I learned my Bible the old-fashioned way: by watching The West Wing. It’s high piety and swelling democratic music was my Church of the Capra America. It was, I reckon, the best PR the Clinton Administration ever got, and it taught me a term to describe a trick I have long used. ”Saying Shibboleth” is how I have entered rooms with CEOs and CIOs, housewives, soap opera writers, golfers, and NASCAR execs and curried their trust and favor. It is often thought of as a kind of password, a signifier of your origin, a stamp of authenticity. It is, at its most literal, a pronunciation used as what we would now refer to as a litmus test: pronounce it right, and gain entry to the kingdom; say it wrong, and be killed.
Like many people, I have instincts that tell me when I am among friends – body language, tone, facial expressions give me strong clues about whether I am welcome in a room or not. Social cues – how my friends or family are behaving – also tell me whether I am in friendly waters. These instincts and social cues are deeply rooted and closely held.
Even language plays a role – idioms are the hardest things for non-native speakers to absorb and employ, yet they are also significant indicators of origin. I’ve worked with Brits for years, and have adopted some of their idioms – sometimes you’ll hear me say I’m at the end of my tether rather than rope, or that a project’s gone ‘tits up’, or I’ll confuse whether something is as dull as dishwater (US) or ditchwater (UK). [As an aside, check these out, there are a lot of them that are also said in the US, at least in my part of the Northwest and among some of my friends here in NYC.]
There are also a lot I know and understand, but don’t say – you’ll never catch me describing a pregnant woman as “up the duff”, though lots of my friends do. But I’ll say there are “loads” of something when most Americans will say “lots”, and sometimes, after several hours with my Brit pals, I’ll adopt the rhythm of British accents, all of them at once usually, and confuse the hell out of the next person I talk to. Nevertheless, most people are quite well aware that I’m not English myself. And while my American friends find my English accent hilarious after a few drinks, my friend Liam winces like I’m scratching at a chalkboard. I could not frame to pronounce it right, it turns out.
Saying Shibboleth at ROFLcon
I’ve been thinking a lot about saying Shibboleth since I ‘returned’ to Internet Culture (I hadn’t realized I left, of course, but some people regard me as a neophyte – I’ve already protested too much on this topic, so won’t flog my bona fides again). I attended ROFLcon in Boston a few months ago and people were buzzing about someone’s mispronunciation of the word ‘meme.’ That word and I are the same age, though I can safely say I did not spring from the head of Richard Dawkins; while people much younger than me scoffed at the mispronunciation – the faux pas of an obvious n00b – I think we can forgive the transgressor for mistaking the pronunciation of so new a word, and one he had probably only seen in text. Later, a panelist seemed perplexed when a questioner referred to IRL; the audience murmured their shock at his ignorance, and someone helpfully shouted the definition (“In Real Life”, a designation that is frankly, wildly out of date and out of step with how most of us live today).
What struck me at the time, and continues to simmer beneath the surface of so many conversations with and about the world of the Internet Nerds, is that these little hang-ups are cases of people failing to say Shibboleth. They are not members of the tribe, and are held in some contempt for being outsiders. People marveled at ROFLcon about how these people, who were clearly not ‘from the community’ (as people so delicately phrased it) were successful enough at their meme-making to be a panelist at a meme conference. The “insiders” were at turns impressed, confused, and put off by these outsiders and their success at making memes even when they couldn’t pronounce “meme.” They don’t speak the language, people seemed to be saying, and yet they’re succeeding anyway.
As a relative oldster in the crowd, I was at the time amazed at how ‘new’ everything was perceived to be. Mainstream, commercial culture adopting internet memes was seen as a looming threat, as opposed to an ebbing and flowing one that has already washed over countless memetic sandcastles. I was also surprised to discover that there was some sense of a homogenous “internet culture” – something that belonged to this group, and perhaps only this group. (In fairness, there were efforts at discussion of women and minorities within the culture, but these felt a bit forced to me.) The whole point, I always supposed (as the Internet Utopian I once was), was that the internet crossed cultures, combined cultures, even eluded traditional ideas of culture.
I can see that I was wrong. And not just at ROFLcon.
Back to the gender “shitstorm“
I’ve continued my background processing of the TechCrunch/WSJ/Change the Ratio spat from the weekend, and started to wonder whether an innate tribalism wasn’t the truer root of the gender divide in tech start-ups.
I noticed two ‘fact-based’ arguments being made as a reason (or an excuse) for the lack of women-led start-ups. Statistics about women studying engineering or computer sciences were raised consistently – and legitimately – in the comments of all these discussions; so too were flimsy arguments about evolution, biology and neurochemistry. But scratch these arguments and you find two ideas that may be much more about the tribalism of the start-up “scene” and much less about gender specifically.
ShibbolethFAIL #1: No CS or engineering degree
The first argument about women’s presence in schools and programs teaching the underpinnings of technology speaks to this idea of saying Shibboleth. I used to describe my dad, a product manager for tech firms ranging from InFocus to Intel to Sun (and a great many pre-dot-com start-ups in between), as someone who spoke English and C++. The truth is, my dad was a philosophy major who loved technology. When it came to the innards of servers and circuit boards, he was an autodidact who learned mainly by trial and error. He passed for a native because he learned the language, adopted the accent and – perhaps most importantly – understood the concepts (logic, most especially) that underpinned the technology. You don’t need to have a CS degree to understand what technology is capable of doing, or imagining what it could do in the future, or to have a passion for it. But these arguments suggest that without these bona fides, you’re an Ephraimite who’s about to lose your head.
Look, so far women aren’t overwhelming the admissions offices of CalTech, but so what? I have a degree in PoliSci and Journalism, and another in Law. But nothing excites me as much as what technology can do. Tech has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and it is ultimately where I turn for connection, communication, information, and inspiration. I can name-drop Ruby on Rails, mention spending the day teaching myself WordPress hooks, and lecture my exes on the difference between memory and storage (in other words, I can be a real drag). I know a lot of women who are far more knowledgeable than I am; I know a lot of women who know less about the tech but have a million great ideas for how to use it and develop it and evolve it. If getting in to the club requires a CS or engineering diploma, then I reckon a purging is in order. Michael Arrington, for one, has a degree in economics and another in law, but no CS or engineering credentials. Perhaps we start with stripping him of his all-access pass until he completes the curriculum.
ShibbolethFAIL #2: Women are biologically and chemically different
Women in tech, it seems to me, are quite simply the Constitutive Other. They are not like the Same, so they are different, and need to be sorted into a category of some kind – safe/unsafe, certain/uncertain, integrated/segregated. While we are tribal creatures – this is why we build cities and cathedrals, why we go to war, get married, study in classrooms, pledge fraternities, live in neighborhoods, go to the movies, eat in restaurants, hang out in parks, go to meetups, follow each other on twitter – we build tribes of people who share something in common with us. And we occupy many tribes – in fact, what some have regarded as a splintering of society may really just be a more fluid movement between multiple overlapping and/or disparate tribes. The pluralism of our Internet Culture fosters these new ideas of tribal identity – interests, passions, beliefs, behaviors all can serve in place of nationalities or religions (or alongside them).
But to gain entry into these tribes, you must be the Same, not the Other. Women are, for a variety of reasons and as the result of many causes, not yet seen as the Same. An earlier, less educated time might have simply said that these matters were not a woman’s place, or that women were not smart enough or strong enough or whatever enough to do them; that these are important matters best left to the men, and not to worry our (ahem) pretty little heads about it.
Citing biology and neurochemistry and some pop-science understanding of evolutionary imperatives seems to me to be what smart, educated men (and some women, too) who know better rely upon to explain their perception of women’s Other-ness.
Perhaps, then, it’s not exactly men v. women. Maybe it’s more Same v. Other. The obvious solution would be to stop asking for passwords and start embracing ideas and action. Focus on the merit of the idea as an initial matter more than the merit of the person. Defining meritocracy that way might lead to more balanced outcomes.
L’envoi
The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same. (via The New York Times)