Can you please point me/us to an article that supports that “fact”?
So far I’ve only heard the opinions of self proclaimed (male) experts.
Admittedly my research wasn’t that extensive but everything I came up with seems to suggest that the term is still widely used in its original meaning.
I really don’t see why this is necessarily a bad thing. It makes people think, may lead to discussion and might even help to broaden one’s horizon.
^^this
You cannot conform to everyone’s norms and trying to appease everybody preemptively leads to self-censorship.
@woei Ok I get it, but I’m from the “tough up” school.
Mainly because arguing over the name of a folder is no where near being reviled on your ethnicity\birth place - giving space to anger\inequality\whatever about a folder’s name humiliates and demeans the real issues of marginalization: people beaten up, degraded and ostracized.
Sorry, not sorry: I don’t care if you a have a trigger word, really.
I rather keep this post short ))
I agree with @andresc4, who agrees with @velcrome@vux@sebl and @microdee.
Always had fun about girlpower folder with @ain when doing workshops together
ps @h99 's video is hilarious
@bjoern the wiki article you linked has a criticism section. and the ‘evolvement’ i was referring to can be found in the same article see also section here. in very short it’s (amongst other things) about getting rid of gender binary and roles.
may lead to discussion and might even help to broaden one’s horizon
since this has been mentioned a couple of times. yes, of course, discussions like we have here. on the other hand, i really didn’t feel in a position to be able discuss this when eyebrows were raised giving a workshop in a muslim country, me kind of being the ‘priviledged white male’ workshop host. @h99 honestly, would you tell those people in the face to just toughen up a bit?
i really like how lively this thread has turned out. and while i can completely understand the arguments, that the term is already empowering and the dispute whether it could even be perceived as offensive or not. what really strikes me is this:
when it comes to progress in technology the consensus is, yay, we wan’t that! no one is like, well, directx 8 (around 2000) is just fine, let’s stick with it, because it has been there and it serves us well. @tekcor and @mburk also argued, that there simply is something better nowadays than a maybe misleading or maybe empowering term from nearly 20 years ago. why the nostalgia here? it doesn’t really affect anyone already working with vvvv seriously at all if would change. the users mostly affected are probably the teachers and workshop hosts.
edit:
so let me rephrase:
the majority of the scientific papers of the last decade consent that ‘girlpower’ might fall into the legacy category. While compatibility remains until further notice, the usage results in compiler warning C4996 (‘function or variable that is marked deprecated’). Please consider upgrading to naming convention 4.0 (w3c 2015) which reduces the misinterpretation error, surfacing under certain socio-cultural configurations, by 10%.
It was expected that when opening this topics, two directions would clash a little bit and I also think thats important.
@bjoern : I can see your point. Maybe it’s not enough to do a quick search then, especially with personalised search results you will probably just end up in with a majority of pop-culture related search results if you are not so much into the topic.
So maybe google scholar is actually better for this!
Anyway, I will at least post one link that I found, the article discusses the different streams behind the term “girlpower”.
In this article we can see that “girlpower” has its root in the description we can find in the Wikipedia article, posted by you,
but
“the discourse of Girl Power had also been deployed by various elements of popular culture and the mainstream media in a way that constructed a version of girlhood that excludes girls` political selves.”
Furthermore the author discusses Girl Power under the following four aspects: Anti-Feminism, Postfeminism, Individual Power and Consumer Power. And I highly recommend reading through that a little bit to understand the bigger picture.
In another book by Susan J. Douglas we can find the following citation:
"
These were the new, revised, incredibly contradictory images of girl power at the turn of the twenty-first century: real power came from having a slim, youg, hot body but to get it you might have to be anything but powerful - prostrate on a gurney - which was, in a nice twist, sold as a new technology of power for women"
This is when it got into leaf menu: Girlpower in Leaf Menu
You’ll see also that I expressed my doubts about the folder’s name, and you’ll see why it got a different name into leaf menu, and why devvvvs are not privileged white men, as they choose, IMHO, function over form (a clear string to point to tutorials).
It express my point in a very clear way.
Sorry, I honestly don’t understand the context of your question, I think it gone lost with edits and formatting.
@h99
totally cool this has been dicussed already. just saying this is not optimal presented. going for the leaf menu is a bit of a footy shooty design with so many options. but there is hope since VL has a dropdown which can have a better structure.
the goal should be that noobs find the examples themselves, without someone pointing them to it or having to read a manual, right ?
i’d call it ‘flowerpower’ then
no feminist men or women would suffer, an occasional pacifist would smile -
but nice to keep a quaint name for curious minds
@u7angel
yes, I obviously agree: in that thread I was indeed trying to point out that new users are missing the shipped tutorial library. Including it in leaf menu didn’t solve the issue, either; in case, it just made a dent on it, because there are so much info in there, that the link can get lost.
On the other hand, if we don’t have a menu bar…
// not political correct, and might include trigger warnings or micro agressions
Should the name be change for usability proposes? Yes
Should the name be changed do the fact that this can offend someone ? NO, its my opinion.
I made a long post before, and I erase/modify it due to the risk of being offensive or cause a trigger on someone else.This need to stop. This feeling of not being able to say/write something because someone could be offended can´t reach vvvv community.
Girlpower were called NWA “NerdzWithAbilities,”… I wouldn’t be ‘offended.’ “Check out the NWA folder for…” is something I could imagine telling folks so they can find the an amazing 3d UI example. I would understand the vibe and the humour, if a little riske. But it would still be a bit awkward showing the software to my brother or sister and having being asked to what it stands for.
They’ll know the reference. They’ll get the joke, but it’ll be acknowledged mutely. Maybe with a smirk if they think I want them to ellicit a positive reaction. But they also won’t be ‘offended.’ They won’t come online here to shout their outrage; they won’t lobby for legislation calling for the removal of or instances of the accronym “NWA” from public life for fear it will “undermine identity;” No-one will email Ice Cube and ask him to do tipping him off about trademark infringement. But they’d wonder who this community is and whether they want to be part of it. And perhaps decide to check out OpenFrameworks (I’m joking of course, but Touch Designer…).
Sometimes, being equal means to not have a big deal made about your “special” difference in places that it shouldn’t be a big deal.
Kind of feels like this thread has been derailed into pretty emotional discussion, that somewhat misses the point.
Honest question I’ve been asking myself for a while: what exactly is the joke behind that name? Is it just “lol random”? While other namings like Boygrouping & DeNiro somewhat make sense (and I guess are well liked), the reasoning behind Girlpower never clicked for me,
@dennis@mburk since you asked, here my recollection from ~17 years ago: we came up with this idea for a client/server render-system built into vvvv while pop music around us was dominated by the weird phenomenon of casting-bands. one of the more popular boygroups was called “n sync” and it struck us that their synchronous dancing somehow resembles the idea of our networked rendering system which thus got a fancy name. it then felt uneasy with such a name to seemingly burn a gender-bias into our software, but luckily pop also had a ready answer here: the term “girlpower” seemed like a good fit to create a balance, if just by its sound. now, what i have no exact recollection of, is how the term became the name of a folder for vvvvs demo patches. it was probably rather random…having the name in vvvv somewhere seemed smart enough to avoid (not actually) anticipated criticism.
indeed i think this “background info” was never printed anywhere, but i guess whoever asked about it got this as an answer and done. joke? political statement? more a humble attempt in poetry…
did it worry us that it was not the best usability choice? apparently not. the thinking was more: it is such a strange name that people will rather likely look into it, to see what’s in it. win-win.
as for all your comments, my personal thoughts: thanks for a balanced discussion showing that different views and opinions can live side-by-side in our vvvvorld. we learned that a controversy built up around the term over the years. good. should we use that as a chance to confuse even unbiased future users of vvvv even more by changing the name of a folder that has been mentioned all over the wiki/forum/youtube-videos/blogs in reference for people to find help?
or can we turn this into a discussion to think about concrete ways of getting under-represented groups more represented in our community? because after all occurrences of the term “girlpower” have been rewritten in the univvvverse, not much would have happened in that respect, right?
Great to see this informative discussion! I hope you don’t mind that we devvvvs step in that late, but it looks like open discussions work better if not biased from us.
And you might think: well, we know already what to expect, but as shown with rainbow midi files in an ASCII animated crack.exe, we sometimes are actually able to show that we appreciate and value your opinion, and also, there is no automatic vote within our team as well.
For me, this topic would allow showing that appreciation again and I would interpret the voices leaning towards a rename. In my personal opinion, I would also think that we’d not lose our legacy by doing so, we’d just make a legacy term [obsolete].
Practically speaking: we will be confronted with old forum entries and alike that make even less sense for newcomers, but if this can make us appear less nineties, I guess it is worth the hassle :D
I don’t like to see people being uneasy about something that can be easily changed, without losing anything really. And examples would be a pretty self-explanatory name, wouldn’t it? So yes, I’m in favor of that, but I would go for what the majority votes for.
I think you are right, since no one is answering anymore :)
@joreg your point that it was written a billion times all over the forum is actually a realy good one and I didn`t think about that before. One way to counter this a little bit after a possible rename would be to highlight the EXAMPLES folder on the download page and maybe also in the setup.exe as a note. Then at least no one can ask where such an folder can be found (and would not end up searching for it on the forum). But randomly reading about girlpower folder would be hard to avoid, yes. Then it becomes a mysterious thing actually
Since I’m relatively new to vvvv I thought it might be valuable to add my thoughts to the discussion from the perspective of a beginner.
I only came across the thread yesterday. I found it highly interesting since I was confused by the naming of the folder as well. I wanted to know more and was close to writing a post myself. What was confusing me is the following question:
As you recognised in this discussion depending on the answer, it creates very different perspectives on vvvv and reactions to it.
I’m glad @joreg explained the history of this since it answers the question:
So it was meant to be a political statement about equality. Good on you! But I think it’s tough to click on this as a beginner with no context in 2018 in my opinion.
Before suggesting some ideas, I would also like to show what this discussion did to me and what those obstacles can do to new users. I’m just going to quote myself from this Vvvv ecosystem and design thread. Sorry for hijacking this thread a bit, but I feel the reasons and solutions are related:
My earlier thoughts:
Stepping into vvvv felt a lot harder to me than other tools. As a newbie, I was laughing a bit about some of the jokes. On others, I didn’t click and was left alone. Those things put me off a couple of times before trying to dive into vvvv again. It felt like a locked-up community that’s hard to approach. The reality is different, I learned to ask heaps on the forum and got great responses. But I’ve only done that after eying and playing with the software for a few years and making sure I’m not the only one who is too dumb to understand.
If you want new people to love vvvv you should be less vague and more explicit about your and its intentions in my opinion.
So here is my suggestion to make sure no one even gets negative impressions similar to mine:
Considering the long history of vvvv, it’s hard for me to imagine this has never been discussed before, and I’m surprised not to find any info on this on the website easily. I feel silly for bringing the topic up as a newbie as I might repeat what was said a bunch of times before. If something like that exists somewhere, I would be happy if someone pointed me towards it.
I would also like to suggest writing a page about the history of vvvv. Include those remarkable stories like the one by @joreg explaining why things are designed in that way even if the design changes. (I know about the page on the MESO website. It’s cool, but not part of the vvvv website). Those stories are fascinating and will make it much easier for new people to relate to the vibe of the vvvv community.
Generally please don’t get stuck with legacies. Everything would only become harder in the future. If you feel a change is necessary do it as soon as possible.
If you end up renaming the girlpower folder, I suggest adding a script to the website that dynamically annotates the word girlpower on all pages or posts explaining that it’s been renamed. The annotation can be subtle too. That should prevent people from being confused. (Furthermore, that script could annotate other words which are part of the glossary to make it even easier for beginners.)
