Starla 　/ 　絵芽理・梨賦 ([info]starladear6) wrote in [info]welovegeeks,
@ 2006-01-16 12:54:00
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Current mood: sleepy

gender, liberal arts, ubuntu-linux
Hey all, I was thinking about some geek related things over the last few days, and I wanted to see what all of you thought about this, and maybe we could start a discussion/exchange info, yadda yadda.

Anyway, yesterday, a friend of mine told me that I exist in this really unique niche as far as my geek-tech-linux-gender identity. I'm a female undergraduate English major who uses ubuntu as an end-user. In other words, I use linux the way the rest of my department (and the world?) uses OS X or Windows, and I don't use linux because I'm a system administrator or because I'm a programmer or spend a significant time developing tools for myself.

I use Ubuntu for several really specific reasons: it's free and I'm a very poor college student, it forces me to maintain a slightly higher-than-average internet-usage literacy without overwhelming me with forcing me to understand everything about my hardware or even the software I use, and it encourages me to stay away from pirated software for Windows. The fact that it also allows me the freedom to dive much deeper into learning about advanced computing, web design and hosting, programming etc when I do have the time to mess around for fun really is just an added bonus. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I don't have to deal with spyware, virii, malware, etc.

I'm also really interested in gender and the internet, gender and tech-consumption/usage, the changing face of gender in gamining, and general literacy and technology issues from a very human and "end-user" point of view. I'm interested in doing serious internet research on this, and maybe even setting up a blog specifically for this kind of discussion and research even. My friend suggested that if I dove into it and really devoted myself to this, I could end up getting hired as a pro blogger somewhere down the line. (wow, wouldn't that be nifty?)

Anyway, I never really thought about this as being as unique or significant as he seemed to think it was until he pointed it out to me and tried to make me see it in that way. (he's been working for mozilla for a year, and has been deep into the tech and web industries for a long time, so I guess he's got his thumb on the pulse of something that might make him know what he's talking about, right?)

How many of you are also interested in these kinds of issues? Anyone here use linux purely as an 'end-user' or desktop user and not as a developer or programmer? I think that this is partly the philosophy of Ubuntu actually, and I'd be interested to know how many other "less technical" users there are out there.

This is all also partly inspired by my failed attempts at getting fellow liberal arts students into linux... I ordered a bunch of pressed cds and tried to give them away to others (particularly girls), but it didn't catch fire at all...

Anyway, anyone have links to sites or blogs exploring this sort of thing? I'm interested in collecting info and doing some research for fun (and to increase the level of meaning I feel my life has in general), and perhaps to set up a really focused blog about these kinds of topics.

[Anyway, the content and "meat" of this post has been partially cross-posted in my blogspot blog, because blogger gets more google attention...]


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[info]endthymes
2006-01-16 09:15 pm UTC (link)
I can relate. I am a long time systems administrator who went back to school to pursue a PH.D in English, while simultaneously managing a tech shop and call center at my college. I love *nix based OSes... However, my liberal arts buddies have a hard enough time navigating Windows without assistance; let alone another operating system like Ubuntu.

Don't be discouraged though! I think it is great that you are breaking down the stereotypes that surround the *nix platform.

I wish my English buddies would pass out pressed distro CDs...

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[info]starladear6
2006-01-16 10:09 pm UTC (link)
I've been relatively lucky about the types of people I've met over the years. the majority of my friends in the english department are pretty computer literate. As far as using advanced microsoft word features and understanding that notepad will strip formatting from text copied from the internet goes... things like that.

But I also don't know very many people who are as far into computers as I am in my field... people mistake my mediocre photoshop/gimp skillz as advanced, and they think that I'm a bleeding edge computer whiz... (one prof described me as something like "highly experienced in everything related to computers" *cringe* ... it was a class on literacy and technology and she's trying to dive into researching blogging and amazon.com reviews from a rhet and comp perspective)

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[info]izuko
2006-01-16 09:15 pm UTC (link)
Liberal arts.... odd how the mind puts commas where they don't belong.

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[info]starladear6
2006-01-16 10:10 pm UTC (link)
?

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[info]izuko
2006-01-17 12:14 am UTC (link)
As the author of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves would tell you, there's a difference between "gender, liberal arts, ubuntu-linux" and "gender, liberal, arts, ubuntu-linux" (as read by me).

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[info]starladear6
2006-01-17 01:37 am UTC (link)
yeah, i read eats, shoots, and Leaves. Did a great big research paper about punctuation's history.

and ok, I didn't realize that you had read it as "liberal, arts." :) you should have typed out your miss-read and we all could have laughed. :)

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[info]edmcman
2006-01-16 09:18 pm UTC (link)
Here are some ideas:

1.Most people are very hesistant to try something as "risky" as installing a new operating system onto their computer, and for good reason: software is hardly perfect! Ubuntu (Hoary) did not set up grub correctly (the program that loads ubuntu when the computer first starts) if you wanted to have both Windows and Ubuntu installed at the same time.

2.Everyone knows Windows and Office. Chances are if you ask your professor for help, they'll start talking about Word, not openoffice or Ubuntu. It's a lot harder to find end-users like yourself to help you.

I find it pretty interesting that you're using it as an end-user. I'm not sure I'd reccomend it for say, my parents, but it's getting there. As for gender difference, I have no idea. I'm a computer science major, and there's a sad lack of females! My first guess would be that it's just a social issue, but it could just be that male/female brains operate differently.

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[info]zqfmbg
2006-01-16 09:44 pm UTC (link)
Most people are hesitant to even reinstall Windows. So sticking a CD in that installs something else must be like jumping into the abyss.

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[info]grimtictac
2006-01-17 05:57 pm UTC (link)
Hmm, totally agree with your first point, I remember being extremely annoyed when I took my shiny new Ubuntu CD to introduce somebody to linux, only to discover that there was no immediately obvious way to set it up in dual boot configuration without totally trashing the windows partition. Unfazed, I simply whipped out my trusty Ultimate Boot CD and set up a nice linux partition, but all with an increasingly nervous end-user watching his computer doing strange things he had never seen before.

I think this was a huge oversight and I haven't had a chance to see if the latest Ubuntu (Breezy I think?) has provided a better partitioning wizard, I hope so. I know Suse was superb in this respect and nestled in very nicely alongside my windows back when I was a linux newbie.

Come to think of it, maybe it is just a bit too risky to start trying to get people to change there operating systems, perhaps it's better to rather concentrate on those new to computers who have never used windows either?

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[info]neophoenix
2006-01-16 09:39 pm UTC (link)
ZOMG GIRL ON TEH INTARWEB!!!

Just kidding.

I'd agree that even without pulling gender into the equation that you are a pretty unique demographic.

(post pix plz)

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[info]starladear6
2006-01-16 10:04 pm UTC (link)
lawl and a half. :)

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[info]exploded_music
2006-01-16 11:17 pm UTC (link)
omg interbutt pickup!!11 :P

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[info]worldforger
2006-01-16 10:30 pm UTC (link)
*raises hand*
I use Red Hat as a desktop system occasionally just because I like the elegance of 'nix, although i must admit that OSX is my favorite implementation of 'nix so far.

The only reasons I don't go completely to some form of Linux (besides OSX) are 1) As a webcomic author, I find the Gimp doesn't keep up with Photoshop and 2) I haven't yet seen Civ IV or MOO III for Linux. So for now I mostly use Microsucks Winblows and Mac OSex.

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[info]laudre
2006-01-16 10:38 pm UTC (link)
I'm about 75% end-user in my system usage, but I'm nuts enough, and love getting under the hood enough, that I run freaking Gentoo, the Linux distro that even frightens some geeks.

(To be fair, it did take me 24 hours of continuous work, and me learning whole new things I'd never known I didn't know about my computer, to get it running properly.)

My wife is terrified of my computer, and only uses it because we don't have another for her; she's scared of the command line, and terrified that she's going to accidentally wipe my HD one day. (I may need to explain about permissions to her...) She's a Mac fan, and a graphics professional, and she HATES the GIMP, which I love.

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[info]starladear6
2006-01-16 10:52 pm UTC (link)
I have a few friends who run gentoo, and it scares the shit out of me too. One of my friends got too fed up with the learning curve and constant crashiness for him that he switched to Ubuntu around the time that I switched. Someday I think it would be fun to learn what gentoo is all about. :)

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[info]exploded_music
2006-01-16 11:20 pm UTC (link)
I'm a computer science graduate but don't use *nix for programming(much). I use Debian and SuSE because anything else just doesn't make sense to me :)

Alas, I also keep Windows because that's what Photoshop runs on and i'd like to keep using Photoshop.

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[info]starladear6
2006-01-17 01:33 am UTC (link)
I hear ya on the needing photoshop... gimp really doesn't cut it for all my needs either... but luckily I've got access to photoshop at school so I'm pretty happy in general about that.

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hey baby
[info]santojugador
2006-01-17 12:02 am UTC (link)
I wouldn't mind being a part of your experiment.

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Re: hey baby
[info]starladear6
2006-01-17 01:32 am UTC (link)
?

what do you mean? I'm not conducting any experiments. I'm just looking for discussion or stories or links from people.

are you a linux-loving liberal arts girl?

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[info]ctuck
2006-01-17 01:34 am UTC (link)
I know how it feels to stand up and say I am the non-windows user of this area! Now, granted, being a Mac-user comes with its pro and con stigmas, I also use *nix like OS's and Windows. most people are just afraid of my computers, period. My Mac is user friendly and happy to help out, where my PC is running WinXP Pro so striped of all the extras and customized for gaming/photoshoping/programming, they don't want to get near it. My Dual G5 Mac is way more poerful than my Dual-core AMD PC, it just looks friendlier with it's Aqua skin.

The computer world gender bending is something I usually just get angry about. Education goes a long way. So many of the modern functions and features of OS's and hardware were invented by women in the workplaces that they got used in when computers were new! I do see the gaming world as being largely male dominant (**cough** adult boys), and I think that is changing at a fast rate. In the world of programmers, I see a fair split of men and women. I think it comes down to a logic that some people have and others don't, right-brain left brian kind of things. I think everyone can learn to program. I don't think everyone would like the tedious checking and rechecking and trying and retrying of things to create a finish, polished peice of software. Not something that is gender specific.

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[info]starladear6
2006-01-17 04:52 am UTC (link)
What do you mean that the "computer world gender bending is something I usually just get angry about" ?

You mean women invented a lot of features, and now the dominant culture is male?

or do you mean that the fact that different parts of the computer world are basically gendered male-friendly and female-friendly and how that changes is what makes you angry?

I've never really bought the theory of one gender or another being left or right brained people. I'm pretty sure that's got nothing to do with what's in your pants and more to do with gender construction. Most contemporary research shows the same too.

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[info]ctuck
2006-01-17 07:19 am UTC (link)
I thought I had written it clearly... I guess not so.

Women did invent a lot of the features we see today. A lot of people don't recall that fact or fail to know it, and that angers me.

Change does not make me angry. :) I think more change is needed, more in the form about how we approach some computer teaching techniques.

Wasn't trying to say that one gender is or is not left or right brained. I was suggesting that people, in general are either left or right brained in a way that makes them more or less apt to be willing to go through all the steps that shouldbe taken for writing a computer program and getting it tested and published.

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[info]horny_metalhead
2006-01-17 01:44 am UTC (link)
I was trying to think of something interesting or relevant to say but after several minutes of typing I realized that I had a whole lot of text that was neither. Sorry.

I will tell yout his where I work and at my CS department in college there was next to no females. I belive two in the entire 4 years I was there. The program itself wasn't that large though.

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[info]starladear6
2006-01-17 04:45 am UTC (link)
You should just say whatever it was you were going to say! tangents are cool! they're the brain's way of telling us that even in conversation, no one likes to be a clone. (or something equally insightful)

actually, now I really want to know what you were going to say. :)

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[info]horny_metalhead
2006-01-18 05:01 am UTC (link)
I have to try and think of it now. I don't think it was all thatr interesting... give me a bit.

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[info]grimtictac
2006-01-17 05:26 pm UTC (link)
First off you may be interested in this. It's more about the command line vs gui as opposed to linux vs windows etc, but I think it has a really interesting spin that may help you convince other liberal arts people:

The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

As for me, I am an undoubted geeky power user. I enjoy diving in and tinkering with inner workings, programming, tweaking, fiddling, you name it. So obviously I am not intimidated by technology, which is what many end-user people claim to be.

However my reasons for using linux (which I have been doing for just over a year now) are it's power and overall simplicity. That's right, simplicity. And those are the exact same reasons I advocate it for end-users.

I like to feel I am in control of what I am doing , but I got fed up of feeling like I was riding a bucking horse with windows. At the end of the day all the multiple layers of abstraction and "user-friendlyness" simply confused the hell out of me because I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn't just do it, I had to fight the OS into doing it for me. With linux, there is generally nothing going on behind your back, as you said:
it forces me to maintain a slightly higher-than-average internet-usage literacy without overwhelming me with forcing me to understand everything about my hardware or even the software I use
And the same goes for all other functionality, I find that even the most inexperienced users soon become comfortable opening up a terminal and firing off a few simple commands to get something done. Linux does that, I provides shortcuts, but never ever tries to hide the truth, and you can enjoy the niceties of a KDE or GNOME desktop but still be totally in control via the command line.

All that said though, it is a rather big leap, and many people simply rote learn the actions required to achive everyday tasks in Word, Excel, and Outlook (or the Big Three as I call them, Internet Explorer doesn't count because websites tend to look identical in any browser). This means that they battle to learn new things in new packages like OpenOffice, but a willing hand-holder can go a long way. Also the disappearance of "My Documents" (Eccchhh! Evil!) and "(C:) My Computer" not to mention the "Start" button tends to really throw some people. Again a bit of hand-holding goes a long way. At the end of the day a lot of people use Windows for years and are still totally bewildered by it and stumped when anything goes wrong, so I really do not see why they should be scared to try new things?

Anyway, I'm beginning to waffle now so I'll stop, but I watch this thread with interest.

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