a deep dive (that is a joke)

The first time I came in contact with the idea that Representation Matters (the idea, not the phrase, which was still years away), it was circa 1980 and I was in college at a conservative Christian school, not the place where you would expect it to show up. 

I was taking Intro to Sociology, and the female professor was a bit of a renegade, and she wanted us to understand that male experience is not universal. This is so obvious now in 2022 that it seems difficult to imagine it was ever otherwise, but at the time, I had been trained to believe that what white men experienced applied to all of us. 

Since it was a Christian school, the vast majority of the students had been born and raised in middle America Christian homes and we all bought into this idea. In hindsight, it doesn't even make sense. In the churches where most of us grew up, only men were allowed in leadership positions, so how could their experience be the same as women who could only make coffee, teach children's Sunday school, and work in the nursery?

I still remember when I began to understand her point. We'd been having a discussion in class where all of us good little girls stated quite firmly that we didn't need to have the patriarchal language of the Bible untangled, because we knew God was beyond gender (it's right there in Genesis 1:27, the image of God is both male and female, and we were so pleased with our progressive selves for knowing that). So it didn't make any difference to always hear God referred to as capital-H Him, or Father, or even to hear believers referred to as men, because we knew that language covered women, too.

Then she had us read a number of bible passages and traditional hymns aloud, substituting her for him, and mother for father, and woman for man, and she was right. It was entirely different. There was no mistaking: it makes a difference.

Rise up, oh women of God, in one united throng,
Bring in the day of sisterhood and end the night of wrong!

(That's a hymn, not the Bible, if you didn't grow up in a similar church.) So fast forward 25-ish years to the first time I heard the actual phrase Representation Matters (meaning it matters that you can see yourself, your self, your gender and race and orientation and economic status, in a book or on the screen or online), and I got it. I may be slow to the party at times, but I can learn.

Since I'm about to talk about my own representation, I should say first of all: I know that I don't have anything to complain about. I am privileged beyond belief, especially in a global context. I understand this more and more as time goes by. I'm not trying to paint myself as a victim here, because I'm not. This is not a tale of woe, this is a tale of me sorting through my experience.  

All of that setup was just to tell this story. I know now that I am a nerd, in both the good and bad senses of the word. I love knowledge, I love being smart and knowing things, I love being good at tech. I roll my eyes when a podcaster says, "We're going to do a deep dive into (some topic) today," and then they spend about three minutes talking about it. (Seriously, that is not a deep dive. Call it something else.) When I set challenges for myself, they are intellectual challenges. I am a nerd.

But the category of nerd didn't even exist when I was a kid, and it certainly didn't exist for women. By the time I was in high school, there were Radio Shack home computers and a computer club at my high school, but the closest most of us got to personal contact with a computer was by using state of the art Texas Instruments calculators. Which were miracle enough. 

Real computers were so far out of the realm of what I could conceive of as possible for a teenage girl in East Texas in the late 70s that it didn't even occur to me that I might be interested. I didn't learn to use a computer until I was in graduate school (my first, abortive attempt at grad school, in 1983)--so like everyone else, I typed all my undergrad papers on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter. 

But once I finally made it to the world of tech, I was immediately in love. It felt like I had found my niche, my people. We weren't great at social skills and we were always wearing the wrong clothes, but we knew how to program the damn VCR. C'mon people, it's not that hard.

I loved the online forums and the listserv email groups for specific niche interests. I loved everything about all of it. I knew how to write DOS batch files. I knew how to create data-driven graphics in Lotus 1-2-3. I was a regular reader of Slashdot. I loved being the one who knew how to fix the laser printer. My favorite job ever was database programming, which I did for a couple of years in the late 80s, just as the shift from flat-file to relational databases was happening. I was ON IT. 

Since the bar for admission to all of this was being comfortable with all things tech-y, it was a self-limiting field. Pretty much everyone online back then was a nerd, and we were all self-taught. The real techies, the ones who had taken computer science classes in college, were writing machine language (code that communicates directly with hardware).

But alas, times have changed. Now there are all kinds of programs that act as front ends to the tech. That's not to say they are dumbed down-- I'm not nearly smart enough to know the social media tech that teenagers handle with ease. But there aren't the same kind of social and knowledge barriers to admission that there were back in the 80s and 90s. 

So now the internet has become just like real life. Once again I am a nerd that doesn't really get it, the one that doesn't know how to write a good post on Instagram or Twitter, isn't really all that interested in the vast library of makeup and skincare tutorials on YouTube, and really, seriously does not want to make pop tarts or ketchup from scratch from a cooking blog. I do not want to shelve my books by color, or drape them with ribbons so they look prettier. 

In other words, I no longer fit in on the internet. Those are not my people. And since years of being out of the industry have dulled my tech skills, I don't really fit there either. This has been true for years, but I couldn't figure out what had happened until an online friend from back in the 90s pointed it out to me. *sigh* It was nice while it lasted.

(You know, I'm kind of cringing to think of this as an issue of representation, but I don't have time to totally re-write this post. Just think of this post as two separate stories.)