memevector: (Default)
[personal profile] memevector
Here are some thoughts, especially for anyone who considers themself a UK bi activist or part of the UK bi community, about something I've been noticing and thinking about lately.

Example 1.
Conversation between me and a friend last week (summarised):
X: I was looking on the net for that discussion you'd mentioned, about the results from the bi-activist weekend, but I couldn't find it - maybe that's 'cause I'm not very clued in to what's happening on LiveJournal.
Me: No, actually that one wasn't on LJ - it was on an email list. But come to think of it, I'm not sure if you could have known about that list. I can't remember now how I found out about it.

The list I'd alluded to was of course the one set up to plan the bi-activist weekend. Since the weekend, it's been the venue for an explosion of activist inventiveness, and has hosted several discussions of potential interest to a much wider audience.

Example 2.
The other day, at the end of the post on the BiCon LJ about access, [livejournal.com profile] barakta mentioned crossposting to the BiCon 2004 discussion forum. Oh, what's that? I thought, and went to look. It seems this forum has been going since new year, and some people have been posting there for a while. I don't know how they knew it was happening. Maybe they just happened to check in to the BiCon 2004 web site (from where there's a link)? Maybe it was mentioned at the bi-activist weekend?

And I'm left wondering: if I hadn't read to the end of [livejournal.com profile] barakta's post (which wasn't actually about the new forum, more a mention in passing), then how long would it have been before I found out the forum was there?


I could go on to list another three or four recent examples of a similar nature: where things are going on which are theoretically open to anyone, but whether you find out about them depends largely on chance - e.g. on which friendship groups you're in and/or whose personal LJs you're reading. It can happen off the net too - you miss something because nobody thought to mention that it was happening, or remembered you might be interested.

(Most of the examples I'm thinking of haven't affected me in the sense of my being in the out-group. Let's face it, I probably don't even know all the places I'm in the out-group of. But they're examples where someone is/was in some inadvertent out-group.)


I am not happy about the level of this phenomenon. If it were just the odd once or twice, I'd probably disregard it, but it's more than that, and I think it's costing us as a community more than we realise. Making people work hard to find out what's going on is not an effective way to do activism.

The sense of "conversations happening somewhere, but I don't know where", or "conversations in which no-one cares if I'm included or not" can be highly frustrating and unwelcoming to newcomers, and pretty disempowering even to the veterans.

To comment on my own example of being in the out-group: I'm sure it wasn't deliberate exclusion - BiCon teams have a lot to think about and a lot to do! But it still shows up in my world as an unspoken indication of whose presence is considered important (not mine, and not the other people who didn't get told). That doesn't exactly fill me with inspiration.

And of course, even aside from the demoralisation factor, creating inadvertent out-groups inevitably leads to less effectiveness, because people with relevant information or insights (or pure enthusiasm & willingness) are being inadvertently excluded. How much more activism would get done if it were easy for every newcomer to find their niche and start to contribute?


One major in-group/out-group phenomenon is between people on or not on the internet. To some degree I think we have to live with that, although BCN and support for local groups can mitigate it to some degree. But creating inadvertent out-groups on the net is i.m.o. a lot less inevitable or justifiable.

Sometimes there's a conscious strategic decision to limit particular discussions to a certain group. An obvious example is the people within a BiCon organising team. I'm not questioning the legitimacy of that practice - consciously chosen strategic subgroups are not my subject here.

Plus, in any planning, I think a degree of "slow propagation" is inevitable. I.e. often the first people to hear about a new idea are friends of the person who had the idea.

But I'm talking about the point where a general discussion gets opened. At that point, either you make the effort to put the information out there where any interested person is likely to encounter it, or you may as well admit that you're excluding people.


I don't think this issue is new - some people have been describing the bi community as cliquey as far back as I remember it (though I'm sure that description encompasses other phenomena besides this one).

I think it's possible that this aspect of it may be (inadvertently) increasing lately, though, because of the way people are using LJ.

A few years ago, most UK bi community things would at least get a mention on the UK-bi emailing list. If you wanted to know what was going on, then hanging out there would get you probably 80 to 90% of it.

That list is very low traffic now, despite having a lot of people still subscribed to it, and LJ doesn't have an equivalent of it.

The BiCon LJ could be that equivalent (though still of limited usefulness to people who choose not to have LJs), and a few people (including me) have been using it that way. Like, personally I do tend to put at least a one-liner on there if I've written something which I think is for the community as a whole.

But a lot of people tend to put their activism posts on their personal journals, and then even if it's a public post (in terms of privacy settings), the fact is that usually only the people who've "friended" them will read it. (E.g. recent posts on individual journals about plans and inventions arising from the bi-activist weekend.)

Also (and I'm not the first to comment on this), it seems that the immediacy of LJ, and the resulting focus on it, has gone along with a falling-off of attention on BCN - although [livejournal.com profile] softfruit has done sterling work in rejuvenating it in the last year or two, and catalysing interesting content for it, and trawling the net for things that ought to be mentioned in BCN too. It seems like people often feel "if it's been said somewhere on LJ, then it's been said". BCN is especially important as one of the few interfaces available to people without net access.

The proliferation of little emailing lists on different topics is another factor. I don't mean in the sense that not everyone is subscribed to every list - that's inherent, because the whole point of having separate lists is that not everyone is interested in every topic, or has time to read about it. I'm talking about when the interested people don't know that a list exists, or don't know that the discussion on that list now includes topics to which they have something to contribute.


Basically I'm saying that I think our intra-community communication is currently sufficiently erratic and patchy as to be a significant limiting factor on what we can accomplish.

I don't think there is any one remedy for this. (I do think that [livejournal.com profile] barakta's post about BiCon access the other day, and the parallel article in BCN, are good examples of the kind of thought and effort required for effective communication with the activist community.)

Mainly I just wanted to invite people to pay consistent attention to the question of: whom are we including in this conversation, and is it everyone who has something to contribute to it?

(no subject)

Date: 2004-01-26 03:21 pm (UTC)
ext_8176: (Default)
From: [identity profile] softfruit.livejournal.com
BCN should to my mind be that space. LJ lacks the persistence as things scroll off the bottom of your friends page, and comments to old LJ entries pass 99% of readers by. Of course, I'm terribly biased!

Speaking of BCN, remember you're in a lull between the activist weekend and the next issue of the magazine, which will carry rather a lot of post activist weekend news and links. It's also got something about the relaunch of Bi Underground at last :o) and in due course those things will make their way onto the BCN website.

Email lists is an interesting point. Should BCN reintroduce details of them in our regular listings section? We abandoned doing that in about 1999 when we opted to have more content, less listings, and put the listings on an auto responder email thingie. Said email responder thingie has died some time ago (hence we don't list it in BCN any more!) and we have some www listings in the Starters Pack but nothing in the regular magazine.

The proposed "BCN Annual" may also have a role to play here in providing deeper listings information. (noise of brain cogs turning)

(no subject)

Date: 2004-01-27 02:59 am (UTC)
cryx: me showing off hair done by a stylist from paris (Default)
From: [personal profile] cryx
i would agree with you, and i appreciate that i am one of the guilty parties, with the bi media group i recently set up. I certainly don't want that just to be a cliquey little group, but as i was doing it on the spur of the moment, i only posted about it on the bi weekend list and my own lj. To be honest, i really would not be sure where else to put it. your suggestion of uk-bi is a good one. i'm not sure if i am actually subscribed to that, so i'll have to check it out.

So it's just due to my crapness really i spose :(

Any other ideas where i could advertise it?

(no subject)

Date: 2004-02-27 08:44 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thebirdwoman.livejournal.com
Hello, I'm terribly sorry for gatecrashing your journal - I found it via [livejournal.com profile] davidmcn and read it occasionally (along with your site). Re: LJ not having an equivalent of a UK bi mailing list, is there a community? Could we set one up? Not having been to bicon I don't know most of the LJ bi brigade, and hence I don't read the bicon community much. A more generic community might be useful. On the other hand, there are probably too many communities on LJ already...

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