Difference Engines

Cartoon We

2009-10-14T17:56:30Z

In an idle moment the other day (yeah, I really shouldn’t admit to having those in academia), I loaded into my Firefox an add-on I found on Facebook called MyWebFace that promised to let me make a cartoon image of myself.

An aside: I might add that I found this app only because I was searching the Facebook ad board looking for an ad that I would be willing to ‘thumbs up’ to appear alongside my page. Not only did I find no such thing, I discovered that Facebook now does not allow users to ‘thumbs down’ an ad. Possibly this is my fault, since I relentlessly thumbs-downed (down-thumbed?) dozens of ads in my first weeks on Facebook, hoping to help skew the ad pool toward public service ads and away from shopaholic ads (the bulk). It always gives you a good feeling as an adult citizen of a republic when your options are: you may approve of this, or you may approve of this.

Back to MyWebFace. It’s set up as a kind of simple Identi-Kit, allowing you to construct your face from mostly predictable parts: noses, eyebrows, lips, etc., all of various shapes. Size, color, and placement of most objects can be adjusted. After I was finished, I ended up with what you see here. Anyone who knows me will see that this is not a good cartoon of me; the reason for this lies in the kinds of choices the software gives—and just as importantly, withholds. Eyebrows, eyes, and mouths come in a fair range of shapes (not enough noses, though). Skin color is wide open– a matter of picking from a palette of millions of shades.

For face shape, however, you appear to be stuck with a default upper half of the face and a modifiable chin. Result for me: entirely wrong face shape. (Oddly, you can choose various kinds of ‘blush’ for your cheeks, as if that is more important than basic face shape.) In addition, the general body type is too skinny for me and not modifiable (this head shot is a detail of a full-length image). Hair style: no options match my admittedly idiosyncratic style. Accessories: no glasses frames match the ones I wear. Hair accessories and hats: nothing matches what I wear; the earphones were the best option because I use them when playing online games. Clothing: nothing really matched in the limited choices, largely because almost all the clothing styles skewed at least a decade younger than I am. In general, registering aging was not an option. You can make your hair all blond/red/brown/black, or all gray, and nothing in between—no one in MyWebFace’s world is grizzled. There is one pane for wrinkles, but they’re so lightly drawn and weirdly thought out that they don’t make the face look older so much as scribbled on. Basically, you can’t make yourself look older than about 25 with this software (or to be fair, much younger either; no kids need apply). Can you say target demographics?

Coincidentally, as I was halfway through writing this, I stumbled on the image below over on boingboing.net, in a post rejoicing in the wonderful title “Ralph Lauren opens new outlet store in the Uncanny Valley.” They credited a favorite site of mine, Photoshop Disasters, where the image has since been made to disappear by a DMCA-wielding Ralph Lauren; see this Huffington Post entry for a similar threat against boingboing. Ralph Lauren has admitted to their “poor imaging and retouching that resulted in a very distorted image of a woman’s body.” Yet model Filippa Hamilton was fired by Ralph Lauren last April; she says they told her she was overweight. So fashion logic has finally created the inevitable impasse for itself, in which the cartoonized emaciation of this image is “very distorted” but a 5′10″ model weighing 120 lbs is “overweight” (although one might want to take models’ claims about their height-to-weight ratio with a grain of salt; given the constraints of their job, they have every incentive to modify this figure to gain professional advantage.) In other words, at ground zero of the American female body image, the concept of “just right” has at last shrunk to a complete null set.

My reason for making this post, though, has less to do with the general problem of body image than with the propagation of this cartoonization through software– through Photoshop, which allows it (but does not require it; you can just as easily make yourself fatter and older in Photoshop), and MyWebFace, which actually requires it. What has previously been reinforced through consumption of media created by others, we are now made complicit in reinforcing through the software we ourselves use and the objects we ourselves make.

Lisa Nakamura and Difference Engines are going steady

2009-09-21T02:12:44Z

Lisa Nakamura has been posting her thoughts and analysis of digital race issues to Difference Engines for a while. We’re excited to report that she’s joining as a permanent contributor to diffeng. Yay!

Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, The Women’s Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on social inequality in virtual worlds, tentatively entitled “Workers Without Bodies: Towards a Theory of Race and Digital Labor in Virtual Worlds, or, Why World of Warcraft needs a Civil Rights Movement.”

Google Books: Thinking Like Engineers Rather than Librarians

2009-09-08T20:05:55Z

I wish Google Book Search would hire a humanist and/or librarians and actually listen to them. I really appreciate digitized books but feel that they could be so much more than they are now.

Here, Siva Viadhyanathan asks of Google Book Search questions that I know librarians have developed a whole discipline to think about. He asks critical questions about the politics of search ranking and privacy of browsing records — questions that have been asked about search more generally but cannot be passed off as unknown territory when it comes to books.

Reading the post about Vaidhyanathan’s questions reminded me that I don’t know of a single librarian or even humanist on the Google Book Search team (and I know two of their engineers and several of their past product managers). My engineer friends’ joking pride at never visiting the college library don’t inspire confidence. I worry that much is lost when the business and engineering of information sciences is left to people trained as engineers. Engineering is hard and important, but it is not about understanding the role of books in culture, knowledge, and power. For a start, intertextuality is a lot more than the overt citations made between written works; engineering and to a lesser extent social sciences literally cite their references to ideas directly, but many works are speaking to audiences you can’t algorithmically parse out of the text. Second, knowledge politics is far more than civic participation; as a start, there’s no such thing as neutral or unbiased so we need to stop talking about your search ranking goals that way. Third, libraries are more than fuzzy search engines and a library is more than a dusty, paper database; if you’re offering to radically reconfigure a whole category of information institution, it would be nice to hear about your hopes for that institution can be in the future and see you taking steps to do that collaboratively. It’s not at all crazy for people to be freaked out about a corporation, where benevolence is a privilege of profitable times, taking such a central role in the distribution of books which had been far more distributed and decentralized. (Disclaimer: I’m not a library historian, so I just mean it had seemed more decentralized to me within my decades of life.)

I have to wonder how the female gendering of library professions is tied in with the relative silence on information studies concerns in Google Book Search from what I can tell from the outside, having used the services and having seen a few talks on it. But the people I know on the team are smart, feminist, and doing what they know they can do within the crazy complexity of making a product that doesn’t breakdown in a crazy mess of powerful organizational actors and infrastructures. This isn’t an indictment of their work so far, which I benefit from. But it is a earnest and concerned call.

Racist gadgetry?

2009-09-04T06:13:30Z

Via disgrasian, racist voice control on the iPhone and racist digital camera “blink deteector”

I don’t much mileage out of the words racist and sexist because they get used so broadly and differently that they usually just get read as attack but don’t actually explain why the situation is messed up. That said, these kinds of technology examples are exactly the sort of thing that set me down the path of feminist technology obsession that brings you this blog today. In Margolis and Fisher’s “Unlocking the Clubhouse,” I learned about conference phone systems tuned and tested only on male voices, literally giving voices that tended higher the short shrift. Got other examples of this sort of thing?

Dusting off the patriarch

2009-08-31T18:33:17Z

For those of us who grew up in Massachusetts, immunized by long exposure to the national obsession with All Things Kennedy (sort of like 18th century milkmaids and cowpox?), this has been a long week of déja vu. Without detouring into the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s complex life, I want to consider why the media seemingly finds it impossible to refer to Kennedy without using the term ‘patriarch’—and, in at least one case that I stumbled across, ‘revered patriarch’. Of course, in our democracy there is no longer any legal sanction for the position of patriarch as head of an extended family, as that terrain of authority has been partitioned up among the much more modest scopes of “head of household,” “parent,” “guardian,” and the like, while expanding to include both men and women. In one sense, patriarch is now little more than an honorific designating the high influence within a family exerted by a senior male (although I should note that saying it is “little more than” an honorific does not do justice to the fact that by sheer repetition, honorifics reinforce the importance of the status that they assert).

However, the relentless appearance of the term coupled with Senator Kennedy’s name suggests that the word is doing other work as well, serving as code for what cannot be said otherwise. For one thing ‘patriarch’ makes visible a large number of otherwise irrelevant individuals by linking them up into a subordinate web: not just family, but abject family. It is impossible to use the word patriarch without envisioning a vast faceless horde milling about aimlessly, waiting for the patriarch to tell them what to do. Somewhere a Kennedy third cousin once removed is living some kind of life that has nothing to do with the ‘clan’, but evoking the word patriarch immediately sweeps this person into a crowd. One consequence is thus to make the patriarch’s position of informal influence seem larger than it may actually be. There is no question that Senator Kennedy was hugely influential in Congress, in the formal context of his job; but was he really the go-to guy for all those hundreds of random individuals linked by accidents of birth? To put it another way: doesn’t it actually put Kennedy down to suggest that he was influential because of progeneration rather than because of his own competence as a Senator?

Another function of the word patriarch in this particular instance may be to allow the media to underline the size of Senator Kennedy’s family—one of nine children himself, he has numerous near relatives in his own and the following generation—without getting bogged down in often fractious debates on family size in America. ‘Patriarch’ can thus serve as code for suggestions about Catholic fertility or male virility that the writer doesn’t want to explicitly adumbrate for fear of offending someone. It is left to the individual reader to decode the hidden text.

I believe that the chief work the word does in this context, however, is to express the realities of nepotism without going into the ugly details. Senator Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, ruthlessly bought, bartered, and finagled his way to wealth and power, and then used both to further political careers for three of his sons. Their individual qualifications for the jobs they held aside, they each benefited from Joe Kennedy’s machinations on their behalf; and this pattern has been replicated in the following generation. Certainly nepotism is no new force in American politics; indeed, a 2003 article in Atlantic Monthly by Adam Bellow argues that this is a golden age of dynastic politics (Bellow sees political nepotism as a force for both good and bad). ‘Patriarch’ puts a normative face on this reality that serves to sweep it back under the rug.

I do realize that this is something of a basic gloss on Patriarchy 101; also that I have not addressed the rather dissimilar use of the word ‘matriarch’ in connection with the Kennedys. But I do find it interesting that not all the disquisitions on patriarchy over the last half-century could keep journalists of all stripes from reflexively grabbing for ‘patriarch’ as a term of admiration when Senator Kennedy died.

Enough, already.

Piracy: Cutthroat capitalism or response to an enviro-exploitation disaster?

2009-08-03T22:23:14Z

Dragging my net on WorldChanging and Wired for a recent research project, I stumbled across Wired’s flash game “Cutthroat Capitalism”. The game lets you “simulate” a Somali pirate interacting with the world as if through a Tamagotchi, as “economic man” usually is, balancing hostage health and trust with threat to their safety to negotiators. The game claims that pirates “are not just buccaneers — they’re businessmen,” as if Somali pirates metaphorically presage what dangers await us all when capitalism goes awry.

Well, the might be right but not how they think. Rather than capitalism gone awry, some argue that the Somali pirates are a response to globalized capitalism and the absence of governance in the face of European toxic waste dumping off the Somali coast (see
The Huffington Post’s article by a Somalian writing about these issues).

In short, the pirates may be a capitalistic response to “legitimate” forms of capitalism, rather than Other to them.

Summer Encounters with Art / Technology

2009-07-31T21:06:04Z

The Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga has an exhibit called Enjoy Your Time by UCI artist Connie Samaras. Connie cites a range of influences, including science fiction, urban political economy, and the history of art as historical/archival/ political practice. The exhibit makes these connections come alive in disturbing, dystopian, but tentatively hopeful, critical ways. Here are some thoughts on the work:

Connie Samaras’ work raises a range of fundamental issues : she’s addressed human agency, narrative structures of art and everyday experience, and our globalised urban futures. In conventional schools of philosophy as well as of science, “fundamental” problems are supposed to have fundamental answers – that is, abstract answers that are testable, authentic, universally applicable to all the possible manifestations of those problems. However, these are not the kind of answers Connie offers us – indeed, she invites us to consider not just the impossibility, but also the undesirability of such a quest; the complicities and blindnesses which a search for fundamentalism, immutability, universality, would bind us to.

Consider the question of agency. Rather than offering us the agency of the artist as heroic explorer, recorder of irrefutable fact, exposer of immutable truths, Connie gives us, deliberately, the uncertainty of the “not sure” in response to the question of what is in front of the camera, or of the ideological intentions behind the camera. But this refusal to unmask is not a refusal to show. Rather, the work shows us so much, almost an excess, a profusion of image and information to assimilate which we must work, not passively consume. The resulting relationships – among the conventional subject positions of artist, subject, object, viewer, viewed – becomes a pedagogical one rather than a consumerist one. One is forced to ask how these, and not other, more conventional narratives (such as the heroic solo explorer in the Antarctic, the revelatory tropical travelogue, the intimate, heterosexualized cityscape) came to be – how were these camera positions enabled? Why haven’t I seen this image of a mosque before ( through the shanty-town-like walls of a labor camp), rather than more conventionally romanticized and orientalized mosque-at-dusk images? How does the choice of too-bright-to-believe – yet un-manipulated colors and surfaces and the choice not to digitally manipulate, help us think about consumer technology and the ways in which we digitally manipulate our own images and narratives almost automatically, “correcting” the artist’s seemingly askew perspective to a more easily digestible one? None of these questions suggest clean contemplative answers – rather, we must enter into the messiness of everyday life, the choice made to walk into the labor camps of Dubai in particular ways, making allies of taxi drivers and security guards; the choice to be deliberately slightly out of place, and out of pace, in the 7-star hotels of dubai and the masculinized scientific spaces of Antarctica. We enter into a pedagogical relationship with not only the artist, but her networked-agency; we see how the artist is always linked with allies without whom networks could not function; she is a spy-with-accomplices without whom agency would falter, a curious traveler with fellow travellers without whom mobility would be impossible.

Where is agency, as we enter this embedded network? It becomes decentered, contingent, always dependent. It is not just the heroic artist who is dethroned here – the heroic proletarian is absented, too. Connie’s images of workers may be inspired by Fritz Lang’s, but the emotional impact of the tired construction crews far above the Dubai street is quote different from the utopian worker striking in early 20th century artistic narratives. Agency on both sides of the camera is decentered; cast out of the individual . It is emergent and and indeterminate, rather than pre-ordained and predictable.

What about the conventional narrative structures of art and everyday experience, what happens to them? Connie’s work unravels all our conventional narratives, and we are invited to re-thread them, in a collective pedagogical encounter.
And our globalized urban futures, what of them? Muting but never disemboweling the utopian harmonics of future imaginings, Connie’s work suggests the impossibility of most of these imagined futures. But in deferring both revolutionary and dystopian futures, she is engaging us in a far more hopeful conversation. That conversation is embedded in ground-level realities, yet never reducible to the pragmatic. It participates in flights of hope and fantasy, yet is never naïvely utopian. Like all techno-scientific imaginaries, it contains the historical, political, economic traces of its functions, as well as the fantasy structures of our culture.

All technological and scientific stories of progress, oppression, struggle, truth, and vindication lie embedded in history as well as in fantasy. By saying that the historical and the fantasmatic mutually constitute techno-science, I am not suggesting simply that scientists and planners “have their creative sides.” Rather, the way in which they, and we, have conceived of technological solutions has everything to do with the fantasmatic ways in which they understand contemporary problems. Fritz Lang’s workers in Metropolis see the machine as pagan god demanding human sacrifice; and the robot-Maria as an orientalized seductress; the choice of the apparently rational but equally fantasmatic head-heart-hand trinity as the resolving metaphor for the film should not distract us from the fact that all these fantasies continually played a critical role in this repeated science-fictional and political narrative of industrial conflict and human-technological identity.
If the heart represented the mediator between human head and machinic hand of the industrial-era narrative, the heart becomes de-centered in later science fiction. Recall that in the Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man seeks a heart, and finds that he already has it, by virtue of his human-like practices. Philip K Dick raises the suspicion that machines, evolving with humans, might already have the hearts we believed we withheld from them at their creation – or, conversely, that humans never had what we conventionally call the heart. The whole notion of emotional agency is decentered, hovering somewhere in the decentered network that is always already human and machininc.

Recall Bladerunner, the 1980s sci fi classic that re-jump-started the American public’s love-affair with dystopian techno-fantasties.As Rutger Hauer’s replicant character dies at the end, the audience suddenly experiences heart, hope, emotions. The replicant’s speech contains memories, emotions, hopes, dreams, a consciouseness of time and mortality – everything that seemed to make humans unique, set them apart from machines. Ridley Scoot – drawing on Philip K. Dick - blurs the line between human and machine here, as in so much other Philip Dick-influenced sci fi film. Also recall the set design in blade runner. In the fight scene on the rood just preceding this clip, the turbine-like wheels turn, the rain drips – reminiscent of an industrial era landscape. Yes Bladreunner (1982) set the stage for a revival of science fiction film that has culminated in images of technology far different from the industrial. The ability to move between the industrial and the digital, the steam era and the network era, with a rich palette of metaphors for agency and identity, is a malleable strength of science fiction. In another essay (in progress, co-authored with Bleak Masterson) I want to explore further the links between Samaras’ work and the SF genre and its many techniques. But I’ll end this piece here just by commenting on the distance we have come, technologically:
Have we entered, as many authors claim, a new politics of time (Virilio’s chronopolitics ) or of global technology (Castell’s informational order, or Jameson’s global postmodern)? If so, it is simultaneously new and old. coal power and quantum mechanics co-exist in our world. This world’s simultaneous newness and familiarity can only be grasped through a simultaneous narrating of the fantasy structures and the historical/economic/ political structures that make it possible. Connie Samaras’ work brings to us, in so many breathtaking and troubling ways, all the sides of this simultanaeity.

Neda Soltani, Race, and Digital Labor

2009-06-27T19:34:53Z

This Fall, I will be presenting at the Institute for Distributed Creativity’s conference “The Internet as Playground and Factory” from November 12-14 at the New School for Social Research. This looks to be a really interesting conference. As its website states, “This conference confronts the urgent need to interrogate what constitutes labor and value in the digital economy and it seeks to inspire proposals for action. Currently, there are few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy.” I figure that my job is to represent for the person/woman of color perspective in this. This writing is some work towards that end. So, how are bodies of color engaging with the digital economy as both labor and value, or to paraphrase Lisa Lowe through my friend race and gender scholar Grace Hong, how are bodies of color both labor and capital? What do the Mechanical Turk worker, the Twitter user, the citizen journalist, the gold farmer, and the game level author or modder have in common? And how are their interests (part of what makes this conference exciting is that it views digital laborers are both more numerous and a broader category than we thought, and also as even having interests, rather than simply demographics) similar to or different from those of people of color?

As Trebor Scholz writes on June 24 in the Institute for Digital Culture listserv, “Why do so many people care more about digital rights management on iTunes, intellectual property, and privacy on Facebook than about the suffering of people in Rwanda or indeed Neda Soltani (or the other Iranian students whose death was not recorded)?” Yet rather than seeing these two struggles—the struggle for racial justice and the struggle for the digital commons—as being two separate and opposed causes, it makes sense to me to see them as structurally linked. Both are social justice struggles that identify and challenge the mis-allocation of resources. As Andrea Volpe writes, “So the problem for the study of internet cultures, not unlike the pre-digital study of media and popular culture, is that any attempts at appropriation are complicated by top-down control of the means of expression.”

Critical race feminist theory and digital labor theory can benefit from each other—watching the Neda Soltani images on CNN I was struck by the ways that her phenotypic whiteness, beauty, youth, and gender gave her a claim to the “white woman in trouble” status that largely determines the style and extent of news coverage dedicated to violence against women in our news media. Her light skin, blue jeans, white tennis shoes, and unveiled but headscarved face permitted her to be “seen” as white, and thus as legible as a female subject to American viewers. The veil or hijab, which as Mimi Nguyen notes in “You Say You Want A Revolution (In a Loose Headscarf)” is “made to stand as a visual shorthand for Islamic oppression in the West.” Soltani’s dying body is a racialized digital image that was captured by a citizen journalist’s cell phone, and circulated via social networks like Twitter and Facebook and other pages on the web before ending up on the evening news. This is surely an epochal moment in digital media history; those of us teaching courses on new media will have to change our syllabi this year. Yet rather than viewing this as a triumph of born-digital media and the power of disenfranchised people to “get the truth out” faster and better than for-profit or commercial mass media, it is important to remember that its standing as a media event depends upon of the veil’s absence—a sign of the secular state’s power over women’s bodies– and because of the victim’s approximate whiteness. As Nguyen notes, the veil is always a sign of power over women: “both forced veiling and forced unveiling operated as disciplinary state edicts –often enacted violently on female bodies by male soldiers or police– at discrete political times to instrumentally shape a feminine civic body.” Suffering bodies are not telegenic when they belong to black or brown women in different contexts. Images of dead or dying Rwandan, Somali, or Chinese women and their children victimized by civil war, ethnic violence, famine, or the depredations of the modern slave trade fail to engage the sympathies and the air time of either legacy or “new” media: CNN and Twitter alike both earn a fail in this regard. There is, however, an immense appetite for mediation regarding black performing bodies, as the recent almost-crashing of the Internet by Michael Jackson’s recent demise attests.

As Scholz writes, DRM, privacy, and IP struggles may seem like luxuries of the moneyed class, one of the many minor irritants of the privileged digital consumer, yet they are linked to people of color issues quite intimately. In my recent work on worker-players in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games like World of Warcraft, I describe how laborers or “gold farmers” create and sell virtual money, goods, and characters for real money. These workers are creating new racialized forms of labor. The term “Chinese gold farmer” has come to stand for all worker-players in MMO’s, just as the term “Mexican gardener” comes to stand in for all dark skinned men cutting lawns and trimming bushes in other people’s yards, be they Guatemalan, Salvadoran, or Brazilian. (The racialization of labor is a persistent effect of race classification itself—in my grandfather’s days “Japanese gardener” was a term that described him and many other Asian men in the Bay Area before the war, whether they were Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese. Today, the term “Indian computer programmer” can come to stand for Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, and all other brown people from South or West Asia.) The work that these digital migrants do is affective and embodied work within virtual worlds, yet forbidden by Blizzard’s terms of service. Blizzard’s ownership of World of Warcraft, a virtual world that is successfully marketed as and that is viewed by many of its users as a digital playground drives these forms of labor underground, where they come to resemble virtual factories. Just as in other leisure spaces, the work that maintains it must be hidden, just as is its racialization. The struggle against this type of value-extractive ownership of virtual worlds and of all digital communication forms is a racialized one, if only because it effectively criminalizes forms of transnational trade like gold farming that less fortunate people need to survive.

Neda Soltani’s death is a tragedy. I hope that nobody reading this thinks that I’m diminishing that. I mean to point out instead that beauty, gender, youth, race, and modernity came together in that piece of video that we saw to engage our sympathies in ways unavailable to other female suffering bodies. As sociologist Bonilla Silva writes in Racism Without Racists “phenotype will be a central factor determining where groups and members of racial and ethnic groups will fit—lighter people at the top, medium in the middle, dark at the bottom.” The digital labor that went into creating and distributing that piece of galvanizing media was multiply borne by thousands of people who formed an informal network, one that looked for a moment to have displaced commercial networks like CNN. It is important to track the ways that the event was quickly recuperated by the mass media industry—within hours of the story breaking CNN had altered its broadcasting to “promise” that it had “more news” about the story than any other source, presumably including the Internet. It is equally important to look at why and how this could become the particular spectacle that it did in the first place. War will always trump famine, slavery, and domestic violence as a visual event, even in “real time,” and the image of a “white woman in trouble” still represents the sine qua non of media palatability. The war became individualized and personalized—“real”–through the intimate images of Soltani’s face presumably at the moment of her demise.

The paradox of race in America is that race is both hyper-visible and commodified in both politics and media, yet simultaneously made invisible and unspeakable by individuals in social interaction as well as within the public sphere. Bonilla-Silva documents the halting and tortuous rhetoric that characterizes racial discourse, and is utterly constitutive of neoliberal racism. It is literally hard for people to talk about race. The Neda Soltani case makes this abundantly clear; pundits initially read and continue to read this as a story about the triumph of social networks and citizen journalism as an allegory for the power of the people. Race has not yet entered into this discussion at all, for some racialized bodies are not either on or in social networks. They cannot be, for reasons having to do with phenotype, access, gender, class.

This is the same paradox of the Internet itself. Value is extracted from race as it is from the Internet, but unfortunately, the proceeds are not often directed towards people of color, nor the “users” who make “user generated content.” Serious racial and class divides continue to exist and to worsen, as the furor over ownership of digital music, intellectual digital property, and virtual world currencies continues apace at academic conferences and corporate boardrooms alike.

blogging the numbers

2009-05-26T16:43:16Z

I stumbled on an interesting post over at double X blog that roundly criticized much writing about how women have been affected by the economic downturn as “recession lite.” Its central complaint amounts to too much soft news, not enough numbers. The author—Linda Hirshman, a retired professor of philosophy and women’s studies at Brandeis—goes on to commend a number of feminist blogs and initiatives that are making a point of grappling with the relevant statistics, with an eye to affecting public policy.

I don’t know how accurate Hirshman’s overall picture is—though I picked up on it partly because I had long since become annoyed myself about all those silly depressionista stories about how Clipping Coupons Saves Thousand$! or When Mom and Dad Move In to Your Basement! Hirshman is mainly taking women writers to task for this, so I don’t know if she shares my (admittedly anecdotal) sense that just as much of this fluff is coming from men as from women writers but wants to hold feminist bloggers to a higher standard, or if she really thinks women writers churn out more anumerical fluff than men do.

If the latter is true, I am left wondering: is this one of the predictable downstream effects of an acculturation process that has pushed so many women away from mathematics in high school? Or an effect of longstanding gender assumptions in the publishing field, regarding both which stories women reporters should cover and which stories women want to read? Or both? Or, more optimistically, is the interesting story here to be found in the signs of a reversal, given that recent statistics show more women now take advanced math in high school and beyond (e.g. the 2008 study published in Science)?

OK, count me also guilty here of speculating about trends in the absence of good—make that: any—numbers. So tempting, and so dangerous…

Canaries of the gender system

2009-05-12T07:58:35Z

Transgendered people are like the canaries of the gender system. Stuck at the seams, this NY Times op-ed tells the story of “gay” marriage when one member of the marriage undergoes a sex change undergoes the how complex a matter gender really is.

The difficulty of establishing any basis for “true” gender extends into areas like gender-testing in sports and how society treats children born intersexed.
Is My Marriage Gay?

Virginia Tech Conference on Gender, Bodies, and Technology

2009-05-07T06:35:10Z

CFP also here
Virginia Tech’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program welcomes you to
GENDER, BODIES AND TECHNOLOGY.

This upcoming conference, scheduled for April 22-24, 2010, at the historic Hotel Roanoke in Roanoke, Virginia, will showcase scholarship that explores the role of technologies, broadly defined, in constructing, reinforcing and destabilizing gendered bodies. As an assemblage of people and technologies, we view the conference itself as an enactment of this theme. Proposals for presentations, including performance art and new media as well as traditional text-based formats, are welcome from scholars in all disciplines. The topics that we anticipate exploring include, but are by no means limited to: new media and feminist aesthetics; gendered in/security and technologies of surveillance; technologies of development and eco-feminism; and the gendered production, design and deployment of technologies. (See the Call for Proposals for more information.)

The conference includes a keynote address by Jennifer Terry; a new, one-woman performance piece on aging and body image featuring Sue Ott Rowlands; and a plenary showcasing examples of new media and performance art that engage gender, bodies and technology through….gender, bodies and technology. The conference format is designed to be inclusive, provocative, and sociable. Continental breakfasts, buffet lunches, and evening receptions are included in the registration fee.

The Gender, Bodies and Technology conference grows out of a new, interdisciplinary research initiative at Virginia Tech, sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, which brings together scholars from Computer Science, Education, English, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Theater Arts, Visual Arts, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Our research interests include, among other topics, gender and aging bodies, flexible laboring bodies and immigrant workplaces, performance and new media as technologies for destabilizing gendered embodiments, gendered access to technology fields such as engineering, and writing as a technology of power. We envision the conference as a means to expand our lively internal discussions to a wider group of scholars.

For more information about substantive aspects of the conference or the Gender, Bodies and Technology initiative, please contact:

Barbara Ellen Smith, Director
Women’s and Gender Studies Program (0227)
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Email: smithbe@vt.edu

For more information about conference registration and accommodations, please contact:

Dinah Girma , Virginia Tech Conference Registrar
Continuing and Professional Education
702 University City Blvd. (0364)
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Email: dinah@vt.edu

Improvisational simplicity

2009-04-28T07:19:02Z

The ball drops and you can draw lines that it bounces off of. It is almost like an improvisational rube goldberg machine. The sounds it makes are pretty too so if you can get a structure set up, you can just listen to it for a bit — especially if you like blips like I do.

BallDroppings found on the Processing website

But this isn’t explicitly feminist, you might say! I’ve been thinking about improvisation and ethnography as a form of knowing during this fieldwork in design methods here in India. I’m allowing for the fact I might respond to something with the senses and without thinking too analytically about it, putting it out there to explore what happens. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you will contribute a bit of randomness too, or maybe it bores you. Only way to tell is by trying.

Female-only ant species located

2009-04-17T07:44:26Z

Things have been particularly slow because I’m in India, studying how designers do their thing here. I’m learning a lot about method, improvisation, and platforms for creativity but it’s too early to say anything.

For now, I just thought I’d pass on that Scientists have found a species of ant that reproduces without males by cloning the queen (from The Telegraph).

Reproduction without sex is fairly common in the ant world, but the Mycocepurus smithii is the first known to be a male-free species. The phenomenon takes the stress out of finding a mate and may help keep the peace in colonies, the scientists believe.

I’m not the biggest fan of science journalism since it often uncritically reports speculations based on tropes. Is keeping the piece causal speculation based on metaphors of gender relations in some human cultures or is there something to back it up? Nonetheless, I thought I’d put it out there.

To highlight the serendipity, I will also admit that I found it on Ashton Kutcher’s twitter feed.

Gender and the economic market

2009-03-13T08:03:32Z

Via my friend Doug, a fascinating abstract from Haas (Cal) researchers about the invisible hands of the market being gendered:

Boys will be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment

Brad Barber and Terrance Odean
Theoretical models of financial markets built on the assumption that some investors are overconfident yield one central prediction: overconfident investors will trade too much. We test this prediction by partitioning investors on the basis of a variable that provides a natural proxy for overconfidence – gender. Psychological research has established that men are more prone to overconfidence than women. Thus, models of investor overconfidence predict that men will trade more and perform worse than women. Using account data for over 35,000 households from a large discount brokerage firm, we analyze the common stock investments of men and women from February 1991 through January 1997. Consistent with the predictions of the overconfidence models, we document that men trade 45 percent more than women and earn annual risk-adjusted net returns that are 1.4 percent less than those earned by women. These differences are more pronounced between single men and single women; single men trade 67 percent more than single women and earn annual risk-adjusted net returns that are 2.3 percent less than those earned by single women.

Full article in PDF

digital piecework: a mockery of creative industries

2009-03-15T00:48:44Z

Lilly’s intervention into the Digital Turk has gotten me thinking about this kind of labor as the same type of digital piecework that women of color have done since the early days of digital culture. My grandmother worked in electronics assembly right after the war because she saw an ad recruiting Japanese American women as workers–this was right after the war in Santa Clara, when many of them had returned from internment camps. Thus, they were a fairly emiserated and jobless group of workers who had an excellent reputation for manual dexterity. As Donna Haraway wrote years ago, women of color, especially transnational ones, have always done the piecework of the digital age.

The Mechnical Turk makes digital piecework seem game-like, done on one’s own time, but it is also a mockery of the “creative industries” form of labor, done for love/interest/personal development rather than for the (meager) pay. Amazon is a platform for consumption, and hosting the Turk there makes working that way look like play. Lots of types of sweated/semi-sweated labor like this seem like play rather than work, and are also a mockery of the creative industries–like gold farming.

Lilly knows that I am obsessed with gold farming, because it is sweated labor done by Asian men in actual sweatshop conditions, but also because it is so overtly about play as work. These jobless and unemployable Chinese men play World of Warcraft and other MMO’s and sell their avatars and virtual money through third party virtual goods resellers like IGE. If we look at what they do, it’s also a mockery of the creative industries that the digital revolution was supposed to make available to so many.

In film and television studies, there’s new interest in studying “below the line” workers, like secretaries, script girls, craft workers, and personal assistants. So many of them are women, and they are so seldom talked about–they’re not auteurs or stars. If we look at digital games like other media, can we talk about gold farmers as “below the line” workers in the digital entertainment industry? They make the “play” of other more privileged people more easy and fun, they do the boring stuff that needs to get done to make the game accessible to busy Americans and even busy Asians who want to play at a high level but don’t have time to earn all this gold, and they are despised as a workforce for these very reasons. Are they Mechanical Turks? To free associate a bit, the Turk was an Oriental–exotic, inscrutable, and tricky. Chinese gold farmers are so marginalized, they are pallet-sharing, bleary eyed information workers a world away whose work is always viewed as harmful and antisocial in world of warcraft, yet their labor is essential; 20% of players have bought gold, and they are tolerated because Blizzard knows that without them many players would drop out in frustration (Mia Consalvo’s book _Cheating_, MIT Press, discusses this strategy–game manufacturers often leak cheat codes and tolerate farmers because otherwise new players would get too frustrated and stop being good customers.)

I wrote a paper about this which will appear in a communication studies journal. I’m posting it here because the journal is a paper journal and isn’t out yet. I wrote this article almost exactly a year ago, and I thank Difference Engine’s editors for letting me post it here so that people can read it. Any feedback welcome, as always.

WordPress doesn’t like my attachment, so I’m having to link it: click Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft to get the pdf.

Online / offline: Different spheres?

2009-03-13T07:59:56Z

Over at witty title pending, sky posts:

In some senses,it’s true that things work differently online - one of the most important aspects of this (for my work) is the ability to easily copy and share information. However, online and offline space are never truly separate. Part of what I’m arguing in my thesis is that even movements that don’t use the Internet much should care about what happens online, because it will end up affecting their work. It’s also important to remember that the abstract space of bits and bytes that is represented on cyberthrillers by flows of bright green numbers is based on real infrastructure. Fibreoptic cables and satellites and huge banks of servers.

The implications of this are manifold. The IT industry produces a not-insignificant amount of carbon emissions, in part because it has to run and cool those huge banks of servers. And all those devices we use to access ‘cyberspace’; mobile phones, PDAs, netbooks, laptops, PCs, are made somewhere, and have to go somewhere when we throw them out. There are plenty of stories on the problems associated with recycling electronics (try here or here or here), and probably plenty of articles on the terribly conditions which electronics workers face. A new report has just come out on the latter issue (via BoingBoing and Difference Engines).

I’d thought about the online / offline divide related to some of my research on virtual worlds, but labor and resource consumption implications of splitting these spheres, obscuring the ways they’re entangled and related, had not occurred to me. It’s almost as if talking about online culture and its supposed immateriality actually happily suppresses the data centers, power, chip manufacturing labor, coltan civil wars, and toxic waste that goes into these things.

Art: Stiching waveforms

2009-03-05T20:01:33Z

From chotipyari, 13 conversations each one minute long displayed through embroidery:

Others can comment more intelligently on this than me, but the juxtaposition of a craft form typically genered female with the waveforms that remind me of cold war analog inscriptions on oscilloscopes (still part of life in many labs settings) creates a sense of surprise. The surprise raises those issues of gender and taken-for-granted associations of visual tropes like waveforms.

National Labor Committee releases report on working conditions in China factories of major electronics manufacturers

2009-02-09T10:31:17Z

I bought a $280 laptop today. Question: what human costs have been externalized? More dramatically, how many people had to die for me to get it (at that price)? Fractional answers accepted, if perverse.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

High Tech Misery in China

Meitai Plastics & Electronics
Dongguan City, Guangdong
CHINA

*
Two thousand workers, mostly young women, produce computer equipment including keyboards and printer cases for Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM.
*
Management instructs the workers to “love the company like your home,” “continuously strive for perfection” and to spy on and “actively monitor each other.”
*
Workers are prohibited from talking, listening to music, raising their heads, putting their hands in their pockets. Workers are fined for being one minute late, for not trimming their fingernails—which could impede the work, and for stepping on the grass. Workers are searched on the way in and out of the factory. Workers who hand out flyers or discuss factory conditions with outsiders are fired.
*
The young workers sit on hard wooden stools twelve hours a day, seven days a week as 500 computer keyboards an hour move down the assembly line or one every 7.2 seconds. Workers are allowed just 1.1 seconds to snap each key into place, repeating the same operation 3,250 times an hour, 35,750 times a day, 250,250 times a week and over one million times a month.
*
The workers are paid 1/50th of a cent for each operation.
*
The assembly line never stops, and workers needing to use the bathroom must learn to hold it until there is a break.
*
All overtime is mandatory, with 12-hour shifts seven days a week and an average of two days off a month. A worker daring to take a Sunday off—which is supposedly their weekly holiday—will be docked 2 ½ days’ wages. Including unpaid overtime, workers are at the factory up to 87 hours a week. On average, they are at the factory 81 hours a week, while toiling 74 hours, including 34 hours of overtime, which exceeds China’s legal limit by 318 percent!
*
The workers are paid a base wage of 64 cents an hour, which does not even come close to meeting subsistence level needs. After deductions for primitive room and board, the workers’ take-home wage drops to just 41 cents an hour. A worker toiling 75 hours a week will earn a take-home wage of $57.19, or 76 cents an hour including overtime and bonuses. The workers are routinely cheated of 14 to 19 percent of the wages legally due them.
*
Ten to twelve workers share each crowded dorm room, sleeping on narrow metal bunk beds that line the walls. They drape old sheets over their cubicle openings for privacy. In the winter, workers have to walk down several flights of stairs to fetch hot water in a small plastic bucket, which they carry back to their rooms to take a sponge bath. In the summer, dorm temperatures reach into the high 90s.
*
Workers are locked in the factory compound four days a week and are prohibited from even taking a walk.
*
To symbolize their “improving lives” the workers are served a special treat on Fridays—a small chicken leg and foot. For breakfast, they are given watery rice gruel. The workers say the food has a bad taste and is “hard to swallow.”
*
Illegally, workers are not inscribed in the mandatory work injury and health insurance and Social Security maternity leave program. In the Molding department, due to the excessive heat, the workers suffer skin rashes on their faces and arms.
*
One worker summed up the general feeling in the factory: “I feel like I am serving a prison sentence.”

Full report here.

Tweaking Technocapitalism: Turkopticon

2009-02-02T11:03:59Z

I’ve posted about Turkopticon here before. Well, it’s up, it has undergone a rev, and it has some users we don’t know who seem to like us. I wanted to talk a little bit about what is at stake in it.

For a long time, I’ve been thining about infrastructure and technology design and, in particular, how certain designs (in certain contexts) end up giving certain people the crap end of the stick. As of late, my friend Six and I have been spending our spare nerd cycles on a particular case of this: Amazon Mechanical Turk, which lets workers do cognitive piecework usually averaging a dollar or two an hour. The low wages, the lack of health protections in a “work environment” (the computer) that has caused my arms and wrists much pain over the years, and the exuberant excitement many have for getting the faceless “crowd” to do work so cheaply were my initial cause for concern. As I started to survey Turk workers about their experiences, workers reported little protection from employers who don’t pay and low wages as big problems. I heard from workers who did Turk after their main jobs to make food and rent when gas prices were high. While I don’t have the power to regulate AMT or radically shift market dynamics at the moment, Six and I put our heads to the first problem of employers who take people’s work and then don’t pay.

So we made Turkopticon, a Firefox extension workers can use to access ratings and commentary of employers/requesters as they browse for HITs (”human intelligence tasks” and an unfortunate acronym). Turkopticon isn’t revolution — it’s not going to fix the fact that jobs are increasingly contingent, that health care costs are insane, and people have fewer good choices about how to make their livelihoods. But it’s a start at drawing attention to an information imbalance that has been letting some requesters abuse people. It’s something that can make us ask why Amazon didn’t design these informational safeguards in to begin with. And lest we think the traditional lines of employer v worker are simply drawn, Dolores Labs provided critical support and feedback. We started off as an empty database asking workers to install our extension, but there wasn’t much for workers to see. Dolores Labs put up a survey for us and got a hundred or so reviews of requesters that formed the seed of the database, motivated in part by their desire to resist Turk being spoiled by crappy employers. (I’ll probably post most about this in future posts.)

Is it just about Mechanical Turk for me? Not really. I see AMT as an dystopian extreme case of a the increasingly contingent, low paid labor I’ve been seeing creeping up for years.

Jobs aren’t a great way to make a living these days. A few trends that disturb me. The practice of hiring temp workers on a mostly permanent basis so that they can be denied health benefits and other perks took Microsoft to court and even got its own neologism: permatemps. The largest employer in 2/3 of US states, Walmart, pays barely enough for a full-timer to make ends meet, claiming to only provide “supplemental income.” About half of a those filing for bankruptcy in a 2005 study cited medical debts as a main cause [pdf source]. Livelihoods are precarious for a lot of hard working people.

People frequently argue that those working for these low wages have a choice. As one person I corresponded with explained, “I realize I have a choice to work or not work on AMT, but that means I would also not need to make the choice to eat or not eat, pay bills or not pay bills, etc.” The thing we need to worry about is not only what choices people make, but what choices people have. Not all jobs are available everywhere. Not all people are equally able to move. Not everyone can afford a solid educational foundation. Not everyone even gets their knowledge and wisdom equally recognized and respected. People do have choices, but some have more choices than others.

Turkopticon is just a little Firefox extension, but for Six and I, it’s also forcing us to think about a lot of issues in labor and politics that we just don’t know enough about, but which have consequences around us every day.

Thanks to Dolores Labs, the 67 turkers who shared their experiences, and those who have been using Turkopticon and reviewing already.

Interesting conferences coming up

2009-01-21T20:48:25Z

FEMMSS3 is the University of South Carolina Women’s and Gender Studies Conference being held in conjunction with the Association of
Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics, and Science Studies at University of SC on March 19-21, 2009.

National Womens Studies Association’s Annual Conference is also looking to encourage STS and science studies contributions and has a Feb 15 submission deadline:

Our goal is to increase the number of feminist science and technology studies scholars who will attend and present at the conference. We
encourage you to send individual papers or, better yet, involve some of your colleagues to create a panel around your area of specialization. We also encourage you to plan discussion-based roundtables around topics of your interest. Virginia Eubanks and Jane Lehr, two of the taskforce co-chairs, have offered to propose and chair one roundtable discussion at the conference on the theme of
“Difficult Dialogues in Feminist Science & Technology Studies:
Continuing Challenges and New Directions.” Anyone who is interested in
working with them on that proposal should contact them directly at
veubanks@albany.edu or jlehr@calpoly.edu.

And, of course, 4S’ Annual Meeting is in Washington DC this year with a March 1 submission deadline.

Who is going to what? Tell in the comments. Meet up!