We can’t perfectly control our online selves any more than we can control the contours of our flesh. Bodies, like data, are leaky. Out of the mess of bodies and blood and bones and pixels and dreams and books and hopes we create this mess of reality we call a self, we make it and remake it. Each human being is a palimpsest of possible faces, of personas, and none of us were “born this way.”

From Model Behaviour by Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) in the New Inquiry, 30 May 2012.

The longer post is about the social enforcement of feminine appearances, with an excellent conclusion arguing that all gender performance is drag - well worth a read. But of course it’s the physical/digital parallel that jumps out at me.

Image by Lucas Simões from his Unportraits series

Perfect case study in how design is gendered:

Here is a bike storage solution.
It works by holding on to bikes by the top bar
The designers apparently never considered that some bikes don’t have a top bar…
…Women’s bikes.

Blindness to issues like this: not good design.

CASE and New Economics Foundation public discussion

Date: Wednesday 11 January 2012 
Time: 6-7.30pm
Speakers: Professor Juliet Schor, Professor Lord Skidelsky, Dr Edward Skidelsky
Discussant: Professor Tim Jackson
Chair: Anna Coote

As the economic crisis deepens, this is the moment to consider moving towards much shorter, more flexible paid working hours – sharing out jobs and unpaid time more fairly across the population. The new economics foundation (nef) set out the case in its report 21 Hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century.

Now, in partnership with CASE (Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion) at the London School of Economics, this event brings together a panel of experts to examine the social, environmental and economic implications. They will consider how far a shorter working week can help to address a range of urgent social, economic and environmental problems: unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being and entrenched inequalities.

Solving part-time work is one of the big socio-economic challenges for the next decade. It’s something needed by several demographics:

1. The baby boomer bulge coming up to retirement, but not financially able to support 30 years of leisure off 35-40 years of work.
2. Young people wanting to get an education, but potentially increasingly unwilling to commit to 3 years of full-time residential study at the age of 18 to rack up £60,000 of debt / future tax liability. They need better work-study options, not only Apprenticeships which are far too often being used as ways for employers to escape the minimum wage
3. Solving the work/kids balance is essential for many countries to avoid the aging population problem above. (It’s not just Italy worst affected, but actually South Korea, most of Eastern Europe, Japan and Germany too [source].)
   You could call this the “last challenge of feminism”, in that childrearing is the point where income inequality kicks in (women in their 20s are actually earning 3.6% more than men, commensurate with greater levels of education [source].) But that’d be a very white middle-class feminism (aka blinkered to others’ challenges).
   I’m more inclined to consider it one of the first challenges of post-feminism, if we take post-feminism not to mean not the backlash (that’s anti-feminism) but something more constructive where we “generalise the insurrection” such that what were once seen as “women’s issues” are recognised as struggles men too want to fight. Research shows that fathers want more involvement with bringing up their children [source] - in about the last 10 years, going part-time after having kids has really become much less gendered behaviour.
   Gaby Hinsliff’s new book Half a Wife talks about the need for households with children to find 2 days a week for “wifework” (itself another book by Susan Maushart, worth reading).

There’s also another set of ideas worth referring to around the increasing automation of work and the challenges of maintaining full employment under these circumstances. A few quick links:

• Job-devouring technology confronts US workers [Financial Times]
• Will robots take our jobs? Who cares? [Tim Worstall, Forbes]
• The Next Economic Revolution [Alex Planes, Motley Fool]. One of the most fascinating and important articles I’ve read recently, it argues, “our economy — and much of our market prices — is built on consumption, and a world run by machines is one that won’t support the same levels of consumption if those displaced have no easy way back into the workforce.” The profits from increasing labour efficiency can’t necessarily outrun the losses from permanently-high unemployment killing consumer demand.

The emerging (middle-class) ideal may be the four-day work-week, and the employers who do best at making this possible may well prosper by being the ones who hold on to talent. Unexpectedly enough, it is in fact the companies known for the longest working hours that are making strides to introduce it - law and consulting firms are really pushing flexible working as they recognise (are best-placed to measure?) the impact of losing experienced women at 35. They’re also keen to reduce their fixed costs from real estate, and allowing working from home + hotdesking can dramatically reduce the office square-footage required.

But that’s still an upper-middle class elite. The real challenge is how to introduce a shorter work-week for lower-middle and working class jobs that retain the benefits of employment (pension; healthcare in the US) and don’t become the zero-hour flexi-contracts of the “precariat”….

Read a couple of good long-form pieces recently about teenage girls online - the whole nexus of growing up and working out who you are in a digital culture voraciously set to consume youth, fashion, cool, and of course sexuality.

Here they are:

1. bebe zeva and overcoming the hatred of the american teenage girl

Sets out the progression from cute kid - to girl consciously being cute - to teen girl playing with looking sexy before she’s quite aware of how it’s being read - to being picked up by other blogs (Hipster Runoff) for having a prominent ‘personal brand’ - to having a lofi documentary made about 24 hours in your hipster life.

along the way bebe talks about her life being home schooled, her isolation, her philosophy on life and the internet and her strange family situation. the best moments are when bebe talks candidly about her unusual life, which is focused on her internet presence, or makes comments that shows us she knows exactly how ridiculous it is. bebe says “I understand that life is bleak and you can either kill yourself or donate yourself to social commentary. I’m just a brand. I’m just shit. All of my content regarding my personality is available.”

…

obviously, society’s problem is not teenage girls. rather, what society views its problems to be often become fully embodied by the teenage girl. in other words, the teenage girl has become a mirror, in which we see everything we believe to be bad about our culture and ourselves—excess materiality, a desire for fame, vapidity and so on. as a young woman it can be close to impossible to avoid taking on these qualities when our society values our beauty over our intellect and the services we can provide rather than our contributions.

Significant also that the article’s author is artist Ann Hirsch, who’s done some pretty big performative projects about “internet cewebrity”, gaining 1.5 million YouTube views for her Scandalishious dancing girl vids.

Hirsh’s essay was spurred in part by this rather uncomfortable review by (who else?) Vice of the Bebe Zeva documentary.

Bebe Zeva’s photoblog is called Fated To Be Hated, which says it all.

2. Rolling Stone on Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire

Another story from MySpace to Stickam video stream to online shop - and cyberbullying spilling over into the real world, and stalkers, and paedophiles - and a really nasty sub-Perez Hilton site called Stickydrama.com created by an adult man seeking to cash in on teen drama, internet celebrities, and all their sexy naked pics.

Ick.

It’s particularly interesting to read Stickydrama.com as a compare-and-contrast with Fandom Wank. They initially seem to be similar meta-blogs reporting on activity within particular scenes’ social mediaspheres - and, subtitled Mock Mock Mockity-mock-mock - both would seem to be equally savage.

Except that Fandom Wank ends up working as a disciplinary mechanism for the fandom community, shooting down hostile and malicious behaviour and reaffirming social norms of decent behaviour. It’s basically the Internet Police, but with enough autocritique (and indeed postgrad social scientists onboard) to keep its own actions in check and largely clear of anything that can be called bullying.

Why Fandom Wank is constructive and most other scene blogs wildly destructive, I’m not sure. I’d moot it was something to do with fandom being highly female-dominated - but I went to an all-girls’ school, so bitch puh-lease! So maybe it’s something to do with fandom culture being anti-commercial - fanfiction, fansubs, shared vids, and somehow managing to build something creative strong enough to escape the vortex of capitalist consumption in a way that Scene Girls putting together new outfits somehow never quite does?

3. danah boyd on Publicity and the culture of celebritization

As information swirls all around us, we have begun to build an attention economy where the value of a piece of content is driven by how much attention it can attract and sustain. It’s all about eyeballs, especially when advertising is involved. Countless social media consultants are swarming around Web2.0, trying to help organizations increase their status and profitability in the attention economy. But the attention economy doesn’t just affect the monetization of web properties; it’s increasingly shaping how people interact with one another.

Teens’ desire for attention is not new. Teens have always looked for attention and validation from others – parents, peers, and high-status individuals. And just as many in business argue that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, there are plenty of teens who believe that there’s no such thing as bad attention. The notion of an “attention whore” predates the internet. Likewise, the notion that a child might “act out” is recognized as being a call for attention. And it’s important to highlight that the gendered aspects of these tropes are reinforced online.

So what happens when a teen who is predisposed to seeking attention gets access to the tools of the attention economy? Needless to say, we see both exciting and horrifying events play out. We see teens like Tavi Gevinson propel her interest in fashion into a full-blown career before the age of 14. And we see countless teens replicating the trainwreck activities of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and other celebrities. When teens leverage social media to propel themselves into the spotlight, they fully (and with reckless abandon) engage in a set of practices that Terri Senft and Alice Marwick talk about as micro-celebrity. They work to manage their impressions, cultivate attention, and interact in ways that will increase their fame and social status.

Epigraph: Hipster Runoff on Where have all the Myspacers gone?

Whenever ur internet identity is so strongly linked to a social network’s brand
U run the risk of being buried alive
underneath the sands of internet time
in the digital graveyard

I’ve read about ‘hair politics’ from black women’s perspectives, so it was great to find this piece on thoughtful fashion blog Threadbared giving an Asian take on the issue.

In a phone interview over three years ago I was asked, “What do you think of Asian women who bleach or dye their hair; do you think they’re trying to be white?”

That day my hair was chin-length, a faded green. I said, “No.”

Read the whole article for a really great personal-is-political take on gender, race and sexuality as seen through the medium of buzz cuts and blue hairdye.