Determining the history of something we take for granted is a vital record which helps us to use the past to learn about the present, as well as looking to the future. Dr. Cait McKinney’s work on the history of lesbian print newsletters as networks is one example where this relatively small area of focus can tell us so much, and generate so many lessons for how to treat the networks that we use everyday today. In a recent presentation about her work to the Digital Democracies Institute (DDI), Dr. McKinney talked about the work that informed their new book, Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies out now from Duke UP here.
Dr. McKinney ‘s work on lesbian print newsletters describes how they were essentially one of the first networks for a queer community that had limited means for connecting with one another. Their distribution grew through word of mouth, community groups, specialist bookstores and the like, linking people with similar interests and building subscriber lists that were managed by the editors. These days, we take for granted the ability to search for anything we might be curious about online, but before such things were possible, the importance of being able to connect with like-minded people and communities through this medium cannot be underplayed.
The subscriber lists did not just contain contact information, the managers also collected details about what the person was interested in, or if they were researchers then what it was they were working on. The newsletter could be used for members to reach out to other community members via classified ads, looking for people to connect with on any subject they were curious about, or wanted information on. Other subscribers could then respond directly. The editors were working by hand, manually inputting information into the database from index cards as pictured below, a process that Dr. McKinney describes as a “material and loving way to work with data.” If only the same care and attention of communities was taken by larger platforms, or questions of terminology were taken to the communities, perhaps our networks would look very different.
When it came to making those subscriber lists digital, the categorisation of data made it searchable in a much more manageable and accessible way, but the determination of those categories was not a simple endeavour. Dr. McKinney used the example of “trans-people” and how the term was changed from ‘trans-people (men)’ to ‘trans-people (male to female)’; [is that correct] a seemingly semantic detail, but one that makes a huge difference to how a person might categorise themselves. It is in details such as this where some of the key elements of networks and databases begin to be considered, and where Dr. McKinney’s work is so fundamental to the work of the DDI. The creation of categories, and the categorisation of people by platforms from the data given to them can be so limiting, that to try and combat such arbitrary segregation is one of the key areas of our work. Crucially, the difference between the editors of the newsletters and the people responsible for platform databases is the accountability. The editors were accountable to their communities to provide a representative and useful database for the community, and the ability to change terms such as the example above was necessary for adapting to changes that occurred within it.
In looking at the elements of the networks that have changed, and those that have remained the same in the migration to online databases and the much larger databases that are now commonplace, one feature is the existence of trolls. For the print newsletters, due to the limited distribution and close-knit communities, abuse from trolls could only exist in a limited fashion, and was a smaller, although still visible element for the subscribers. The effort taken to mail abusive material to subscribers would have been much greater than it is to write a tweet or a post today, although accordingly, the reach nowadays can be far greater. Trying to understand how to curb abusive language is another focus for the DDI, and understanding its roots as part of minority community experience can only help with this research. Dr. McKinney referred to the impact of the Communications Decency Act (1996) which is still the fundamental communications policy in existence today nearly 25 years later. Questions of censorship have been prevalent in recent work the DDI is undertaking, in terms of counter-speech and protest, and how agonism and hate manifest and are censored by the platforms terms and conditions. As a moving target, again it is key to understand how the current status was created.
Finally, in the journey from small, carefully curated databases such as the queer newsletters to the large platforms experienced today, one feature that concerns the DDI as a primary focus is the homophily of such networks. By virtue of its small subscriber network, the database from the queer print newsletters was deliberately homophilic and specific. The comparison with the databases today that create homophily through echo chambers, which amplify gender and racial biases is a fascinating one, and again, can teach us so many things about how an element that was previously a positive feature of a network can transition into something sinister.
In creating opportunities for collaboration, our networks continue to grow and learn. The DDI is an exciting hub to foster this type of learning and information-sharing amongst our affiliates, and other presenters to the Group which will feature here as they arise.