The moderator for this discussion is Lynne D. Johnson (L). The panel includes Susie Bright (S), a feminist erotica writer, Ann Crady (A), a parent blogger, and Tara Hunt (T), a writer.

This session is broadcast on SecondLife.

Follow up:

L: I’ll be the moderator for Safer Spaces Online. L introduced the panel.

T: I have never had any qualms about putting everything online…who here twitters? I twitter…people know what I’m doing all the time. I’m uploading pictures…people can match the two. I use Doppler, my blog tells people what I’m thinking. You can tell I’m away from my home. So, people quite often say, “Don’t you feel concerned?” I have a teenage child, “aren’t you concerned?” It occurs to me, but I’ve always trusted human nature, maybe I’m naive, I think human beings are good until pushed to the edge, and I get a lot of benefit career wise by putting myself out there. People trust me, I get more business.

A: I’m the founder of Maya’s Mom. Before I started MM, I wasn’t a blogger…I hadn’t thought about whether I was comfortable talking about my life online. My husband and I talked about it…thought about it. I decided I was comfortable talking about my life. Each time I post I think, I’m conscious, of what people read. Aside from safety, I’m more conscious about them being okay with stuff as teenagers. I’m comfortable with the safety issues. I think the safety issues are way overblown. The benefits for me outweigh the risks, but I did give it a lot of thought.

S: I’m Suzie Bright, a political activist, a sex and politics writer. This subject has come up for me since I was a high school journalist as a underground paper writer. At that time we were at the end of the Cold War and I was attracted to feminist and socialist politics and to tell people you were a pinko or commie still struck fear in people’s hearts. I didn’t have the time to tell anyone about whether I was queer or a pinko…I wanted everyone to get in a giant communist waterbed! I got a lot of advice from activist socialist organizers who said to me being out there is one of the best protections you have. People will defend you if they know you and what you stand for. As a general rule, to be open about who you are are both an offense and a defense. It makes it harder for you to be scapegoated. “Safe” has become a strange euphemism. I have a strong comments policy. I want a safe atmosphere where no one is going to come in and say “Jane, you ignorant slut.” You don’t allow ad hominem attacks. “Safety” can also mean to protect one’s physical person or household or one’s family. It’s much more likely than I’m going to be in a car accident than to have someone to assassinate me. If you think of yourself as a journalist, you are going to get threats, kooks, nuts. That’s what happens when you work as a journalist that is socially active. You’re going to get flack. The third thing is that when “safety” has been used as a tool to oppress dissent. This kind of rhetoric gets used in devious ways. It’s just a way of saying that I disagree with you and it’s a way of getting you to shut up. I’m exasperated with that. I’m the opposite of cruel, but this is the way this terminology gets used. I want to know what you mean by [safe].

L: Are women more of a target online for being threatened?

T: I don’t know if anyone gets Pew Internet Research studies online, but they put out a study on online bullying. Young women are more…there seems to be quite a difference. 41% of young girls between 15-17 were experience cyber-bullying whereas boys were [less]. So yeah, they took a look and surveyed MySpace and Facebook. But in all cases, 67% said they are more likely to be bullied offline.

L: So you give these stats, but are we just more sensitive?

Audience: How are you defining cyber-bullying?

S: What a lot of women experience as bullying is being attacked about their sexuality. Someone condemns me that I’m a whore, has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It uses sexism to erase me. When it comes to cyber-bullying, I feel like women are being encouraged to stay offline, like not going out at night. Slightly tougher skin required. Most bullies are full of it. The webmistress is going to delete you.

Audience: There was recently a women within the blogging commmunity who canceled - yes, that’s who - and there was a whole hue and holler. Was she or wasn’t she being bullied? I came in in the middle, but I agree with you, Susie. One of the things I’ve learned about being a woman, is that you need a tougher skin.

Audience2: Can someone please talk about this?

T: One of the reasons I’m here is that I wrote a post about this. I’m a friend of Kathy’s and I was there when she went through the situation…what happened was, I wrote a post about finding your higher purpose. There’s a particular group that patrols blogs, and they hate self help. So they came into my comments section and started talking about Nazis, so I started deleting comments, so they started a blog called Mean Kids. They started posting Photoshopped pictures of me. So I said that I was flattered by it. So they stopped, and then Kathy went on there to defend me. So they turned to her, so it escalated, so they posted pictures of her with a noose, the only thing she’s fit for is a noose in her necksize, then they started saying terrible things about someone else, so someone came to their senses and took that blog down. Then they started “Bob’s Your Uncle". That was awful, references to women as slugs, and then a picture of Kathy with panties over her head suffocating. Meanwhile, she had an anonymous person saying awful things. She was freaked out, she hadn’t encountered this type of behavior in real life. How is she supposed to distinguish between the two? She was genuinely in fear. I thought what she did was quite brave, but she posted that there was no First Amendment right to threaten people online. After she posted the big rebuttal, someone took her social security number and did research into her hospital visits and bankruptcies. We went to different webmasters. But, yeah, it was out there. People didn’t like that. I don’t think her identity was stolen.

Audience: what was frightening to me was the addresses. I get hate mail constantly. But when it comes to my home, and then they say I want to rape your mother, that’s different…it’s attached to your home address. And I’m coming for you is the implied message. Where is the line between developing a thicker skin and an active threat?

A: For me personally, I think the likelihood that something bad happens is extremely low. It isn’t necessarily comforting to all. The line is the law. To the extent that you can get the police involved…there’s a certain, they’re jerks, they’re all people you know from high school. For the most part, these people are not going to take it to the level they’re suggesting. To the extent they’re ignored, that’s a burden no one should have to deal with, but that’s what I would recommend. The reality is that it doesn’t make it any less scary. I don’t want to be scared away, but I do understand, no one…you have to live with your own choices, if you’re not comfortable, don’t. The odds of something happening to you is small.

Audience2: There’s still a small chance. I had an online stalker (explains).

Audience: I had a question. Whether you believe there is a danger or not, you have to keep in mind what your threshold is. What are some of the steps we can take.

A: The goal of Maya’s Mom is to create a place where parents can talk to each other. We originally were thinking about creating a safe place, but I don’t want to market anything as safe. Nothing in life is safe. Driving your car is not safe. So anyway, we did design Maya’s Mom with the…if someone wants to remain anonymous you can…we are empowering moms.

S: In my case, I have a different set of things I’ve done as a solo activist. My address is not my physical address. If you can create an address that is not where you live. None of this requires any James Bond ability. I have a very strict but gracious comment section. Now if it gets a slight whiff of troll, they’re blocked. You aren’t feeling the fear. You cut off the attention, they wither. I first experienced this offline. A lot of steam, smoke, but nothing really there. When I went to U of MN to give a talk, people were passing out fliers saying “First there was slavery in the Roman Empire, then the Holocaust, then Susie Bright.” The idea that I was promoting genocide! I’m going to go from something wild as that. Do I regret my activism? No. I cry all the time. I get upset about things, but I won’t stop. But what I have had to stop is personal relationships. I don’t talk about what happened in bed last night, and I don’t talk about my daughter. You have to think of the intimacy you have with the loved ones in your life. What are the mommybloggers going to deal with with teenagers?

Audience: Do you know of any case of any predator becoming interested in a child?

A: I don’t know of any. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

T: I think we would know. The media would explode it.

A: There are a lot of gross search words…but people leave.

S: I want to give you this name: Mike Males…he and a group in the Bay Area found that statistically your child has a bigger chance of being molested in the grocery than online.

Audience: You talk about work and home, what I want to know is, I’m a recovering alcoholic, I talk about all kinds of stuff. But what I’m interested in is I want to get paid to write, and then I send them links to Chicagoist. Do I want to let them read…I’m depressed, these meds aren’t working, this is what I think about AA? You know what I mean? Do I just have to write an entirely different blog? That’s not who I am.

A: If your question is how you get paid to write, I think you’re in an excellent era, corporations are trying to get into the social media phenomenon. Now, corporations realize that the types of discussions – we have a depressed anxious moms group – corporations understand that this is real life and they’re far less scared. As long, you’re going to market for them, that’s interesting to them.

T: I have a story about a woman, a famous writer, a supergeek, she blogs about her depression in the midst of her professional blog. Molly.com. But you know, she…her career is amazing because she’s open and honest. She’s a consultant, hired by Microsoft.

L: I twitter, I’m on MySpace all the time. Because I’m out there like that, I have my job - senior editor of FastCompany.

Audience: That’s encouraging.

T: It’s brave.

S: You’ll find that if you think about this as a woman, as opposed to a man, you’ll see the sexism. The sense in which women can be marginalized because they say anything personal. You’re doing Women’s Studies 101 every day.

Audience: I just wanted to bring up the silver lining of dealing with abuse, harassment and trolls. Having trolls that have attacked every aspect of my life, dealing with professional criticism, it’s easy. No one called my Mom a dyke!! We have some sensitivities, it’s a small silver lining. My skin’s way thicker than many of my professional colleagues.

Audience: I write a blog about postpartum mood disorders. To properly discuss an issue like that, you have to be honest. You have to have a sense of humor, no one can derail me from the cause. If you are looking for work, is that anyone who would judge you is not who you would want to work with. You’re going to clash. Anyone who is going to judge me, delete. You don’t even register.

A: That’s such a great point. It’s people like you who counter mean bullies.

Audience: A question for everybody…I share a lot, I’m a university professor, I don’t want students to find me. There are strategies we can adopt for being open but not outing ourselves. I can see people hit this point at 3 months, where something happens…do you have strategies for being open in one way but not in others?

Audience: I think the conservative side of me that says that if you’re a young person, how do you regulate some of this content?

Audience: We get questions like this, the usual question is “I went in for an interview and someone looked up my profile.” It’s usually after the fact, it’s too late. The questions are, is this legal? If that is something that is objectionable to the employer, they can wiggle out of it. Think about who you want viewing this, and realize that anyone can view it. You need to keep this in mind, just as if you were in public. Whether it’s someone you’re dating, an employer, anyone, whether it’s a Flickr photo, etc.

S: Sometimes we face people who are on a crusade to shut us up. I think most of what we experience from 90% of online bullying is jealousy. I believe that but I don’t know how to address it. It’s devastating, the secret emotion behind a lot of this grief. There’s no other explanation.

T: Kill them with kindness?

A: I don’t think it’s jealousy, I think it’s boredom. If you ignore someone, they go away. I do think it’s boredom, I don’t think people are bad, just bored.

L: Ignoring does tend to work. A guy once picked on me, he does it to raise his credibility, that he becomes more popular. The first time I responded, the second time I ignored him. He needed me to give him back energy, I wouldn’t give it back to him. It works.

Audience: I blog for Wired and geeky places. A cautionary note to the discussion about hunting for a job while doing opinion blogging. I had the opportunity to be on the hiring committee and there was a candidate who was overqualified, we were lucky she had even applied. But she is an opinionated blogger. Everyone said they were lucky she applied, but one person thought she would be too divisive just based on the blog. Instead we hired someone who sucked, and later quit. I think it can bite people in the ass. Some of us are lucky that they have many employment opportunities, but people who don’t have that lucky position…what about them?

T: Isn’t that an employer issue but not her issue? That would have been better for the company to hire her, it was the hiring bias, and became a star elsewhere. It wasn’t her loss.

Audience: But there may be other women in that situation who can’t go on to get other jobs.

A: It may have come out okay, but it wasn’t okay. All of the stuff online is public. If you don’t take measures, it is, that’s the reality. Anyone posting needs to know this.

Audience: (lists MSM credentials) I never aspired to be a public figure. When you choose to blog because of syndication, we have to understand that anything on the web at any time, the policy should be you could get on the front page of the NYT Business section. I think this is a sensible statement I’m making. We’re worried about all this exposure, but this is what we’re trying to gain. The internet has produced this ability, I’m in second life now, live your life like it’s on the front page of the newspaper.

Audience: If Virginia Woolf were here, she would talk about the angel on our shoulder. That’s what we have to get rid of to be successful.

S: There’s nothing like time to give you a little gumption. What we’re talking about…of course we like the success, and it isn’t easy.

T: I call mine the inner Gollum. I had to make peace with him. On the level of the whole job issue - I didn’t mean to be flippant, but my dream is that people get to act genuine and not act perfect. We all have times we feel depressed, shitty, negative feelings…we live in a world where we’re not allowed to reveal these things. Well, everybody feels this way. The more people that do this, the better it will be. Cut the crap, be yourselves.

Audience: I’d like to spend more time on the boundaries with people in our lives. I feel like the onus is on me…where do I need to say no, where do they have a right to privacy? There needs to be a boundary. I wish there’d be more talk about this.

S: I have all these decades behind me, If I talk about a night, you’ll never figure out who it is. If you’re 19, how many people could it be? I’m careful to have a good family relationship. Ask about everything or err on the side of discretion.

A: I think the decision as to whether you should write about your children is highly personal. Eventually your child will read this. I don’t write my journal because I’m a great writer, I write because we went to Great America…and Maya felt…I urge people that are parents, think about what memories you can save.

T: I have a 14 year old who’s Emo. He’s a great source of writing material. It’s great twittering material. If he was younger, I’d be more sensitive, but he talks about stuff on MySpace.

L: Thank you all.