All Posts Tagged With: "internet"

Ezra Klein comments on the act of typing “hahahahaha” when IMing:

The artificial nature of electronic writing — where tone can’t soften and facial expressions can’t contextualize — actually requires a lot of validating communication. Typing out laughter, weird as it seems, doesn’t suggest a joke is funny so much as it acknowledges that the other person just made a joke, and you recognized it for what it was.

This is true, but it seems as though at least in my circle of friends we have developed a way of implicitly communicating whether we are engaging in the sort of validating “I recognize that was a joke” sort of laughter or we actually thought the joke was quite funny. Namely, a mere validation would be “haha” or perhaps “hahaha,” whereas if the joke actually provoked genuine laughter it would be “hahahahaha” or “HAHAHA” or, occasionally, “I just actually lol-ed.” It’s really more of a spectrum, with variations based on the number of “ha”s, the use of all-caps, the presence or absence of exclamation points, etc. The use of emoticons may also play a role, but I haven’t hammered out the finer details yet or anything.

So Harvard University recently enacted a policy in which its gym is open exclusively to women for six hours a week in order to accommodate the religious customs of Muslim women that make it difficult for some of them to work out in the presence of men.

What follows is a spectacular encapsulation of all the danger and promise that the blogosphere offers.

First, Glenn Reynolds asks whether the Harvard policy violates the Massachusetts anti-discrimination law.

Eugene Volokh then puts together a thoughtful if somewhat technical post responding to this question. Volokh first quotes a press release from Professor John Banzhaf saying that the policy probably is a violation. But then Volokh suggests that the relevant statute wouldn’t apply to Harvard, and so it isn’t a violation.

Andrew Sullivan, in a post titled “Sharia at Harvard,” makes my ugh-o-meter go off the charts by responding to the policy thusly:

They would never do that kind of thing for any other religion. If a religion refuses to allow men and women to work out together in public, then its adherents need to work out at home. What’s next? Removing all gay men from the locker-room? This is the West, guys. Get over yourselves.

Matthew Yglesias, in response to Sullivan, points out that Harvard and every other institute of higher education, as well as every elementary and high school in the country, shuts down and creates a holiday that just happens to coincide with Christmas, whereas no such holiday is created for Passover. He adds that when he was a student at Harvard there was a policy against starting any kind of fire in dorm rooms and that there was a movement to create an exemption for Jewish students to light Hannukah candles, arguing that such an exemption “certainly wouldn’t constitute the dawning of a new era of Jewish theocratic rule at the university.”

Noah Millman at the American Scene then takes the whole thing up a notch and asks, “Does anyone think Harvard would have made allowances to male Muslim students who didn’t want to exercise around women?”

Phew!

Honestly, I don’t know what to think about the Harvard policy. I would have to know more about how much of a burden such a policy places on the men who want to work out at the gym. In the end, I doubt that I would find it objectionable.

But what this whole thing does illustrate is what the blogosphere is good and bad at doing. On the one hand, the post by Volokh shows how much easier it is now for a casual observer to get a more detailed, expert analysis of the questions surrounding a particular issue. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan’s post shows how easy it is for bloggers to shoot off emotion-driven posts that oversimplify the issues in order to advance a sexier, culture-warrior sort of argument. On the third hand (we’re bloggers, we have lots of hands), Yglesias’s post shows how easy it is to smack somebody down who says something stupid. And on the fourth hand, Millman’s post shows how the blogosphere creates an atmosphere in which quirky, original ideas and questions can come forth and bubble up to the top if they pique people’s interest.

On the whole I feel pretty good about it.