Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed.What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- Links of Great Interest: “We are human??”
- Women and the 2010 federal election
- Instant parenting: Just read a story!
- The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality
- Five ways to talk to the religious right about marriage
- Beware of anyone talking about your ‘hard wiring’
- How To Respect Sex Workers
- Stereotyping boys in the classroom
- buncha links on “triggering” and “calling out”
- The best of the rest of the internet
– linkfest from the Hathor Legacy
– Marian Sawer looks at the policy that was never discussed in the election campaign – women’s policy
– From the terrific blog ‘Awful Library Books’
– the myth of all “rationality” come to that – we are all the irrational product of implicit bias in our unconscious cognitive processes
– Useful guidelines for not just this issue but for engaging with anybody on the opposite side of any issue
– Neurosexism and its challengers
– A 4-point thought-jumpstarter with links to more detailed resources
– another datapoint on the ‘stereotype threat’ phenomenon
– bfp highlights some deep thinking about bigotry, speaking out, accountability and no One True Answer in social justice movements
– Linkfest from Rachel Hills
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
I really liked this speech by J.K. Rowling that everyone’s probably already read.
And something that’s interesting to me but perhaps not to anyone else: how non-gamers navigate games.
Re the women and the 2010 election piece, I was *at* the Labor women’s policy launch. I do wish people would stop confusing the media not reporting thing with the politicians not saying things.
I just clicked through and had to come back to add that the policy launch was about two weeks before the election and not, as that piece suggests, the day before.
Re the women and the 2010 election: Marian Sawer seriously knows her shit and I applaud her for drawing attention to the fact that women’s issues were absent from the election campaign.
speech here
What politicians talk about and what the media chooses to cover are two different things.
Agreed, Rebekka – although it’s worth noting how some political groups manage social media better than others and how that can improve the general coverage of their platform during a campaign.
It was one of the great strengths of the Kevin07 campaign – that he got his message out regularly on Facebook and Twitter and didn’t just rely on traditional pressers. The shared status updates and retweets got them loads of Googlejuice for their talking-points, which translated into more interest from people asking questions on talkback radio and tabloid TV especially – that was gold in the sense of free PR. That sense of engagement with the wider audience of interested onlookers was missing from the latest campaign – they had a go, but I don’t think they had anyone on staff who properly understood how to make it work this time around.
As an example of how other groups go about promulgating their messages: I get alerts from various large feminist orgs whom I have never signed up with, never requested their newsletter etc. But because I’m on their radar as a feminist blog of a certain prominence, they send me stuff anyway. I don’t blog all of it – but I check it out, and if it interests me enough, I do blog or tweet about it.
How hard would it have been for Labor to have found someone who could have worked out which blogs were at least moderately sympathetic to the Labor “brand” and included them in the news release loop?
Yep, agree, I don’t think they had anyone who really understands social media on the campaign and also with the idea that sympathetic bloggers should be included on media releases, which is a really obvious idea one you’ve thought of it, but doesn’t seem to have occured to anyone…
I suspect towards the end that Labor had someone reading LP (was that you Bek?) and passing ideas on. But still they didn’t put LP in the loop and they should have.
Nope, not me Mindy, and I doubt very much anyone was in any sort of official capacity – that would have been way too organised for what I know about the campaign.
I second Rebekka on the disorganised bit. Looked most disorganised from what I could see from friends on the inside of the campaign.