Two Days ago, the New York Times published an article called “Sorry Boys, This is Our Domain“, talking about how teenage girls are becoming more of a force with Web 2.0 and social networking websites. Some of the points in this article are really valid, others are a bit of a stretch. So since I’m not in the mood to talk about movie making today (Princess Daisy will be done shooting tomorrow and hopefully Andy will upload it somewhere so you acn see it, BTW), I’ll go into this.
It says that the gender gap for blogging has widened vastly in the past few years. Why they needed a study to come to this conclusion I have no idea. Of course girls are going to be big into blogging. After generations of diary writing now they get to combine the need to express their thoughts with the need for attention. It’s a match made in heaven. Combine that with free blog sites like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc and all of a sudden an online presense is as easy as typing your name. The hardest part is coming up with a name for your blog, which, effectively can be solved with a quick brainstorming phone call. If as the article claims, that girls are the ones expected to be social, this should be no surprise. Especially when all the hard work is done for you.
So why didn’t this pick up sooner? Sure places like LiveJournal have been around for a long time, but why has it taken to 2008 for the “feminization of the internet” (As Professor Gill in the article claims) to happen? It’s super easy, and currently trendy. Back in the Web 1.0 days, starting a journal or a blog online wasn’t always easy. If you wanted full control over how it looked you had to either find a CMS you could customize or you either program it yourself or just find a way to HTML it. It wasn’t always elegant, but it did the trick at the time. You were either stuck on Geocities or Freewebs for your hosting unless you had the means of getting your own hosting. It wasn’t easy, took a lot of time, and nobody bothered to read the blogs anyways, so it wasn’t the fun joyous thing it has become today.
Hosting itself is another issue. The two things I always look for in a teenage site to somewhat legitimize it are
- Does it have it’s own domain and hosting?
- Does it use real programming?
The first means did you take the time to install WordPress yourself? Set up the databases and all that? Did yourself a legit host and you know how to setup and configure it all? (Bonus points if it has a real control panel, like Cpanel or Plesk that you know how to set up).
The second point is how is your site powered? Did you just throw some html and css together and call it a site or do you actually know how to program something? PHP, ASP, JSP, etc.
The difference not only with girls but with all teenagers is a that alot of sites are so easy to set up that they don’t know what’s required to really set up a site from scratch, how to program everything correctly, etc. The NYT article talk about how people just utilize other services.
“Zach Saltzman, 17, of Memphis, said content creation among his circle of male friends includes having a Facebook profile and posting videos of lacrosse games and original short films on YouTube. ”
The article also says that he’s never thought of making his own website. But big deal, the guy knows how to upload things on facebook and youtube? Sorry, but that’s not impressive. I agree that it’s an awesome and convenient way of doing it, but all things considered, it’s not hard to do.
These are the people that I consider the script kiddies of the general population: They know how to run the programs needed to do stuff, but don’t know how to really do any of it themselves. It bothers me as someone who grew up with the development of the world wide web to see respectable news sources treat things like Blogger and Facebook on the same level as hand coded web sites. Having a blog on Blogger doesn’t give you a website, it gives you an account with a company which lets you use their product on their servers for free.
Let’s get things straight: I’m not slamming people who use free services. If you use Podshow, Blogger, Myspace, or anything like that it doesn’t make your site any less worthwhile. Some sites in my Blogroll use these kinds of services. It however, does not make you particularly computer savvy. That’s not directed at one gender or another either, that’s for everyone.
I use Wordpress to power Conveniently Misplaced, but I manage and host it all myself. I use Picasa for my photos just because it’s easy. Anyone that remembers what it was like setting up a manual image gallery in the past knows what a bitch it is to manually size your pictures, make your thumbnails, FTP them, etc. With Picasa I just open up the program, find the pic I want to upload, and send it to the web which goes right into the blog. Now that’s pure magic.
But enough of addressing the social web script kiddies posers. What about the legit people out there, especially the Girls as the article mentions. If you are a teenage girl and you are good at this stuff, where are you? How come we never really see or hear from you. Every so often i’ll get a programming or CSS question on AIM from some random girl I know and the first thing I’ll think is “Since when do you know ___”? I have been completely flabbergasted by the amount of tech knowledge some people have. Even yesterday I was talking to a good friend of mine and she told me that she was taking a Visual Basic next semester, and talked about how she really enjoys programming and did html in high school and that was easy, etc. All I could think was “wow I would have never guessed”. Just when you think someone can’t get any cooler, they spring that on you.
Dale Pickett, one of my programming professors at Baker College said “Girls make great programmers because they’re so meticulous and exact about everything”. And yes, he’s right. So if you girls are programming stuff as teenagers, you like doing it, and you’re good doing it…why does it end there? I simply don’t buy the argument the article makes about shaking the existing stereotype about CS being dominated by men or that there are no female role models to look up to. Women have been vocal crusaders for causes for a long time, saying that “we’re no different, we can do it too”.So why does that attitude stop when it comes to programming? Why does “Girl Power” end with computer science and programming? If it’s just a superficial thing about wanting to do layouts to have a prettier myspace page, that’s one thing. But this is something else.
So this is what I have to say to the programming girls of the world:
As a gender, you are creative, you are social, and you are good at what you do. I understand that many of the guys in this area are D&D playing dorks who you would never want to talk to. That’s ok, I don’t always want to talk to them either. But if you are good at this stuff and you like doing it, please consider doing it for a living. We would love to have you in class, in our workplaces, etc. I have no doubt that your contributions can be amazing, but instead you doubt yourselves. You were able to shrug off the nay-sayers when you wanted to enter the workforce to begin with, when you wanted to vote, when you wanted gener equality, and everything else that women have pushed hard to get. Now that we want you in something, you look the other way. I’m not saying that everyone who likes programming should do it for a living. The girl I mentioned previously I would never try to talk her out of her major because I know how strongely she feels about it. It’s not for everyone. Even I strongly considered going into school for Music instead of Web Development. But if you think it might be fun, give it a try. We would love to have you.
Give it a legit shot. And social script kiddies, stay out of the way. Some people, no matter what age or gender, have real work to do.
