Presider: Alice Marwick (@alicetiara)

Hashmod: Allison Bennett (@bennett_alison)

This is the first in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled a/s/l.

Though presenting empirically and theoretically distinct works, the panelists of a/s/l are connected by their keen interests in identity. In particular, each work addresses—in its own way—the mutually constitutive relationship between identities and technologies. Furthermore, each paper is structurally situated, couching discussions of identity within frameworks of power in which certain voices, bodies, and desires take precedence over others, and in which technologies are both a means of struggle against, and reinforcement of, these power relations.

Check out the abstracts below:

Michelle Johnson (@MJohnson_Ling)  Language is Power: Vernacular Literacy Practices Becoming Mainstream with Twitter

Writing and literacy are relatively new technological advances in the human species, but have traditionally been held as a source of power, there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to write, read, and interact with written language. That is, until the advent of social digital technologies. For the first time in history, vernacular literacy practices are being made public, people are writing as they speak and able to play with language publically more than ever before. This shift has major consequences for what it means to be literate, who controls the written word and how students are educated. In this talk, I illustrate how this can be seen in the mixing of Spanish and English by four different groups on twitter. Mixing languages is referred to as code-switching, and is generally seen as an unwanted practice – it is considered bad English or bad Spanish in many respects and is not taught in a mainstream classroom. However, it is a common practice on twitter and illustrates how the users of language on digital mediums are the owners of it as well.
I followed 50 bilingual twitter users over 3 months to investigate how they code-switch. There are users who never mix languages in the same tweet and users who mix them freely as if they were speaking, using every type of code switching known to linguists. In the middle, though, are users who code-switch very selectively, sometimes targeting a specific group and other times targeting an individual, but always mixing languages for a specific communicative purpose. It is these users that are most interesting in that they are uniformly professional on some level, but utilizing what is often seen as an unprofessional form of writing. I hypothesize that the motivation for this careful writing comes from a merging of the audience and addressee, parallel to the merging of public and private. These twitter users are caught in a balancing act where they simultaneously present a public image that adheres to traditional literacy expectations and power structures that come with that, but also one that acknowledges their bilingual identity and voice. Social digital technologies have allowed non-traditional literacy practices to develop because of the voice and power average citizens are able to find through them. From this talk, participants will come away with an increased understanding of the role of social digital technologies in literacy and an awareness of the power individuals have in the shaping of literacy practices.

Nora Madison (@gendergeek) New Mediations of Bisexuality: Technologies of Visibility Online

This paper focuses on users’ engagement across multiple forms of online social media to create and sustain bisexuality as a culturally intelligible subject position. Digital mediation, a process of enacting forms of identity- like race, gender, and sexual orientation- underscores both the non-essentialism of identity as well as its hybridity and fluidity. The online spaces I study are marked as for and/or pertaining to bisexuals, which often includes transgender, omnisexual, pansexual, polysexual and ‘fluid’ identified users. I do not attempt to study individual identity or a single “community” but rather examine a series of spaces in which bisexuality is produced through digital mediation.

One of the most salient themes to emerge from this research to date is participants’ affective struggles with feeling “invisible.” The issue of (in)visibility is complex as participants discuss the challenges of an identity that ‘appears’ more visible in online environments than it does elsewhere. As one participant posted: I feel I’m more out online that offline. That’s because, in the offline world there’s the whole ”social assumptions” issue. My co-workers, friends, etc, know I have a boyfriend, wich [sic] equals ”straight” for most ppl out there. So, I’ll out myself when the occasion comes (talking abt smn I used to date, the LGBT youth group I used to belong to, or usually just abt some girl I find atractive) and usually ppl are not surprised. Whereas online, my pic at Facebook (and Orkut) is a Bisexual Pride icon. I follow Bi groups on Twitter. I’m a member of bi groups. So, online it’s spelled out, while offline ppl usually think me having a bf means I’m straight.

The Internet, which was touted early on as a space of great potential for anonymity and exploration where visibility could be masked, here becomes the place where users try to make the perceived invisible ‘visible’ through semiotic performance. However, online participants struggle to imagine what bisexual visibility ‘looks like’ and what would successfully signify ‘bisexual’ to others. As one participant posted, ‘I wish there was a look. I wish I could get up every day and put on the clothes and jewelry that identified me to the world when I stepped out of my apartment. I wish I was as visible on the street as I am on facebook.’

In the frequent example of intimate partners in the physical world rendering a bisexual’s identity invisible, participants of these online communities grapple with the seeming paradox of one’s offline self as the avatar and one’s online self as more fully integrated, represented, and recognized. New mediascapes provide particularly useful environments for participants of online bisexual spaces to negotiate issues of (in)visibility. Although this creative work is not confined to the Internet, new media technologies provide exceptional opportunities for examining these tensions as participants construct visibility using Jenny Sunden’s notion of ‘typing oneself into being’ through daily posts, threads, videos, and discourse in which bisexuality as a subject position is discursively imagined, produced, articulated, defended, and desired.

Helen Stuhr-Rommereim (@helencopter)  WHEN I WRITE TO YOU: Lennay Kekua, @horse_ebooks, and the precarious promise of inventing subjectivities online

Last year, football hero Manti Te’o suffered public humiliation when his “girlfriend,” “Lennay Kekua,” dissolved into an amalgamation of words, voice, and image. She did not exist, but he loved her. Some months later, it was revealed that @horse_ebooks, thought to be a charming Twitter bot producing random genius, was actually a performance art project. As disillusioned Twitter user @leoncrawl lamented, “the one thing people thought wasn’t — couldn’t be — pandering to them, actually was.”

Girlfriend and robot took shape as new, necessary subjectivities animated through text. Manti wanted a love that couldn’t tempt or disappoint. Clamoring self-representation on social media created an atmosphere where only automated thought was authentic. Hopeful belief on the part of the virtual milieu gave these avatars form and narrative, and interactions with others gave them concrete, accepted identities.

This is not so different from how human subjectivity takes shape. In GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF ONESELF, Judith Butler writes, “…the ‘I’ that I am is nothing without this ‘you’ and cannot even begin to refer to itself outside the relation to the other” (82). With each sentence I construct, I conjure a “me” that can say something to “you.” Without this interaction, “I” would not exist.

In THE HERMENEUTICS OF THE SUBJECT, Michel Foucault discusses the Stoic philosophers’ engagement with a subjectivization process that can be practiced and ultimately mastered, crafting a particular relationship between the self and the world (51). This practice included writing letters and using the imagined gaze of another as a guiding force in the process of self-formation.

Taken more experimentally, this “Care of the Self,” can be considered as a means of generating fiction in the space between individuals that then functions as part of self-formation in potentially transformative ways. In Chris Kraus’ epistolary novel I LOVE DICK, for example, “Chris,” engages in an aggressive campaign of self-creation through her correspondence with “Dick.” Fictionalized correspondence then becomes a radicalized “technology of the self” (Foucault’s terminology) as agency is asserted in subjectivization.

@horse_ebooks and Lennay Kekua are, like “Dick,” subjectivities instrumentalized via fiction. However, they exist outside the self-contained universe of literature. The people behind the avatars, those they interact with, and the avatars themselves operate with divergent understandings of the situation at hand. Although Lennay and @horse_ebooks present emotional and psychological risk to those they encounter, as I LOVE DICK demonstrates, the potential to create novel subjectivities also presents radical possibilities.

Using these case studies, my paper builds an understanding of the invented e-subject, examining the platforms that birth them and the social spaces in which they operate in the context of subjectivization as discussed by Foucault, Butler, and Lauren Berlant. I construct a theory of what Berlant has termed “fantasmatic intersubjectivity” (CRUEL OPTIMISM, 25) as it exists outside of the space of literature, taking on a life and reality all its own. I seek to shed light on the pain and potential of the fiction-permeated encounter to better understand the desires and disappointments of living and loving on social media.

Elizabeth Wissinger (@betsywiss) Fashion Modeling and the Entanglements of Glamour

How do media and information technologies shape the evolution of culturally idealized bodies? What forces influence fashion models, for instance, in shaping the current bodily ideal? Considering recent changes in fashion modeling work within the rise of digital technologies that facilitate the globalization of imaging and the intensification of bodily manipulation, my work explores how models idealize a body made porous to technology, and in so doing, perform affective labor that habituates publics to interacting with fashion while raising questions about the nature of the body itself. Glamorizing engagement with technologies of bodily intervention, modeling work regulates publics according to a biopolitics of beauty, pulling them into a continuous bodily modulation that troubles bodily boundaries, while making profits for capital.

Biopolitical regimes seek to maximize life, and modeling has popularized certain branding practices as a means to achieving the good life for some, while hiding these practices’ detrimental effects on others. The fashion system where some have access to the cycle of ‘cheap and chic’ at the cost of others who work under inhuman conditions to produce those fashions, is just one example of this type of biopolitical divide. The model-brand-assemblage seduces some populations into endless cycles of self- branding, while also legitimating the denial of the ‘benefits’ of living in a branded world to those who have been marked as less willing or able to brand themselves.

My ethnographic inquiry into modeling reveals how the work entails being fashionable, embodying the dream of a fully optimized life, and therefore popularizes the trend toward making bodily potential and connectivity continuously available to metering and regulation, an availability which facilitates capital’s constant expansion. Models ‘model’ an embodied entanglement with technology, using every means possible to polish their image, promote their brand, and stay in the public eye. The entanglements they glamorize bank on possibilities inherent in both bodily vitality and the capacity for connection. Models are on the frontlines of selling a way of being in the world that pulls bodies into productive matrixes in novel ways.
The trend toward the digital facilitated the rise of ‘fast’ fashion and popularized amateur fashion in the blogosphere. Consequently, the street has become a runway, where everyone can ‘model’ their look. In this process, the notion that we must all become the ‘CEO of Me, Inc.,’ is no longer a shocking revelation, and the formerly specialized modeling work of self styling and crafting a ‘look’ has become a fact of many people’s lives. Models glamorize the work of building one’s brand, work that increases the workload of many, while the profits go to a few corporations such as Facebook, WordPress, Klout, Instagram, Twitter, and the like. By interrogating the influence of changing media and information technologies on fashions in, and conceptualizations of, bodies over time, I seek to advance thought in the fields of sociology, feminism, science studies, fashion, and media studies.