Shocking Pink ([info]fionnghuala) wrote,
@ 2008-06-10 18:34:00
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Current mood: write-y

Hide and Seek
Had hoped as I was posting yesterday about the Hide and Seek festival, that it would filter into my consciousness and I'd realise that not only did I think it would be cool to go, I actually could go, and would get my arse in gear to do it.

Then I noticed that it's the same weekend as my Big Conference, so there's no way I can.

Which means it's also the same weekend as Glastonbury. Which seems a shame as the two have superficially similar remits. So then I started to wonder what this means. Why would avoiding this clash not be important to the organisers?

I guess because there isn't a big feeling that their audience would want to go to both, despite the apparent similar appeal. Two main reasonings I can think of:

1)Glastonbury is over, and is no longer about art and creativity and fun and innovation, but is just a few gigs and other entertainments happening on top of each other.

2)Hide & Seeks audience are not the kind of people who would go to Glastonbury. (1) can be kind of subsumed into this, but more a statement of a kind of geek, gamer maybe intellectual culture being a separate one from whatever Glastonbury represents; perhaps more of a crusty or indy or outdoorsy or even just music-interest culture.

This relates to some stuff I've been thinking today about what geek culture is. I'm imagining some kind of perfect internet user who stands in opposition to the stuff I'm interested in about fluffing it up.


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[info]doctor_nemesis
2008-06-11 02:55 pm UTC (link)
How do you want to "fluff it up"?

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[info]fionnghuala
2008-06-11 03:36 pm UTC (link)
THAT is exactly the question I am interested in. How does fluffing it up happen.

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[info]doctor_nemesis
2008-06-11 03:47 pm UTC (link)
Why isn't it fluffy already? What is fluffy?

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[info]fionnghuala
2008-06-11 03:54 pm UTC (link)
Oh, "to fluff up" = "to mess up"

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[info]fionnghuala
2008-06-11 03:55 pm UTC (link)
I think it might be:

Fluff up is to Fuck up as
Sugar! is to Shit!

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[info]minnesattva
2008-06-11 04:22 pm UTC (link)
That sounds intriguing. What's the stuff you're interested in that that'd be opposed to?

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[info]fionnghuala
2008-06-11 04:34 pm UTC (link)
I'm interested in what people do with technology when they actually end up using it as part of their normal life. Specifically women and the internet at the moment. Because I'm also interested in things like inequality and who gets excluded, I'm trying to look at how people who aren't particularly good with technology manage to muddle along and get things to work for them.

The vast majority of writing about technology looks at people who are really good at using it, so that some of the bits I think are interesting - for example how you actually find out about the stuff and get the money together to get it and then set it up once you've got it - become really quick and simple and hardly an issue at all.

So I'm trying to work out some of the characteristics of the 'ideal user' that is often the assumed user. And then look at some of the ways that's reflected in how less-good users use things. I'm not sure yet whether it's worth doing or not... But to imagine this ghostly figure standing over people as they fail to get their scanner to work. Or at least ghostly set of assumptions and things you might have difficulty finding out how to do, or have to apologist for, etc, etc..

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[info]minnesattva
2008-06-11 09:33 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure yet whether it's worth doing or not...

It sounds it to me! Of course that's easy to say from the outside, where I can just hope to read about it at the end and not have to do the grunt work in the middle. But it sounds a lot like something I tried to think and wanted to talk about when I was in college, befriending and dating geeks. I used to say I felt like a geek anthropologist, and I liked that.

I went from someone totally unused to computers (my family didn't have one until I was in high school, and didn't have the internet until after I'd left home for college) to someone who was thought to be the resident geek in her hall of residence in a year, and in another year I started using Linux. And one of the command-line heavy versions, too! Yet I'm still not a computer programmer or even someone who particularly likes computers as such, I just like the internet because all my friends live there. :) So I've been through lots of the stages of tech-savviness and I like to think I have some sympathy for most of them, and that's why I'm interested in all this.

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[info]fionnghuala
2008-06-12 02:18 pm UTC (link)
That's a really interesting story! I think it's a much more common kind of story for women, which is one of the reasons they always have a bit of an outsider status in geek-dom, that it's later in life, or when a specific opportunity presents itself that women become familiar with computer etc!

One of the reason I quite enjoy these gamer conferences is because you get to see the whole ecology of these systems in one place. Even the really hardcore women talk about things like feeling anxiety when they play an online game, that people will see that they aren't good enough, or even just that they won't know the etiquette of it.

Thanks for the encouragement ;) At the moment I'm calling this character The Hacker, but I might have to come up with some less generic name in a bit. It's very Literary Criticism or maybe Cultural Studies style, rather than Sociology which is more my training and a bit less playful, so I'm not quite sure where to go with it...

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[info]minnesattva
2008-06-12 04:24 pm UTC (link)
And to be fair a lot -- not all! by any means -- of that geekiness was due to the guy I was dating; he got into Linux then and installed it on my laptop when he borrowed it for a while... but of course I would've have been interested in befriending/dating geeks, or in Linux (he did ask me before he put it on my computer!) if I hadn't already been sort of a geek myself.

I tried very hard to be a humanities student when I was in college, and I would've done something a lot like this if given the chance (my school wasn't big enough to have departments for things like Cultural Studies, though my English degree had (far too much for me!) Literary Criticism. If my experiences had been more like what you're talking about here I would've probably liked it a lot better.

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