#GamerGate 101

In recent weeks a number of people have tried to explain #GamerGate.  You can check out "Why Bother with GamerGate?" or "What is GamerGate, and Why?  An Explainer for Non-Geeks" for some primers.  Now that The New York Times is running headlines that read "Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in 'GamerGate,'" public attention to the rise of menacing, intimidating, and graphic online comments about disfigurement, rape, mutilation, and murder addressed to Anita Sarkeesian Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, and others is spurring a broader discussion about harassment, gender, and digital culture.

If you are interested in primary sources, it's useful to look at the testimonies of the women themselves.  Quinn has written about being the Internet's "most hated person" here, Wu describes being driven out of her home here, and Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency explains becoming a villain in a kind of nightmarish massively multiplayer game in this TED Talk. 

#GamerGate is a hashtag used by participants to talk about a supposed conspiracy that is allegedly endangering the future of video games.  In the paranoid universe of GamerGate in which "social justice warriors" (often abbreviated to SJW) collude to deprive gamers of the aggressive games of violent machismo that they love, independent developers like Quinn are to blame for threatening a multi-billion dollar industry of big AAA franchises and their acolytes.

I'll admit that I wasn't a fan of Quinn's Depression Quest, which seemed too simple and predictable, as well as typical of many serious games in lacking subtlety or nuance, but I understand why it might have merited have merited a review in The New Yorker, even independent of the newsworthiness of the threats to Quinn's safety.  Unfortunately for Quinn, many have attributed her critical attention to her personal relationships with game journalists and have supported the online vendetta of a vengeful ex-boyfriend who has accused her of offering sexual favors as a way to solicit good press.  The power laws of social networks led to cascading effects, particularly after actor Adam Baldwin encouraged his libertarian followers to adopt the #GamerGate handle, which was tweeted almost a quarter million times in the first week.  Eventually Quinn was doxxed on Reddit.  With details about her private personal information made public, including her home address, the specificity of threats intensified.  Soon GamerGate was a story that the Washington Post was following.  

Although her rhetorical technique may be a bit heavy-handed, I think that many of the videos at Sarkesian's Feminist Frequency are worth watching.  What is easy to miss if you haven't watched the actual videos is the fact that Sarkeesian doesn't just criticize the games industry for being sexist: she criticizes it for being derivative and relying on recycling the same motifs.  

So what else is #GamerGate about?  As Ian Bogost pointed out at the alternative games festival IndieCade, it has become a "Voldomortian" entity that many critics would rather just ignore in the interests of avoiding its wrath.

But here goes.

It's about feminism.  Tags like #SJW or #notyourshield make it seem like women are either among the aggressors or merely serving conveniently as human shields to protect corrupt interests from exposure and expulsion.  Many #GamerGate advocates deny that their movement is misogynistic and claim that they are keeping the encroachment of feminism in check rather than harassing women.  In some ways feminism has become more visible with feminists gaining access to new social media venues for publishing content online, but so has virulent antifeminism.  For every "I need feminism" selfie campaign there is an "I don't need feminism" campaign in which women seem compelled to be participants in their own subjugation.  Even this female game developer denies the accusation of misogyny and claims that trolls merely "lack social skills" rather than "hate women."  Nonetheless, "the silencing of women" seems to be an obvious theme, given how Mattie Brice and Jenn Frank also felt targeted.

It's about journalism.   The status of "journalism" in online discourse with the rise of user-generated content has been an issue for a while.  For over a decade, in the "are blogs journalism?" debate, magazines and newspapers have been bemoaning "journalism without journalists," and legal battles have been waged over the question.  Blogs are accused of delivering subjective reportage rather than objective reporting.  At the same time, those who favor the anonymous over the personal insist that transparency groups like WikiLeaks do the work of a "fifth estate" by letting whistleblowers leak evidence more safely and directly than they can as confidential informants to the press.  #GamerGate enthusiasts use a range of blogging and leaking techniques, as the diatribes of Breitbart.com about "Angry Feminists, Unethical Journalists" may indicate.

Of course, for those who have visited large game conventions, such as E3 and GDC, these charges about ethical lapses among game journalists might seem laughable, given how little influence independent game developers have in comparison to the might of the corporate manufacturers of big budget titles.  AAA titles have the means to offer the parties, perks, and enticements associated with good reviews, and obviously they provide the advertising that allows game reporting to be a viable profession.  As a sign of where monied interests lie, Intel has already pulled ads from Gamasutra in response to calls for a #GamerGate boycott,  and Kotaku may be pulling some support for crowd funding independent games.

It's about definitions of "gamer" and "game."  At a deeper level many might argue that #GamerGate is about who is a gamer and what games are.  GamerGaters have seemed particularly enraged by having game journalists opine that they are a vanishing breed in articles like "Gamers Are Over," "The End of Gamers," and "We Might Be Witnessing the Death of an Identity."  GamerGaters also defend "real games" over imitations and phony products, and much of the wrath of the group is consequently directed at independent and alternative game producers.

As members of the feminist game collective Ludica note in their challenge to define games differently, "The Hegemony of Play," narrow definitions of games, gaming, and gamers privilege white, male hardcore gamers and exclude the play experiences of women and other perceived minorities -- despite the fact that though those who play online card games, casual games, dress up games, simulations of playing house, and other forms of feminized recreation may often be a relatively silent majority to which the industry is finally paying attention.  Furthermore, surveys indicate that game developers themselves are finally seeing sexism as a problem in the field.

It's about militarism.  This might be more of a stretch, but I might argue that it's no accident that "real" games are often military-themed games such as Call of Duty in the #GamerGate universe or the fact that Leigh Alexander (who can be seen in the documentary Joystick Warriors) becomes the "worst game critic in the world" in the minds of GamerGaters.  Even a fan of CoD who claims in a fan film that #GamerGate is "not that big of a deal" might repeat many of the allegations uncritically and add more insults to the women involved.

It's about embodiment.  For a while now people in media studies have been talking about how experiences of digital media are not very virtual at all.  No longer do television commercials promote the idea that people have no gender or race online.  The bodies of these women are very much of concern for GamerGaters as objects of sexual violence or rape fantasies, as inanimate objects that can be criticized for being ugly, or as passive objects of aggression, as in the case of a Flash game that invites users to punch Sarkeesian in the face.  The marvel of heroic mission games is having an invulnerable, unkillable, infinitely replaceable body in the most unlikely of circumstances in battle, and some first-person shooter games don't even let you see your feet.

It's about language.  The language that people use to register their presence (and absence) in digital environments may spread across the whole continuum from instrumental trash talk, which functions as what Lisa Nakamura calls a "procedural strategy" in many gaming communities, to online hate speech that is intended to victimize others.  Some might understandably call GamerGaters a hate group, but policing language can also be problematic.  Schools and authoritarian regimes use filtering software to focus on offensive terms, but it may be difficult for even humans to identify context.

It's about metadata.  To get this many people to use this hashtag, it shows a group capable of making canny decisions about how to label their content and how to direct people to using a particular naming convention.  #GamerGate gets attention because it is distinctive, easy to spell, and alliterative.  It is even shorter than the equally alliterative #feministfrequency, and it takes advantage of the common scandal-signifying suffix "gate."  ("Gate" as a signifier for scandal even appears in stories about the new iPhone with #bendgate or #seamgate hashtags.)

It's about collectives.   The term "online community" is eschewed by many critics who argue that online networked publics lack the social cohesion, public culture, and rituals of inclusion of traditional communities.  Instead, the coordination of large groups of supposedly otherwise autonomous individuals can be seen as representative of everything from smart mobs to hive minds.  #GamerGate sympathizers may be promised free Steam codes, and many of them may be mere sock puppets rather than real people, but a volunteer spirit and an ethos of independence seems to motivate many GamerGaters to participate.

For its fortieth anniversary the journal Camera Obscura is celebrating the theme of collectives, but collectives aren't necessarily progressive entities, as the work of Megan Boler, Gabriella Coleman, and many other net critics indicates.

Those who want to organize collectively toward progressive ends against the nefarious GamerGate collective are encouraged to perform mass coordination by using their own hashtags (including #StopGamerGate) or to give to crowd funding efforts by visiting the donation pages for game critics.  Over a thousand developers also signed this open letter "to the gaming community."

Oddly #GamerGate is also about imagined collectives.  Sargon of Akkad has argued -- quite improbably -- in this YouTube video that DiGRA is secretly a feminist cabal. GamerGaters have compiled lists of "SJW Game Journalists" supposedly in cahoots.  There is even a satiric game where you can be turned "into a crusader for online morality, a champion of internet justice, and the lone defender standing valiantly against the encroaching morass of willful human ignorance."

It's about rights.  Women's rights are not ones that I take lightly or rights to privacy, security, and safety.  But it might be important to pay attention to rights-based claims that GamerGaters make too, even if they seem like ludicrous demands for "men's rights" that ignore the benefits of male privilege or the right to bear arms that made it impossible for Sarkeesian to speak at a public university in Utah, where a school shooting was threatened if she appeared.

It's about values.  The conversation about values is going on in a number of places, including FemTechNet.  The question will be if this conversation can be both widely accessible and broadly constructive.  We'll see.

Three-Ring Circus

As I go back to the lecture hall this quarter, it is interesting to think about all of the different experiments taking place right now in the connected courses movement, which encourages faculty and students to use new technologies for online social networks to experiment with access and collaboration in new pedagogical ways.

Last week the FemTechNet DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) hosted its first Open Office Hour for the year, which I moderated with the help of Melissa Gregg, a renowned researcher on ubiquitous technologies, affective labor, and the quantified self movement.  Students were encouraged to watch a video dialogue themed around "Labor" with Judy Wajcman and Anne Balsamo before coming to the office hour and to read a set of open access readings on the subject.  Although we had faculty members rather than students show up for the office hour, it was still a lively discussion, which pointed to the possibilities for more kinds of synchronous exchanges in connected courses, as Gregg spoke from her own office in Intel.

Last week was also the week when the materials that I had developed with Jill Walker Rettberg and the rest of the Selfie Researchers group were scheduled to be covered in the collaborative syllabus for our Selfie Course.  Jill wrote a great blog post for our week on "Dataveillance, Biometrics, and Facial Recognition."

Before I know it, the FemTechNet week on "Diversity, Equity, Access" will be coming up in the Connected Courses initiative for "active co-learning in higher ed" with Balsamo,  Lisa Nakamura, and Veronica Paredes.  Course facilitators Jim Groom, Alan Levine, and Howard Rheingold have been building from the earlier Reclaim Open Learning challenge to rethink the MOOC paradigm with more innovative options for higher education.

As though this three-ring circus doesn't have enough going on simultaneously, I am also working with other faculty in the UC system to design and develop an online Digital Writing and Rhetoric course with the Innovative Learning Technology Initiative.  To complement course content, interviews with researchers in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology are publicly available for others interested in digital rhetoric.  

As usual, I have also set up the video podcasts for my big Media Seductions course,  so that even my regular university teaching will continue to have an open component. 

Feminist IT: Legacies (Leigh Star, Beatriz da Costa, and Anne Friedberg)

The Feminist IT conference devoted time to celebrating the legacies of three feminist scholars who represented the group's commitment to doing interdisciplinary work and the interpersonal networking that supports such field building.  Since members of this assembly do research that crosscuts "STS (science and technology studies), film and media studies, sci-art, digital humanities, informatics, and critical media practice" it was also important to emphasize exemplary thinkers who worked in the different traditions of ethnography, media arts practice, and archival criticism represented at the conference.  (In my opening I noted that it was an assembly both in the sense of representing multiple delegations and in the sense of the term "some assembly required.")




Leigh Star was remembered by Adele Clarke and Martha Lampland.  Clarke noted how Star was a polymath who worked on neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and ecologies of knowledge, but she also humanized her by describing her personal struggles and by showing her at leisure in photos interacting with different types of environments, including a palm tree oasis. Ever the responsible pedagogue Clarke provided a handout and began by providing context for Star's work in Ecologies of Knowledge. She argued that Star rewrote the narratives of scientific discovering by presenting scientists as "citizens neither villains nor heroes" and asked fundamental questions like "Who is doing the dishes?" or "Where is the garbage going?" or "Who owns the means of knowledge production?" This focus on everyday practices, organized what Clarke called her "work commitment."  She also spent some time trying to demystify the "boundary object concept" that was a critical part of Star's intellectual legacy.  She showed its roots in pragmatist philosophy, in the Chicago School, in And in Anselm Strauss's theories about social worlds and arenas, and in the Everett Hughes classic, The Sociological Eye.  Star's conception of workplace as a site of "cooperation without consensus" continues to be extremely influential, and -- as Les Gasser notes -- two thirds of the citations of Star's work actually come from computer science.   Clarke also cautioned that Star's seminal work on "Institutional Ecology," which looks at negotiations among professional and amateur communities working with taxidermy specimens in museums, appears in science studies readers in abridged form.  Often overlooked was the fact that boundary objects are "loosely structured in common practice" and "a sort of arrangement that allows different groups to work together."  She also pointed out that her work on "boundary infrastructures" in Sorting Things Out (co-authored with partner Geof Bowker) was important to consider.  Clark said that "interpretive flexibility" tends to get more attention than structuring and processual dynamics.  She also remarked on the role that "lack of fit" played in creating new boundary objects.  She then focused on the importance of the concept of "torque" in Star's work as a "twisting of time lines."  Clarke closed by returning to the diversity of experiences that Star's life represented, which included "the importance of  writing poetry and fiction" as well as the fact of "being allergic to onions" in a life of "drinking and dancing" as well as "mentoring and loving." In the slide above we see Clarke citing Star on how "forming a scientific self entails a peculiar kind of pain and of joy that remains almost unspeakable" (Star 2007: 76).

Lampland began her remembrance by emphasizing how Star engaged with "fighting for social justice" in ways that recognized the complexity of causes and consequences.  For example, the SAT could be both the test that allowed Star to attend Harvard University without class connections and a potentially discriminatory gatekeeping examination.   Lampland, who co-edited Standards and their Stories with Star, admitted to occasional disagreements and also asserted that Star's method of quickly being able to identify commonalities did not necessarily contradict an engagement with sustained empirical research.  She also emphasized the "mistake of championing transparency" that "could hide what doesn’t fit."

Antoinette LaFarge, who described herself as fortunate to benefit from colleagues in the UC Irvine "brain trust" who have been part of FemTechNet, then remembered critical sci-artist Beatriz da Costa in a talk called "Less Dismal Science" that made a number of implicit connections to the previous discussion of Star's work by noting the role of "standards," "tools," and situations" in her art.  Beatriz da Costa co-edited Tactical Biopolitics with Kavita Philip, one of the PIs for UCFemTechNet, and she was part of conference planning until her untimely death from cancer.

In unpacking the art practice of "Shani" (the name she preferred to Beatriz), LaFarge described how da Costa's projects were often designed around hands-on workshops and situated in a participatory ethos from her beginnings in Critical Art Ensemble.  LaFarge chose to analyze da Costa's work in relationship to Nietzsche's The Gay Science and Carlyle's The Dismal Science to consider science as an end not a means and critique science's "offer for radical truth," which Avital Ronell also challenged in The Test Drive in questioning the ostensibly sovereign presence of truth in science, politics, and religion and the compulsion to dis-identify and deny attachment.  LaFarge also argued against scholars "strip mining Nietzsche" without attention to his chauvinistic remarks about how women are weak, conniving, and characterized by disgusting natural functions and his ideas about the present moment as a time of virility.

In an oeuvre that included microbes, biodiversity, air pollution, RFID tracking, and genetically modified food, da Costa engaged in a series of public actions oriented around expanding the notion of citizen science in ways that were mutually positive for creators and participants.  For example, LaFarge pointed to her work in Invisible Earthlings with CO2-sensing yeast colonies and in Pigeonblog undertaking a "collaborative endeavor between homing pigeons, artists, engineers and pigeon fanciers engaged in a grassroots scientific data gathering initiative."  Like other speakers, LaFarge acknowledged the presence of disagreement among feminists, and the fact that her friend and colleague thought that LaFarge's interest in "computer games was a complete waste of time."   The difficulty that Beatriz da Costa addressed was described by LaFarge as "how much has to be left out in order to make an argument" and "how test results are used to conceal a lie."  Visitors to the conference were encouraged to visit an installation of da Costa's Dying for the Other in the Consume show at the Calit2 Gallery, which interrogates the relationship of the dying artist to the mortality of laboratory animals. 

The final tribute was devoted to Anne Friedberg.  Co-organizer Lisa Cartwright actually had Friedberg as a teaching assistant and recollected being given names like Irigaray, Cixous, Althusser, and Mulvey by this early mentor.  Heidi Rae Cooley gave a tearful and moving remembrance of Friedberg that drew upon the memories of Sheila Murphy as well.  She emphasized the radical rewriting of four centuries of the history of perspective that Friedberg undertook that went far beyond how the work of film historians was traditionally constituted.  (See her digital companion for The Virtual Window for an interactive version of her argument.)

Friedberg founded both the UC Irvine Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies and the IMAP program at USC and launched the careers of many interdisciplinary students.  Cooley pointed to Mark Sample's essay "When Service Becomes Scholarship" to explain the depth of Friedberg's contributions and how she made public and circulated the work of others, even "taking in freeway fliers" who were normally outcasts at the university or sitting on information technology committees.  She also discovered talents by recommending people for one-year contracts that later developed into long term institutional presences, as she did for Daniel Herbert who chronicled the rise and fall of the video store.

A particularly beautiful and lyrical moment in Cooley's talk came when she described how Friedberg made homemade temporary tattoos with "SCMS" for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies when the "media" part was still new.  Friedberg also took on DIY with gusto by making her own pamphlets for an improvised MIT Press booth, since she was not one to hold herself above others, according to Cooley.   As in the case of the other founding mothers remembered, we learned much about the details of Friedberg's passions worthy of remembering: Gil Sans as Friedberg's font of choice, Conan Doyle on camera, stuffed Furbees speaking Furbish, writing about the Aibo robot dog, and Vaucanson's infamous duck.   Although Friedberg changed theories of "windowed visuality" and the mobile virtual gaze, she also recognized the temporality of the apparatus and the impermanence of institutions.

Note that attendee Wikipedia maven Adrianne Wadewitz periodically reminded conference participants that they could improve these three women's entries on Wikipedia.

(Photos from Lisa Parks)

Feminist IT: Infrastructures

The Feminist IT conference devoted to "Feminist Infrastructures & Technocultures" featured a number of prominent feminist scholars of technology in the morning sessions, which were devoted to questions about infrastructures and legacies.  With over three decades of scholarship to draw upon and a strong concentration of work done in the University of California, this conference tried to facilitate more conversation between people doing interdisciplinary work, specifically those who might be positioned in either the Society for the Social Studies of Science or the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

In my opening welcome I pointed to the work of fellow organizers and panel moderators who approach questions about mediation from the perspective of material culture, the study of the apparatus and embodiment, and engagement with particular communities of practice, such as Lisa Cartwright on 3D printers that can produce guns, Lisa Parks on drone vision, and Kelly Gates on the truth claims of facial recognition technologies and surveillance footage, which have been much in the news this week in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings.  I also noted that the particular context of public institutions devoted to big science provides affordances as well as constraints for this work on "making science, designing culture, shaping the technological imagination, sorting things out, and determining 'the right tools for the job.'"

The UC FemTechNet group is a regional research offshoot of the larger and more distributed FemTechNet initiative currently archived at the FemBot Collective and slated to move to new space at a FemTechNet site at The New School.  Many of its members use the UCFemTechNet Facebook page as a site for cross-campus coordination and introductions, although there is also a mailing list for announcements.

The opening panel featured a dialogue between Anne Balsamo and Chandra Mukerji about infrastructure that focused on their shared scholarly interest in uncovering women's roles in the labor force of expert knowledge workers who played a key role in shaping the technocultures of the modern administrative state.  Balsamo famously wrote about how her mother was a "computer" or person who performed mathematical communications, a topic that I also wrote about in the last chapter of the Virtualpolitik book and that was memorialized in N. Katherine Hayles' classic text My Mother Was a Computer.  To commemorate the occasion, we included a non-human participant on the panel, "Nancy," the actual type of comptometer that Balsamo describes.  (The machine is literally labeled "Nancy," presumably with the name of its former operator.)

The first question posed by disability activist Louise Hickman asked "How can we slow down time to shape participation in discussions?"  Mukerji, who does research on how female engineers played a vital role in hydrology projects in Bourbon France, laughed about the fact that mostly she lived in the 17th century and was well aware of how time functioned as a technology as well, particularly when the cyclical time of women's labor differs so radically from linear time.  Balsamo talked about how members of the FemTechNet initiative struggled to coordinate with each other and talked about how to align schedules at professional scholarly conferences in order to gain critical mass.  Balsamo also recast Marx with feminist temporality, by pointing out that women make the present and the future, but not under conditions of their own making.  Temporality has also been a concern for the panel's third moderator, Lilly Irani, whose recent work on hackathons looks at the bias toward action in the compressed time of such events.

In addressing the main topic of infrastructure, which Mukerji defined as the "structure of impersonal rule," panelists discussed how even social infrastructures, such as laws and regulations, had connections to material culture, in that they were written down.  Balsamo acknowledged the work of Leigh Star and many other feminist scholars who published important work on infrastructure, as as way to think about the challenges and opportunities of feminist networking.  As Mukerji pointed out, the actions of largely female staff members in human resources charged with the Weberian task of the maintenance of files, played a more important role in implementing affirmative action than any piece of legislation or judicial decision.  Codes of politeness that allow flexibility in infrastructure that make continual function possible are also infrastructural, as I noted, where women's labor also mattered.  Such codes are also important to FemTechNet, as are the peer promotion practices of those who might be maintaining tenure and promotion files, but the object-oriented character of the panel was also emphasized with Mukerji's object, which was also passed around, a rock and leaf to demonstrate the laundry techniques that she argued were important for understanding the cultural innovations associated with daily life.  (She is famed for arguing that the Canal du Midi is much more than the sole achievement of Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax farmer and entrepreneur, because it was also the product of collective intelligence, depending on peasant women and artisans--unrecognized heirs to Roman traditions of engineering--who came to labor on the waterway in collaboration with military and academic supervisors.)

MLA 2012: Debates in the Digital Humanities

Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University
Elizabeth Losh, University of California, San Diego

In June 2009, Cathy Davidson wrote a blog entry for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) soliciting applications for a Program Coordinator. In her recruitment, she described HASTAC as a “voluntary network” of scholars who reach beyond academia to expand what the digital humanities could and should be. In doing so, Davidson defined its sphere of influence in broad moral and political terms that included “the role of science and technology and the state of our planet” and “issues of equity and ethics.” However, she concluded her post with a different kind of call to action from her initial “help wanted” message, one that spoke directly to hackers wanting to topple the Iranian regime that had just crushed pro-democracy protests and had shut down the microblogging and text messaging services.

Davidson alerted her audience that Western digital rights advocates had “received an SOS from pro-democracy activists in Tehran asking us all to use basic hacking tools to flood the propaganda sites of the ruling regime with junk traffic in order to bring them down and thereby open Twitter channels again.” Accordingly she reposted the following orders for electronic civil disobedience:

NOTE to HACKERS - attack www.farhang.gov.ir - pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us,? Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks isn?t clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. (Jardin)

What is the connection between Davidson’s eloquent defense of a broader notion of the digital humanities and her reposting of a rushed message that is peppered with misspellings, abbreviations, and infelicities of style? In both cases DH functions as a site of political activism, recognizable as being in the tradition of campus protests about civil rights or anti-militarism that defined how political commitment and dissent were staged in the built environment of the university in the past while also being part of a new vanguard of networked cultures in which protests in temporary autonomous zones could be rhizomatic, sporadic, and even ironic in their rhetorics.

By urging readers to launch distributed denial of service attacks aimed at the Iranian state, Davidson links HASTAC with another frame of cultural reference, that of “hacktivism” or the writing of code to promote or subvert particular political ideologies. In addition to protesting human rights violations, hacktivists have used their programming skills as a form of civil disobedience to promote free and open software, privacy, free speech, freedom of movement, governmental transparency, information ethics, political self-determination, environmental protection, and a range of other online and offline causes. However, because hacking tends to be a virtuoso performance by seasoned programmers, the ability to wield tools that expose vulnerabilities in security, privacy, or accurate data representation is often seen as the sole purview of an elite group of highly computer-literate cognoscenti very different from the print-cultured readers of her blog.

In thinking about the relationship between “hacktivism” and the humanities, it is worth noting that some academics are already risking tenure and even arrest because of their acts of electronic civil disobedience. To understand these phenomena that test academic freedom either to bring politics into academia or academia into politics, I argue it is helpful to examine theories of “hacktivism” or the nonviolent use of digital tools in pursuit of political ends. In the context of the digital humanities, I argue that hacktivism theory can broaden and deepen our understanding of the use of digital tools and of the politics of that tool use and to question the uncritical instrumentalism of so many DH projects.

Of course, some might argue that Davidson’s appeal for hackers to bring down Iranian government sites shows a naïve understanding of how human rights discourses function in the era of the Internet. In practical terms, denial of service attacks on state-run online media may only intensify suspicions that outside agitators are interfering with the internal politics of a country with a long history of unwelcome intervention. Furthermore, such attacks on the state’s propaganda infrastructure do little to promote the work of activists who bear witness through channels independent of the authoritarian state or provide evidence with persuasive power rather than just disruption of user experience.

In response to the Iranian situation, some digital humanities projects took a fundamentally different approach from the cyber-attacks promoted by Davidson. HyperCities, an initiative that describes itself as “a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces,” supported the efforts of UCLA Iranian-American graduate student Xarene Eskandar to create a collection of geotagged social media artifacts that documented Iranian election protests with markers on electronic maps, online videos, links to microblog postings, and explanations of the significance of a range of other digital ephemera from Tehran. More recently, the group created Hypercities Egypt, which included a Google map of Cairo that pinpointed a new anti-government tweet every four seconds. HyperCities director Todd Presner maintained that this retasking of a mapping tool designed to teach about urban history in ancient Rome or Weimar Berlin was completely consistent with the project’s mission, because “HyperCities Egypt gives users a sense of living — and reliving — history.”

Such software also shares information about rapidly unfolding events organized by smart mobs in the present with future participants. Although the HyperCities team sees disseminating real-time data as continuing the scholarly work of building digital archives, such tools may also become of interest to those outside academia who hope that visualized trends could also be deployed to try to predict the future. This is precisely the situation that Laila Shereen Sakr, a.k.a. VJ Um Amel, a USC graduate student has found herself in once the State Department took interest in her project, R-Shief, a suite of tools designed to visualize the shifting real-time patterns of popular opinion in the Middle East to provide “real-time analysis of opinion about late-breaking issues in the Arab world.” By using aggregate data from Twitter and the Web, R-Shief attempts to dissect phenomena such as how people in Egypt are reacting to the latest changes to the constitutional process, how Libyans perceive the presence of NATO forces, what Bahrainis think about the presence of Saudi military, and how pro-regime supporters in Syria are using social media. Being able, literally, to picture such complex social and political interactions could encourage more meaningful dialogue about democracy and civil society both in and about Arabic-speaking countries Shereen Sakr argues. She also embraces open-ended methods of inquiry that recognize contemporary means of communication as “technically mediated, messy, real-time, and fast” and notes that it is already challenging to write a “history of the present,” because “distance is critical to be critical.” Yet through tech@state now she has also been asked to engage in futurecasting so that public diplomacy efforts could maximize rhetorical impact and minimize security risk. Shereen Sakr might seem to be an unlikely ally to the nation-state, given her interest in hacking and hacktivism as part of the USC Critical Code Studies group and her public promotion of the Occupy Data movement, but with a paucity of regional experts and trained analysts of social media, her digital humanities projects have become of great interest to government agencies far beyond the N.E.H.

New uses for digital testimony and evidence even puts the digital humanities in dialogue with movements for decriminalization and political abolitionism. For example, Sharon Daniel’s “Public Secrets” and “Blood Sugar” websites about imprisonment and addiction were created with programming resources from the online journal Vectors and thus partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Yet many NEH competitions specifically forbid endorsing any particular political point of view and would seem to promote a form of technocratic neutrality antithetical to the ethos that I am describing here.

At its most extreme, outright electronic civil disobedience could be described as the most militant form of political resistance in DH . Many scholars date theories of electronic civil disobedience in the academy to the early work of Critical Art Ensemble as an artist-activist collective. Electronic Disturbance Theater put many earlier principles of the CAE into digital practice with a series of “virtual sit-ins.” For example, EDT organized digital protests on the virtual real estate of official websites in Mexico, the U.S., and the European Union. No actual damage was done to the infrastructure of the sites or to their security mechanisms; the intent was merely “to disrupt access to the targeted website by flooding the host server with requests.”
Nonetheless, after EDT member Professor Richardo Dominguez held a well-publicized virtual sit-in on March 4, 2010 to protest tuition hikes that used computer servers owned by his employer, University of California, and targeted websites of the UC Office of the President, he found himself under investigation and at risk of losing his recently earned tenure. While faculty and students marched on the state Capitol building, Dominguez had instructed some four hundred EDT supporters to help occupy the ucop.edu domain. Because of the timeline of accusations, some claim that it was actually the development of the controversial “Transborder Immigrant Tool” or TBT that caused Dominguez to face possible disciplinary consequences for expropriating public resources and criminal prosecution for violating existing computer law. After all, Fox News was running stories explaining “hacktivism” to their viewership soon after reporting that Dominguez’s group was helping illegal immigrants by recycling cheap mobile phones and equipping them with new software to guide them in making the risky trip across the border to water caches left by humanitarian groups.

The use of computing resources in more conventional digital humanities projects may seem less obviously open to debate, but Dominguez’s case should function as both a cautionary tale and as an aspirational story to those operating in the mainstream of this emerging area. In other words, projects involving text encoding, archiving, or G.I.S. generally use university computer resources as well, and controversies about ownership, access, and control may have consequences for DH projects also. Although the battles over who uses a given server and under what circumstances may seem less contested for a database of Jane Austen novels than a database of covert water caches in the desert, academics involved in all kinds of projects must grapple with the politics of combative IT funding situations.

According to a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a new cohort of “digitally incorrect” professors determined to flout convention in defense of hacktivist principles, such misunderstandings may occur more often now that the university must assimilate “the first generation of new-media artists who migrated to academe.” These faculty dissenters use tools of tactical media as imagined most broadly by theorists like Geert Lovink to include not only software, but also other kinds of small-scale media appropriation, such as “pirated radio waves, video art, animations, hoaxes, wi-fi networks, musical jam sessions, Xerox cultures, performances, grassroots robotics, cinema screenings, street graffiti” (Lovink 189).

At the 2011 annual convention of the MLA, noted humanities scholar Alan Liu made a plea for more political engagement within the digital humanities and specifically for taking hacktivism and tactical media activism more seriously: “In the digital humanities, cultural criticism–in both its interpretive and advocacy modes–has been noticeably absent by comparison with the mainstream humanities or, even more strikingly, with “new media studies” (populated as the latter is by net critics, tactical media critics, hacktivists, and so on).” Liu argues that these predictable catalogues of digital humanities products (“tools,” “data,” “metadata,” and “archives”), modes of institutional membership (“associations,” “conferences,” “journals,” and “projects”), and stock issues (“the digital divide,” “privacy,” and “copyright”) add up to little critical thinking about neoliberalism at best and collaboration with for-profit educational outsourcing at worst.

Davidson and Liu are certainly closer to the center of the digital humanities as it is currently defined, and Shereen Sakr and Dominguez are probably located farther away on its peripheries, but they all argue for the formation of new modes of institutional critique, particularly – in Liu’s case – as impersonal and dehumanized distance learning threatens to transform public education for the worse. Yet the history of the digital humanities told by Tara McPherson describes founding fathers who turned to humanities computing not because they were in love with the aquarianism of Ted Nelson, but because were in full retreat from race, gender, and class in the post-free-speech academy. Nonetheless, the history of new media more generally is now filled with stories of gender and race, since even supposedly neutral algorithms and computer chips were shaped by material culture and the labor practices of female programmers and Native American workers, as N. Katherine Hayles and Lisa Nakamura have explained.
In addition to opening up blackboxed systems of nation and sexuality, many hacktivists also tinker with the materiality of technology and the contingent character of current consumer comforts. For example, CAE and EDT hacktivists have created projects on genetically modified food and nanotechnology in cosmetics. Digital humanists may be similarly incorporating criticism from studies of material culture, social practice, or media archeology, but I would argue that hacktivism pushes this consciousness raising further.

Perhaps it is not heretical to say that the digital humanities is more about bit rot and obsolete file formats than it is about “clean” data and perfect visualizations. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has observed in a recent NEH White Paper, DH maintenance and preservation practices are “localized and idiosyncratic,” much – as I would argue – hacker practice is. Furthermore, because digital humanities projects force scholars to care about mundane matters like maintaining servers and replacing routers, this peculiar breed of academic must also come to understand the instability and materiality of the archive not its permanence and abstraction. Even digital files in the “cloud” exist somewhere in time and space, and high-tech satellites or data barges are built and decay in systems of property and territory. As more digital humanities projects, such as the recent Digging into Data challenge, require international collaboration, the geopolitical, legal, logistical, and material risks are even greater.

In the end, both the hacktivist and the more mainstream digital humanist must be sensitive to the vulnerability and imperfection of digital knowledge systems to pursue their avocations on a day-to-day basis. As Galloway and Thacker argue “the exploit” lets us understand procedures and protocols. In considering the need for supporting a truly hacktivist digital humanities, perhaps we can imagine both new forms of activism and new publics for DH, and in thinking about the relationship between forms of symbolic representation that humanists care about and forms of political representation that activists care about, perhaps we all need to break some systems to understand how they should be built.

Why Is There No Motherhood.gov?

This month the comforting voice of Barack Obama is plugging a new government website in a series of public service announcements. Listeners are urged to visit Fatherhood.gov, which describes itself as a "National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse." I must say that looking at this website, I find myself irritated with more than the strange use of a noun as a modifier, as though fatherhood is something that could be stacked up efficiently and inventoried. (Even those who teach written composition love the clearinghouse trope, so I should probably just give up on that fight.)

Instead I'll start with the fact that there is no Motherhood.gov and the weird assumption that the government should be invested with patriarchal authority. Of course, it isn't the only asymmetrical government website. There is a WomensHealth.gov but no corresponding MensHealth.gov. There is a GirlsHealth.gov as well, which is similarly unmated.

I also have to note the frequency of the word "important" on the site, which appears over fifty times on a relatively small number of web pages. Fathers are asked "Are you important?" Obama describes it as "the most important job." It is as though the message of patriarchy needs to be marked "important" in an e-mail or memo.

Off a Cliff

Among feminist friends there has been a lot of talk about the valorization of so-called "Facebook stalking" in the Chevy Superbowl ad, talk that has even made it onto watercooler conversation websites like this one.

Now my fellow CAA New Media Caucus presenter Joseph DeLappe has created a delectable parody almost certain to be hit with a takedown notice in a matter of days. Check out what happens to our mixed reality Romeo in DeLappe's version of events.

The Attackers and the Bystanders

In "Stars and Sewers," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd points to misogynistic Internet comments posted about the brutal gang rape of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Egypt's Tahrir Square, comments that appeared on Twitter, in blogs, and anonymously on Yahoo! For Doyd, this abusive online verbiage serves as more support for Nicholas Carr's high-profile anti-Internet argument that networked computer technology is "rewiring" our brains. Dowd also cites a number of other social media skeptics in rapid fire succession: Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, and Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, with whom she ends her editorial.

“I’m not interested in having the sewer appear on my site,” he said. “Why would I engage with people digitally whom I would never engage with actually? Why does the technology exonerate the kind of foul expression that you would not tolerate anywhere else?”

In "Adding insult to Lara Logan's injury," once controversial blogger Amanda Marcotte, whom I write about in the chapter on blogs and Photoshop in the Virtualpolitik book, focuses on a cast of conservatives in the blogosphere.

Popular rightwing bloggers Debbie Schlussel, Robert Stacy McCain, and Sister Toldja were among those who immediately used the attack to reinforce their anti-Muslim, anti-revolution arguments. But the real cause of sex crime is power, and its abuse, and that is a problem in all the nations on this planet.

Meanwhile, anti-Republican journalist Nir Rosen has been apologizing for Tweets that maligned Logan's character in "How 480 characters unraveled my career." From a rhetorical perspective, it is interesting to note that Rosen drops in a reference to WikiLeaks in explaining his lapse into Internet cynicism.

With 480 characters I undid a long career defending the weak and victims of injustice. There is no excuse for what I wrote. At the time, I did not know that the attack against Lara Logan was so severe, or included apparent sexual violence. Even so, any violence against anyone is wrong. I've apologized, lost my job, and humiliated myself and my family. But I, at least, don't want to go down looking like a sexist pig. I am not. I am a staunch supporter of women's rights, gay rights and the rights of the weak anywhere in the world. . . . So why did I write it? It was a disgusting comment born from dark humor I have developed working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Lebanon -- and a need to provoke people. I have a few think tank friends on Twitter, and we often banter about the morality of WikiLeaks, counterinsurgency and other issues. When I first heard the news about Logan, I assumed she was roughed up like every other journalist -- which is still bad -- but I was jokingly trying to provoke one of my think tank friends on Twitter, thoughtlessly, of course, and terribly insensitively. Stupidly, I didn't think the banter between myself and a couple of other guys would amount to anything.

Now, Twitter is no place for nuance, which is why I should have stuck to long-form journalism.

Logan's own journalistic practices have had a complex relationship to social media. As I write in this article, the cell phone footage that she used in her reporting on the Iraq war caused her story on the Battle of Haifa Street to be rejected for broadcast; subsequently Logan complained about having been exiled to the station's webcast as a result.

I might suggest to Dowd that online comments left last year on a 60 Minutes story done by Logan about Green Berets who shot two boys accidentally provide an example of much more substantive counter-discourse and civic engagement. Even if the tone of some of those postings was caustic and cynical, viewers were able to question the powers that be

Ada Day

Last year I celebrated Ada Lovelace Day at the Game Developer's Conference, where participants celebrated the legacy of Lord Byron's daughter, who created a name for herself working on the analytical engine of Charles Babbage. This year at Finding Ada, bloggers are encouraged to list at least one contemporary woman making a significant contribution to science and technology. My choice would be NASA's Shannon Bartell, who is a Director of Safety and Mission Assurance. I don't know if her voice was the one I heard at the the countdown to the WISE launch I witnessed, but whoever that Ada was I would recognize her with this post.

Long Pass

This anti-abortion Super Bowl ad muted its message by directing viewers to a website sponsored by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, where the group could use the longer format available with online video to promote their trademarked "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life" narrative that promotes the ministry of former Heisman trophy winner and supposed former baby once at risk of abortion Tim Tebow. (There are a number of other sections of interactive content on the site, including their pages for online Focus on the Family valentines.)

Unlike other "gotcha" ads like this one that have been rejected by the Superbowl, Focus on the Family's use of Internet content to outsource the polemics made its way past network censors wary of offending viewers in a lucrative TV time slot.

Of course, I most like this parody of the Doritos user-generated content contest spots when it comes to depicting the Tebow family's media presence.

Professor Prose

I've written about the UC System-Wide online sexual harassment tutorial several times before, first in this blog and then in the Virtualpolitik book, as an example of what Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric." Gone are the cartoon characters of the earliest iteration, although characters in the scenarios continue to have silly names to go along with their departmental or institutional identities. The emphasis in the version of the tutorial that I took this week emphasized the case law involving sexual harassment with more ____ v. _____ cases summarized than opportunities for role playing. Links on the tutorial often went to PDF files of policy statements from the University of California.

The programming of the actual software showed little progress four years hence. Pages were slow loading, curly quotes were rendered as nonsense, and icons sometimes automatically downloaded into one's image editing software. As if that weren't enough those who completed their certificate and wanted to check that the system had registered it online might accidentally restart the tutorial from the very beginning and thus seem to cancel their scores.

Truth in Labeling

As I get ready to guest teach a unit on counterfactual photography at UC Irvine with my longtime friend and colleague Jenny Cool, I am looking to update my talk.

Today's piece in the New York Times from "The Ethicist" Randy Cohen, who once commented on YouTube cheating videos in a segment of Good Morning America in which I was originally scheduled, specifically asks the question if photos "should come with warning labels" if they have been altered with the image software program Photoshop. Cohen opens with the example of a recent Ralph Lauren advertising campaign, a company that was also involved in an intellectual property dispute with the mega-blog Boing Boing after bloggers mocked a particularly distorted model. It's interesting that the examples originated with the blog Photoshop Disasters, which primarily criticizes amateurish execution rather than the ideologies behind the more finished work that the fashion industry specializes in.

Cohen notes that a number of countries are considering legislation that would require a disclaimer on artificially skinny images, so that young people with eating disorders won't have their warped view of the world and quest for impossible body types legitimized. Cohen admits that such warnings may be ineffective and they would almost necessarily become too long, if they tried to take in all the mitigating factors for a model on a fashion shoot, but he does think that the basic idea has merit, even if it might give more evidence for Cohen's critics who accuse him of social engineering. Cohen explains his position as follows:

Yet it’s still worth posting those alerts. That’s one way ideas percolate through a society. Social change is achieved by battling on many fronts: studying gender roles, learning about health and nutrition and calling attention to bogus photos. That is how we can move toward a less creepy concept of female beauty than the one promulgated by Ralph Lauren and, more ambitiously, resist the sexist assumption that beauty is a commodity women are obliged to provide to men. This is not to deny the delights of allure, of playfulness, of flirtation, of sexual attractiveness: bring them on. But don’t make it all the woman’s burden only, don’t make it contingent on what she buys and don’t lie to get her to buy it.

Meanwhile, the beauty industry is seeming to alter its editorial policies based on enthusiastic online comments and viral distribution of nude images that defy norms like this and this.

Please Don't Pee on the Seats or Storm the Café : Nowcasting III

The image above from a guerrilla artist who changed a Los Angeles freeway sign to make its directions more legible wasn't mentioned by Julila Lupton in her talk about vernacular signage, "Signs and Misdemeanors," which started with this fabulous image of Tytus Andronikus and ended with the argument that when it came to education, "the design question and the writing question is the same question," as "more and more people are expected to write."

Speaking as an advocate for DIY practices that teach non-professionals to use "tools responsibly," Lupton argued that "the design cat is out of the design bag," and digital humanists would have to adjust. Perhaps her most Twittered line was that "it’s never to early to talk to your children about kerning," but a talk that began with a discussion of the difference between spring-loaded and open-ended toilet paper holders had some serious messages, despite her facetious answer to the question about "Why do Americans prefer that spring loaded model?" with an explanation of their willingness "to sacrifice security for liberty."

Next, she gave a number of other examples from her new book Design Your Life, which included inquiries into where baby carrots came from and why bras don’t fit, along with the observation that bra-wearers were "underrepresented at the conference." She explained that the book also contained some substantive advice that could be of value to digital humanists about third places and creativity theory, living with paper, and the art of procrastination, even if their "generalist approach to design" was aimed at women as the "footsoldiers in the new economy," who might be more included in their explanation of typeface design with their chosen examples of Dunkin Donuts vs. Tootsie Roll. She also said that the book was encouraging writing practices, specifically those that produced manifestos, and she showed the manifesto about design that she wrote with her sister Ellen Lupton, which asserted that design is thinking, design making, public, private, garbage, saving the world, communication, craft, technology, etc. (She drew comparisons to Anne Burdick's work on design as speculative and provocational the day before.)

Then she transitioned to a section on signage and how people must work in or navigate through public spaces, which in one of her sister's paintings was labeled with a "Yes -But" clause. She described a project with UCI graduate student Arden Stern about "how to do informal signage better" or "how to hang signs so they don’t ruin the world." As illustration, she showed several examples a few yards away from where the Nowcasting conference was taking place that direct potential visitors to the "photo classroom" and "photo lab." As a sign of a serious sign-makeover, she told how her sister had redone some ALL CAPS scotch-taped two-page signage in restroom with an elegant framed sign that preserved some of the original vitriol by ending with an instruction to "please don’t pee on the toilet seats" but phrased its instructions in verbiage far more genteel. (I too have always been interested in such signage, particularly signs in little Saigon that instruct new immigrants not to squat on the toilet seets, and I also have noted the gendered labor politics that is implicit in their messages, much like signs that ask people in office kitchens to wash their own dishes.)

As Lupton opined, "Ellen’s theory is that no one will take the signs down," given the "power of graphic design," but she also pointed to some more difficult examples of appropriation and improvised signage, as in the case of the work of Cardon Copy in redoing signs for cleaning ladies, regardless of the impositions and assumptions of class superiority in doing design for the working classes. She even cautioned that design could create a false sense of authority, as it did for those who placed trust in Erich Kofmel of the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society. Although design might provide spit and polish to a University of California in crisis, it might also legitimize phishing and identity theft with design element. She cited Daniel Pink on "emotionally intelligent" signage and argued that even a trash can can serve as a message board. (For more on attempts to control waste with persuasive technologies and architectures of control, see the Design with Intent blog from Virtualpolitik friend Dan Lockton.)

In answering questions, Lupton reiterated that design literacy had to be built into general education to encourage people to think about how to contribute to public sphere with rhetorics that are "verbal and visual and thoroughly digital." Lev Manovich noted that there were certain assumptions about class and status in minimalism and white space that raised "social obligations," and Anne Burdick talked about the difference between little “d” design vs. Big “D” design and taste regimes, as Lupton talked about how as director of the Humanities Core Course at UC Irvine, they taught students to understand the Bauhaus as a socialist movement, albeit one with a continuing relationship to vernacular design. The last word was had by Lorraine Wild, who asked about the domestic worker's new signage, "Does she want to be a heavy metal cleaning lady or is she only cleaning churches?" The interventionist aesthetic involved in taking over the "implied expression in typography" by another party was to Wild questionable at best on Cardon Copy's part.

Then Benjamin Bratton gave a remarkable talk "On the Design and Designation of Cosmoppolitics: Geoscapes, Coogle Caliphate, Mumbai" about the "modern ethos of disclosure, transparency, and enlightenment" and the "emergence of information visualization as an adaptation to data abundance" as the Google suite of mapping and geospatial visualization tools played such a central role in the attacks by terrorists on Mumbai. He questioned the "rationalized images of the world" of "cosmograms and cosmomedia" and the status of Kant’s central human universals and his vision of a globalizing governance and the conditions of cogmopolitan assemblage might be understood in the environment of digitally enabled jihad. The talk was punctuated with gorgeous slides that included the Legoland Capitol dome, time clocks in automated distribution points, older maps of the world, and soldiers in KISS make-up, along with an understanding of contemporary thinkers that ranged from Bruno Latour to Jean-Luc Nancy to Jacques Rancière.

One of the recurrange images in his talk showed various forms of geographies dictated by concentric rings that ranged from Robert Smithson's geoscape to late medieval visions of the world with Jerusalem at the center. He noted how the "fragile pairing of geography and law: and "territory and projection" could be seen in th terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the militarism of the urban landscape of the city. When cities lose ability to triage conflict, he argued, terrorist incursions that serve as an "attack on habits and inhabitants" complicate questions about how a global city with mobile mapping functions. He observed that the terrorists used Google earth and maps, along with cell phones and sim cards, to exploit "situational awarenss." He connected their geospatial understandings with Photoshopped images that "plant the flag of Islam in Washington, Tel Aviv."

For Bratton, this was a "designed moment" of "righteous sacred geography." Thus at a design conference, he wanted to bring in difficult questions about terrorist acts, because it was "iimportant to engage at the register of design." For the attackers, the geography of the partition of Kasmir necessitated another kind of geoscape as they participated in a "shifting landscape of shifting landscapes" that was "not an empty arrangement but conceptual assemblage" that was "secular and geographic."

Bratton asserted that the "public sphere is spherical only to the extent that it lacks topological perspective" and that these "armed smart mobs" represented "irregular and asymmetrical" combat, as "armed Versace knock-off wearing tourists" perpetrating actions that were more like an amok than a Klauswitzian contest of rational equals. In tracing the "trail of geographic events, Bratton noted that the news agencies also used Google Earth and that the very software problematizes certain aspects of the "open, objective, materialist, dialogic" Friedman-esque view of the world.

Perhaps Bratton's most contentious assertion was that jihadist Islam and the "representation of the earth as circle . . . onto and into which history might work" is not entirely alien to Google itself if this "remapping of the Caliphate" could be applied to the products and practices perpetuated by the Mountain View, California company in which "our modernity is always already also theirs." In thinking about a "politico theological urban design practice" and the "spatial imaginaries of Jihad and Google" contained in "computational geospace" involving both sub and super state agents, Bratton argued that it was "less about what is seen than what is not seen," as Google effects its transnational ends. As evidence he pointed to the "territorial and naval incursion" represented by the plan for floating Google data centers that harness tidal and wind energy, along with cooling the cooling powers of the sea, which create uncharted possibilities for the jurisdictional and legal control of data as the territory of the cloud enters international waters. (Another illustration of his thesis was offered in a photo of a Sun data center in a shipping container.)

Bratton argued that digital humanists must engage with the "political information built into hardware" that "no law passed can undo," if it involves the polity of an Intel chip. For him, it was a question of "accidental technologies and political design" in which there was "design for the effect and affect" and a codependence of "functioning infrastructure and decorative camouflage" in the cameras and cross signals that were now part of the integrated posture of the global city. The monopoly on legitimate violence and the monopoly of legitimate citizenship once held by the state was being challenged by Google, in that Bratton could imagine a "Google citizenship" built on rational actor microeconomics. He closed by quoting Paul Virilio and offering a reminder that just as technologies create accidents, accidents create technologies.

Mommy Dearest

In the past on this blog I've noted the rhetorical power of mommy blogging, how female bloggers may see their writing as gendered, and how journalists who question the legitimacy of blogging will sometimes specifically call up the image of the housewife scribe. So it was interesting to see how Mommy Blogger's Irreverent Observations reinforces a number of still prevalent stereotypes about blogging and the domestic sphere. The first is that blogging involves extremely personal and intimate revelations rather than newsgathering, reportage, or engagement with the public sphere and broader communities than the unit of "the town." The second is that "successful" blogs involve the advertising model and the paradigm of small business.

Do As I Say Not As I Do

This video from Scott Steinberg does a nice job making the argument about how new audiences for games have emerged and that female gamers and older gamers are important consumers. What's strange about the video, however, is that none of the talking heads are women and that we don't hear the voices of female experts. How would a video about how people of color play games seem if all the speakers were white? I also would question using so much footage from game ads, since these ads show idealized forms of game play that are designed to appeal to market models rather than actual practice.

The Twitter Police

danah boyd points out an important way that the crowd sourcing potential of Twitter can be used to legitimate certain forms of sexual politics, particularly in conference settings in which sentiments about approval or disapproval of speakers may rapidly aggregate, even while the speaker is talking. In my own case, these backchannel postings to my talks have been more about disciplinary hostility than masculine hegemony, but I know of female colleagues who feel frustrated about having their looks evaluated by voyeuristic spectators in the audience armed with mobile devices and online laptops who are answering the question "hot or not" rather than engaging with the argument.

The source boyd cites, "Prude or Professional," looks at a somewhat different Twitter dynamic, in which a misogynistic presentation by Hoss Gifford at the Flashbelt conference was received with sexist approval and seconded by those who also criticized offended women with possible objections as overly sensitive to the speaker's boys-will-be-boys humor. Sample Tweets that "Geek Girl" Courtney Remes quotes include the following examples.

* Fonx is reading the #flashbelt rants on Hoss offending the ladies w/ a few swear words & a penis drawing - r u really that prudish & sexist?
* nthitz lol @hoss69 "If you are easily offended, fuck you" #flashbelt
* livenootrac Ladies of #flashbelt , I am sorry for the Hoss preso, but in the flash community he gets a pass, kinda like Don Rickles - that's just Hoss.
* CujoJpn @livenootrac And there were many ladies at #flashbelt who were offended by Hoss' Preso some were thick skinned and took it as is.

Remes encouraged sympathetic readers to follow up with three courses of action: 1) "Comment on this post and let it serve as a petition," 2) "Tweet about this and use the hashtag #prosnotprudes," and 3) "Digg this and let's make a statement." Obviously the campaign was successful based on the sympathetic comments of readers who asserted that web development should not be a boys club and the apologetic letter from the conference organizer that followed.

Misery Loves Company

This week the main focus of YouTube's auditory culture seems not to be the heavily publicized YouTube symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas but rather the much-forwarded and viewed online clip of Susan Boyle's appearance on the television show Britain's Got Talent. Boyle presents her matronly figure and ungroomed face to the potential mockery of the audience, but then the the middle-aged singer follows the script for defying expectations and bursts into a song from Les Misérables, and soon the crowd is on its feet cheering her on. As the New York Times reports in "Unlikely Singer Is YouTube Sensation," the clip is garnering millions of views and lots of chatter in the blogosphere.

In "Why Susan Boyle Makes Us Cry," self-described feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin argues that there are reasons that this particular online experience is such a powerfully emotional one, which contradicts the dominant paradigm of the detached web-surfer perusing the database of human experience on YouTube with detachment and irony.

After she got her unanimous Yes votes from Simon, Amanda, and Piers, I typed "Ageism Be Damned" in the subject line of an email and sent the YouTube link to everyone on my Women's Issues list and within an hour, more than a dozen had written to tell me that it made them weep. Since then I've talked to other friends who've confessed to the same reaction. What are we all crying about? What is it about this woman that touches us so deeply?

Partly, I think it's the age thing, the fact that a woman closing in on 50 had the courage to compete with the kids -- and blew them out of the water. "Women of a certain age" should be forgiven for finding vicarious satisfaction in Susan's victory. In plain words, it's an up-yours to the cocky youth culture that often writes us off.

Then, too, we were weeping for the years of wasted talent, the career that wasn't, the time lost -- both for Susan Boyle and two generations of her putative fans. If someone with a voice like Julie Andrews' spent decades in a sea of frustration and obscurity, how many other women (and men) must be out there becalmed in the same boat? I believe we were crying for them and for whatever unrealized, yet-to-be-expressed talent may lie within ourselves.

But I'd wager that most of our joyful tears were fueled by the moral implicit in Susan's fairy-tale performance: "You can't tell a book by its cover." For such extraordinary artistry to emerge from a woman that plain-spoken, unglamorous, and unyoung was an intoxicating reminder of the wisdom in that corny old cliché. The three judges and virtually all those who watched Susan Boyle in the theater (and probably on YouTube as well) were initially blinded by entrenched stereotypes of age, class, gender, and Western beauty standards, until her book was opened and everyone saw what was inside.
I think we cried because her story appears to be en route to a happy ending, but also, perhaps, for all the books whose covers have never been cracked.

However, not all bloggers for the Huffington Post were in agreement that the clip is a devastating strike against ageism and sexism, if its character as a curiosity piece indicates only -- much as a freak show does -- that exceptions only prove the rule of lauding narrowly defined physical beauty. Dennis Palumbo argues in "What if Susan Boyle Couldn't Sing?" that its shock value only confirms our culture's prejudices about attention to appearance. Indeed, this happened in the case of Florence Foster Jenkins, whose story and music from the analog age lives on in the digital one.

Andy Borowitz uses satire in "Talented Ugly Person Baffles World" to state the premise explicitly and then to suggest that such people generally end up in academia, where they are safe from public view.

From a scholarly perspective, the clip is interesting in relation to Henry Jenkins' thesis in "YouTube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic" that YouTube rewards modular performances, variety and diversion, actor-centered choreographies, and direct appeals to the audience. Much like a similar video by Paul Potts from the show, I might argue that it actually reinforces the norms of broadcast visual aesthetics by emphasizing the role of distant audiences, managing hosts, and editing of background stories.