1. Emil Durkheim on April 9, 2004 12:35 PM writes...

Danah's post wasn't particularly about racial discrimination; any category of person (status achieved or ascribed) would do to make the same point. Her argument is about blaming the victim.

And until we know just what factors actually contribute to more and less participation, then concerns about de facto discrimination are very reasonable.

It would be nice to see some acknowledgment that broader participation is better than narrower, that processes (witting or otherwise) which act to reduce participation are not a good thing, that some serious inquiry into what factors influence participation is in order, and that choosing to participate is never a completely unconstrained choice.

2. Clay Shirky on April 9, 2004 1:49 PM writes...

Hogwash -- anyone likening a situation to racial discrimination is writing about race. Her point is not about blaming the victim, her point is to conflate matters over which there is some choice with matters over which there is no choice. And that muddies the debate.

3. Andrew T. Fiore on April 9, 2004 3:22 PM writes...

Clay is right that the race comparison is problematic, but it's more because it's hard to argue about racial discrimination. Unless the comparison is incredibly apt (which it isn't here, though neither is it entirely wrong), playing the race card implicitly demonizes anyone who argues against you. It can obfuscate the real argument with politically correct claim-staking.

But, even though the race comparison has too much baggage to work well here, it still has some merit: in a time-limited context, the prior experience that people bring to the table does matter. There were many researchers at the social computing symposium who had never used IRC before, including well-known, respected, published folks. I know this because I helped several of them download clients and connect to the server.

In pointing out that everyone at the symposium should be familiar with IRC because it is decades old, I think Clay mistakenly assumes that researchers in some area of social computing are necessarily enthusiasts about all social computing. One can study email usage, even become an expert, without cracking open an IRC client.

This is especially true of the older generation of computer-mediated communication researchers; many of them trained in other disciplines and later applied their expertise to CMC simply as a fruitful venue. This stands in contrast to enthusiasts who study or write about what they enjoy, for whom the enthusiasm for the medium motivates first.

At the symposium, since not everybody was familiar with the tools, including some of those who were being criticized in the channel during their talks, danah's point about exclusion is apt, even if the race analogy is rather inflammatory.

Twenty-four hours is not a realistic amount of time for a neophyte to become familiar with IRC tools and norms of communication, which are more complicated than those in most other chat rooms.

4. Andrew T. Fiore on April 9, 2004 3:26 PM writes...

To clarify the second paragraph of my previous comment: Clay said that race isn't applicable because it's an immutable part of identity, whereas one can control whether one has a laptop with an IRC client. I would say that one cannot gain facility with IRC in the time-limited context of a two-day workshop, which makes having/not having that facility an effectively immutable characteristic for the purposes of this discussion.

5. Ross Mayfield on April 9, 2004 7:30 PM writes...

I think Andrew just pointed out the difference between social computing and social software.

6. Bill Seitz on April 9, 2004 8:27 PM writes...

It seems like a good 2-part plan for helping the newbies would be:

1. a generic intro to IRC and its use as a conference backchannel

2. for any conference that's planning on having wifi available, to have a page which includes a link to #1 plus some additional info that would be specifically relevant to the attendees of that conference. Intro/context, planned URL of conference IRC channel, URLs of reasonably-active existing channels that may be of interest to attendees (as a place to practice before the conference), etc.

(I'm not an unabashed fan of backchannel activity, but figure it's better to teach a man to fish than to whine about the people who brought fish with them, or something...)

7. Seb on April 9, 2004 9:41 PM writes...

I think Andrew is dead on. Familiarity with IRC does not follow from having been invited to that event. I'm sure some of the participants weren't in a position to actually "opt-out".

8. orcmid on April 10, 2004 8:38 PM writes...

http://nfocentrale.net/orcmid/blog/2004_04_04_lair-chive.asp#108164273460949479

[When I learn to make trackback work, I will trackback.]

I think seeking to find ways to make the back channel work ignores ways in which the activity is meeting-hostile, involving more important, non-technology concerns. I see us abdicating important questions about why we are there, what we signify by our attendance, and what our responsibility might be for the outcome.

9. Danyel Fisher on April 11, 2004 3:26 PM writes...

Leaving aside questions of "backchannel good/backchannel bad" (and I have extraordinarily mixed feelings about it), I personally introduced two or three people at the conference to IRC who hadn't used it before and brought them into the back channel. "Lack of familiarity" doesn't cut it as an excuse; the divisions were pretty much "I want to use it" vs "I don't have my laptop, or I think it's rude, or I prefer to say snarky things over IM."

10. zephoria on April 11, 2004 6:30 PM writes...

Wow - it's always a little strange to come back from a foreign country and find my points misinterpreted. (Clay - this attack doesn't sound like you. Perhaps you have too much invested in your belief of the backchannel?)

Anyhow, let me dive into a few points here, first by challenging Clay's post and then by going back to my original point, which i believe gets lost in this discussion of race.

"A person has no agency with regards to their race." Well... this isn't entirely true. Race is a social construction and its culturally determined. In the States, we have one construction of "black" but my Irish great-grandmother was considered "colored" back in the day. South Africa has an entirely different construction of "black." During apartheid, there were two racial constructions - black and white. Not all Asians were considered black there. I don't remember the complete breakdown but i think that Japanese were considered white and Chinese were considered black. That culture had its own construction of race.

Back to agency... There's a key element of my post that i think was lost in the shuffle. I'm not talking about race; i'm talking about class. In the States, we conflate race and class constantly. The primary quote of concern - "any person of color can get on the Internet so the race divide is their fault" is a reference to the kind of rhetoric that i constantly hear. Over and over again. Given that it was not the central point of my post, i didn't actually dive in to break down the fact that people talk about race when they really mean class. The digital divide is not about race even though we construct the conversation about race. It is about class.

Here's the key question: do people have agency over their socio-economic status? There's a battle for the sociologists that i'm not going to get into. But the short answer is that class is mutable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that individuals have agency. Of course, perhaps as a libertarian, you believe that people have more agency over their socio-economic status than i do.

Clay has a very meritocratic perspective on the world; i do not. Or more precisely, i think that meritocracy is a utopian fantasy that only plays out in books. The point of those two sentences is to highlight that agency isn't everything, that there are other factors - cultural factors, psychological factors, personal experience factors. These additional factors play a significant role in people's ability to interact with a tool because we aren't simply interacting with a tool. We are interacting with a set of social norms, values, expectations. Worse, in the conferences in which i am referring, we are interacting with people with whom we have real life interactions. We don't want to fuck up the social norms in the backchannel because of its consequences in the physical channel.

And yes, there is a very clear link here to being a marginalized population. Try being the only girl in the room. You feel this pressure to represent all women, that if you fuck up, you're going to fuck up for more people than just yourself. It's about reputation, it's about honor. These are cultural factors embedded in participation as a marginalized person in a given context. And in the IRC backchannel, there are some damn experienced people who make the inexperienced ones feel out of place. Telling people to get over it doesn't fix it.

11. zephoria on April 11, 2004 6:33 PM writes...

Actually, Danyel, that's not entirely true. There were certainly a few people who didn't have laptops and there were definitely many who thought that it was rude and inappropriate. Honestly, i'd attribute a lot of this to lack of cultural familiarity. Two cultures colliding. But there were also half a dozen folks who sat on the backchannel but never typed a damn thing because they weren't sure what to do. It was great when a few came out of their shell and participated.

In either case, your example of IM or rudeness plays precisely into my point about lack of familiarity... it's not simply familiarity with the tool, but familiarty with the culture.

12. Andrew T. Fiore on April 12, 2004 11:31 AM writes...

Orcmid's full entry (as he linked above) is great. I elaborated about why it's great, but trackbacks seem somewhat broken from my old version of MT to Many-to-Many's newer one. Here's what I was trying to link to, followed by a bit of relevant excerpt. Please go read Orcmid's entry, too.

http://tresolini.org/andrew/words/archive/000005.html

I think backchannelers need to ask themselves honestly whether the notion that they are using the backchannel because the talks suck is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[...]

On a related note, I take issue with Clay Shirky's assertion that presenters should address the seductiveness of the backchannel by being more compelling, more "expert" at holding the attention of the audience. The audience (in most cases) does not consist of children whose attention wanders without shiny things to look at -- which is good, because a lot of important and interesting research doesn't consist of shiny baubles. Is USA Today a better paper than The New York Times because it has brighter colors, more infographics, and shorter articles? Well, it's certainly better at holding the attention of its audience. The abdication of the reader or listener's agency (responsibility?) leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

13. Clay Shirky on April 12, 2004 11:58 AM writes...

Andrew, you seem to be approaching this from the question of whether the back-channel should exist. It exists, and will always exist, from now on.

So I'm not _advocating_ the pressure this creates on speakers, I'm simply noting that it's there.

14. Clay Shirky on April 12, 2004 12:02 PM writes...

danah,

First, let me apologize -- that sort of argumentation _is_ unlike me, and I was wrong to put it in that tone. I'm sorry.

The hot-button part of the issue for me is not the back-channel, but rather the use of racial discrimination as an analogy. I don't buy the elision of race and class because there are middle-class blacks who are discriminated against in the way middle-class whites are not. The thing that accounts for the added discrimination is race.

Class is more plastic than race. (How much more plastic is, as you note, one for the sociologist and economists.) Habit is more plastic than class. Behavior is more plastic than habit. To use the word race (even in the sense of including class) as an analogy for behavior (even in the sense of including habituation) seems to me to grossly overstate the difficulty of getting on an irc channel. For a group of technologically adept scholars and practitioners of social software, the question of whether or not to use irc, even if it means bringing a laptop to a conference, does not begin to approach the difficulty of overcoming barriers that exist because of race or even class.

And the real risk there, it seems to me, is getting it wrong about the back-channel, by conflating behaviors and identities. If people were not at all familiar with the back-channel on Day One, and using it by Day Two, then it's hard to argue that users and non-users were separated by a gulf of identity.

Furthermore, the real hurdle is getting people to read the channel, not necessarily to post to it, in the same way that lurkers on mailing lists and people who go to conferences but don't ask questions still get value out of those forums.

The degree of plasticity exhibited at the conference suggests that the degree to which the host of a conference approves of, advertises, and provides support for the back-channel is far more important than identity in whether or not people can use it.

15. Andrew T. Fiore on April 12, 2004 1:28 PM writes...

Clay, that's an important clarification about the need for expert presenters -- in the light of a situational pressure, it is less problematic, for sure, and I might have misinterpreted your intent initially. But I still believe the audience has to accept some responsibility for its attentional choices and their consequences; they are not helpless in the face of the entrancing backchannel.

What if people made a principled decision that they weren't going to use the backchannel? Not everyone would have to make this decision, because it depends on some degree of critical mass. Are backchannels inevitable if the technology is there?

(BTW, it appears my trackbacks went through even though my MT said they failed. If somebody would like to delete one or both of them, please feel free.)