Here Mashable, take my vagina. I’m obviously not using it right.

According to Mashable, the In Touch of the social networking scene (bold and uppity upstart with a handsome Twitterface), I am not actually a woman.

On Mother’s Day Mashable churned out another one of their highly-re-bloggable social networking list of links. The focus of this new list is a bizarre niche group rarely mentioned on Mashable—women!

I felt special. All past slights undone. Mashable was finally compensating for their status quo sexism by exploring “some of the most popular social networking sites for women.” If felt like maybe the Mashable Twitterhead (aka Pete Cashmore) cared about me after all.

But I was wrong. I got all amped up for nothing.
And I was not alone:

I (Rubybeck) agree with AskFrasco. I was excited to see a post focusing on women, but sorely disappointed with the content. This post should be more aptly titled “Top 10 Social Networking Sites for Moms.”

Indeed. It seems that to Mashable a woman is defined by her incubating and birthing abilities. I, socialnet czarina, had only heard of one of the sites they listed. One! And the sites listed would be better placed on an April Fool’s Day post than on one for Mother’s Day. Cafemom was bad enough, but ParentsConnect? WTF.

And then it dawned on me. According to Mashable logic I must not really be a woman. I should just hand my vagina, my uterus—heck my whole endocrine system—over to Mashable because I am not using it right. Even if I did pop out a kid, I would never–ever–use these sites. My main life interests would not shift from historicization and social-net culture to parenting and motherhood. So obviously, even if I bore children, my lack of monomaniacal focus on child-rearing would make me a horrible mother.

In the end, Mashable would be doing the entire world a favour taking these simultaneously useless and dangerous organ-weapons off my hands. Or, um, out of my body.

The single problem here is that the Mashable Men assume that, once birthing, female interests shift to some generic, home-based mother category from whomever they might have been before. Even if this new breed of thin-framed, notebook-totting patriarch uses 43 Folders for excellent file system organization, a devalued housewife is still a devalued housewife.

So thanks Mashable Men for using Mother’s Day to remind me of how insignificant I am to the denizens of social networking because my destiny is to sacrifice my identity for the production of others greater than me. The men can then be free of my menacing feminist critiques to handily carve up the cultural landscape in the mirror image of themselves. I’ll never forget how special you’ve made me feel.

Want to scan and analyze the chatter of millions of conversations? Have an idea for a story, a song, a research paper, or are you a voyeur like me?

Go to Tweetscan.

Pick a word. Enter the word. Presto. You can even subscribe to the search and have it in your RSS feed.

Following the word walrus I have learned that they play an important role in the semiotics of the phallus (the beast not the magazine of course). And that those damn baby boomer idols The Beatles are quoted daily. We at The Walrus have a lot of work to do to remove that pantagruelian taint.

I also follow my own name and reply to everyone who uses it with a short explanation about how I am the real Chantelle. With each explanation I attempt to create the perfect and elusive self-obsessed, 140 character, haiku:

Bloody hammer finds
the lies that chantelle told you
selfish memes us two

The composition of my soul has been cleaved in two: one half social-net savant; the other A-list celebrity god-talker seeking divine counsel through a pop-cult telekinesis.The composition of my soul has been cleaved in two: One half social-net savant; the other A-list celebrity god-talker seeking divine counsel through a pop-cult telekinesis.

But everything that rises must converge.

A Hollywood A-lister has just joined Twitter: Diablo Cody (Academy Award winning screenwriter of Juno with the captivating stripper byline). This time the celebrity is real, not just a pretender scraping the Net and depositing an RSS feed into a Twitter account. And she’s great at it. Sharing just enough of her insider life to keep you panting for more:

I thought I was going to stay in last night, but I wound up on the patio of the Chateau at 2:00 a.m

And then Sharon Stone follows suit. Here comes Hollywood!

Look out, micro-celebrities Scobolizer and Leo Laporte. It’s like what happens to Ben Mulroney and Don McKellar (sorry gentle American reader, I know these names mean nothing to you) when the Hollywood cast of the Toronto International Film Festival sojourns in Toronto: Canadian niche celebrities get a train ticket to nobodysville.

The implications are enormous. (more…)

Am I a just a myopic textard? A horsegeek of the updated apocalypse?

From Lifehacker comments:

Everyone join in and repeat after me…

Social Networking Will Destroy the World.

Yes, you heard me correctly. Social Networking is the glue that binds retarded anti-socialites together; without it, they would need to ACTUALLY interact with real humans or just accept being shut-in couch potatoes (what we used to refer to these people as before they could all join together virtually in one giant blob of mental mush.

Twitter is for those people with too much time on their hands and too few REAL friends to spend it with.

Come on everyone, detach your fingers from the sticky keyboard (or keypad, you textards) and go outside and just breathe… just breathe fresh air and then go knock on your neighbors door (you know the strange people that live next door) and say hello.

My keypad isn’t sticky! It’s protected by a kbcover. I get plenty of fresh air at wifi cafes with patios. And, when I last spoke to my octogenarian neighbour all she said was “WHAT? SAY AGAIN!” and “WHY DON’T YOU HAVE THE BABIES YET?” so I retreated.

But, after smashing my grocery cart head-on into scuppie couple searching through the organic coffee at Dominion for the Decaf Cliff Hanger Espresso because I was mid-tweet (and then naturally twittering the entire event during the aftermath) I have to wonder:

Am I a just a myopic textard? Am I a horsegeek of the updated apocalypse (physical atrophy, social apathy, emotional starvation and digital immortality)? I don’t have a horse—but I do have a thin, small and pale-coloured dog!

Are you sick to death of hearing about Twitter and not knowing what it is? Of feeling behind the times?

Here is a step-by-step Twitter video instruction guide presented by a pioneer lady. In just a few minutes you can be part of the modern era!

Twitter for Beginners: So Simple A Pioneer Can Do It from twitter howto on Vimeo.

Are you ready for even more? You’d better be:

• Concise and comprehensive guide to Twitter, including desktop applications and practical uses.
• Animation video overview of Twitter from Commoncraft.
• Video from the history of Twitter.
• 137 links of the most recent Twitter developments and news.
• My username on Twitter is the past form and yet femininized version of Tweet: Twot.

Articles about tech blogging and death have been bubbling through the tech lifestream over the past few weeks.

Triggered by the passing of two prominent bloggers that may or may not be blog-stress related, the feeing that the news never stops has driven many tech bloggers (like Michael Arrington of Techcrunch) to sleeplessness and the complete abandon of their physical and mental well-being.

But they love it.

I do too. But from there my perspective diverges. (more…)

Ebay helped me sell my beloved Remington Steele car to a man who lived many hours away in a town named Swastika. The swastika originally comes from ancient India but of course that’s not the first thing that came to my mind. I immediately Twittered and Twitpic’d the event and my feelings about it.

After reading “The Spy Who Blogged Me”, I’d think Hal Niedzviecki might call me a surveillance slut as I go blindly putting my private life out into the world. (more…)

Pierre Maraval, as part of June 2008’s Luminato/L’Oréal arts festival, took my portrait this morning. He calls his latest project Toronto’s Mille Femmes and describes it as a cultural landscape of women who “enrich” Toronto.

And, luckily for Mr. Maraval, in our culture we all are expected to wear make-up, so L’Oréal flips the bill in this murky synergism of capitalism and ‘capital A’ Art.

Each woman is asked to provide a word that will accompany their portrait. Each portrait and word will appear in both a gallery show and companion book. I looked at what words other women had chosen: libre, honest, étincelante, fabulous, cosmopolitan, flexible and even jedi. The other women with me deliberated thoughtfully before committing their word to paper.

I, on the other hand, didn’t miss a beat. I handed my paper to Maraval’s assistant.

“What is this?” she asked in her thick Quebécois accent, “I do not know of this word? What could it mean?”

Everything, I answered. Just everything.

My word? Can’t you guess? All praise Twitter. Testify!

“Tweet.”

Newton wanted to reshape his retina, I want to Tweet. (more…)

On my way to LAX I passed a Pollo Loco that was no ordinary fried chicken extravaganza. It was a warning.

Leaving Los Angeles is confusing. Like Twitter, it holds so much promise. As soon as I land and see would-be The Hills cast members I am comforted. Surely being proximal to those whose biggest problem is running into old frienemies at Vice will rub off. I can walk their walk, talk their talk. (more…)

LOS ANGELES—Do fashion and geek mix? Well at the Techcrunch/Popsugar Meetup they did. It all happened April 10 inside the grotesque Hollywoodland club Vanguard—complete with flocked wallpaper and Perry Ferrell Macintosh Dj-ing.

Was it fun? It was weird. In some ways glorious. Beautiful people in head-to-toe Kitson and Abbot Kinney lined up outside (they hadn’t figured out how to register online and the club was full) while dudes in rumpled t-shirts and department store jeans breezed by fingering iPhones. There were many fashion tribes inside but the mix was candy for my eyes. Grey-haired suits (walking money) orbited the tables of cash-starved startups like Meebo and Picapp who gazed hungrily on. Laguna Beach was represented as were the flocks of tiny pretty girls in thigh-baring polyblends and patent pumps. And of course, the ill-fitting-t-shirt-wearing geeks.

Joe, a coder from ThisNext, working his green t-shirt told me that this was the biggest meetup he’d ever attended. He looked a little uncomfortable and seemed to draw comfort from the computer he was attached to via transparent umbilical cord.

What was most remarkable is that Joe, and others, were very kind. And not in the AC/DC “You Shook Me All Night Long” way. And no girl fights in the bathroom over mirror space. People were talking business and ideas despite the ear-shattering music, darkness and relentless press of the crowd.

Unfortunately, very few people used the dancefloor properly. Being from Toronto and starved for dancefloors without sexual predators or pretense, I couldn’t be stopped.

While the aspies in the coding and tech world would certainly only last at a meetup like that for a couple minutes, for order and kindness, it rivaled my best Hollywood club night ever.

Take that Hyde club! Lindsay and Paris take note…a new nightlife is emerging.

While I was posting surveillance footage of a crime I saw last night on postacrime (a group of undergrads were doing keg stands while chanting patriotic gibberish in unison) I got another beta invite. This time to Twingly—a European blog search engine with Digg-like ranking systems.

Each time I sign up I have to give yet another username. I used to try being clever—give as my username the title of Crispen Glover’s novel, the name of the woman who used to sell my dad cheap booze, or microcelebrity names like Calcanis—and then fill out all my personal information accurately.

No more. I’ve put on a social networking mask. I prefer corporate names—like Google or CocaCola. My age, gender, interests, vocation all vary depending on mood. With Facebook truth-telling became necessary to open up its utility. If you didn’t use your real data, no long lost friends you always hated could find you. But on betas, with such a high likelihood of failure to reach any eyes other than my own, I feel it is a good time to have some fun.

Like Mary-Kate and Ashlee Olsen, who just went to her stylist Estee Stanley’s wedding in a mask so she wouldn’t overshadow the nameless faceless bride with her fame, I wear a mask for mystery. Ever the famewhore, MK knew the stunt would catapult this Z-list event into the spotlight because we’d all have to guess who was who in the wedding party. Mystery, even when fake, is irresistible.

I am followed and follow several persons of mystery. No pictures, no names, no easily traceable identity. Like Roamin and God on Twitter. What didn’t work on Facebook seems to work there.

It makes me wonder, though, if I unknowingly follow the same person repeatedly or vice versa? And how many people wear a social networking mask for fun or spamming profit?

Or if maybe Twitter only has fifty-two intensely active, creative people with access to tens of thousands of different email sign-up accounts.

BRENTWOOD, CALIFORNIA—This morning I walked my dog Jesus to a beautiful lush lawn to pee. Her delicate quarter-sized paws prefer dry soft ground and her nose craves living grass after an enduring Toronto winter.

But instead of sniffing around eagerly for the right spot to relieve herself, she broke her pattern and did a very strange thing. She rolled down and onto her back, like she does on the carpet at home. I urged her on to no avail. Kneeling down to pick her up my fingers brushed the grass and I realized what was wrong.

The huge lovely “lawn” was in fact, extremely realistic AstroTurf. (more…)

This week I gave a thesis talk. I outlined my chapters. I gave an overview of significant definitions. And then my most significant discovery started to fall together….

Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you

Love for certain ideas got me into academia. Ideas that were so significant to humanity and yet—due to the isolated nature of the academy—just as distant from its mass. My obsession with transliterating these theories into action drove me to write produce and co-direct a horror film. The film was a distillation of my beloved theories and chock full of genuine cow brain and sheep intestine. To give you a hint: it was a remake of The Breakfast Club only all the characters were female inmates. (you know, feminist-type junk).

How splendid and ridiculous.

This blog is my new horror film. I sneak in a glop of critical theory (Let’s Get Low Low Low) and historicization whenever I can. But I try to make it smooth. So it goes down easy. Only this time I’ve got Mary-Kate Olsen and Facebook standing in for bovine innards. Don’t get me wrong: I love gore. I worship Mary-Kate (those round Chanel glasses cleave a hole in my space-time). I’m no user. And it goes both ways. In my thesis, horror movie superstar The Candyman eviscerates the flaws in academic theory.

A feedback system, for it goes both ways. It is a process, pulling these realities—both in need of each other—into the proximity that they and we all deserve.

Oh how it can burn though. Like Ben Affleck falling for Sacha Baron Cohen’s new character Bruno. After explaining to people who study popular culture what microblogging and Twitter is I feel I’m just like Rick Astley. You see, he is going on tour to take advantage of the rickrolling—from Anonymous (Scientology protesters) to Perez Hilton—Rick Astley is whoring himself out on his own naffishness.

Read my thesis, open my blog.

Isn’t it all just one great big fat autoloading Chantelleroll?

Another heart-wrenching night online. I’m waiting around to bid on Britney’s clothes after her appearance on How I Met Your Mother. For charity or whatever.

I’m after the blue floral cardigan by boutique designer Nanette Lepore. After missing David Duchovny’s black t-shirt by only a few hundred dollars I can’t let this one go.

As if I needed any more stress, I stumble onto Mandy Moore’s uPumpitup at Kraftbrands.com/upumpitup/. Mandy wants me to join hands with her and challenge myself and the world. Now, I’d be against feminism if I don’t join the sisterhood of Mandy. I can’t let Mandy down.

After I join her network, Mandy’s Crystal-Light-quenched smile dares me to be spontaneous and face my fears so I can, “Get a great story you can laugh about over and over again. The only rule in this challenge is to break one!”
(more…)

Just scanning the title of Janice Galloway’s Walrus article”Opera” makes me feel tiny because my only opera comes at me in 30 second snatches when I am listening to scan on the radio. But the Toronto Star’s Stephen Marche’s article on celebrity operatics got me thinking. He compares Britney Spears to Lucia di Lammermoor. He describes how Amy Winehouse is similar to Puccini. Neat. The problem: opera is not a meaningful point of comparison to me.

Instead of opera, my parents were blasting Little Feat and The Who in tinny Radio Shack speakers above the chicken coops. At school we sang about Tom Dooley and how We’re All His Children. I never heard opera until I saw Pretty Woman. Like me, Julia Roberts as the Cinderella prostitute had never seen opera. Verdi’s La traviata made her cry. But I wasn’t planning to play sensitive whore for a middle-aged john. So ended my opera introduction.

I want to ask Stephen Marche what kind of opera would Web 2.0 be. I can’t guess because the only thing I’ve learned about it since Julia Roberts’ outstanding portrayal is that Edward Said likes to use opera terminology in is oh-so-self-reflexive cosmopolitan critical theories.

What I do know is fashion. So, I can tell you that Web 2.0 is eerily familiar to the fashion world. Early adopters battle the ugly hoards who drag down the prestige and edginess of a trend. Just look at Facebook. (more…)