The next item on the agenda was lunch...a working lunch.
The working lunch session was Flame, Blame & Shame, lead by Lisa Sabater. The panel included Alisa Valdes-Rodrigues, Ellen Spertus, Judith Meskill and Debi Jones, better known as Mobile Jones.
The session was meant to be:
We're constructing a BlogHercon session on the art of handling disagreement online. What would make this session useful to you? What are the keys to making women bloggers fearless?
While the panelists are each women of accomplishment, the group was (in my opinion) less than well-suited to address the purpose of the the session.
Lisa Sabitier was (and is) and excellent choice as moderator (but her role was a bit usurped by Jory Des Jardins).
Right up front: who else would have good (and why):
- Teresa Nielson Hayden,, for her experience in running the very-high-comment blog (with trolls and so on) Making Light
- Suzette Hadin Elgin, for her blog and for her work on How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable (my introductory post; the "How Stuff Works" introductory post for verbal self-defense)
- Amy Gahran, who writes Contentious. She has written a great deal about trolls, porcupines, and other vermin.
- GetupGrrl (who writes Chez Miscarriage) who regularly gets 10s, even hundreds of comments. She had a lengthy discussion of "driveby parenting"--being flamed (or worse). (I can't find the link and wonder if she has taken it down)
Lisa Sabatier:
Your expert flamer and shamer extraordinaire, moi, will be moderating a panel on how to deal with the annoying trolls and assholes that think they can shut you up just because you're a girl. Or for that matter, expect you to be nice, play safe and be their cheeleaders, just because you're a girl.
Ellen Spertus is a very interesting person with a lot of internet moxie, but I am not sure she was a good choice as voice on this panel
Judith Meskill has early-adopter status and has written a great deal about the knowledge worker. But flame-handling expert?
Debi Jones (Mobile Jones)
Full Circle Online has a good summary post. I had forgotten the most important of Ellen's contributions, about
linguist Susan Herring, who studied about how women speak in groups and how women are not heard in groups. When women start posting more than 30% of the discussion, the men started saying the women were taking over.
Little Judy also covered the discussion well:
Liza says that race, ethnicity and sexual politics are hot-button issues. Another woman who is a "mommy blogger" says anything to do with parenting always draws flames.
Her commentators (following the post) also discussed the issue of anger and the expression of anger.
Brian, from The Bay Area is Talking, also has a post about this session, with some good comments. Alembic has a series of posts, too. Real Kato writes
how do you stop trolls and flamers? There's some talk about having a commenter rating system and more moderation facilities, but that might require a centralized registry of some sort. I can see that happening in a closed community (MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc.) but what we really need is an open interoperable system, and one that's self-governing. Hmm.
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Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is the author of The Dirty Girls' Social Club (the link is to the Random House promo for the book....it does not intrigue me).
Alisa and her husband moved to L.A. in 1998 so Alisa could take a job as a reporter at the LA Times. Somewhere along the way she decided she did not want breast implants or to spend most of her life sucking Starbucks on a freeway; this required immediate and irrevocable exile from Southern California.
Alisa quit her job, telling peers she wanted to write novels in the mountains of New Mexico. They said supportive things like, "I hope you like waiting tables" and "Jesus, you’re a freakin’ idiot."
Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez is better at handing out firey comments
At Alisa’s book release party in Albuquerque for her first novel, Miss Wilson, the teacher who once told Alisa what a crap writer she was, somehow resurfaced as the photographer on assignment to shoot the event for a local paper. Miss Wilson vaguely remembered Alisa, but did not recall humiliating her in front of her peers. In fact, Miss Wilson gushed about how great it was to see a local writer do so well. Alisa did not remind Miss Wilson that it was no thanks to her, but later humiliated Miss Wilson on this very web site.
Alisa’s first novel, “The Dirty Girls Social Club,” became a New York Times bestseller. Miss Wilson was still freelancing photos, and still had a lesbian mullet. Whether or not she was, in fact, a lesbian was not clear. But the poor choice of hairdo was.
So what makes Valdes-Rodriguez good at teaching or talking about flame?
There was a bit of to-do over the interchange between Des Jardins and Valdes-Rodriguez. Also, the following day was a flurry, of in which Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez took down her blog and put it up again.
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