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Opine at me, web ladies
Feb. 27th, 2011 05:24 pmGood afternoon, fiends!
I'm popping in for a blether while G succumbs to the rare manly pursuits of watching the football while eating fruit cake. (Actually he has been super-manly today because he also did some drilling so that I could change the handles on my bedside drawers for some lovely glass ones that had winged their way over from the People's Republic of China.)
Thank you for the replies to my poll yesterday. I'm delighted to see that "Ruprecht" is getting almost as many votes as the leading option! I have come to accept that, whatever his official name ends up being, he will always be Ruprecht to me. I've developed such a fond attachment to it that all other names now sound like strangers. (Last night we attended a family dinner for G's brother and received several new suggestions from nephews & neices, including Zebulon, Jesus and Timothy. Hmmm...)
On an unrelated matter, I've been noticing something about women who use the interwebz and wonder what you webby chapettes think. Do you think there is a 'type'? And if so, is there a whole nother type sitting quetly out there whose voices are not being heard online?
Being incurably plugged into the matrix, I am what you might call "active" on the webz. Admittedly a lot of my hangouts lean towards the thoroughly shallow, but at least two of them are big and mainstream. One of my fav haunts is www.ravelry.com, a social community for people who mess about with string. (Against all expectations, this site has won a ton of web awards and has become freakishly popular, with millions of members and never fewer than 3,000 logged in at any time.) Another - probably larger - community that I joined very recently is mumsnet (which again seems to have thousands logged in at any time).
The raison d'etre for both of these sites is to be a gathering place for people with one very specific thing on common - i.e. they are either string-fetishists or sproggers. Other than that, these places are free-for-alls which ought to represent the full politicial and social gamut. However, what I have started to notice in both camps is a dominant 'type' - this being ladies who are liberal/left wing, blunt, iconoclastic, tongue-in-cheek, irreverent, eloquent and a tad sweary. Humour tends to dominate most threads, and the rare voice that pops up to express something smacking of conservatism or easily-taken-offence tends to be drowned out pretty quickly by a combination of tutters, arguers and piss takers*. It's led me to wonder what it would look like if someone drew a Venn diagram of women who read the Daily Fail and women who are heavily active on internet forums. Would the two overlap at all? (And if so, where on earth are the Daily Fail readers all hanging out?)
Well I suppose that's enough witter from me. I think it's time to do a few lines...
Hope you're all having lovely, relaxing Sunday PMs. I wish it would not slip by so quickly....
* e.g. last week someone dared to complain about how offensive she finds "the C word" and asked if other mumsnetters would please stop using it so liberally - which has generated a huge thread dominated by love-your-vagina feminists and enthusiastic language geeks, extolling its worth and quoting Shakespeare, Chaucer and other etymological nerdery.
I'm popping in for a blether while G succumbs to the rare manly pursuits of watching the football while eating fruit cake. (Actually he has been super-manly today because he also did some drilling so that I could change the handles on my bedside drawers for some lovely glass ones that had winged their way over from the People's Republic of China.)
Thank you for the replies to my poll yesterday. I'm delighted to see that "Ruprecht" is getting almost as many votes as the leading option! I have come to accept that, whatever his official name ends up being, he will always be Ruprecht to me. I've developed such a fond attachment to it that all other names now sound like strangers. (Last night we attended a family dinner for G's brother and received several new suggestions from nephews & neices, including Zebulon, Jesus and Timothy. Hmmm...)
On an unrelated matter, I've been noticing something about women who use the interwebz and wonder what you webby chapettes think. Do you think there is a 'type'? And if so, is there a whole nother type sitting quetly out there whose voices are not being heard online?
Being incurably plugged into the matrix, I am what you might call "active" on the webz. Admittedly a lot of my hangouts lean towards the thoroughly shallow, but at least two of them are big and mainstream. One of my fav haunts is www.ravelry.com, a social community for people who mess about with string. (Against all expectations, this site has won a ton of web awards and has become freakishly popular, with millions of members and never fewer than 3,000 logged in at any time.) Another - probably larger - community that I joined very recently is mumsnet (which again seems to have thousands logged in at any time).
The raison d'etre for both of these sites is to be a gathering place for people with one very specific thing on common - i.e. they are either string-fetishists or sproggers. Other than that, these places are free-for-alls which ought to represent the full politicial and social gamut. However, what I have started to notice in both camps is a dominant 'type' - this being ladies who are liberal/left wing, blunt, iconoclastic, tongue-in-cheek, irreverent, eloquent and a tad sweary. Humour tends to dominate most threads, and the rare voice that pops up to express something smacking of conservatism or easily-taken-offence tends to be drowned out pretty quickly by a combination of tutters, arguers and piss takers*. It's led me to wonder what it would look like if someone drew a Venn diagram of women who read the Daily Fail and women who are heavily active on internet forums. Would the two overlap at all? (And if so, where on earth are the Daily Fail readers all hanging out?)
Well I suppose that's enough witter from me. I think it's time to do a few lines...
Hope you're all having lovely, relaxing Sunday PMs. I wish it would not slip by so quickly....
* e.g. last week someone dared to complain about how offensive she finds "the C word" and asked if other mumsnetters would please stop using it so liberally - which has generated a huge thread dominated by love-your-vagina feminists and enthusiastic language geeks, extolling its worth and quoting Shakespeare, Chaucer and other etymological nerdery.
