Don’t tell me to boycott something; invite me to the alternative. Boycotting is only effective if critical mass is reached in a critical period of time. This is why it was effective during the Civil Rights’ era of the United States of America. Critical mass.

In this sound bitten age of social media, critical mass is not as easy come by. At least, critical mass about things that YOU care about. And even if you do reach critical mass (however you define that), you’re not guaranteed that the product or service you’re boycotting will change anything related to the status quo. Especially if that product or service is a movie.

That’s already been filmed.

And promoted.

And distributed.

Especially if that movie that has already been filmed, promoted and distributed was created by entities that are rather large. Peace to M. Night Shyamalan and Tyler Perry (who always gets a bad rep from my Conscious Black People circles).

The alternative is not easy. We can’t just go stand in front of movie theatre, join a Facebook group or five or throw clever dozens at the problem on twitter. (Even though y’all live tweets of BET Awards are HI-larious).

You have to create the solution. We have to create the alternative.  It’s a simple trick any parent knows. I don’t want my child to eat candy, but I want to her to enjoy a treat now and then. Before I’ve told her no candy, I already have an alternative ready. Warm peach cobbler. Vanilla ice cream.

What does the alternative look like? Different. Remixed and probably a little less polished than the shiny distraction. But you create it. You promote it. You learn the tricks to the trade and use it to transform the status quo. It’s not easy. But it sure will taste better.

By now, the fourth wave of Facebook’s privacy issues has surely come to your attention. It should come as no surprise to those who have been following Facebook closely since the very beginning.  Facebook has never been one to care about privacy, not because it’s Facebook, but because it exists on a platform that doesn’t have privacy as its concern. The internet was created by the US  government and has tracking devices built into its architecture.  In short, everything we do on the internet can be traced back to us. That’s just the nature of this beast.

So if you decide to quit Facebook in a fit of pure principal on May 31st, know that it’s beyond your world. Quitting Facebook won’t stop other social networking or internet utility sites from springing up and finding new ways to expose and share your information without your express permission.  Quitting Facebook aligns you with an elite class of technophiles who can afford to quit and shows you are not the demographic Facebook is appealing to anyway.

I could go on into a history of Facebook’s disregard of our imagined privacy, but I think this conversation needs to happen on a larger level.  It needs to include the entire scope of the internet’s architecture from ISPs to web browsers to mobile devices and back.  It’s a conversation that needs to include education as access to the net increases and saturates our way of life.

Once more and more people are better educated on how the internet works at a very basic level, they can then begin to demand things of services like social media and ISPs.  That’s the crux of the matter: people just don’t know and it benefits large companies to keep folks in the dark.

Shutting down your Facebook account not help because there is still a LARGE number of folks using their service. Creating wiser internet users is better.

Every so often, in any industry that is dominated by men, someone, usually a man, will raise a pertinent question:

Where are all the women in this industry?

There are two variables in that sentence: “the women” and “this industry”. Replace them appropriately and you get a number of similar questions, usually asked by the dominant voice of the community.

• Where are all the black people in technology?
• Where are all the women in engineering?
• Where are all the Hispanic women in web design?
• Where are all the women in hip hop?

I could go on and, in fact, I ask you to submit your own in the comments below.

The point of this isn’t to repeat what these questions are asking. I’d like to answer them all in one fell swoop:

They are here.

They are! We’re just not looking in the right place. Within any community, there are sub communities, also known as cliques, tribes, clubs, circles and so on. These sub communities exist to offer something missing or overlooked by the community at large. While a member of a club may participate in the community as a whole, it’s not the case that anyone in the community is part of every club. Often, whenever this type question is asked, it’s almost as if an ostrich stuck its head out from the ground and realized something or someone was missing.

Chances are, if you know one minority in your community, he or she knows others like him or herself: knows where they are, where they eat lunch, what they do on the weekends and how they feel about the community at large. This isn’t to say that every minorty has these connections. In fact, I confess, I would ask these questions often when I first entered web design in 2003. As a young, black, nerdy woman, I needed a community of similar people to share my journey with. I was following who I considered to be the greats in web design and development. People like Molly H, David Shea, Greg Storey, Dan Cederholm, Derek Powazek were stacked in my blogroll on every iteration of my personal webspace. In reality, the community I looked for were doing their own thing and building their own networks. There were talents in every race, creed and class who created their own communities that flew beyond my radar. But I said, I was young and, might I add, narrow minded.

Thankfully, the Internet has grown in leaps and bounds and more and more people like me have access to community-creating tools. I can see that asking these types of questions may not necessarily pull minority groups into the community at large. What do they have to gain from that if their networks are already thriving the way they are?

The answer to this question, then, is still “They are here.” We’ve just got to widen our radars a bit to include them in the conversations we have about them.