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A review by sidewriter
Broad Band by Claire L. Evans
4.0
I found this book really helpful for seeing patterns over time in various tech industries, and for making work that had previously been invisible to me (and admittedly also thus devalued) visible and vital. Some of the attempts at levity fall a little flat, but they were easy for me to ignore because I was busy drawing connections between the chapters. Oh, women are getting pushed out of that profession? Oh, look, it’s happening again in this other area of the field, following the exact same pattern. As long as their job didn’t seem to come with power, everyone (read: men) was cool with women doing it. Women are for menial labor! But once that labor stopped seeming so menial to the men, once men felt reliant on women’s work, EEEEK! Put a man in there! I’m scared to count on a woman. Again, and again, and again. Evans shows it happening with computing, with coding, with managing the infrastructure of the internet.
The other real joy of this book for me was how it elevated “behind the scenes,” work to its rightful status of “vital.” I had to notice that I have been guilty of devaluing work that isn’t all that flashy, or isn’t getting as much attention (from whom?), as if the real work is the big stuff, the invention, the moment of brilliance, the breakthrough. This book did a great job of showing the structural work that had to happen for any of the tech we have today to exist, the day to day organizing of minutiae that could only have been done by a sharp and dynamic mind. When the internet was just two nodes, then 4, then 10, then 100, then 1000, someone had to organize those addresses, and they had to come up with a system for organizing something that had never existed before and they had to have the foresight to understand that 1000 nodes was still miniscule compared to what it was going to be. Woah. Evans follows the thread from the invention of systems and strategies (mostly by women) to the flashier leaps in technology (usually made by men). Women laid the roads and driveways, and built some of the castles at the ends of those driveways, but the the castles were usually given to and named for someone else, and the sparkling crystal sculptures the occupant placed on the front lawn when they moved in got more attention than the castle itself. Also, admittedly, that metaphor was about as labored as a few sections of this book. At any rate, I learned a lot from this read.
The other real joy of this book for me was how it elevated “behind the scenes,” work to its rightful status of “vital.” I had to notice that I have been guilty of devaluing work that isn’t all that flashy, or isn’t getting as much attention (from whom?), as if the real work is the big stuff, the invention, the moment of brilliance, the breakthrough. This book did a great job of showing the structural work that had to happen for any of the tech we have today to exist, the day to day organizing of minutiae that could only have been done by a sharp and dynamic mind. When the internet was just two nodes, then 4, then 10, then 100, then 1000, someone had to organize those addresses, and they had to come up with a system for organizing something that had never existed before and they had to have the foresight to understand that 1000 nodes was still miniscule compared to what it was going to be. Woah. Evans follows the thread from the invention of systems and strategies (mostly by women) to the flashier leaps in technology (usually made by men). Women laid the roads and driveways, and built some of the castles at the ends of those driveways, but the the castles were usually given to and named for someone else, and the sparkling crystal sculptures the occupant placed on the front lawn when they moved in got more attention than the castle itself. Also, admittedly, that metaphor was about as labored as a few sections of this book. At any rate, I learned a lot from this read.