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Friction

In Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Anna Tsing traces the collaborations of nature lovers, local villagers and activists in the Indonesian environmental movement. The heterogeneity of the various groups involved was characterized by what Tsing labels friction: “the awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (4).

Oxford Dictionary’s definition of the term “friction”: noun. the resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another • conflict or animosity caused by a clash of wills, temperaments, or opinions : a considerable amount of friction between father and son.

The key difference here lies in the word “creative.” While not necessarily negative, friction does not usually have positive connotations. Friction implies resistance, tension, clash. Yet in Tsing’s account, positive forces can arise out of specific localized encounters. Ultimately, this blend of realism and optimism, of the critical and the Utopian is what really stuck out for me in Tsing’s ethnography. In the last chapter, in her discussion of her encounters with the Ford Foundation, she describes the friction between academics and activists in the discussion of community-based resource management. The former tended to concentrate on the re-inscriptions of imperial power and the latter questioned the former’s pessimism toward the programs (at least that was my interpretation of it). Tsing asks “might it be possible to use other scholarly skills, including the ability to tell a story that both acknowledges imperial power and leaves room for possibility?” This question gets to the heart of my own worldview, and attitude toward scholarship. When conversations exclusively focus on criticism of the relations of power and imperialism that constitute a given relationship, object, or text, while knowledge may result, agency becomes something predetermined and static. When discussions are opened up and possibility for agency and movement are allowed, hope can be regained and to paraphrase Tsing, the mystery of our times is re-opened.

As an ethnographic work, Tsing adopts an unconventional approach. Rather than using specific cultural practices to show some unified pattern, Tsing focuses on “fragments”–the unpredictable details of global connections:

Instead of positing a triumphant global regine, these methods guide us to the disjunctions of global travel, such as those [she has] traced in the excesses of capitalist proliferations and the awkward conjunctures of social movement building. Here it is possible to consider the practical shape of global politics and culture without the interference of self-fulfilling prophesies. (271)

Tsing’s focus on localized encounters of the global relates to Fatimah Tuggar’s work. In her talk, Tuggar claimed that in her explorations and use of technology present in her work, she “explores power dynamics.” Yet, Tuggar does not stop there. Her work (here I am thinking of photo collage piece Working Women) does not condemn technology nor does it praise it. Instead it produces “conversation.” In her focus on technological objects, Tuggar echoes Tsing in her embrace of both imperialist critique and (technological) utopianism.

STORIES. Back to Friction. I especially enjoyed the “Tracking Traveling Stories” section of Chapter 6 (“Movements”). Tsing shows how “activism moves in ‘charismatic packages,’ allegorical modules that speak to the possibilities of making a cause heard…formed in a political and cultural location that gives their stories meaning…” (227) and “travel when they are unmoored from the contexts of culture and politics from which they emerged and reattached as allegories within the culture and politics of those with the institutional strength to spread the word” (234). Her discussion of the various translations of the Chico Mendes story illustrates the importance of narratives and localized circumstance. Allegories that are rejected at one historical moment may be relevant at another, and the same goes for different cultures.

Tsing’s concept of traveling packages echoes Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘decoding‘. In applying this concept, there have been many audience-based studies that show the divergent and unexpected readings of texts generated across cultural difference. Take the film Rambo. Some American viewers would derive meaning from the film out of its appeal to patriotism, a Ronald Reagan reading, if you will. To others who take a critical stance or a Cultural Studies text-based approach, the film is a pretty blatant articulation of White, American, imperial power (akin to the “imperial” analysis mention earlier). And Australian Aboriginals derive meaning in a completely different manner. As Eric Michaels discovered in his study (“Aboriginal Content: Who’s Got It–Who Needs It?”) Aboriginal viewers “rewrote” Rambo, deriving pleasure from Rambo’s hostility to authority, constructing him as having “tribal or family motivation by inserting him into an elaborate kinship network with those he was recusing, which enable them to make sense of the movie in a way that paralleled the way they made sense of their social relations both with each other and with white power” (Fiske 541)*. In other words, the meaning of Rambo was attached to the specific localized Aboriginal context. I guess in using this example, I am trying to add to Tsing in suggesting that cultural texts, as well as activism, moves in ‘charismatic packages’…just a thought.

* John Fiske, “Moments of Television Neither The Text Nor the Audience” in Remote Control : Television, Audiences and Cultural Power

Stitch Bitch

Shelley Jackson’s (or is it Shelley Shelly?) “Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl” discusses the “banished body” and the hypertext. She proposes hypertext as an alternative to the more traditional linear writing found in novels. Following Jackson’s line of thought, I think it is only appropriate that I assemble a disorienting collage out of her words and my own.

(Body

not

Whole) We’re not who we say we are.

(Writing Mutt) My favorite writing is impure, improper, and disoreinting.

(Everything at Once) You’re not where you think (everything at once) you are.

I’m not where you say I am.

(No place)

You won’t get (Gaps, Leaps) where you think you’re (gaps, leaps) going.

It’s not what we wish it were. (Banished Body) What it’s not were we wish it.

We don’t think what we think we think. (Boundary Play)

It’s not what is says it is. (Reality Fiction) It says what it’s not.

She’s not what she says she is (The Feminine)

I’m not what you think I am. (Constellation) Neither am I.

We are not who we wish we were. (we like to make statues)
We don’t say what we mean to say. (Collage)

It’s not all you think it is. (Constraints and the Book)

It’s not how they said it was. (History)

From Use to Presence, From Context to Practice

When reading Hallnas and Redstrom (sorry H&R but I can’t figure out how to insert umlauts for your names) I found myself dwelling on the authors’ vocabulary at times. In hindsight, this was probably not such a bad thing because in concentrating on the particulars I was paradoxically able to grasp the bigger picture. In order to discuss the “coming” of ubiquitous computational things, H&R urge us to distinguish between the two perspectives of “use” and “presence” in conceptualizing the design of such devices. Use refers to an thing’s function while presence refers to the thing’s place in our everyday lives. A computational thing is “expressional” because it is “the bearer of properties of expressions that are invariant across the many different existential definitions” (113).

I found their clarifications useful in trying to decipher exactly what this distinction means. First, their example of a piano: its use being its function as a musical instrument and its presence as the meaning and significance that it holds for its owner, the place is occupies in his or her life.

Here I will jump to Paul Dourish’s “What we talk about when we talk about context” because the word “meaning” is important to his differentiation between context and practice. In a way, practice is similar to presence because both emphasize the importance of particular ways that technology make meaning in our lives and in our interactions with others. When H&R discuss the mobile phone as a “talking-to-yourself-loudly device,” or a “flirting-device” or a “check-that-nothing-has-happened-device”–the expressions in various acts of phoning–they are implicitly referring to meaning. The functions/use equivalents of these expressions of a cell phone would be: speaker phone, text messaging etc. Though H&R refer to expressions as “surface level” descriptions, they are actually more meaningful ways of describing the technology. And while the use the linguistic distinction of use vs. presence, they are still referring the the ways that tech. is “used” in practice, in life, to make meaning.

Ah, and then we get to yet another distinction between ‘practice’ and ‘context’ underlined in the Dourish article. Practice is negotiated, lived use while context is stable, known use. Context is location and activity specific but practice is even more specific because it is the ‘what’ that emerges from each specific interaction. And this is how we get to meaning.

Meaning is made, negotiated and emergent. And this is why both Dourish and H&R argue that design must reflect this rather than simply how a device functions or where it is used. It is really about what is made possible at the moment.

As for the Smith article on Literalism and Magic, his decision not to “attempt much in the way of a general discussion of the tension between majgic and literalism” was a bit disappointing for me. But this absence let me to create my own dialog about this tension and relationship. For me it sparked something that I discussed in my first post about SL: the connection between SL (and virtuality more generally) and the literary genre of magic realism. I think we are inherently drawn to texts and experiences that blur the boundaries between realism and magic/fiction. We want SL to resemble our own world yet we also want to to enable things not possible in real life, like flying, building etc.

I am going to explore this further.

Fictional Characters Get Second Lives, Too

New York Times recently ran an article about an upcoming CSI episode which focuses on a real life murder that connects with the victim’s Second Life.

Apparently, this is the thing to do on all these types of criminal investigation shows because Law & Order: SVU is also doing an episode  called Avatar.

It always seems like Law & Order uses current issues and controversies as the basis of their fictions, and in doing so confirm the status of such issues as “important” in cultural consciousness. Despite reports of its decreasing popularity amongst users, it appears as though Second Life is still popular enough to make it onto the story lines of our favorite TV shows…despite their focus on SL’s sinister potential for murder plots.

Readings- Autoethnography and Connected

I really enjoyed “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexity.” Firstly, it gave me a much better sense of what exactly autoethnography is. And I really appreciated how the form reflected the content, how the article was written as an autoethnography about autoethnography, a personal narrative about personal narrative and so on. Not only did this enable the authors to put their money where the mouths are, so to speak, but it gave me a much better sense of how autoeth. works and why is is effective. When Art reads his part of the handbook, he discusses how he arrived at this kind of sociological writing, tracing the various academics that he read who caused him to question the Social Science methodologies currently being used. I was especially drawn to the part when Ellis discusses how “personal narrative is a response to the human problem of authorship, the desire to make sense and preserve coherence over the course of our lives.” This reminded me of something that I once read when studying Canadian Fiction in undergrad. I was reading Alice Munro, an author who has the amazing ability to create life for her characters and often focuses on the incongruities between memory and reality and how memory has a constructive function rather than a mimetic one. She said this in an interview:

“Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories–and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. We can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative. And underneath all these edited, inspired, self-serving or entertaining stories there is, we suppose, some big bulging awful mysterious entity called THE TRUTH, which our fictional stories are supposed to be poking at and grabbing pieces of. What could be more interesting as a life’s occupation? One of the ways we do this, I think, is by trying to look at what memory does (different tricks at different stages of our lives) and at the way people’s different memories deal with the same (shared) experience. The more disconcerting the differences are, the more the writer in me feels an odd exhilaration”.

Later in the article one of the audience members critiques this type of writing as a kind of voyeurism, playing into the same fears and desires that reality TV does. I found this comparison very interesting.  Although Art does a fine job of addressing this critique, I think the comparison is an interesting way of looking at a cultural moment. In the preface to Connected, Shaviro explains the “structural affinities” between contemporary cultural theory and science fiction, comparing it to the way that 19th century realism is the genre of choice for Marxism (literary) criticism.  Going back to my reality TV tangent, perhaps autoethnography and reality TV, blogging, personal disclosure do bear structural affinities. This is not a value judgment. I am not comparing them as a way to devalue autoethnography as the audience member did in the audience. But perhaps in narrative terms, we are fluctuating between realism and personal narrative. And perhaps this reflects a shared cultural desire to share our stories with one another, voyeuristic or not…

I really like the idea of weaving the personal and cultural experiences when doing ethnographic writing. It is a way of probing how personal experience and culture co-exist, react and relate to one another but ultimately it does not attempt to generalize. It is an exploration of the particular and hence is very much a posthumanist way of writing, and embodied writing and knowledge.

In Connected, Shaviro uses a similar approach to Hayles in his use of the science fiction genre to explore the current networked age. I suppose I will return to my reality TV tangent now. Shaviro states and re-states the premise that in our contemporary media landscape, “to be is to be perceived.” He uses celebrity, Warhol, philosophy and examples from the Internet to illustrate his point. When we think about the proliferation of webcams we usually think of them as a type of voyeurism or surveillance, but the truth is, as Shaviro says, that their are more webcams than there are eyes to watch them. Our virtual presence is enough to redeem our real existence. Here, we go back to the idea of the desire to narrate our lives except with the very important fact of virtuality added to the picture. If narration is a way to make sense of our lives and virtual presence is a confirmation of identity, the two must necessarily go hand in hand. The narratives we construct online are both for ourselves and for others. For ourselves as a way of organizing our lives and bringing continuity to them and for others as a way of “being perceived.” Shaviro cites McLuhan and follows his logic that the medium is the message: “what the JenniCam shows us is unimportant, compared to the sheer fact  that it is always on, so that Jenni’s life is presented to the world in its sheer ordinariness” (78). So narrative is content and virtual is form.

Second Field Trip

Last night we had our second class meeting in SL. This time around our time together was more organized as Jason/Kamran had organized a meeting with Gothotta Zander, an avatar who owns a tattoo ship. Gothotta met his RL girlfriend (or was it his fiancee? I had to reboot the program so I missed the introductions…) on SL and they now live together in RL (and on SL). He told us how they went on a SL date–they went out to a restaurant–and later he flew out to meet her in person.

I have heard stories of people meeting their RL significant others on SL but it was very interesting to hear about it firsthand. SL offers so many different things to so many different people and ultimately the one thing that cannot be virtually replicated is real physical contact. Here I am reminded of the passage from Hayles where she emphasizes that humans can never fully integrate with machines because the experiences of embodiment differ greatly. So, as I’m sure Gothotta would attest, the RL time spent with Jinger is very different than the time they spend together on SL.

We then went to the couple’s farm. I pet their dog Molly and hearts appeared on the screen. (This was in no way similar to petting a dog in RL). Kamran then teleported Ainat and I to a place where a bible predictions video was playing. I did not really understand the content of the video, nor did I wish to. I was more interested in the experience of spectatorship–the idea of watching a video playing on a television screen on SL through my computer screen. In order to get the best view of the video, I had to situated my avatar as if she was watching the screen. When I became bored with the video, I had my avatar sit cross-legged on the sofa, and I could no longer see the screen.

Mirra then teleported us to her friend’s island. I ended up in the pool, which was pretty funny to me. We then spoke about how his neighbors are Dutch lesbians in SL but live straight lives and have families in RL. This is a very interesting thing. Although there is no way of knowing, I would imagine that some of these people know that they are gay in RL but for whatever reason remain on the closet. And there way of expressing their “true” sexual identity is through SL. While the Internet has always provided this avenue via chatrooms etc. SL adds a whole new dimension. Something worth exploring I think. And perhaps an interesting research topic.

Mirra then teleported me to an 80’s dance club. We danced and communicated via IM (private chat). This would have been more fun if I could hear the music. For some reason I was unable to at the time. There were quite a number of avatars at this club. After not hearing anything for a while, all of a sudden I started to hear other people’s voice chats. This was VERY STANGE. One of them sounded like there were children playing in the background (in RL) and another fellow had a deep Southern accent. At one point he spoke about the redneck (his word) places he usually frequents. If my own personal engagement with voice chat was weird, this was even weirder because I really felt like I was involuntarily eavesdropping on others’ conversations. Not only was I invading their SL space, but I was also hearing their RL space.

Mirra and I danced a while more and then we both had to go. I think I will return to the 80’s club.

Here is what it looked like, but there were many more people than shown in the snapshot. Notice the two avatars slow dancing…

Presentation Discussion Questions

Here are some questions Alysha and I put together.

What are the consequence of embodiment of identity? on technology? If free will and human agency possible in the posthuman future?

Hayles concludes her book as follows. “Although some current versions of the poshumans point toward the anti-human and the apocalyptic, we can craft others that will be conducive to the long -range survival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves.”
What does Hayles mean here? What does the conception of the posthuman subject make possible? what does it prevent?

The main discussion that the Reinghold readings provoke involve enhancement oflife from an individual level (cyborgs) to a logistical day to day level (smart things) to a societal level (wifi movement).  There are several arguments within these readings regarding what approach we
should take towards these new enhancements as far as design elements and how this will affect issues of privacy and control.  Another argument was what sort of policies should be enforced to make sure these new powers or extensions of ourselves do not get out of hand.

What should the agenda be for these new capabilities? (smart things, wifi etc.) Who should be in charge of them, or how should they be managed? How will access be provided to these new capabilities? Is individual enhancement more important than societal enhancement or
are they equally important?

Smart Mobs of Post Humans

I am presenting on this topic, hence the length…

The readings for this week’s class can be seen as representing three different lenses through which to discuss The Posthuman. Hayles provides the theoretical framework of The Posthuman, Rheingold conceptualizes the mode of relationality that exists when PHs act collectively, as “smart mobs,” and Horst and Miller zoom in on a particular cultural appropriation of technology where the PH is examined through an ethnographic lens.

[paraphrased from the back cover] N. Katherine Hayles investigates the fate of emodiment in a virtual age. As machines and technology become increasingly ubiquitous, how are we to theorize the human body? She uses information theory and cybernetics as well as science fiction literature to explore:
how information lost its body; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg 3. the dismantling of the liberal humanist subject in cybernetic discourse.

Pretty much, Hayles is arguing for a new way to look at human subjectivity. I like to think of posthumanism as a particular way of seeing the word like feminism and Marxism. But this theory does not hold there to be any kind of universal truth, whether it be the relations of production in capitalist society or relations of gender in patriarchal society, or race etc. Rather this is a theory of the particular. Of potential. Potential because nothing is fixed. And identity is not a fixed -disembodied- construct. Rather, the posthuman is constantly changing, evolving and interacting with its environment. This ties in with the term “emergence.”

Internet Reseach Ethics

Clancy Ratcliff’s article posed a series of questions collected from a bibliography and The Belmont Report. These are the questions that researchers should ask themselves when conducting online research. This article was a good starting point for our class, and especially for me who has had little to no experience with this kind of research. The questions touch on issues pertaining to informed consent, confideniality, manipulaion of data, relationship with audience, validity and reliability, the role of the researcher and many more.

In Amy Bruckman’s “Ethical Guidelines for Research Online,” she lists a set of guidelines for online research, all of which follow the human subjects research model where the rights of the subjects always take precedence over the integrity of the research.

The Netnography article based on Kozinets (2002) was more interesting for me because it went from simply listing either questions or guidelines to an actual discussion of online communities and how they construct social meaning. What is particularly interesting is the way that advertising and market research uses ethnographic form “useful conclusions about how [a] group constucts itself, how it develops social meaning, and how it derives personal gratifications.” From this information, advertisers are able to determine ways to brand their products, not just selling the product itself but to sell a constructed experience. Netnographic ethical guidelines in this article are very similar to those listed in the other articles. The main points are that: researchers should fully disclose their role as researcher, confidentiality and anonymity of the participants must be ensured, informed consent should be obtained, and the researcher should obtain and incorporate feedback from the subjects.

The last article was by far of the most interest for me due to my experience with and enjoyment of literary theory. Here, E.H. Bassett and Kathleen O’Riordan contest the Human Subjects Research Model. The HSRM is based on the metaphor of spatiality applied to the Internet meaning that the Internet is understood as a space where human social actors engage in activity. These authors argue that this conception can lead to unethical practices because “overly protective research ethics risk diminishing the cultural capital of those engaging in cultural production through Internet technologies , and inadvertently contributing to their further marginalization.” Instead they argue that a textual metaphor should also be applied to the Internet. Because the Internet is a medium of publishing and an object of cultural production. It is here where the authors invoke literary theory as a way of exploring the various theories about authorship–the relationship between the text and its author. Ultimately, O’Riordan and Bassett argue that ethical considerations be based on a hybrid model of the Internet that incorporates text, space, and bodies where texts are considered “neither virtual selves nor objecs completely distinct from those who write them.” In addition, the researcher’s role as a textual interpreter who contributes to the meaning must also be considered. They draw inspiration from the fields of Life Writing and feminism as useful ways of seeing texts and their producers. What I find especially interesting about this article is its acknowledgment that neither texts nor boies can be seen as having any kind of fixed meaning.

I also like this last view because it acknowledges the separation that exists between self and virtual self. Here I do not mean that there is no connection between the two but that their are elements of construction and narrative that go into one’s online experience. I think about Facebook, for example. If I write on someone’s wall I am not just writing a message to that person. I am publishing my comment to everyone else that will go to his or her page and therefore I will write with this knowledge in mind. When I compose my profile, I choose which books and films and quotes so as to construct a picture of “who I am.” This is not to say that there is no connection between my virtual and “real” self (if there even is such a thing) but just that I am engaging in an act of representation, in addition to being part of a social network or an online space.