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From: gds@spam.istc.sri.com (Greg Skinner)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Women on the Net
Message-ID: <6720@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: 14 Mar 89 23:12:31 GMT
References: <6377@ecsvax.UUCP> <6394@ecsvax.UUCP> <6558@ecsvax.UUCP>
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In article <6656@ecsvax.UUCP> you write:
>Those of us that weren't really sports types, really exiled ourselves
>to activities such as computers because we believed we were failures
>as men (well boys) and that our salvation lay in other directions.

I had a little different experience in high school.  I was not a "real
sports type" (ie. not on varsity, but I did train with the team) but I
didn't feel like a failure.  I found some time to play sports after
school with friends, I sang in my high school choir, I wrote for
magazines and I was a math tutor.  I never felt compelled to be a
hacker.  There was a computer in our high school with hackers, but I
didn't become one of them.  I wanted to learn how to submit my own
jobs, but I never had a burning desire to spend all my time with the
computer.

>I still believe to this day that if a bunch of girls had had the
>gumption to look past the rules of 'coolness' and had showed any
>interest in us guys, the school would have run out of 'hackers' in
>about twenty seconds flat. 

The thing that is bothering me in this thread of discussion is the
fact that being a hacker is looked upon as some socially undesirable
thing.  This is a view portrayed by the media that casts hackers in a
highly unfavorable light.  Hackers are not the one-dimensional beings
that the movies and TV would have us believe.

I know quite a lot of hackers.  Some are as have been described here,
but not the majority.  I know hackers that are skiers, keep pets,
spend afternoons at amusement parks, sing in choirs, roller skate,
compose music, and do a number of other things non-hackers do.  I'm
not even limiting myself to computer hackers -- hackers come in all
disciplines.

In my opinion, what sets computer hackers apart from people who use
computers for their job or research is that they really have fun with
them, enough so that they choose to spend time interacting with them
whereas other people would do other things.  Perhaps they are not as
socially interactive as other people but it is up to them.  As long as
they are not being self-destructive or destructive to others I don't
see what is so bad about what they are doing.

--gregbo