Sarah Davies

You must do the thinking for both of us.

I’ve been thinking lately about modern portrayals of masculine identity. I don’t like them. The best contrast I’ve come up with is Avatar and Casablanca. They are perfect opposites – one encapsulates sexism against women, the other sexism against men.

Ilsa and Jake are both portrayed as weak in the same key ways – lacking in basic knowledge, childlike, in need of guidance and support. That weakness is portrayed as something to be aspired to by their whole gender. They are defined by their mistakes and missteps.

Jake’s foil, Colonel Quaritch, is a villain. He is aggresive in his decisions; he is manipulative; he’s patriotic; he believes firmly in the justice of war. Ilsa’s foil, Yvonne, makes a lesser appearance. She is drunk, slutty, and only nominally patriotic.

This new sexism isn’t just odd, it’s much more insidious than its predecessor. In Casablanca, women should listen to men because otherwise they will get drunk and throw themselves at otherwise upstanding young men and regret it “someday and for the rest of [their] li[ves].” In Avatar, men should listen to women because otherwise they will enact genocide and destroy sacred places all across the cosmos.

When did we do this major 180 on sexism? Was there a point in the middle where we respected both sexes? If we split the difference between 1942 and 2009, we get 1977. Top grossing film of 1977? Star Wars.

What does it all mean? Thoughts? Do you think Star Wars was pro-men? pro-women? pro-human? Anti-human and pro-yoda?

I will be eating raspberries and reading books and ignoring all of you in an undisclosed location for the next two weeks. Please make a note of it.

Let’s say you have a friend who is a big blabbermouth and a friend who only discloses information about you if you give them explicit permission (FWODIAYIYGTEP). Knowing this, you regulate the information you tell the blabbermouth, but not the information you tell the FWODIAYIYGTEP. This is where Twitter and Facebook were three years ago. The heart of Twitter is and always has been broadcasting information publicly. This is why the Iranian revolution used Twitter and not Facebook. This is why cable news shows highlighted tweets rather than status updates. Facebook got jealous of the popularity and became a blabbermouth.

The ACLU is now very angry with Facebook. I am not. Facebook is merely attempting to become what Twitter has always been. The internet is built to broadcast information. Facebook is a networking site. I simply don’t understand how you can be mad at Facebook without being mad at Twitter, or WordPress, or HTML, or people who talk really loud on buses. Why does one website have to conform to a higher privacy standard than other websites?

It’s your job as a citizen of the internet to decide which sites are blabbermouths and which sites are FWODIAYIYGTEPs. The problem is that every site can potentially become a blabbermouth. They can even do it without meaning to by having a small hole in their code, which every site on the internet has. The logical conclusion here is if you don’t want it to be public, don’t put it on the internet.

But there’s another catch. Other people can put things about you on the internet, and they are becoming increasingly capable of doing so as humanity is getting better at recording and transferring information.

I’m here to warn you that in ten years you will be required to live in public. There will be no secrets. It won’t be because of a big brother government, or Facebook, or even malicious people. It will be because we like each other, and we want to know more about each other, and it’s very profitable to collect that information, make it public, and push it to anyone who wants it.

Stop having a temper tantrum over Facebook, and start gently tactfully taking the skeletons out of the closet. It’s only a matter of time until those walls will be brought down forcefully, and we’ll all learn an uncomfortably large amount about each other in a very short amount of time.

I will be presenting a workshop called “Marketing & Outreach: Engaging Your Community in a Digital World” at the Northwest Community Media Gathering at 11 on Saturday, May 15th at The Governor Hotel. If you are a community media person who wants to become a social media expert thanks to my fine tutelage, please do attend!

we have the new Facebook “like” button. Released yesterday, on the blog today. That’s how much I love you, dear dear readers and likers and tweeters.

I just installed a plugin for Twitter’s fancy new @Anywhere service on my blog that automagically links people’s twitter names if I put an @ in front of them, and it even shows (or if you prefer, “seamlessly activates”) the new hovercard so you just hover your mouse over the name, and out of nowhere will appear a picture, a bio, their most recent tweet, and a follow button, just in case you’re too lazy to actually click through to the link that it automagically put there.

Testing this plugin seems like a good excuse to promote a few of my favorite tweeters, just in case you’re looking for friends. I’ve grouped them roughly by category.

Me

@sarahdavies

Infomaniacs (those insanely obsessed with information and how it effects humans)

@emahlee

@WebEcology

@laurenpressley

@kathy_live and @kegill

@sarterus

Nonprofits

@ACLU and @ACLU_WA

@NTENorg

@vittana

@WashingtonBus

@seafreeschool

@equalrightswa

@civicactions

The Strange yet Awesome

@unicornbooty

@awesomefound

Note: If you’re reading this through rss or Facebook, this won’t work for you. You have to be on the site. Since Facebook is amazingly good at hiding what site this came from, here’s a link for all you Facebookers. http://sarahdavies.cc/2010/04/23/we-have-been-assimilated-by-the-twitter

Second note: Damn, Twitter, way to rip off Obama’s graphic design. You guys had a great cute opaque curvy thing going. You don’t need to steal other people’s style, we like you just the way you are!

Third note: Since my twitter is in the sidebar of my blog, will my @replies on twitter come back to my blog and get hovercards linking them back to twitter in an endless recursive nightmare of microbloggy madness?

Several people at TEDxSeattle last weekend mentioned Vittana to me as an up and coming nonprofit. They microfinance student loans for people in developing countries. For example:

This is Thanh-Luong Thi Nguyen. She is an eighteen year-old student in Vietnam. She would like to attend Hanoi Industrial Vocational College to get a degree in accounting which would allow her to earn an annual salary of $2,670. She needs a loan of $538 and intends to pay back the loan once she gets a job at a rate of a little over $30 per month. As of this writing, eight lenders have pledged a total of $270 in loans toward her education.

I think this is a fantastic idea. Education directly correlates with income, happiness, and family planning. It looks like they only have a few students up there currently, although whether that’s due to a lack of demand for loans or an abundance of lenders is unclear.

I’m glad that they are a nonprofit. The for-profit microlending field has always tasted a little sour to me. When you finance a loan, Vittana asks for a small optional donation to cover their costs. They are also grant-funded by the Peery Foundation, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation and the Crystal Springs Foundation.

Interestingly, the students who appear on Vittana have already received loans from banks at an interest rate of 10-15%; Vittana essentially guarantees those loans with money from people like you, so that the banks can take more risk in lending. The banks (not the lenders or Vittana) keep the interest to cover their costs. By the time a student appears on Vittana, they have typically already started their educational program.

My notes on Debra Music and Joe Whinney’s TEDxSeattle talk “Doing Well While Doing Good; The
Sweet Story of Theo Chocolate.”

They are passing out chocolate bars!

Joe started Theo with Debra about five years ago. He was volunteering in Central America. His first day at the foundation, he was asked to harvest cocoa with indigenous Mayans. He knew nothing about harvesting chocolate. They went out into the rainforest, and they would cut the pods off the tree and he would chase them as they rolled down the hill. They were about the size of a football. Then they scooped the seeds out of the pod, and chewed on them as they were working. The flavor of the seeds was amazing. As a kid, Joe only had only known the processed commodity version of chocolate.

He wanted to create a company that had heart and sole and wanted to create commerce where they could transparently prove that no one was harmed, including the planet. We hope that people will buy it the first time because it says organic and fair trade, but we hope you will continue to eat it because it’s so good.

Debra and Joe married about twenty years ago and they’ve been divorced nearly as long.

At Theo, they believe they can make something that people really want, where everyone in the process benefits from making the product. Joe refers to it as “enlightened capitalism.” All businesses need to go in this direction if we are going to sustain life on this planet.

The cocoa industry trades about 3 million tons annually. Of that, theo buys about 300 tons, about .01%, but they’ve still been disruptive in the market. There are very few companies in the US that buy the beans and make their own chocolate. Theo is the only organic fair trade chocolate company. They’ve set a new standard for behavior. By doing that, they’ve been able to illuminate the practices of their competitors.

Theo works closely with cocoa farmers where they live. They provide them with education, resources, and tools to grow quality cacao. Most chocolate farmers have no idea what happens to the beans after they leave the farm. They’ve never had chocolate before. They went to the farm and explained the process and gave chocolate to them and their families. Farmers need to understand what Theo is looking for when they are quality testing.

Once the beans are fermented and dried, they are sent to the Theo factory. There they can set the quality by doing all of their own manufacturing. They source everything that goes into the product. They know the real value of every part of the product – cherries, hazelnuts, labels. Theo is not a nonprofit. They need to make money. Last year during the recession, they launched a new line of chocolate that was more accessible and cheaper. They grew 36% last year and achieved profitability for the first time.

My notes from Morgan Dusatko and Sarah Stuteville’s TEDxSeattle talk “America in 5.”

Now more than ever, there are stories all around us that need to be told that aren’t being told. We’re in the middle of economic collapse. There are a lot of parallels between today and the 1930s. Back then, there were writing projects who sent out journalists like Dorothy Lang to tell those stories. America in 5 is doing that now.

It’s crucial to look at the stories of ourselves and our neighbors. We have more opportunity now than we ever have to document those stories. The America in 5 website has stories from all over America.

America in 5 wants to send out teams of journalists all over the country, with the goal of getting one piece of media back a day. The media has to be nonfiction and under 5 minutes.

One story they sponsored is a homeless family. They hired a cartoon artist to illustrate the story, as well as getting footage of the family telling their story. In January 2010 one homeless shelter had to turn away 700 families. This family didn’t want to take the kids out of school, so they took a three hour bus ride each way to get from the shelter to the school.

America in 5 needs investors to start this project.

My notes on Ben Huh’s TEDxSeattle talk “Convening Community & Company Direction Through Life Goals.”

19 Debts is the idea that these are the things that Ben owes it to himself to accomplish.

These are all difficult because he’s afraid, or he’s not good at them, or no one’s done it before.

The “have fun” part of the list:

1999 Graduate with a bachelor’s degree

2000 Start a startup

2001 Find the perfect woman

2008 Learn how to sail

Learn how to fly

Learn how to ride a motorcycle

Own a home outright

Sell a company for profit

Ben was the first person in his school to go to college, and it was hard during the dot com boom of 1999 to stay in school rather than joining a startup and making lots of money.

His first startup folded and he ended up $40,000 in debt. The practice of failure was important.

The “help yourself” list:

2004 Payoff all debts (excl. mortgage)

2008 Turn an annual profit

Have a net worth of $1 million

Beat the S&P 500 as a stock investor

Set aside enough money to never have to work for the rest of my life

Getting out of failure and out of debt means you are a person who has a center than cannot be shaken. When the world comes to you and says you’re an idiot and you know you’re right, those experiences help you take the heat.

Out of that failure, he built the Cheezburger network, which became profitable in 2008.

The “help the world” list:

2008 Invest in other startups

Give away $1 million to charity

Help someone go to college

Work on a political campaign

After becoming a millionaire, and knowing he can take care of the rest of his family for the rest of his life, then giving away a million dollars can help hundreds of people. Vatana is an organization that allows people to finance a college education when student loans aren’t available.

Ben has a degree in journalism. He can, in fact, spell things correctly when needed. He would love to cover or work on a political campaign. It seems like a lot of fun.

“Write a book” is shorthand for “live a life worth writing about.” If your life allows you to see into the hearts and minds of other people, then you have lived a good life.

Sarah’s commentary
I think his message of overcoming adversity is inspiring. I think it’s made him a little arrogant, though. I definitely agree with the overall message that you should live a life worth writing about.