Panel members’ research and stories take us across and beyond assumptions or claims that social media have isolating effects or reduce intimacy, or that they train psyches to reside in virtual spaces removed from embodiment. Instead these particular “augmented encounters” add rather than subtract embodiments, multiply intensities of affect and its meanings, and complicate political intersectionalities across media, together with identity formations.
Multimodel communication and transmedia storytelling are forms of transdisciplinary research here, both objects of analysis and ways of sharing analysis. They include projects addressing
- transnational migration and connection across space and race,
- rape discourse standards across media platforms with implications for communication across worlds,
- queering the normativities of computer code embodiments for an augmented critical study of codes, and
- exploring how the techno-organic social worlds of college students are pressured into and by these very multimodel communications.
The abstracts for the panel includes:
Nicholas Boston, “The Amorous Migrant: Race, Relationships and Resettlement through Cyberspace”
This paper documents the cosmopolitan attitudes and interracial desire of recent gay Polish immigrant men to the United Kingdom and how they utilize two online dating sites, Gaydar.co.uk and Gayromeo.com, to seek out amorous and/or sexual contact with racial Others.
The study is based on an ethnography, conducted primarily online, between November 2007 and November 2010. The participants, numbering in the 90s, are all gay-identified, Polish-born men who arrived in Britain as immigrants post May 1, 2004, the date on which Poland officially entered the European Union (initiating the largest scale internal European economic migration, from Poland to Britain, in recent European history). At this point, almost seven years after Britain opened its labor market to Poland and seven other former Eastern bloc countries joining the Union, there has not been an inconsiderable amount of scholarly and journalistic attention shone on Polish migrants in the United Kingdom. Their presence has dramatically transformed the social landscape. Very little work on the topic, however, has considered the role of the Internet in migrants’ everyday lives. Furthermore, with transnational coupling (mail order brides, family reunification, green card marriages, in addition to a plethora of emotion-based partnership transactions) having been explored by researchers, it is surprising that no existing study has focused specifically on Internet dating or the negotiation of sexuality via computer-mediated communication within this population.
This paper addresses these gaps in knowledge.
All participants in the present study came to it by the fact that they were men who initiated contact with the researcher, me, online on one of two gay dating/”hook up” sites, Gayromeo.com and Gaydar.co.uk, over the last three years while I was resident in Britain. They all were seeking sexual encounters or romantic relationships with a black man for one reason or another, they at some point made clear. Some said they were curious and always wanted “to try”; some said they had a preference for black men and only dated within that racial category; some said they dated all types of men, including blacks; some said they were “obsessed” with black men, yet, being from Poland, never had an opportunity to be intimate with any; some even said that a primary reason for migrating to Britain was to gain access to black men or men of color, in general, for sex and relationships.
I found this quite curious, as at one point, there was such a preponderance of recent Polish immigrant men contacting me through these websites with one or another of the aforementioned stories to tell. I began, from this curiosity, to make a study of the phenomenon.
The research shows the ways in which one cohort of gay, Polish, recently-immigrant men relate to multicultural Britain in and through their migratory choices, sexual interests (what I term, “libidinal cosmopolitanism”) and online behavior. It explains how sexuality and migration relate to, or influence, one another and how the Internet both facilitates and complicates contact with racial and national Others.
The study also reveals crucial details about the relationship of online behavior to offline subjectivity and the ways in which the architectures of online dating sites determine not only users’ choices but in many important senses their imaginaries.
Anastasia Salter (@MsAnastasia), “#DearJohn, Don’t be a Dickwolf; or, A Rape in Twitterspace”
Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace” offered a first glimpse of an online community setting its rules of discourse in the face of rape in a text-based space. More recently, Twitter has been a site of several showdowns over defining communal standards for the discourse of rape both in and out of online spaces. Three separate but intertwined campaigns arose in response to three events: the #MooreandMe campaign called for an apology from Moore in dismissing the allegations of rape against Julian Assange as a “so-called crime;” the #DearJohn campaign was a concerted effort to lobby Congressional representatives involved in a bill that would redefine rape for the purposes of abortion funding in a way that severely limited the term’s application, and a rape survivor explained her intention to boycott the gaming event Penny Arcade Expo because of the sale of “Dickwolves” t-shirts linked to a series of Penny Arcade comics on rape and started a movement.
The organizer for both #DearJohn and #MooreandMe, Sady Doyle, explained that Twitter was the perfect medium for the campaigns because “it was really equalizing, it wasn’t hierarchical, it ensured that voices and perspectives could influence the conversation regardless of how well-connected or well-known they were, and it was a very visible, trackable way to register dissent” (http://whereisyourline.org/2011/02/badass-activist-friday-presents-sady-doyle-of-tiger-beatdown/). These attributes have strengthened Twitter as a space for activist movements large and small—with results ranging from Michael Moore’s statement on TV retracting his earlier words to the removal of the Dickwolves t-shirt from the Penny Arcade store. #MooreandMe asked for a change in rhetoric, for an admission from Michael Moore that his words had encouraged the silencing of women. This laid the foundation for #DearJohn and #Dickwolves, both calls for action happening near-simultaneously and involving the active participation of rape survivors and their allies.
The very qualities of the network Sady Doyle emphasized are what distinguish Twitter from social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In an essay on Facebook as a space lacking in political activism, “Can Social Network Sites Enable Political Action?”, danah boyd noted: “Just as politically engaged people know one another, alienated and uninterested people mainly know people like themselves. Bridging the structural holes that divide these groups is just as challenging online as offline, if not more so. Offline, you know if a door has been slammed in your face; online, it is impossible to determine the response that the invisible audience is having to your message” (boyd 115). The same problems are present in Twitter discourse, as most tweets go unremarked. Twitter can feel like an echo chamber, with retweeting—the resending of your tweet by another user with your username acknowledged—a common way to demonstrate agreement. Yet activism on Twitter has the potential to transcend the boundaries of immediate social networks of shared interests: the hashtag approach has the ability to immediately draw users into an ongoing conversation, and the short form of Twitter makes it easy for the quick contribution of a new voice.
The activists in every one of these endeavors have found themselves assailed with rhetoric worthy of Mr. Bungle. The attacks on Dickwolves protesters came from accounts with names like “TeamRape” and “Dickwolvington” created under a veil of anonymity. Like Mr. Bungle, Dickwolvington no longer exists: a Twitter search on his username turns up no results. This occurred after a tweet from Penny Arcade’s writer, Gabe, requesting him to stop. The dynamic of the Rape in Cyberspace is here re-enacted: the “toaded” account has gone silent, but the communal space (in this case, Penny Arcade Expo) will never regain its comfort. And even as these hashtags go silent, the small victories won, the larger conflict remains a current of disruption in the Twittersphere.
Jarah Moesch (@jarahmoesch), “Queer Profiles: embodying the (computer) code”
(computer) code for everyday digital technologies/objects is (usually) written by a human, or a group of humans, who have preconceived notions about the world, through their own common senses, knowledges, and values that enable them to do their work according to best practices and web-standardizations.
This paper focuses on the programmer’s embodiment of the code and how the programmer brings notions of the world into the code itself, thereby creating an invisible layer of embedded normativity. I argue that the embodied actions of developers (and their socio-historical entanglements), along with standards and best practices, normalize our everyday digital interactions, rendering certain embodiments invisible.
The programmer (and development team) are humans who are, amongst other things, aged, gendered, classed, raced, sexualized, nationalized, and educated in particular ways. These specific humans create meaning for our current interactions with, in and through multiple intersecting histories and genealogies over the space and time of the Internet.
How does this impact everyday life? How does embedded normativity within the code render the content inaccessible? (or doesn’t it?) How are our physical bodies rendered in code? What do we learn when we read the ‘code’ that represents us?
Untangling this matrix requires a close reading and queer interpretation of the code that underlies it. Using queer theory, phenomenology and critical code studies, I uncover what it means to queerly read the developer’s embodiment of the code for popular social media objects, such as user profiles and website taxonomies.
Alecea Standlee, “Technologies of Relationships: Meaning Making in the Techno-Organic Social World of College Students”
Generation Y, Millennials, Digital Natives, the Net Gen. These are all names for the generation of young people born in the United States between roughly 1983 and 2001 (Howe and Strauss 2000). The last 20 years have been a time of dramatic techno-social transformation. Among them are cohorts of young people who encountered the meteoric rise of the internet as a communication form and social space at key developmental life phases and subsequently have demonstrated social behavior that uses internet technologies in day to day communication practices and social expectations. This study examines the way in which internet technology based communication practices are implicated in the negotiation of relationships of intimacy, relationship negotiation and constructions of public and private spheres, among college students. This work explores the ways in which technology is deeply integrated into the social world in the present moment. I focus on the integration and detachment of technology in the interpersonal microstructures of the society.
Beginning with questions of experience, understanding and value within the role of intimate personal relationships, this paper will discuss some of the key findings from an ongoing study of technology use in college age adults. The primary questions for this project explore what techno-social behaviors are expected by college students of their peers, within the insular social world of university life. What importance and meaning do participants attach to compliant or non-compliance with such behavior? How do individuals experience the self in relation to participation in techno-organic social processes and the internalization of norms of technological integration within processes of social interaction? The pervasiveness of the Internet in social organizations and interaction plays a key role in shaping the social self. For those young people that grew to adulthood in an era of technological information revolutions, the power of technology to shape their social world and their social self is immense. Exploring the meanings, ideals and technological structures that young people experience has the potential to help researchers understand the social development and contemporary culture of this population.
Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 32 college students at a private university in the northeast, this research explores the ways in which the social world of college students has become increasingly techno-organic. My research suggests the integration of internet technologies into norms that guide social practices and behavior may impact participant understanding and expectations of intimate social relationships. In analyzing this data I have concluded that social expectations of presence and absence in the technological realm are transferred to the social realm creating a presence/absence binary in interpersonal relationships. Within this binary discourse I suggest that despite popular culture representations of regular internet users as being isolated from the social world, the popularity of mobile internet devices and social media platforms has resulted in a kind of hyper-connection between participants. The importance of this binary will be discussed, including how it serves as a tool to pressure participants into techno-organic multi-modal communication practices in order to maintain social relationships. Within this social environment in which being connected, and being available function not simply as part of social relationships but form their core. The importance of accessibility for intimacy and collective social experience has resulted in the development of new social meanings attached to concepts of intimacy, specifically the redefinition of such a concept with increasingly common practices of public performance and narration of intimate life experiences.