
Starting your own feminist backchannel - zdw
http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2015/03/01/starting-your-own-feminist-backchannel/
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sjp2705
Why is this garbage here? The author's tone is flagrantly antagonistic. If
this wasn't meant to be satirical, then it is almost certainly a purposeful
deviation from civil and constructive discourse meant to provoke angry
reactions from dissenters. It's precisely this kind of deplorable vitriol that
hinders and sabotages the gender debate.

I also disagree on a purely rational level that retreating to an echo chamber
can lead to anything positive: on the contrary, this is precisely how strong
beliefs and emotions can fester into something malignant. This is for instance
why things like the Tea Party exist - because people who shut out dissenting
voices quickly become unable to empathize with alternative points of view.

~~~
angersock
I actually think it was a decent article--good points, some decent hands-on
knowledge. I agree that slapping "feminist" as a modifier on everything was a
bit odd, because the advice functions for _any_ group you want to assemble.

A point about the echo-chamber, though:

Sometimes, if you are optimizing for humor or whatever, an echo-chamber is
exactly what you want, because the social mores and cultural touchstones are
the same. It's also very hard to have people with widely diverse viewpoints in
these groups (worth it though!), because the tendency is just to turtle up and
argue back and forth and back and forth and generally suck the air out of the
place for anything else. This makes it not fun, and that drives people away,
and then your channel dies.

If you want to try that, you need people that are willing to find a point and
say "Okay, we clearly agree to disagree here, and let's move on and not
revisit this unless circumstances really change or we are just being
academic". That's a sort of civility, though, that is very rare.

It's also difficult because you have two people who are meeting and usually
who have very different echo-chambers they subscribe to, and so even when they
do enter into a discussion they are doing so from such divergent starting
points that they're more likely to talk past each other.

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angersock
Having been involved in various versions of these, some observations.

First, just having a semi-common mail subject line of [ANGERSOCK-BAD-ATTITUDE]
or whatever and then having a list of contacts and reply-all works pretty
well. You can easily tag and filter the resulting backchannel, and it helps
lend to the general sharing style of "Here is a thing", "Here is a comment on
that thing", "Here is a comment on that comment". Longer-form discussion or
debate is better suited to IRC.

Second, IRC is really, really good for this. Like, seriously, go setup a
channel on Quakenet or whatever for you and your friends today! It's open,
there's a lot of clients you can get, and it definitely feels more intimate
than certain hangouts or social-web solutions.

Third, try to bring in people with different views. It makes discussions more
interesting, makes everyone more moderate, and overall helps people learn.
That said, people have to be respectful of one another, or at least have some
agreed-upon decorum for teasing and ribbing. Sometimes, it's helpful to hang
around and make sure that people who are opposed to, say, a majority opinion
on GG or whatever still see that they are still members of a majority on
something else (like, chocolate flavors or whatever). Everybody wants to be
part of a community, and you can accomplish--with care!--even if that
community has different beliefs.

Fourth, group dynamics and conversations can really, really change just by
adding one or two people. It's not something to be done lightly, and it may be
necessary (say, in the case of the email backchannel) to just address a
different subset of the group in order to prevent flamewars or whatever. The
main idea is that everyone is part of the community, but again, that they
don't feel ostracized for disagreeing on a few points.

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wendybrown
"As a way to support women and marginalized folks of all sorts, I’d like to
see Slack add an additional option to the free offering that allows people to
choose to permanently delete messages that they can’t access themselves. That
would be sweet!"

Not that the government should have a right to all of your private
communications, but maybe it's not a good idea to integrate your team
communication platform with your discussing/doing illegal activities hobby.
Marginalized folks like Richard Nixon made that mistake and he had to resign
before his company fired him, if you can imagine the injustice.

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elnate
What about phpbb, is that still a thing? Seems perfect for what they want.

