commentary

“Otherness” has long been a concern of social scientists. It refers to those who are marked, set-apart, excluded, or included with qualification. Those who fail to fit into normative conceptions of belongingness are treated, unsurprisingly, as though they do not belong. They are a polluting force, an intruder, an outsider. In this post, we discuss the dual nature of Otherness and the Othered subject, as they must navigate a social space in which they are either excluded or fetishized, but never fully integrated. We exemplify this dual nature with a discussion of new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer—a tech industry power player marked with femininity, amplified by pregnancy. We begin with a theoretical discussion of Otherness.

 The Dirty Other

As suggested by Sigmund Freud and Marry Douglas, “Dirt is matter out of place”; it threatens the integrity of boundaries—moral, aesthetic, symbolic, experiential and otherwise.  The removal or neutralization of dirt is not an easy matter for its methods of contamination are many.  The most effective method of contamination occurs within and through fantasy.  Case in point, the non-normative Other acquires her pollution powers from the fantastic projections of “Normals.”  But in analyzing the non-normative Other, we find that not all dirt is abject.  Rather than demonstrating the power of horror, dirt may acquire the quality of seduction, indulgence and exotic profundity.  Of course, Kristeva notes that the abject—while maintaining its horrifying quality—is the sight of fascination.  Although such a stipulation is relevant to the present discussion, we may note that said fascination need not coincide with horror.  For example, the “out of place” position of non-normative others facilitates the fantastic lure of systemic escape, reparation or atonement.  After all, that which is not dirt: the normative, the systemic, the homogenized, carries the weight of morality and social judgment.

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Who decided the Minority Report computer was the goal of 21st century interfaces? Why does anyone think its a good idea? Could you imagine doing a spreadsheet on that thing? And why the hell are they using physical media to transport information? What is so alluring, exactly, about this gigantic computer that requires two (two!) Nintendo Powergloves to operate and can only receive data (apparently) through physical media drives the size of VHS tapes? The resolution looks awful and, since the screens are transparent, I can only assume your computer always has to be up against a blank wall. But none of those things are nearly as important as the human element it ignores. The computer has no soul. Its a sterile interface meant to catch murders (or frame people as such), not share family photos. The obsession with the Minority Report computer is a betrayal of everything that is human about computers.  more...

Oh, the irony…to find myself preparing to write about adaptations just months after the release of a motion picture based on a board game. A graduate student never had it so good: Battleship may not be a critical reflection of the delicate process of creating an adapted work, nor does it allow for the discussion of nuance and variation in the product of the adaptation process. But it is a rather wonderful example of the kind of derisive talk that swirls around them. Adaptations are spin-offs. Remakes.

Rehashed and retold, adaptations carry a stigma: the unoriginal story, not so much created as concocted. They are cobbled together from the source text – the original work, the one that was inspired by some spark of creative genius – and they can never be ‘as good as’ the story that came first.

To me, the adapted text is one that emerges out of an older, more established work. In the case of writing, it’s often a book that’s been made into a film, but it’s also novels that are based on older, more classic works. There is the original story – the source text. And there is the adaptation. Adaptations open up the original in a new way. A really good adaptation makes me read or watch the story with an awareness of the original source – it hangs in the back of my mind, and I compare what I know to be familiar or the same, and I am fascinated by what is different. Battleship aside, adaptations are original works of art – the same way a song that samples another is still music. But not everybody sees it this way…and so the debates go on, about what is art and what is not art, what is original and what is second-hand, and whether adaptations can stand on their own merits. more...

Discussing the relative strengths and weaknesses of education as it occurs on and offline, in and outside of a classroom, is important. Best pedagogical practices have not yet emerged for courses primarily taught online. What opportunities and pitfalls await both on and offline learning environments? Under ideal circumstances, how might we best integrate face-to-face as well as online tools? In non-ideal teaching situations, how can we make the best of the on/offline arrangement handed to us? All of us teaching, and taking, college courses welcome this discussion. What isn’t helpful is condemning a medium of learning, be it face-to-face or via digital technologies, as less real. Some have begun this conversation by disqualifying interaction mediated by digitality (all interaction is, by the way) as less human, less true and less worthy, obscuring the path forward for the vast majority of future students.

This is exactly the problem with the op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times titled, “The Trouble With Online Education.” more...

In Part I this essay, I considered the fact that we are always connected to digital social technologies, whether we are connecting through them or not. Because many companies collect what I call second-hand data (data about people other than those from whom the data is collected), whether we leave digital traces is not a decision we can make autonomously. The end result is that we cannot escape being connected to digital social technologies anymore than we can escape society itself.

In Part II, I examined two prevailing privacy discourses to show that, although our connections to digital social technology are out of our hands, we still conceptualize privacy as a matter of individual choice and control. Clinging to the myth of individual autonomy, however, leads us to think about privacy in ways that mask both structural inequalities and larger issues of power.

In this third and final installment, I consider one of the many impacts that follow from being inescapably connected in a society that still masks issues of power and inequality through conceptualizations of ‘privacy’ as an individual choice. I argue that the reality of inescapable connection and the impossible demands of prevailing privacy discourses have together resulted in what I term documentary consciousness, or the abstracted and internalized reproduction of others’ documentary vision. Documentary consciousness demands impossible disciplinary projects, and as such brings with it a gnawing disquietude; it is not uniformly distributed, but rests most heavily on those for whom (in the words of Foucault) “visibility is a trap.” I close by calling for new ways of thinking about both privacy and autonomy that more accurately reflect the ways power and identity intersect in augmented societies. more...

In each of the past two Theorizing the Web conferences, I have been present to see an audience member—concerned about the fleeting popularity of online platforms and rapid technological development— question the pervasive use of Facebook as a study site. This is an important question, and one to which panelists (including myself) have not adequately responded.  Absent the pressure of probing eyes and a ticking clock, I work here to craft the kind of response that the question deserves.

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