Blog Post #4.

Blog Post #4.


Let me start by saying that I thought I was supposed to put all of the things we read or watched for this week (and last) into a conversation with each other.   Let me continue by saying that this is because I did not read the directions carefully.   Let me finish by saying that I could be much better at noticing and following directions.

So.....rather than back up and start over, I'll just plow ahead with what I have done because it has been fun and illuminating for me.

The dominant theme in all of these week-four and week-five texts is how the intersection of race and identity gets played out in digital mediums: in particular, these texts look at how identity is constructed, who it is constructed by, and how those constructions are controlled by other people's fears, ignorance, entitlements and tendencies to create categories of exclusion. 


Identity is a powerful construct.  It seems to me that we are always in the process of constructing ourselves, and the degree to which we are free to do that without too many challenging, controlling or opposing opinions about who we are or should be is the degree to which we are privileged (and probably pretty satisfied with our lives).

So when we ask questions like, "Does information really want to be free (emphasis mine)?" (Christen 2870), the answer is: It depends on whose information it is because that determines who has the authority to make the decisions about it. 

On some level, I agree with Noam Chomsky, who (in his delivery of the Potter Memorial lecture) at WSU in 2005, argued that information created on state time (funded by state dollars) should belong to the state and not to the individuals creating (discovering, inventing) it.  (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MeZE1HbRY4)

If we thought about information in social and moral ways rather than in economic ways (Christen 2875), it could be possible for more information to be absorbed into an intellectual commons, or at least possible for more equitable discussion to occur relative to that information.  But we don't.  In this culture, information is not even free when the state has already paid for it.

This obsession with ownership has over-taken public education (particularly in the university) where the comprehension of information is deemed of less importance than the giving of credit to the person who first (or best) articulated it.  But again, it depends on who that person is.  If the person is a state-supported scholar, the information is so valuable that we all-but tape dollar bills onto our in-text attributions.  If the person is (was) an indigenous artist, well, then that work should be in the free museum and belong to everyone. (Read sarcasm here and also read that this thought evolves from having read Kim Christen's article.)

For me Digital Resource Management and the issues it grapples in the management of subaltern resources, is a microcosm of the larger truth that culture-controllers, by having a voice in what is and isn't important in people's historical records, use technologies to script who people can and can not be. It is crucially important to be aware that what has been decided as "public domain" (or not public domain) has not been a consensual or communal process. The decisions have been made by people who have the economic clout to control, highlight or subordinate resources in ways that best benefit them.

In other words, while many try to de-historicize notions of public domain (what is so precious it must be sequestered, and what is so mundane that it can serve as staples for the collective), it is important to realize that this selection process is highly historicized and we should not pretend otherwise (Christen 2880).  This is also the central theme of Cybertypes:  there is huge history behind how individuals are ascribed scripts in the hegemony play by the hegemony playwrights.  If you don't want to play your part, you may end up with no identity at all. And that makes people crazy.  In fact, perhaps one of the most effective punishment for humans is community exile (solitary confinement).

As extensions of cultural values, technologies script people's lives and those scripts often serve as shackles. Nakamura and Chow-White write, "...slavery was a dominant technology in itself" (10).  This statement sure slaps us out of any stupor that technology is somehow, in and of itself, a good thing.  We always have to be noticing how our technologies (as extensions of our cultural values) privilege some and disadvantage others.  We should never be complacent or unconscious about our technologies because we should never be complacent or unconscious about our own actions in the world.  That is how the banality of evil gets played out.

Nakamura and Chow-White write, "Digital technology is here pressed into service as an identity construction aid" (3).  The phrase "pressed into service" makes me think of "techno-slavery," especially if the technology continues to make it possible for people of privilege to construct their identities on the backs of subordinated identities.  How is anything different, if in digital space, white men get to try on  or try on women of color in order to perpetuate the vision of these women as tools and toys for their titilation?

Nakamura nad Chow-White "If racism is a technology, or rather, a systematic way of doing things that operates by mediating between users and techniques to create specific forms of oppression and discrimination, then enforced forgetting of the familial or historical past is surely a key part of it workings" (3).

The 1st part of this quote makes sense to me, but the 2nd part notsomuch.  Isn't racializing based on the insistence of maintaining the memory of a subordinated past?  Isn't that (the idea of a historical worthlessness) what creates the habit or the patterns of identity that serve to keeps people oppressed?   If I put this into conversation with issues related to DRM, I can understand how, while the hegemonic goal might not be to enforce a forgetting of the past, it is perhaps to control the image of that past.  In other words, what the dominant culture selects to preserve of a people's past inevitably creates a forgetting of the things that, if remembered, would not benefit the oppressors' goals.

Vivien Thomas comes to mind here.  He was an African American surgical technician who developed and perfected a heart surgery vital to the survival of "blue babies," but (until recently) the white physician Alfred Blalock got the credit.

Having a safe space to play with identity is also a dominant theme in these texts.  It's my Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood, investigates (in addition to more complex identity construction issues) the way that social networking sites can provide safe space for experimentation with and establishment of self-representations.   This article helped me to see how one can move between logos and mythos (blood quantum and embodied signifiers like regalia) as powerful identity markers either singularly or mixed (Arola 213-215).   Nakamura and Chow-White's  story of Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot's finding out on Public Television that she actually had no American Indian blood quantum is a case-in-point that we are as much who we think (or have been taught to think) we are (mythos) as we are anything real. 

Putting Kristin's article into conversation with the Junot Diaz interview, it became so clear to me that identity crafting (identity emerging) requires safe space for playing with our selves. (Yes I really did mean to say it this way, and I do not use the term "playing" here frivolously.  I use it to indicate a vital activity.)

Junot Diaz's story about the safe identity space he was afforded as a child was powerful. In his interview, Diaz relates how his brothers and sisters (due to both their age and affiliation with the military) protected him from neighborhood bullies who would have humiliated him into silence or self-hatred because he was a "nerd."  He expresses much gratitude for his sibling protectors who secured the necessary space for him to just BE who was.  I think we are all looking for that; it's just that not everyone gets a safe space for it.  The construct of race takes that safe space away from people, both physically and mentally.

An early vision for cyberspace was that it could be this safe space.  But alas, that idealistic hope has fallen to the wayside, and Julian Dibbell's A Rape in Cyberspace is perhaps the most profound articulation of how this fall from Utopic Grace felt.

Same shit, different space.

That's what Cybertypes is getting at.  It is a book calling for us to do what Junot Diaz is asking us to do as well, "To notice how white supremacy narrativizes the world." And this world is both physical and virtual.

 "White people should just shut the fuck up for awhile" (Junot Diaz).

Blog Post #3

Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet

The most important issue in this book is the one that encourages exploiting the potential of the Internet to be a site of subverting the dominant paradigms of oppression and discrimination (146).

Since the Internet has failed to live up to the Utopian predictions of what is possible in a disembodied space (107), it is time to get real and recognize that the Internet is just another institution governed by hegemonic forces and those forces can only be mitigated by conscious, active resistance.  This is vital relative to race, since that is the most dire issue facing this country (and really the whole world).

Beyond that critical call to action, this text really struck some dissonant chords for me.  Most notably, I noticed a disturbing lack of continuity in language usage as the author switched back and forth between endowing technology with human agency and then holding humans accountable for the way we use our tools.
 
Quoting Lev Manovich's call for new terminology and introducing what is meant by "transcoding," Nakamura writes, "If we follow this proposition, we can see that our culture is in the process of being "transcoded" by the computer's "ontology, epistemology, pragmatics" (3).

Nakamura uses this statement to make the argument  for "a new openness in new media studies toward the adoption of a terminology that at least acknowledges the indispensable nature of the computer in the study of new media" (3).

 I agree with the need for the computer to be a central star in new media studies, and I also acknowledge the need for more precise or expansive terminology for the "computerization of culture" (and I agree that academics should be at the helm of it since we "like to make up new words" (1)). I am concerned, however, that in the interim, the unconscious use some of our "old" terms  are creating a problem in our conception of digital tools and their agency.

Referring back to the Manovich quote on the computer's "ontology, epistemology, pragmatics" (and Nakamura's emphasis by re-stating it):  I suggest that computers can't have an ontology. Computers might reflect an ontology, but that is a very different thing from having one.  If we endow computers with the power to have an ideology of being, we endow them with a humanity they do not and should not have.  No matter how excited we are about digital doodads and revolutionary robotics, things constructed of metals and plastics still constitute inanimate and inorganic inventions. The only purpose it might serve to anthropomorphize them might be to scapegoat them with the blame we are too arrogant to accept for ourselves.

Phrases like "the computer determines" (3) or "the Internet propagates, disseminates, and codifies" (3) or "the Utopian ideal of the Internet" (10) or "the Internet causes depression" (28) suggest (subliminally if not overtly) that the tool--or the space--is what is calling the ideological shots.  This is in direct opposition to other statements or phrases in the text that are more conscious of agency--like the nod to the discourse of technological liberation and how it "situates the agency directly where it belongs: with the user" (5) and Nakamura's reminder of the import "of claiming the right agency in our ways of seeing--of being a subject rather than an object of technology" (12).

How we manage this rhetoric of agency is central to our responsible use of technology.  In my experience, we humans have a remarkable tendency for creating ontological and teleological constructs that absolve us from responsibility and accountability for our own actions.  A powerful example of this is in this excerpt from Sophie's Choice: 

 “Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"

And the answer: "Where was man?” 

 ― William Styron, Sophie's Choice

Blaming computers when things go wrong or praising computers when things go right is like blaming God or praising God for things that humans have the agency to control.  Human beings have unbelievable creative and destructive energies; we need to own up to that and be willing to take responsibility for what we create and what we destroy.  (Yes, Virginia, there is a Frankenstein.)

What does this have to do with Cybertypes, Race, Ethnicity and identity? Well, it mostly has to do with my concern that legitimized academic conversation insinuates the ability of technology to remaster race or create harmony in bricolaged spaces when it is human beings in human bodies who have to do that first.  The Internet doesn't create a monoculture anymore than my neighbor's tractor does, and my prosthetic hip doesn't go anywhere without me. (Even though I can't go anywhere without it, it is not what drives this body.)   Even though our technologies might be analogized to a runaway train, it was not the train that decided to run away.

As Robert J. Oppenheimer said: "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you've had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."

That part of this is simple.

What is not so simple is the subject of space or spaces and what humans see fit to put or to do in the spaces we create.   Structures determine the way energy flows (Starhawk).  But one thing that hasn't changed, no matter how much space we create or colonize, is that never has there been a space populated by human bodies or human thoughts or human intentions (based on any historical records of which I am aware) that has been Utopic for more than a month or two. Yes, we should keep trying to make a better world, but we can not expect our tools to do something for us that we have not clearly intended for ourselves. 

Can the master's tools be used to dismantle the master's house?  I think so.  This belief is what motivates me to teach writing.  Writing and rhetoric are most certainly central to the master's tool belt.  But it is not the writing or the rhetoric that dismantles the house.  It is the purposefulness of the carpenter.

Nakamura says, "There is no ignoring that the Internet can and does enable new and insidious forms of racism" (30).   But the Internet is not the problem.  What there is no ignoring is that the world has no shortage of assholes and fear-mongers who believe that more for others means less for them.  This is a myth of scarcity that was not created by the Internet.  In fact, the Internet, as a space imagined out of the ether (in a world of over-crowded cities and grid-locked interstates), is a glaring testimony to the falsity of such limited imagination. 

I am concerned that the disembodied spaces of the Internet have the potential to derail critical cultural conversations about race by creating a diversion of hope that spaces rather than humans will solve this problem.  When the entire continent of Africa has pretty much been left off the digital map (Digitized Lives), when a disease like Ebola is decimating an area of the globe inhabited mostly by black people,  there is no human liberation in cyber-touring someone else's panty-less Geisha identity (43); it is just more titilating conquest; it is just more conspicuous consumption.  It is just more drone-distant distraction.

All culture(s) needs to be under the scrutiny of critical race studies, and any space or place or institution claiming to have found a Kings X from human selfishness and cruelty is lying.  Also, anyone claiming that we are post anything (post-racial, post-colonial, post-human) is similarly deluded.

Nakamura's book Cyber-types brings to light the continued racializing of American (and world) culture, but too much of the argument is buried in a be-labored and often contradictory lament about the failure of the Internet to be realized as a liberatory space for all identities.  The real crux of the matter is this truth Nakamura tells: "Conversations about how the web can "wipe out" race may obscure the fact that users do indeed possess bodies that are raced--bodies that are denied housing and discriminated against in job interviews and that suffer institutionalized racism offline" (107).

What the conversations about the web also obscure is who is responsible.

 It is not the web that will wipe out anything.

 It will be the people using it.

Or not.

 

Blog post #2

The last half of Digitized Lives is a quicker read than the first.  In fact, it felt like most of the unbiased (at least on the surface) presentations of information were in the first half of the book, making the second half feel like a greased slide of hefty opinions.  Yet while Reed claims that "this is not a book dedicated to celebrating digital cultures; it is dedicated to improving them" (151), I didn't get many ideas about how to improve digital cultures.  I guess the one idea I do have is to improve myself; but how to do that is not the purview of this book (that would be Iyanla: Fix My Life).

I did learn some nifty new terms like NetRoots and Slacktivism, and I processed another slew of thought provoking questions; but I came to the end of the book with no clearer an idea of how to think about all of this than I had going into it.  It isn't as though I need someone to tell me what to think, but I do want evidence that doesn't constantly run into a contradiction.

Perhaps the greatest contradiction is when, at the end of a book full of assertions and predictions, Reed writes,  "Anyone who tells you they know for certain what the future of new media technologies will be is full of shtml" (197). 

Hmmm. But how about these predictions?

• "If not dealt with, lack of meaningful digital access will increase all forms of poverty (economic, social and informational), and deepen all forms of inequality" (183).
• "One thing that is easy to predict is that our relationship to digital technologies will become increasingly pervasive (if not invasive), increasingly intimate" (195).
• "Virtual reality devices will also become increasingly affordable and sophisticated." (196)
• "The Internet and related digital communication technologies open up vast possibilities for expanding the amount of information, knowledge and wisdom in the world"(178).

While I challenge all of them, I think I am going to take particular issue with that last bullet-pointed assertion abut wisdom:

I did not feel that there was any evidence in this book that persuaded me that digital technologies expand possibilities for gaining wisdom. I think it is actually the other way around.

Reed might have even been inclined to agree with me at the moment when he wrote, "Information after all, is not knowledge (knowledge is information arranged intelligently) and knowledge is not wisdom (wisdom is knowledge put to good use)" (164).  And "It is important to remember that computers are tools, and tools are only as good as the people who wield them" (166).

My wisdom (what of it I have) makes me question how tools that are as expensive as digital technologies are (both in material resources and in power grid costs), can be at all sustainable.  Personally, I spend $75.00 a month on internet, $63.00 a month on my phone, $100.00 a month on television, and an average of $100.00 a month on electricity (some of this is heat). (And this says nothing about the costs of the machines that are in constant need of upgrade.) As well paid as I am relative to many of my 3rd world counterparts, I can't afford my life.  The first costs to go when and if my pay check gets any tighter will not be my heat; it will be my television and my internet.

How will this be different for any one else in the world?  World economics have never worked out an equitable resource model for all, and the experiments that gave lip service to the attempt to do so (Communism under Lenin and then Stalin), failure miserably.

So if it is true that "70 percent of the world's population (five billion people) have no engagement with digital culture at all"(180), should we worry about making sure all get phones and I-pads at a reduced price so all have better access to 'information," or should we be more concerned that 780 million people don't have access to clean water? (http://water.org/water-crisis/water-facts/water/)

"At present," says Reed when talking about the effects of digital technologies on our cognition,"we do not have enough consistent data from neuroscience studies to thoughtfully answer the question, are we becoming more thoughtful?"(171).  I would suggest that until we have that data, that we be especially careful about what basket we put most of our eggs in.

In the scheme of emergency response, the main values are (in this order): water, food, shelter and communication.  Communication is last. 

Digitized Lives are a luxury.  Let's just own it and stop trying to pretend that terminals and circuit boards--no matter how many bytes of data they store --will save the world.  They will share the world, and they will share it with and for those of us who are sated, hydrated and home enough to be wired into those conversations.


 

 This is Ella, my grand daughter, at the Palouse Fair.  The other beautiful creature in the photo (filling up far more senses than any plastic computer terminal could muster) is a Grand Champion Porker (belonging to Ella's cousin).  The knowledge that it took to feed and raise this big fella, and the skill and emotional resolve it will take to butcher him, can save human lives (unless you are a vegetarian--but you get my drift).  There is no text book that needs to spend 9 chapters questioning and analyzing the truth to or the importance of that.

I am not a digital "don't want," (190), but I am a digital skeptic (mostly because I do not see it as economically or environmentally sustainable).  I agree with Thoreau that if we are going to connect ourselves to people and places, we have to value what they have the potential to teach us.  Just being connected is not enough;  connection does not insure effective communication. In fact, after reading most tweets and facebook feeds I rarely feel enlightened.  Most often feel like I have just been on the Jerry Springer Show.

The other issue I want to grab onto, but hopefully will spin out in more detail in other posts (because this one is running a bit long), is the degree to which digital multi-modality, visual rhetorics and the interfaces of online spaces, "may be undermining our ability to think linearly, ... and to grasp complex sustained logical arguments" (170).

I can't answer that, but perhaps it is a shift the world needs us to make.  Perhaps calling back the image will call back a softness that we traded in for the starker and less ambiguous codes of alphabetic literacy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QQuD62RxrU

Personally, I love writing.  I love the distance is has the potential to travel; I love the "It" (as compared to "I" or "You"--thank you James Moffett) audience it has the potential to reach.  But, dear Hestia, I could be probably happy with a hearth and a broom and a chicken and a few spells to get me through the day :-). 

Blog #1

T.V. Reed’s, Digitized Lives:  Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era, is a 10 chapter text dedicated to Reed’s son, Hart, whom Reed acknowledges as the “best kind of digital native.”  My assumption about this dedication is that Hart is deemed “the best” because he approaches the tool with an open and critically inquiring mind.  This assumption is based in Reed’s preface where, quoting both Gertrude Stein and Theodore Sturgeon for emphasis, he makes it clear that he values questions more than answers.  In this spirit he asks the reader to, “ask the question that leads beyond what you think you already know…ask the next question that neither you nor I have thought of yet” (xiv).

The first five chapters of Digitized Lives make it clear that Reed does not imbue digital technologies with super hero or panacea qualities, but sees them as tools that smart people can use smartly or cruel people can use cruelly.   Basing his definition in the Greek etymology of the word, Reed offers that technologies are “practical things that extend our human capacities” (5).  He suggests that digital tools will and are changing human identities in “unimaginably diverse ways” (5), and that, as tools, digital technologies are only “as good as the imaginations of the people that will put them to use” (5).  Reed explains his belief that all knowledge is situated knowledge (entrenched in culture); and that “digital devices are never culturally neutral”(13); he makes it clear, however, that this is not an excuse to argue from a position of cultural relativism, but an attempt to arrive at a “deeper level of objectivity” (6).

The most dominant of the framing questions for the first five chapters of this book are, “Who benefits from digital cultures and who doesn’t”? (8), and “What can it do for us, but also what can it not do for us, what are its limits, and what do we not want the tool to do”? (11).  Reed asserts that the ability to analyze the technology, and our uses of it, is instrumental to answering the important over-arching questions (or at least instrumental to knowing what questions are next to ask). He organizes the analytical frames into four main categories: production, textual, audience/user, and historical (13).   From this framework, Reed proceeds to interrogate technology all the way from the material plane to the imagined ether by asking questions that range from, What kinds of waste do the gadgetries of our technologies generate, and how do pollutive metals and plastics affect the quality of people’s lives? to What kinds of people do our techno-diversions privilege and who do they exclude?  What is the world demographic relative to technological access?  How has the virtualization of spaces allowed for freer identities or less racialized or sexualized attitudes and environments?  And how has digital technology made it worse, or made no difference at all?

While Reed makes it clear to the reader that he will be overt about his biases (6), I did not notice a place in the first five chapters where I see this bias revealed (except perhaps with his unequivocal, and in my view, accurate, assertion about how media representations of women have set feminism back decades).  For the most part, I found the first five chapters to be an even-handed unveiling of the many areas we need to be investigating to see how these tools we have shaped are now shaping us (McLuhan’s concern pg 10).
 Speaking of our tools:  this below link is to an article about fake cell towers (my chosen meme to symbolize the drama of living digitized lives).  While the towers, which no one is sure who they belong to, are creepy reminders of the constant potential for privacy violations, what is far creepier are the overt assertions that they probably don't belong to the government or the military (despite proximity to military bases), because those institutions don't need to pretend anything by using mock machinery.  They have carte blanch to do whatever spying on the American people that they want to do.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mysterious-fake-cellphone-towers-intercepting-162645809.html
This leads me back to the main issue in Reed's opening chapters that resonates most powerfully for me: "digital devices are never culturally neutral" (13).   What is the main message that is being sent by our culture's mediums?  To me, the message is that we (Americans), as bodies and minds, cannot be trusted.  This issue of trust: What does it mean to not trust yourself--your power to remember, to intuit, to entertain yourself with your own stories or songs, to relate inter-personally in elevators or airports, or to moderately consume food, drugs, material items?  How is this lack of trust in ourselves extending out into our intentions for what the police, the military, and the state are responsible for controlling?  (When there is time I will tell you what the field of Prevention Science is all about.) The Panopticon is upon us.  It is no longer a metaphoric vision of Foucault's.  It is a habitus we are wiring our minds to embrace.
If our technologies are only “as good as the imaginations of the people that will put them to use” (Reed 5), then as educators we have a lot of work to do.  Ours is the work of re-invigorating the American imagination so we can inspire our students believe in themselves more than in their  technologies. How to do best do this is something I will keep thinking about. :-)