When I started an online journal in 2002, I had no idea how it would transform my life. My blog brought me closer to the women who are now my best friends. It also helped me to help Hurricane Katrina evacuees. It’s like the perfect feminist parable: I told my own stories, and that had a ripple effect that changed the world. They are small changes, but they reflect thousands of similar small changes happening right now.
Blogs gave me news about the hurricane and told me that I was needed and where to go to help with hurricane relief. My blog raised money to send me to the Gulf Coast. I got a picture of what was happening from the LiveJournal “katrinacane” community, which had people posting from cell phones during the hurricane itself and afterwards through the floods.
Then the Houston Chronicle’s domeblog, set up by a reporter named Dwight Silverman, called for volunteers with wireless laptops to come to the Astrodome shelter, which was then housing about 10,000 Katrina evacuees who had come from the Superdome and New Orleans Convention Center. I read on the Feministe blog and on Bitch Ph.D. about Charmaine Neville’s experience leading a group of people through the floodwaters. On my personal blog, I put up a request for donations to pay for a plane ticket. Twelve hours later I was on the plane with $800 in extra donations in my pocket. My private online diary had built enough trust that I raised money from small donations in an amazingly short time.
At the Astrodome I helped hundreds of people navigate the constantly changing disaster-relief systems. My laptop was my lifeline. Without it, I would have been standing around wondering how to help. With the laptop and access to the ‘net, I put people’s data out into the world. I helped them find their families. I ended up leading a team of people doing this kind of work. Every night I blogged my horror, frustration, and passion at what I saw in Houston at the Astrodome.
Then my blog-friend Grace Davis, of the blog “Dr. Laura’s Worst Nightmare,” stepped in to do something amazing. Inspired by my stories from the Astrodome, she started a new blog called Hurricane Katrina Direct Relief. By reading Craigslist ads and cold-calling people from the Gulf Coast, she connected with Victoria Powell, a mom and blogger on the ground in Mississippi. Victoria was driving supplies down to shelters in devastated areas while her kids were in school. Grace made a new blog on Typepad to post the shelter addresses and wishlists. All her readers started donating supplies directly to shelters and families. The trust she had created with other bloggers by reading each other’s blogs made it possible to cut through the red tape of disaster relief.
Meanwhile, I was using the Yahoo Katrina peoplefinding site to reconnect families. Along with a team of dozens of “rogue volunteers”, I helped Dorothy find out that her husband wasn’t dead. Baby Thomas’s dad, rumored to have been last seen on CNN on a highway overpass with water rising all around him, was safe in Louisiana. Christine was reunited with her entire family by phone. Byron found his elderly, diabetic father-in-law had survived and was somewhere in the Dome; eventually they were reunited through Byron’s tireless efforts. We got bus tickets, plane tickets, housing, forms, sent faxes and emails, gave out our cell phone numbers. I looked up addresses and drew maps. My biggest effort came at the end of the day when I’d blog for a couple of hours before going to sleep, trying to give a personal report of the situation on the ground. I’d bet that everyone reading my blog made some effort, donated, or simply cared more about the situation.
Back in Santa Cruz, Hurricane Katrina Direct Relief took off running.
Grace, her daughter, and real life and blog-friends have done huge amounts of work. I’m still working with them and using them as a resource. They have sent volunteers to the Gulf, and kept shelters and foodbanks alive in places where no one’s seen the Red Cross or FEMA yet, a month after the hurricanes. Sunny, a woman in Mississippi who owns a tiny smalltown sandwich shop, ended up feeding her entire town of 150 people. Victoria came across Sunny just by driving around; she called it in to Grace Davis, who blogged it. Now bloggers and blog readers all over the country are sending food by the ton directly to Sunny’s deli or to Victoria’s volunteer supply drivers.
I feel lucky to be part of a network of women like Grace, who combine their political beliefs, technical skills, and personal relationships to achieve something amazing. Blogs are powerful because they contain so much personal information. I became Grace’s friend long before I met her in person, and would have trusted her with anything. By talking about her personal life, by that public vulnerability, she allowed intimacy to form between her and complete strangers, a level of intimacy that doesn’t usually happen in public life.
Another blogger from LiveJournal, Marta, read about my trip and resolved to do the same thing. We talked over email and on the phone. She flew to Houston with her laptop, the day after I left, and volunteered with the same people I did. When she was caught in Hurricane Rita, she stayed with the friends I made in Houston, and though she’s home in Chicago now, she still works closely with them. Marta connected the last pieces of information for Dorothy, an evacuee I’d worked with, to reconnect her with her family. She is hosting an evacuee now in her hometown: a man who broke his arm falling off his sister’s roof and then had to escape from a flooding hospital and remove his own flood-drenched cast. Marta didn’t know me, and I think we’re a few degrees separated; I don’t even know the real name of “bibliophile”, the LJ contact who connected us.
Marta and I have still never met in person, but I know we will and that we’ll always be friends after sharing so much intensity.
The Katrina effort has brought women bloggers together with more energy than ever before. But even before that, we were learning how many, how intricately connected, and how powerful we were. In July 2005, at the BlogHer conference for women in blogging, I felt a kind of sisterhood that wouldn’t have been out of place at a Seventies consciousness-raising event. But instead of all moving to Vermont and weaving hammocks and making sand candles to create our utopian society, we have blogs and a strong public online presence.
At BlogHer, I felt happy, high, and proud. I was amid 300 women running around with wireless laptops welded to their arms; women who apologize not for being nerdy, but that they’re not nerdy enough to represent for their people. Feminist principles were everywhere, hand in hand with technophilia.
Women in the blogosphere pay attention to each other. We are so deeply dependent on our connections to the Internet that our reality has changed already and our utopia is already halfway here. My personal interactions have shifted in recent years — not from face to face interactions to blogs, but from books to blogs — from people who are either dead or inaccessible, to people who engage in group conversation, in public discourse.
Before the Internet and the blogosphere, the main way I obtained nerdy knowledge and mentorship was from boyfriends.
In effect, I gained inclusion by proxy in the male-dominated nerd community because of a sexual relationship. No matter how wonderful your nerdy boyfriend or husband is and no matter how good your level of trust, this dynamic is inherently flawed. Even now, women need to make an effort, to connect with each other outside of the sexual economy.
I had no books, and no one to teach me anything further. I didn’t know any girl geeks, and when I tried to hang out with the nerd guys... well, let’s just say they got teased for letting me play Dungeons & Dragons.
Then there was this one guy I’d make out with so that he would tell me the hints for Zork III... I’m not complaining really. He was hot. But he would have been so much hotter if he’d shared his knowledge about assembly language!
There was no possibility of mentorship or of the nerd boys being my peer group.
When I started using the Internet, I finally found a community that accepted me. Before the Web, there were Usenet, and mudding, IRC, gopher and veronica and archie. I got to know people from multi-user dimensions (MUDs). I helped implement the Arcane Nites MUD along with a woman named Stomp, and we formed a friendship that still continues.
Instead of blogs, we filled our .plan files with information and read them using the “finger” command. I created the Usenet group alt.sex.fetish-startrek. When the Web came along, I started a site for short book reviews, Bookmania. Over time, Bookmania evolved into my blog. I tried Greymatter, I tried Moveable Type, and ended up on Blogspot. Now I use Typepad and have a LiveJournal presence as well. I joined Friendster, Tribe, Orkut, Flickr. I don’t have a programming or a tech job any more. But I am part of a community of techy women who are also writing women.
When I had a baby in 2000, I felt isolated once again because I didn’t know anybody else who had children. I went to playgroups and events, but didn’t meet anyone beyond tense chit-chat. I sent the occasional rant to an email list for local moms, and these helped me find kindred spirits.
But what helped most of all was when I started blogging about being a mother.
Two other local moms, Jo Spanglemonkey and Squid, started their own “mommyblogs” — a term that hadn’t been invented yet. Depth of information made our friendships strong. I mostly blogged about raising a kid, but I also forayed off into books, politics, and my own intellectual life as a writer, poet, and translator. It meant that my friends who read it suddenly knew me better than anyone ever had. People who read all three of our blogs could get a composite picture of our lives, as we talk about each other, our playgroups, our kids, our relationships.
So for me, what started as a lonely fascination with machines turned into a utopian feminist information community. Meeting in person definitely helped spark us into action, but blogs and email lists brought us together in the first place. I’d recommend to all the women bloggers out there: start a meeting or a conference for people in your area. Make a wiki or a special conference blog and get the word out - the event will happen and you’ll get results from it!
Comics writer and artist Lea Hernandez has been a blog-friend for me, Jo Spanglemonkey, and Squid for a couple of years. She and Squid connected because they both blog about raising an autistic child. Gradually we all started reading each other. At the Astrodome, as I got overloaded with family searches, I put out a call on my blog for help. Lea responded right away despite all her work deadlines and family obligations. She tracked down answers with ferocious intelligence. She helped reunite families, but then she would also ask what they needed. She told them about useful programs like the Red Cross free hotel stays and Modest Needs, which gives small grants to people who need immediate help.
My blogging homies, Jo Spanglemonkey, Squid, and other mom’s club friends covered for me the whole week I was gone. They cared for my son, picked him up from school and fed him, and they also made donations.
They made it possible for me to pick up at a moment’s notice and fly to work in the Astrodome. We joke that we are the Hive Mind, and I think it’s true. Our hive mind has amazing superpowers, and we’re only just starting to see what we’re capable of.
