RATM, or how a band accidentally changed a landscape

This is going to be a complicated post for me because I must not be emotive. That's hard because I passionately believe in democracy for all, in engagement, and in influence and shaping the future to be what we want it to be instead of sitting on our asses and letting someone else do all the debating.

Firstly, I need to own up to something. Shyness is not the only reason this blog never existed before. Confidence factored in, but also apathy. What was the point, I thought, in being one voice among many, invisible, tipping empty irrelevant thoughts into the black hole of cyber space. What difference can I make, what contribution do I have? I didn't think I had an opinion at all, never mind that expressing it might be a positive thing.

Then something odd happened. I loved Rage Against the Machine when I was younger. I was a shy little geek and Killing in the name of allowed me to scream rebellion in an acceptable form. It was cathartic, a way of getting rid of all the worries and stress of my teens. I didn't know they were a 'political band', I just knew the words resonated on a very deep level. And what do you know, but a large number of years later, it seems those words resonated with a whole new generation. Against all the odds, despite all the naysayers, Killing in the name of was the British Xmas number 1. Perhaps less of a deal than it used to be in this digital age, but still, actually, a really rather big deal. And not because it had the F word in it.

You see, in 10 years time, and with no disrespect to a band I now understand better and admire, no one will care who the band was and what the song was about, because it will be largely lost in the much bigger picture. One framed in the word Facebook, but containing a picture of the faces of over 1/2 million people who wanted to see if they could.

The picture is this, as I see it. At the end of last year some people in their teens and early 20's decided to see if they could do something, just for a laugh. I don't think they expected to succeed, that's certainly the feeling I got at the start of the group. They genuinely had a manifesto - to make a point to the country that they were sick of X Factor produced yawn inducing pop - but they also had timing on their side. Facebook is familiar now, a thing which even the people who have never used it are aware of, in much the same way that a few years ago people understood Googling something was to do with computers, even if they didn't own one. At the end of last year, a recession year, a year of doom, gloom, awful weather and an absence of political inspiration, bad music seems to have been the rallying call. Maybe it's what a zeitgeist is, something which cannot be quantified, just something which occurs as a result of someone catching a mood, a feeling, a discontent.

Whatever, as a result we ended up with the Xmas no 1 that 1/2 million people had actively chosen, downloaded, listened to and believed in. But that 1/2 million were not mums, dads, aunts and uncles buying presents for stocking fillers. They were a certain age, a generation. In an age of political apathy, where a certain age bracket engage not at all with the political and democratic process, suddenly there was hard cold proof of something tangible. If you stand up and state your case, your claim or your opinion, be it downloading something to ensure something else does not attain no 1 status, or be it putting a tick in a box, you can change history. Yes, it's music, yes it's a no 1, yes it's no big deal. And yet. Imagine being a teenager and being utterly disenchanted with anyone caring about your voice or opinion, and suddenly realising that you can change something real. No one can argue with the change this 1/2 million made. No can take it away from them or belittle it and no one should. The value of a lesson learnt in this day and age is plastered through old and new media alike and that lesson is indelible. If you decide that you want to make a change somewhere, no matter how big or small, if you can speak to the masses and motivate them, then you can win.

@marcshmid asked this morning what people thought of the Facebook General Election page, and I must confess that question is the reason for this post. My response was that I thought that RATM may have taught people that there is a point, that apathy may have been eliminated.

I stand by that comment, because I do believe this. I believe that this year, people who have never ever bothered putting a tick in a box (and I am one of them, oh yes I am) will get up a little earlier, and slightly self consciously fumble around trying to locate their nearest polling station. There will be people who wont know where to put the tick, whether we should take our own pencils, whether we will be looked at strangely. There will be those of us who wont do our research too much but will vote on gut instinct, those of us who will do our research and press extra hard on that pencil when we make our mark.

But our marks will be left, and I believe there will be more of them, because I believe 1/2 million people learnt a lesson for life in December 2009. I was one of them. I learnt that there is no excuse for sitting on my ass shouting at the television. I learnt that it's possible to change something that looked inevitable and divert the future onto a different course. Such a small thing, downloading a music track, and yet, from such small acorns......

On June 12th 2010 I will scream the lyrics of Killing in the name of into a storm of lights and sound with 110,000 other people. I will scream them oh so very loudly. It will be a thank you for a catalystic wake up call to an apathetic unengaged ignorant woman who should have known better. I wont be the only one, and ultimately, that's the lesson of the Xmas no 1. You're not the only one.

Here come the girls (Ada Lovelace with thanks)

The 24th March has been designated as Ada Lovelace day. A day for blogging about women in tech and science in memory of one womans contribution to Babbage's analytical engine. She was, it would seem, one of the worlds first programmers, and she was a woman. I dislike commenting publicly on gender politics, but this is something which hit a chord with me, because I am a geek, and I am a girl, and those two things do not go together quite as often as one might think they do. Ask any male geek how difficult it is/was to find a girlfriend/wife who understood geeking, nevermind is/was one and you will understand. The world looks differently, I hope, from the generation below, but this is my experience.

So I thought I would write about a woman in tech or science who has inspired me. Who has caught my imagination and taught me to understand that being a geek is not unusual, a role model and mentor who I can go to and bounce ideas off, without needing to dumb down the technical terminology because they wont understand.

The problem with that, of course, is there is no one. Not one single person, that I can think of, who is female and codes, sysadmins, network configures or security defends and is out and proud about it enough to inspire or act as a role model.

So I thought I'd write about Lucy (not her real name, I'm not going to embarrass her, she works with me). The reason I want to write about her despite not being a geek, is the way in which she deals with things which she doesn't understand the mechanics of intimately. Most people are aware of ICT. They understand the meaning of the initials. They understand who they are calling when they have a problem and need the helpdesk. Most people don't understand much further than that and make no effort to.

Lucy makes an effort. A really big one. She is not a geek, but she analyses. She is not a geek, but she puts the jigsaw pieces together and quickly. She is not a geek, but she can see the overview faster than most, and sees how everything intertwines, understanding where ICT must fit into that puzzle. She is not a geek, but she problem solves in a way which gets straight to the point, fixes the cause and lets the rest take care of itself. So in some ways she is a geek, but not in the way it matters when understanding the intricacies of system resource management, network speeds and their impact on responsiveness or the nightmares of security. So she asks. Something so many other people fail to do. She doesn't go away and quietly Google it for fear of losing face, she just asks the question, and asks you to qualify and simplify anything she doesn't understand. She goes away with a proper understanding of something in the context it's relevant to and makes decisions and writes proposals based on the correct information.

For me, watching someone unashamedly admit to not knowing something but using the resource around her to gain the information and understand she needs has been exactly what I needed. Lucy gets straight to the point and doesn't get distracted, perhaps because of the sheer amount of information she is taking on board. And in this she is inspirational, because she has taught me the value of owning up to something, that you do not lose respect for admitting to not knowing something, that choosing the parameters within which you will operate in the business world is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.

It is odd, perhaps, but the person I have found to be most inspirational, helpful and who has provided the most mentoring to me as a geek, is not a fellow geek but someone who is teaching a geek how to operate in the world with no apologies for not knowing something. As much as I am Lucy's translator and interpreter for geek things - software, hardware, connections, requirements etc - she is my translator and interpreter for how to operate in the world outside geekery, where etiquette, social interaction and getting beyond my shyness and expressing myself and my opinion are things which were challenging but are becoming less so because of her.

Our working relationship may look odd from the outside, I have no idea. But from where I'm standing it is a perfect balance and perhaps demonstrates the massive value of surrounding yourself with non geeks as well as geeks.

So ultimately, this post isn't about women in tech and science at all. Except, actually, it is. It's about me. It's about learning from other people and sharing with other people, and us geeks need to do it more often. So, today, I celebrate the women who mentor us and who are our role models despite not being geeks. In the absence of any one else, they're all I have, and I am thankful for them.

140 characters or less

The initial business plan must have seemed strange. “I’m going to build a system which allows people to communicate from all around the world, without restriction. Except that they will have no more than 140 characters to do it in”

When I first started using Twitter, I must confess I missed the point. I posted pointless updates about random annoyances, chatted to friends and used it as a way of asking my boyfriend what was for tea. Yes, in our house the man cooks. The woman owns her own hammer and screwdriver. We fight over who’s erecting the Ikea haul. Modern life.

Modern life, it turns out, can exist quite happily in 140 characters. I suddenly don’t need any more. It’s forced me to strip the irrelevant from my communications, teaching me, slowly but surely, the value of commas and sentence construction. As I accrued followers, I suddenly became aware of the potential annoyance factor of these little irrelevances and day to day tedium being thrown into a black hole for people to read. The focus switched. I became more restrained in the nature of my updates, trying to connect with people using hashtags, slowly realising the value of the individuals on the other end of the Twitter line.

Time passed. I still failed to quite see the point. Not that I wasn’t using Twitter, but I wasn’t using it to its full capability. I still chatted about pointless things, I didn’t search for interesting people to follow, I didn’t understand its point. It was a massively multiuser chat system of public conversations, and little more.

Then I went to a convention. A convention of geeks, in the main. I used the hashtag and through it found a community of others, also attending the convention, also commenting on their experiences and interactions. Some of those people I found through that hashtag are now becoming friends, people who I’ve connected with and who I can ask questions of and receive answers. The penny dropped.

140 characters is not a lot through which to get a sense of a person. It’s not a lot to portray yourself through, either. But the web is far bigger than Twitter, and so through links posted in my stream I can find out about live streaming of digital inclusion conferences, read about experienced professionals and their opinion of our digital infrastructure, discover other peoples social media strategies, take part in discussions through hashtags and learn from 1000’s of different people about the state of the world, right now. This second. Dynamic communication is finally here – public sharing of instant reactions, commentary and feedback. News is instant and available in a way it never was before.

So where am I now? What do I think the point of Twitter is now?

Connection. On a really fundamental level, Twitter connects people. People with the same interests, people with the same agendas, people studying the same courses, people asking the same questions, people fighting for the same cause. Twitter is about linking people, creating communities from nothing, breaching geographical restrictions and allowing us to finally share. You can still do nothing but post status updates in a manner similar to Facebook. That’s fine. But the level above that is a mass of information sharing, questioning, collaborating and connecting, and it’s value is immeasurable.

140 characters or less might finally be the restriction which removes all the other ones we’ve lived with for so long. Funny world, isn’t it.

Judging books by their covers

A few days ago, I commented on a blog. I don't normally do this. for a variety of reasons, some of which will perhaps become clear. But the post made me think, and I wanted to discuss the subjects the author had raised and so I commented.

Annoyingly, of all the subjects to get stuck on repeat loop in my head, the one of judging books by their covers is the one which wont go away. So in an effort to get out of the loop, I'm sharing, because it's a source of enormous frustration to me and one of the reasons I've been ever so quiet on a variety of subjects to this point.

Someone who shall remain nameless, in a place which shall remain unidentified commented that they used to judge whether someone was worth doing business with on the basis of whether they had a mobile phone, because they were the right type of person.

I boggled.

That was the way business was done in the late 80's/early 90's. I accept that. In the absence, perhaps, of anything else to go on, a mobile phone was an obvious indicator of someones worth in monetary terms. But is the world the same now? Is my value as a contributor to the current discussions on digital inclusion and infrastructure dependant entirely on my access to that infrastructure and the fact I am included? Is my monetary value directly correlated to my intellect? Does my experience of living 50% of my life in a connected web world become invalidated when it becomes obvious that I do not dress in Gucci and my iPhone is last gen and battered to death?

I think outside of the box, because I don't see the box. I question because I am curious, intensely so, about how the world is being shaped, who is contributing, what the rules are, who's speaking sense and who isn't. I am not alone in this by any means, I am not unusual. There are 100's of thousands of people just like me stating the obvious, pulling people up when they make silly assumptions, correcting peoples misunderstandings of the technology and what it will do. To the last, to the absolute very last, the thing which makes those people so valuable to our economy and our future is the very thing which is not visible in any kind of monetary way. If you looked at me, or any of my friends you would see nothing remarkable. We are not remarkable. And yet we are the people with the experience, understanding, commitment, passion, enthusiasm and drive to want to make a difference, to want to make things happen, who build the things people think there are no use for only to find that actually, they're fundamental. They build toys because they can, code music because they can, create digital replicas of reality, because they can.

That person, who made that comment, would look at me and dismiss. He is a businessman. He will be playing in the digital sandpit in the future and he will be playing by old rules which are no longer always true. The digital world works differently, connects differently. The terms of engagement are changing and those who play by the old rules, will perhaps not be as successful as they could be if they do not learn the new ones.

And while we're here and I'm having a bit of a rant about the new world order, yes, I come to you Mr Head of Age Concern. I listened with interest to someone referring to your comment that 'in two years the geeks will have taken over' or something along those lines.

My response to you is this. Shall we take our tech back now? Those machines which whiz and whir in your local hospital, those scanners and life support machines churning out vital data about peoples hearts and kidneys and livers and brains.....shall we take the software which drives them, the code which makes them whir and whiz, shall we take it back? How about the flight control software which I have no doubt takes you on your shiny holidays each year and means your likelihood of crashing has been reduced quite considerably considering the amount of tin cans flying around up there? How's your commute to work? Is the traffic control maintained and controlled by dynamic speed limits and traffic lights who have been given parameters to know and understand feedback from sensors and react to that input to give you a smoother faster drive to work?

If you were to surmise that this comment irritated me somewhat, you would be correct. Geeks have inherited the earth whether you like it or not. That comes with it's own responsibilities (yes, I am looking at some of my friends very sternly), but most of the geeks I know are stepping up to the plate finally and sharing and training and communicating what they know. That's a seperate post. It's not published, but it's written, and yes I know.

Anyhow, here's the rub. It's too late to decide you don't want to play in the new world. The new shiny world allows such amazing possibilities for connection and not letting people disappear off the social map, that I am struggling to comprehend why the Head of a charity aimed at assisting older people with the quality of their life seems to somehow fear this. We don't want to exclude anyone. Anyone. Everyone is welcome on the bus. Including you. But please, seriously, would you go and find your nearest friendly geek, sit them down, feed them coffee and cake and ask them to explain whatever it is you don't understand about tech and the web. You might not understand all of it, but they'll try their very best to explain the opportunities and doorways which all these magic little tools the geeks have designed for you to play with open up, and you know, it's okay to ask questions.

It is not okay to dismiss in one sentence the hard work, passion, enthusiasm and blue sky thinking which has been going on for at least the last 20 years and which allows you to live longer and more comfortably. Get on the bus. The people you are representing will thank you for it.

And finally. If someone comes along and tells me I misheard, didn't understand the quote, it was a misquote from the chap who quoted him initially, then I will concede and apologise profusely. But I fear he is not alone in his misunderstanding and I fear there is much work to be done in making the toys we take for granted more user friendly and intuitive than they are at the moment. But that's for the other post