Thou Shalt Commit: The Internet, New Media, and the Future of Women’s History Claire Bond Potter Journal of Women's History, Volume 25, Number 4, Winter 2013, pp. 350-362 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2013.0041 For additional information about this article Access provided by New School University (5 Feb 2014 09:11 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jowh/summary/v025/25.4.potter.html http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jowh/summary/v025/25.4.potter.html 350 © 2013 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 25 No. 4, 350–362. Thou Shalt Commit The Internet, New Media, and the Future of Women’s History Claire Bond Potter More than a tool for global networking and intellectual exchange, digital technology has transformed the most basic terms of feminist scholarship: reading, writing, archival research, and publication itself. This article addresses how the Internet and the emerging field of digital humanities has fulfilled some of the larger aspirations of feminist scholarship as they were articulated at the dawn of the twenty-first century. When we move online, however, scholars engaged with history and new media identify new questions that require feminist attention. Among them are the digital divide between universities and their publics; transnational linguistic barriers; the uncertain future of journals within an altered reading and publishing environment; and the gendered history of digital technology itself. In the mid-1990s, I was about to sign my first book contract with a uni-versity press. Having made a heroic effort to read the dense legal prose, I stumbled on a line about electronic rights. “What are they talking about?” I asked my tennis partner, a former mass-market book editor, later in the day. “Who knows?” she responded, handing two balls over the net. “Just sign it. Your serve.” What if she had told me instead that, by 2013, this same book would be delivered over radio waves, making it possible for a buyer to “start reading War on Crime on your Kindle in under a minute”; that I myself would be reading other people’s books on a six-by-eight glass screen; or that I would be pulling journal citations for this article from electronic files stored on that device? I would not have believed it. In 2000, even Leo Beranek, a col- laborator on ARPANET, a predecessor to the Internet, predicted that linked computers would expand scholarly networking, but not that they would transform a task as basic as reading. “Early in the new century the number of homes connected to the Internet will equal the number that now have televisions,” he wrote in the Massachusetts Historical Review. “The Internet has succeeded wildly beyond early expectations because it has immense practical value and because it is, quite simply, fun.” 1 When the Journal of Women’s History (JWH) opened for business twenty- five years ago, most historians were not even familiar with email. By the spring of 1998, as the contours of a post-Cold War world were emerging, Claire Bond Potter2013 351 and JWH geared up for its tenth anniversary issue, the Internet still had not made an impact on how feminist scholarship was written or consumed. The Journal instead looked to major changes in what we thought “women’s history” was, changes that were undoubtedly related to the enhanced net- working possibilities created by email. Leila Rupp’s introduction urged readers toward these paradigm shifts: the critical importance of advances in feminist and queer theory; decentering North American women’s history and its dominance over the field; and reconsidering women’s history from a transnational perspective.2 Looking back, an article on the recent history of digital scholarship, and its promise for our work, would have dovetailed nicely with this agenda. If digital and new media projects were already demonstrating the dramatic impact they would have on the historical profession, and on what we mean when we use basic keywords like “archive,” “document,” or “publish,” very few intellectuals had recognized that the Internet would reshape the humanities, producing distinct practices, methodologies, and tools. And yet, many collaborative digital history projects were up and running prior to JWH’s tenth anniversary. The American Social History Project at the City University of New York had moved into the new Center for Media and Learning (now the ASHP/CML) in 1991, its own tenth anniversary. In 1992, the historian Richard Jensen, of the University of Illinois-Chicago, and his collaborators founded H-Net as a free, list serve-based scholarly network. Jensen, collaborating with a group of scholars who were disproportionately female compared to the rest of the profession, launched H-Women and twelve other field-based lists in 1993, creating a communications infrastruc- ture that would allow journals, like JWH, to send calls for papers anywhere that a computer could receive them. By 1994, Roy Rosenzweig, who had published his first article on his- torical computing in 1984 and had collaborated with Steve Brier and Josh Brown of ASHP/CML at ASHP and the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization (MARHO) collective, established the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.3 Despite feminist scholarship’s roots in an activist social history project (two historians of women, Elizabeth Blackmar and Susan Porter Benson, were also collaborators at MARHO), there was no explicit link between feminist scholarship and the research occurring at what have come to be known as digital humanities labs. This may be why the editors of JWH did not speculate in that tenth anniversary issue about the impact that applied computer technology and the emerging Internet would have on feminist research, the objects of feminist research, or collaborative scholarship, much less on how the community of scholars that made up women’s and gender history would function in a digital media environment. Journal of Women’s History352 Winter The JWH editors were not alone in this omission. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, historians of all genders and specialties seemed largely unaware that the fancy typewriters with screens suddenly appearing on their desks would fundamentally alter how anyone practiced, published, or taught history. A Google Scholar search for the phrase “digital history” between 1980 and 1998 turns up only forty-eight results, most of which are related to archiving.4 As a skeptical Andrew McMichael put it in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives in the same year as JWH celebrated its tenth an- niversary, the Internet offered historians “a mixed message” and always would.5 Why? Perhaps this was because computer-driven, quantitative cliometric research, and the historians who did it, had largely taken their work to more receptive economics departments by 1998. Perhaps, ironically, it was a tautological problem. What was cutting edge in the digital humani- ties often migrated to specialized research centers, like ASHP/CML, because history departments did not view such projects as sufficiently scholarly, almost ensuring that non-digital historians could remain happily ignorant of what computers could accomplish. Perhaps it was a status problem: many of the people who pioneered the digital humanities were at public institutions, were women, and were working at colleges and universities outside the academic research metropolis.6 Whatever the reason, in 1998, it was easy for most historians to imag- ine that anything not printed on paper was unscholarly and impermanent, despite the rapid adoption of digital learning at the secondary school level. This condition persists in many departments today. Despite the rise of refereed on-line history journals, on-line versions of every major publica- tion, and sophisticated archiving systems, the question of why electronic scholarship matters, and how it should be evaluated, is still an alarmingly difficult conversation to have with many colleagues in the humanities. Interestingly, when I reflected on the great silence about digital history in the JWH tenth anniversary issue, I realized that most of the basic tools that structure daily onscreen life for the average historian were already in place in 1998. Email, web pages, web logs (soon to be called blogs), newsgroups, the pioneering graphically-oriented Netscape browser, and the list serve were well established. Google was in the works and would launch in September 1998. In other words, everything existed but Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and research tools like Endnote and Zotero! Regardless, McMichael asserted a consensus among historians (“all would concede”) that “much, perhaps most, of the information on information available on the Internet is not very useful.” The most open tools, such as newsgroups, would “never be any more than a forum where those who repeat their arguments the most and the loudest tend to dominate the discussion.” Email alone had potential. Claire Bond Potter2013 353 “A majority of historians are now using e-mail,” he wrote, “and the rest have probably heard about it from colleagues. In fact, from the perspective of the historian, email may be one of the greatest benefits of the Internet revolution,” giving us the capacity “to communicate almost instantly with other historians around the globe.”7 Things turned out differently, although it is worth mentioning that Internet utopians have been wrong about some of their predictions, too. Firewalls limit free access to scholarship and major journalism outlets, while connecting to the digital realm usually requires either a job or money to pay for a wireless signal. The Internet has also transformed access to some, although not all, archives. It is particularly friendly to collections where privacy, copyright, or (as recent events in the United States have demonstrated) national security, are not a concern.8 But access to digitized documents and finding aids does push research forward, and in some fields the absences are unimportant when compared to improved access. “Digitization is a godsend,” one prominent early American women’s his- torian said to me over breakfast when I asked if, and how, the Internet had changed her work. Newspapers are a critical source for anyone writing about women and gender in the early modern period, not only because they provide documentation of a period in which women were less liter- ate, had less leisure to write, and were rarely published, but because they provide insights into the gendering of public discourse. Not only could this historian read seventeenth and eighteenth century newspapers at her desk, she could enlarge them at will, a huge leap over microfilm and microfiche reproduction and a welcome relief to the eyes, young or older. In 1998, it was also hard to imagine that the emergence of free blogging and social media software would make the boundaries between “fun” and “work” on the Internet highly porous within five years.9 On the one hand, scholars who have made the leap to new media may be the targets of skep- ticism by a more traditional history establishment that prefers paper. On the other hand, for most of the twentieth century, the same establishment preferred white men of the political and intellectual classes as historical subjects, and look what happened to that. If history is not yet on the side of digital scholarship, those of us who prowl the Internet may nevertheless be on the side of history, which is trending sharply toward the consumption of information and education, as well as entertainment, on digital platforms. In 2012, when asked which electronic technologies, or “screens” they used “too much,” American adults between 18 and 65 named television, not the Internet as their chief “time-waster.” Yet the survey adds to common sense evidence that the public sphere is increasingly shaped by new media. Fifty-eight percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 saw themselves as too active on smartphones, as opposed to thirteen percent aged 50 to 64, Journal of Women’s History354 Winter and 8 percent in the 65 and over age group. Those who felt they used the Internet too much: 59, 15, and 5 percent. Those who felt they spent too much time on social media such as Facebook: 48, 13, and 4 percent.10 While these numbers could be read in several different ways (for example, that older age groups are less deft with new technologies, more resistant to change, think that the time that they spend on the Internet is not wasted; or that believe they have less time to waste), the cultural impact of time spent in front of screens is undeniable. Young people raised with technology have simply integrated digital platforms and screens more thoroughly into all their activities, including those that they believe, or have been schooled to believe, are a waste of time. I would also propose that if historians strive to be more publicly engaged than we currently are, we might want our work—whether it is traditional scholarly books and articles, narrative and mapping done on web platforms, community history, or writing for a popular audience—to be done in a virtual world where people are both working and wasting time. This is a good place to pause and ask, in particular, what the move to screens might mean for feminists, for female-bodied people, for the study of gender and sexuality, and for this journal as it moves into its next twenty- five years. Has the Internet made a difference to the practice of women’s history? If so, what difference has it made? And what do journals devoted to the history of women, gender, and sexuality need to be thinking about as they look to the future? Let’s start with the bigger picture. The first thing that probably should come to mind is the likelihood that the journal you may be holding in your hand right now will not always be printed on paper and delivered in the mail. Already many of us receive email links to journals we subscribe to, followed a week or so later by a heavy, plastic-wrapped tome printed on expensive, acid-free paper. While paper will still be with us for some time, the writing, so to speak, is on the (Facebook?) wall. Historians should soon expect to have the option to receive journals only through the ether. Those of us who have access to a university library don’t need subscriptions now: we simply log in to JSTOR, or Project Muse, to get what we want, or what we think we need. Most simplify this task by making table of contents services available to their faculty: a simple email alerts the recipient to a new issue. Like the effect of MP3 music files on the concept of a unified record album, the trend towards on-line delivery will accelerate mash-up style journal consumption. Scholars will read without regard to editorial themes, sequencing, clusters, and introductions, unless these files are “bound” to each other in such a way as to prevent separating them. One solution is to make a journal deliverable in the manner of mass-market magazines or e- books, in which the reader can use hyperlinks to read around the volume, Claire Bond Potter2013 355 but the issue is delivered as a coherent whole. At the most recent meeting of the American Historical Association, President William Cronon announced that the AHA would begin delivering its journal through an app, or Internet application, sometime in 2013 (the conference program had been delivered on paper, in a PDF, and in a very popular smartphone app). Technological changes are not cheap and represent a new state of play that may hit history journals that are not backed up by steep professional membership dues in the pocketbook. This currently implicates nearly all journals in the fields of women’s, gender, queer, and sexuality studies based in the United States. Journals also will experience differently the increas- ing cultural pressure on universities and scholarly organizations to make our work freely available. This is something some universities do through digital commons platforms, like bepress.com, and individual scholars can accomplish by uploading PDF files of their work to a website made from a simple Word Press blog platform. But recirculating our own work on the web is not always legal. Most history journals, which have contracts with subscription services like JSTOR and Project Muse, currently ask authors to sign a contract that restrains republication for a year or more. While the problem of access is not particular to women’s history as a field, I would argue that feminists and queer scholars have a special re- sponsibility to address it because of our attachment to political communi- ties outside the university. In other words, our intellectual principles have always been animated by our progressive commitments to social justice. Attending to the project of writing and publishing across national, class, and racial lines is, arguably, a task that is complete only when our scholarship is returned to the communities where the research originates. Freedom of access needs to be matched by attending to the linguistic barriers that divide scholars from each other, and from their global publics. Language barriers prevent scholars and citizens around the world from accessing primary and secondary material that may be easily available on line, but are unreadable. As historians Alice Yang and Alan S. Christy, co- directors of the University of California Santa Cruz Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories, have argued, antagonistic nationalisms thrive on linguistic barriers that allow each country’s narrative to go unchallenged by another’s. However, as they point out, “demanding mastery of multiple languages and historiographies” to pursue truly transnational projects “is unrealistic.” Digital technology that translates the work of collaborators and history consumers across many national publics “can effectively achieve this goal…. The key to this is not erasing the language barrier but making the language barrier visible and negotiable.”11 Transnational and translingual collaborations may also require a necessary shift away from the history profession’s outdated valorization of the sole author. Journal of Women’s History356 Winter Recognition of the scholarly value of new media and digital publication does not promote, as some have put it, the “death of the book” (after all, literary theorist Roland Barthes announced the death of the author almost forty years ago and that seems to have passed); nor does the possibility of collaborating in virtual space mean that scholarly meetings will become redundant.12 While some may prefer an eReader, almost nobody prefers to read a book on a computer screen. Most recently, the demise of print was bandied about at a history convention that had an entire exhibit devoted to displaying thousands of books, hundreds of which had been published that year.13 Nor, despite the surge in popularity of online teaching and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), should we imagine that digital and new media would necessarily replace face-to-face pedagogy. What we do know, however, is that academics (many of whom are not particularly interested in digital history as a practice) have, in the past fifteen years, flocked to social media and blogging as a new way of making community. This has been occurring even as hiring and tenure practices, and the turn to contingent labor, have undermined older forms of community like the department and the campus.14 New media has also become a way in which feminist communities organize themselves at a time in which women’s, gender, and sexuality studies programs, founded to organize against gender inequities within the university, have ceased playing an activist or mentoring function on many campuses. What do these new forms of community look like? As one example, on Labor Day weekend, 2011, feminist academic bloggers Notorious Ph.D. and Another Damned Medievalist put out a call for participants in their second on-line writing group. The two women, each a long-time presence in the blogosphere, proclaimed that the network of writers who would be hosted on both their blogs had been “founded as a virtual alternative to those dissertation writing groups that many of us benefited from when we were grad students, but that seem to disappear as we move into jobs.” Members were instructed to dispense support and advice, and establish discussion topics, but slackers would not be tolerated. “The main commandment here,” they wrote, “is Thou Shalt Commit.”15 If you blog it, they will come. By September 15, fifty-six historians and literary and cultural studies scholars had signed up for what became known as Another Damned Notorious Writing Group. Each listed a project, or in some cases a series of tasks, that they wanted to complete during the virtual group’s twelve-week life span. As Another Damned Medievalist warned, not showing up for two weeks would cause a member to be dropped. “OBE happens. Yes, we are all at times Overtaken By Events,” and the most com- mon response to that was to stop writing. “If shit happens, then you have two choices. You cannot make any progress, and drop out of the group. Or Claire Bond Potter2013 357 you can write in and say you have been OBE, and then use the group as a reason to think through how you are going to deal with it. I’m voting for the latter.”16 This kind of tough love was once only possible in real life (or as we say in the blogosphere, IRL). Now history is being written, archived, posted, researched, and lived online, with the added advantage that scholars can be more open about what, and who, sabotages their work than colleagueship permits. However, email, counter to Andrew McMichael’s 1998 prediction, has, by 2013, become the Internet’s “mixed message.” A worse time waster than Facebook, LOL Cats, and online shopping, email nags at our conscious- ness, drives us to Wi-Fi free locations and Internet blocking software, and leaves us wringing sore hands that have not written a scholarly word. A search for the phrase “managing email” at The Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2013 turned up over 3100 articles devoted to lifting the burden of daily, or hourly, communication. “With so many messages coming in, many people on campuses are feeling a sense of overload,” one blog announced. “The Tech Therapy team talks with Brett Foster, an associate professor of English at Wheaton College, in Illinois, about his experiment in keeping his inbox to zero each day.”17 Academic computing technology often seems to generate more work than it is worth, particularly for those who doubt their ability to learn some- thing more complex than email, and has eased the way to forms of labor exploitation and speedup.18 However much our hearts may sink at the most recent administrative exhortation to develop a MOOC on the Civil War, or announcement of the most recent “student success software,” the Internet has had a far greater capacity to create community and generate creative, shareable scholarship than could have been anticipated twenty-five years ago. At the same time, it allows historians to work across the boundaries of the universities where we are appointed, edit journals, organize confer- ences, and access archives without ever leaving our desks.19 Feminist historians have long prided themselves on the creation of com- munity. The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the Coordinating Council for Women in History, the International Federation for Research in Women’s History, the Committee on Women of the American Historical Association, the Western Association of Women Historians, the Southern Association of Women Historians, and the Lesbian HerStory Archives are but a few of the organizations that arose to meet a felt need for intellectual support, mentoring, and mutuality. Our presence on the web has surely enhanced that. Women’s studies programs, many of which have now be- come gender, sexuality, or feminist studies programs to mark changes in the discipline, create web communities for the students and faculty they serve. Journal of Women’s History358 Winter The Internet makes all of the organizations and journals that are founda- tional to feminist scholarship more visible and makes them better resources for young scholars. Blogs, which emerged as a powerful social networking platform in the early twenty-first century, have emerged as sites for public and experimental feminist writing, for sharing scholarly and methodical insights, for discussing professional issues, and for interpreting current events. Blogs attached to professional websites create a flexible location for spreading news and Calls for Papers, while those that are attached to the mass-circulation press provide a more inclusive sphere for bringing women and gender history to the attention of a non-scholarly public. Finally, new digital technologies have their own history, one that is recent to be sure, but that nevertheless resonates to historical questions of race, class, gender, nationalism, and sexuality that are at the heart of a feminist intellectual enterprise. The recent history of new media will build on established questions and patterns in intellectual, cultural, and business history that frame the economic progress of women in relation to the gendering of work itself. Scholars may also want to weave their findings into the long labor history of the American West, and compara- tive economic frontier industries in Canada, Australia, and South Africa. As historian Stephen Pitti has argued, companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple thrived in the so-called “Silicon Valley” as only the most recent entrepreneurs to displace and exploit working class Mexican-Americans. Apple, for example, has also made enormous profits at the expense of a predominantly female, Chinese factory labor force that rioted in 2012 in response to oppressive work conditions.20 Feminist historians have an important task before them in examining the proto-pioneer, masculine progress narratives that portray successful Internet entrepreneurs as establishing a newly democratic public sphere on and off the web. In this contemporary history, the industry had a sexual hierarchy, but no longer does. Male aggression has given way to the uniquely civilizing influence of American women in a bricks and mortar workplace far from the sites of neo-colonial exploitation. Experience, a job bank and dotcom networking site founded in 1996, imagines an industry now come to full maturity, one that encourages a diverse workforce to “work hard and play hard” in rational settings that abhor sexism, racism, and homophobia. In reality, women have succeeded in new media and technology careers in this New West much as they did in the Old West, or indeed, anywhere: by educational, racial, and class status; and in relation to whether the work itself has always been, or has become, gendered in such a way as to allow “women” to excel at it. As one Experience blogger notes, although an earlier generation had to fight for status, women now have a distinct advantage Claire Bond Potter2013 359 over men because of “the attributes they bring to their jobs” (communica- tion skills, consensus building, and intuition).21 The feminist historian asks: is it possible to achieve gender equality on any shop floor—digital or IRL—that shapes itself around the “essential qualities” of masculinity and femininity? Here, the digital brings nothing intellectually new to the table, even though evidence collection and preser- vation on the Internet may require new skills. Whether in automobile and electrical factories, where women kept their jobs in the upholstery shops after World War II because their fingers were said to be more nimble than men’s, or on the editorial boards of mass-market magazines, new employ- ment opportunities for women have often disguised more permanent forms of highly gendered, racialized, and class inequality. Early research on the technology boom has indicated, for example, that if well-educated women do well in a digital world, working-class women do not. Pink-collar workers in technology-driven service industries, the core of the neoliberal U.S. economy, have access to less modern, hand-me-down equipment and are inadequately educated to use it. This results in low pay, little or no advancement, and “difficult if not impossible work environments” for working-class women.22 In addition to valorizing masculine adventurism, cheating, sexual conquest, and misogyny, dotcom hagiographies ignore these persistent inequalities. The American journalist Ben Mezrich’s best-selling account of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, the basis for a 2010 award- winning movie, The Social Network, is one example. Appearing in its first edition with a martini and a piece of red lingerie on the cover, Mezrich’s Zuckerberg and his male cronies celebrate each technological and financial victory by seeking out beautiful women who are glad to open their—er, arms—to the triumphant nerds. In a less sensational register, Katherine Losse describes her years as one of the first, and few, female employees of Facebook in The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network. An almost perversely asexual observer of adolescent male social aggression, Losse’s Facebook is an endless “bromance,” a frat house with free food, free toys, flipped work and sleep schedules, and free concert tickets. Male engineers are at the top of the hierarchy, while the less financially privileged female support staff perform the metaphorical housework and practical tasks that connect the company to its users.23 Since its inception, women’s history has expanded its portfolio to meet new challenges, new opportunities, and new subjects. Too many historians continue to privilege email, online journal searches, and guilty consultations with Wikipedia, while ignoring scholarly developments in digital scholarship and new media. One immediate, and unnecessary, consequence of this is that departments are reluctant to educate, evaluate, Journal of Women’s History360 Winter hire, or tenure scholars in a field that is not only well established, but may represent great potential for training future PhDs for jobs in the university, journalism, corporate and independent publishing, secondary education, IT and archives management, and public service. This makes it ever more important that scholars, like those assembled on the editorial board of JWH, provide the space, the prestige, and the creative publishing opportunities that feminist scholars in digital history around the globe require to move forward in their work and careers. These unexploited opportunities beckon to the leadership that feminist historians have shown in the past as they have remade the university around principles of inclusion, progress, and cutting edge interdisciplinary work. Feminist historians, like other specialists who came out of the progres- sive social history tradition, can set an example by firmly moving history towards the digital, just as JWH shrewdly moved to decenter the United States and U.S.-based historians in its own pages fifteen years ago. Not eliminating but re-imagining print, and with it the power of conventional narratives and textual styles linked to the production of codex narratives, has the potential to transform and re-energize history as a scholarly, public, and politically relevant practice. Notes 1Leo Beranek, “Roots of the Internet: A Personal History,” Massachusetts Historical Review. 2 (2000), 75. 2Leila Rupp, “Editor’s Note,” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 1 (Spring, 1998): 6–8. 3Richard Jenson to CampbellD@apsu.bitnet, June 24 1993, Humanist Discussion Group, History Net Lists 2/122 7, no. 0075, http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/ Humanist/v07/0073.html; and Anthony Grafton, “Roy Rosenzweig: Scholarship as Commu- nity,” Clio Wired: the Future of the Past in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), ix–xx. By 1994, Brier, Brown, and Rosenzweig had also produced a CD-ROM for the first edition of the United States social history textbook, Who Built America? (New York: Bedford Books, 1989) and the website, History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/. 4I can’t help but point out that Google Scholar, an indispensable tool, was launched as recently as 2007. 5Andrew McMichael, “The Historian, the Internet and the Web: A Reassess- ment,” Perspectives (February 1998), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/ issues/1998/9802/9802VIE2.CFM. 6This is my speculation based on observations made by Melanie R. Shell- Weiss, Marilyn Levine, Kriste Lindenmeyer, Paul Turnbull, and Kelly A. Woestman, some of the founding members of H-Net on “H-Net and the Disciplines,” 127th American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, January 3 2013. Claire Bond Potter2013 361 7Ibid. 8Gail Drakes, “Who Owns Your Archive? Historians and the Challenge of Intellectual Property Law,” in Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back, ed., Claire Potter and Renee Romano (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 83–111. 9For a contemporary history of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that began life as a blog, see Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (New York: the Feminist Press, 2005). Jeff Nunokawa, of Princeton University’s English Department, has been writing Facebook notes for several years that combine photographs, scraps of literature, and commentary about the feelings these quotations summon or encapsulate. This project was the object of a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece; see Rebecca Mead, “Earnest,” The New Yorker, July 4 2011. Mead’s piece will soon appear as a book. 10Frank Newport, “U.S. Young Adults Admit Too Much Time on Cell Phones, Web,” Gallup Economy, April 12 2012, http://www.gallup.com/poll/153863/Young-Adults-Admit- Time-Cell-Phones-Web.aspx. One study argues young people are leaving Facebook because their parents are going on it. In 2011, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook was in its mid-thirties and forties; see Mary Madden, “Older Adults and Social Media,” Pew Internet, August 27 2010, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/ Older-Adults-and-Social-Media.aspx; and Sherry Turkel, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 201–204. 11Alice Yang and Alan Y. Christy, “Eternal Flames: The Translingual Impera- tive in the Study of World War II Memories,” in Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back, ed., Claire Potter and Renee Romano (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 225–247, 244. 12Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 142–148. 13Leah Price, “Dead Again,” New York Times August 10 2012; Christopher Mims, “The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated,” MIT Technology Review, September 21 2010, http://www.technologyreview.com/view/420881/ the-death-of-the-book-has-been-greatly-exaggerated/. 14“Virtually a Historian: Blogs and the Recent History of Dispossessed Aca- demic Labor,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 38, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 83–97. 15The Adventures of Notorious, Ph.D., Girl Scholar, “Writing Group, Fall Term: Call for Projects,” September 4 2011, http://girlscholar.blogspot.com/2011/09/writing-group- fall-term-call-for.html. 16Blogenspiel, “Another Damned Notorious Writing Group is Called To Order,” September 9 2011, http://anotherdamnedmedievalist.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/another- damned-notorious-writing-group-is-called-to-order/; and The Adventures of Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar, “Writing Group 2: Pacing,” September 15 2011, http://girlscholar. blogspot.com/2011/09/writing-group-week-2-pacing.html. Journal of Women’s History362 Winter 17Jeffrey R. Young, “Academics Struggle With Managing Email,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10 2013, http://chronicle.com/blogs/techtherapy/2013/01/10/ episode-102-academics-struggle-with-managing-e-mail/. 18Joan Greenbaum, Windows on the Workplace: Technology, Jobs and the Organiza- tion of Office Work (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004). 19Leila J. Rupp, “At the Turn of the Millennium,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 33–38, 34. 20Stephen Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race and Mexican Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Adam Gabbatt, “Foxconn Workers on iPhone Line Strike in China, Rights Group Says,” The Guardian, October 5 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/oct/05/foxconn-apple-iphone-china-strike. 21Amy Marcott, “A Level Field At Last? Women and the Internet,” Experience, http://s2b.experience.com/alumnus/article?channel_id=diversity&source_page=additional_ articles&article_id=article_1126286322846 (accessed January 8 2013). 22Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: the Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 15; Carrie Pitzulo, Bachelors and Bunnies: the Sexual Politics of Playboy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 62–3; and Mary E. Virnoche, “Pink Collars on the Internet: Roadblocks to the Information Superhighway,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 29, no. ¾ (Fall-Winter 2001): 80–102, 80. 23Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: the Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal (New York: Doubleday, 2009); and Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network (New York: Free Press, 2012).