Wired summarizes the study, found in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Lead author and research Sapna Cheryan had an interesting question - if people can base their perceptions of another person on the items found in their bedroom, would the same type of reasoning apply in a classroom setting? Cheryan and her team quickly set up an experiment:

Cheryan and colleagues tested this idea by alternately decorating a computer science classroom with objects that earlier surveys pegged as stereotypically geeky-Star Trek posters, videogames and comic books - or with objects that the surveys found to be neutral- coffee mugs, plants and art posters. Thirty-nine college students spent a few minutes in the room, then filled out a questionnaire on their attitudes toward computer science.

Women who spent time in the geeky room reported less interest in computer science than women who saw the neutral room. For male students, however, the room's décor made no difference.

In follow-up tests, a total of 215 students were asked to imagine they were joining either a geekily decorated or a neutrally decorated company after graduation. For every possible scenario, women preferred the non-geeky space.

"It's a consistent effect," Cheryan says. "The environment can communicate a sense of belonging, but it also communicates a sense of exclusion, or a sense that this is not a place where I would fit in."

Cheryan and co-researchers believe that by creating more neutral appearing spaces will help combat stereotypes and improve diversity in the computer science field.

Cheryan is correct in thinking perception matters in how people place themselves in different roles. But as a geeky girl gamer, I think that focusing on the internal motivations for why women avoid stereotypical or gendered areas (i.e., "I just don't think I belong") obscures the nature of societal norms to influence women away from engaging in the maths and sciences, especially as they are considered male dominated spaces.

Some of the most fascinating explorations of this dynamic are found in Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. The collection of research findings and games theory, published in 2008, reveal a lot more than barriers to entry for women who want to play games or work in the industry - it reveals how gender norms often influence how "permitted" women are to access certain spaces, and how those limitations function to maintain the low numbers of women entering fields like computer science or game design.

Some of the research upholds Cheryan's ideas. In "Becoming a Player," T.L. Taylor uses the marketing strategies and environments of gaming stores to illustrate the belonging dynamic:

Part of the work of any leisure activity is coming to understand - practically and symbolically - that this is something you can do, that it is not at odds with your sense of self or your social world. The game industry (and, I would argue, the larger game community) knows this at some level and is constantly working to give players information about new games, where to get them, why they are fun, and how to play them. Just as powerfully, it is always mirroring back to boys and men that "this is your and your friends' play space" and "you belong here. Rarely are women gamers given this kind of attention. (p. 55)

Two other studies explain how the idea that some people "belong" and some do not take shape and manifest themselves in physical space. "Getting Girls into the Game," a joint study by Tracy Fullerton, Janine Fron, Celia Pearce, and Jacki Morie, explored a variety of reasons why more women don't pursue careers in gaming. After concluding that early experiences with video games impact how girls perceive the space, they note:

These early experiences pave the way to an interest in game development, but male-dominated environments can limit girls' involvement. In fact, computer labs in schools or clubhouses are often dominated by boys, who tend to elbow out the girls and take control of the equipment. (p. 168)

In "Gender Identity, Play Style, and the Design of Games for Classroom Learning," researchers Carrie Heeter and Brian Winn also talk about some of the gendered norms that come into play when there are limitations on availability of equipment:

When boys play games (or use computers), when there are fewer machines than people, girls step aside. It is difficult to determine whether it is the girls' "stepping aside" from their opportunity… or the boys "crowding out" the girls…. Nonetheless, this chemistry seems to exist between males and females pervasively when it comes to using gaming machines. (p.282)

The most comprehensive (and damning) research comes from Holin Lin, who invested countless hours into her research in Taiwan. Seeking answers to women's exclusion from the larger gaming world, Lin decides to look into home life, societal messaging, school and peer groups in her groundbreaking study "Body, Space, and Gendered Gaming Experiences: A Cultural Geography of Homes, Cybercafés and Dormitories." I devoted a substantial portion of my review of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat to Lin's research, because the connections drawn are mindblowing:

Deftly weaving connections between the threat of violence, gendered socialization, and the internalized expectations of the women themselves, Lin paints a scenario familiar to any woman who moves into a heavily gendered space. Taiwanese youth frequent cybercafés to increase their skills, use upgraded machines, and hang out with their friends. However, women gamers looking to participate in the fun have to contend with real-world harassment:

The layouts of some cybercafés serve as gender barriers: girls must pass through a room full of pool tables to access the back spaces that are reserved for computers. Most girls are not willing to subject themselves to the scrutiny of and comments made by the pool players, and therefore only enter when accompanied by male friends.

This parallels one of Lin's observations of cybercafés in Taiwan… most girls are unwilling to enter a cybercafé unless accompanied by a male friend. Together, these stories imply that physical and social barriers to entry for women become misinterpreted as a lack of desire to play video games.

Despite the limits of online, virtual communities, however, they are often more appealing to female gamers than actual, physical cybercafés, as Lin points out:

Women's fear and perceptions of risk are deeply rooted in their bodies, and avoiding dangerous places is a common practice for managing the fear of male violence. In contrast, no threat of physical harm exists for players wearing either female or male avatar bodies.

Outside of the dynamics of the cybercafe scene, Lin also looks at women at home, from growing up with their parents to their play dynamics in college dormitories. Lin notes that college-aged male gamers tend to see gaming as a way to bond, while female gamers are often ostracized and made into a minority. In addition, family pressures tend to place pressure on girls to do more help with household tasks, as well as to work on social relationships. Males, however, were often left to their own devices when it came to interacting with technology. This functions to increase discomfort with technologies as women are socialized to spend less time understanding and getting familiar with these types of systems. Over time, this casual discouragement on so many fronts presents girls with a disincentive to continue working with or playing with game systems - and this dynamic is also evident with most other technologies, including computers.

Lin concludes that "[c]ultural constructions of gender are ubiquitous and therefore hard to remove from any analytical interpretation of gender issues in computer gaming." And indeed, while Cheryan has the right idea with looking at how spaces can be perceived as hospitable and inhospitable, solving the issue of gender gaps in technology will require looking at encouragement to get into the maths and sciences plays strongly into societal idea of what girls are "supposed" to do and where they "belong." And I'm afraid it will be a bit more complex than redesigning classrooms.

Star Trek Stops Women From Becoming Computer Scientists [Wired]
Beyond Barbie® and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Hardcover) [Amazon]

Related: Gamer Girls Rising [Women's Review of Books]

By now, you know the drill: almost immediately, commenters on news sites and around the web started pointing fingers at the mother, Shellie Ross, a prolific Twitter user with more than five thousand followers, after it was discovered that she'd posted a message about the weather a mere minute before her son was discovered in the pool - one of 70 tweets she'd already written that day. They also blamed her for tweeting a request for prayers minutes before learning the toddler had died - and, of course, for alerting readers to his death.

Any indignation over this - because that's the appropriate, immediate response to the tragedy - has been overtaken by collective shock at said vitriol, and the lack of humanity it seems to suggest. Wrote Conor Friedersdorf on the Atlantic's Daily Dish, "the callousness strangers direct via Internet at a grieving mother is a far more dire harbinger of where we're headed" than any dangerous dependence on technology. Madison McGraw, one of the most strident critics of Ross's parenting, spoke for critics when she tweeted, "Perhaps if Mrs. Ross had spent less time tweeting and more time playing with her son, this would not have happened." (If you check McGraw's Twitter, she recently added, "On my way to MSNBC to discuss if Bryson Ross would still be alive if mother wasn't tweeting.")

Let's say, for the purposes of argument, that McGraw, a woman who's never met this mother, is absolutely right: Ross had an internet addiction that made her neglect her family and led indisputably to her child's death. Are we pointing fingers at the bereaved mother, or at the technology that lured her away from her place at her children's side? Is she suggesting that this was an unstable, easily-influenced woman unfit to care for children (in which case surely she would have fallen prey to other distractions, right?) or that it was demon technology that led her astray? And let's say, which we cannot and should not, that all or some of that was true. It's just as true that this was a case where we saw the good of these same networking sites: thousands of strangers reaching out in prayer and comfort and solidarity, providing a community that one can only assume Ross - who has two other children and whose husband is deployed - valued. You couldn't have that good without the evil the critics claim. And if that comfort means nothing, well then, the criticism of strangers should mean even less.

Mom's Tweet As Son Was Dying Stirs Debate [USA Today]
Mom Shellie Ross' Tweet About Son's Death Sparks Debate Over Use of Twitter During Tragedy [ABC]
So She Tweeted It [Daily Dish]

Now, I have nothing against pink as a color. I own some pink shirts, some books, some pens. It's fine, one of the many colors I enjoy looking at.

What I hate are pink technology pimps, those marketers/salespeople that assume that since I am walking around in the possession of a uterus, everything I touch must be coated in pink and/or rhinestones.

And I am not alone.

Writing for Wired's Gadget Lab, Priya Ganapati breaks it down:

[G]adget companies seem to find it difficult to design, produce and market products to women without resorting to stereotypes. The current strategy among most gadget makers is that if it is for women, it must be pink or sparkly.

And worse still is the insult that normally comes with the assumption that I'm a pink sparkly princess. It's not enough that they want us to fit in with their pre-existing color palette, but then they have the nerve to think we will be so blinded by the rhinestone bling that we'd forget to check for important things. Like, you know, cost and functionality. Ganapati made me put my fist in the air when she wrote:

If you think pink and sparkly strategy is lazy, so is slapping a designer label on a product for women and pricing it much higher than similar products. HP Vivienne Tam netbook, I am looking at you. The netbook hit some of the right notes. It's a pleasant red, has a stylish exterior and comes with a matching Vivienne Tam designed clutch. But for those perks, women have to shell out $700, much more than the $350 for a comparable HP black or blue netbook.

Now, I'll just put it out there. I'm a slut for pretty. And so this was actually the first netbook I looked at when I was in the market to purchase one. While I loved the color (ooh!), the design left me a bit cold. I was planning to cover it with a skin. But then I realized:

I may be a slut for pretty, but this whore has standards.

So, away I went to give Samsung $400 for sleek, white machine with the battery life, keyboard size, and RAM I wanted that also manages to fit into the tiniest of totes. And for some reason, men go crazy when they see it, eagerly inquiring about the experience and specs. Man, if I was single, this thing would be better than a cute puppy.

Slapping pink paint on some basic ass technology isn't going to help you move units - tailoring it to a woman's needs will.

So marketers/product developers/entrepreneurs, please do me a favor: stop and think before you make it pink.

Official Site [South by Southwest Interactive]
What Real Women Want in Their Gadgets [Wired]
Vivienne Tam Netbook [Amazon]

[Image of Neeru Paharia| Photograph by Ben Stechschulte]

Jim Groom is ""instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it," and one of the featured innovators in "Who Needs Harvard?" Fast Company's exploration of the changing nature of higher education.

All the people and ideas discussed in the Anya Kamenetz's article converge on one idea: our model for higher education needs to change and adapt to continue to be relevant. This is a powerful message, especially now as the United States educational rankings are sliding (the article states we've slid to tenth most educated nation, down from number one) and the average cost of a college education is spiraling out of control.

But can moving to an open-source model of education work and still provide the type of structure and benefits of a traditional school setting? A few of the interview subjects decided to directly tackle that question:

In 2005, [Neeru Paharia, now a PhD student at Harvard Business School] started AcaWiki, a crowdsourced compilation of free summaries of academic papers. Now, she says, she wants to address "all the other things that a university does for you: It provides you a clear path from A to B, provides social infrastructure of teachers and other students, and accreditation so you actually get credit for what you do. So the question becomes, Is there a way of hacking something like this together?"

At a conference in Croatia last year, Paharia met Jan Philipp Schmidt, a German computer scientist working on open courseware in South Africa; together with a Canadian and an Australian, they started Peer2Peer University, which has become one of the most buzzed-about initiatives in open education. Would-be students can use the Web site to convene and schedule classes, meet online, and tutor one another; a volunteer facilitator for each course helps the process along. Peer2Peer got a $70,000 seed grant from the Hewlett Foundation to launch its first 10 pilot courses, in topics from behavioral economics to Wikipedia visualization — content areas that already have online audiences of self-motivated learners.

Other educators are decided to solve one of the problems that leads to the devaluation of college degrees in the workplace - difficulties measure competence, not just coursework:

If open courseware is about applying technology to sharing knowledge, and Peer2Peer is about social networking for teaching and learning, Bob Mendenhall, president of the online Western Governors University, is proudest of his college's innovation in the third, hardest-to-crack dimension of education: accreditation and assessment. WGU was formed in the late 1990s, when the governors of 19 western states decided to take advantage of the newfangled Internet and create an online university to expand access to students in rural communities across their region. Today, it's an all-online university with 12,000 students in all 50 states. It's a private not-for-profit, like Harvard; the only state money was an initial $100,000 stake from each founding state. WGU runs entirely on tuition: $2,890 for a six-month term.

"We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' " Mendenhall says. "We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree."

WGU began by convening a national advisory board of employers, including Google and Tenet Healthcare. "We asked them, 'What is it the graduates you're hiring can't do that you wish they could?' We've never had a silence after that question." Then assessments were created to measure each competency area. Mendenhall recalls one student who had been self-employed in IT for 15 years but never earned a degree; he passed all the required assessments in six months and took home his bachelor's without taking a course.

I have to admit, all this discussion appeals to me. As a someone who read The Teenage Liberation Handbook at a formative age, adopted some of the key principles of the unschooling movement, and subsequently dropped out of college when I couldn't reconcile the cost with the benefit, I can really get behind a lot of these initiatives, particularly for those of us with a strong focus or who, for reasons of temperament or ability, cannot gel with the current system of education.

In addition, I think that looking at educational alternatives would help to reset the value of a college degree. I had an argument with a former boss once, over the required schooling needed to do the job I was leaving. In agreeing to help her write the job description, I noticed she had slipped in a "college degree required" line.

When I asked why, pointing out that I had done the job well without a degree (because really, the job only required reading comprehension and basic communication skills) she said "well, that's just to keep the riff-raff out."

Excuse me?

"By your standards, I'm uneducated," I pointed out.

She waved off my concerns, but I - having fought with the employment market for over a decade at that point - knew that the lack of a degree resulted in an instant disqualification for many jobs. And many of those jobs were compensating at under $12 an hour, which strikes me a bit unreasonable. It's one thing to require a degree for an entry-level, stepping stone job, but for a job you acknowledge is dead end? Where is the logic in that decision? It just cheapens the overall value of earning a degree.

However, the price of going without a college degree is a high one to pay, and life is much much harder. However, with many college-qualified students choosing to opt-out due to costs and other factors, perhaps it is time to examine alternate methods of education.

Kamenetz agrees, noting:

Paharia's idea of "hacking" education — putting something together on the fly — is important. All of these projects are still very much works in progress. Not even the most starry-eyed geeks are claiming that an LCD monitor can and should replace the richest, most fully textured college experience out there (at least not yet). But it could certainly represent an upgrade in opportunity for those who can't afford college, or for the half of American college students who attend community colleges, or even the 80% who attend nonselective universities.

Ultimately what interests Paharia is proving the model, demonstrating that there's a way to provide education cheaply or even for free to all who are qualified. "I ride the Boston T around and I see these ads for schools, and it bothers me that so much hope is rested on having an education, and yet at the end of the day you end up with $100,000 in debt. What are you paying for? And is this the best way of setting up the system?"

Peer2Peer is not the only attempt to bridge the gap between free material and cheap education. The online University of the People, founded by Shai Reshef, who made his fortune in for-profit education, signed up its first class this fall — 300 students from nearly 100 countries. While it has yet to get accreditation, the not-for-profit plans to offer bachelor's degrees in business and computer science using open courseware and volunteer faculty; fees would add up to about $4,000 for a full four-year degree.

Perhaps it is time to start restructuring our ideas of what constitutes an education. In the process of explaining why our educational model functions the way it does, Kamenetz explains:

The university as we know it was born around AD 1100, when communities formed in Bologna, Italy; Oxford, England; and Paris around a scarce, precious information technology: the handwritten book. Illuminated manuscripts of the period show a professor at a podium lecturing from a revered volume while rows of students sit with paper and quill — the same basic format that most classes take 1,000 years later.

Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions.

We do benefit from a glut of information, and only lack a way to effectively organize and quantify learning outside of a university system. But even if these new online systems give rise to less expensive options for college, will our existing digital divide continue to perpetuate the same set of problems?

Who Needs Harvard? How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education [Fast Company]
Cost of higher education gets more pricey [USA Today]
The Teenage Liberation Handbook [Amazon]
Unschooling [Wikipedia]
Misperceptions and Unexpected Barriers Deter Some of The Nation's Brightest Students From Attending College [IHEP]
Digital Divide [Wikipedia]

(Image of Neeru Paharia| Photograph by Ben Stechschulte)

Usually manufacturers just slap a coat of pink paint on when the marketing electronics to women. Sony Ericsson clearly put a lot more thought into its Jalou phone, which comes out later this year, but still managed to come up with one of the most insulting pieces of electronics on the market. According to the press release:

Sony Ericsson explored art, architecture and furniture trends whilst delving deep into the couture and fashion world to ensure Jalou encapsulates some of the hottest fashion trends which will emerge next year. Structured forms, intricate corners, hidden depths and jewel accents are set to be some of the hottest fashion trends in 2010... Jalou reflects these trends with its delicate facet-cut diamond shape design, clean and expressive lines and variety of different shine and matt finishes, that give depth to the handset.

Jalou is "encased in a beautiful facet-cut jewel form," just like the engagement ring we desperately want on our fingers. Apparently, the hot colors in 2010 will be Deep Amethyst, Aquamarine Blue and Onyx Black, but if you simply must have a pink one, there is a more expensive rose-colored Dolce & Gabbana edition (which comes with a silk jewelry bag). Plus, the phone is only 73mm long, which the press release explains this is "shorter than your favourite lipstick." (Sony realized that sometimes ladies get confused by math.)

Since Jalou "exudes style as well as substance," Sony Ericsson provides a list of the phone's features and how a stylish woman might use them. For example, you can use the 3.2 megapixel camera to "snap your favorite outfit and send it to your friends." There's a button that turns the entire screen into a mirror so you can "check your hair before a hot date," and the phone "automatically updates with zodiac signs," since all women are into flakey stuff like horoscopes. It's also the first Sony Ericsson phone to feature a BMI calculator and the Walk Mate step counter, "to help you stay in shape wherever you go."

But as Mother Jones points out,

Vanity, body image, and horoscopes aren't the only stereotypes Sony Ericcson made sure cover. Catfights will also be all the rage in 2010. Jalou is derived from the french, jalouse meaning jealousy.

There's nothing wrong with designing an attractive phone (or even liking the color pink), but like Dell and Memorex, the folks at Sony Ericsson seem to assume that female consumers care mainly that the phone is cute. Certainly women aren't using their cell phones to make business calls, read news on their web browser, or download stock quotes like a man would.

As mentioned earlier, electronics companies are still designing products for women as a niche, as if we're a feeble-minded minority rather than half of all electronics consumers. The European Information Technology Observatory just reported that mobile phone users make up 2/3 of the world's population, so some women must have already figured out how to operate a cell phone. Maybe Sony Ericsson should have asked some of these ladies why they bought the wretched non-jewel shaped phones they're using now, rather than imagining how to make this newfangled device simple and pretty enough for a woman to use.

Communicate In Style With Jalou, The Irresistable Compact Fashion Phone From Sony Ericsson [Sony Ericsson]
Dolce&Gabbana Design Special Edition Jalou For Sony Ericsson [Sony Ericsson]
Diamond Shaped Phones Are Girls Best Friend [Mother Jones]
More Than Four Billion Mobile Phone Users Worldwide [EITO]

Earlier: Memorex Launches Electronics Line By Women For Morons
Dell Discovers Ladies Use Computers For More Than Diet Tips
Della Website Suggests Marketers Don't Consider Women Regular People

In 2007, a Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@." We've already seen names like Moon Unit, Espn and Rocket, Racer, Rebel and Rogue. But this is beyond Apple and Bronx: This is about technology, and creating an identity for yourself. Many of us have an online persona — a name we've chosen to represent us, and who can be either just like our real life personality or more anonymous, more mysterious, more witty, more aggressive, more thoughtful, more self-promoting, more bitchy… etc. For many of us, online and offline personae don't overlap, and the whole point of using a pseudonym is having the freedom to be expressive without boundaries. But online, you can create a name, a brand, a life that you end up carrying into your real life. And maybe as technology plays a bigger and bigger part in our lives, the names we give ourselves will become more meaningful than the names we are given.

Woman Changes Name To Princess-Rainbow.com [Independent]

The CDC's website has 174 e-cards that link recipients to information on the agency's website. There are cards for offering congratulations on a new pet, flu vaccination reminders, and get well cards, as well as more bizarre fare such as:

But, the cards we'd be most disturbed to find in our inboxes deal with sex, marriage, and babies. We like the idea of using an e-card to let your partners know you've given them a STD. For most of us, getting that e-mail would be enough to make us go get checked out, but the CDC's card explains you may want to get that clamydia out of your reproductive organs because you may want to put a baby in there some day:

Well, at least the CDC isn't homophobic:

On the surface this engagement e-card isn't too bad, but it links to a "safe and healthy bride" page that starts out by telling future brides to "eat healthy" and "make smart choices to help you look and feel good for your wedding, showers, parties, and new life together." It's the perfect way to tell a friend that you don't want to be the one trying to zip her into that too-tight wedding gown.

But, what if a few years have passed and she and her husband still haven't started a family? (And she has diabetes.) Just pass on this handy hint:

Once she's expecting, there are plenty of ways to let her know that you never considered her mom material anyway:

It's really unfortunate that pregnant woman can't drink, because they may have a hard time calming down after finding these troubling reminders in her inbox:

Even after the kid is born, you can continue sending her intrusive tips about her family. Most people who suspect a friend's child has ADHD would sit them down and break it to them gently, but you could also just forward them this:

Or, just let them know that you think their little rugrats have poor hygiene:

Generally, this is all good health advice, we just don't want to be reminded that we and our loved ones are constantly in mortal danger via e-mail.

Health E-Cards [CDC.gov]
Safe And Healthy Bride [CDC.gov]

Earlier: You've Got Mail! And Something Else...

27-year-old Canadian @Maureen (Evans) has, with her collection of condensed international recipes, become something of a global sensation. I regret to say that certain things about the description of her in today's Times set of my "petty" alarm. To wit,

Though not a trained chef, she is an enthusiastic home cook and traveler, with a close connection to Twitter through her partner, Blaine Cook, who was Twitter's lead architect. They live by the sea in a rented castle; when I reached her by phone the other day, she said she was looking out over the low tide.

We've already mentioned her real job description; she describes the "tiny recipes" as " a coffee-break hobby."

But, pettiness aside, her tweets are rad. Her recipes, described as "Delicious ideas from all over the world" are inventive, ingeniously broken down, and very appealing. The ones yours truly have tried have worked, and the author of the article tests a bunch with no problems. Here's one: "Strudel Pastry: cut 2T butter/1c flour/mash tater. Knead w 2t yeast/2T h2o; rise 1h. On flour cloth gently pull 17x25"; trim-1"/butter well."

She says she likes the challenge of the condensation; the Times reporter likes the challenge of decoding them. Figuring out the recipes takes way longer than reading them, and while this may seem counterintuitive and gimmicky, it demands a level of detective work and basic know-how modern cookbooks, ironically, have rendered obsolete. In this sense, she's really a throwback to the receipt books of an earlier age, which assumed a breadth of knowledge and expertise and so could give only the broadest strokes of an idea. Beyond sites like this, Twitter's a boon for people looking for ideas; you have only to ask what your followers are having for dinner and get a barrage of suggestions and links. It takes some of the loneliness out of menu-planning and cooking. Lots of food bloggers and food diarists have taken advantage of the medium, and on a practical level, plenty of food trucks have started tweeting their whereabouts to hungry customers. When it comes to dieting, tweeting is great, too, as people can keep food diaries and compare notes with others on sites like tweetwhattyoueat.com.

If that's the sublime - and hey, this is Twitter, here - get a load of the ridic, also profiled in today's "Dining In." Basically, Danyelle Freeman, the New York Daily News' critic and a well-known blogger, has had her identity stolen - or so say she and her lawyers. A guy called Adam Robb Rucinsky has adopted her "Restaurant Girl" moniker and parodies Freeman's breezy, dizzy tone on Twitter. This might constitute trademark infringement, but is only really problematic if it moves beyond parody into impersonation. Thing is, it's hard to say: a lot of his writing is uncannily like hers. Weirder still, he adopts her "voice" on a blog devoted to Freeman's work, and on, um, his personal blog. Whether it's legal or not, this has clearly gone beyond idle interest into something quite peculiar.

Has Twitter changed the way we eat? Well, probably not, but certainly how we think about food: our obsessions are out in the open now, for good and bad. Even if you're not sold on a 140-character recipe, you can probably appreciate the back-to-basics streamlining it entails. And that someone's 140-character parodies can be recognized as riffs on 140-character originals? Altogether, this shows that when it comes to food, you can say a terrifying amount in a very few words.

Lawyers Enter Twitter Tempest [NY Times]

Take 1 Recipe, Mince, Reduce, Serve [NY Times]
Twitter for Your Lunch [New York Observer]
Latest Twitter Food Trend, Kogi BBQ [Look And Taste]
Tweet What You Eat [Official Site]

One awesome thing about moms joining Facebook or any other "new" social networking thing is how unjaded they are: technology that seems to us old-hat is a revelation, a source of excitement, a personal discovery (even several years into a phenomenon.) Whereas we don't wish to admit there's anything we don't know about - or at least suspected - those who've lived through a less technological age feel unconstrained to marvel. While we are already preemptively embarrassed by the crudeness of today's wonders, knowing there's something even better around the corner, moms are able to appreciate the wonder of what is.

Kids today have been hooked on Facebook for years, and by now have surely moved on to harder stuff: Twitter, the narcissists' heroin, makes Facebook look practically selfless in its expansiveness. But to Kristen Hansen Brakeman, a recent Facebook convert, the addiction comes as shocking.

I began to neglect my duties at the office, so busy was I uploading photos and posting links to hilarious videos. I learned to hide my omnipresent Facebook page by keeping a work-related document open on my desktop, which I would click on whenever my boss happened by...Then my kids began to infringe on my addiction. They would want meals or other irritating things like rides to school. "Just a minute, I have to check my Facebook. Oh, how cute; my friend Karen posted a new picture of her little baby."

What is it that we find so comically bizarre about older people doing this stuff? Is it what Brakeman describes, a neglect of parental duties which, even to adult kids, feels like a betrayal? Part of it is the fact that we want to hold tight to technology I'm sure - to say nothing of our privacy. I naturally queries ex-Jezebel Jessica, as an expert on all things Mom, who replied that "we present a certain version of ourselves to our parents, and that's not necessarily the version we're presenting to the internet world." (Which is ironic as they're two constructs of the same coin, to mix.) And you know what else? In a way, I think we want better for them. We know firsthand the soul-sucking, addictive, voyeuristic, petty, mean-spirited, superficial vapidity of this world and we wish to save them, in their innocence, from such horrors. We deserve no better; in a way, they do. It's undignified, of course, and while they may be blissfully ignorant of the sordid underpinnings of all such modes of communication, we all know there's a seediness to it - to even the most average photo album - that we'd rather protect them from. Beyond not wanting to deal with their reaction to a shot of you smoking a cigarette is the wish to shield them from it. But in a weird reversal of prior generations' roles, they're always nipping at our heels, forcing us on to the newest technologies, confident at least that it will be two years before they discover it. And on that note, we'd really discourage Brakeman from Twitter.

Finished With Facebook [Washington Post]
Mother Lode [New Yorker]

As the New York Times' "Styles" section reports, voicemail avoidance is becoming common. Take this dude:

It's not that he doesn't like to talk. But with the cascade of messages he receives by e-mail, texting and on Facebook, Mr. Hamrick, 29, a self-described "voice mail phobic" from Cupertino, Calif., said he'd found better ways to keep in touch..."I had to give up something and that, for me, was voice mail," he said. "It's cutting out some forms of communication to make room for the others."

Apparently, now that we have easier modes of communication, like BlackBerry, texting and email, we're too lazy to bother with dialing in codes and wading through incoherent messages - not least because to a lot of folks, voicemail need not contain any information more pressing than "call me back." Technology is responding to our loathing.

Frustrated by missing important calls while stuck in meetings, James Siminoff founded PhoneTag, now one of a handful of companies that offer voice-to-text transcription services. For a monthly or per-message fee, subscribers' messages are converted into typed texts, which are then automatically delivered to phones or e-mail in-boxes.

I was heartened to read this article, because, to the rage of my family, I have yet to set up the voicemailbox on my three-month-old phone. This is rank avoidance on my part, as the sight of a "message mailbox" always for some reason summons in me a feeling of dread. Even as I'll check a text message immediately and return an email within minutes, I'll put off checking voicemail for days or even longer. Then the messages pile up and the task becomes more daunting still. The problem, of course, is that plenty of people still do use voicemail, not least all doctors' offices. My parents are both of the school who feel morally compelled to respond to a voicemailbox message even if they have nothing to say. Having landlines, for one thing, I don't think they understand that our phones let us know who's called, and as such it's necessary to let me know they're "just checking in" or "saying hi." In my case, part of my aversion is that I can't bear to listen to my squeaky voice, even on the playback necessary to recording the message, and so have let this neurosis cause me far greater inconvenience in missed appointments and angry relatives.

I should probably get that PhoneTag thing. But it sounds like a lot of work.

You've Got Voice Mail, but Do You Care? [NY Times]

The Washington Post explores both sides of this issue, but by now, we are probably more familiar with the cons than the pros. There is the old grouse about text speak, emoticons and the decline of writing, along with other, more serious concerns:

There also are concerns about texting while driving, text-bullying and "sexting," or the term for adolescents messaging naked photos of themselves or others. What might have been intended for a friend can be widely distributed, and the texting of lewd photographs of minors can lead to criminal charges.

The American Journal of Psychiatry published an editorial last year by psychiatrist Jerald J. Block, suggesting that addiction to the Internet and text messaging be included in the diagnostic manual for mental illnesses.

Sexting has proved to be a real problem lately, with teens nude cellphone pictures resulting in charges of disseminating child pornography. However, the question about online addiction seems even hairier. We're just beginning to come to terms with the idea of sex addiction (and many still wonder whether it a real addiction) so while it is not surprising that some feel addicted to the internet or texting -or their "crackberries" - it is still up for debate whether this should be classified as an addiction up there with "real" issues like alcohol or drugs. But, as Block points out, we won't know the repercussions of our texting tendencies for some time: "our use of technology today amounts to a large social experiment. We still don't know how it helps us or how it hurts us."

Fortunately, there is also a pro-side to this debate. Al Filreis, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that texting (and instant messaging/emailing) has caused student writing to improve rather than deteriorate:

"In writing, quantity tends to lead to quality," he said, "and we're doing quantity right now." Through texting and other instant communication, Filreis says, his students have learned hard-to-teach lessons about audience, succinctness and syntax. "My students are better writers than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago."

Others point out that texting can help create feelings of community and connectedness, bring parents and teens closer together. However, the overall tone of this article is rather alarmist, and seems to fall quite heavily on the cons-side. Filreis is the only expert quoted who believes texting may ultimately be good for teens, everyone else seems to think that texting is a symptom of our decreased attention spans (which may be true), our decaying family structure, and our crippling dependency on technology. But honestly, we're getting pretty sick of all the doomsayer prophesying. Texting is probably not going to destroy the grammar and moral fiber of an entire generation. IMing didn't, despite articles that claimed that abbreviations and emoticons popularized by instant messenger were "part of a continuing assault of technology on formal written English." Six years ago, the New York Times thought IMing could lead to a generation of anti-social, emotionally detached addicts. This brouhaha about texting is really just more of the same. So please, journalists, calm down, the kids are alright.

6,473 Texts a Month, But at What Cost? [Washington Post]

Related: What's The Right Punishment For Teen "Sexting"?

Writer Delphine Schrank quotes psychologist Susan Pinker, who says the Internet "will increase the skills that you already have." Schrank continues,

Preliminary evidence suggests as much, she said. Violent computer games didn't encourage violence in boys, but violently inclined boys were naturally more attracted to violent computer games. And, she pointed out, women latched onto emoticons, those colorful smiley faces and such, as bonding devices for use in Internet chat rooms. Such use, Pinker said, was an organic outgrowth of women's natural tendency to use language socially.

As opposed to men's tendency to use language for what, exactly? Eating steak? Football? Online researcher Gordon Hotchkiss offers a more nuanced view. Faced with a slow-loading page, women were more likely to sit and wait, while men navigated away. But, says Hotchkiss, the men and women in his studies "eventually ended up in the same place, on the page or scanning the same material."

Psychiatrist Gary Small, meanwhile, think that the Internet might bring the genders closer because it requires the same skills of everybody. Others worry that "its fractured, viral, weirdly random world" might just make us all dumber. But Schrank's intro is, perhaps, the most telling part of the article:

Say you're halfway through a turkey sub when you have a sudden urge to Wikipedia the word "crush," because your nephew was bashfully asking what it meant, which reminded you of when you, too, were 13 and tripped on a chair on your way to the blackboard right in front of the girl with the pigtails, whom you suddenly feel like searching for on Facebook — after all these years — so you log on to your homepage, which is blitzed with photos from Nick's mushing trip in Alaska, including one with a comment about you that just landed in your inbox, where you have five urgent messages from Bob about a football blog that you click to and really mean to finish reading, but only after you're done smacking the ball on that pop-up Orbitz ad, the one with the baseball bat, once, twice, six times and . . .

Why did you leave your sandwich for the computer again?

Is this your brain, the male brain that is, on Google?

This is perilously close to the "men are so dumb, we can't trust them to do anything" rhetoric so popular in beer and fast food commercials. Whatever the Internet does to our brains, let's not let it become yet another forum for stupid stereotypes.

The Online Male Takes a Licking and Keeps on Clicking [Washington Post]