UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
Shutting Down Discussion at Catholic Blog Sites and Amanda Hess on Why Women Aren’t Welcome Online: Making the Connections
William D. Lindsey
Some eye-popping statistical data from Amanda Hess’s magisterial essay about why women aren’t welcome on the internet (each bullet point is a direct quote from Hess’s article):
• Pew found that from 2000 to 2005, the percentage of Internet users who participate in online chats and discussion groups dropped from 28 percent to 17 percent, “entirely because of women’s fall off in participation.” …
For me, the advent of online discourse spaces opened places in which I could, for the first time ever, speak out as a gay Catholic theologian, when the Catholic theological academy had decisively slammed its door in my face, and when Catholic journals, all of them dominated primarily by heterosexual men, did not intend to listen seriously to my story of discrimination and exclusion, and colluded in making me invisible and voiceless.
And then, over the course of time, the conversation has seemed to me to slow down significantly. At some Catholic blog sites like NCR’s threads, it has become well-nigh impossible to continue, due to the deliberate targeting of those conversations by groups that appear intent on shutting these conversations down by lobbing stink bombs into the discussions and making it extremely difficult for people who are at these sites to talk together respectfully as they pursue their conversations.
And since the slowing down of discourse at these sites, which seems apparent to me if to no one else, has occurred in roughly the period in which Pew Forum studies have found a steady, even precipitous decline in the participation of women in the discussion groups at many blog sites–because women have been deliberately targeted and made unsafe at many blog sites where they had begun freely to express their views–I also have to conclude that the gradual shutting down of open discourse at many of the sites I began following soon after 2000 is deliberate.
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