Everything You Wanted to Know About Ladies Groups

What is a ladies group?

Saying that RAOK is a "Ladies Group" is meaningless unless you have a definition for a ladies group. A ladies group is a support group that tries to bring a diverse group of individuals together for emotional sharing and support. Usually these individuals are female. Though a few ladies groups including RAOK are co-ed, nearly all ladies groups have a lopsidedly female majority. They also have an ethos that places feelings foremost and a penchant for painstakingly crafted graphics.

As mentioned above most ladies group members are female. Until recently most members were also older. Most did not live in large cities. I used to joke that as a female who lived at the time lived in flyover country, that I was a partial demographic match.

Where I differ from the typical ladies group member (and this is not everyone who joins a ladies group. It is just a hypothetical average.) is that I have a graduate degree, a professional career, and that I have been on the net since 1984, except for a two year break in the early 1990's.

So what did ladies groups do, and what do they do now?

Ladies groups arose as a product of Web 1.0 when enough free web space and free remotely, hosted applications such as web boards and email discussion lists became available and easy to use. Ladies group founders typically lacked the funding or technical wherewithal to mount their own web boards inside ad free paid space and the groups themselves lacked the social capital to secure space on university or college servers. Ladies groups arose ENTIRELY OUTSIDE the fabled gift economy.

Ladies groups gathered to give one another messages of support. Web boards and chat lists were often filled with members' prayer requests or with inspirations prose, and with the answers to support and prayer requests as well. Sometimes answers to support/prayer requests found their way into guestbooks. Most ladies group members had static pages on such sites as Geocities or Tripod. Guestbooks offered a quick sort of interactivity.

When ladies group members ventured outsided the group's board or email list, they usually visited others similar to themselves who may or may not have been group memebers. Web rings and guest book signings (Remember Web 1.0 was extremely interactive) provided suggestions for new places to visit and offer a few kind words or just say hi. One famous task for RAOK members was to sign/fill a "lonely guest book."

Typically, ladies group members signed guestbooks with a short message formatted in html code that included a remotely loaded small graphic called a pressie. This meant that most ladies group members had at least rudimentary knowledge of how to code. Craftsmanship was always very much a part of the ladies group ethos.

In addition, ladies group members gathered together to build pages and create galleries of small size graphics. Depending on whether the group was located on Yahoogroups plus a web board plus a static site as was RAOK or on MSN Groups (now nearly defunct) and on the size of the .gif and .jpg files, one called these graphics web sets, pressies, or siggies. Siggie is short for sig-file. Most pressies and siggies were a well restrained size, 230 * 230 pixels. Some were a bit larger. Blinkies, another type of graphic in the ladies group traditon were even smaller.

Today it is possible for ladies group members to sign walls on social networking profiles instead of guestbooks on static web sites. They can still create smallwork and upload it to either their profile galleries, a static web page, a wiki, or Flickr. Ladies groups actually can adopt quite well to Web 2.0. The biggest obstacles to doing so are social rather than technical.

Why haven't I heard of ladies groups before?

The reason that a history of ladies groups does not exist is that those who officially studied cyberculture wrote us off as uninteresting. If you read, From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Cynthia Turner you will learn that one of the main labs/think tanks that studied cyberculture got a grant from a captain of industry to study what he and his corporation found interesting. Needless to say, he had no interest in ladies groups.

Likewise, traditional net historians look upon Geocities as a failed experiment on the way to blogs. Geocities and other free services which formed the backbone of much of ladies group culture were a "bunch of grandmothers putting up pictures of their cats." Meanwhile, the old time populaton on the net who got on before 1995 or so, often spoke of Geocities and its denziens as "the trailer park of the net." Yes, it was a case of class bias and also of misogyny. Yes, it was a case of eminent researchers never asking what the secreatry down the hall did on the internet or what their mothers or sisters might be doing. And no, I shouldn't be the one to be recounting this history for you. You should know it.

The other reason you have not heard of ladies groups is that these have fallen on hard times. What killed Web 1.0 was not the flashing, shiney superiorty of Web 2.0, but instead Web 1.0 died due to the contraction of 2000/2001 when the dot.com bubble burst, and more recently the spam epidemic and the behavior of two major venues for ladies group activity. Spam makes it impossible for some users to maintain a stable email address without knowledge of filtering or an email provider who filters. Worse yet, a box full of spam, makes it hard to find mailnig list letters and read them. In fact, it makes reading one's email torture rather than a pleasant diversion. And changing email addresses makes keeping up with list memberships a chore and a chore at which not everyone succeeds. To make matters worse, there is now only one freely available host for email discussion lists. Monopolies have their problems. It's easy to give poor service when users have nowhere to go.

Spam is also a problem for guest books. There is now only one guest book provider left that allows the depositing of graphic gifts and html code. That is Bravenet who have a faught history with opt-in by deceit though they currently don't have this. They have instituted CAPTCHA to keep out spam. As a result, very few active, open web sites and nearly no blogs maintain guest books. The passtime of signing guestbooks really no longer exists.

As for static web pages, there are only a few free providers of these who take all comers and who have good, stable up time and the field looks likely to shrink since Daum, Lycos' parent company, which is the parent company of Tripod and Angelfire looks likely to take a financial hit due to the recession.

Other ladies group venues that have vanished include the free web sites once offered at Homestead and MSN Groups which was the site of a huge sig-file creating subculture.

But why should I join or be interested in a ladies group, and RAOK in particular?

Ladies groups generally have their hearts in the right place and a good clear moral compass. Putting feelinsg first makes sense most of the time. RAOK is not ironic. It is not nasty, and it does not try to be cool. Instead, we concentrate on helping each other and others by being a bit kinder.

In a Facebook environment, walls replace guestbooks. By keeping smallwork on a flash drive or your hard drive, you can upload photos as a substitute for pressies. This is not easy the first time you do it, but you can say hello to friends who are really distant acquaintances because everyone deserves a kind attitude.

When you have been a member of a group that does not take kindness into account, you learn how precious RAOK is. I was a member of such a group. It's name was Brainstorms and it jerked me around with a parody of due process that I swear I will never forget. One of the things I swore before they kicked me out the door was that I'd support groups that had the right values. Most ladies groups have the right values.

Now the hard part is joining up and then being an active member which means living those values, at least on the web for part of your day.