s o l i t u d e is not the same as s i n g u l a r i t y

Causing Trouble
2003-02-05 � 12:02 p.m.

Where to begin?

I am still employed. My workweek is now four days long instead of five, but the days are ten-hour days (which isn't that much of a change, really).

This is good, sort of.

I am extremely tired, despite the fact that I just finished having four days in a row off of work. This is partly due to the fact that I stayed up way too late at a birthday party last night, and partly due to...uh, yeah. Birthday party.

And here's a question for you — how come is it that gender equality goes out the window when there's an unpleasant task to be done?

The scene: the aforementioned birthday party. The cast: me and eight females, not including the birthday girl. The conflict: birthday girl is well on her way to drinking herself into a stupor.

No fewer than FIVE of the other attendees came to me and told me to make sure the birthday girl got home okay. Me? Why me? Of the people at the party, I am far from the top of the intimate friends list. I'm a friend, but not some amazingly close friend.

But it falls to me. I'm the one who has to shoulder the burden. It's like there wasn't any question — I was the one who needed to get her home.

Odd, no?

And I am such a good guy that I drove her home in her own car and then walked back to the bar to get my own. And damn, it was cold out!

So, tired. Yes.

Because I am on the subject, let me now transcribe for you an interesting article I read yesterday. It's by a lady named Deborah Tannen and was originally published in Newsweek in 1994, but I am taking it from a book of essays entitled The Writer's Presence. Keep in mind that these opinions are not necessarily my own, but are certainly interesting and not without validity.

Gender Gap in Cyberspace
I was a computing pioneer, but I'm still something of a novice. That paradox is telling.
I was the second person on my block to get a computer. The first was my colleague Ralph. It was 1980. Ralph got a Radio Shack TRS-80, I got a used Apple II+. He helped me get started and went on to become a maven, reading computer magazines, hungering for the new technology he read about, and buying and mastering it as quickly as he could afford. I hung on to old equipment far too long because I dislike giving up what I'm used to, fear making the wrong decision about what to buy, and resent the time it takes to install and learn a new system.
My first Apple came with videogames; I gave them away. Playing games on the computer didn't interest me. If I had free time I'd spend it talking on the telephone to friends.
Ralph got hooked. His wife was often annoyed by the hours he spent at his computer and the money he spent upgrading it. My marriage had no such strains — until I discovered email. Then I got hooked. Email draws me the same way the phone does: it's a souped-up conversation.
Email deepened my friendship with Ralph. Though his office was next to mine, we rarely had extended conversations because he is shy. Face to face he mumbled so, I could barely tell he was speaking. But when we both got on email, I started receiving long, self-revealing messages; we poured our hearts out to each other. A friend discovered that email opened up that kind of communication with her father. He would never talk much on the phone (as her mother would), but they have become close since they both got online.
Why, I wondered, would some men find it easier to open up on email? It's a combination of the technology (which they enjoy) and the obliqueness of the written word, just as many men will reveal feelings in dribs and drabs while riding in the car or doing something, which they'd never talk about sitting face to face. It's too intense, too bearing-down on them, and once you start you have to keep going. With a computer in between, it's safer.
It was on email, in fact, that I described to Ralph how boys in groups often struggle to get the upper hand whereas girls tend to maintain an appearance of cooperation. And he pointed out that this explains why boys are more likely to be captivated by computers than girls are. Boys are typically motivated by a social structure that says if you don't dominate you will be dominated. Computers, by their nature, balk; you type a perfectly appropriate command and it refuses to do what it should. Many boys and men are excited by this defiance: "I'm going to whip this into line and teach it who's boss! I'll get it to do what I say!" (and if they work hard enough, they always can). Girls and women are more likely to respond, "This thing won't cooperate. Get it away from me!"
While no one wants to think of herself as "typical" — how much nicer to be sui generis [Latin, meaning "of its own kind," "unique."] — my relationship to my computer is — gulp — fairly typical for a woman. Most women (with plenty of exceptions) aren't excited by tinkering with the technology, grappling with the challenge of eliminating bugs or getting the biggest and best computer. These dynamics appeal to many men's interest in making sure they're on the top side of the inevitable who's-up-who's-down struggle that life is for them. Email appeals to my view of life as a contest for connections to others. When I see that I have fifteen messages, I feel loved.
I once posted a technical question on a computer network for linguists and was flooded with long dispositions, some pages long. I was staggered by the generosity and the expertise, but I wondered where these guys found the time — and why all the answers I got were from men.
Like coed classrooms and meetings, discussions on email networks tend to be dominated by male voices, unless they're specifically women-only, like single-sex schools. Online, women don't have to worry about getting the floor (you just send a message when you feel like it), but, according to linguists Susan Herring and Laurel Sutton, who have studied this, they have the usual problems of having their messages ignored or attacked. The anonymity of public networks frees a small number of men to send long, vituperative, sarcastic messages that many other men either can tolerate or actually enjoy, but that turn most women off.
The anonymity of networks leads to another sad part of the email story: there are the men who deluge women with questions about their appearance and invitations to sex. On college campuses, as soon as women students log on, they are bombarded by references to sex, like going to work and finding pornographic posters adorning the walls.
Most women want one thing from a computer — to work. This is significant counterevidence to the claim that men want to focus on information while women are interested in rapport. That claim I found was often true in casual conversation, in which there is no particular information to be conveyed. But with computers, it is often women who are more focused on information, because they don't respond to the challenge of getting equipment to submit.
Once I learned the basics, my interest in computers waned. I use it to write books (though I never mastered having it do bibliographies or tables of contents) and write checks (but not balance my checkbook). Much as I'd like to use it to do more, I begrudge the time it would take to learn.
Ralph's computer expertise costs him a lot of time. Chivalry requires that he rescue novices in need, and he is called upon by damsel novices far more often than knaves. More men would rather study the instruction booklet than ask directions, as it were, from another person. "When I do help men," Ralph wrote (on email, of course), "they want to be more involved. I once installed a hard drive for a guy, and he wanted to be there with me, wielding the screwdriver and giving his own advice where he could." Women, he finds, usually are not interested in what he's doing; they just want him to get the computer to the point where they can do what they want.
Which pretty much explains how I managed to be a pioneer without becoming an expert.

Okay — this is obviously quite old. I mean, 1994? Still I find a lot of it interesting, even more so if you take what she's saying as true and look around at how things have changed.

Unfortunately I do not agree with a lot of what she says, and I think she says it poorly for being a linguist and having a personal essay printed in Newsweek.

What do you folks think?

I was just informed that I have to work the door at the bar on Friday night. Suck! Four hours of checking IDs in the cold. Why did I ever volunteer?

-t

Currently Aurally Inducing: nada
Selection of the Lyrical Vocabulary: nope

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