the mainstream?

One positive example of addressing consumer concerns straight-on is the triage-style response from Tim Horton’s to their comp’ed coffee clusterfritter.  After being accused of supporting anti-gay groups, HQ calmly, widely, publicly stated otherwise, while explaining the franchisee relationship & corporate values in a balanced manner.  Though they’ll go down in Twitter history as being ‘too slow’, realistically a major multi-national addressing an online issue centered on a (not ideal ideologically…) backwoods charity BBQ in less than 48 hours (counting weekend days…sadly the downside of our email era is expectation to check 24/7) is approaching impressive.

Finally, last Sunday’s NYTimes magazine on women’s issues had a special ‘The Medium’ column on Feminist Hawks by Virginia Herrernan. It illustrates how ‘motherhood’ issues (for lack of a better word…) can be repackaged, re-purposed & emailed for protest campaigns under new auspices.  In this case an anti-Afghan outlook was wrapped in women’s rights.  Herrernan tracked a popular email petition propelled by pundits such as David Horowitz that sought signatures supporting persecuted Muslim women, but stated military aggression was the solution to women’s liberation.  “This material is expected to help seal Horowitz’s general case for the war on terror, though he has not yet changed the name of his cause to, say, the war on misogyny.”

It might be hard to assign a #fail to online protests writ large, but the summer months brought a new level of inane chatter that could be called out & calmed down as the temperature drops & leaves begin to fall.  Creating online communities, sharing fact-checked/substantiated information & organizing IRL events is one of the strengths of the internet.  Our creative communities’ ongoing successes in subverting negative legislative/funding changes & presenting a strong case for supporting the arts is my favourite example of combining social networks, multimedia & the power of assembly to affect legislative change & public discourse.  Maybe revisiting the history of protests & learning from past well-informed, organized, thoughtful participants, will remind us of this.  You’ve been assigned Whingeing History for first period, first semester – enjoy the final days of summer, kids

Since there’s plenty of time to browbeat, spam & harangue y’all into voting for our South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) panel about passionate people (please do vote early’n'often here, seriously), I wanted to riff on the theme of a spot-on proposal, discovered thanks to Rad Campaign‘s founder Allyson Kapin twitterstream (@womenwhotech).

Sarah Granger of WomenCount has an awesome lineup of women speakers on board to discuss ‘The Silent Majority: Women in Politics Online.’ Regardless of whether or not you plan to attend SXSWi, could you please click that link, create an account & vote for this panel as a favour to me? Please?

Timing’s spot-on, with scorching-hot political discussions about proposed healthcare overhauls & infinitely blog-able nutbars attending local townhall sessions.  Countering the divisive & anger-fueled ‘discussions’ occurring on this subject is an online space launched today, built by BlogHer & the Sunlight Foundation for women to share their thoughts on the healthcare debate. Users are encouraged to employ Sunlight Foundation’s roster of online tools, such as OpenCongress, to efficiently search & read the healthcare bill’s contents.  It’s telling that the first space online for public policy conversations by/for women is on the subject of healthcare, a public policy and private sector subject area that is in dire need of more estrogen after hundreds of years of male-only pharma trials & medical studies.

Hopefully by March this space‘ll serve as a case study for the ‘Silent Majority’ panelists to demonstrate that a large female audience will eagerly contribute to serious policy discussions when offered a space & encouragement; & this space‘ll also contrast sharply with mainstream media coverage of screaming match soundbites, insult-slinging & fear-mongering.

While it might seem ‘kumbya’ to state that these policy discussions would be more civil had they been shepherded by women, having worked for two whip-smart, balanced, strong & self-effacing female politicos, I truly believe that this is true & look optimistically to Kathleen Sebelius‘ ‘tenacious d’ throughout her career to deliver real reforms from the Health & Human Services Department in the months to come.

The clearest authoritative communicator on the touchy subject of lower participation rates of women in politics is Dee Dee Myers.  In her 2008 ‘Why Women Should Rule the World’, Myers devotes an entire chapter to ‘Closing the Confidence Gap,’ where she specifically lists verbal tics (starting phrases with ‘I think..’) & self-discouraging mental patterns that eroded her confidence while working in the West Wing. (More recently a Canadian expert scholar on this subject, Sylvia Bashevkin, published ‘Women, Power & Politics,’ which I’d highly recommend if you want a maple-glazed variety).

As Myers recounts her personal experience in one of the most coveted staffer roles interacting directly with news media, she supports her heartening &/or cringe-inducing anecdotes with research & interview quotes from biologists, sociologists & politicos (including Sebelius .  What made me think of this chapter within the context of BlogHer/Sunlight/SilentMajority was this quote from Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, which merges gendered discussion participation, voices online & confidence perfectly:

“There is no talent difference that I can see.  There is sometimes a difference between the men and women in the willingness to claim airtime in class.  The men seem to feel that they can start talking and eventually they’ll have a point to make.  The women are more likely to feel that they ought to have something valuable to say before they say it.”

We’re definitely lucky to have wry commentary coming frequently from bloggers such as Kadi O’Malley, as well as the many sharp female print jounalists from Canadian dailies extending conversations from their columns online, but we are unfortunately still at a loss when it comes to quantity & choice for viewing the political landscape through a women writer’s lens, professional or amateur.

Blogging about this at all means entering a loaded & delicate subject matter (landmines include ‘tokenism,’ ‘quotas,’ ‘man-bashing,’ etc.), but I feel the same as I did when I blogged in the winter to mark The Churchill Society‘s support of women in politics.  What’s changed is that with more collaboration between female writers online & the tools to synthesise information to suit a searcher’s specific policy interests, in the months ahead we’ll hopefully see more safe spaces built for informed female users to discuss specific policy issues, flesh out their views, disagree honestly & openly – without descending into name-calling.