Wednesday, February 11, 2009
A reflection on David Silver's "Looking Backwards, Looking Forward"
In reading David Silver's "Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000," I must admit that the first thing that struck me about this was the time period. It was early on in that period that I received my own first exposure to the Internet, and to the world of cyberculture. It's difficult to fathom, even having lived through it, the vast changes that have occurred since that time (even in the past two or three years, for that matter), and how much might still be the same. While technology grows and changes, we still find the Internet riddled with the issues that Silver and the cyberculturalists he discussed faced: a great divide between people of different races, ethnicities, and genders. While, at the time of reading this article, I didn't have more current statistics (this is something that bears looking into in the near future), I can't help but wonder how the statistics have changed. Most certainly it is far more common to have a computer with internet access in the home, or access to the Internet in public schools and libraries (as well as the ever-popular cyber-cafes); and perhaps the divide has lessened a good deal in terms of access (though this could also be wishful thinking on my part), but in terms of expression, is there a greater equality? If such is the case, then why do so many choose anonymity, facelessness, pseudonimity? Is that anonymity the key to lessening the "digital divide," or does it worsen the problem, as Nakamura noted about the perception of Asian males as anochronistic stereotypes throughout cyberspace? When there is no option of "race," "gender," or even "name," what sort of identities are we constructing?
A reflection on Neil Whitehead's "Post-human"
As we approach our ethnographic studies of anonymity and identity on the Internet, we find ourselves facing an incredible challenge of significance - we have a desire to learn, and to share what we learn with others, not only so that they can learn from our work, but so that we can learn from their responses - thus, we must not only be knowledgable about the subject of our ethnography, but we must also be sure that it conveys a message that is meaningful to our audience. This class, from its beginning, has taken a very unique approach to ethnography - the medium of video, not only in the documentary form, but in the form of vlogs, where students reflected on the topics of their research and even interacted with their audience through exchanges of video responses. Now, as we, this latest group of students, tackle this new topic, we approach it with video, as before, but already, we see the need to explore other forms to express this that will convey more and different meanings, and perhaps be increasingly significant to our audience. It was with this challenge in mind that I read the article "Post-human" by Neil Whitehead.
Whitehead, by far, has had the most unusual and interesting approach to ethnography that I have ever seen - he calls it "performative ethnography" and the process by which he learns about his subject turns the byword of our discipline, "participant observation," on its head - he calls his method "observant participation," a far more active method of learning. He speaks of desire as a motivation for the material, rather than the reverse, and points out that it is desire which fuels ethnography, though this desire is hidden, covert and trivialized. He approached his research on sexuality and violence by a creative musical endeavor, creating, with the help of several others, a popular Goth/Industrial band known as Blood Jewel. This band, as he pointed out, and the creation of art as a form of "visual lyric" to accompany the music and convey its messages of empowering violence and sexuality, was not a mask by which he could conduct fieldwork, but the fulfillment of a desire to create, and to explore violence and sexuality in a bodiless, "safe" medium which is becoming more and more desireable today - the Internet. This gives his research a sense of authenticity that a lot of ethnographic work in the recent past has lacked - while anthropologists engaging in self-reflection often produced ethnographies that seemed more like biographies than actual studies of the people they engaged with, Whitehead's work, his "self-ethnography," allows both him and the reader to learn about not only ourselves, but the society around us. It is self-reflective, but it is also far more productive.
So what can we take from his work that will help us in the production of our own work? This practice of observant participation could certainly carry us a long way, and though it doesn't give us a new medium to convey our message, it does give us a new method of discovering just what that message really is, what it means to us, and what we want it to say to the people who see it. By actually being the subjects of our research - by embracing the role of the faceless on the Internet rather than simply observing others who do, we can more keenly understand what it means to be anonymous - what constraints it places on us, what freedoms it grants us, and just how powerful our words can be when no one knows who we are.
Whitehead, by far, has had the most unusual and interesting approach to ethnography that I have ever seen - he calls it "performative ethnography" and the process by which he learns about his subject turns the byword of our discipline, "participant observation," on its head - he calls his method "observant participation," a far more active method of learning. He speaks of desire as a motivation for the material, rather than the reverse, and points out that it is desire which fuels ethnography, though this desire is hidden, covert and trivialized. He approached his research on sexuality and violence by a creative musical endeavor, creating, with the help of several others, a popular Goth/Industrial band known as Blood Jewel. This band, as he pointed out, and the creation of art as a form of "visual lyric" to accompany the music and convey its messages of empowering violence and sexuality, was not a mask by which he could conduct fieldwork, but the fulfillment of a desire to create, and to explore violence and sexuality in a bodiless, "safe" medium which is becoming more and more desireable today - the Internet. This gives his research a sense of authenticity that a lot of ethnographic work in the recent past has lacked - while anthropologists engaging in self-reflection often produced ethnographies that seemed more like biographies than actual studies of the people they engaged with, Whitehead's work, his "self-ethnography," allows both him and the reader to learn about not only ourselves, but the society around us. It is self-reflective, but it is also far more productive.
So what can we take from his work that will help us in the production of our own work? This practice of observant participation could certainly carry us a long way, and though it doesn't give us a new medium to convey our message, it does give us a new method of discovering just what that message really is, what it means to us, and what we want it to say to the people who see it. By actually being the subjects of our research - by embracing the role of the faceless on the Internet rather than simply observing others who do, we can more keenly understand what it means to be anonymous - what constraints it places on us, what freedoms it grants us, and just how powerful our words can be when no one knows who we are.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Reflection on Yochai Benkler reading
In the Benkler reading, he discusses two opposing views of the Internet - one intrinsically negative, postulating that the Internet would lead to the breakdown of social relationships - and the other perhaps naively positive, stating that the Internet would lead to new forms of community, and make us more connected than ever before. Benkler does not believe either view to be entirely correct, but feels that the more negative view is "more wrong" than the other. He claims that the data on the Internet as it is today does not show a breakdown in relationships, but a building of new ones, new kinds of relationships as well as more traditional ones, and strengthening of face-to-face relationships via faster, more immediate long-distance communication (as well as more convenient e-mail; one no longer has to wait for a letter, nor do they have to schedule a good time to talk on the phone - they can simply reply to e-mail as time permits).
He also points out that studies which tried to prove that the Internet detracted from time spent on face-to-face relationships only ultimately proved that they spent less time doing things that traditionally were considered to detract from those same-said relationships: shopping and television watching. Most people participating in these studies reported that they watched a good deal less television than they used to. He also points out, when one study asserted that while CMC promoted communication, it detracted from it as one could not meet for coffee or hug over the Internet, that such things weren't exactly possible over the phone, either, and so the assertion that the Internet is a less desireable means of promoting relationships than the telephone is inherently flawed. Another study even demonstrated that Internet users tended to be in contact with more people within their own physical communities, rather than just the people on their block (as people without Internet tended to be), and they spent just as much time with their familes. They looked things up more and kept in touch with others more than they would have without the Internet.
Another important point he raised was how the Internet allows us to express parts of our identity that we would not express in our daily, face-to-face interactions for fear of reprisal; I found this to be true in my study of cross-gender roleplay, and this is also something I think would be applicable to our study of Anonymous - people online can express themselves in ways they cannot when people can more readily identify them.
In short, I find myself, through personal experience, research, and Benkler's own data, agreeing with his statement that the Internet does not bring us a sense of anomie, as some could say of the industrialization of our society did, but instead, it does foster a sense of community among us; still, I do believe that there are forms of communication on the internet, particularly in places like /b/, where people can be made to feel exclusion from community rather than inclusion, and where isolation can and does occur; still, like Benkler, I think it is much more common for communication to improve with Internet use rather than to degrade.
He also points out that studies which tried to prove that the Internet detracted from time spent on face-to-face relationships only ultimately proved that they spent less time doing things that traditionally were considered to detract from those same-said relationships: shopping and television watching. Most people participating in these studies reported that they watched a good deal less television than they used to. He also points out, when one study asserted that while CMC promoted communication, it detracted from it as one could not meet for coffee or hug over the Internet, that such things weren't exactly possible over the phone, either, and so the assertion that the Internet is a less desireable means of promoting relationships than the telephone is inherently flawed. Another study even demonstrated that Internet users tended to be in contact with more people within their own physical communities, rather than just the people on their block (as people without Internet tended to be), and they spent just as much time with their familes. They looked things up more and kept in touch with others more than they would have without the Internet.
Another important point he raised was how the Internet allows us to express parts of our identity that we would not express in our daily, face-to-face interactions for fear of reprisal; I found this to be true in my study of cross-gender roleplay, and this is also something I think would be applicable to our study of Anonymous - people online can express themselves in ways they cannot when people can more readily identify them.
In short, I find myself, through personal experience, research, and Benkler's own data, agreeing with his statement that the Internet does not bring us a sense of anomie, as some could say of the industrialization of our society did, but instead, it does foster a sense of community among us; still, I do believe that there are forms of communication on the internet, particularly in places like /b/, where people can be made to feel exclusion from community rather than inclusion, and where isolation can and does occur; still, like Benkler, I think it is much more common for communication to improve with Internet use rather than to degrade.
Reflection on Christine Hine's "Virtual Ethnography"
Hines raises some interesting points in building up to her discussion on virtual ethnography, particularly when she discusses the triple-crisis of ethnography proposed by Denzin; however, I feel the real meat of what she says is found under the topic of how to perceive the Internet in terms of a site of ethnographic research - is it more productive in our own research, for instance, to view the World Wide Web as more interactive, or more as a series of static texts on mostly-unchanging websites? While there are a lot of the old HTML-based websites still around, where interaction is minimal at best, I think the changes in technology over the past several years have brought online interaction beyond the IRC channels, message/image boards and newsgroups of 2000, and content of most sites is vastly more interactive. I don't think it always equates to communication, but I think the question of how to view the Internet has become more complex a question even than it was at the time this chapter was written. However, when she talks about examining the Internet ethnographically by tying these "static texts" to the modes of production and consumption, she's hit on an idea that's still relevant; how these new forms of communication are produced, and the ways in which we consume them (the ways we use them to interact with others in the faceless world of the Internet) can give us insights into the culture that has produced them. She also suggests that studying such forms of interaction like newsgroups as texts can provide ethnographic insight to identity construction; this may be helpful in studies of anonymous communication like image boards as well, where authority and "identity" are constructed not necessarily on the basis of how well an argument is made or information is conveyed, but on a more social basis (which post incited the biggest reaction, for instance, such as in the case of the postings on /b/). These are still forms of interaction, though they have been textualized, and they have value as a form of communication; much can be learned from a careful study of them, though perhaps more can be gained from a multi-faceted approach, studying them both as interaction and as text.
While a reflexive method does endanger the privileged position of ethnographer, I do not think this is necessarily a bad thing, so long as the focus of the ethnography itself remains on the members of the culture studied, rather than becoming something akin to the ethnographer's biography of the experience, or an exercise in self-reflection. Also, the use of multimedia to allow the reader to draw their own inferences from the data presented is something I think our project can benefit from; while Hine used the more traditional form of printed text to convey her data, and we can and have benefited from this, the use of multimedia not only draws the academic readers to our work, but also those outside the discipline, and thus more can benefit from our research.
I really appreciate her discussion concerning interconnectedness and the idea of the field site as bound place being problematic, particularly in a study of the Internet; a multi-sited approach to our project can be immensely helpful in painting a more accurate picture of what the "culture of the Internet" is like; a focus on one type of web-based media over another doesn't do the entirety of web-based interaction justice. But how can we really tell the whole story of identity on the Internet, when what that actually means is constantly changing?
While a reflexive method does endanger the privileged position of ethnographer, I do not think this is necessarily a bad thing, so long as the focus of the ethnography itself remains on the members of the culture studied, rather than becoming something akin to the ethnographer's biography of the experience, or an exercise in self-reflection. Also, the use of multimedia to allow the reader to draw their own inferences from the data presented is something I think our project can benefit from; while Hine used the more traditional form of printed text to convey her data, and we can and have benefited from this, the use of multimedia not only draws the academic readers to our work, but also those outside the discipline, and thus more can benefit from our research.
I really appreciate her discussion concerning interconnectedness and the idea of the field site as bound place being problematic, particularly in a study of the Internet; a multi-sited approach to our project can be immensely helpful in painting a more accurate picture of what the "culture of the Internet" is like; a focus on one type of web-based media over another doesn't do the entirety of web-based interaction justice. But how can we really tell the whole story of identity on the Internet, when what that actually means is constantly changing?
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Final trailer...finally posted!
After much headache, I finally got my final trailer finished. I'm not sure how it measures up to the first two, but it is now done and YouTube has FINALLY finished processing it, so I can go to sleep!
And here it is, below, for your viewing pleasure:
EDIT: After an EPIC FAIL where I accidentally posted someone else's trailer (I'd just been watching it, and it was fantastic) I have corrected my technical difficulty and THIS is the trailer you should see.
And here it is, below, for your viewing pleasure:
EDIT: After an EPIC FAIL where I accidentally posted someone else's trailer (I'd just been watching it, and it was fantastic) I have corrected my technical difficulty and THIS is the trailer you should see.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Trailer: Draft the Second
So below I've posted my trailer's second draft for your viewing pleasure. I wasn't sure what changes I really wanted to make, but I knew I should include credits, and I wanted to try at the end to fade out, if for no other reason than to attempt the technique and be sure I grasped it properly. I also wanted to try different music. If you all would, I would appreciate it if you tell me if you like it better with the first song or the second; just leave me a comment.
Now, concerning my project itself, I'm afraid I'm making little headway looking at /b/ so far; I haven't seen anything that would really indicate that misogynist-sounding posts come from women at all. Reading various threads and lurking amongst Chanology's irc channel still seems to show that a lot of Anonymous protesters are women, as I suspected, but I'm still not convinced that this means women simply don't go into /b/. There are women on the Internets, and I will find them! Even in /b/!
Now, concerning my project itself, I'm afraid I'm making little headway looking at /b/ so far; I haven't seen anything that would really indicate that misogynist-sounding posts come from women at all. Reading various threads and lurking amongst Chanology's irc channel still seems to show that a lot of Anonymous protesters are women, as I suspected, but I'm still not convinced that this means women simply don't go into /b/. There are women on the Internets, and I will find them! Even in /b/!
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Well...HAVE women been killing the lulz? Maybe...
Anonymity on the Internet can accomplish a variety of aims. It can allow us to speak out about sensitive issues without fear of reprisal from more powerful entities; it can also allow us to behave in a manner that would otherwise be unacceptable, also without fear of reprisal. For women, some studies have shown that anonymity allows us to express opinions and have them judged on their own merit, rather than on the merit of their gender; it is also tool to prevent harassment.
Websites like 4chan.org and whyweprotest.net are two among many that are breeding grounds for anonymity of every stripe – and on top of that, there seems to be a rivalry between /b/ from 4Chan and Project Chanology (the “organization” behind whyweprotest.net); /b/tards seem ill-inclined to do things for the sheer goodness of it, calling members of Chanology “moralfags,” claiming that "moralfags" are like politicians, out to establish fame or powerful identity using the internet rather than just out of a desire to do good, while said members think the /b/tards are immature, ineffectual, and have outlived their usefulness. Where do women fit into this?
This is the aim of my project – discovering where anonymous women on the Internet best find their niche: in troll-infested chans like /b/, or in more socially conscious gatherings of like-minded people looking to make a stand for something they believe is right. The tendency in American society is to place women in the role of nurturers and keepers of morality, and men in the role of agressors, and so we expect more of the posturing present in /b/ to come from men (in fact, as stated on Encyclopedia Dramatica, it's a commonly stated idea that “there are no women on the Internets”), but if, as one site stated, /b/tards can be ironically pedophilic, then why can't there be female anons who are ironically misogynist? I have the suspicion that there are some that are, who post pornographic female imagery and shout “TITS OR GTFO” at “the newfags” they suspect are also female, but at the same time, I believe I'll find more female anons that are oriented towards Chanology. Either will be difficult, if not impossible to prove, but I think this research is going to raise as many interesting questions as it answers.
...so are women killing the lulz? Let's find out...
Websites like 4chan.org and whyweprotest.net are two among many that are breeding grounds for anonymity of every stripe – and on top of that, there seems to be a rivalry between /b/ from 4Chan and Project Chanology (the “organization” behind whyweprotest.net); /b/tards seem ill-inclined to do things for the sheer goodness of it, calling members of Chanology “moralfags,” claiming that "moralfags" are like politicians, out to establish fame or powerful identity using the internet rather than just out of a desire to do good, while said members think the /b/tards are immature, ineffectual, and have outlived their usefulness. Where do women fit into this?
This is the aim of my project – discovering where anonymous women on the Internet best find their niche: in troll-infested chans like /b/, or in more socially conscious gatherings of like-minded people looking to make a stand for something they believe is right. The tendency in American society is to place women in the role of nurturers and keepers of morality, and men in the role of agressors, and so we expect more of the posturing present in /b/ to come from men (in fact, as stated on Encyclopedia Dramatica, it's a commonly stated idea that “there are no women on the Internets”), but if, as one site stated, /b/tards can be ironically pedophilic, then why can't there be female anons who are ironically misogynist? I have the suspicion that there are some that are, who post pornographic female imagery and shout “TITS OR GTFO” at “the newfags” they suspect are also female, but at the same time, I believe I'll find more female anons that are oriented towards Chanology. Either will be difficult, if not impossible to prove, but I think this research is going to raise as many interesting questions as it answers.
...so are women killing the lulz? Let's find out...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)