Saturday the 6th of March was the Million Women Rise march. Scheduled the closest weekend to International Women’s Day, Million Women Rise brings together women from all over the country to march against violence against women – domestic and sexual abuse. For more on my thoughts on why it’s important for women to stand up agains VAW, and why it does require a different approach than violence against men, by men, see here.

This following quote was on a few placards, and really stuck in my mind:

“It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in armed conflict”
- Major-General Patrick Cammaert, former Commander of UN Peacekeeping forces in the eastern Congo (Source).

There was a really good turn out. You can see the F Word’s coverage here with links to @CTrouper and @Jester’s  photo sets. Below see an audioboo I recorded just before we got going, a flickr slideshow of my snaps, and a couple of videos of speakers/singers at the rally after the march.

It’s difficult to get involved in domestic and sexual violence protest if you are male, because it’s often important that such spaces are ’safe’ spaces for people who have been subject to such violence, and also that women are able to be seen to be powerful in their own right.

If you want to oppose male violence against women, and are male, you can start by recognising that women are not objects or possessions, oppose their portrayal as such in the media, magazines, music, your workplace, and your own home. You could also check out the White Ribbon Campaign, and support Rape Crisis Centres, Refuge, and Amnesty International’s work in countries where rape is being used as a weapon of war, and state religion refuses women rights over their own bodies.

This is a post about identity politics in the spaces between personal and professional that we now inhabit.

My ideas aren’t fully formed on this yet, but I thought it was important to open up a discussion, because (as I intend to go on to say) it’s important to get a collective as well as personal view on this, because as much as new mediums suggest that I am at the centre of my social and political universe, and as politics and marketing turn their sights to the hyperlocal, I believe the collective, and the universal should still be part of the dialogue.

At the NCVO New Politics conference that I attended in early January there was a real sense of charities and not-for-profit organisations turning towards the ‘hyper-local’, an approach that especially suits relatively new social media tools that allow unmediated (in a conventional sense) conversation with individuals. In this interview with a couple of NCVO members organisation representatives, I chatted about this trend.

In a lot of ways a hyperlocal approach is empowering for both parties, but in another way I believe a radical or uncritical shift towards the hyperlocal could be incredibly dangerous. If you forward your cause or politics only on an individual basis – this is how this directly affects you, and why you should care – you lose a sense of the bigger ‘better good’. You lose the politics that acknowledges that in some aspects we are all alike, and should all have equal footing, privilege and rights. Why should someone have to empathise on an individual level to support human rights and environmental causes? How far is hyperlocal different from a proactive version of NIMBYism? This is not the fault of the tools (social media) but how we use them.

There’s another aspect of this shift in personal/professional spaces which is endlessly fascinating to me. As someone who’s very resistant to advertising (it’s the main reason I don’t watch television) and any message that attempts to shape me to a hegemonic vision of consumer driven happiness, I am very conscious of how we are now opening up and splitting ourselves over different platforms, and how vulnerable that makes us to pernicious outside visions of identity.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that twitter, facebook, digital photography, photoshop et al are necessarily dangerous, these are new mediums for a very old way of communicating, I believe we are operating by the same rules as we always have done, just that on here the longtail is evidential, physically left. Recently I’ve been looking after a couple of friends who’ve gone through pretty bad break ups, both of which has been made almost insurmountably worse by the presence of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr – public spaces that are experienced personally, hyperlocally. Whenever I’ve broken up with someone, we’ve always done the 3 month mutual block/unfollow. But it’s always *there*. The long tail to your relationship. The relationship status change.

I went out on Friday night, and found that rather than asking for people’s numbers, 18 and 19 years olds are now more likely to ask for a full name – like a QRcode can hold so much more information than text, a facebook profile gives you so much more upfront. But it is also meticulously constructed, groups are the badges showing politics, bands, humour, unflattering photos are untagged, people are constructing online versions of themselves, whether you want to call it a profile or an avatar or a character, we de- and reconstruct ourselves daily. Are we making ourselves more vulnerable?

Enter personal brand ambassadors

More so than ever before children are being used to influence their peers, via social networking and IRL, on behalf of certain brands. Likewise throughout Twitter and blogs we hear the calls to the ‘personalised brand’ or the personal-as-brand. People (myself included) now find Twitter a space that shifts from personal to professional daily, and indeed this is technically no different to how we exist IRL – we shift between personas daily, at work me, public transport me, parent me, partner me – however extra dangers persist and in the preservation, we can lose context. Does social media focussing on the personal as brand, political, important, or central, distort our world view? And how do we critique a world built on personal brand? What happens when the brands we tire of are implicit? Integral?

There’s something to be said for easing people away from hegemonic visions of identity, encouraging fluidity, but we should also acknowledge that to assume the fluid transition of personal to professional, person to brand, in archived spaces assumes identity is a blank slate, sculpted, opted. Does this also apply to people who aren’t white, CIS, hetero, able bodied, middle class, developed-world men? What about the majority cast as as an ongoing ‘Other’ – to whom identity is more important, or more integral, people who are defined by their difference? Identity is dangerous when it is thoughtlessly fragmented or assaulted – and is at the root of an awful lot of hurt, destruction, and aggression throughout the world.

Acknowledging the cartesian mind/body split is all very well, but the split mightn’t be so simple with people whose bodies have shaped their mind’s experience – as a defining characteristic, a battleground, an Other.

My own experiences haven’t been particularly traumatic, but I have certainly been faced with difficult decisions when it comes to being female and on the internet. For a while I used an unconnected name (I still do on Comment is Free etc.) and photos that you couldn’t really discern me from. I got a bit angry at this, though. Although I’m not happy to fill the public internet (my facebook is mostly private) with pictures of myself as my main ’selling point’, I also don’t feel like I should have to divorce myself from my image in order to be taken seriously. Which prompts people (even people I valued the opinions of) to accuse me of only having a certain amount of Twitter followers, or interaction online because I was ‘a pretty girl’. In what space will I ever be my words first?

These are fragmented thoughts, on a political, professional and personal level. I want to emphasise that in no way do I think social media, longtails, hyperlocal politics and activism are in any way bad. What it cannot be, however, is the only tool, left uncriticised. I’d be interested in what you think, and whether you think it’s something that’s being talked about enough, or too much. Go forth and comment.

People “have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that … has marked the experience of living as embodied creatures […] Although VR may afford simulated access to a virtual and digitised community of representations — arguably a kind of “global public sphere” achieved at the loss of embeddedness and context — given the individuated manner in which the technology is being developed and will be accessed, the conflation between the conception it affords the user and the user’s own perceptivity needs to be acknowledged and theorised” pp.15-6 N Katherine Hayles in Digital Sensations, by Ken Hillis.

NB I know it’s a bit of a wanky title, but I thought the one I really wanted to use (Cybrands – like Cyborgs, geddit?) looked a bit like a pharmaceutical product, so there we are.

And yes the robot picture is me. I was BORN A GEEK.

“Following the critically-acclaimed sell-out success of Word:Play 2, Box of Tricks has commissioned six new playwrights to write a fifteen-minute play inspired by a single word; for this cycle, the word “obsession”.

We’ve assembled some of the hottest emerging talent to rise to this unique creative challenge: six playwrights, who between them have already won a clutch of awards and accolades; including the Kings Cross Award, Best New Writing at the Lost Festival, winner of the Off Cut Festival, the Old Vic New Voices’ 24 Hour Plays and US/UK Exchange and the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme.”

This is just a quick push on a new 15 minute play I have on at Theatre503 as part of Box of Tricks Theatre’s Word:Play new writing showcase. The evening will be made up of 6 new plays all stemming from the same word: Obsession. The evening will be running from the 30th March-3rd of April and details on how to grab tickets can be found on the Word:Play3 page.

My piece is called Awake, and traces the liminal experience of an MMORPG gamer who passes out whilst gaming. To mention any more is probably giving the game away, but it basically explores being and nothingness in a virtual context. I hope. I mean the fullest expression in the form of a third and final draft will be happening this weekend. I’m sure it’ll be awesome. I’m certain all the other pieces will be (for more info on the other pieces check out the Word:Play3 page again).

For more info on the evening, do follow @bottc and the hashtag #wordplay3 – if you go and see it let us know what you think via the hashtag too. I should hopefully get to some of the rehearsals, so I may even throw together a teaser trail for my piece, who knows.