I began to write a response after the initial email was sent, but I deleted it hoping that this would pass over sooner. As others have mentioned, this is a strange, bordering on personal, response/attack. It is also an immature way to handle a disagreement about a scholarly conference talk, shows a lack of understanding of the purpose of such talks, and highlights an obsession towards nitpicking terminology.
Conference talks are places to showcase ideas, get feedback on works in progress, and form community. They are not always written out before hand. For instance, I gave a talk at the conference that I view as a work in progress rather than a finished piece. I only wrote down some of my paper and talked impromptu for the rest of it. If someone typed every word that I said out meticulously, I would find it extremely abhorrent and disconcerting. If someone then contacted the people I wrote about for the expressed purpose of discrediting my work in progress, writing about it in a long blog post, and sending it to all my colleagues, I would find it hostile.
In your follow up email, you seem to imply the problem is that people have not read your response. I have read your article and the claims you made, and I was present in the front row when Joy gave her, in my opinion, excellent presentation. Joy does not need me to defend her talk, but here is my response to your article's points for what they are worth--I apologize ahead of time for the atrocious grammar and spelling but it is getting late:
Rankin’s presentation makes assertions about the PLATO system, its developers, its users, and its online and offline culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the 1960s and 1970s, that paint a decidedly negative picture, one where Rankin declares PLATO suffered from "endemic misogyny" and that she likens to a "fortress of patriarchal heterosexual power in American computing."
Your use of quotes for "endemic misogyny" and "fortress of patriarchal heterosexual power in American computing" is a strange rhetorical move. Presumably, you have put these in quotes to highlight the words Joy used, but at the same time, they position her claims as arbitrary, perhaps spoken by "others"--read feminists--but not those couched in "historical reality."
(Dr. Rankin was contacted twice by email and once by phone for this article, and offered some questions the answers to which would hopefully shed light on how she reached her conclusions. I was particularly curious to know if she ever met or otherwise communicated directly with any of the PLATO people she names and talks about in her presentation. She never responded.)
Sounds like you contacted her purely to put on her trial. If this article is any indication, perhaps the reason she did not respond is the hostile nature of your approaches towards her and her work?
Rankin and others who spoke at SIGCIS are to be commended for revisiting the history of computing with a fresh and different perspective. However, whenever one revisits history, it is important to get the basic story straight, so that any higher-level analysis avoids losing its footing.
The first sentence here contradicts what you are saying in the second.
Lamont told me that Earth Day had nothing to do with the Boneyard Creek lesson. (The creek was a contentious local environmental issue long before 1970.) Lamont was a serious scholar pursuing a doctoral degree, not a “hippie earth mother” contending with “military industrial computing cold warriors.”
This is a strange juxtaposition of the term "hippie earth mothers" and "serious scholar." I know tons of "hippie earth mothers" that are serious scholars. I don't know why they are supposed to be mutually exclusive.
And despite Rankin’s attempt to attach some knowing political subtext to Lamont’s use of the word “demonstration” to describe the act of demonstrating her PLATO lesson to members of the public, that is all it was, a demonstration, as in, a demo. In the world of PLATO, much like the world of software developers today, one was constantly demonstrating, or demoing, that which one had created on the computer. Demos went on all day long then and they go on all the time now (ask any software company or lab creating applications). That the English word “demonstration” also happens to have a completely different meaning having to do with political protests where large groups of people assemble for a redress of grievances, is mere coincidence.
I do not have time to get into a whole course on semiotics, but for the purposes here, words exist in both a cultural and social context. It is not a stretch to assume that the political meaning of a word in one context can have implications for other uses of the word. In fact, this is a common understanding accepted by numerous historians, scholars, and linguists. For instance, in Elaine Taylor May in Homeword Bound, she talks about the dual meaning of the word "containment" during the Cold War. While you may disagree with such research, dismissing it so casually without contending with the long list of scholarly literature on it is disingenuous.
Would the presence of a male collaborator be an inconvenient truth, weakening Rankin’s arguments, necessitating his omission?
No, because Rankin's argument works more or less the same with or without a male collaborator. In your defense though, it is interesting to note.
As for the role gender played in the PLATO lab, and in the development of the Boneyard Creek lesson, Lamont says there was none. “It wasn’t what your gender was, it was what you were doing. Nobody seemed to care whether I was a male or female.”
Research on gender, race, class, etc. have continuously shown that statements where identity markers are downplayed tend to perpetuate dominant structures that benefit, usually white, straight, upper to middle-class, males. The hiding of gender during this time period only lends more credit to Rankin's argument that gender was seen as taboo, downplayed, and irrelevant. Given the broader historical context of attempts to prop up the nuclear family during the post-World War II era and similar rhetoric to downplay both the Civil Rights, LGBT Rights, and women's rights movements during this time, it is reasonable to assume that PLATO perpetuated similar patriarchal norms.
What evidence gave Rankin the ability to know what Donald Bitzer “thought,” when she declares that he “thought, what could be better than having a bunch of nurses…”? We do not know. What evidence gave Rankin insight into Donald Bitzer’s motivations? We do not know. It must be compelling evidence because Rankin not only knows what “Donald” (note the first-name basis) was thinking, but she declares that “nurturing, soft femininity” was “precisely [emphasis added] what Donald sought to make PLATO more broadly appealing.” What document proves this? What interview? We do not know.
I do not know why I am supposed to "note" the first name, but it is common practice when discussing two people with the same last name. Also, the rest seem to be nitpicking terminology. I do not believe that Joy or anyone around her believes that she knows what Donald Blitzer "thought" in a telepathic sense.
Is Rankin arguing that it would have been better if the nurses been kept away from PLATO?
No...
How did Rankin manage to get a wholly different story about Maryann Bitzer? We do not know. What we do know is that the story and the motivations of the Bitzers that Rankin presents in the SIGCIS talk appear to be based on speculation as I cannot find any documentary or oral history evidence that Donald and Maryann Bitzer set out to exploit nurses — not to mention their own marriage — in some nefarious patriarchal scheme to promote PLATO. The assertion is frankly absurd.
We can not both "not know" how Rankin got a different story about Maryann Blitzer and "know" that her story is based on speculation. They are self-contradictory.
As for the argument that heteronormative marriages exerted privilege during post-World War II America strikes me as so blatantly obvious that it doesn't require a lot of defense. Nonetheless, there is numerous works in queer theory that provide a more thorough understanding if you are interested, see the works of Michael Warner in particular.
How does the fact that these two people were married have anything to do with anything? Has Dr. Rankin ever met the Bitzers? What is she basing her case on? We do not know. Unless Rankin has compelling documentary evidence to the contrary, her assertions must be seen as regrettably inaccurate, amounting to strange and possibly defamatory insinuations, and standing on questionable ethical ground.
See above.
The reader is invited to read the response above by a user named “al” of group “mflu” and identify what makes it an example of the sexism that Rankin alleges was “pervasive” on the PLATO system. Rankin correctly points out that Ruth “had clearly explained in her original post that she wanted to remain on the Users List so that her collaborators could easily each her.” But is that sexism?
Given the responses I read, yes.
Could it have been possible that “AL” (are those initials, or someone’s name? we do not know) might not have read or remembered that detail in Ruth’s original note? Is there a person alive today who has participated in online communications who has not skimmed someone else’s forum posting, social media newsfeed, or email? Occam’s Razor would suggest that even forty-three years ago, “AL” simply skimmed Ruth’s note, then skimmed the gist of the rest of the replies, and posted his or her note (at 12:48 am in the middle of the night). That was completely normal in the daily PLATO experience. There were too many notes to read, and it could take many hours if you did not skim. (Something that only by interviewing actual PLATO users would one likely discover.) Encountering a wall of text on PLATO — and face it, a long note like Ruth’s (and “AL”’s) are walls of text — was no different forty-three years ago than it is today. This article you are reading right now is a gigantic wall of text, after all (and I am impressed you’ve gotten this far). Occam’s Razor suggests a simple case of TL;DR on AL’s part, and the consequences that arise from TL;DR, not any sort of learned patriarchal hatred of women or even simple rudeness. Unless Rankin successfully contacted the mysterious AL and got a first-hand explanation (I was unable to figure out who AL is so I could not), we do not know.
I don't even know what to make of this.
Considering that you have written a huge blog post about the way that Joy reads modern Internet norms into the past, it is strange that you claim to know how the author of a random post over forty years ago "skimmed" it. Also, it comes off as dismissing the behavior.
Asking women who used PLATO in the 1970s will tell you that invariably the callers were teenagers running amok on the system. Imagine handing out mobile phones to teens in the 1970s, phones that had a feature that listed all the people who also had phones, with an easy facility to call them immediately. It does not take much imagination to figure out what would happen next.
Are teenagers not supposed to be responsible for their actions? I wish my parents had known this when I was a teenager.
To judge how people communicated in an online forum in 1974 through an extremely narrow gender-studies lens of 2017 not to mention a lens that is accustomed to looking at the world of today where billions of people spend many of their waking hours online, an online world where norms and customs about online behavior, including notions of what to expect from others online, have long been established and etched into unspoken law (but are still widely ignored), is to mischaracterize how things were in the historical period under examination, and ends up potentially misleading present-day people hoping to gain some insight into the history of PLATO.
See my response to your paragraph on skimming posts.
It must be mentioned that Dr. Rankin describes “Al, Don, and Bruce,” three users who responded to Ruth’s note, as “white adult men.” How did she arrive at that conclusion? It could not be from simply reading the text of an archive of a 43-year-old computer message forum thread: no such information is to be found there. Therefore, one must ask, what information did Dr. Rankin rely on for that assertion? Did she contact the three of them, if still alive all now theoretically in their sixties or older, and verify their skin color? We do not know.
Given the screen names, the demographics of PLATO, and the responses, it is a fairly well supported assertion. It is the same assertion you make when you describe the original responder to Ruth's posts as men.
This is not the first time a PhD has criticized, if not outright condemned, the PLATO system. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Douglas Noble was pursuing his PhD at the University of Rochester where he did his dissertation on the PLATO system, resulting in a subsequent book, The Classroom Arsenal, based on the dissertation. He relied on articles, documents, and oral histories at the same university archive that Dr. Rankin used, but, when asked in an interview I conducted in 2012, he admitted that he never met or interviewed or otherwise communicated with any PLATO people directly, including Donald Bitzer.*
I basically have no idea what Douglas Noble has to do with any of this or why his anti-war activities are relevant to Joy's conference talk.