:: gia’s blog ::

Oh Christ.

I’m so wrapped up in Sunshine that this week has passed me by. I vaguely heard the whole ‘Death Threats In The Blogosphere’ thing - in the way that I tend to get my news from the newpaper boards outside newsagents- but only today took the time to look into it after an email from John Dodds…

I was complaining to him about the misogyny I’m detecting coming from some posters at IMDB… He said, “This whole online criticism thing is so tired. I know it’s hard to ignore because we’re all especially sensitive for some reason to online barbs but that’s all they’re contributing.” He then went on to talk about how he’d been in email contact with Kathy Sierra before it all came out…

I looked into it all properly and have learned that Maryam and Hugh were attacked, as well. Fucking hell.

What the fuck is happening?!

I consider Maryam, Robert and Hugh as friends. Like, real world friends. Brian and I had a lovely dinner in Geneva with Robert and Maryam during LIFT where Maryam and I talked about having babies (she must have been only newly pregnant and hadn’t announced it yet). I really, really like Maryam a lot. They are *all* genuinely kind, interesting and positive people. You can disagree with their opinions, fine, whatever… but in no way do they deserve any kind of personal attacks like they are getting.

Hugh brought up the rape metaphor, “OK, so you weren’t the actual jock who raped the cheerleader. But it seems you were in the posse circling them, chanting ‘Go go go go go go go…’ “… and that’s what the attack on both Kathy and Maryam is. No ifs ands or buts about it- a vile and violent attack on them as women. They were gender-based, violent and sexual, verbal attacks.

That is out of fucking order in a very serious way. A very serious way. And no amount of ‘oh, it was just in jest’ will explain that kind of shit away.

I don’t think most men realise just how terrifying these kinds of threats can be and seem to think it’s OK to just say ‘Ah, it’s not *real* it’s just online.’ That’s like saying death threats via letter shouldn’t be taken seriously. One female presenter I worked with started receiving death threats via written letters and successfully prosecuted the guy. Jill Dando was killed when I was working for the BBC. A week after she was killed, someone came into my house with a knife and the BBC insisted that I be escorted everywhere, despite the fact that the knife-thing was in no way related to my telly work. People in the real world take *any* kind of threat against one’s person seriously, they should be treated with the same gravity online.

The moment you venture off your women-friendly iVillage-like sites or places where genuinely intelligent and secure men congregate (and, on the whole, men interested in social software are ALL about communication which isn’t a typically male mindset, you have to admit) and into a more typically male domain, it’s seriously fucking tough being a woman online. You have to find a Kevlar coating and quick if you’re going to openly admit to being female. Not because one isn’t intellectually capable of engaging in intelligent discussion, but because even online some men can’t see past your tits.

In online situations where I have chosen to remain anonymous (which happens very rarely), I am almost always assumed to be a man. If I could just let my female pride rest and pose as a man I think things would be different… but, silly old me, I always have to go and admit to being female. I don’t even HAVE a body online, but as soon as I admit to having a certain body type in the real world- *bam*- in come the sexual jibes - ’sugar tits’ being the latest thing I’ve been called on IMDB.

I spend a lot of time on IMDB talking about ‘Sunshine’. I genuinely, genuinely love the film and couldn’t do my job as passionately if I didn’t love it. But like all sidelined coteries there’s a sizeable minority of ‘genre film’ aficionados (all male) who seem to want to attack absolutely everyone and everything that doesn’t fit into their narrow view of the narrow world in which they’ve chosen to reside. And if you are a woman who *dares* to venture in with a different, wider, more inclusive, more positive viewpoint you’d better be prepared to be attacked. It might start with your opinions being attacked, but it won’t take long before it’s your gender that’s the focus. And so it has proved to be again.

I’m absolutely sick of misogyny. Really, truly fucking sick of it.

I had a wonderful time at LIFT again this year.

I saw Henriette, Sig and Maryam and finally met Stephanie– and, in fact, many more people whose cards are in my bag, but I’m in bed and don’t have the energy to go downstairs to get them… :-/

Brian, a couple of his CERN colleagues and I had dinner with Maryam, Nicole Smith and Robert Scoble last night. He’s now a big fan of Brian, but more importantly is bigging up CERN. Brian wants to invite him back to CERN later in the year to do a podcast together.

Laurent - you rule…

I didn’t take any photos. I didn’t take any video. I don’t even have a brain left (Sunshine has finally stolen it) to write anything more about LIFT… so why not read what everyone else wrote instead.

Yep, totally pissed off at me. Not Robert, but Maryam Scoble.

Last night I saw a fun video on Gia’s blog (I am not going to link to her blog again, because apparently that doesn’t matter), and linked to it, because it was really funny. Then Robert saw that on my blog and linked to her as well. He didn’t give me the credit for having found the link on Gia’s blog and linked directly to her. He is such a rip off artist. Apparently someone died and made me blog research specialist. I real all the blogs; I find the good stuff and then let you link to them. That’s enough to make one mad. A little note saying thanks Maryam for the link would’ve been real nice. Then I see on Gia’s blog (no I am not going to link to her because it doesn’t really matter) that she is thanking Scoble for linking to her, except she doesn’t acknowledge that it was this Scoble who linked to her first.

Clearly, Maryam is feeling a bit “Yoko”. No matter what Maryam does online she’s always going to be overshadowed by her husband. Whenever he likes something that she likes and writes about it (and doesn’t credit her), her contribution is going to be swept under the carpet while everyone swoons over her husband. That’s just how it’s going to be.

I have lived the past 15 years in the shadows of two extremely talented and rather well-known men. After seeing far more than a couple handfuls of my ideas greet the world under my partner’s name or under both of our names, but when the contract comes my name mysteriously has vanished, I know exactly how Maryam feels. It really, really sucks.

One time when I gave my ex an idea for one of his programmes, he took it into work, told everyone he worked with about it, they thought it was fucking excellent and thought he was a genius for coming up with it. He came home, told me all this and then said, ‘Don’t ever tell anyone it was your idea.’

Seriously.

When your own partner writes you out of the equation, it makes this “Feeling Yoko” stuff even more difficult to deal with. If, like it is now with Brian, your partner always acknowledges your contribution and makes sure that you aren’t overlooked by others (which happens a whole lot, let me tell you), then, though still not “fun”, it makes it bearable.

I will say this in my defence to, Maryam (cos I genuinely do like her):
I woke up yesterday morning with about 2,000 hits coming through from Robert. I use a free stats thingy which only records the info of the last 100 hits. They were all from Scobleizer. I had a parents’ assembly at school and then had to rush off to my first day at Channel 4. I didn’t make a point of looking at Technorati to see who else was linking to me… Also, when I wrote my post about Robert linking to me it was- and hopefully was taken as - tongue-in-cheek. Believe it or not, I don’t think that being linked to by Robert Scoble is the highlight of my life- nor my blog, for that matter.

ALSO, I CAN’T BLOODY COMMENT ON MARYAM’S BLOG UNLESS I SIGN UP TO SOME MICROSOFT THINGY!!!

I would have loved to have gone on to her blog to tell her this there, but I’m just not going to sign up to any of these things anymore.

So, I now rely on Technorati to relay this message to her. And if that doesn’t work, then if you all just click through to Maryam’s blog so that she can see people coming from here, that’d be lovely.

I find it interesting how online we battle against the draconian copyright laws, we release our writing under the Creative Commons, we allow anyone to use and publish our photos, we get seriously pissed off when we think that tradmedia is manipulating “our” free media, we all happily admit to engaging in “file sharing” and acquiring large parts of our vast MP3 collections for free, we drone on and on about destroying the top-down mentality of the media, we sit in our little ‘geek gatherings’ and collectively dream about a day when our “free”, “open” and “unrestricted” way of thinking will be the norm…

And then we get angry about not getting “credit” for linking to someone else who is linking to something else which has already been distributed far and wide.

If Maryam or Robert had linked directly to the YouTube video rather than my post with the video embedded and NOT credited me as their “source”, would I have cared? Not one single bit. It’s not my video, why should I care?

When we watch something on tv or hear it on the radio do we say, ‘Last night I was watching Channel 4’s ‘Celebrity Big Brother’- which I found out about while reading the Radio Times which is published by BBC Magazines which is owned by BBC Worldwide which is owned by the BBC which is technically owned by me through payment of my license fee…”??

It’s just silliness.

If you create something, you deserve credit. Full stop. If you merely facilitate the distribution of someone else’s creation, I genuinely don’t think it’s the end of the world if you don’t get a credit.

Typing “a href” is not a creative act. (I just made that up. And you all better fucking credit me if you use it, because it’s a great sentence.)

I only have a few minutes as I’m going into Channel 4 today to start working on the 1-2-1 Project.

I went to see an preview screening of Scenes of A Sexual Nature last night. Lovely little film. Ewan McGregor was fantastic. But what makes the film extremely interesting is that the filmmakers themselves are distributing it. It’s a very risky decision, but if the film is successful their rewards will be huge…

I woke up this morning to see that Scoble linked to me. I can die now. Again.