So I’ve been talking with my friend about the effect on the internet (and computers in general) of the overwhelming male influence (the high percentage of male ITers, coders, what have you) and simultaneously formatting the blog-comments sections of my forthcoming novel Gender Fraud: a fiction, and I realize the ‘reply’ design (widgets?) for comments are incredibly not up to the task: a back-and-forth conversation would result in a long diagonal down-and-to-the-right stream which, after just a few exchanges, would force the replies to be squished into a one-inch column. Why didn’t they use, instead, an all-comments-on-a-subthread-are-aligned principle?
Which suggests two additional questions: Are men in general unaccustomed to extended conversational back-and-forth exchange? Is the ideal conversation for them, the imagined conversation, one in which a reply is a single blow that establishes victory, the end?
