Virtual Visibility (Re: Diversity Issues...)

Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se)
Mon, 6 Oct 1997 20:51:30 +0200

At 10.25 -0400 97-10-06, stephanie spina wrote:
>But perhaps I should first identify myself with an assortment of labels so
>I can be put in the appropriate boxes.

Yeah... on the Internet our bodies are pretty invisible. As the saying
goes: nobody knows you're a dog... as long as you type the lingo.

Nobody knows my grey hairs or the pouches under my eyes. Unless I put them
on my Home Page, that is. What people DO know about each other on a list
like this (i.e. what we know about each other BY MEANS of this list) is the
content and the style of our writing. I don't mean anything very
theoretically well defined by "style": just all the thousand little details
of how we move in the common language, that are SO revealing (and serve
quite well to put us in boxes).

I write now as being privileged: as having appropriated English well enough
to have my own fun with it. Still: I am "spellbound" enough to edit my
fingerslips in what I just wrote: "thoousand little deatils". And
privileged to have a mailer that allows me to edit...

I'm rambling. Just wanted to pump up my courage to say I cannot help but
feel it is unfair to pour a bucket of fluent wrath upon one of the few
contributors who are obvious Guests in the anglo tongue. I don't know the
diversity fellows well enough to have an opinion, but Mary: what is the
point of a rhetorical tactic that either slaps people into silence OR push
them into the defensive mode?

Eva
on top of that iceberg again