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.