I made myself look like an idiot today. Wrapped up in a confluence of annoyances, I put my foot in my 140-character mouth. Read on for more.
xkcd
I've always been annoyed by xkcd. Sometimes it's funny, but most of the it's dumb geek humor. You know the geek who is always very pleased with himself at just how clever and edgy he is? That's what xkcd reminds me of.
Worse, the dirty stuff in xkcd is just juvenile. Here's some dirty wordplay that would have made me roll my eyes in middle school. If that's not edgy enough for you, here's some stick figure copulation. xkcd's also likes to play with adolescent geek revenge fantasies of various types. Heck, you can even get stick figure sex combined with adolescent geek revenge fantasies!
So, clearly, I'm not a fan of xkcd.
Unprofessional presentations
In April, at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference, Matt Aimonetti gave a presentation on a database package called "CouchDB: Perform like a pr0n star". The slides. included partially clad women, Viagra, size jokes, group sex references and pole dancing. Much discussion centered around how displaying semi-nude women is hostile to the women in a group that is predominantly men, but it was also pointed out that it was just unprofessional.
The GeekFeminism wiki page about the presentation has plenty of links, so I won't bother including any here. Many of the comments supporting the presentation, throwing out the time-honored canard of accusing anyone offended of being "politically correct," show an appalling lack of empathy for anyone else. Geek empathy is a topic I've been stewing on for quite a while.
Fast forward to today
This morning, Brady Forrest posts to O'Reilly Radar an article about geolocation services on the Net, accompanied by a recent xkcd cartoon about geolocation where the joke is about a woman who has to go to the hospital after a mishap with a sex toy. This blonde joke is also about a who woman is injured because of a sex toy, but I can't imagine that a highly-esteemed blog like the O'Reilly Radar would base a blog post on it.
Then, the Twittering about Flashbelt started. At a Flash developers' conference in Minneapolis, there was a presentation more explicitly offensive and pornographic than the CouchDB talk. I saw a mention of it and Tweeted my disapproval:
The Ruby community doesn't own the market on offensive conference presentations.
A little later, Tim O'Reilly Tweets about it:
"Boy's club" is not an acceptable mindset. Geek girls are right to be offended: http://bit.ly/5cWWs
after he's Tweeted an endorsement of Brady's column from the day:
Hilarious: xkcd on location services and @brady's idea of "the future self" http://bit.ly/E2nRs Clever LOL reference to http://xkcd.com/414/
This just seemed so incongruous to me. To my eyes, the juvenile and offensive presentations are more extreme versions of the juvenile xkcd cartoons. Yes, making porn Flash videos at a conference is at another level than sex toy mishap jokes, but they're cut from the same cloth. I see the O'Reilly blogs as just as much a professional environment as a conference. If someone had a presentation about geolocation where the examples showed a woman's travels to sex shops followed by the emergency room, I'd be pretty uncomfortable.
How to look like an idiot in 140 characters
So I was surprised to see Tim endorse one while (rightly) damning the other. I wanted to ask Tim about this incongruity, but all that doesn't fit in 140 characters, so I Tweeted:
@timoreilly Why are the XKCD jokes OK but "code like a porn star" is not? Is it just one of severity?
What a fool I was.
Tim's response came quickly:
@petdance If you can't tell the difference between xkcd and the sexist presentation at the flash conference, I don't know what to say to you
Well, crap. Now I've got someone I've always admired but who I only know passingly thinking I'm some sexist and/or clueless moron. Worse, he just happens to be head of the company that distributes my book and employs me at conferences.
And really, why shouldn't he think I'm a moron?
My message was easy to misinterpret, as I tried to wedge my comment into a single tweet, and a public one at that. It sounded like I was challenging Tim, instead of being a query into his thoughts. I didn't explain exactly what about xkcd I was referring to. And my annoyance with xkcd came out in my tone.
Worst of all, it was all in public. Skud replied to my tweet, and a number of her followers replied as well, people to whom I can't reply because they don't follow me. I'm left wiping egg off my face as best I can.
Lessons for the Working Geek
- Hot-button topics require much more forethought before sending an irreversible message, especially publicly visible ones.
- Managers have a maxim that applies to everyone: "Praise in public, criticize in private." That applies to things that can be taken as criticism as well.
- Don't try to cram too much into 140 characters. Twitter is meant for signposts to serious discussion, not serious discussion on its own.
Why should anyone think you're a moron? Your point is valid.
Anyone who thinks that only "Geek girls" should be offended by a crass and inappropriate presentation has missed the point and anyone who says "You're wrong but I'm not going to tell you why because I can't figure out how to explain it to someone who's missed the point so badly" is playing coy, trying to pretend he's not insulting you, or throwing off a lousy dissemination to avoid answering the question.
Perhaps it doesn't matter though, because you're not a "geek girl". Clever rhetorical trap, that.
Here's a reason why xkcd (which I like) and these presentations are different.
With xkcd, each individual person can easily make the decision about whether or not they want to view it. If it offends them, they never need to look at it again. It's also entirely standalone. You can give up xkcd and just give up xkcd.
Also, xkcd is published regularly and has a clearly viewable history. If you take a little time, you can figure out what it's thing is, and if that's not your thing, you can ignore it.
You can view xkcd alone in privacy. Finally, xkcd is intended primarily as entertainment.
A conference presentation, OTOH, often comes with much less historical context. You don't necessarily know much about the presenter or what they're likely to say.
A conference is intended to be a professional, educational experience. It should also be fun, but it's not purely entertainment. Sometimes it's harder to skip a presentation, especially a keynote (everyone's going to it).
Leaving the presentation partway through is harder too, since you may have to climb over several other people. You're viewing along with many other people, and there may be social pressure to react a certain way (others are laughing at things you find offensive).
So really, I think they are completely different.
I'm not talking about xkcd as a comic strip on its own.
Here are my three premises.
Perhaps I should have just bulletized these in the first place and not included anything else that might distract.
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the feedback. I'd like to tell you where I was coming from when I made Friday's post.
I think that Latitude, the XKCD cartoon in question, has a lot going on. You correctly pointed out in your comment that an aspect of it is crass ("Dumb woman injures herself with inappropriate sex toy"). However, it was not the crassness of the cartoon that inspired my post (and it certainly is not what is most interesting about it). Instead it was the very accurate capture of people's fears about location-tracking technology.
Fears, that they will do something thinking they are in private, but are actually very much in public. I would describe this cartoon as "woman tries out new location technology and unwittingly embarrasses herself".
For people who would consider using a location-tracker I posit that revealing their sexual habits would rank among their worst nightmare.
I think very highly of Randall Munroe's work on XKCD. For me, he often finds the right mix of absurdity, silliness and insight that I like. I am not alone in this. XKCD reaches hundreds of thousands of people every month (probably millions). His cartoon is going to be seen by those thousands and will influence their thinking on products like Google Latitude. His piece is more striking than the standard technology puff piece in a newspaper and may end up having more influence on both Latitude's users and creators. I felt and still feel that this cartoon deserved a comment.
Brady Forrest
Was that the "It's funny because it's true" defense, the "Can't you ignore the crassness and focus on the real point" defense, or the "Crass is not offensive because it's popular" defense? (I thought Andy rejected the latter in his third point.)
At least they're better than the "Get a sense of humor, you thin-skinned whiner!" defense.
@chromatic: Are all things that are crass by definition offensive? I like crass. To me, crass and offensive are two different things. I'm sure each person has their own dividing line between the two.
We (as in all people everywhere) have to balance self-expression and humor with restraint. I think reasonable people can disagree on that balance. I think that xkcd cartoon is both funny and acceptable for linking. I also think that the recent "porn scandal" presentations are neither funny nor acceptable.
@Andy: I don't get the "dumb woman" part. I reread the cartoon, and my original take (which I still have) is that the woman in question is not dumb, but rather that she's a sexual being and a risk-taking geek. Can't smart people do things which get them in trouble? Do dumb people customize their sex toys?
I'm not trying to convince you to like xkcd, but I think you're seeing an attack against women which really isn't in that strip.
@autarch: I'm not saying it's an attack on women. Just unprofessional.