jill/txt

“Nobody knows you’re a dog on the internet“, right? Although many of us still engage in a little harmless identity tourism now and then, the internet in general is not an anonymous space, and current trends in social media are making it less and less so. If you can’t connect your Twitter name to a solid identity with a website and preferably a photo and CV on LinkedIn, you’ll have trouble being taken seriously. But there are still examples of people making good use of the possibility to be “anyone” on the internet. Such as “James Chartrand”, a successful freelance writer who, as it turns out, just happens to be a single mother who couldn’t make ends meet when she sold the same writing using her real name and gender.

Have you ever seen such a ridiculously over-the-top male website? Well, it worked. As James Chartrand, this woman, who still remains anonymous, launched a successful career. It wasn’t until someone who knew her secret threatened to reveal it that she admitted that “James” was a woman. She still hasn’t made it obvious on her website, although it’s there if you look.

Sounds rather he-man-ish, doesn’t it? But if you click that link labelled “pen name”, you’ll find the full story.

I’m rather shocked at this story, I must admit. Obviously it’s hard to know whether you’d have more success as a man when you always present yourself as a woman. I’ve never experienced obvious discrimination, though I’ve certainly felt uncomfortable in meetings where everyone else is male. Oh, and fumed at the difficulties of breastfeeding while travelling and noted that applications aren’t evaluated equally and that I have (had? have…?) a tendency to act like a little girl, a typical mistake women make.

And “James Chartrand” isn’t just acting like a man. She’s acting like a caricature, a parody of a man. I mean, look at that logo, an ejaculation if ever I saw one. Come on. A photo of welding below it? And on and on. Perhaps clients don’t just want male writers, they want he-men?

I feel myself sinking into that inward nestingness that happens when you’re expecting a baby. Twitter holds less fascination for me, and I forget to blog or read blogs for weeks at a time (except for my “life, not research” category in Google Reader…) But the baby won’t actually come until early February, and I’m still at work until mid-January. A few things do catch my attention. Like Regine Stokke’s blog, which had me wiping away tears. She wrote in Norwegian, but Google translates it reasonably well. Regine was an eighteen year old Norwegian girls who died of cancer last week and had blogged about her illness for the last year. (I’m pretty sure this is real, unlike the Kaycee Nicole case). Or, on a completely different note, June Breivik’s post about privacy and school students (also in Norwegian/Google translated to English), which is an issue I’ve been far more aware of after reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. June Breivik is the project leader of “Digital School” for our region in Norway, and links to a great website about privacy in schools, Personvernskolen (translated). I’m so glad this is actually being discussed - finally!

And then there’s this graphic of how big the internet is. I’m sure some will use this to fuss about how much bad quality nonsense there is on the internet. But I think I might use it anyway, in presentations or teaching somewhere.

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