After reading these two pieces, I think a lot of connections can be drawn between the chapter "It’s My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood" and Cybertypes. Though they build off one another and diverge in interesting ways, it is important to acknowledge the similarities between them and the issues they discuss as well.First of all, both pieces clearly point to the fetishization of groups based on race. For example, Arola says:
...non-Indians, when looking to see Indians, often fall into this visual trap—a trap that fetishizes what it means to be American Indian. This fethishization is manifested in popular visual representations of the Indian (think your typical mascot, or your cigar store Indian), thus providing a visual standard by which to measure the “real Indian” (216).
Similarly, Nakamura claims:
The vast majority of male Asian characters deployed in the MOO fit into familiar stereotypes from popular electronic media...the orientalized male persona, complete with sword, confirms the idea of the Asian man as potent, antique, exotic, and anachronistic" (38-39).
Though Nakamura is specifically referring to names and descriptors in an MOO, her ideas about how groups are stereotyped and the repression that occurs due to lack of real representation fit into the more general terms that Arola describes. Furthermore, Nakamura and Arola bring up earlier forms of media that influence representation (e.g. the mascot, video games such as Mortal Kombat, popular television shows, etc). These examples serve to remind us that we have not moved "beyond race" and that online spaces are not new, free utopias where we no longer have to worry about silly stuff like race or, if you dare to bring it up at all, you deserve a little flak (Nakamura 45). Both authors use their examples to illustrate that forming these over-simplified, outdated categorizations of other allows us to feel more "usy." In other words, we need these stereotypes or cybertypes to reassure us that we are us and not them. According to Nakamura, "These images [of the Orient] provide the necessary contrast, the dark background, against which the user can feel even more 'himself' than he did before" (40). How comforting.
In addition, Arola builds on the idea of identity tourism and its similarity to a costume in her work. Nakamura uses the term costume in the second chapter when she says:
One of the dangers of identity tourism is that it takes this restriction across the axes of race/class in the 'real world' to an even more subtle and complex degree by reducing nonwhite identity positions to part of a costume or masquerade to be used by curious vacationers in cyberspace (47).
The term is used more extensively in "It’s My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood", and Arola uses it to connect the real world with the digital. She starts out with a narrative that describes the difference between regalia and a costume outside of the web, when a women comes up and asks Arola about the meaning behind her beautiful costume (213). The woman is insulting because her use of the word costume separates the outfit from identity and everyday life; it is something a "curious vacationer" (Nakamura 47) might try on. Arola goes on to explain her definition of regalia and why it applies to the outfit when she says, "Regalia is not something one simply dons atop the self for the sake of play or trivial performance; instead, regalia is an intimate expression of self" (214). She then uses the concept of regalia to describe online identity and its materiality, something I do not notice being discussed overtly in Nakamura's text. According to Arola, a shawl is not a costume; online identity is not a bracketed performance (217). Thus, though both works want to "call the fixedness of these categories [gender, race, or condition of life] into question" (Nakamura 49), I believe there is a stronger connection between online and offline identity in Arola's text, and a sense of how offline identity feeds into identity online. This is likely tied to the fact that Friendster first came to the US in 2002, and MySpace did not appear until 2003 (though we all know that the internet didn't really exist until after Facebook in 2004) ("The Brief History of Social Media"). These sites made it much more popular to post pictures of yourself (and obviously your body) as part of your online identity, and I'm just guessing that Nakamura deals with that more in Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, which was published in 2007.
Furthermore, Arola's focus is much more on being mixedblood and the choices users can make in social media to represent (or not represent) that identity. However, both texts bring up the fact that the internet makes racial categories discreet, limiting a user's options to one. I thought it was particularly interesting that Jamie initially does not mark himself as Native American but goes back to check the box a few days after their discussion; I would have been very interested to hear his thoughts as he decided to check that box again. I am also interested in how non-artists might represent themselves as mixedblood in online spaces. For example, would it be different if someone were to share the picture of Erica instead of his/her own self-portrait? Does it matter who that someone is? (Though I think this is a rather obvious question, the implications are interesting to consider.) How much do other people and what they post affect your identity or how other people view that identity? Is this any different than in "real life"?
Lisa Nakamura's text deals with (to use that handy little subtitle) "race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet" using her term cybertypes, which she defined as "the distinctive ways that the internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism" (3). She states that her definition allows for a layering of the ideology of race in the non-virtual world with that of the computer and its influence on access, interaction, and expression. She argues against the assertion that we are "beyond race" on the web in all its Utopian promise, saying that we are certainly still under the same guidelines, cultural norms, and hegemonies that govern our "solid" selves (4). Her book certainly talks about issues of access in relation to this issue, but she also discusses the cybertying that occurs even when a significant number of minorities are able to use the web, including redlining (10) and the possibility of the internet mimicking the problems in television despite diverse viewership (28). Like Reed, she brings up a lack of minorities not only as consumers, but also as producers, and ends with talking about issues of access in the academic world. Overall, her chapters cover identity tourism and menu-driven, reductive identities, race and cyberpunk films, the myth of multiculturalism, and the way advertising perpetuates the view of the other as "clean" and "unspoiled".
I found Nakamura’s quote in the introduction about monocultures and what we consider contamination very interesting. She cites Saradar, who says that the cyberspace is a monoculture, and briefly talks about the discourse of bioengineering and agribusiness. In agriculture, monocultures often produce high yields, because practices can be standardized and the strain used is bred for disease resistance and, you guessed it, high yield. However, “the fashionables” (17) claim that monocultures reduce soil fertility over time, and disasters can occur if a novel disease is introduced. I’m not sure I quite understand her bitterness toward the opposition here if we are strictly speaking crops; however, she brings up interesting points: Do we have a monoculture? (*Nakamura raises hand*) What would be the “high yield” of monoculture on the web? Do we really care what the downfalls are, as long as we get what we want? What would a polyculture look like, and how would it be maintained? In the end, does it all come down to economics?
Nakamura then goes on to say, “…the tourist gaze would like to see [the African woman] out of time, protected from the incursions of digital “culture” (or monoculture) by Western intervention: the authenticity of the timeless primitive is threatened by the television set. In the second example, cultural appropriations are commonly celebrated as hybridity and assimilation” (17). She quickly explains that music allows for these mixings, but I was hoping to hear more. Would that newspaper article be different if the African woman was listening to an iPod? Furthermore, does this same dichotomy apply for the people using this technology? For example, what do the Filipino youth, the African woman, and the Chinese rock group think about the tools they are using? When I was in Guatemala this summer, several people I talked to blamed technology for the loss of their Mayan culture and identity. Our tour guide specifically spoke about how computers have Westernized the small town we lived in, causing women to trade their traditional dresses for skinny jeans and graphic t-shirts. He sounded nostalgic, sad, and resigned. However, I later learned that many families could no longer afford to put their children in the expensive, traditional dresses, which was why they had switched to the "Americanized" clothing, bringing up an issue that technology may mask. There is certainly a digital divide, but there is also a non-digital divide, and the cost of getting on the internet (less than 10 cents an hour) was certainly much lower than buying a dress (perhaps around $50 but up to hundreds of dollars). In addition, though he mourned the loss of that part of his culture, he also wore jeans and a t-shirt instead of the suit only worn by the oldest generation of men in the town. I wish I had been able to talk with more people about their views of technology, but, with my limited vocabulary, it was hard to get from "how are you?" to "Do cell phones and internet cafes affect the way you view your cultural identity?"
Also, given my summer experience and the way I am still trying to make sense of it all, I found Nakamura's definition of identity tourism unsettling and disturbing. She claims, "Multiply distributed identities allow identity tourists to simultaneously claim two positions, that of the tourist and that of the native; the can be both inside and outside" (56). In Guatemala, I always felt like a tourist, an outsider, and I found myself wanting to somehow pass. I hated my height, my skin, my accent, but part of me still wanted the "best" of both worlds, and that's scary. I'm interested in how this notion connects to the "unspoiled" notion of nature and "authentic otherness" (94) that Nakamura talks about in Chapter 4. Does this perhaps explain the tourist's love of the postcard, with images akin to those described in the advertisements? There's only enough space on the back to write some quick, little note (in that primitive pencil) about how you are having "so much fun" and "experiencing that real culture." Not "I found out that the push to use trash cans and recycle has been largely unsuccessful in the market" or "Someone just told me that during the fair they put poison out for all the dogs on the street. TTYL!" On a related note, I would love to hear Nakamura's opinion about the more recent, controversial Coca Cola ad, where actors sang "America the Beautiful" in different languages. Does that challenge her argument at all?
When I read Chapter 5 I found myself wondering how much internet menus have changed since 2002. It was enlightening, for example, to have looked at the categories WSU uses to define student demographics this year in PDC last week and what they have recently added. Nakamura describes how these boxes function to exclude when she says, "When race is put on the menu...it is cybertyped in such a way that mestiza or other culturally ambiguous identities--such as those belonging to hyphenated Americans--are rendered unintelligible, inexpressible, and invisible...in the world of the contemporary interface, if it can't be clicked, that means it functionally can't exist"(120). Thus, as she states, these identities cannot make "legitimate" racial categories less so. Because that would definitely be the case. I also appreciate that she talks about how that information has been used to develop niche marketing and the overwhelming desire of companies to just sell us something. Though we now often have the "I prefer not to say" option, I wonder if choosing that option itself also says something that you may prefer not to say. I've found that at least on some websites nationality is being arranged in true alphabetical order, instead of the United States being pre-highlighted at the top and Europe sliding into second. Progress?
The invisibility of whiteness (caution: entering default mode) is another thread I noticed running through Nakamura's text, and I thought her discussion of the 1995 debate on Lambda was striking in its commonality. In her example, the opponents of the petition against hate crime said it was unnecessary, with one person even claiming, '"If you want to get in somebody's face with your race then perhaps you deserve a bit of flak"' (45). I've seen that argument on Facebook before with (dare I say it) even less eloquence. I would have liked to see more of that debate and responses to Taffy in the text to get a better sense of the conversation as a whole.
The second half of Reed's text deals with politics, games, education, and accessibility. Chapter 7 discusses how the digital influences voting, campaigning, hacking, and protesting. I thought that the discussion of slactivism was particularly interesting given the myriad of reactions to the extremely popular ALS ice bucket challenge and its impact. My friends in real life (i.e. Facebook) have posted that it is helpful, up-lifting, self-serving, harmful, environmentally unfriendly, and overwhelming (just to name a few). Google search tells me that it is a....satanic ritual? I wish Reed would have spent a bit more time talking about how people are/are not more well-informed and the reasons behind that, as it is interesting to think about that in terms of what we see vs. what we click on vs. the source. To me the main message behind this chapter was that a mix of the digital and non-digital is important, and that the digital should enhance rather than replace. I also enjoyed learning about the games/parody sites that exist (Cybracero was quite good and more than a little scary in its mimicry, and I liked looking at the site in both English and Spanish). It might be an interesting exercise to have students examine the rhetoric going on there...
Chapter 8 addressed the role of digital games, pitting the view that they are violent, sexist, and racist against the claim that they are going to save the world. Given our discussion last week, I do not think many of us will find his conclusions surprising; however, it was interesting to read about Laura Croft, given that I did play that video game when I was young. Looking back, I remember more about her economic situation (wow, this lady has a full-sized pool in her house!) than how her gender impacted game-play, though I do want to know more about dialogue and if that differs between male and female protagonists (I only recall that some of her one-liners were a little odd). Furthermore, while looking at Laura Croft YouTube videos, I found videos related to Beyond Two Souls, one of the games Reed mentions. They discuss the leak of nude shots of Ellen Page's character Jodie, as some systems were apparently able to access alternative camera angles during the shower scene. Sony's response included "please take these down" and "this is not Ellen Page's body". Does it matter? Should it matter? What are the differences between leaking naked photos and leaking naked photos from a game? One of the commentator's statements paraphrased: "This concerns a very pretty woman...well, she is very pretty...well, depending on your taste..." Blah.
Furthermore, I can certainly see the danger of war games. Reed states, "But many argue that this similarity presents the danger of lessening the reality of war, rendering it playful. Even antiwar activists report feeling a certain thrill in being positioned as soldiers during the invasion, a reaction difficult to imagine apart from the messy merging of the real and the simulated via millitainment " (148). How realistic should these games be? How does that affect the portrayal of America to Americans? To others? I am also really curious about how the video games help veterans and which ones are used (or if it matters). In other words, why is this chapter so short?
Chapter 9 talks about the use of the digital in education, concluding that good technology use in the classroom requires good teachers (ba duh duh). However, I do wonder how that relates to university education and the TA system, where standardization and training becomes an issue. I think it is also important to consider the history of teaching and what technologies have been used. Reed mentions that few teachers are great lecturers (169), but I wonder if that understates the difficulty of leading a good discussion and planning interactive activities. I also like the distinction between teaching how to use technology and teaching to learn with technology; however, it seems to me as if you have to teach the how before you can get to the learning. This also fails to address access on the level of the students or the level of the university. On the other hand, I agree with many of Reed's points about publishing as a business:
Innovations in the digitization of educational resources raise the larger question of whether knowledge is something that should be hoarded and made financially inaccessible to all but the few (the business model), or a human right that should be available to anyone with the intellectual skills to benefit from it, regardless of ability and pay (177).
In other words, it sucks to do "academic work" (with all the discussion that could come with the use of that term) without being associated with a university. Trust me.
The last chapter considers who is able to access technology, and I appreciated the breakdown of the digital divide in terms of digital resources, human resources, and community resources as well as the physical requirements needed for accessibility. When I traveled to Guatemala this summer, it was very rare for anyone to have internet in their home, but there were at least four internet cafes on our street, and the customers were predominantly young people and, of course, tourists. Thus, it was certainly more of a communal experience than in the United States, and, because you had to directly pay for time, people were less likely to go for leisure or to "surf the web." Many people saw a direct connection between technology and the loss of their culture, including the traditional dress.
It was also interesting to think about how we might all be connected and then have "nothing" to talk about. I would like to know more about what people thought of Power's quote concerning technology: "The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster...it seems to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and more ways not to say it"(190). Sometimes, I think I agree.
According to T.V. Reed, this book was written in order to provide the layperson (e.g. someone who does not reside on Planet Geek) with a framework for thinking about technology and the questions that we continue to face when we use, analyze, and break down digital culture. He states that he is more interested in good questions than answers, and his work dissects and complicates binaries (Technology is awesome-sauce vs. technology will ruin us all!). The first section of the book is broken down into five chapters, each with a first page that reminds me a bit of a website with "hyperlinks" to the right that define the sections within each chapter. The topics range from desire and sex online to how the digital is produced to identity when using ICT; thus, as mentioned in class, it provides more of an overview than an in-depth discussion of any particular topic. However, it is a good starting point for thinking about the myriad issues surrounding digital culture.
The first chapter is primarily concerned with defining important terms and thinking about the importance of naming (Fields...naming...shout out to 534 blog!) and how that affects what is examined (e.g. plurality, technological determinism, the four different ways of examining digital culture). In other words, the text sets the groundwork for looking at relevant issues and provides readers with the main aim of Reed's work: a focus on social relationships in a medium that is rapidly changing and ubiquitous in some areas. He states:
...Let me be clear that I will not pretend to deal with all aspects of new communications technologies. My focus will be on cultural and social questions, on asking what can be done to make to make digital communication technologies serve the cause of richer representation for groups currently on the margins, and how digital communication technology can be used to further economic and social justice for all (7).
I especially like the way he used the quote by McLuhan--"we shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us" (10)--to think about the role of technology, its context, and its limits. I have lately become very interested in how design and original intent affects options provided to current users. I also found the discussion of cyberspace and its lack of material reality quite relevant to my own life. Why do we want to hide the physicality of cyberspace so badly? What is the difference between being immersed in a book and being immersed online? How does that affect learning? What role does remediation play, and has that become invisible?
What my lab is supposed to look like (above) vs. what my lab
might actually look like (right). imcconstruction.com
What should I do with the skeletons of my once-functioning Dell Inspiron and newly-labeled "dumb" phone? What is the relationship between innovation and sterility, and why do we like it so much? Why the desire to hide what is in that little black box (even see-through computers seem to have fallen out of favor)?
The second chapter talks about the making of the digital, which is particularly relevant to this semester at WSU given that the required reading is Garbology and the recent issues surrounding garments sold by the university. The chapter gives an overview of the history of the internet (military/war - science - academics - hippie counterculture - the public), including a discussion of a user-friendly interface and Web 2.0. One of the scariest quotes of the chapter proclaims:
Apart from the occasional scandal when workers in a computer assembly factory in China or Bangladesh commit suicide or die in a fire because they were literally locked into the factory, these workers do not get much attention. And when scandals bring them to public attention, their work conditions are dismissed as aberrations and swept from popular memory as easily as the mind cleansing in films like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" or "Men in Black." (41).
Can we target the entire industry in order to stop this? How? What about Kairos (and mode)? Can we find some enlightened self-interest for everyone? What changes can we make and how quickly can we expect to make them? How does prosuming (filter than publish to publish than filter switch) affect public perception and how we see news, scandal etc.?
Also, I now really want to play Phone Story (check out the website for more information http://www.phonestory.org/)! Just the numbers provided in this chapter were staggering: "The US alone has over 50,000,000 obsolete computers and US consumers toss away over 1,000,000 cellphones every year" (48). What?!
http://news.chrisjordan.com/
The third chapter deals with identity online, including a discussion of the crowdsourcing and fluidity of identity. It then moves on to the "death" of privacy on the net through social media networks, email, and other digital devices. The difference between digital immigrants and digital natives is interesting here. Reed states that though young people much less worried about online privacy, they still complain about the misuse of their personal information: "It seems that while young people in general share far more intimate details of their lives publicly (online) than did their parents' generation, they still care deeply about certain people revealing certain things (e.g. a "friend" betraying a confidence about a person's attraction to another individual)" (58). What about bigger betrayals that affect more than a crush? What do people share on what forms of media and why? What is the new definition of "personal" or "over-share" and does that differ between digital and face-to-face?
Reed then moves on to talk about sorority girls (59), weblining (61), Facebook and Privacyfix (62), and cosmetic privacy settings (64), stating that legislation has really lagged behind in terms of privacy in the digital realm. He also returns to the issue of being cyborg or post-human with a discussion of place and using tools, as well as the dangers and opportunities provided by anonymity on the web (71). He also asks more questions: Does being online make us value time offline more or less (77)? How does hegemony (cultural domination without overt or coercion [78]) function on the web? I thought that Reed did a nice job of defining hegemony and offering comparable examples such as the music industry for greater understanding.
Does anyone read these?
The fourth chapter covers equality, addressing gender, ethnicity, and dis/ability. The main theme in all of these sections is the ability of online space to both deepen and lessen inequalities, and Reed suggests that much of this inequality might be dealt with if we had more diversity in production. I enjoyed the section that talked about how students in the Western world focus on uniqueness, though their values tend to match their own subject positions (84). It seems as if much of Reed's critique deals with making the invisible visible. The discussion about cyber harassment was also interesting, especially the split between cyberbullying and cyberstalking at the age of 18 (90). I agree with Reed's assessment that it seems arbitrary and lacks sensitivity.
Message posted on http://fatuglyorslutty.com
I also wonder how effective sites are that call-out cyberharrasment. For example, I had never heard of "Fat, Ugly, or Slutty", and it seems that some of the most recent posts on the page are still from 2013. I certainly applaud the idea, but is it doing enough? For example, who visits these sites? Is it effective in "shaming"? What would happen if information like this was brought to Facebook or Twitter?
The last chapter in this section deals with desire and the digital. This chapter seems particularly short given the amount of material it tries to cover, as Reed touches on sexual education, the porn industry, sex trafficking, and alternative sexualities online. I had never really thought about the safety of online sex or the "safety valve theory" (112); both topics would be interesting to discuss further. Furthermore, I wonder how schools can use digital technology in sexual education and how the digital affects relationships that are not long-distance. I also wonder about Reed's tone in this section and whether it affected your reading of the chapter, such as the commentary on gamut (110) and the puns on sexual positions (110) and penetration (109). Is this an appeal to audience? Does it make him seem uncomfortable with the topic?
Lastly, I leave you with a video that shows a term new to me in the digital realm: swatting.
