Context Collapse, Architecture, and Plows

Women and the Internet: Part Two

This is part two of a four-part series. Part One, Part Three, Part Four.

Technology changes everything.

I dance with the trolls, and I enjoy it. I have some wonderfully sketchy internet friends; this comes from covering Anonymous and other lovely crazy hackers and anarchists over the years. I have a deep affection for their horribly rude asshole talk and the strange problems they are trying to solve. Sometimes they are stupid, and sometimes brilliant, and even more often, a bit of both.

One day I found myself in a conversation with a couple anon/hacker-anarchists about how to support a community-wide anti-snitching policy, i.e. never calling the police, without abandoning women to gendered violence. Both of them, professed men, acknowledged that men would have to police men to create justice for women in a community that had turned away from the state monopoly on violence. In particular, we talked about Oakland, California, and how communities of men and women could work together to make women safe. One of them, in particular, embraced the idea that gendered violence was a men’s problem that men should confront.

The next day I found him attacking a British feminist on Twitter using the language of violence and rape. I said to him, roughly, “What the fuck are you doing?” I knew he’d meant what he’d said before, it was part of his activism and his sense of community, whereas this was trolly Twitter nonsense. To paraphrase him: “She came at me, and I’m not going to just sit there!” I stared at my computer and sighed.

Trolls gonna troll.

What had happened was a classic example of what academics call a context collapse. A feminist activist on Twitter was getting horrifically attacked after successfully campaigning to keep women in public images in her country, and she’d decided to fight back. That fight had wandered, context-free, into the realm of my Oakland-concerned trollish friends. From the perspective of this man, who had only hours before been looking for ways to support women and prevent gendered violence in a poor community, a high-status person from a far off country had come in and told him what he could and couldn’t say. He responded by saying the worst things he could. From her perspective, another nasty anonymous male voice online had chimed in to punish her for being a public feminist and winning something for women.

From my perspective, it was all facepalm. Both sides didn’t know they weren’t in the same conversation. They weren’t able to talk to or hear each other, and it descended into a disaster.

We all know what context is in our lives. The same thing we do with our friends can be horrifying to think about doing with our bosses or families. This isn’t because we’re all massive hypocrites, it’s because context matters in culture. One of the major problems with online space is that the wrong people see us hanging out with our friends, and suddenly decontextualize our actions. This makes them wholly different and often unintended actions.

This is foul homophobia.

In my work, dealing with everything from old trolls and novice internet users, it’s not hard to understand that me calling a /b/tard Faggot, a term of art on 4chan, is a different act than me calling a gay thirteen-year-old that just got his first Twitter account earlier today Faggot.

This is just weird-ass shit.

What I can’t control is if one party sees me talking to another and gets the wrong idea about what I mean and what kind of person I am. When trolls bounce around Twitter they play a baiting game. At its best, it’s a conversational art that exposes contradictions. At its worst, it’s stupid bullying. Most trolling lives somewhere in between, full of cues and references that make no sense to people who aren’t part of the conversation. Sometimes even the trolls forget this.

Similarly, an angry woman getting abuse and crazy rapey stuff from a portion of the population of an EU country for trying to raise the profile of accomplished women in her country, is going to be stressed.

I should stop for a moment and say “angry woman” is not an insult. People find angry women unseemly, ungirly, ugly. Well, fuck that. Women have a right to be angry, and a lot to be angry about.

Angry women are strong and beautiful creatures, and they’ve saved worlds in their fierceness. Angry women are angry humans, and all the better worlds were built by rejecting the status quo. I respected her anger, and her decision to fight back. To get the abuse she got and not be angry is the sign of either a bodhisattva or a mentally ill person.

But anger is exhausting, and it makes it harder to understand context. She needed some leeway on doing all her internet social protocols right, and nothing in the context of Twitter helped her do that. To this day, neither side has given an inch.

Social media allows people to see each other practicing cultures in ways that were never possible before the internet, which is amazing. But it doesn’t magically give anyone the cross cultural understanding to interpret what they are seeing. This isn’t new, it’s been a problem with mass media since there was such a thing. In Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd’s fantastic paper on context collapse on Twitter, I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience, they talk about where public figures have had to navigate the difficulty of media destroying cultural context:

Meyrowitz (1985) gives the example of Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael, who typically used different styles when presenting to black and white audiences. Speaking on broadcast television, Carmichael could not appear ‘authentic’ to both audiences and had to choose between a black or white rhetorical style. He chose the former, engaging his black audience but alienating white viewers.

Public figures have also developed ways of coping:

In today’s media-saturated landscape, politicians and celebrities use ‘polysemy’ or coded communication to simultaneously appeal to different, even oppositional audiences (Albertson, 2006; Fiske, 1989). Madonna’s early image exemplifies polysemy. She was interpreted differently by young women, who responded to her feminist message, and young men, who responded to her sexy persona (Fiske, 1989). Similarly, George W. Bush sprinkled coded references to hymns, Bible verses, and Evangelical culture throughout his speeches to appeal to his base without alienating others (Albertson, 2006).

You should all read this paper, by the way, trolls, activists, and newbies alike. It will explain a lot of contemporary life that hasn’t been explained before.