Saturday Morning Keynote

I got here late, so forgive me!

I walked into the room with NOW President Kim Gandy* and the first thing I heard was something about sex fetishes. GOOD MORNING!

Right now there is a discussion whether or not blogging is elitist. One speaker said it perfectly, it's not elitist in that only upper class discussions occur, but that it is elitist in that there is a digital divide. Now a discussion about literacy itself. I know that some of my blogging friends & I kid about the NSA looking thru our emails and blogs, but one speaker mentioned that in conversations with poor communities could care less, they just want to be online - for job applications, community, and all the fun that we take for granted.

Community is a huge theme, especially within the momosphere. I made a parallel yesterday to someone. That our lives are so crazy that we don't have time to chat over fences with neighbors, so we have created online intimate communities.

Do we need to change technology to suit women or do we change society's view of women? What role do we have to play to make technology the best it can be for women?

Our country has always had an underground press, the internet & blogs have taken that role over. People are aware of the corruption of mainstream media. Althou we have seen that corruption leak into online media.

Women need to be confident in what we know about technology. We don't need to have a Ph.D. in computer science to have technical knowledge. Don't dismiss what you know. I admit to doing this often. I pledge to work on this harder.

I'm a C or B-grade geek thou. I just found out that digg seems to be not listing stories that are being submitted by women. Anyone have any insight on this? Yikes!

Technology is not gender neutral because behind the technology are human beings and we're still sexist/racist/etc.

A great conversation about what the hell we're doing with all this blogging.


* I was lucky in that she was looking for the ballroom when I was walking by. It's not like we planned it. I'm not that cool.


blogher07