Latest in the arsenal of moral–panic studies of digital technologies is a recent article published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, written by psychologists and education scholars from UCLA.  The piece, entitled: “Five Days at Education Camp without Screens Improves Preteen Skills with Nonverbal Emotion Cues,” announces the study’s ultimate thesis: engagement with digital technologies diminishes face-to-face social skills. Unsurprisingly, the article and its’ findings have been making the rounds on mainstream media outlets over the past week. Here is the abstract:

A field experiment examined whether increasing opportunities for face-to-face interaction while eliminating the use of screen-based media and communication tools improved nonverbal emotion–cue recognition in preteens. Fifty-one preteens spent five days at an overnight nature camp where television, computers and mobile phones were not allowed; this group was compared with school-based matched controls (n = 54) that retained usual media practices. Both groups took pre- and post-tests that required participants to infer emotional states from photographs of facial expressions and videotaped scenes with verbal cues removed. Change scores for the two groups were compared using gender, ethnicity, media use, and age as covariates. After five days interacting face-to-face without the use of any screen-based media, preteens’ recognition of nonverbal emotion cues improved significantly more than that of the control group for both facial expressions and videotaped scenes. Implications are that the short-term effects of increased opportunities for social interaction, combined with time away from screen-based media and digital communication tools, improves a preteen’s understanding of nonverbal emotional cues.

Having read the original article and the mainstream interpretation(s) of it, I’m left frustrated that we haven’t moved beyond “good” versus “bad” arguments, and even more frustrated by the way good v. bad arguments cast critics—in this case, myself—into the role of technological utopianist.

The heavy handedness of the authors’ argument, coupled with a problem-ridden research design, does a true disservice to public and scholarly understandings of the nuanced relationship between digital social technologies and experiences of social engagement.

Let’s begin with the design problems— I’ve summarized them into two points:

1) As the authors acknowledge in their conclusion, it is impossible to disentangle the effects of technology, the nature camp itself, and experiences with the group. That is, although the authors frame this as a study about the (negative) effects of screen-time, they conflate the screen-time variable with other variables (namely, the experience of being isolated with a small group at camp and engaging in highly social activities), to say nothing of the conflation of all digitally mediated activities into a single variable.

2) Results were based on change scores between a pre and post-test, but pretests and posttests were given to participants under different conditions.  The experimental group took the pretest just after arriving at camp and posttest just before leaving, while the control group took the pretest at school. Differences in pretest scores highlight the way this likely affected the data. Pretest scores for the experimental group were lower than the control group on each of the two emotional cues tests. In the end of the study, however, scores were very close between the two groups (see Table 1 below). This means that change scores, which the authors used as the dependent variable, were significantly higher for the experimental group than the control group, even though end scores were similar. Results were interpreted—I think incorrectly—as a result of the intervention rather than inconsistencies in administration of the pretest. In particular, I would argue that kids in a new environment, distracted by the excitement and nervousness of a week in the woods, would not score as well as those taking the test in a comfortable and familiar environment. This alternative interpretation would account for initial differences, making change scores ineffective for predicting the effects of screen-time on social skills.

Table 1: Pretest, Posttest, and Change Scores

*Each task operated on a separate metric. Task 1 calculated number of errors; Task 2 calculated percent correct.

But let’s put these design problems in our pocket for just a second. The bigger issue, for me, is the research question itself. The question of “good” versus “bad” is unproductive in its own right through its inherent digital dualism and insistence on dichotomization. The answer to research questions such as these are over simplified and obscure more than they reveal, solidifying a view of reality in which a particular kind of technology either helps or it hurts. This is a narrow conversation that restricts future inquiries rather than fostering intellectual outgrowth and diversity.

More beneficial research questions address how technological developments alter the social landscape, and what this means in practice. They address how necessary skill sets change, who is best equipped to manage the newly required skill sets, and the conditions under which communication and interaction are hindered or improved.

These more useful research questions open dialogues, rather than pit Pollyanna’s against Naysayers in a debate neither intended to have. However, these more useful research question make for tedious reading. They produce a kind of  TL;DR  scholarship that rarely, if ever, finds its way into public discourse.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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“You are talking to me like I don’t understand what you are saying. I understand what you are saying, I don’t accept what you are saying,” shouted the bespectacled woman who would soon have tears running down her indignant face. “I’m not from this country. I don’t have a phone. I have kids with me. What am I supposed to do!?” The customer service representative at the airline desk spoke slowly and explained again, as if to a spoiled child, that all of the hotels were full and customers were now responsible for finding and booking their own, but not to worry, customers would be reimbursed after going online and submitting the necessary information with a paid receipt. The woman stared blankly at him, and stepped aside to wait for a supervisor. Now she would cry.

*****

I write this while sitting in an airport, on my way home from the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting, waiting for the flight I was supposed to take last night. After idling on the tarmac for 3- hours-worth of 15 minute “we’ll be leaving soon folks” intervals, the flight was canceled. Within the hour, another flight from the same airline was canceled. We all had to rebook, and most of us were unable to get a flight until the next morning. The line at customer service, as you might imagine, was both long and slow—the kind of long and slow that turns fellow customers into comrades, bound by collective suffering and mutual animosity toward a shared enemy.

It was in this line, under these conditions, unpleasant for us all, that the imbrication of technology with inequality became painfully clear.

First, there was the waiting itself. It turns out that I could have skipped the line altogether, arranging everything through phone calls and websites. Of course, having been explicitly directed to the service desk, nobody on either of the two flights realized DIY was an option until an agent announced it about 3 hours in to the waiting. Amidst the loud grumbling, which included my own exasperated comments, it struck me that only some of us could have skipped the line—namely those of us with smartphones and a relative sense of comfort with such devices.  The rest of us, those of us without phones, without a charge, or without the skills to navigate the Internet on mobile devices, never had a chance at getting out quickly.

Second, there was the privilege of communication. Even though I apparently didn’t have to wait in line to see an agent, I did. For several hours. As did the rest of the passengers on the two canceled flights. Between talking/commiserating with one another, many of us pulled out our phones, ipads, and even laptops. We notified family members that we would be late. We called friends to pass the time. A man in a suit seemed to be conducting business deals. I posted a picture of the line to Facebook and felt comforted by the self-elicited sympathy of Likes and comments. That is, for those of us with the means to expand our communicative circles, the hours-long wait was not, entirely, wasted. It was social and productive. And our own social and productive use of mobile technologies, though a means of connection for us, become a mechanism of isolation for those without these technologies or without the capacities to use them. How many times, I wonder, did someone without access to the outside world look up in search of a an eyeball, only to find so many of the eyeballs gazing intently at a screen?

Finally, there was the woman I referenced in the opening paragraph—the woman with kids, without a phone, and, so I found, without the cash for a room. Even if she had known, as none of us did, that she could skip the line, this would not have been an option. She, no matter what, had to wait, foregoing access to ideal flight times (i.e., flights leaving that night instead of the next day), and missing out on free hotels. After waiting, she was expected to do it all herself anyway. “Find a hotel,” they told her, as though this required no equipment or skill.

Instead, this woman relied on the one technology available to her: her body. She used her voice to first ask for help, and then demand it loudly. She used her tears to convey dismay. She used her hands, which would eventually both flail defiantly and wipe tears dejectedly, to punctuate her expressions. In the end, a supervising agent agreed to bus her and her children 45 minutes from the airport to an available hotel room. The agent booked the ride and the hotel. There would be no monetary cost, as this woman paid instead in public humiliation and emotional exhaustion.

Jenny Davis is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University and a regular contributor for Cyborgology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

Headline pic via: www.origami-kids.com

Last week I wrote about the curious case of traditional love narratives in the face of online dating. In short, the profiled format, pay structure, and overall bureaucracy of online dating throws into stark relief the constructed belief in a fateful meeting of souls. And yet, the narrative persists. Here’s a brief snippet:

…[T]he landscape has drastically changed but the narrative, not so much. The maintenance of romantic love as a cultural construct, personal striving, and affective embodied response to courtship rituals speaks to the resiliency of normative culture and its instantiation through human action. Even as we transact and negotiate romantic relationships; even as we agree upon terms; even as we screen partners and subject ourselves to screening; we nonetheless speak of butterflies and hope for magic.

In the case of love and online dating, the narrative is both highlighted and strengthened through its empirical contradiction.

This idea sparked an interesting conversation among the Cyborgology team about how this principle—constitution through contradiction—is theoretically useful in understanding the relationship between technologies and culture. Technologies reflect cultural realities, but can also expose the constructed nature of these realities, threatening their taken-for-granted logic and concomitant guidance over behavior and interaction. In the face of such a threat, however, the logics remain, and even strengthen.

In addition to the fate-based love narrative, an example that sticks out is that of personal authenticity. Authenticity is the idea that the self—including desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—are uncalculated, spontaneous, and true to a unique core being. The structure of social media, however, reveals the performative nature of self-presentation and social engagement, posing a threat to the authenticity of individual social media users, and the idea of authenticity more generally. Text based communication and atemporal interaction structures suggest effort and forethought—rather than spontaneity; profiles afford telling—rather than showing—who a person is; the problem of context collision and its solutions— selective privacy settings, lowest common denominator sharing, wall cleaning etc.— reveal the distinct versions of self performed for varied audiences. And yet, authenticity persists as a narrative both personally and culturally. Indeed, rather than question the compulsory value of authenticity in the face of exposure, social media users staunchly police those who fail to live up to the authentic ideal. The mechanisms by which they do so is the topic of a whole paper I wrote a couple of years back.

Identifying constitution through contradiction as a theoretical principle which underlies these two empirical examples opens the door for particular kinds of cultural analyses. Such analyses look quite similar to those employed in the microsociology tradition of ethnomethodology.  Ethnomethodologists contend that the logics and assumptions of an interaction situation reveal themselves to interactants most clearly when that situation falls apart. The job of the social scientist, they argue, is to document the work of interactants as they put the situation back together, returning logics and assumptions to their proper place outside of conscious thought.

Extending the ethnomethodological method to cultural—rather than interpersonal—realities, new technologies, when they threaten existing narratives, become a key mechanism by which to identify these narratives and examine how these narratives are accomplished. That is, new technologies can threaten to unravel narratives; to make them fall apart. When they persist, there is much to be learned from the work of keeping the narratives firmly held together.

I close now, with some questions.  Besides authenticity and love, where else do we see this principle in action? That is, which other narratives are threatened by new technologies and still persist? And perhaps the more interesting question, where, if anywhere, does this principle not hold up? Can we think of examples in which new technologies have effectively obliterated existing narratives or cultural logics?

Thoughts are welcome in the comments and on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

Image: Source

Romantic love occupies a significant amount of space in both popular culture and, often, the human psyche. It is why the girlfriend activation system free download has access to pieces of information when it comes to romantic love. It is the muse of artists, musicians, and poets; the downfall of great characters; the impetus for sheer giddy joy, deep comfort, and the sharpest most debilitating pain. Truly, what else matters when you’re in the arms of a lover? What else is of import after a lover breaks your heart? Of course, romantic love, as conceived in the contemporary West, has an end game: marriage and/or life partnership along with the formation of a family.

This has not always been the case, and is not the case everywhere. The notion of romantic love began with knights and ladies of nobility and had nothing to do with marriage, or even sex, while arranged marriages and dowry agreements have little to do with romantic love.  That is, the coupling of love with marriage is not compulsory, but culturally constructed as such. And it strikes me, when I think about it, as a bit of an odd couple.

The historically situated pairing of love with marriage and family is located at the unlikely intersection of pure bodied emotion and capitalist practicality. Marriage is simultaneously the penultimate form of, and antithesis to, romantic love. The family unit is at once a means of expressing undying commitment rooted in human connectedness and a means of pooling resources. Like most social conventions, people have largely been able to play out the love-marriage pairing without conscious consideration of its uncomfortable tension, employing fate-based love narratives while opening shared bank accounts and enjoying spousal health benefits. What is fascinating, though, is how the tension remains concealed in the face of what should be—I think—its ultimate revelatory threat: the spread of online dating services[i].

The business of love has a long history, and certainly pre-exists Match.com and eHarmony. Marriage agencies popped up in England in the 18^th century, and dating agencies appeared in the U.S. following WWII. And of course, as immortalized by Rupert Holmes, Newspapers have long offered pay-by-the-character personal ads. These services, however, operated discretely and tacked a stigma onto those who utilized them.

This stigma carried over into the digital age through comedic tropes of unattractive or socially clumsy singles searching for love online. Rooted in both digital dualism and fantasies of authentic love, to say one met a lover on The Internet was to deeply discredit the relationship. This, however, is no longer the case.

According to Pew, 38% of those who are single and looking have used online dating services, 60% of American adults think it’s a good way to meet people, and only 20% think it connotes desperation in those who do it. These stats, which are over a year old and don’t yet account for usage or changing attitudes over the last year (which, I imagine, move in the direction of higher usage and greater acceptance) indicate that these services, which explicitly commodify and bureaucratize love, have worked into the mundane practices of dating publics and shed their stigmatizing connotation.

The use of any dating service poses a threat, at an individual level, to the fantasy of authentic love. The business transaction that grants access to potential partners; the intentionality of sorting and filtering characteristics—rather than relying on an inchoate spark factor; the calculated effort to find love, rather than allowing love to find you, all make the maintenance of a fate-based narrative difficult to maintain. Indeed, dating services irrevocably alter the fate-based narrative’s key component: the origin story. Rather than eyes meeting across the room or physically bumping into someone in a hallway—a-la 1980s film lore—those who employ dating services meet because they signed up for a service and that service was rendered.  The now widespread use of dating services and proliferation of dating platforms extends this threat beyond the individuals who use them, to the very idea of authentic love. The fate-based narrative, as a social fact, should be in peril. And yet, I don’t believe it is. Musicians keep singing about it, films keep telling love’s story, and many of my friends who use dating services continue to talk about finding “The One.”

In short, the landscape has drastically changed but the narrative, not so much. The maintenance of romantic love as a cultural construct, personal striving, and affective embodied response to courtship rituals speaks to the resiliency of normative culture and its instantiation through human action. Even as we transact and negotiate romantic relationships; even as we agree upon terms; even as we screen partners and subject ourselves to screening; we nonetheless speak of butterflies and hope for magic.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

Headline pic: source

Napoleon Dynamite: Source

[i] Certainly, not everyone who uses dating sites does so for purposes of love or marriage. Some use these services for casual sex or even friendship. For instance, I’ve known heterosexual women to use dating sites to seek out women friends with similar interests after moving to a new city. Similarly, not all partner-connection services are geared towards love or marriage. The mobile location based apps, in particular, have  stronger sexual—rather than gooey romantic/family formation—connotations. But there are services which promote marriage as the ultimate goal—such as eHarmony which advertises its high rates of “successful” matches as measured in marriages— and many users who employ these services towards matrimonial ends. It is these services and these users to whom I refer.

Pharmaceutical drugs do an array of things to the body. They can affect mood, energy, blood flow, experiences of pain, and capacities for pleasure.  Their increasing prevalence in the marketplace and home medicine cabinets suggests an addition to the old adage that ‘we are what we eat.’ Today, we are also what we take.

But embedded within cultural realities,  pharmaceuticals do not simply do things to the body. Rather, they are the conduits through which the body becomes connected with and constituted through economies of both money and moral value. Pharmaceutical drugs are at once tools of medicinal healing and commodities of social and financial exchange. In understanding the implications of any particular pharmaceutical drug, then, it is pertinent to ask not only what it does, but what the pharmaceutical company is selling, to whom, and with what kind of trajectory. 

Truvada is a pharmaceutical drug associated with HIV. Manufactured by Gilead, the pill has traditionally treated those already infected. Recently, however, it has also been used as an HIV preventative. Gilead claims that when taken daily, Truvada is over 90% effective in preventing HIV contraction. The preventative use for Truvada falls under the category of  pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. The use of Truvada as PrEP was highlighted this month  by the World Health Organization (WHO), which now recommends PrEP for all men who have sex with men, citing a projected 20-25% decrease in HIV infections among this population over 10 years[i]. WHO’s statement, released on July 11^th, came in anticipation of the 20^th International Aids Conference in Melbourne, Australia, currently going on this week.

Addressing the questions above about goods sold and apparent trajectory, the most obvious answer is that Gilead is selling health and wellness. They are selling it to HIV vulnerable populations. And they are selling it at widely varying financial costs, with a trajectory of reduced incidents of AIDS. In the U.S., the drug costs between $8,000-$14,000 per year—though those with insurance may be eligible for coverage—while in South Africa and India, the yearly bill for the drug is around $100.  Of course, the costs also come in the form of side effects, such as liver damage, lethargy, nausea, and decreased bone density. Likely an easy trade for HIV positive patients, though maybe less so for those who have not contracted the virus.

But for the price, both financial and physical, I argue that Gilead offers more than just health and wellness; more than a future trajectory with fewer cases of AIDS internationally.  In addition, Gilead offers a technology of intimacy and a re-positioning of trust.

The WHO focuses exclusively on AIDS prevention, but doctors, citizens, activists, and practitioners address the social side of medicine when they talk about PrEP.  In particular, proponents construct discourses of control over sexuality and new kinds of connection, purportedly stifled or repressed when mediated through the barrier of a condom. For instance, in an interview with NPR, a New York man who uses Truvada as PrEP explains:

I didn’t fully understand what it meant to live in fear every time I had sex…And it wasn’t until about a year after I was using PREP that I had the experience of pleasurable intimacy, and realized: I’m not afraid anymore.

In ironic tension with this increased physical intimacy, is the diminished need to rely on a partner’s honesty and engage in potentially awkward and difficult conversations about sexual history[ii]. In a neoliberal move of control over the self—rather than stewardship for one another—the pill allows sexual subjects to protect themselves responsibly. This of course repositions responsibility, such that the contraction of AIDS can legitimately elicit the accusatory question: were you taking your pill regularly? This is inextricably entwined with morality. A protected body is a responsible body. A responsible self is a moral self[iii].

Interestingly, this personal responsibility is tied in with, indeed depends upon, a technological object. The moral self, here, is literally consumed.

Perhaps unsatisfyingly, I close with no clear argument for or against the production, sale, distribution, or use of PrEP. Instead, I point to the imbrication of bodies, technologies, and market economies. Truvada is not just about safety, it is about self. It is about morality. And it is, as always, about monetary exchange.

Jenny Davis is a weekly contributor for Cyborgology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

[i] It is unclear why the recommendation is for men who have sex with men specifically, and not extended to the full list of “vulnerable populations” as identified by the WHO, which include people in prison, people who inject drugs, sex workers and transgender people

[ii] Of course this drug only prevents AIDS.  Condoms and communication are still essential in preventing other sexually transmitted diseases.

[iii] This discourse sounds quite familiar in its mimicry of women and birth control pills.

Okay, readers, it’s time to get to work. I recently found out that I get to teach a New Media and Society course in spring 2015. The course, housed in Sociology,  is geared toward upper-level undergraduates and will be listed under “Special Topics,” which basically means it’s a trial run with the potential for eventual inclusion in the official course catalog. I have had this course milling around in my head for quite awhile now, and have an outline ready.

What would really make the course great, though, is input from the scholarly community (broadly conceived). Since Cyborgology has a truly fantastic scholarly community, I’m asking for help here.

Below, I outline the general topics I plan to cover. Your job is to suggest content for any of these topics. You can list them in the comments. I will combine everyone’s suggestions, along with my own existing list, and construct a follow up post. Suggestions can include books, journal articles, blog posts, videos, and popular media pieces in written or visual form.

This only works if you participate, so please, everyone, give me what you’ve got and spread widely.

General Topics:

1)      Theories of Technology and Society

2)      Theories of Communication

3)      Social Media: A History and Recent Trends

4)      Utopias and Dystopias

5)      Political Economy of Social Media 

6)      The Public Sphere

7)      Privacy and Publicity

8)      Self and Identity

9)      Interpersonal Relationships

10)  Opting Out

Jenny Davis is on Twitter and happy to take suggestions there, too: @Jenny_L_Davis

Image Source

On 25 February 1940, an officer with the San Francisco police department’s homicide detail reported a “rather suspicious business” operating in the city. At 126 Jackson Street sat an old, three-story rooming house, recently leased by Dr. Henri F. St. Pierre of the Dermic Laboratories. As Assistant Special Agent J. W. Williams later described the scene, “women had been seen entering the place from the Jackson Street side at various times of the day, subsequently leaving by … an alley at the rear of the building. Following the arrival of the women, cars would arrive with a man carrying a case resembling … a doctor’s kit. They would also enter the building for a short time, come out, and drive away. . . .” At first sight, the medical kit, the furtive departures, and the seedy locale all signaled to Williams that St. Pierre was running a “new abortion parlor.” As it turned out, however, “the so-called ‘Dr.'” was offering a somewhat different service to these women: the removal of their unwanted body hair through prolonged exposure to X rays (quoted directly from Rebecca Herzig’s Removing Roots: ‘North American Hiroshima Maidens’ and the X-Ray).

Body hair. Humans have it. Where they have it, how much they have, and what color it is, holds moral connotations tied to cultural norms of both gender and race. In the simplest sense, men should be hairy. Women should be hairless. And it does take effort to implement some crafty methods, like the use of an IPL device, to shrewdly make people believe that body hair on women is something that’s unheard of.

Hot wax hair removal is one of the most popular ways of removing unwanted hair. This type of hair removal would require for you to heat the wax on a microwave before using it. Compared to using epilators or shaving, where you have to do it daily to be hair-free, hair waxing is more efficient as it allows hair-free part’s of the body for about 2-3 weeks. This method never fails to give your skin a smooth and fresh look. Another advantage of using hot wax is that it gives a softer feel as the hair that would grow back are with tapered ends, which do not give that prickly feeling that you get when you use epilators, depilatories or when you shave. Waxing and Skincare by Celeste hair also works on peeling off the top layer of the skin, which does not only remove unwanted hairs but also removes the dead cells on the skin. It is important to read the instructions very well when applying wax for hair removal, make sure that you don’t get burned by it.

If your goal is a regimen of totally natural skincare, then look no further than your pantry. If you want pre-fabricated natural skincare products, then here is some advice on what to look for.

Your personal skin care needs will determine which ingredients it is necessary for you to use. Let’s first look at moisturizing, since that is an area which concerns everyone. Even those with oily skin should focus on moisturizing in their natural skincare program.

The sebaceous glands naturally excrete an oily substance known as sebum. It is actually the debris of dead fat producing cells. Sebum has been a difficult substance for natural skincare products to match in consistency. Three natural skincare ingredients come very close to replicating sebum in texture. They are Jojoba, Babassu wax, and Maracuja passion fruit extract. The three of these ingredients working together will bring balance to the skin’s natural sebum production. Jojoba wax is derived from the Jojoba shrub, which is native to California, Arizona, and Mexico. The substance has been shown to have strong antioxidant properties. The Native Americans used Jojoba ground nuts in order to treat burns, as the substance accelerated the healing process. Jojoba has become so popular that it is now being harvested on plantations. It is on these tracts that the Jojoba seeds are being processed for their oil, which is then added as an ingredient in natural skincare products. It is very similar to human sebum in that it is a long, straight chain ester.

The good and moral woman has little to no body hair, and the body hair she does have is only on her legs, and all of those hairs are blond and fine. For those of us who fail to naturally achieve this bodied moral norm, the medical-cosmetic market offers an array of technologies to help hide, temporarily or permanently, our moral failing.  

****************

About a month ago I exchanged the following text messages with a friend[i]:

Friend: Yoga!!??

Me: Don’t judge me, but I’m going to get full-leg laser #feminismisdead

Friend: Ha!!! Choose your choice!

Friend: #Hairbeltproblems

Me: Right!?

Friend: Go get third wave smooth 😉

Laser hair removal relies on lasers that find and kill active hair roots. Hair growth happens in cycles. Killing all of the roots and producing permanently[ii] hairless skin typically takes 5-6 treatments. I’ve had one treatment so far. I spent two bare-legged hours while the goggle-adorned technician carefully traced the laser over my skin. It feels like continuous snaps of a tiny rubber band and smells like burning hair.  It’s weirdly satisfying and from what I can tell, quite effective.

In what follows, I use the lens of laser hair removal technologies to work through and trace the three waves[iii] of feminism. I intend this as both an implicit argument and an explicit teaching tool. The argument herein is that politics and political discourse are written into and through technologies—especially those of the body.  More concretely, this piece can be of pedagogical use in its delineation of feminist waves, as instantiated through a relatable and grounded example.

Of obligatory note, the three “waves” of feminism are far from clear and remain contentious in their definitions. Moreover, their temporal and ideological overlaps inhibit clean distinctions. With that said, the waves follow, generally, from a focus on women’s civic participation (first wave), to a focus on overturning patriarchal structures and regaining control of women’s reproductive rights (second wave), to a disintegration of the “universal woman” with an insistence on intersectionalities  and empowerment through reclaimed sexuality (third wave).

****************

 First Wave: Who cares about bodies, we just want to vote!!

The first wave of feminism, typically dated to the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, was all about women’s civic participation. In particular, it was about women’s suffrage. Bodies, though the site of unequal citizenship designations, were not central here. It was during this time that X-ray hair removal, referenced in the opening quote, was in its heyday. Had laser been available, I imagine some of the most strident feminists would have taken advantage.  Rather than celebrated, women’s bodies during first wave feminism were strategically absent. Women’s minds, the feminists argued, were not constrained by feminine frailty. Women deserved a voice despite their bodies. “Real” womanhood—beauty, compassion, motherly-ness—would bring new and important perspectives into the public sphere. The perfect first wave feminist was the middle class, cultured, and appropriately hairless woman.

Second Wave: Screw hair removal!! Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow.

The second wave of feminism, typically dated from the 1960s to the 1990s but continuing into the present, is the home of radical women’s liberation and efforts to recognize and overturn patriarchal structures. In particular, second wave feminists fight vehemently for women’s control over their own bodies, and against the controls—often so deeply embedded as to remain ambient—of patriarchy.

From a second wave perspective laser hair removal machines are an inherently patriarchal and oppressive technology, further perpetuating impossible body standards, transforming women’s bodies into those of pre-pubescent girls, and charging women for the privilege of this transformation. To this latter point, the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy locate women—in this case, women like me— in the position of literally consuming their own subjugation.

Third Wave: It’s my body and I’ll laser if I want to!!

Third wave feminism, typically dated from the late 1990s into the present, re-fragments womanhood, insisting there are infinite “right” ways to be a woman, and those multiple ways are valuable and respectable. Of particular relevance, third wave feminism promotes a reclaiming of sexuality and the body, such that hyper-fem, masculine, and queer sex and gender preferences and performances deserve equal respect and institutional avenues within society. Third wave is all about informed options. Do what you want, but know why you’re doing it, and food goodness sake, do it because you want to.

From a third wave perspective laser hair removal machines offer an option for bodily configuration. They are not inherently patriarchal or feminist, but can be used for varied ends. Those who choose laser can do so because they are in charge of their own bodies. Laser is therefore a tool in women’s control over their own embodiment. It is also a key tool in trans* embodiment, as these technologies are a means of performing femininity and accomplishing a feminine presentation, regardless of genital or chromosomal makeup.

In addition to empowerment, however, the third wave perspective facilitates a critical analysis of the raced and classed nature of laser hair removal technologies. In short, these technologies were made for white people, and remain available exclusively to those with expendable income.

A key component of third wave feminism is its insistence that feminism operates at the level of intersectionality. Third wavers remind us that race, class, and (dis)ability all intersect with issues of sex and gender.

Laser treatments are expensive. As a tenure-track professor, I have a definitively professional job, with a comfortable salary. Yet, were it not for Groupon—which reduced the price of my package from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars—laser would not be an option for me. Laser remains unattainable for much of the population. Those who can pay get to have a culturally defined “moral” body. For those who cannot pay, the moral battle—fought with razors and Nair—continues.

Laser technologies were also originally built for particular kinds of bodies. My skin/hair combination is light/dark respectively. As I joked to my laser technician, though undesirable in life, this combination is perfect for laser hair removal. Machines were built to seek out dark pigment, detecting black hair roots beneath pale skin. For a long time, laser was simply not an option for people of color. Although some machines have advanced, the additional capability to detect hair on dark skin is just that, an addition. And it’s an imperfect one. People with dark skin run a higher risk of burns from the laser. In this vein, my laser technician explained that we were able to use stronger settings due to my particular hair/skin color combination, while those with darker skin needed lower settings. This means my treatments will probably be quicker and more effective than someone with darker skin, costing less money and time, and subjecting me to less risk. Moreover, people with dark skin always still have to ask—rather than assume—that a laser facility will be able to treat them at all.

And so here I sit, with my privilege-enabled laser-smooth legs, relieved that my days of buying razors will soon be over, but still deeply unsure if my trips to the medical esthetician are at all different from the X-ray seekers of the early 20^th century.  And this reflects, experientially, what it means to be a feminist today. Today’s feminist brings with hir the history and politics of those who came before, and contends with the complexities that choice—real choice—entails.

Jenny Davis is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University and a weekly contributor for Cyborgology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

[i] Edited for typos (mostly mine) and length

[ii] Laser hair removal is not completely permanent. A small amount of hair can grow back in some people due to hormonal changes.

[iii] Some argue that feminism has 4 waves, and/or that there is a post-feminist wave. For the purposes of this post, though, I will stick with the well-established 3.

Pic Creds:

Headline: http://www.sodahead.com/fun/what-is-one-physical-quality-you-find-attractive-in-the-opposite-sex/question-1886893/?page=3&postId=60352625#post_60352625

X-ray http://samhs.org.au/Virtual%20Museum/adelaide-notable-collectables/Medical%20Collections%20Adelaide.html

Women’s suffrage parade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movements_in_the_United_States

Vagina Monologues: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vagina_Monologues_Poster.jpg

Anarcha-feminists: https://www.flickr.com/photos/holdoffhunger/8742971002/

Emotional Contagion is the idea that emotions spread throughout networks. If you are around happy people, you are more likely to be happy. If you are around gloomy people, you are likely to be glum.

The data scientists at Facebook set out to learn if text-based, nonverbal/non-face-to-face interactions had similar effects.  They asked: Do emotions remain contagious within digitally mediated settings? They worked to answer this question experimentally by manipulating the emotional tenor of users’ News Feeds, and recording the results.

Public reaction was such that many expressed dismay that Facebook would 1) collect their data without asking and 2) manipulate their emotions.

I’m going to leave aside the ethics of Facebook’s data collection. It hits on an important but blurry issue of informed consent in light of Terms of Use agreements, and deserves a post all its own. Instead, I focus on the emotional manipulation, arguing that Facebook was already manipulating your emotions, and likely in ways far more effectual than algorithmically altering the emotional tenor of your News Feed.

Here is there full report. And here is the abstract:

Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people.

In brief, Facebook made either negative or positive emotions more prevalent in users’ News Feeds, and measured how this affected users’ emotionally expressive behaviors, as indicated by users’ own posts. In line with Emotional Contagion Theory, and in contrast to “technology disconnects us and makes us sad through comparison” hypotheses, they found that indeed, those exposed to happier content expressed higher rates of positive emotion, while those exposed to sadder content expressed higher rates of negative emotion.

Looking at the data, there are three points of particular interest:

1. When positive posts were reduced in the News Feed, people used .01% fewer positive words in their own posts, while increasing the number of negative words they used by .04%.
2. When negative posts were reduced in the News Feed, people used .07% fewer negative words in their own posts, while increasing the number of positive words by.06%.
3.  Prior to manipulation, 22.4% of posts contained negative words, as compared to 46.8% which contained positive words.

Let’s first look at points 1 and 2—the effects of positive and negative content in users’ News Feeds. These effects, though significant and in the predicted direction, are really really tiny[i]. None of the effects even approach 1%. In fact, the effects are all below .1%. That’s so little!! The authors acknowledge the small effects, but defend them by translating these effects into raw numbers, reflecting “hundreds of thousands” of emotion-laden status updates per day. They don’t, however, acknowledge how their (and I quote) “massive” sample size of 689,003 increases the likelihood of finding significant results.

So what’s up with the tiny effects?

The answer, I argue, is that the structural affordances of Facebook are such users are far more likely to post positive content anyway. For instance, there is no dislike button, and emoticons are the primary means of visually expressing emotion. Concretely, when someone posts something sad, there is no canned way to respond, nor an adequate visual representation. Nobody wants to “Like” the death of someone’s grandmother, and a Frownie-Face emoticon seems decidedly out of place.

The emotional tenor of your News Feed is small potatoes compared to the effects of structural affordances. The affordances of Facebook buffer against variations in content. This is clear in point 3 above, in which positive posts far outnumbered negative posts, prior to any manipulation. The very small effects of experimental manipulations indicates that  the overall emotional makeup of posts changed little after the study, even when positive content was artificially decreased.

So Facebook was already manipulating your emotions—our emotions—and our logical lines of action. We come to know ourselves by seeing what we do, and the selves we perform through social media become important mirrors with which we glean personal reflections. The affordances of Facebook therefore affect not just emotive expressions, but reflect back to users that they are the kind of people who express positive emotions.

Positive psychologists would say this is good; it’s a way in which Facebook helps its users achieve personal happiness. Critical theorists would disagree, arguing that Facebook’s emotional guidance is a capitalist tool which stifles rightful anger, indignation, and mobilization towards social justice. In any case, Facebook is not, nor ever was, emotionally neutral.

Jenny Davis is a weekly contributor for Cyborgology and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University. Follow Jenny on Twitter: @Jenny_L_Davis

[i] Nathan Jurgenson pointed out just how tiny the effects were in an email thread. I then fumbled through an explanation that manifested in this post.

Headline pic via:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Lab_coats.jpg

Over the summer I began supervising a student for an independent study of BDSM and Kink communities. To begin, this student created a list of academic articles, books, and blog posts relevant to the question of study. I will be reading along with the student, and am currently making my way through the blogosphere. In doing so, I’ve been struck by the prevalence of “trigger warnings” attached to blog posts, many of which deal with safety, abuse, and rape culture. Many readers are probably familiar with the trigger warning. Posted in front of potentially upsetting content, the trigger warning gives potential readers a heads up about the nature of the text, sound, or images that follow.

It is perhaps unsurprising that trigger warnings are common among bloggers writing about rape, consent, and sex-positive encounters. These are sensitive topics and the authors (the ones that my student and I have been reading) come at these topics from a conscientiously critical feminist perspective. But what about all of those trigger warnings outside of this explicitly conscientious space? Although unscientific, I’ve noticed an abundance of trigger warnings throughout my Twitter and Facebook feeds as people share content with one another.  The phenomena has even spread to higher education, with students and universities calling for the integration of trigger warnings into class syllabi (though this is not without critique).

While it is clear what the trigger warning does; why, socially, people use the trigger warning, I am left with two questions: First, why, technologically, has the trigger warning become so prominent? Second, what does the widespread use of trigger warnings add to how we understand the ways human relationships develop with and through new technological developments?

The short answer to question 1—why are trigger warnings so prevalent?— is that through technological developments, content is abundant, and consumers are hit hard and fast with a lot of things they did not necessarily seek out. This makes suppression difficult. Trigger warnings make suppression little easier.  And suppression, or active forgetting[i], can be important to mental functioning.

Suppression is not unique to the contemporary era. Actively forgetting traumatic or upsetting events and realities is a well-worn human pastime.  Recall, for example, the first time you got dumped. Aside from writhing around on the floor in a puddle of your own snot and tears screaming “whyyyyyyy!?!?!,” it’s likely you also avoided certain songs on the radio, didn’t go to certain restaurants for awhile, took down (or burned?) that picture of the two of you which hung so prominently in your high school locker or sat framed by your bedside. You may have even forbade your friends from mentioning your ex-lover’s name. These are all means of active forgetting, and they were around before the Internet.

But new technological developments have complicated active forgetting by locating sociality, work, and leisure in content rich environments; environments in which content creators likely don’t have you in mind. I’ve written previously about curation, and this is of particular relevance here. Content rich environments require that people curate through the mass of images and text, seeking out what they want to consume and avoiding what they don’t. And content they don’t want, can hit unexpectedly. This is why trigger warnings matter. They are a curatorial tool in a curation-heavy context.

This brings me to my second question: what do trigger warnings add to the conversation about human relationships as they develop with and through new technologies?

I argue that in contrast to the oft stated fear that technologies drive humans apart, or get in the way of meaningful relationships, the trigger warning is a means by which technological developments—or at least our reaction to technological developments—create an ethic of collective responsibility for the psychological well-being of one another.

The trigger warning is not merely a curatorial tool, but a collective curatorial tool, provided by humans, for fellow humans. Content creators may not have you specifically in mind, but when they post trigger warnings, they do so for the general You, all of the Yous who make up the Us.

Things did not have to develop this way. If I had taken bets five years ago, I would have guessed that within the context of liberal ideology, curation would be left to personal responsibility. I would have guessed that something like the trigger warning would either not exist, or exist in small niche communities, largely absent from the mainstream. This would have been a well- founded guess, given the presence of things like revenge porn and shaming narratives with regards to data exposure.  But in this case, this one instance of individualism versus collectivism, I would have been wrong. And I’m happy about that.

Follow Jenny on Twitter: @Jenny_L_Davis

[i] The idea of “active forgetting” comes from an in-progress paper by James Chouinard—my partner in life and sociology. This post is largely a product of our conversation about active forgetting in light of new technologies, which occurred over a wonderful plate of very deeply fried tofu.

Several months ago, the CDC released a report on Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). They found that as of 2010, 1 in every 68 U.S. children are on the ASD spectrum. This is up from 1 in every 150 children just ten years prior. This means that rates have more than doubled. The reasons for the large increase are fodder for some wonderfully interesting conversations and heated debates about biology vs. environment vs. culture vs. the Medical Industrial Complex. Putting these debates aside for another day, however, I instead want to talk about how new technologies can serve this ever growing population. As a quick caveat, I should say that I am a person who dabbles in disability studies research. My hope is that those who know more than I—through personal experience and/or professional expertise—will add nuance to the ideas I present below and help guide the discussion into all of the complex places I know it can go, but don’t quite know how to take it.

According to the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) (released in May 2013) Autism Spectrum Disorders are those that negatively affect social-emotional responses and communication skills across contexts, inhibit relationship building and development, and manifest behaviorally through inflexibility, inappropriate responses to stimulation, and obsessive focus on narrow topics. I encourage you to check out the link above for the full diagnostic criteria.

The first thing to notice about Autism’s official description is the incredibly ableist language in which the DSM-V authors wrote. If you click the link above, you will see a lot of words like “deficit,”   “symptoms,” and “severity.” Reframing this for the purposes of the this blog post, we can instead understand Autism as a way of engaging the world that is poorly accommodated by interpersonal social structures (i.e., norms of interaction) and institutions (e.g., schools). The degree of difference between a person with an Autistic sensibility and those termed “Neurotypical” represents a person’s location upon the Autism spectrum, and the ease or difficulty with which they can function in an environment built for Neurotypicals.

Understanding Autism as a poorly accommodated way of being in the world, it is important to look at the means by which those with ASD can improve upon their plight. One way, I argue, is through the written mode of communication afforded by Internet technologies.

Jason Rodriquez wrote a fantastic article about the use of Internet forums by people with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Although Rodriquez focused on the construction of identity narratives, his data touched on an interesting point that I explore further here. Some of the participants on the forum Rodriquez studied expressed relief at the opportunity to engage in meaningful communication, avoiding the limitations of traditional interaction. In particular, these people with varying degrees of dementia, found it difficult to keep up with the fast-paced, asynchronous, social-cue-laden, distracting environment of face-to-face communication. The forums allowed them to pause, think, process, and articulate in ways that they otherwise could not.  This is a big deal. It gave these participants an outlet to connect on a human level that was otherwise denied. Moreover, participants reported clinical benefits from continued engagement, as they exercised their brains in an accommodating environment. That is, for people with early-onset Alzheimer’s, the forum provided reprieve from a “disabling” condition.

Extending this, I wonder about the extent to which digital mediation can be used as an accommodation for those with ASD in general, and those with intellectual disabilities more generally. The key problem for people with ASD is a difficulty fitting themselves into social situations. But what if social situations are such that the differences between those with ASD and Neurotypicals are made less consequential and therefore less disabling? Digitally mediated forms of sociality, I argue, can potentially create such an environment.

The key factors are written—rather than spoken—communication, asynchronicity, and expansive niche groups.

If it is difficult for a person to read or demonstrate social cues through facial expression and body language, than writing and reading may be an easier and more effective means of communication than spoken or face-to-face interaction. Such text based communication is widely prevalent through social media, SMS, and community forums.

Of course, people can (and do) write in implicit, sarcastic, and polysemic ways. This brings me to my second point: asynchronicity. Digitally mediated communication often (though not always) includes a pause. This pause is hugely useful for communication between people using slightly different languages or logics. It seems that when someone with ASD can take the time to read, think about, and respond to others’ communications, the likelihood of mutual understanding will increase.

Finally, these communicative advantages can be put to use in the expansive niche communities available online. In addition to social issues, some people with ASD express an intense interest and focus on particular topics. Although this focus may seem abnormal in many settings, it likely fits quite comfortably within communities centered around the topic. For instance, if someone thinks and talks a lot about fishing, this might create distance between them and co-workers or classmates, but the other members on TheBigFishTackle.com will remain fascinated and continue to provide stimulating conversation.

Importantly, this is not to say that The Internet solves all problems of ableism. On the contrary, most digital social technologies are built with Nuerotypicals in mind, and this could have dire consequences for “Other” populations. For instance, the staying power of content online means that social faux-pas have a longer—sometimes permanent—shelf life, and can come back in ways that tangibly harm those who commit them. Further, I certainly do not mean to imply that people with ASD should lock themselves away behind closed doors, lit only by the glow of a computer screen. Rather, I contend that in a disabling world, some digital social technologies may be unexpected, unintentional, means of accommodation. Moreover, sociality begets sociality, and if those with ASD have an opportunity to engage socially in ways that are comfortable for them, they can be more fully integrated members of society, while Neurotypicals can learn to better interact with those who deviate from their normative social expectations.

Most importantly, however, it’s time for researchers to examine how people with intellectual disabilities experience a technologically changing world. This post is an early, largely speculative and open, attempt in this direction.

Thoughts and critiques welcome. Let’s push this conversation forward.

Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

Pics Via:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html (chart)

http://biblioteca.uam.es/psicologia/exposiciones/ (Ribbon)