This report is about the challenges the Crosstalk faces. We are definitely going ahead, and in good spirits, but we had a bad week recently that encouraged a rethink that we are still engaged in. Our InterMix software crashed, forcing a postponement of the first round of the Crosstalk from March 20 to April 18. At the same time a City College of San Francisco (CCSF) Women’s Studies Professor had some tough questions.
1. We missed the Gender Crosstalk March 20th deadline.
2. Questions and a major concern from a CCSF Women’s Studies Professor:
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What is the Gender Crosstalk aimed at?
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Doesn’t the process need a more immediate attraction or payoff for the participant?
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Isn’t the process too demanding?
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The “deep entrenchment of the binary construction of gender” in the Crosstalk vision is discomforting.
3. So what are the lessons learned?
We missed the Gender Crosstalk March 20th deadline.
We missed our March 20 New Moon deadline to select two messages for Dr Mlambo-Ngcuka, Exec Dir of UN Women. Just a few days before March 20, the InterMix software began failing, with 30 second wait times. Also it became clear that the display of the winning messages from the previous round of the Crosstalk would not work properly. The only way forward was to postpone a month until the new moon of April 18. The wait time problem has been fixed and the previous results difficulty is being addressed.
Questions and a major concern from a CCSF Women’s Studies Professor:
These three questions and the final concern about the “binary construction of gender” are far from trivial.
a. What is the Gender Crosstalk aimed at?
As to what the Gender Crosstalk is about, the shortest phrase that covers it is “human unity with gender equality built in”. Our title subtext is “finding our common humanity across all national, religious and cultural boundaries”. And on our home-page we now have these paragraphs:
The UNA Gender Crosstalk is an online community where the crowd-sourced voices of the genders will weave a tale of love and wit, remaking humanity's vision of itself in the process. Through this new lens, the human race will see itself as the intelligent, generous and capable species that we are, giving us the trust and confidence we need to cooperate on pressing global matters. More concretely, the intent is to build towards a Human Unity With Gender Equality Built In conference to be held in San Francisco for International Day of Peace, 2016.
The Gender Crosstalk will soon be complemented by a Generational Crosstalk with a Voice of Youth, a Voice of Experience and a Voice of Wisdom. Also coming right up, will be a "geographic slider" so the scope of the Crosstalk can be easily changed from Global to National to Metro and group levels. The idea is that these "Voices of Humanity" will support diversity as well as unity.
The great hope is that the Voices of Humanity will be morale builders whose messages are always new and inspiring, and that the multitude of organizations and networks that see the value of uniting humanity will promote the Crosstalk process as an easy way to build a global consciousness. We need a global consciousness to underpin a nonviolent Global Citizens Movement (GCM), and we need the GCM to persuade the nations and religions to cooperate. The simple trick that can make all this happen will be for local groups to make it a practice at their meetings to read aloud just a single one of the latest Crosstalk winners. This ongoing world-wide conversation will create a sense of community at all levels. It is the back-and-forth between the online and the in-person contexts that will make for success.
Human unity is required if we are to handle the enormous global problems caused by the population explosion, now projected to reach over 10 billion, and by technological advances that make it easier and easier to overstep nature’s boundaries. The jealousies and distrust between the nations and to a lesser degree between the religions are standing in the way of the global cooperation we need, yet we love our nations and religions and are not going to give them up, so the only way forward is to persuade the nations and religions to stop being so selfish and learn to trust each other. Not an easy task, to say the least. This is where the Gender Crosstalk comes in. It is a long shot, for sure, but even longshot plans for human unity are scarce, so it is worth looking at it.
b. Doesn’t the process need a more immediate attraction or payoff for the participant?
The Gender Crosstalk does need to be made more attractive to participants. One of the ideas which our team is pursuing is called “Brainstorm Our World”, using facebook as a major tool in conjunction with a new website. We are reaching out to recruit a local PR firm to do the design work and build a modest back-end for a new website. More ambitiously, we have a “Make Your Gift Work Twice” plan where we hope to motivate participation by giving out points that translate to dollars for a favorite cause. This is at the unfunded idea stage, though, it has to be admitted. More immediately, the fact that gender equality is built into the process makes it attractive to the Women’s Movement. The world must unite or face the collapse of civilization, so if the Gender Crosstalk turns out to be the vehicle through which we succeed in uniting humanity, then the struggle for gender equality will also be won. It makes sense therefore to reach out to women’s groups to get things going.
The notion of persuading local groups to read just one of the latest Crosstalk messages at each of their in-person meetings just might be effective. We need to put across the idea that the Crosstalk messages will be morale builders, laying the foundation for a Global Citizens Movement. Members of local organizations will be intrigued and some of them will be motivated to participate. This simple practice, once it gets started, could sweep the world rather quickly. We need to focus our outreach efforts in this direction.
c. Isn’t the process too demanding?
As to the Crosstalk process being too demanding, requiring people to actually read messages written by others and even write a message each month, we need to realize first that achieving human unity is going to take some effort (;-), but there are at least three roadblocks that make it particularly difficult to bring in participants.
For one, the concept of “crowd-sourcing” the voice of women and of men is novel and not immediately understood. It boils down to a process of electing messages to represent groups, but while the internet is edging towards something like that in several ways, the idea is still too new for people to “get it” until they see it in action. So we can hope that the first two rounds of the process will illustrate the notion and people will not be quite so much at a loss as to what it is all about just a few months down the road.
Then too, the InterMix software that we are using is based on email communications, but busy people (and who isn’t?) are taking more and more shortcuts to trim their incoming messages. The fact is that only one third of InterMix messages get opened, and of that one third about 80 percent are closed within seconds. Many students use email only when necessary for institutional reasons, preferring to text their friends instead. Moreover, two-thirds of InterMix users who open their emails are doing so on their cell phones, so it seems we need to create an app - easier said than done.
Finally, until we build momentum, people will hesitate to participate, thinking they are probably just throwing away their effort. This is called the “critical mass” hurdle, and while we need to keep at it, recruiting participants one by one through our networks, the real solution is to figure out how to go viral. What is our best next step in this direction?
d. The “deep entrenchment of the binary construction of gender” in the Crosstalk vision is discomforting.
There are several angles to this criticism. First, although the great majority of people think of themselves as a man or a woman, there are many who either identify with both genders or neither. They should not be left out. This seems a valid criticism, so in response, the Crosstalk will soon implement three gender identifications instead of two: Female, Male and Simply Human. As part of this change, the monthly results of the Crosstalk will be expanded to include the Voice of Humanity as One as well as the Voice of Women and the Voice of Men.
Second, the simple division of humanity into male and female has been standardly exaggerated in many societies, so women and men are taken to be opposites, with men having the commanding role at every level. The Crosstalk, however, far from promoting this kind of polarization, will act as an antidote, implementing gender equality at a structural level. The collective Voice of Women will empower women equally with men, which is the opposite of what the gender divide has largely meant through recorded history.
As collectivities, both women and men have the interest of humanity at heart. This commonality is what will be developed by the Gender Crosstalk. The women’s movement already transcends the nations and religions, and when the women bring the men into a global Crosstalk discussion, it will be those men who are amenable to the interests of humanity who come in first. Men and women who take their particular national or religious perspective first will never catch up because the process itself is stacked against them, with any message tilting too much towards one nation or religion getting too many negative votes to win.
Also, once we get the Gender Crosstalk going, there is a plan to add a simple flip-switch to the online forum that will instantaneously move the participant between Gender and Generation Crosstalks. The Generation Crosstalk will divide humanity into Youth, Middle-Age and Seniors, with the same opportunity to choose “Simply Human” as in the Gender Crosstalk. In this larger “Voices of Humanity” context, the gender division is not so all-defining. People differ by generation as well as gender, and both of these distinctions transcend the nations and religions.
Beyond these two aspects of the “binary construction of gender”, there is a deeply searching question whether any distinction between women and men necessarily reinforces the socially constructed gender roles that have worked to the disadvantage of women.
As I see it, the Gender Crosstalk will reinforce the distinction, yes, but it will do so in a way that empowers women. With equal collective voices for men and women, we will capture the social imagination at every level from global to local for a heartfelt human unity with gender equality built in. The social division between the genders is not going to go away, so why not build on it and transform it in a positive way? The same applies to our nations and religions. They are not going to go away, so let’s involve them in a system of collective voices capped by the unifying Voices of Humanity: the Voice of Women, of Men, of Youth, Experience and Wisdom, and the Voice of Humanity as One.
So what are the lessons learned?
We need to add the inter-generation crosstalk capability to the gender crosstalk under the more general heading of the “Voices of Humanity”.
We need to allow those who do not identify by age or gender a way to participate as “Simply Human” and bring in the Voice of Humanity as One as an additional result for both gender and generational crosstalks.
We need to pursue the Brainstorm Our World initiative.
We need an app for cell phone usage.
We need to stress the importance of the Voices of Humanity Crosstalks as a morale builder for a global citizen’s movement for a human unity that respects diversity.
We need to go viral with the idea of persuading local organizations to distribute at least one of the Voices of Humanity messages each month.
