Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:
“cupcakes match—& attempt to assuage—our cultural anxieties of the moment”
“Each second, I observe friends on Facebook contributing to a shared space of disposable moments”
“I’m wondering, now, if machines are, by default, gender queer?”
“the modes of constraint operating through [the Web] are material, while liberation is semiotic”
“typewriters alter the physical connection between writer and text“
Writing Tools and the Instrumentalist Conception of Technology
My recent article in The Atlantic, “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun,” is provocative in part because it suggests tools like guns might have more power of us than meets the eye. Given widely held views about autonomy (e.g., the notion that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”), this alternative way of looking at things can cause anxiety, especially when misunderstood and translated into terms like those offered by the first commenter, “Guns are magic mind control machines.” The article presented an account of how humans relate to technology, and to further illuminate those relations, I’ll briefly revisit media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s take on Friedrich Nietzche’s use of the typewriter. Like my gun essay, this analysis challenges the “instrumentalist” conception of technology.
In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler contends that in order to understand how Nietzsche coped with myopia, it is crucial to grasp the import of him by buying a typewriter: a Danish model invented by Hans Rasmus Johann Malling Hanson. Given the lack of philosophical precedent, Kittler characterizes Nietzsche as the “first mechanized philosopher,” and argues that integrating the typewriter into the writing process facilitated several changes to the act of writing itself, profoundly impacting Nietzsche’s thought and style.
Kittler stresses how typewriters alter the physical connection between writer and text. Unlike the visual attention that writing by hand requires, the typewriter made it possible to create texts by exploiting a blind, tactile power that can harness “a historically new proficiency: écriture automatique.” Given the report of a Frankfurt eye doctor, which stated that Nietzsche’s “right eye could only perceive mistaken and distorted images,” and Nietzsche’s own claim to find reading and writing painful after twenty minutes, we can appreciate why he would turn to a writing device that could be operated simply by pressing briefly on a key—a key that doesn’t even need to be looked at. Indeed, the Malling Hanson was specifically designed to “compensate for physical deficiencies” by having the capacity to “be guided solely by one’s sense of touch.”
When considering this shift from sight to touch, it is instructive to follow Kittler’s lead and recall that by the 1940’s, Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who might have ethical blindness, but did not suffer from Nietzsche’s physical maladies, famously expressed a position about automatic writing that ran contrary to Nietzsche’s enthusiasm. Underwritten by a conception of the human hand being utterly distinctive, Heidegger articulated distain for the typewriter’s speediness. He preferred the slower moving ink pen, insisting the device is more conducive to fostering deep philosophical thought. When discussing the Greek sense of action, pragma, in his lectures on Parmenides, Heidegger thus makes the following claims,
Man himself acts [handelt] through the hand [Hand]; for the hand is, together with the word, the essential distinction of man. Only a being which, like man, “has” the word, can and must “have” “the hand.”…No animal has a hand and a hand never originates from a paw or claw or talon…The hand sprang forth only out of the word and together with the word. Man does not “have” hands, but the hand holds the essence of man, because the word as the essential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man. The word as what is inscribed and what appears is the written word, i.e., script. And the word as script is handwriting.
It is not accidental that the modern man writes “with” the typewriter and “dictates” [diktiert] “into” a machine. This “history” of writing is one of the man reasons for the increasing destruction of the word. The latter no longer comes and goes by means of the writing hand, the properly acting hand, but b the means of the mechanical forces it releases. The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word. The word itself turns into something “typed.”…Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a means of communication.
This is not the appropriate space to try to resolve the different philosophical perspectives on the typewriter. Doing so would require a detailed discussion of whether Heidegger’s position depends upon unjustifiable skepticism about natural evolution, and whether his conclusions lead to a nostalgia regress. Would a quill or reed pen be even better? Should the “authentic” writer make his or her own paper? Rather, the value of calling attention to the core issue over which Nietzsche and Heidegger diverge is that it allows us to emphasize a crucial point of commonality. Both philosophers agree that material culture can have a profound influence upon thought and, thereby, upon the kind of subject who thinks in particular way.
Kittler further stresses the fact that typed texts display a different visual configuration than handwritten ones. Unlike handwritten documents, typed manuscripts distribute spatially discrete signs of standardized size. Such uniformity could appeal to Nietzsche precisely because it fused what Marshal McLuhan calls “composition and publication.” It enabled “a half-blind writer chased by publishers…to produce ‘documents as beautiful and standardized as print.”
Finally, and most significantly, Kittler makes the following rather startling claim about Nietzsche’s response:
Nietzsche, as proud of the publication of his mechanization as any philosopher, changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style. That is precisely what is meant by the sentence our writing tools are also working on our thoughts. Malling Hansen’s writing ball, with its operating difficulties, made Nietzsche into a laconic.
Kittler’s point, then, is that when Nietzsche challenged conventional modes of philosophical expression, he didn’t opt for epigraphs simply because he believed the style would dramatically impact readers—more so than, say, lengthy texts comprised of logically arranged propositions. Rather, Nietzsche’s decision to “artistically” confront the problem of communication emerged from a combination factors: his views on language, the physical limitations imposed by his ailments, and the horizon of possibilities that the typewriter affords. Given the importance of all three, Kittler cites a poem that Nietzsche wrote about the Malling Hansen in 1882. Translated, it states:
THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF /IRON/ YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS./ PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ADBUNDANCE,/ AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS, TO USE US.
By comparing “the equipment, the thing, and the agent,” Nietzsche appears to demonstrate his awareness that “authors” do not generate thoughts that transcend their material culture.
Obviously, much has changed since Nietzsche wrote with a typewriter. That technology largely has faded from practice, and for the most part, become a relic replaced by various forms of computer-mediated programs. Nevertheless, the manner in which the typewriter impacts cognition is paralleled by changes brought upon by current digital writing tools.
Michael Chabon, for example, listed software (DevonThink Pro and Nisus Writer Express) in the acknowledgement section to his highly acclaimed novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. If the instrumentalist view of technology were correct, this attribution should strike us as absurd. According to the instrumentalist outlook, people can be good or bad collaborators. Pen, paper, typewriters, and computers are merely artifacts that good writers use well, and bad writers use poorly. Indeed, for the instrumentalist, it is bad faith to associate the quality of writing with its underlying material culture; an artist in denial blames his or her tools to avoid the painful realization that he or she lacks talent. And yet, Chabon isn’t blaming a dry spell or a poor novel on his tools. Remarkably, he is doing the opposite. Instead of taking all the credit for his accomplishment, he’s challenging perceptions of autonomy by distributing its value to a human-machine interface.
The significance of Chabon’s comments—and Kittler and Heidegger’s analyses—extends beyond the topic of writers and their tools. To grasp the effects of computers have on society, we need to carefully reflect on the distortions that arise when the instrumentalist perspective pervades coverage of social media. The go-to phrase, “the Web is just a tool” is as off-base as the NRA slogan, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
Evan Selinger is an associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology. Follow him on Twitter: @evanselinger
Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:
“Kickstarter is just another form of entertainment. It’s QVC for the Net set”
“the desire of theory always involves a dimension of universalism”
“What does it mean to feel empathy for a twitter feed?”
“Comic-Con protesters call cyberpunk doorway to demonic possession“
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.” Far from making a convincing case that online education should trouble us, Mark Edmundson instead makes a case for interactivity. He does this by contrasting brilliant lecturers who can read a room when face-to-face against completely non-interactive online course templates. Sure, the former has advantages over the latter, but is this really the choice faced by universities, professors and students today? Of course not.
Edmundon’s first error is having nostalgia for a fiction past where the Web didn’t exist and professors were always there with the students in the room, face to face, making the lecture an in-the-moment responsive operation, always guided by the changing currents of the classroom. The varying interests and needs of the students were perceived by the professor’s magical “pedagogical sixth sense” (Edmundson’s term) and the speech would morph accordingly like a work of performance art. Beautiful! Unfortunately, as just about anyone who has ever taken a college course ever knows well, a whole bunch of face-to-face lecturers also created very non-interactive courses. Edmundson describes an ideal but presents it as a norm.
Then, Edmundson describes an online course. He describes them as courses finished before they are started; the text is pre-written and video lectures pre-filmed. Online courses are made out to be like freight trains that propel forward upon a pre-determined track, irrespective to the needs of the particular students enrolled. While this actually reminds some of us of the offline-only courses we took in the past, the bigger point is that this is not how online education needs to be done.
The real argument that Edmundson is making, and it is actually a good one, is that there are pedagocial benefits to interactive and responsive learning environments. Where he fails is wrongly assuming that human interactivity is solely the business of the offline and impossible online. This is plainly false.
The easier argument is actually discussing the difficulties of being interactive when teaching face-to-face. For example, sometimes professors are over-worked or uninterested in interacting with students and sometimes the classrooms are too large to be intimate. Building interactivity into online education, on the other hand, is actually less mysterious and less likely to require some magical sixth-sense. Using the digital, and social, technologies that so many of the students and professors already know much about is the obvious start. There is a whole literature being written about how to use discussion boards, wiki’s, blogs, Twitter and other tools when teaching online and offline courses.
What I’d rather conclude on is drawing a more abstract point from this specific discussion. Let’s look closely at the rhetoric Edmundson uses to develop his argument disqualifying online education:
in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will. Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely. [emphases added]
Straight out of the link-grabbing and substance-lacking playbook of Sherry Turkle or Steven Marche, Edmundson ends with the argument that the Internet is making us lonely. This is an argumentative strategy that plays well, generates lots of page-views and comments, and is thoroughly unsubstantiated by research. And like all the other popular pieces claiming the Internet is making us lonely, the argumentative strategy is to contrast the Internet with the “real.”
This is my biggest complaint about tech-writing: the understanding of that which is mediated by digital information is somehow not real. The offline is described as human, filled with “joy” and “community” and all the intangibles related to our messy IRL existence. Conversely, the online is “virtual,” “sterile” and apparently comprised of bored and frowning teenagers, as the article’s lead illustration seems to suggest. This understanding of a “real” world separate from this other “virtual” world is popular and, I think, fundamentally wrongheaded.
I’ve previously coined the phrase “digital dualism” to describe false separation of the on and offline, and, in this case, it is via this dualism that Edmundson justifies his claim that interactivity can only happen offline. The logic is that offline is a space pregnant with human connection, the online is a space where students are met with algorithms and robots; without human connection there can be no true interactivity. I recently described this faulty logic “The IRL Fetish” (IRL = “in real life”), to mistake real human interaction as only existing “IRL” and missing the degree to which digital tools do not whisk us to some new virtual space but are rather part of our one, lived, augmented, human reality. To fetishize the offline as the sole domain of humanity is to obscure the fact that our digital tools are also comprised of real people, with real histories, politics, standpoints, ideas and potential. That which happens online is real, it is human; online education does not preclude real connection, community or interactivity.
What are the consequences of fetishizing offline education? Who benefits from disqualifying all education that does not happen purely face-to-face as less “real”? What does that view say of the many teachers and students making use of some combination of on and offline learning tools? Is that pedagogy less real? Are the student’s insights less real? Let’s not begin this by belittling learning communities that, to some degree, use or don’t use digital tools. Let’s drop this false binary between the online and offline and recognize that, instead, they are both real. From here we can start the more important discussion of how to teach, both on and offline, in our ever changing real world.
Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:
“there’s blood dripped from fast-clouding retinas onto all of our computer chips”
“Why is it that, unlike buildings, old websites never have any prestige?”
“Do templated spaces of identity construction necessarily do violence to experience?”
“using social media the same way a rat in the maze “uses” the scientists to get cheese”
“Our idea of “nature” owes something to the advance of technology”
“now the novelty isn’t being online, it’s being offline”
“Friendship’s path,” a 1937 AT&T ad declared, “often follows the trail of the telephone wire.”
“what’s the point of doing something awesome if you can’t brag about it online?”
“Kids don’t as deeply distinguish between online & offline bullying”
“anything that you see in the real world needs to be in our database“
Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:
“The appeal of TED comes as much from its presentation as from its substance”
“Just because the picture looks artsy doesn’t mean you are”
“consuming & owning the present moment has become more important than capturing an experience”
“many-to-many communication is becoming impossible without a for-profit many-to-one infrastructure”
“one of the first names considered for the iPhone was actually “iPad”
“computational social science may make surveillance, profiling, and targeting overly accessible”
There is often the assumption that the information economy expects us to consume more and more, leading us to process more but concentrate less. Some have called this a “fear of missing out” (or FOMO), a “blend of anxiety, inadequacy and irritation that can flare up while skimming social media.” However, most of these arguments about FOMO make the false assumption that the information economy wants and expects us to always process more. This isn’t true; we need to accept the reality that the information economy as well as our own preferences actually value, even need, missing out.
Many do feel in over their heads when scrolling social media streams. Especially those of us who make a hobby or career in the attention/information economy, always reading, sharing, commenting and writing; tweeting, blogging, retweeting and reblogging. Many of us do feel positioned directly in the path of a growing avalanche of information, scared of missing out and afraid of losing our ability to slow down, concentrate, connect and daydream, too distracted by that growing list of unread tweets. While it seemed fun and harmless (Tribble-like?) at first, have we found ourselves drowning in the information streams we signed up for and participate in?
As Cheri Lucas, recently said,
I have a Fear of Missing Out on the best links and stories of the day, hesitant of taking breaks from Twitter—of jumping off the moving train—because I feel it will be harder to jump back on. […] Sometimes I envision my Twitter feed as rushing water: my presence is a dam, and each tweet is debris making its way downstream. It’s now a challenge to let information simply flow—to let tweets swim by without me seeing or interacting with them.
Rob Horning applies this line of thought to his work on “the data self,” describing our relationship to producing and consuming (prosuming) on social media with respect to an analysis of contemporary capitalism. Horning’s assumption is that capitalism requires of us to always consume and share more and more. The logic is that sharing something, getting some retweets, likes, reblogs and new friends and followers means added social and cultural capital and therefore doing more of this thus equals even more cultural capital:
The goal is the same: higher throughput: more consuming work achieved in less time, with fewer barriers in the form of human interaction to impede the quantifiable consumption experience. The faster we can turn what we consume into a form of information, the more our consumption efforts are recouped as a form of labor for capital. Until the advent of social media, much of human interaction escaped being converted into information. Fortunately that problem has been more or less solved. Social media has at last made social interaction “more convenient.”
This need to consume more and more is presumed to be linear. Horning goes on,
Information doesn’t pass by us without leaving a residue; the more we let slip past the more we feel ignorant. […]It shifts my mental mode from thinking to concentration; from comprehension to stamina. I have to process all the information into a product for social consumption rather than actually let this information facilitate sociality as something not to be consumed but experienced. In other words, online sociality may be a form of social deskilling designed to get us to perform more quasi-social behavior (sharing, etc.) while enjoying it less.
This neglects the reality that what markets (and ourselves) actually want is not pure quantity. Those “frictions” Horning laments are actually essential to the economic productivity he criticizes. The value, from the perspective of our own enjoyment as well as the companies attempting to commoditize our labor, is not just absent-mindedly scrolling, trying to keep up with everything, skimming articles and retweeting along the way. Sure, that will provide that quantitatively-largest amount of social-data, the most rows and columns in their mysterious databases, but does not reflect the full value of social media.
Rather, the value that users provide on social media happens precisely when they do slow down, when they log off, when they concentrate and when they “miss out” on some things in order to more fully engage with others. There is value in choosing to read one essay closely instead of skimming ten. First, of course, there is the personal enjoyment of digging into something and, also, this sort of attention is more likely to spin off into new ideas and perhaps even more original content. Logging off and working on new ideas ultimately is more valuable to both yourself and attention-capitalism than the brainless retweeting Horning thinks information-capitalism is encouraging.
This reminds me of the discussions around “logging off” and “disconnecting” for a day or weekend as a way to lessen the role of social media in our lives. They also neglect the fact that what we do offline is the fuel that runs the engine of social media; your “offline” weekend is where you’ll take the photos, read the books and come up with the ideas that will end up on your social media streams when you log back on.
Fundamentally, the “logging off” discussion, like the “fear of missing out” folks, wrongly assume a too strong distinction between the on and offline, what I call the fallacy of “digital dualism” (Horning knew I’d call him on this). The on and offline are not zero-sum; logging off might ultimately provide you with more social media content; likewise, reading, linking and tweeting less—”missing out”—can ultimately make you more productive and valuable.
If one does sense a pressure to always read and share more and more to the point of uncreative exhaustion, I feel that is a misreading of what we actually want to do as well as what the attention economy actually expects of us (aka, you’re doing it wrong). Remembering that overtweeting and oversharing are often admonished, social media encourages a balance of being present, sharing information and also providing our own unique insights; something that requires time, absence and learning to appreciate “missing out.”
This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). It was originally posted on 4.11.12 and was updated to include video on 6.5.12. See the conference website for additional information.
I am very happy to have the opportunity to preside over the panel on technologies of identity. Internet is intimately related to people’s identities; a point that is almost self-evident. People express, reinforce and even sometimes construct new identities via the Internet. But how exactly does this happen? through what mechanisms? How, for example, do people who date online maintain or challenge their identities concerning their sexual preference, class, race, etc. in ways similarly and differently than those who date exclusively offline? Or, how do second-generation immigrants take advantage of the Internet to reshape society’s perceptions of them? How, for instance, do people’s conception of consumption change when faced with the new possibility of shopping online? How does our desire for power and pleasure manifest itself through online social networks? …the questions are endless…
Internet meet identity are both fascinating topics: we expect expect analyses that are both interesting and insightful. And that is the promise our presenters try to fulfill with their intriguing papers.
*Note: Due to an unforeseen scheduling conflict, Nicholas Boston will not be able to attend the conference.
[Paper titles and abstracts after the jump.]
Matthew Morrison
– “Queering Intimacy: Class, Coupling, and the Internet in Gay Life”
The vast majority of sociological literature demonstrates that social inequality is maintained through relationship formation, as most heterosexual people in the U.S. today partner with someone who has a similar education and occupation. Scholarly work from sexuality studies, however, demonstrates that gay men in particular defy this trend and are more likely to partner across social class and race. Moreover, many contemporary relationships now begin online – including over 61 percent of contemporary same-sex relationships. As media studies’ scholars urgently debate whether the Internet is challenging, preserving, or amplifying social inequality, a study of gay men’s online romantic practices promises to fruitfully push this debate forward. Weaving together these insights, my dissertation asks several questions: First, what are the contours of gay online intimacy, and what are its consequences for cross-class relationships and social inequality in general? Second, how do cross-class couples who have met online navigate their offline relationships? And third, are there “unanticipated gains” – or possible losses – in cultural and social capital for cross-class couples? To ground these questions empirically, my study relies on in-depth interviews about gay men’s experiences with online and offline intimacy; participant observation of men doing online and offline intimacy; and content analysis of websites or “apps” that enable online intimacy. By examining gay men’s relationships as they begin online, my dissertation seeks to uncover the cultural mechanisms that underlie the relationship between romantic encounters and social inequality.
Alice Marwick
(@alicetiara) – “Pinning Down Identity: Consumer Goods and Digital Consumption”
In the neoliberal era of “identity as project” (Giddens 1991), consumer goods are used as identity markers. People signal personality, individuality and affiliation through the clothes they buy, the car they drive, and the music they listen to (Hebdige 1979; Bourdieu 1993; Featherstone 1991). Online, these identity markers do not have to be purchased; they can be displayed through bookmarking sites like Polyvore and Pinterest, reviewed and discussed on blogs and online fora, and broadcast automatically to audiences using tools like foursquare, Facebook and Twitter. Digital marketers have seized upon social media as a way for consumers to affiliate themselves with global brands and influence others with “word of mouth” marketing, regardless of whether the person actually buys the brand in question (Kozinets et al. 2010). If we accept that consumption is a broad social process that includes many activities besides buying and selling (Chin 2001), this paper asks what this digital broadening means for theories of consumption. Using case studies of fashion bloggers and Pinterest users, I argue that except for extremely high-end luxury goods, purchasing of items is secondary to the cultivation and display of “authentic personal style,” which becomes a primary status marker in fashion-related social media. “Authenticity” is a construct rather than a given, and comes into being through social interaction and status signals by user groups within a particular online environment. On Pinterest, for instance, “fitspo” (fitness inspiration), Christian mommy bloggers, and DIY wedding planners co-exist; all value authenticity, but what signals authenticity is widely variable. While sites like Pinterest encourage interacting with consumer goods, this interaction is removed from the acts of buying or selling and becomes a signifier of identity that is both deeply commercial and disembodied from goods themselves. Thus, the postmodern project of “brand identities” that embody emotions and beliefs is a skill that users themselves learn to apply to their online images through interaction with consumer communities.
Nicholas Boston – “Tell yuh friend dem dat Ramchan deh pon YouChoob!” [Note: Due to an unforeseen scheduling conflict, Nicholas Boston will not be able to attend the conference]
This paper explores the adaptation of the YouTube video meme, “Shit [X] Say” by young adults of Caribbean descent born and resident in the United States or Canada to parody their parents’ technologies of the self: the parents’ accented English diction, domestic practices, cultural attitudes, and peculiar orientations to ICTs in the home, such as cell phones, television remotes and personal computers. After Kyle Humphrey and Graydon Sheppard shot and uploaded to YouTube their parodic drag performance, “Shit Girls Say” in December 2011 and the one minute, nineteen second video went viral, a vast array of parodies snowcloning the original have appeared on YouTube. The fundamental stylistic convention of the genre is drag, whether sartorial (e.g. a man dressed as a woman) or identitarian (e.g. a “black” woman speaking in the voice of, and behaving as, a “white” woman). The presumption is that this kind of embodiment and performativity will draw attention to, or help negotiate, through the humor its banal familiarity evokes, taken-for-granted gaps in perception between social groups. This paper focuses on four video performances in this genre, all produced by North American born and raised children of Caribbean immigrants, specifically Barbadian, Guyanese, Jamaican and Trinidadian, all of whom have very active channels on YouTube. The paper gives diegetic readings of the videos, pointing out recurrent representations and statements across the pieces, as well as draws on interviews conducted with the videos’ creator-actors to discuss how and why these videos satirize cross-generational tensions experienced by the Caribbean diasporic subject. Drawing on Nakamura and Chow-White’s collected conceptualizations in the volume, Race After the Internet (2011), I explore the overlap of the digital divide between the global north and south with the generation gap between immigrant parent and native offspring.
Kelsey Brannan – “Grindr – Browsing and Geolocating Sexiness”
The quest for actualization and interconnection within socially mediated realities, such as Facebook, Linkedin, OkCupid, and Grindr, is linked with an individual’s desire for pleasure and power. Drawing from Sigmund Freud’s book Civilization and Its Discontents and Michel Foucault’s concept of space and power, this paper examines how Grindr, an all gay male location-based social network application for mobile phones, is altering the space and time of sexual relationships and the way users signify or survey their sexuality. Grindr, as a heterotopic space of otherness, is able to surpass the limits of Victorian ideology by liberating sex from the confines of the home. However, it also controls and represses the individual’s desire for physical sex through the censorship imposed by the culture’s super-ego (governmentality) and the guilt produced by the ego (self-surveillance). In other words, Grindr lets gay males “grind” or “digitally cruise” to find each other via mapping technologies that were originally designed by the state to track and monitor people for the sake of national security. The concept of governmentality, a monitoring process that creates a hegemonic regime based on self-normalization, becomes immediately intertwined with sexual desire. What are the implications of this? How does desire change when it is linked to surveillance?
While tech-writers often act as if the Web is something out there away from society, we all know (and they do too) that technology is always embedded in social structures, power, domination and inequalities. And the words we choose to talk about tech, while seemingly innocuous, betray some pretty heavy political predispositions.
Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story looking at a “new digital divide” where “poorer” folks aren’t using the web in a “meaningful” way but instead are “wasting time” on social media. I was reminded of how Facebook users looked down on MySpace users a few years ago or the current racist rhetoric surrounding iPhone versus Android mobile phone users. Technology is often an excuse to reify the fallacy that those less privledged are an other, different, less capable and less human.
Whenever someone declares what Internet-use is “meaningful” versus a “waste” we must be critical: who is making the claim? who benefits from these too-commonly constructed hierarchies? And here, as usual, we are dealing with a hierarchical framework created by privileged folks for everyone else to placed within.
New York Times reporter Matt Richtel looks at how children of poor families connect more on social media – and declares it “a waste of time.” Talking about children of less educated parents, Vicky Rideout is quoted in the article as saying, “Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment […]Instead of closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap” [emphases added].
The more “meaningful” technology use is defined as that which is more “productive.” By productivity the article points to things like how to apply for jobs online, use word processors, use parent-filters and finding ”educational” links.
While these are important skills to be sure, to discount identity performance, socialization and other activities on social media as not productive, not educational, not meaningful, pure entertainment and a waste of time offensively reduces less privileged folks as “an other,” less worthy and less human.
When seeing this story, my first reaction was to find sociologist and author of Cyber Racism Jessie Daniels’ Twitter stream. Of course she was on top of this, providing analysis, more links to other stories like this and links to those who have challenged the digital divide rhetoric. She says all of this better than I, so here’s a Storify I created of her reaction [I can’t embed it on this site]: “Jessie Daniels on the ‘New Digital Divide’.”
Like this New York Times article, the goal of ‘digital divide’ rhetoric is to fix the division; not to repair but to preserve it. The rhetoric claims to be about identifying and mending a divide when the reality is that it is more about creating and reifying a divide; to invent differences, chastise and paternalistically help, educate and “civilize” the manufactured “other.”
More work should be done in the future demonstrating how social media is indeed productive, meaningful and important and not a waste of time [also, since when is entertainment always a waste?]. But we cannot begin this work until we stop manufacturing divides and start recognizing all Internet users as equally and fully human.
