In Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam J. Banks illustrates the ways in which access to technology is immersed in issues of race and racism. For Banks, existing discourses around access to technology fail to account for more systemic considerations about race and racism insofar as these discourses assume that proximity or material access to technologies is effectively all there is to understanding and practicing access. In giving more dialogic space to these systemic considerations within conversations in and about access to technology, Banks calls for more critically informed approaches to such conversations, approaches that ultimately problematize the notion that African Americans are somehow fundamentally "non-technological" (12), and contest the sort of "user-friendly racism" (45) that is programmed into the very foundation of what comprises technology access and use. In this sense, Banks calls for more studied, inclusive, and robust considerations of "African American rhetoric" and "Black Digital Ethos," considerations that promote a "larger, macrolevel awareness" (67) of design components that structure and overdetermine race relations inside and outside of various technological interfaces. Ultimately, a focus on such design components, in Banks' estimation, not only reveals underlying assumptions and prescribed uses and abuses embedded in technologies, but also provides more space to individuals to position themselves against overbearing and totalizing systems and structures that support and enable tacit racist activities in both the real world and cyberspace.
In an effort to provide a better understanding of Banks' project and overall argument in Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, I have selected three quotes that might help flesh out the critical ground he is attempting to navigate throughout the text:
1) ". . . more than mere artifacts, technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advance its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations." (10)
2) "All technologies come packaged with a set of politics: if those technologies are not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and in which they circulate into a society are political and influence their uses in that society (Winner, 1986), and those politics can profoundly change the spaces in which messages are created, received, and used." (23)
3) "These debates all carry assumptions about what constitutes access to computers, the Internet, or any digital technology that, even when guided by the best of intentions, threaten disaster if not addressed. This danger exists because those assumptions will guide legal, corporate, and educational policies that can trap Black people into roles as passive consumers of technologies rather than producers and partners, and worse, lead to continued electronic invisibility and economic, educational, and political injustice." (31)
While Banks certainly raises a number of important issues in these quotes and throughout Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, there were two issues in particular that really stood out to me during my reading:
1) In an effort to provide a more potent and substantive vocabulary for engaging in discourses in and around access to technology, Banks references four prospective lenses through which to understand the shades and dynamics of access: material access, functional access, experiential access, and critical access. Meaningful access refers to the prospects for "equality in the material conditions that drive technology use or nonuse" (41). Functional access refers to "the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools [technologies] effectively" (41). Experiential access refers to a brand of access that "makes the tools [technologies] a relevant part of their lives" (42). Critical access refers to the ways in which individuals might engage with technologies in such a way that they become "intelligent users and producers of technology," a position through which access comes to "mean more than mere ownership of or proximity to random bits of plastic and metal" (42). Insofar as these lenses provide a more robust and inclusive vernacular for discussing issues of access to technology, they serve as valuable mediums through which to further complicate and nuance matters of access beyond traditional emphases on proximity to technologies.
2) In placing a particular emphasis on alternatives to proximity to technologies in discourses in and around access to technologies, Banks locates a measure of liberatory potential in the design components of the technologies we use and navigate on a daily basis. In this sense, Banks suggests that "the most important work we can do on behalf of our students is not knowledge work or critical work, but design work, work in creating the spaces in which they will communicate" (84). By keeping design components at the forefront of considerations about access to technology, Banks frees students up to visualize and enact the prospects for freely navigating and contesting the systems in which they are embedded.
"B.O.B.B.Y." by RZA
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Blog Post #6: Dis(abilities) and "AccessFirst Design"
This past week the readings for class pertained to the ways in which individuals with disabilities are or are not served and/or represented in online and classroom spaces. Though the readings by Yergeau et al. and Dolmage were certainly robust, engaging, and accessible, I will focus on Slatin's "The Imagination Gap: Making Web-based Instructional Resources Accessible to Students and Colleagues with Disabilities" in the blog post that follows.
Slatin's main argument revolves around the idea of "AccessFirst Design." Within this idea, he is primarily concerned with issues of accessibility as they intersect with the organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Throughout the essay, Slatin places an emphasis on how the very foundation of Web pages and digitized, Internet-based information, is structured in such a way as to exclude and foreclose upon participation by individuals with disabilities. Many Web-based resources fail, in his estimation, because issues of accessibility were not addressed or considered at the nascent stages of the Internet's emergence nor in the subsequent stages in which the Internet gathered steam and acquired users without significant disabilities or obstacles. Slatin therefore proposes "AccessFirst Design" to remediate upon issues of narrow and prejudiced accessibility, a potent lens and discursive framework through which to rightfully expand the scope and reach of Web-based resources.
In my reading, I found three quotes/references to the text particularly important for understanding Slatin's project and overall argument:
1) "Rhetoric is all about knowing your audience, understanding what information audience members are likely to possess already, what beliefs they hold, and what might move them to the action or the change of belief we're calling for. Underlying all this is the fundamental conviction that members of that audience can read and understand and make appropriate responses. We also should extend that expectation to audience members who have disabilities." (7)
2) "Why should accessibility have to be hidden? When I say that good design is accessible design, I mean that it's not enough to make a site "look good" and then "add accessibility": That's like adding wheelchair ramps to existing buildings where it's convenient for the architects and engineers, not the people who need to go in and out. It's good to have that ramp, but for a person in a hand-propelled chair it's a whole lot better if the slope meets the specifications in the ADA Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG): one inch of rise for every foot of length (the ADAAG is available on the U.S. Access Board Web site; specifically, see http://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm#4.8) - ). And it would be even better if the ramp led to the front door instead of going in through the loading-dock. Accessibility isn't additive: it's integral." (11)
3) "The first item in both the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the Section 508 federal standards calls upon Web-authors to provide "equivalent alternatives" for all visual and auditory material on a site. For images, this typically involves adding an ALT attribute to the HTML image (IMG) element; the ALT attribute specifies a short text--a phrase or perhaps a sentence--that replaces the image for people who can't see it (whether because they're blind or because they're using a text-only display). For richer, more complex images such as photographs, works of art, charts, or graphs, it may be necessary to use an additional attribute, LONGDESC, to provide a "long description" of the image as well as the ALT attribute that provides an "equivalent" for the image or the function that the image serves." (24)
From anticipating an audience's existing values, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses; to ensuring that structures and design components are more accessible and inclusive; to making it a point to provide "equivalent alternatives" to individuals with disabilities; the ideas that emerge from the aforementioned quotes and Slatin's project and overall argument continuously touch on two issues in particular:
1) Web-based resources that are designed for and with individuals with disabilities in mind are liable to be just as (if not more) effective and aesthetically rich for such marginalized populations as they might be for others. In making this claim, Slatin is responding to prospective counter-arguments against "AccessFirst Design" that might balk at fundamental and structural modifications to existing Web-based resources. Indeed, modifications of this magnitude will demand active and incessant social, cultural, political, and economic commitments that serve as obstacles for those charged with the task of integrating the tenets of "AccessFirst Design" into their Web-based resources as well as those who navigate these Web-based resources. Which is to say that those individuals who freely and easily navigate existing interfaces and Web-based resources might not initially see the value of "AccessFirst Design" if it does not necessarily serve their interests. I mean, at the front of "AccessFirst Design" is the idea that basically every interface and Web-based resource, and thus basically every familiar and "neutral" medium for communication, will be subject to change and overhaul. I do not say this to cast my lot against "AccessFirst Design." Rather, I merely seek to articulate the scope of the changes and modifications that Slatin is suggesting in his essay and the potential windfall these changes and modifications might bring forth.
2) Regardless of the sorts of evaluative and self-serving objections that might emerge from "AccessFirst Design," a salient point in Slatin's project and overall argument, is the fact that it is our ethical and legal obligation to attend to the ways in which the Web-based resources we use and make available, are or are not accessible to the students we are supposed to be serving inside and outside of the classroom. Slatin's references to such ethical and legal implications elucidates upon the fact that individuals with disabilities are a prominent and indelible population within the classrooms that we construct and navigate on a daily basis. The stakes are therefore rather high in terms of how, not when or why, we actually serve individuals with disabilities. I am grateful to Slatin for his brevity and economical approach to representing and fleshing out the intersection between issues of accessibility for individuals with disabilities and organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Ultimately, Slatin was equal parts concerned with selling the reader on the merits and virtues of "AccessFirst Design" as well as the ethical and legal obligations that demand that we as instructors attend to such merits and virtues.
Disability, Art, and the Age of the Internet: Jes Sachse at TEDxTrentUniversity
Slatin's main argument revolves around the idea of "AccessFirst Design." Within this idea, he is primarily concerned with issues of accessibility as they intersect with the organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Throughout the essay, Slatin places an emphasis on how the very foundation of Web pages and digitized, Internet-based information, is structured in such a way as to exclude and foreclose upon participation by individuals with disabilities. Many Web-based resources fail, in his estimation, because issues of accessibility were not addressed or considered at the nascent stages of the Internet's emergence nor in the subsequent stages in which the Internet gathered steam and acquired users without significant disabilities or obstacles. Slatin therefore proposes "AccessFirst Design" to remediate upon issues of narrow and prejudiced accessibility, a potent lens and discursive framework through which to rightfully expand the scope and reach of Web-based resources.
In my reading, I found three quotes/references to the text particularly important for understanding Slatin's project and overall argument:
1) "Rhetoric is all about knowing your audience, understanding what information audience members are likely to possess already, what beliefs they hold, and what might move them to the action or the change of belief we're calling for. Underlying all this is the fundamental conviction that members of that audience can read and understand and make appropriate responses. We also should extend that expectation to audience members who have disabilities." (7)
2) "Why should accessibility have to be hidden? When I say that good design is accessible design, I mean that it's not enough to make a site "look good" and then "add accessibility": That's like adding wheelchair ramps to existing buildings where it's convenient for the architects and engineers, not the people who need to go in and out. It's good to have that ramp, but for a person in a hand-propelled chair it's a whole lot better if the slope meets the specifications in the ADA Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG): one inch of rise for every foot of length (the ADAAG is available on the U.S. Access Board Web site; specifically, see http://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm#4.8) - ). And it would be even better if the ramp led to the front door instead of going in through the loading-dock. Accessibility isn't additive: it's integral." (11)
3) "The first item in both the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the Section 508 federal standards calls upon Web-authors to provide "equivalent alternatives" for all visual and auditory material on a site. For images, this typically involves adding an ALT attribute to the HTML image (IMG) element; the ALT attribute specifies a short text--a phrase or perhaps a sentence--that replaces the image for people who can't see it (whether because they're blind or because they're using a text-only display). For richer, more complex images such as photographs, works of art, charts, or graphs, it may be necessary to use an additional attribute, LONGDESC, to provide a "long description" of the image as well as the ALT attribute that provides an "equivalent" for the image or the function that the image serves." (24)
From anticipating an audience's existing values, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses; to ensuring that structures and design components are more accessible and inclusive; to making it a point to provide "equivalent alternatives" to individuals with disabilities; the ideas that emerge from the aforementioned quotes and Slatin's project and overall argument continuously touch on two issues in particular:
1) Web-based resources that are designed for and with individuals with disabilities in mind are liable to be just as (if not more) effective and aesthetically rich for such marginalized populations as they might be for others. In making this claim, Slatin is responding to prospective counter-arguments against "AccessFirst Design" that might balk at fundamental and structural modifications to existing Web-based resources. Indeed, modifications of this magnitude will demand active and incessant social, cultural, political, and economic commitments that serve as obstacles for those charged with the task of integrating the tenets of "AccessFirst Design" into their Web-based resources as well as those who navigate these Web-based resources. Which is to say that those individuals who freely and easily navigate existing interfaces and Web-based resources might not initially see the value of "AccessFirst Design" if it does not necessarily serve their interests. I mean, at the front of "AccessFirst Design" is the idea that basically every interface and Web-based resource, and thus basically every familiar and "neutral" medium for communication, will be subject to change and overhaul. I do not say this to cast my lot against "AccessFirst Design." Rather, I merely seek to articulate the scope of the changes and modifications that Slatin is suggesting in his essay and the potential windfall these changes and modifications might bring forth.
2) Regardless of the sorts of evaluative and self-serving objections that might emerge from "AccessFirst Design," a salient point in Slatin's project and overall argument, is the fact that it is our ethical and legal obligation to attend to the ways in which the Web-based resources we use and make available, are or are not accessible to the students we are supposed to be serving inside and outside of the classroom. Slatin's references to such ethical and legal implications elucidates upon the fact that individuals with disabilities are a prominent and indelible population within the classrooms that we construct and navigate on a daily basis. The stakes are therefore rather high in terms of how, not when or why, we actually serve individuals with disabilities. I am grateful to Slatin for his brevity and economical approach to representing and fleshing out the intersection between issues of accessibility for individuals with disabilities and organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Ultimately, Slatin was equal parts concerned with selling the reader on the merits and virtues of "AccessFirst Design" as well as the ethical and legal obligations that demand that we as instructors attend to such merits and virtues.
Disability, Art, and the Age of the Internet: Jes Sachse at TEDxTrentUniversity
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Article Conversation #3: Embodiments vs. Cyborgs
In my last blog post, I explored the dynamics of N. Katherine Hayles' project in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. In this blog post, however, I will put Hayles' project in conversation with that of Donna Haraway in "A Cyborg Manifesto," placing a particular emphasis on the ways in which their conceptualizations of the human body converge and/or depart from one another.
Though written nearly ten years before How We Became Posthuman (1999), Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991) still shares a relatively common vernacular with Hayles in terms of how they both write about intersections between informational code and the human body. Indeed, much like Haraway, who suggests that understanding the discursive boundaries of the human body involves "the translation of the world into a problem of coding" (327), Hayles similarly frames her own argument around the transition to virtuality and a virtual age as a significant cultural shift in which "material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns" (13-14). In their respective pieces, Haraway and Hayles treat "coding" and "informational patterns" as touchstones for articulating and intellectualizing the human body and the material spaces through which it navigates. In so doing, they do not so much emphasize the static, hegemonic, and implacable nature of information and knowledge so much as the prospects for transgressing and/or contesting existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries.
For Haraway, internalizing this perspective on information means not so much thinking "in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints" (325). The salient point in both of their projects therefore centers on the idealized prospect of divesting oneself of the constraints, limitations, and patterns of the world in which marginalized and socialized individuals are situated, and thus enacting and performing alternative subjectivities. These alternative subjectivities therefore emerge from imagined and/or performative spaces, spaces that, in Hayles' estimation, re-constitute boundaries and "change the locus of selfhood" (279), therefore "offer[ing] resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288) of reality as more fluid, malleable, and open to interpretation.
Though both Haraway and Hayles locate much of this liberatory and subversive potential in and around performances and discourses of the human body, their specific points of entry for initiating this dialogue are slightly different.
For Haraway, the notion of the cyborg serves as the medium or mythos through which one might re-work hegemonic, patriarchal, and capitalistic codes and re-draw the discursive boundaries against which the social realities of gender, race, and class consciousness are determined and embodied. "A cyborg," according to Haraway, "is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction" (315). By crafting the cyborg around both "social reality" and "fiction," Haraway seeks to elucidate upon the ways in which individuals are constituted, but not determined, by a multitude of dominant codes and restrictive social structures. While these codes and structures are "lived" and "real" in the sense that they act as the social, cultural, and political spaces through which individuals navigate, Haraway places a particular emphasis on the interests, structures, and institutions that such spaces actually serve. In this sense, codes and structures are not so much "objective" realities and/or "self-evident" truths so much as potent and pervasive fictions and propaganda that organize and dictate the terms of "reality" and intelligible life. This sense of reality and "intelligible life," however, comprises just one constitutive piece of the cyborg, a piece that the cyborg might "disassemble" and "reassemble," all under aegis of exposing the fact that "no 'natural' architectures constrain system design" (326).
Like Haraway, Hayles is also committed to problematizing the purported "'natural' architectures" of "reality" and intelligible life. Unlike Haraway, though, Hayles does not use the cyborg or any other related mythos to articulate her project. Instead, Hayles frames her project around the "interplay between the body as a cultural construct and experiences of embodiment that individual people within a culture feel and articulate" (193). This interplay ultimately makes an important distinction between "the human body" and "embodiment." While "the human body" serves as an "idealized form" (196) that connotes and prescribes particular behaviors and manners of being, "embodiment" serves as the actual material performance of various behaviors and manners of being. These material performances of "the human body," as Hayles emphatically suggests, might, on the one hand, align and enact the existing tenets that comprise "the human body," but, on the other hand, they also offer opportunities for "randomness," opportunities that subvert, transgress, and contest the entire institution of "the human body." In this sense, "bodily practices have a physical reality that can never be fully assimilated into discourse" (195). Ultimately, by integrating "randomness" into and onto existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries, "embodiment" functions as "the creative ground from which lnew] pattern[s] can emerge" (286).
Where I feel that their projects might not necessarily overlap is in the way that they position the transgressive potential for their respective conceptualizations of the human body. In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway indicates that "[t]he cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbols, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (316). Though locating the cyborg in a "post-gender world" might serve more as a rhetorical feature for her project, I feel that it is important to note that Haraway is in fact imagining materialities and discourses well outside of the confines of "reality" and our immediate surroundings. Hayles, on the other hand, takes a more sobering and pragmatic approach in her analysis on Philip K. Dick's work when she suggests that "the construction of the observer cannot finally be separated from the construction reality" (190). While I feel that Hayles' project certainly hinges on the sorts of material and discursive imaginaries that comprise Haraway's notion of the cyborg, I also feel that the breadth and trajectory of Hayles' project cautions against divorcing and/or divesting oneself from lived reality. But, again, these distinctions may speak more to the rhetorical scaffolding of their respective projects than any profound or substantive difference in their general approach to the prospects for transgression and subversion.
Though written nearly ten years before How We Became Posthuman (1999), Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991) still shares a relatively common vernacular with Hayles in terms of how they both write about intersections between informational code and the human body. Indeed, much like Haraway, who suggests that understanding the discursive boundaries of the human body involves "the translation of the world into a problem of coding" (327), Hayles similarly frames her own argument around the transition to virtuality and a virtual age as a significant cultural shift in which "material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns" (13-14). In their respective pieces, Haraway and Hayles treat "coding" and "informational patterns" as touchstones for articulating and intellectualizing the human body and the material spaces through which it navigates. In so doing, they do not so much emphasize the static, hegemonic, and implacable nature of information and knowledge so much as the prospects for transgressing and/or contesting existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries.
For Haraway, internalizing this perspective on information means not so much thinking "in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints" (325). The salient point in both of their projects therefore centers on the idealized prospect of divesting oneself of the constraints, limitations, and patterns of the world in which marginalized and socialized individuals are situated, and thus enacting and performing alternative subjectivities. These alternative subjectivities therefore emerge from imagined and/or performative spaces, spaces that, in Hayles' estimation, re-constitute boundaries and "change the locus of selfhood" (279), therefore "offer[ing] resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288) of reality as more fluid, malleable, and open to interpretation.
Though both Haraway and Hayles locate much of this liberatory and subversive potential in and around performances and discourses of the human body, their specific points of entry for initiating this dialogue are slightly different.
For Haraway, the notion of the cyborg serves as the medium or mythos through which one might re-work hegemonic, patriarchal, and capitalistic codes and re-draw the discursive boundaries against which the social realities of gender, race, and class consciousness are determined and embodied. "A cyborg," according to Haraway, "is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction" (315). By crafting the cyborg around both "social reality" and "fiction," Haraway seeks to elucidate upon the ways in which individuals are constituted, but not determined, by a multitude of dominant codes and restrictive social structures. While these codes and structures are "lived" and "real" in the sense that they act as the social, cultural, and political spaces through which individuals navigate, Haraway places a particular emphasis on the interests, structures, and institutions that such spaces actually serve. In this sense, codes and structures are not so much "objective" realities and/or "self-evident" truths so much as potent and pervasive fictions and propaganda that organize and dictate the terms of "reality" and intelligible life. This sense of reality and "intelligible life," however, comprises just one constitutive piece of the cyborg, a piece that the cyborg might "disassemble" and "reassemble," all under aegis of exposing the fact that "no 'natural' architectures constrain system design" (326).
Like Haraway, Hayles is also committed to problematizing the purported "'natural' architectures" of "reality" and intelligible life. Unlike Haraway, though, Hayles does not use the cyborg or any other related mythos to articulate her project. Instead, Hayles frames her project around the "interplay between the body as a cultural construct and experiences of embodiment that individual people within a culture feel and articulate" (193). This interplay ultimately makes an important distinction between "the human body" and "embodiment." While "the human body" serves as an "idealized form" (196) that connotes and prescribes particular behaviors and manners of being, "embodiment" serves as the actual material performance of various behaviors and manners of being. These material performances of "the human body," as Hayles emphatically suggests, might, on the one hand, align and enact the existing tenets that comprise "the human body," but, on the other hand, they also offer opportunities for "randomness," opportunities that subvert, transgress, and contest the entire institution of "the human body." In this sense, "bodily practices have a physical reality that can never be fully assimilated into discourse" (195). Ultimately, by integrating "randomness" into and onto existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries, "embodiment" functions as "the creative ground from which lnew] pattern[s] can emerge" (286).
Where I feel that their projects might not necessarily overlap is in the way that they position the transgressive potential for their respective conceptualizations of the human body. In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway indicates that "[t]he cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbols, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (316). Though locating the cyborg in a "post-gender world" might serve more as a rhetorical feature for her project, I feel that it is important to note that Haraway is in fact imagining materialities and discourses well outside of the confines of "reality" and our immediate surroundings. Hayles, on the other hand, takes a more sobering and pragmatic approach in her analysis on Philip K. Dick's work when she suggests that "the construction of the observer cannot finally be separated from the construction reality" (190). While I feel that Hayles' project certainly hinges on the sorts of material and discursive imaginaries that comprise Haraway's notion of the cyborg, I also feel that the breadth and trajectory of Hayles' project cautions against divorcing and/or divesting oneself from lived reality. But, again, these distinctions may speak more to the rhetorical scaffolding of their respective projects than any profound or substantive difference in their general approach to the prospects for transgression and subversion.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Blog Post #5: Embodiments are Soooo Random
In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles articulates the ways in which emerging digital technologies have transformed the shape and scope of knowledge and information to the extent that the very foundation of what constitutes and comprises "subjective human experience" has become something else altogether. This "something else" might be referred to as the posthuman, a significant cultural and intellectual position through which human beings assume the role of an "informational pattern" of sorts, a codified husk unmoored from materiality writ large.
For Hayles, the emergence of the posthuman represents a signigicant discursive shift, one that clearly cordons off information from materiality, bringing forth an age in which "it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed" (35). Ultimately, these distinctions re-route discourses around the material and intellectual contexts that human beings navigate from questions of "presence/absence" to questions of "pattern/randomness."
By locating these discourses within the realm of "pattern/randomness," Hayles places an emphasis on information and code as the metrics of sorts through which the posthuman inherits, understands, and embodies a particular iteration of reality. However, throughout How We Became Posthuman, she seeks to problematize this iteration of reality, perpetually challenging assumptions about its purported "organic wholeness" (160). In Hayles' estimation, theories, institutions, and/or metrics of information, particularly those introduced by Claude Shannon, in the age of the posthuman generally contain a "conservative bias that privileges stasis over change" (63), a bias that therefore also "privileges exactness over meaning" (67). In this sense, information serves as a stable, intelligible, and normative framework for constituting reality as a self-evident "pattern," a "pattern" that human beings merely simulate and reify as predictable "manipulators of code" (46) as opposed to creative or autonomous agents of change and "randomness."
While the age of the posthuman might expose the ways in which "conscious agency has never been 'in control'" (288), Hayles' analysis of the role that human beings play in internalizing and perpetuating this systematic thinking seems to suggest at least the prospect for other alternatives and/or some form of resistance. Indeed, if human beings in the age of the posthuman are in many ways "placed in the middle of the circuit, where [their] output and input are already spliced into an existing loop" (68), and if "the observer cannot stand apart from the systems being observed" (221), Hayles seems to really struggle to locate subversive and contrarian potential within practices and performances of embodiment that challenge and destabilize prevailing ideas about what comprises information, "pattern," and normativity. She does this in part by juxtaposing the "human body" against "embodiment." In Hayles' estimation, the "human body" is "naturalized within a culture" (198) to the extent that all material practices and performances are measured against a normative and idealized conceptualization of the "human body." Embodiment, on the other hand, is more individuated and "improvisational" in nature, "becom[ing] naturalized only secondarily through its interactions with concepts of the body" (198). As a material performance of the body, embodiment therefore represents a more elusive and flexible practice, one that might, on the one hand, automatically incorporate into "bodily memory" those norms and mores inscribed within the "pattern" of the "human body" (199); or, on the other hand, engage in the sorts of "emergent behaviors" (225) that problematize the "ideological underpinnings of naturalization" (198).
Ultimately, Hayles makes these distinctions between the "human body" and embodiment in order to elucidate upon the advantages and possibilities of "the posthuman." By in effect talking back to and re-mapping "the locus of selfhood" (279), she engages in the sort of systematic thinking that celebrates and might help instantiate "an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability" (285), a future that might also shirk the vestments and restrictions of "pattern" and "disembodied information" (287). Yet while Hayles suggests that "human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expand" (290-291), she also acknowledges that subversive embodiments in the age of the posthuman may not decisively or automatically destabilize the "pattern." Regardless, Hayles locates any semblance of subjectivity within embodiment and "randomness," and thus within the "emergent rather than [the] given" (291).
PS3 Robot Demo
For Hayles, the emergence of the posthuman represents a signigicant discursive shift, one that clearly cordons off information from materiality, bringing forth an age in which "it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed" (35). Ultimately, these distinctions re-route discourses around the material and intellectual contexts that human beings navigate from questions of "presence/absence" to questions of "pattern/randomness."
By locating these discourses within the realm of "pattern/randomness," Hayles places an emphasis on information and code as the metrics of sorts through which the posthuman inherits, understands, and embodies a particular iteration of reality. However, throughout How We Became Posthuman, she seeks to problematize this iteration of reality, perpetually challenging assumptions about its purported "organic wholeness" (160). In Hayles' estimation, theories, institutions, and/or metrics of information, particularly those introduced by Claude Shannon, in the age of the posthuman generally contain a "conservative bias that privileges stasis over change" (63), a bias that therefore also "privileges exactness over meaning" (67). In this sense, information serves as a stable, intelligible, and normative framework for constituting reality as a self-evident "pattern," a "pattern" that human beings merely simulate and reify as predictable "manipulators of code" (46) as opposed to creative or autonomous agents of change and "randomness."
While the age of the posthuman might expose the ways in which "conscious agency has never been 'in control'" (288), Hayles' analysis of the role that human beings play in internalizing and perpetuating this systematic thinking seems to suggest at least the prospect for other alternatives and/or some form of resistance. Indeed, if human beings in the age of the posthuman are in many ways "placed in the middle of the circuit, where [their] output and input are already spliced into an existing loop" (68), and if "the observer cannot stand apart from the systems being observed" (221), Hayles seems to really struggle to locate subversive and contrarian potential within practices and performances of embodiment that challenge and destabilize prevailing ideas about what comprises information, "pattern," and normativity. She does this in part by juxtaposing the "human body" against "embodiment." In Hayles' estimation, the "human body" is "naturalized within a culture" (198) to the extent that all material practices and performances are measured against a normative and idealized conceptualization of the "human body." Embodiment, on the other hand, is more individuated and "improvisational" in nature, "becom[ing] naturalized only secondarily through its interactions with concepts of the body" (198). As a material performance of the body, embodiment therefore represents a more elusive and flexible practice, one that might, on the one hand, automatically incorporate into "bodily memory" those norms and mores inscribed within the "pattern" of the "human body" (199); or, on the other hand, engage in the sorts of "emergent behaviors" (225) that problematize the "ideological underpinnings of naturalization" (198).
Ultimately, Hayles makes these distinctions between the "human body" and embodiment in order to elucidate upon the advantages and possibilities of "the posthuman." By in effect talking back to and re-mapping "the locus of selfhood" (279), she engages in the sort of systematic thinking that celebrates and might help instantiate "an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability" (285), a future that might also shirk the vestments and restrictions of "pattern" and "disembodied information" (287). Yet while Hayles suggests that "human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expand" (290-291), she also acknowledges that subversive embodiments in the age of the posthuman may not decisively or automatically destabilize the "pattern." Regardless, Hayles locates any semblance of subjectivity within embodiment and "randomness," and thus within the "emergent rather than [the] given" (291).
PS3 Robot Demo
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Final Project Proposal: Anonymous Travelers: Scaffolding Peer Review in the Composition Classroom
INTRODUCTION:
So, last week during class we were charged with the task of presenting our tentative ideas for our final projects for ENGLISH 597 to our fellow classmates. Everyone had anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to articulate the general framework and/or inquiry questions they are working with in these nascent stages of conceptualizing, researching, and composing the final project. Our classmates asked questions and offered suggestions based on their understanding of the final project, oftentimes pushing the presenter to consider new or different contexts that might help nuance and/or crystallize their ideas and help develop a solid point of entry for the presenter's project.
PROPOSAL:
In my presentation, I proposed a sort of exploratory project that pertains to the ways in which digital technologies, anonymity, and deliberate course scaffolding might be used to improve peer review practices among students in the composition classroom. My project is a two-fold response to the efficacy of traditional, face-to-face peer review procedures. It responds to: 1) the general discomfort and/or tenuousness that students oftentimes exhibit when responding to their classmates' work in peer review sessions; and 2) ineffective peer review sessions that not only cause students to disregard the merits of peer review altogether.
Peer review serves as one of the more potent and palatable platforms available to composition instructors through which to emphasize a larger audience or community of readers outside of instructors themselves. It is also provides for unique and valuable opportunities for students to test out and externalize their existing and emerging composing skills and strategies, and to function as facilitators of sorts in the composition classroom.
I would like to explore the prospects for using digital platforms like Google Classroom, ELI Review, SWoRD, etc. to conduct anonymous peer review sessions between two separate composition classes. By juxtaposing students from separate composition classes alongside one another, I envision a kind of "cross-talk" between the classes, a "cross-talk" that alleviates much of students' initial apprehensiveness about traditional face-to-face peer review, and places a great deal of emphasis upon notions of ethos, audience, and community in unorthodox and potentially-fruitful ways.
Most importantly, I see digital anonymity as just a point of entry in a semester-long sequence on peer review, a sequence that slowly and progressively works towards peer review as an embodied practice. By in effect staging (scaffolding) peer review across four major inquiry projects and four separate delivery systems, this approach reinforces the value and importance of peer review as an institution and better positions students to understand the dynamics and possibilities of peer review across various media.
In a brief and separate note, I would also like to say that I see a number of overlaps between my final project and a number of areas of scholarly interest, including: distance education, inclusivity, writing center pedagogy, online education, and embodied writing, just to name a few.
FEEDBACK FROM CLASSMATES:
My project was generally well received by my classmates, but they did provide some very useful and important feedback about how I might organize and further elucidate my ideas and some of the potential downfalls of its application in a composition classroom.
Much of the discussion revolved around the role I would serve as an instructor instituting the platform across classes and overseeing overall student progress. As I am still exploring different mediums to stage the digital anonymity portion of my project, I cannot speak on that as of yet. (Of course, I welcome suggestions here.) However, there were some really great suggestions about having students review one another and reflect on the process. This might avoid my serving as a sort of digital big brother looking over their shoulders, therefore creating a friendlier space for students to compose and navigate.
Presently, I am kind of oscillating back-and-forth between where, how, and why I should position myself one way or the other, but I suppose I will have to read a bit more and digest the ideas before I can map this out. Either way, this quandary will absolutely play a role in the final project that I compose.
There was also quite a bit of talk about how I (and, of course, students) may or may not make direct or significant enough distinctions about what it actually means to engage in peer review in different spaces ranging from digital to embodied, and why these choices matter. Some of my classmates suggested that I pay particular attention to how questions are tailored and how they correlate to the overall conceptual goals and course outcomes of ENGLISH 101 as we navigate various units and delivery systems. Again, I do not have a fleshed-out response to this suggestion, but I am very grateful that it was brought up. I would love to get some feedback here about how I might make such distinctions, though.
Lastly, they recommended getting in touch with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) about my platform and overall project, particularly if I have any intention of truly implementing this in my classes next semester and perhaps using my findings in a publication in the future. This is absolutely on my radar. And this final project will go a long way in exploring the virtues of conceptualizing and materializing the peer review process as a sequence from digital anonymity to embodied practice.
So, last week during class we were charged with the task of presenting our tentative ideas for our final projects for ENGLISH 597 to our fellow classmates. Everyone had anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to articulate the general framework and/or inquiry questions they are working with in these nascent stages of conceptualizing, researching, and composing the final project. Our classmates asked questions and offered suggestions based on their understanding of the final project, oftentimes pushing the presenter to consider new or different contexts that might help nuance and/or crystallize their ideas and help develop a solid point of entry for the presenter's project.
PROPOSAL:
In my presentation, I proposed a sort of exploratory project that pertains to the ways in which digital technologies, anonymity, and deliberate course scaffolding might be used to improve peer review practices among students in the composition classroom. My project is a two-fold response to the efficacy of traditional, face-to-face peer review procedures. It responds to: 1) the general discomfort and/or tenuousness that students oftentimes exhibit when responding to their classmates' work in peer review sessions; and 2) ineffective peer review sessions that not only cause students to disregard the merits of peer review altogether.
Peer review serves as one of the more potent and palatable platforms available to composition instructors through which to emphasize a larger audience or community of readers outside of instructors themselves. It is also provides for unique and valuable opportunities for students to test out and externalize their existing and emerging composing skills and strategies, and to function as facilitators of sorts in the composition classroom.
I would like to explore the prospects for using digital platforms like Google Classroom, ELI Review, SWoRD, etc. to conduct anonymous peer review sessions between two separate composition classes. By juxtaposing students from separate composition classes alongside one another, I envision a kind of "cross-talk" between the classes, a "cross-talk" that alleviates much of students' initial apprehensiveness about traditional face-to-face peer review, and places a great deal of emphasis upon notions of ethos, audience, and community in unorthodox and potentially-fruitful ways.
Most importantly, I see digital anonymity as just a point of entry in a semester-long sequence on peer review, a sequence that slowly and progressively works towards peer review as an embodied practice. By in effect staging (scaffolding) peer review across four major inquiry projects and four separate delivery systems, this approach reinforces the value and importance of peer review as an institution and better positions students to understand the dynamics and possibilities of peer review across various media.
In a brief and separate note, I would also like to say that I see a number of overlaps between my final project and a number of areas of scholarly interest, including: distance education, inclusivity, writing center pedagogy, online education, and embodied writing, just to name a few.
FEEDBACK FROM CLASSMATES:
My project was generally well received by my classmates, but they did provide some very useful and important feedback about how I might organize and further elucidate my ideas and some of the potential downfalls of its application in a composition classroom.
Much of the discussion revolved around the role I would serve as an instructor instituting the platform across classes and overseeing overall student progress. As I am still exploring different mediums to stage the digital anonymity portion of my project, I cannot speak on that as of yet. (Of course, I welcome suggestions here.) However, there were some really great suggestions about having students review one another and reflect on the process. This might avoid my serving as a sort of digital big brother looking over their shoulders, therefore creating a friendlier space for students to compose and navigate.
Presently, I am kind of oscillating back-and-forth between where, how, and why I should position myself one way or the other, but I suppose I will have to read a bit more and digest the ideas before I can map this out. Either way, this quandary will absolutely play a role in the final project that I compose.
There was also quite a bit of talk about how I (and, of course, students) may or may not make direct or significant enough distinctions about what it actually means to engage in peer review in different spaces ranging from digital to embodied, and why these choices matter. Some of my classmates suggested that I pay particular attention to how questions are tailored and how they correlate to the overall conceptual goals and course outcomes of ENGLISH 101 as we navigate various units and delivery systems. Again, I do not have a fleshed-out response to this suggestion, but I am very grateful that it was brought up. I would love to get some feedback here about how I might make such distinctions, though.
Lastly, they recommended getting in touch with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) about my platform and overall project, particularly if I have any intention of truly implementing this in my classes next semester and perhaps using my findings in a publication in the future. This is absolutely on my radar. And this final project will go a long way in exploring the virtues of conceptualizing and materializing the peer review process as a sequence from digital anonymity to embodied practice.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Article Conversation #2: Digital Literacy Practices in the Cuban Blogosphere
In the "Introduction" to Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times, authors Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe, articulate the provisional terrain for a more inclusive and global approach to composition, one predicated on more fluid conceptualizations of digital literacy practices. The impetus for their project emerges from a call for more nuanced theories of digital literacy practices that speak to the increasingly globalized world in which we live in the 21st century and the sorts of intersectional, transnational, and hybrid identities that comprise life in this globalized world. This miasma of identities, perspectives, and subjectivities produce almost as many digital literacy practices, therefore destabilizing dominant, hegemonic, and more exclusive institutions of "literacy." Though we did not engage with the participants that the authors use to illustrate this paradigm, it is important to briefly note that these case studies consisted of writing, oral narratives, videos, etc. to help construct a more robust and complicated continuum of digital literacy practices.
I would like to put this paradigm into conversation with Rainer Rubira and Gisela Gil-Egui's article, "Political communication in the Cuban blogosphere: A case study of Generation Y." In the article, Rubira and Gil-Egui use the emergence of Yoani Sanchez's blog, "Generation Y," within the fraught socio-political landscape of 21st-century Communist Cuba, a landscape saddled by state surveillance, economic inequalities, and tenuous political conditions. Despite these obstacles, Yoani Sanchez's blog emerged in 2007 to worldwide recognition and fanfare. Though the authors of the article celebrate "Generation Y" as an important and potent site for exchanges of ideas about the past, present, and future socio-political trajectories of Cuba outside of the control and confines of state power, they also seem to denigrate the ways in which users--most of which are outside of Cuba-- actually navigate this unique and unbridled communicative space. Indeed, Rubira and Gil-Egui make important distinctions between expressive and deliberative forms of communication, distinctions that seem to compartmentalize approaches to political dialogue in such a way whereby exuberant and/or emotional dispositions fall short of a kind of "rational" yardstick that might prevent "Generation Y" from achieving the status of a more traditional civil or public sphere.
And that's the rub for me. It seems that while Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe locate their project in a call for more inclusivity within conceptualizations of digital literacy practices, Rubira and Gil-Egui articulate the legacy of "Generation Y" in terms of a deficit model, whereby the author and the blog's users are simply trying to keep up. I do not doubt that Rubira and Gil-Egui were intrigued by the liberatory potential of Yoani Sanchez's blog, but those aforementioned distinctions between expressive and deliberative forms of communication strike me as rather backhanded, almost as if lamenting, "If only those silly, emotional, and disorganized commies would be more rational, then maybe they wouldn't be in this mess." I guess what bothers me about such an approach is that it does not exhibit the sorts of sensitivities towards unique or alternative digital literacy practices that Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe seem so committed to in Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times. In this sense, Rubira and Gil-Egui were not nearly as accommodating of literacies in the plural, and not nearly as complementary of the obstacles that Sanchez navigated in order to create and maintain "Generation Y."
I would like to put this paradigm into conversation with Rainer Rubira and Gisela Gil-Egui's article, "Political communication in the Cuban blogosphere: A case study of Generation Y." In the article, Rubira and Gil-Egui use the emergence of Yoani Sanchez's blog, "Generation Y," within the fraught socio-political landscape of 21st-century Communist Cuba, a landscape saddled by state surveillance, economic inequalities, and tenuous political conditions. Despite these obstacles, Yoani Sanchez's blog emerged in 2007 to worldwide recognition and fanfare. Though the authors of the article celebrate "Generation Y" as an important and potent site for exchanges of ideas about the past, present, and future socio-political trajectories of Cuba outside of the control and confines of state power, they also seem to denigrate the ways in which users--most of which are outside of Cuba-- actually navigate this unique and unbridled communicative space. Indeed, Rubira and Gil-Egui make important distinctions between expressive and deliberative forms of communication, distinctions that seem to compartmentalize approaches to political dialogue in such a way whereby exuberant and/or emotional dispositions fall short of a kind of "rational" yardstick that might prevent "Generation Y" from achieving the status of a more traditional civil or public sphere.
And that's the rub for me. It seems that while Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe locate their project in a call for more inclusivity within conceptualizations of digital literacy practices, Rubira and Gil-Egui articulate the legacy of "Generation Y" in terms of a deficit model, whereby the author and the blog's users are simply trying to keep up. I do not doubt that Rubira and Gil-Egui were intrigued by the liberatory potential of Yoani Sanchez's blog, but those aforementioned distinctions between expressive and deliberative forms of communication strike me as rather backhanded, almost as if lamenting, "If only those silly, emotional, and disorganized commies would be more rational, then maybe they wouldn't be in this mess." I guess what bothers me about such an approach is that it does not exhibit the sorts of sensitivities towards unique or alternative digital literacy practices that Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe seem so committed to in Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times. In this sense, Rubira and Gil-Egui were not nearly as accommodating of literacies in the plural, and not nearly as complementary of the obstacles that Sanchez navigated in order to create and maintain "Generation Y."
Friday, October 3, 2014
Blog Post #4: Whose Network? Whose Outrage? Whose Hope? Whose Democracy?
So, I must be honest before I launch into this blog post. I'm not sure there's another text this semester that I've had more difficulty reading than Manuel Castells' Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. My difficulties with the text (I believe) did not emerge so much from issues of comprehension or affinity with content and ideas as from questions about style, audience, and intention.
In short, Networks of Outrage and Hope attempts to articulate and theorize the terms through which protest, advocacy, and revolution materialize in the "real world" in the 21st century, and how such activities are spurred by Internet enclaves of dissent and collective action. Castells is particularly interested in the ways in which movements of this kind are, on the one hand, addled by the crippling weight of economic insolvency, and, on the other hand, mobilized by an overwhelming and united sense of outrage and scandalization at related misuses of state power that perpetuate social, cultural, and political inequalities. This outrage, in Castells' estimation, serves as the catalyst for rather profound and potent sentiments of hope, sentiments that ultimately espouse the efficacy of the Internet as a host for legitimate social activism and a space in which likeminded individuals might work together and make wholesale, systematic changes in the "real world."
That being said, I did find many of the premises of Castells' arguments a bit dubious, particularly in light of the texts we have read up to this point in the semester. Indeed, while the case studies that Castells analyzes in the text (Tunisia, Iceland, Egypt, etc.) perhaps in some way attest to the veracity and potency of the paradigm he constructs in Networks of Outrage and Hope, I did not always feel as if he attended to enough of the complexities of articulating a "one-size-fits-all" paradigm. To be clear, though, I give Castells more credit than that, as I do trust that he might also be flexible as he continues his research. I just find it a bit problematic when he states things like, "By sharing sorrow and hope in the free public space of the Internet, by connecting to each other, and by envisioning projects from multiple sources of being, individuals formed networks, regardless of their personal views or organizational attachments" (2).
On the one hand, I understand the rhetorical purpose of using terms like "outrage" and "hope" to apply to radically different and disparate individuals and communities, whom form these sorts of digital collectivities "regardless of their personal views or organizational attachments." I mean, commonalities and overlapping interests across difference(s) can certainly help expand what constitutes "collective action" and extend membership to such a collectivity to a wider and wider population, right?
On the other hand, by perpetually gesturing to these shared interests, Castells might overlook the virtues and ethics of preserving and keeping in mind that which distinguishes one manner of "outrage" and "hope" from another. In an effort to stoke the fires of collective action, I fear that Castells tacitly stabilizes human experience and activity in ways that could "ghettoize" expressions of "outrage" and "hope" that do not conform to his own designations. And while the case studies perhaps seek to make such distinctions clearer, they still serve as instruments and/or premises for his larger argument in Networks of Outrage and Hope, and his efforts to construct a paradigm around these case studies. Not to mention, his reference to "the free public space of the Internet" presupposes levels of accessibility to not only the content available on the Internet, but also the Internet and digital technologies themselves. Castells attempts to address this at particular points throughout the book, but not, in my mind, in a sustained enough manner that would truly allow readers to imagine as global a reach for his paradigm as he suggests.
These omissions and/or underdeveloped components of Castells' argument are made all the more apparent in his casual investment in the prospects for "democracy" within and outside of the networks he represents in his book. On one of the final pages of Networks of Outrage and Hope, he writes, "The legacy of networked social movements will have been to raise the possibility of re-learning how to live together. In real democracy" (246). It is important to note that the legacy of Castells' project rests on a deficit model that suggests that the social, cultural, and political relationships and power structures that comprise communal life in the 21st century are broken and/or untenable in terms of enacting systematic changes. While I generally agree with Castells on this point and don't necessarily find this terribly provocative, I find myself terrified by the way in which he suggests that a "real democracy" might somehow spur authentic and valuable revolutionary activity and change. By harking to "democracy" in this way, he may perhaps be seeking to re-claim or re-purpose the "colonizer's language," so to speak, but this intent raises important questions about the relative "capital" of a term that has been bandied about in the Western world within neo-colonial and peace-making endeavors. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if Castells' general conceit in Networks of Outrage and Hope is not only to unpack various case studies but also construct a more universal paradigm around the fruitful relationship between the Internet and the "real world" in terms of enacting change and advocating for social justice, it might behoove him and us if he used a more inclusive (and less Western?) term to denote all of this.
I don't mean to give Castells such a hard time, really, but I can't help but be at least a little prickly when I engage with writing that conveys liberatory ideas in such a prescriptive, totalizing manner. What I found as I was reading Networks of Outrage and Hope, is that Castells (like myself in this blog post) generally articulates many of these ideas in the passive voice. Which is to say that while he takes pains to deduce and arrive at his claims, these claims tend to take on a rather direct, colloquial, and implicit form that undermined the part of his project that sought to construct that universal paradigm. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
The networked social movements of our time are largely based on the Internet, a necessary though not sufficient component of their collective action. The digital social networks based on the Internet and on wireless platforms are decisive tools for mobilizing, for organizing, for deliberating, for coordinating and for deciding. Yet, the role of the Internet goes beyond instrumentality: it creates the conditions for a form of shared practice that allows a leaderless movement to survive, deliberate, coordinate and expand. It protects the movement against the repression of their liberated physical spaces by maintaining communication among the people within the movement and with society at large in the long march of social change that is required to overcome institutionalized domination (Juris 2008). (229)
Perhaps I might be in the minority of readers who are less inclined and comfortable embracing the liberatory potential of theory when it appears to become more and more invested in certainties and definition, but I hope (there's that word again) that my views and critiques are taken with a grain of salt. My goal in this blog post was not to tear Castells down and/or undermine his overall project in the book. Rather, I have merely sought to avoid taking theory as axiomatic or inherently true, to push back against those components that seem to depart from the author's lofty project, and to meditate upon the sorts of terms that might be used to promote more inclusion and differentiated representation within and outside of universal applications.
Rage Against the Machine - "Testify"
In short, Networks of Outrage and Hope attempts to articulate and theorize the terms through which protest, advocacy, and revolution materialize in the "real world" in the 21st century, and how such activities are spurred by Internet enclaves of dissent and collective action. Castells is particularly interested in the ways in which movements of this kind are, on the one hand, addled by the crippling weight of economic insolvency, and, on the other hand, mobilized by an overwhelming and united sense of outrage and scandalization at related misuses of state power that perpetuate social, cultural, and political inequalities. This outrage, in Castells' estimation, serves as the catalyst for rather profound and potent sentiments of hope, sentiments that ultimately espouse the efficacy of the Internet as a host for legitimate social activism and a space in which likeminded individuals might work together and make wholesale, systematic changes in the "real world."
That being said, I did find many of the premises of Castells' arguments a bit dubious, particularly in light of the texts we have read up to this point in the semester. Indeed, while the case studies that Castells analyzes in the text (Tunisia, Iceland, Egypt, etc.) perhaps in some way attest to the veracity and potency of the paradigm he constructs in Networks of Outrage and Hope, I did not always feel as if he attended to enough of the complexities of articulating a "one-size-fits-all" paradigm. To be clear, though, I give Castells more credit than that, as I do trust that he might also be flexible as he continues his research. I just find it a bit problematic when he states things like, "By sharing sorrow and hope in the free public space of the Internet, by connecting to each other, and by envisioning projects from multiple sources of being, individuals formed networks, regardless of their personal views or organizational attachments" (2).
On the one hand, I understand the rhetorical purpose of using terms like "outrage" and "hope" to apply to radically different and disparate individuals and communities, whom form these sorts of digital collectivities "regardless of their personal views or organizational attachments." I mean, commonalities and overlapping interests across difference(s) can certainly help expand what constitutes "collective action" and extend membership to such a collectivity to a wider and wider population, right?
On the other hand, by perpetually gesturing to these shared interests, Castells might overlook the virtues and ethics of preserving and keeping in mind that which distinguishes one manner of "outrage" and "hope" from another. In an effort to stoke the fires of collective action, I fear that Castells tacitly stabilizes human experience and activity in ways that could "ghettoize" expressions of "outrage" and "hope" that do not conform to his own designations. And while the case studies perhaps seek to make such distinctions clearer, they still serve as instruments and/or premises for his larger argument in Networks of Outrage and Hope, and his efforts to construct a paradigm around these case studies. Not to mention, his reference to "the free public space of the Internet" presupposes levels of accessibility to not only the content available on the Internet, but also the Internet and digital technologies themselves. Castells attempts to address this at particular points throughout the book, but not, in my mind, in a sustained enough manner that would truly allow readers to imagine as global a reach for his paradigm as he suggests.
These omissions and/or underdeveloped components of Castells' argument are made all the more apparent in his casual investment in the prospects for "democracy" within and outside of the networks he represents in his book. On one of the final pages of Networks of Outrage and Hope, he writes, "The legacy of networked social movements will have been to raise the possibility of re-learning how to live together. In real democracy" (246). It is important to note that the legacy of Castells' project rests on a deficit model that suggests that the social, cultural, and political relationships and power structures that comprise communal life in the 21st century are broken and/or untenable in terms of enacting systematic changes. While I generally agree with Castells on this point and don't necessarily find this terribly provocative, I find myself terrified by the way in which he suggests that a "real democracy" might somehow spur authentic and valuable revolutionary activity and change. By harking to "democracy" in this way, he may perhaps be seeking to re-claim or re-purpose the "colonizer's language," so to speak, but this intent raises important questions about the relative "capital" of a term that has been bandied about in the Western world within neo-colonial and peace-making endeavors. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if Castells' general conceit in Networks of Outrage and Hope is not only to unpack various case studies but also construct a more universal paradigm around the fruitful relationship between the Internet and the "real world" in terms of enacting change and advocating for social justice, it might behoove him and us if he used a more inclusive (and less Western?) term to denote all of this.
I don't mean to give Castells such a hard time, really, but I can't help but be at least a little prickly when I engage with writing that conveys liberatory ideas in such a prescriptive, totalizing manner. What I found as I was reading Networks of Outrage and Hope, is that Castells (like myself in this blog post) generally articulates many of these ideas in the passive voice. Which is to say that while he takes pains to deduce and arrive at his claims, these claims tend to take on a rather direct, colloquial, and implicit form that undermined the part of his project that sought to construct that universal paradigm. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
The networked social movements of our time are largely based on the Internet, a necessary though not sufficient component of their collective action. The digital social networks based on the Internet and on wireless platforms are decisive tools for mobilizing, for organizing, for deliberating, for coordinating and for deciding. Yet, the role of the Internet goes beyond instrumentality: it creates the conditions for a form of shared practice that allows a leaderless movement to survive, deliberate, coordinate and expand. It protects the movement against the repression of their liberated physical spaces by maintaining communication among the people within the movement and with society at large in the long march of social change that is required to overcome institutionalized domination (Juris 2008). (229)
Perhaps I might be in the minority of readers who are less inclined and comfortable embracing the liberatory potential of theory when it appears to become more and more invested in certainties and definition, but I hope (there's that word again) that my views and critiques are taken with a grain of salt. My goal in this blog post was not to tear Castells down and/or undermine his overall project in the book. Rather, I have merely sought to avoid taking theory as axiomatic or inherently true, to push back against those components that seem to depart from the author's lofty project, and to meditate upon the sorts of terms that might be used to promote more inclusion and differentiated representation within and outside of universal applications.
Rage Against the Machine - "Testify"
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Article Conversation #1: Representing "Mixedblood" and Hybrid Bodies in "Stable" and "Menu-driven" Discursive Spaces
In the Introduction to Race After the Internet, editors Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White re-approach and build upon Nakamura's earlier conceptualizations of race, identity, and the symbiotic relationship between the "real world" and cyberspace. Nakamura's Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet articulated the ways in which the Internet serves as a space where "race happens" (111), a space where marginalized individuals are not afforded the safety or the luxury of anonymity or identity tourism, a space where marginalized bodies ultimately remain marginalized and "stable signifiers of otherness" (90) emerge and acquire meaning.
I wrote about this text and Nakamura's project rather extensively in my blog post last week, so I will refrain from re-stating all of that again here, but it is important to note that while Cybertypes mapped the terrain of cyberspace and its attendant hostilities towards "otherness" and "people of color," the Introduction to Race After the Internet seeks to offer relevant and potent spaces in which to respond to and challenge the limitations and xenophobia that characterizes cyberspace. Which is to say that despite how suffocating and objectionable cyberspace might be for "Others" and "people of color," Nakamura and Chow-White identify prospects for resistance and disruption of existing stereo- and cyber-types in online spaces.
By likening race to a technology in its own right, Nakamura and Chow-White embolden Nakamura's previous conceptualizations of the relationship between race, identity, and the Internet, placing a particular emphasis on "re-envision[ing] race as a form of encoding, rather than as a paint-by-numbers kit of stereotypes" (9). Though I would not go so far as to say that Cybertypes was more helpless, concrete, or deterministic in its approach to deconstructing stereo- and cyber-types, I would say that they do seem to strike a more pronounced and strategic contrarian attitude in Race After the Internet. Whereas Cybertypes mapped the terrain of Nakamura's argument, Race After the Internet serves as more of a guideline for actually navigating and perhaps "decoding" this landscape through individual practices. Indeed, Nakamura and Chow-White emphasize the relative malleability of these purported "stable signifiers of otherness," a view that empowers Internet users to "execute race" differently in and through the very medium that marginalizes them.
Doctor Kristin Arola's essay, "It's My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood," in many ways dramatizes the tensions and anxieties around "executing race" and navigating an "unsympathetic" and "deterministic" landscape on the Internet. In this essay, Arola analyzes three user profiles of mixed-race Native Americans on the social media platform, MySpace. Much in the vein of Nakamura's critique of "menu-driven identities," she explores the ways in which all three of these individuals represent themselves and their racial identities in light of their "Mixedblood." In the "real world," these hybrid bodies exist in fraught and intermediary social, cultural, and political spaces, spaces that therefore do not necessarily "fit into" the "stable signifiers of otherness" or "menu-driven identities" articulated in cyberspace and particularly the options made available on MySpace.
Arola introduces the notion of "regalia," a term that refers to "the dance outfit one wears during a powwow" in order to interrogate the online performances that the aforementioned users engage in on MySpace, not as a neutral site for garb and costume but an "intimate expression of self," a profound and deliberate negotiation of identity (214). This "material expression of identity," she suggests, "encourages an examination of online identities as part of the complex ecology of meaning and not merely as an isolated snapshot of performance" (214). In so doing, Arola frames "regalia" as an important site for resisting dominant codes of race, ethnicity, sex, and gender, one that seeks to create space for and generate conversation around "Mixedblood" in both the "real world" and cyberspace.
Arola's project responds to prevailing attitudes in both the "real world" and cyberspace that, by design, attempt "[t]o unsee mixedblood, or to only see her in terms of Indian or non-Indian," a view that ultimately re-inscribes the sorts of binaries and "static categories" that stifle attempts to locate hybrid identities within an established or "legible" continuum of identity categories (217). Arola's observations of the MySpace user profiles for the three "Mixedblood" Native American subjects in her essay, however, pushes back against these ossified and ossifying codes and systems that demand a "one-size-fits-all" approach to racial identification. On the contrary, these profiles reveal a continuum of sorts in which these "Mixedblood" users might perpetuate or challenge existing stereo- and cyber-types.
If anything, Arola's analysis of these profiles illustrates how suffocating and destructive these "stable signifiers of otherness" and "menu-driven identities" truly are for those of "Mixedblood," demanding in many ways that these individuals perpetually define and justify their hybridity and act as thralls to a white, heterosexual gaze that seeks to narrativize their lives and beings. Adam's MySpace in particular dramatizes the pressures and anxieties that emerge from responding to this gaze, as it conveys his "material discomfort with identifying as mixed" (221) and the absolute poverty of discursive spaces in which he might "'explain in full what [being Mixedblood] means to me'" (220).
While Adam's MySpace profile seems to represent the fatigue associated with projects that advocate "seeing Mixedblood," Erica's MySpace profile represents "Mixedblood" and hybridity as an "embodied visual act," one that blurs the lines between the "real world" and cyberspace by pushing back against the "visual expectations of the Indian" (224). Rather than disregard or avoid the discomfort of finding a place for "Mixedblood" and hybridity by identifying herself according to a stable gradient of identity categories, Erica occupies a "middle ground" between such identity categories, in a sense performing "Mixedblood" and hybridity in and through her regalia. In so doing, Erica's MySpace profile pushes back against this stable gradient of identity categories, instead embracing her intermediary position and its attendant "slippages," "slippages" that perform "the messiness of being situated in the middle" (225) and thus attenuate the demands of stereo- and cyber-types.
I wrote about this text and Nakamura's project rather extensively in my blog post last week, so I will refrain from re-stating all of that again here, but it is important to note that while Cybertypes mapped the terrain of cyberspace and its attendant hostilities towards "otherness" and "people of color," the Introduction to Race After the Internet seeks to offer relevant and potent spaces in which to respond to and challenge the limitations and xenophobia that characterizes cyberspace. Which is to say that despite how suffocating and objectionable cyberspace might be for "Others" and "people of color," Nakamura and Chow-White identify prospects for resistance and disruption of existing stereo- and cyber-types in online spaces.
By likening race to a technology in its own right, Nakamura and Chow-White embolden Nakamura's previous conceptualizations of the relationship between race, identity, and the Internet, placing a particular emphasis on "re-envision[ing] race as a form of encoding, rather than as a paint-by-numbers kit of stereotypes" (9). Though I would not go so far as to say that Cybertypes was more helpless, concrete, or deterministic in its approach to deconstructing stereo- and cyber-types, I would say that they do seem to strike a more pronounced and strategic contrarian attitude in Race After the Internet. Whereas Cybertypes mapped the terrain of Nakamura's argument, Race After the Internet serves as more of a guideline for actually navigating and perhaps "decoding" this landscape through individual practices. Indeed, Nakamura and Chow-White emphasize the relative malleability of these purported "stable signifiers of otherness," a view that empowers Internet users to "execute race" differently in and through the very medium that marginalizes them.
Doctor Kristin Arola's essay, "It's My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood," in many ways dramatizes the tensions and anxieties around "executing race" and navigating an "unsympathetic" and "deterministic" landscape on the Internet. In this essay, Arola analyzes three user profiles of mixed-race Native Americans on the social media platform, MySpace. Much in the vein of Nakamura's critique of "menu-driven identities," she explores the ways in which all three of these individuals represent themselves and their racial identities in light of their "Mixedblood." In the "real world," these hybrid bodies exist in fraught and intermediary social, cultural, and political spaces, spaces that therefore do not necessarily "fit into" the "stable signifiers of otherness" or "menu-driven identities" articulated in cyberspace and particularly the options made available on MySpace.
Arola introduces the notion of "regalia," a term that refers to "the dance outfit one wears during a powwow" in order to interrogate the online performances that the aforementioned users engage in on MySpace, not as a neutral site for garb and costume but an "intimate expression of self," a profound and deliberate negotiation of identity (214). This "material expression of identity," she suggests, "encourages an examination of online identities as part of the complex ecology of meaning and not merely as an isolated snapshot of performance" (214). In so doing, Arola frames "regalia" as an important site for resisting dominant codes of race, ethnicity, sex, and gender, one that seeks to create space for and generate conversation around "Mixedblood" in both the "real world" and cyberspace.
Arola's project responds to prevailing attitudes in both the "real world" and cyberspace that, by design, attempt "[t]o unsee mixedblood, or to only see her in terms of Indian or non-Indian," a view that ultimately re-inscribes the sorts of binaries and "static categories" that stifle attempts to locate hybrid identities within an established or "legible" continuum of identity categories (217). Arola's observations of the MySpace user profiles for the three "Mixedblood" Native American subjects in her essay, however, pushes back against these ossified and ossifying codes and systems that demand a "one-size-fits-all" approach to racial identification. On the contrary, these profiles reveal a continuum of sorts in which these "Mixedblood" users might perpetuate or challenge existing stereo- and cyber-types.
If anything, Arola's analysis of these profiles illustrates how suffocating and destructive these "stable signifiers of otherness" and "menu-driven identities" truly are for those of "Mixedblood," demanding in many ways that these individuals perpetually define and justify their hybridity and act as thralls to a white, heterosexual gaze that seeks to narrativize their lives and beings. Adam's MySpace in particular dramatizes the pressures and anxieties that emerge from responding to this gaze, as it conveys his "material discomfort with identifying as mixed" (221) and the absolute poverty of discursive spaces in which he might "'explain in full what [being Mixedblood] means to me'" (220).
While Adam's MySpace profile seems to represent the fatigue associated with projects that advocate "seeing Mixedblood," Erica's MySpace profile represents "Mixedblood" and hybridity as an "embodied visual act," one that blurs the lines between the "real world" and cyberspace by pushing back against the "visual expectations of the Indian" (224). Rather than disregard or avoid the discomfort of finding a place for "Mixedblood" and hybridity by identifying herself according to a stable gradient of identity categories, Erica occupies a "middle ground" between such identity categories, in a sense performing "Mixedblood" and hybridity in and through her regalia. In so doing, Erica's MySpace profile pushes back against this stable gradient of identity categories, instead embracing her intermediary position and its attendant "slippages," "slippages" that perform "the messiness of being situated in the middle" (225) and thus attenuate the demands of stereo- and cyber-types.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Blog Post #3: Race, Disembodiment, and Privilege on the Internet
Lisa Nakamura's Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet explores the ways in which racial and ethnic stereotypes that originate in the "real world" pervade and underpin the overall structure, content, and discursive space of the Internet. Nakamura offers a compelling and incisive argument that traces the Internet back to its origins, placing a particular emphasis on the notion that "people of color were functionally absent from the Internet at precisely that time when its discourse was acquiring its distinctive contours" (xii).
Cyberspace as we know it today was therefore created for people of color, whom Nakamura dubs "online roadkill" (xii), a space that ultimately did not favor, complement, or privilege those whom are already marginalized in the offline world. In this sense, marginalized individuals, including people of color, face a different and more fraught set of challenges when they enter and navigate the medium of the Internet. Indeed, Nakamura suggests that if "being raced is in itself a disorienting position," then "[b]eing raced in cyberspace is doubly disorienting, creating multiple layers of identity construction" (xv).
Nakamura locates and expounds upon this exacerbated feeling of disorientation in and through the idea of "identity tourism," which in many ways conceptualized the Internet as a space for anonymity, a space in which users might divest themselves of their identities (and, by extension, their physical bodies) in the "real world" and try on or perform new or different identities in the online world. However, while the prospects for this sort of "identity prostheses" purportedly claimed to create a purified space divorced from issues of race, sex, gender, and ethnicity, it did little to nothing to and for the plight of those marginalized individuals whom carried "the burdens of physical 'handicaps' such as age, gender, and race" (5).
Ultimately, Nakamura seems to ask what specifically might such "fluid bodies" be if not raced, sexed, gendered, and ethnicized? And if these "fluid bodies" are indeed coded in this manner, what is the relationship between the "real world" and its online counterpart? In what ways do these "fluid bodies" contribute to and/or extend existing racial and ethnic stereotypes and marginalized discourses?
Nakamura's argument is predicated on the idea that the capacity to assume "fluid identities" represents a privileged position, one that is not "much use to those whose problems exist strictly (or even mostly) in the real world" (11). Physical bodies do not cease to be raced, sexed, gendered, and ethnicized in cyberspace. If anything, Nakamura claims, the terms that constitute, police, and dictate physical bodies are exacerbated on the Internet. Indeed, the structure and design of the Internet is organized in and around "whiteness," a racial category that exists within the larger discourse of race in the "real world" yet remains "defined by its invisibility" and its capacity to assume a "default" racial position in cyberspace (105).
By allowing iterations of "whiteness" to lead, define, and manipulate cyberspace without recourse to its own stakes, motivations, and desires, the Internet functions as a "place where race 'happens'" (111), a place where racial and ethnic categories are crystallized and further corroborated. What emerges then, as Nakamura suggests, are "stable signifiers of otherness . . . [that] guarantee the Western subject that his position, wherever he may choose to go today, remains privileged" (90). "Whiteness," however, purports to escape the reach of these "stable signifiers of otherness," remaining elusive, disembodied, and, most importantly, "authentic" and "un-racialized."
Charlie Rose Interviews Toni Morrison about "the absence of race"
Junot Diaz discusses white supremacy and narrativizing the world (starts 14:20)
Cyberspace as we know it today was therefore created for people of color, whom Nakamura dubs "online roadkill" (xii), a space that ultimately did not favor, complement, or privilege those whom are already marginalized in the offline world. In this sense, marginalized individuals, including people of color, face a different and more fraught set of challenges when they enter and navigate the medium of the Internet. Indeed, Nakamura suggests that if "being raced is in itself a disorienting position," then "[b]eing raced in cyberspace is doubly disorienting, creating multiple layers of identity construction" (xv).
Nakamura locates and expounds upon this exacerbated feeling of disorientation in and through the idea of "identity tourism," which in many ways conceptualized the Internet as a space for anonymity, a space in which users might divest themselves of their identities (and, by extension, their physical bodies) in the "real world" and try on or perform new or different identities in the online world. However, while the prospects for this sort of "identity prostheses" purportedly claimed to create a purified space divorced from issues of race, sex, gender, and ethnicity, it did little to nothing to and for the plight of those marginalized individuals whom carried "the burdens of physical 'handicaps' such as age, gender, and race" (5).
Ultimately, Nakamura seems to ask what specifically might such "fluid bodies" be if not raced, sexed, gendered, and ethnicized? And if these "fluid bodies" are indeed coded in this manner, what is the relationship between the "real world" and its online counterpart? In what ways do these "fluid bodies" contribute to and/or extend existing racial and ethnic stereotypes and marginalized discourses?
Nakamura's argument is predicated on the idea that the capacity to assume "fluid identities" represents a privileged position, one that is not "much use to those whose problems exist strictly (or even mostly) in the real world" (11). Physical bodies do not cease to be raced, sexed, gendered, and ethnicized in cyberspace. If anything, Nakamura claims, the terms that constitute, police, and dictate physical bodies are exacerbated on the Internet. Indeed, the structure and design of the Internet is organized in and around "whiteness," a racial category that exists within the larger discourse of race in the "real world" yet remains "defined by its invisibility" and its capacity to assume a "default" racial position in cyberspace (105).
By allowing iterations of "whiteness" to lead, define, and manipulate cyberspace without recourse to its own stakes, motivations, and desires, the Internet functions as a "place where race 'happens'" (111), a place where racial and ethnic categories are crystallized and further corroborated. What emerges then, as Nakamura suggests, are "stable signifiers of otherness . . . [that] guarantee the Western subject that his position, wherever he may choose to go today, remains privileged" (90). "Whiteness," however, purports to escape the reach of these "stable signifiers of otherness," remaining elusive, disembodied, and, most importantly, "authentic" and "un-racialized."
Charlie Rose Interviews Toni Morrison about "the absence of race"
Junot Diaz discusses white supremacy and narrativizing the world (starts 14:20)
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Blog Post #2: Education, Social Justice, and Digital Technologies
The final five chapters of T. V. Reed's Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era provide less of an overview of the general landscape of digital technologies in the 21st century than a more nuanced analysis of some of its constituent parts. Reed explores the political implications and liberatory potential of digital technologies; the role that violence ("militainment") and sexuality play in video games; the ways in which digital technologies are used in the classroom; and issues of accessibility and representation on the "world wide web" and "the real world."
Reed's project seems to be predicated on the idea that those who employ digital technologies most effectively and creatively ultimately determine their uses, perceptions, and efficacies. Which is to say that there are certainly advantages and privileges associated with, well, accessibility for one, but also advanced digital or technological literacies as well. However, Reed seems most concerned with conveying the idea that digital techologies are not so much agents in themselves as tools or mediums that might be manipulated and mobilized in aid of any number of different purposes and ends. And it is an agent's prerogative, not the digital technology itself, that determines these purposes and ends, which in turn constitutes how digital technologies are defined, understood, and used.
In keeping these particular ideas at the forefront of his project, Reed seems to be responding to both proponents and detractors of digital technologies, identifying with the liberatory potential of digital immersion while remaining firmly situated in the real world and its multitude of social, cultural, and political inequalities. In many ways, Reed celebrates uses of digital technologies that pander to both of these "worlds," truly symbiotic assemblages of the digital and the real that engage in advocacy and social justice. Indeed, he suggests that the efficacy of "digital protests" rests on the notion that "it is close connection to 'real world' away-from-keyboard sites that makes online netroots activism most effective" (134).
I tend to agree with Reed on a number of fronts here, particularly the zeal he expresses regarding constructing more bridges to the real world. For this reason I found Chapter 8 really compelling and engaging because it spoke so directly to many of my own interests and anxieties regarding using digital technologies in the classroom. Whereas detractors of this marriage, condescendingly dubbed "edutainment," seem to denigrate the ways in which "online spaces may be undermining our ability to think linearly, to pay attention to long narrative storylines, and to grasp complex sustained logical arguments" (170)--and I suspect that Reed is NOT in this camp--I would say, that learning is taking place, that something is being absorbed. In fact, a lot of things are being absorbed. In what ways all of this information is relayed or compartmentalized is perhaps a more interesting and plausible line of inquiry. No matter the answer, it strikes me that the extent to which digital technologies have certainly transformed information and learning dramatically, in my mind, exacerbates the need to engage these technologies in the classroom.
Yet Reed makes a very astute and important distinction in this chapter between using and integrating technology in the classroom (169) that I feel is important to any pedagogy that employs digital technologies in any way. I was particularly taken with his unrelenting commitment to matters of social justice and his unwillingness to equivocate from the "[r]eal concerns about digitizing education," which always seem to gravitate around "issues of social fairness, equality and digital inclusion, as linked to creative teaching" (171). Which is to say that there is likely a world of difference between screening a movie like Crash with minimal, superficial, and stereotypical gestures to race as an abstract concept and using a song like Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty" as a point of entry for discussing Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson, Missouri and/or issues of whiteness in the surrounding community.
The difference lies in our capacity as instructors to enter different ideological and cultural spaces, not so much to make such spaces palatable to an existing space. Over the course of the last few years I've really taken to the idea of "making the familiar strange." Oftentimes that work has been rather intimidating but immensely rewarding. And I guess in the spirit of that mantra I ought to consider what a classroom WITHOUT digital technologies might look like and how I would navigate that space. Food for thought.
Chamillionaire - "Ridin'"
Reed's project seems to be predicated on the idea that those who employ digital technologies most effectively and creatively ultimately determine their uses, perceptions, and efficacies. Which is to say that there are certainly advantages and privileges associated with, well, accessibility for one, but also advanced digital or technological literacies as well. However, Reed seems most concerned with conveying the idea that digital techologies are not so much agents in themselves as tools or mediums that might be manipulated and mobilized in aid of any number of different purposes and ends. And it is an agent's prerogative, not the digital technology itself, that determines these purposes and ends, which in turn constitutes how digital technologies are defined, understood, and used.
In keeping these particular ideas at the forefront of his project, Reed seems to be responding to both proponents and detractors of digital technologies, identifying with the liberatory potential of digital immersion while remaining firmly situated in the real world and its multitude of social, cultural, and political inequalities. In many ways, Reed celebrates uses of digital technologies that pander to both of these "worlds," truly symbiotic assemblages of the digital and the real that engage in advocacy and social justice. Indeed, he suggests that the efficacy of "digital protests" rests on the notion that "it is close connection to 'real world' away-from-keyboard sites that makes online netroots activism most effective" (134).
I tend to agree with Reed on a number of fronts here, particularly the zeal he expresses regarding constructing more bridges to the real world. For this reason I found Chapter 8 really compelling and engaging because it spoke so directly to many of my own interests and anxieties regarding using digital technologies in the classroom. Whereas detractors of this marriage, condescendingly dubbed "edutainment," seem to denigrate the ways in which "online spaces may be undermining our ability to think linearly, to pay attention to long narrative storylines, and to grasp complex sustained logical arguments" (170)--and I suspect that Reed is NOT in this camp--I would say, that learning is taking place, that something is being absorbed. In fact, a lot of things are being absorbed. In what ways all of this information is relayed or compartmentalized is perhaps a more interesting and plausible line of inquiry. No matter the answer, it strikes me that the extent to which digital technologies have certainly transformed information and learning dramatically, in my mind, exacerbates the need to engage these technologies in the classroom.
Yet Reed makes a very astute and important distinction in this chapter between using and integrating technology in the classroom (169) that I feel is important to any pedagogy that employs digital technologies in any way. I was particularly taken with his unrelenting commitment to matters of social justice and his unwillingness to equivocate from the "[r]eal concerns about digitizing education," which always seem to gravitate around "issues of social fairness, equality and digital inclusion, as linked to creative teaching" (171). Which is to say that there is likely a world of difference between screening a movie like Crash with minimal, superficial, and stereotypical gestures to race as an abstract concept and using a song like Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty" as a point of entry for discussing Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson, Missouri and/or issues of whiteness in the surrounding community.
The difference lies in our capacity as instructors to enter different ideological and cultural spaces, not so much to make such spaces palatable to an existing space. Over the course of the last few years I've really taken to the idea of "making the familiar strange." Oftentimes that work has been rather intimidating but immensely rewarding. And I guess in the spirit of that mantra I ought to consider what a classroom WITHOUT digital technologies might look like and how I would navigate that space. Food for thought.
Chamillionaire - "Ridin'"
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Blog Post #1: Photo Leaks, Victim Blaming, and the "Grotto"-ization of Sexual Expression
Amidst my reading of the first five chapters of T. V. Reed's Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change, something happened. Something happened that brought a number of the themes and anxieties expressed in Reed's book to the forefront of news outlets, social media, and popular culture: nude photographs of a bevy of Hollywood actresses and celebrities were leaked on the Internet. Though there is still no confirmation about how these photographs were acquired, reports have suggested that someone (or a group of people considering the sheer breadth of individuals and photographs exposed in the leak) likely hacked into or had some access to the smart phones or cloud services of these Hollywood actresses and celebrities.
I am here making a conscious ethical and rhetorical choice not to name these individuals, particularly in light of the ways in which these photographs have been described by journalists, newscasters, and on message boards and social media. Not to mention, the hacker(s) remain anonymous as these photographs continue to be copied, re-posted, and otherwise circulated throughout the World Wide Web.
In the interest of putting all of this into conversation with Reed's book, I would like to take a moment to provide a brief summary of his project in Digitized Lives. Simply put, Digitized Lives is designed as a survey of sorts of the impact of digital technologies, namely the Internet, upon the ways in which we communicate and relate to one another. Throughout the book, Reed places a particular emphasis on the notion that "digital devices are never culturally neutral" (13), thus implying that the production, consumption, and use of digital devices have far-reaching social and political consequences that in many ways implicate users and provide the interpersonal scaffolding that forms the cultural landscape we navigate on a daily basis. That's a mouthful, I know, but stay with me.
Reed contests earlier conceptualizations of the World Wide Web as a "place beyond race, sex, and gender" (54), pointing to the ways in which the vectors of race, sex, gender, class, disability, environmentalism, social justice, and geographical location inform and/or are altogether disregarded by mainstream (read: Western, white, heterosexual, male) establishments. Salient to the overall project in Digitized Lives is the role that bodies and embodiment play in constructing and/or deconstructing the bridge that binds online and offline identities and milieus. While Reed identifies strains of the post-human in online efforts to somehow assume or "tour" a new or different identity, he also forecloses the prospects of divesting oneself of their bodily existence offline. Indeed, he makes it a point to suggest that "merely touring an identity is very different from profoundly inhabiting a body that is frequently subjected to discrimination" (55).
Having now provided more of a foundation for what Reed is attempting to accomplish in Digitized Lives, I would like to return to the matter of the leaked photographs. Over the last few days since the photographs were leaked, I have encountered a number of articles and messages that describe them as "raunchy," "naughty," "scandalous," or in some way indicative of the "dirty side" of the Hollywood actresses and celebrities that were exposed.
What's so disturbing about this sort of vernacular is that it detracts in many ways from the actual criminal act that has taken place. Indeed, it becomes unclear whether the aforementioned adjectives pertain to the act of the hacker(s) whom violated the privacy of several young women and, frankly, engaged in sexual assault, by illegally circulating these nude photographs; the act of the Hollywood actresses and celebrities in recording themselves in "compromising" sexual situations; or, most troubling, the act of the Hollywood actresses and celebrities for being in "compromising" sexual situations to begin with.
This is not an issue of "semantics" or "rhetoric." In fact, these purported deflections away from the matter of the actual photo leak might suggest in some ways that those whom had their nude photographs leaked actually share and/or shoulder the responsibility for how they were represented within multimedia that was seemingly not at all intended for the World Wide Web. By using terms like "raunchy," "naughty," "scandalous," "dirty side," or gesturing in any other way to sexual deviance in relation to these leaked nude photographs, these "reports" tacitly attach this terminology and its attendant implications to the Hollywood actresses and celebrities--the victims--themselves.
Victim blaming of this sort not only undermines many of the prospects for engaging in a compelling and important dialogue about privacy measures in the digital age, it aspires to police and circumscribe what constitutes sexuality. And, more specifically, it perverts and "grotto"-izes a pretty benign form of sexual expression. Listen, every human being ever has been naked at least one time in their lives. I don't say this to minimize what has taken place here, but to perhaps caution those who might discuss this matter in any detail or forum against using terminology that might implicate any of the victims of this crime and deflect attention away from the crime itself. No matter how you identify in terms of sex and gender, there's actually quite a bit at stake in the ways in which sexuality and sexual expression are communicated.
And, fellow dudes, please ruminate for a moment on the male-female ratio of leaked photographs now or ever. Meditate for a moment on the fact that pretty much 99.9% of the time, it is women who are targeted in photo leaks of this sort. So, it might be a drag to consider how the rhetoric surrounding this photo leak and, of course, the photo leak itself, contributes to divisions of power, limitations upon the prospects for self-identification, the prevalence of rape and sexual assault, etc., but it's your responsibility. So do it, and for God's sake, please understand the difference between sex and gender.
I am here making a conscious ethical and rhetorical choice not to name these individuals, particularly in light of the ways in which these photographs have been described by journalists, newscasters, and on message boards and social media. Not to mention, the hacker(s) remain anonymous as these photographs continue to be copied, re-posted, and otherwise circulated throughout the World Wide Web.
In the interest of putting all of this into conversation with Reed's book, I would like to take a moment to provide a brief summary of his project in Digitized Lives. Simply put, Digitized Lives is designed as a survey of sorts of the impact of digital technologies, namely the Internet, upon the ways in which we communicate and relate to one another. Throughout the book, Reed places a particular emphasis on the notion that "digital devices are never culturally neutral" (13), thus implying that the production, consumption, and use of digital devices have far-reaching social and political consequences that in many ways implicate users and provide the interpersonal scaffolding that forms the cultural landscape we navigate on a daily basis. That's a mouthful, I know, but stay with me.
Reed contests earlier conceptualizations of the World Wide Web as a "place beyond race, sex, and gender" (54), pointing to the ways in which the vectors of race, sex, gender, class, disability, environmentalism, social justice, and geographical location inform and/or are altogether disregarded by mainstream (read: Western, white, heterosexual, male) establishments. Salient to the overall project in Digitized Lives is the role that bodies and embodiment play in constructing and/or deconstructing the bridge that binds online and offline identities and milieus. While Reed identifies strains of the post-human in online efforts to somehow assume or "tour" a new or different identity, he also forecloses the prospects of divesting oneself of their bodily existence offline. Indeed, he makes it a point to suggest that "merely touring an identity is very different from profoundly inhabiting a body that is frequently subjected to discrimination" (55).
Having now provided more of a foundation for what Reed is attempting to accomplish in Digitized Lives, I would like to return to the matter of the leaked photographs. Over the last few days since the photographs were leaked, I have encountered a number of articles and messages that describe them as "raunchy," "naughty," "scandalous," or in some way indicative of the "dirty side" of the Hollywood actresses and celebrities that were exposed.
What's so disturbing about this sort of vernacular is that it detracts in many ways from the actual criminal act that has taken place. Indeed, it becomes unclear whether the aforementioned adjectives pertain to the act of the hacker(s) whom violated the privacy of several young women and, frankly, engaged in sexual assault, by illegally circulating these nude photographs; the act of the Hollywood actresses and celebrities in recording themselves in "compromising" sexual situations; or, most troubling, the act of the Hollywood actresses and celebrities for being in "compromising" sexual situations to begin with.
This is not an issue of "semantics" or "rhetoric." In fact, these purported deflections away from the matter of the actual photo leak might suggest in some ways that those whom had their nude photographs leaked actually share and/or shoulder the responsibility for how they were represented within multimedia that was seemingly not at all intended for the World Wide Web. By using terms like "raunchy," "naughty," "scandalous," "dirty side," or gesturing in any other way to sexual deviance in relation to these leaked nude photographs, these "reports" tacitly attach this terminology and its attendant implications to the Hollywood actresses and celebrities--the victims--themselves.
Victim blaming of this sort not only undermines many of the prospects for engaging in a compelling and important dialogue about privacy measures in the digital age, it aspires to police and circumscribe what constitutes sexuality. And, more specifically, it perverts and "grotto"-izes a pretty benign form of sexual expression. Listen, every human being ever has been naked at least one time in their lives. I don't say this to minimize what has taken place here, but to perhaps caution those who might discuss this matter in any detail or forum against using terminology that might implicate any of the victims of this crime and deflect attention away from the crime itself. No matter how you identify in terms of sex and gender, there's actually quite a bit at stake in the ways in which sexuality and sexual expression are communicated.
And, fellow dudes, please ruminate for a moment on the male-female ratio of leaked photographs now or ever. Meditate for a moment on the fact that pretty much 99.9% of the time, it is women who are targeted in photo leaks of this sort. So, it might be a drag to consider how the rhetoric surrounding this photo leak and, of course, the photo leak itself, contributes to divisions of power, limitations upon the prospects for self-identification, the prevalence of rape and sexual assault, etc., but it's your responsibility. So do it, and for God's sake, please understand the difference between sex and gender.
Greetings and Disclosures
First and foremost, I'd just like to take a second to thank you for checking out my blog. I've been interested in blogging (though not active, but I'll get into that in a moment) for some time, but haven't really gotten much traction in the smattering of abandoned blogs I've started in the past. The circumstances that prompted me to start this blog, however, will certainly give me the space, forum, and structure to be more consistent and (hopefully) engaging with my approach to the genre.
I am a first-year Ph.D student in Rhetoric and Composition at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. I am currently taking a seminar, ENGL 597 - Studies in Technology and Culture, that asks students to respond to the readings we do in class through an independently-run blog. The instructions are as follows:
"You are responsible for writing a summary for each book we read in class. The summary is due by classtime and must include:
With all of that said, I'm going to work on my first blog post, which covers the first five chapters of T. V. Reed's Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era (Routledge, 2014). I will put many of Reed's ideas in conversation with recent events involving leaked nude photographs of celebrities. Please feel free to read, comment, share, etc. Thanks again for giving my blog a gander.
I am a first-year Ph.D student in Rhetoric and Composition at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. I am currently taking a seminar, ENGL 597 - Studies in Technology and Culture, that asks students to respond to the readings we do in class through an independently-run blog. The instructions are as follows:
"You are responsible for writing a summary for each book we read in class. The summary is due by classtime and must include:
- the book's main argument summarized in your own words,
- three direct quotes from the book that you feel are important to the overall argument,
- a description of two issues the author raises that you find compelling (you may be compelled because you agree or disagree),
- one image, video, or song/soundclip, that you feel is somehow related to what you took away from reading the book (this is VERY open)."
With all of that said, I'm going to work on my first blog post, which covers the first five chapters of T. V. Reed's Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era (Routledge, 2014). I will put many of Reed's ideas in conversation with recent events involving leaked nude photographs of celebrities. Please feel free to read, comment, share, etc. Thanks again for giving my blog a gander.
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