BlogHer Takeaways: All the Maps Change When...

"Anytime you play by the rules, women check themselves at the door," says Charlene Li, Forrester Research,in the opening debate, Play by today's rules, or change the game? at BlogHer.

When the BlogHer conference was proposed in March, Charlene wrote: "Quick – name me five woman bloggers. You probably came up with Wonkette, and if you’re reading this post, you’ve got me on your list." So if you wonder what the debate is all about and why it matters, then take a gander at the August 2005 issue of Wired for starters: 10 Years That Changed The World. Amidst the nearly all-male roster of "change agents" are Jeff Bezos, Shawn Fanning, Steve Jobs. A slew of the obvious suspects. The Lone Female Mention: Yep, "celebrity" blogger, Wonkette (right now, #20 on Technorati 100).

"We should transcend the rules of the game.... If you pledge allegiance to The List, you're saying that's what matters... The List is too narrow for me," emphasized Halley Suitt. (Live blog of debate session...) With all its gender focus, in actuality BlogHer represented a microcosm of the diversity in the blogosphere more than any other blogging conference I've ever attended. The A-List is narrowly focused when you look at the breadth of the 14 million plus blogs and counting.

Halley harks back to the wee hours of blogging history herself. She brought up 9/11 as a turning point in blogs, in media. In voice. Jeff Jarvis and other bloggers "were talking in a way that no one else was talking [about the event]. Weeks later the New York Times picked up that tone, that language [of blogs]" when they published their September 11th personal tribute essays.

Halley challenge us to kick ass in much the same way Ursula Le Guin challenged young women graduates back in 1986: "...when women speak truly they speak subversively--they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That's what I want--to hear you erupting."

All the maps change.

In the morning Birds of a Feather, I was divided (Citizen Journalism, or Storytelling, or) but finally chose the Business Blogging BOF. The more vocal members of the table were convinced that women could not afford to be personal in the big-male-professional world.  Many comments were along the lines of "posting our kid's pictures online would only fuel the stereotypes that we're not serious about work." (Sure sounded like: We must play by the rules. We must speak in the father tongue. We must.) Matt, Yvonne and Renee piped in for erring on the side of "being human." And I: I was uncharacteristically quiet. I was observing. I was musing. Do I push the edge too far in a "business blog"? Am I edging myself out of the game?

Ronni Bennett admits her first blog was anonymous. "It was really bad." In her next incarnation, she openly talks about growing old in a youth-obsessed culture, admits her age, and "didn't pull any punches" on her series on caregiving for her dying mom. The more she shares her story, the more "others pour out their stories; it gives others permisssion to."

Koan Bremner explain why she couldn't possibly have done an anonymous blog. "I'm an advocate. It wouldn't have any credibility if it were anonymous." She shows the audience the back of her T-shirt: Proud to be Trans.  (Not merely not ashamed to be, not O.K. to be, but proud to be.) Proud. To Be.

Heather Armstrong eventually revealed her post-partum depression on her blog: "I felt like I was lying to my husband and to my readers. I've got to tell them." She quips that five years ago, "a magazine wouldn't hire a stay-at-home writing about constipation." She's resolutely certain that "there's going to be more voices and more stories."  (Later that day, I speak to a book publisher that came to meet Heather and to seek out new voices.)

It's taboo to talk informally, colloquially, conversationally, personally, deeply, humanely in the game called the professsional business world. Especially "not done" in public. Thank you, Jory, Koan, Ronni, and Heather for reminding me yet again of the importance of putting our selves forth as ourselves. Reminding me: I'm an advocate too. Me, I'm not compartmentalizing myself. I'm bringing forth my whole self to business. I'm not checking any part of me at the door. (Here's my coming out post.)

We are volcanoes. All the maps change.  There are new mountains.

The title on the panel I was on was Suffragette Journalists...and perhaps we left out the suffragist angle altogether. Suffragist Sojourner Truth wedded together public discourse (the "objective") and the private experience (the "subjective", personal). Consistently I see the personal, the  subjective, the "small" stories of real people discounted and devalued. Yet Sojourner, as Ursula LeGuin shares, welded and fused together the two into a combustible power.

Cathleen Toomey, VP of Communications  Christine Halvorsen, Chief Blogger at Stonyfield Farms, an organic yogurt company oft quoted because of their innovative blogs, also writes for Stonyfield's "Strong Women Daily News" blog. At the closing session, Cathleen Christine said that bloggers escalated coverage of the genocide in Darfur, broke the story of the Alabama woman... "We can fix the world." An obviously belittled blogger passionately responded: "Mommy blogging can be a radical act. It does change people's lives." Amen, sister.

I had a discussion with Elisa Camahort in the car on the way to Renee Blodgett's party last night about the choice of words. Radical? We wondered. Maybe she meant courageous? The more I think about it, the more I realize: Yes, it's radical, revolutionary, map-changing, frame-busting, worldview-warping, rules-breaking.

Although Marc's heart is in the right place, his suggestion that BlogHers create our own list, our own companies and tell the guys to fuck off...is ultimately simply playing the game by the same old (tired, not wired) rules. (Guys aren't the real issue; it's the metaphors we unconsciously live by, the worldviews embedded in the games.) Marc's Implicit Assumption much like August issue of Wired: You only change the world when you are on a list. You only change the world when you are heading a company. Bigger is better. Louder is more impactful. Celebrity matters. [Take this little quiz for alternate view.]

The most misunderstood  quote in the world must be Gandhi's: "Be the change you want to see in the world" and "My life is my message." Yet, I see identity bloggers, mommy bloggers, and many others living out these mantras day by day, post by post.

Jay Rosen wraps up his impressions at the closing session (from my notes): "I've said that blogs are first amendment machines. That blogs are a form of freedom. Now I understand that a bit more [as a result of attending BlogHer]. Instead of press working on our behalf, we do it ourselves... Instead of succumbing to the age of terror we live in - from stalkers to fear of potent reactions - we're meeting it, going on anyway."

We are volcanoes. All the maps change.  There are new mountains.

Yesterday a.m., I grabbed a notebook and jotted a list of bullet-points three pages long of what I wished I had said at the Suffragette Journalism panel (live blogging of session...).

Much of it bounces off Amy Gahran's question: Is personal narrative journalism? (I propose the Technorati tag 'suffragette' to keep the discourse going as I'm only getting started.) As Liza noted at Saturday's dinner: "The personal is political." Thus, I'd wager it's journalism too.

Melanie McBride chimes in: "blog content is blog content: not news content, not journalism, not anything else. therefore it shouldn't be measured against old media. we're not trying to be journalists, we're not looking to speak for *everyone* and many of us are not looking to *cover* all sides. just our own voice, our own perspective and that's it." And "'personal' isn't a dirty word." That's right, who am I to be journaling, story-telling, sharing a perspective? And Courtney wonders aloud why she finds it difficult to enroll "citizen journalists" to engage in the process?

The personal is news when the San Jose Mercury News told it. When I spoke to ABC TV, now that was journalism. When speaking in my mangled, broken Spanish into a camera held by a Telemundo reporter: that was reporting. Better than anything I could possibly say myself in my own words in my own blog. So much better than the stories of the people I met myself. My first-hand experience with American diplomacy, er bureaucracy, echoed and foresaw the miniscule amounts initially pledged to the tsunami-struck countries. We'd called the embassy twelve hours after the tsunami: "Nope, we're not dispatching anyone out to Phuket." Meanwhile the Swedish ambassador herself is making rounds in my hospital room. No U.S. embassy resources to help in Phuket; meanwhile festive flyers recruit helpers for the embassy's New Year's Party...but I digress.

We are volcanoes. All the maps change.  There are new mountains.

Satinder Bindra, New Delhi Bureau Chief for CNN, echoes much of my own thoughts. (He's a real journalist.) When I first met him I did not know who he was. (Although it was a journalism conference so that narrowed the field.)  I'd overheard him speaking to a few folks about a "tsunami book" at the evening reception. Without any introductions whatsoever I jump in and ask, "What angle did you take with the book?" He doesn't hesitate: "The human one." I've heard him speak at the recent SAJA conference. I've read his book (excerpt here; only available in India.) Bottom line: the human resonates. Many children perished in the tsunami. But that fact alone wasn't going to make for compelling TV. Satinder needed one particular story that would illustrate and frame the bigger picture. He found it in Baby 81.

We can debate what's journalism and what's not until we are blue in the face. The fact is TV news audiences are declining. Newspaper circulations are declining. But NPR's audiences are on the upswing. So are blogs. I'm not interested in defining what's journalism so much as understanding what works and why and making an impact. Tsunami news dried up just after Brad and Jen split up. But, the stories haven't.

New York Times op-ed writer Nicholas D. Kristof wrote a compelling piece "All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes on Brad Pitt" (July 26, 2005) beating up the press for neglecting top stories. We're captivated by Tom Cruise and Michael Jackson. I truly believe we could be equally riveted on Darfur given a personal frame of reference. I was struck, just a handful of days after - even in Bangkok - by the remoteness of the tsunami event. It was hard to relate to. What in the world would make the immensity of story come alive for folks half-way around the world? Paradoxically, the particular.

The last thing I wanted to do in Thailand and in January was to be public. (Just too emotionally raw, too much, too soon. I know survivors that couldn't force themselves to watch any footage or pick up a paper for more than a week. In fact, that's something that deserves more airing out now with seven months distance are the tumult of feelings and the sense of acute stress disorder in the first few weeks.). In order to help in some small way with relief funding efforts, I knew that folks needed a personal frame of reference to connect with such a distant tragedy.

We are volcanoes. All the maps change.  There are new mountains.

Quiet subtle profound stories go unreported all the time. Mike Finkel tried to make that point in his new book, True Story. He was black-listed from journalism because he accepted (and agreed to play by the rules) set by his editor (female, too): the idea that slavery in the Ivory Coast was the story he must write no matter what. After digging into the details in the field, he found there was no sensationalistic slavery story. What he found was subtle, profound story on poverty. A story about boys obsessed to leave homes and escape across the borders for piddling wages in cocoa trade jobs. The boys' employers weren't abusers, they were simply dirt poor themselves. They saw a cash-ready market in supplying stories to journalists world-wide: You want slaves, we'll show you slaves. Nope, poverty isn't big enough for the Sunday NYT magazine.

Like many others, I drifted toward journalism partly because it seemed an opportunity to do some good.  (O.K., O.K.: it was also a blast, impressed girls and offered the glory of a byline.) But to sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that we're just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride." - Nicholas D. Kristoff, "All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes for Brad Pitt", New York Times, July 26, 2005

At least the runaway bride was an individual. Someone flesh-and-bones we could envision and possibly relate to. As I've written before, this is what the current tsunami coverage resembles: "Phuket has already lost at least Bt60 billion in tourism revenue in the six months since the tsunami ravaged the island together with other provinces in the South. The tsunami’s impact on the tourism industry on the island has led to the closure of over 400 hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops, leaving over 5,000 people unemployed..." Yawning yet? Care yet?

Here's a great example of taking a neglected issue and welding the personal and public on the AIDS drug patent issues. Featuring real stories, personal stories, real individual people.

There's a reason I left J-school in college. It wasn't just that computer science was lucrative. My journalism professor couldn't have made the subject more lifeless if he was offered a million bucks. And while I never thought myself as a "journalist" since I switched majors, I've rekindled a fresh interest in journalism now that we might be changing the rules of the game. Now that map may being blown to bits by the volcanoes reshaping the terrain.

Map changing doesn't happen overnight. I once wrote: "Om Malik is wrong about the demise of the personal blog." My, that was December 8, 2004. You must read what he wrote less than a month later. (I'm eternally grateful for Malik's post-tsunami writing  and chipping in. What he did was entirely off-topic, "simply not done", on an ultra-techie broadband blog. I loved it.)

I think the lights went on for me during the tsunamis, when I began reading the unmediated accounts of people there. Most of which I picked up at a BBC website. It was like music, voices different instruments, harmonizing, such an antidote to the drone of industrial news. (Well, actually the lights went out a couple of years earlier, and started slowly coming back on, but that's a different story altogether.)

So writes a male. With career experience in radio. (Thanks, Brian.)  In fact, it seemed to me that it was men that most resonated with my post-tsunami writing.

Like I said it's not about guys. (As girls can be guard the game rules ferociously too.) Like Halley said "it's about transcending the rules of the game. If you pledge allegiance to The List, you're saying that's what matters." (I've written enough, but links often presume that the ongoing conversation and conversation topics and content are even the one we want to be having, Jeff.)

Thank you BlogHer. Thank you Elisa, Lisa, Jory. I think all the lights went on for me Saturday.

p.s. Nope these aren't even all my takeaways. When I'm erupting I'm even more stream of consciousness writing than usual so I hope this hangs together. I wanted to blog yesterday when I was spurting fresh fiery lava but I was meeting up with BlogHers much of the day and it was good to see that a few BlogHer attendees had enough energy to host a party - thanks Renee for a great time - and to party, Elisa, Mary, J.D.

Update 9:40 PM: I fixed spelling of Koan's name. And spewing lava has cooled a bit. Much helped by an intense chat this p.m. with long-time journalist Staci Kramer, exec editor at paidContent.org. And being reminded by a poet that screaming and crying is cliched and rarely elicits a desired response. In fact that tone makes the opposite point of this post. People lean into a whisper.

Technorati tags:

BlogHer, BlogHerCon, Citizen journalism, Suffragette

Comments

[Koan Bremner]

Evelyn, thank you for writing a fascinating account of your thoughts arising from BlogHer, and how they link into the wider issues which concern you (and I, for one, don't have an issue with "stream of consciousness" posts; sometimes I think I over-sanitise my own stream of consciousness). Just a minor point; my first name is spelled "Koan" (as in a Buddhist Koan); that's precisely why I chose it. Given the Buddhist tone of much of the post you link to in from this post (i.e. your "coming out" post) I'm sure you can understand why that's important to me.

[davidcoe...]

cool post - let's all keep whispering...

[Ronni Bennett]

Terrific summary of Blogher, Evelyn. And lots more to think about too. Thanks.

[Chris Halvorson]

Sorry to think my end-of-the-day Blogher comments could be misconstrued to mean "Mommy Blogs Don't Matter." On the contrary. But what I was trying to say (and so poorly did say) is please, please lets not all talk just to each other. We must talk to the world in order to change the world. So many blogs I've read are just plain narcissistic. There is very little value in that. But if we all take the communicating skills we've learned, the technological skills we've learned, and the relationships we've formed (however digitally) and USE THIS POWER FOR GOOD, I have no doubt blogging women will make history.

[steven streight aka vaspers the grate]

Mommy blogging is insanely stupid.

Do they have a clue how child molesters, abductors, infertile wannabe mommies, and other predators LOVE seeing photos of children, the nuder the better?

Identity theft and corporate negligence to protect consumer information are why no one should shop online.

At BlogHer, did these issues arise?

How about the difference between female and male blogging styles, marketing blogs, etc.?

I'll bet male bloggers rarely rave about online shopping.

Female bloggers may be reinforcing stereotypes inadvertently. But due to their maternal, nurturing instinct they should be the ones warning about these problems.

Are they?

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Chris, I didn't read your comment that way, but I noted that the commenter two women after you did. She actually began with a statement that there were still "some" at the conference that didn't respect mommy blogging.

Steven, For the most part 'mommy bloggers' are simply women that are personal bloggers or 'identity' bloggers. They are blogging about everyday life, rather than pontificating on subject matter they don't know first-hand (which even I could do with a bit less punditry). They "write what they know."

Most of them say they aren't writing about their kids per se, but they are stay-at-home moms hence the term 'mommy bloggers.'

Very much was said about safety...hence, why Jay Rosen noted fear and 'terror' as a pattern in the sessions. Heather Armstrong, the most popular A-List "mommy blogger" of Dooce fame, talked being only findable online via PO Box. In another conference (not BlogHer), Julie Leung gave one of the best presentations EVER on blogging. The theme: "social masks." She never photographs her kids' faces. Ever. Partly due to respect for their own privacy too - they've never asked to be online celebrities.

I don't know which women talk about shopping...I don't think I read those blogs. In general, I think most women bloggers are for breaking stereotypes. I know I am. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, a journalist turned novelist, talked about this. She hates to generalize "men do X" and "women do Y". In fact, she wrote her latest novel to get over her OWN stereotypes and judgement. She based the character on someone that gave her difficulty (i.e. in 'metta' meditation the hardest circle of 'loving-kindness'): George Bush. Her character is conservative Christian and very likeable. I talked to other "minority" bloggers too that dislike being classified as 'Chicana' or 'Latina' or whatever as tokenism enforces stereotypes too.

[steven streight aka vaspers the grate]

I'm glad you don't dismiss the real dangers of posting children's photos (faces), where they go to school, their favorite hang outs, address, etc.

Online shopping and other passing of sensitive financial or medical information via the internet is very dangerous, with identity theft crime on the increase.

I like Deborah Tannen's books on male vs. female conversation styles.

Where can I learn of male vs. female blogging styles?

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BlogHer Takeaways: All the Maps Change When... - Crossroads Dispatches