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).