Courtesy of Wiki Commons

A person’s surface identity may now be inextricably bound up with Twitter feeds and other heavily tailored, virtual life-mélanges (Facebook Timeline, LinkedIn, etc.), but everybody still uses email, and in a few words email says a lot.

My parents, entirely respectable people, still pay for AOL service. While I want to trust the decisions of those who raised me, AOL domain email addresses make me anxious. Unresolved parental childhood trauma aside, email addresses with “@aol.com” suggestively tacked on the end make my neck hair tingle.

My parents may gain a certain sense of security knowing they are paying to keep all their stored documents “secure” in AOL’s archives, but the very thing that makes them feel so safe—AOL’s unwillingness to go away—is what caused me to abandon the clingy service a long time ago. AOL keeps trying to step up its game, leading its followers on while acquiring platforms no one’s heard of and hawking sensationalist news stories, reluctant to acknowledge it’s well past time to cede the stage.

And what’s the cost of AOL’s clunky service model with its useless add-ons? It can cost a member as much as $55 a month, or $660 a year.

I remember growing up with AOL, as if it were a dysfunctional sibling. I remember the countless activation CDs that got environmental groups seething. I remember dial-up so slow it made me want to rip off my skin, the “you’ve got mail” voice that still haunts my nightmares. AOL was the first provider I used, I thought it was the internet. I even remember my elderly grandmother struggling to remember her username/password combo as AOL’s dialup sounds ground viscerally to life, like concrete in a blender.

Every time my parents find an excuse to resist transferring away from AOL, conceding to accusations of archaicness (“We have gmail accounts,” they say, “we just haven’t…used them yet”), I warn them all the money in the world won’t make AOL any less tenuous-seeming, outdated, backward. Maybe it’s simply generational to not trust “free” things, especially when you don’t fully understand how they work.

And I wonder: how many people does AOL continue to dupe, urging them to pay for its mediocre service, while their files are no more secure than anywhere else? As of 2011, 3.5 million. I got locked out of my AOL account years ago, but I know my inbox still sadly sits somewhere in cyberspace, where it’s slowly been accumulating spam for the past 13 years, like the sibling who, in the wake of abandonment, became a compulsive collector as a substitute for familial closeness.

So maybe I have personal experience to blame, but when I see an AOL address, I think: Stuck in the past. Afraid of change. Someone who probably shouldn’t be trusted. I think of my parents saying: “Let me just locate that in my AOL history…” as countless minutes tick by.

Because of my—admittedly—extreme bias, AOL is of the greatest offense to me, but there are an abundance of other domains which are equally worrisome (Angelfire, Hotmail, Yahoo increasingly), which proudly proclaim: “I know nothing, I have never known anything, nor do I care to at any future time know about [internet] progress.” Even Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer, recently forgot Yahoo existed while still employed at Google.

I say: move over antiquated online services, cyberspace is no longer big enough for the both of us.

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Are we having the right conversation about Marissa Mayer? Mayer, Yahoo’s new CEO and the youngest in the Fortune 500, according to Fortune Magazine, is also the 19th female CEO and an expectant mother. We can choose to view this as a success for women (as long as we don’t act too surprised), however, in the year 2012, it seems like we’re still talking about Mayer’s gender—or issues surrounding her gender (pregnancy, her looks, etc.)—for all the wrong reasons.

(by Alissa Fleck)

According to the Boston Globe, “Working mothers and workplace observers pronounced themselves encouraged that Mayer’s pregnancy was not a factor [in the appointment], somewhat annoyed that in 2012 a pregnant chief executive even merits conversation.”

The conversation about whether you can “have it all” has been a hot topic as long as women have had top jobs. Victoria Budson, founding executive director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, said we should be focusing more on how companies can better maximize talent, including incorporating women of “child-bearing years,” rather than talking about whether you can really “have it all,” according to the Globe. 

Though here at NY Press we do feel the need to question why the Globe follows this observation up by dissecting Mayer’s beauty. How often does that happen with male CEOs? Do we somehow take her achievements at Google to be all the more astonishing because she has a “Kathleen Turner voice” (according to Vogue)? Not that there’s anything wrong with being a beautiful CEO. I mean, let’s talk about Tim Armstrong over at AOL. Let’s talk about how he “demolishes old-fashioned oppositions of beauty and brains” (also Vogue), or maybe not, because, you know, he’s a man.

In 2010, when there were 12 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, 11 of them were mothers, reported the Wall Street Journal. Mothering does not just make you incommunicado after 5 p.m., it has its benefits in the CEO world—learning to raise children can facilitate the management of others. Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said “parenthood taught her the value of picking battles at home and work,” according to the WSJ. So if we decide to view motherhood as a moot point, or even an upside, what conversation should we be having about gender?

Unfortunately the WSJ also reported the reality: “Men with children are more likely to rise into management than women with children in most major industries.” Additionally, women who manage still make 79 cents to the dollar of men who manage, a figure which has stagnated since 2000, said the Journal.

This is why the conversation about gender must stay on the table, but for the right reasons. Hopefully when the next expectant, mother or woman CEO is designated, we won’t have to talk about whether it will be doable, we can just talk about progress.