virtualpolitik

The 2016 Election as Casual Game: Pokémon Go, FiveThirtyEight, and the Paradoxes of the Quantified Citizen

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 06:08:00 +0000

The Norfolk Pagoda is a grim place on election night as the sun is setting. The Chinese restaurant that might attract patrons other than the addicts milling around the waterfront has been shuttered for the better part of the year. Among the people circling its garish umbrella you can overhear discussion of gambling interventions and money problems. Some of these lost souls talk about trouble with the law, especially those fending off the constant temptations of trespassing. But mostly those gathered at the pagoda are immobile and silent. Parents interact little with the children they have brought, and couples do not hold hands or nuzzle. The casino mentality is obvious as the obsessives in the crowd only become energized when there seems to be a run of positive results on their screens. Lots of players wear sunglasses despite the shadows and clouds in the scene, perhaps because they have not been sleeping.

This may be the ultimate place for local Pokémon Go players to gather who have hit rock bottom. I came here as a level 25 player a few days ago and am now a level 26. Participation in this game designed for mobile smart phones has forced me to interact with the Trump supporters that I have been avoiding on social network sites like Facebook. I found the pagoda through Reddit, which I normally steer clear of because of its toxic misogyny. My local Pokémon Go gym is a Confederate shrine so I only collect the game's colorful animated digital characters rather than participate in the full range of behaviors associated with the tournament culture of battling other players that the game's affordances seem to encourage.

For the last few months Pokémon Go has been my escape from the grim prospect of a divisive U.S. election and the toxicity of online discourse. I know a lot of us in FemTechNet have been playing the game with ritual devotion, and I know it was particularly appealing to former co-facilitator T.L. Cowan, who led the group's experimental pedagogy initiatives. Certainly crowdsourced resources exist for instructors interested in teaching with the game, such as the voluminous Pokémon Go Syllabus.

As someone who writes about the digital rhetoric of political life (with both a capital "P" and a small "p"), it has been a time of anxiety and conflict. Since I try to be a conscientious researcher and am teaching a course on digital journalism, I have been reading Breitbart.com, the Twitter feed of Donald Trump, and the online apparatus of Fox News. All of this makes me feel terrible and demeaned. It is an information stream that focuses on hatred of college campuses and of women who are judged as being undesirable potential objects of the male gaze. To resolve my anxiety I constantly refresh data from the website of fivethirtyeight.com where I could see supposedly objective results from polling statistics and quantitative projections that offer a seductive possibility for factual correlation.

Pokémon Go has offered a respite of imagined digital meritocracy as I evolved my Pikachus and Magikarps in what seemed to be a relatively color-blind, age-blind, and gender blind environment of site-specific participation. Living in Colonial Williamsburg, where the algorithm has located a treasure trove of digital assets to be located, I often talked to other players who were scouring the landscape for rare specimens.

My friend and colleague Ian Bogost has done a lot of thinking as a game scholar about how civic virtue could be shaped and rewarded by digital cues. His analysis of the Howard Dean for Iowa game points to the possibilities of gratifying the acquisitive obsessions of the quantified self by tallying good works by canvassing neighborhoods, passing out pamphlets, and waving signs. Yet he disagrees with noted new media scholar Henry Jenkins, who asserts that games and fan culture might offer good models for democratic participation as touchstones for a participatory culture. Bogost adopts a more critical stance when it comes to what gamers learn from gaming and the status of game design and user practices as morally ambiguous forms of cultural expression.

For example, like any example of procedural rhetoric, there are workarounds for those who want to avoid the healthy behaviors of outdoor social interactions that the game supposedly rewards. Pokémon Go seems to encourage exercise by rewarding walking, but a player can also acquire candies for one's digital familiar crawling forward in a commuting vehicle stuck in traffic. Ideally it is could spur intergenerational outings, but the same effects can be achieved in parallel play.

As a symptom of retreating from political realities to the digital world, Pokémon Go became a laugh line on the election trail. Hillary Clinton's comment about not knowing "who created Pokémon Go" but wishing that the same tech wizards would create "Pokémon Go To the Polls" was certainly cringe-worthy, but it took place in the context of praising the growth of tech sector jobs and lauding algorithmic literacy.

What FiveThirtyEight and Pokémon Go may appeal to is a desire for magical thinking and a wish for intimacy with the dataveillance of our mobile devices. While these election results come in this evening we need to understand the ways that digital technologies promulgate false consciousness without succumbing to moral panics about digital distraction and media seduction. Although casting a vote in a polling place is supposed to be a defining moment of exercising agency instrumentally, generally by wielding a tool as we feed in a ballot to a Diebold machine, this election for me has been more like a casual game to be engaged with digitally in short bursts by providing input to sentient devices during the course of many days. As Jesper Juul has pointed out, such games may not be fun, and casual games may involve powerful commitments, dreary labor, and the slog of routine.

Bogost has pointed out that in his essay "The Tragedy of Pokémon Go" that Pokémon Go had many less commercially successful predecessors. In recounting the genealogy of alternate reality games, he also observes that it is a profoundly flawed game that depends on exploiting an intellectual property franchise. In short, according to Bogost, the game "both a delightful new mechanism for urban and social discovery, and also a ghastly reminder that when it comes to culture, sequels rule." I was always a fan of Bogost's mobile game Jet Set, which was about geography of airports and made light of the absurdity of security screening procedures and the place-making work of souvenir acquisition. Critics complained that by mirroring real life it wouldn't be fun enough to turn a profit.

#GamerGate 101

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 05:42:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 21:54:00 +0000

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.

Respect, Niceness, and Generosity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 21:45:00 +0000

According to these reviews from a popular apartment-sharing site, I am someone who is "nice" and "respectful" in person. Perhaps a more substantive question -- for my future as an academic and scholar -- might be what kind of a person I appear to be online. "Respectful" and "nice" can actually be contentious terms, I am going to argue, if they become valued by institutions and professional associations, so it may perhaps be better to aim to be "generous" instead.

Discussions about online speech and civility have decades of history in digital rights discourses. This month many academics -- some of whom might be new to this conversation -- have been challenged to take unpopular (or popular) positions in the name of academic freedom and to explore their suppositions about how networked computational media function (or don't function) as a form of public sphere.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has finally offered a public explanation of their decision to retract a job offer made to Professor Steven Salaita, who was apparently punished for making comments on Twitter that were perceived of as anti-Israeli and allegedly antisemitic. (See my first round of analysis of the Salaita story here.)

In a blog posting called "The Principles on Which We Stand" Chancellor Phyllis Wise has now broken her silence to purportedly defend academic freedom at her institution, which is now being boycotted by many faculty, but she also insists that respectful conduct is a fundamental precept as well. According to Wise, participants in the university are supposed to be "learning from each other in a respectful way," to refuse to tolerate "disrespectful words or actions," and to conduct their debates in a "civil, thoughtful and mutually respectful manner." (Wise had previously editorialized about abusive racist and sexist comments directed at her by disgruntled Twitter users in response to refusing a snow day for the campus.)

The Board of Trustees echoed Wise's emphasis on respect in a supporting statement that lauded "scholarship framed in respect and courtesy," wished to ensure that "students and faculty from all backgrounds and cultures feel valued, respected and comfortable expressing their views," and prohibited "disrespectful and demeaning speech."

Emails from students, parents, alumni, and even fund-raisers released in response to a freedom of information request reveal that respect was also a theme in these lobbying missives. One student wrote, "If I happen to register for Mr. Salaita's course, how could I respectfully engage in conversation and learn material?" As the reporter noted, many of these emails used the same language and may have followed a shared template.

On the blog of the American Association of University Professors, John K. Wilson mocked this sanctifying of respect at UIUC:

Respect is not a fundamental value of any university, and being “disrespectful” is not an academic crime. But it’s notable that Salaita really didn’t say anything personal about anyone. So here Wise greatly expands the concept, declaring that not only persons but “viewpoints themselves” must be protected from any disrespectful words. I am puzzled as to exactly how a free university could possibly operate when no one is allowed to be disrespectful toward any viewpoint. Presumably, Wise will quickly act to fire anyone who has ever disrespected or demeaned Nazism, terrorism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Since all “viewpoints” are protected, then biology professors must be fired for disrespecting creationism as false, along with any other professor who is found to believe or know anything.

Although I would avoid citing Hitler in any online argument, I would tend to support Wilson's position for two basic reasons. First of all, respect doesn't necessarily support a good education. Having watched virtuoso teaching in the University of California for decades, I know that a willingness to overstep bounds of comfort and propriety often distinguishes a memorable pedagogical performance from a forgettable class session. Second, institutionalizing respect makes all forms of protest impossible. At my 1987 Harvard graduation I joined other advocates for divestiture from apartheid South Africa by carrying distinctive red balloons and wearing large lapel pins in solidarity. My parents were horrified at the disrespect students were showing for the occasion, but I certainly don't regret my participation. How many activists groups have been charged with disrespect in my lifetime? The Guerrilla Girls? Act Up? Protestors in Ferguson have also been chastised for their supposed "disrespect for police."

Of course, Ferguson, Missouri, where unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer has also been an important site of debate about the activist political stands that people take online. The show of force by a militarized police force armed with anti-terrorism weaponry, the arrests of journalists and elected representatives, and blame-the-victim press releases and reporting has only stoked anger. Among black Twitter users, the ability to control self-presentation and counter stereotypes of criminality has been just one of the issues playing out in the #iftheygunnedmedown hashtag. Other hashtags emphasize proper names as a point of reference (#Ferguson, #MikeBrown) or the body at risk (#HandsUp, #HandsUpDontShoot). The metadata matters, as Zeynep Tufekci points out in a posting on "Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson," especially when the code running on social media shields users from material that doesn't sell products or pander to personalization.

Just this week MIT Professor Noel Jackson staged what many saw as an over-the-top online rant about the absence of material about Ferguson on the Twitter feeds of prominent digital humanities faculty and about the supposed lack of concern among DHers about politics or race more generally. (Although Jackson seems to feel that he is breaking new ground, this is actually not that new an argument. In Debates in the Digital Humanities Tara McPherson makes it in "Why are the Digital Humanities So White?" and I make it in "Hacktivism and the Humanities.") In a Storify created by Adeline Koh about "The Digital Humanities, Race & Politics (or the Lack Thereof)" Jackson's wrath about digital humanities "bullies" reaches bombastic proportions, as does his vitriol about his fellow white, tenured faculty. He calls out people by name for unfollowing him and even reposts threatening-sounding text messages.

"Niceness" might seem to be an even more compliant, feminized, and passive stance in academia than "respect," but it does have its defenders. For example, in "Why Digital Humanities is Nice," Tom Scheinfeldt claims that DH is concerned with method rather than theory and therefore is naturally less contentious in its interpersonal relations. Recently -- in an article for Differences -- Koh has challenged this convention of niceness as a coercive social contract intended to police behavior. (See resources at DHPoCo for more about the work of Koh and her collaborators.)

So what do we have left if we shouldn't settle for just being "nice" or "respectful"? In Designing Culture, FemTechNet co-founder Anne Balsamo lists the principle of "intellectual generosity" first among feminist virtues that include "confidence," "humility," "flexibility," and "integrity." As Balsamo writes, intellectual generosity includes "the sincere acknowledgement of the work of others" that fosters "intellectual risk-taking and courageous acts of creativity."

As all this boils around the Internet, I've been watching the work of the other FemTechNet co-founder, Alexandra Juhasz, as a model for how to put the intellectualism and activism of that kind of generosity into practice. For example, Juhasz has been sharing Palestine Docs and other resources for teaching. I see this spirit of sharing among other FemTechNet participants, who are circulating different versions of the so-called Ferguson Syllabus, which began as #FergusonSyllabus on Twitter. You can check out a Google docs version of the syllabus, as well as a version posted on About.com.

Is the Water Hot Enough for You?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 06:52:00 +0000

The case of Professor Steven Salaita has recently become a cause célèbre among faculty who once felt comfortable airing their political grievances on social media. What interests me about this story is why a particular set of issues about academic freedom, political expression, and digital communication is getting so much attention precisely now. I would argue it has a lot to do with a specific alignment of empathy and personal risk on the faculty side and the fact that university administrations have reached a tipping point in their public relations strategies toward social media that involves both emulating and monitoring network-savvy professors.

Salaita's use of Twitter to object to Israel's policies in Gaza -- often in hyperbolic or crude language -- has been cited as a key factor in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's decision to rescind a job offer for a tenured position that was seemingly only waiting for the last pro forma approval from the Chancellor's office. According to "Out of a Job," a story that broke in the blog Inside Higher Ed, Salaita had already resigned from his post at Virginia Tech and had made arrangements to relocate when he received the surprising news.

On the Internet there has been considerable outrage vented and analysis unpacked in the days since the revelations about UIUC's backpedaling. Steven Krause notes Salaita had many more rights to digital expression than assistant profs, adjuncts, alt-acs, and anyone else on campus without tenure. Ian Bogost contrasts "academic freedom" with the contractual tactics necessary for "academic paydom." Roopika Risam writes a "love letter to Twitter" as a pre-tenure academic seeking networks and publication opportunities. David Palumbo-Liu has been one of the most prolific critics of UIUC with blog posts about Salaita at Salon, Huffington Post, and Transformation. Former MLA President Michael Bérubé weighed in with a castigating letter to the Chancellor warning that her campus would become a "fourth-rate" institution if the decision wasn't reversed. The Illinois state chapter of the AAUP issued a formal protest.

One thing that's worth noting about Salaita's Twitter feed is the prodigious labor that he invested in maintaining it, apparently right up until just before he received the bad news. Although he's picked up a few thousand followers since the controversy, the size of Salaita's audience was relatively modest in comparison to other high-profile academics, in spite of the energy and affect he obviously devoted to it. After all, he composed almost ten thousand Tweets during his five-year period of activity and followed over three thousand other people to connect and stay current. From all this effort he attracted about four thousand followers.

For scale, Juan Cole of the blog Informed Consent has about thirty thousand more Twitter followers than Salaita. Certainly Cole has posted a huge volume of tens of thousands of Tweets to attract such a sizable following to his feed, but many of Cole's Tweets are reposted content, and he does not engage in context-specific debate about people's individual claims -- either agreeing or disagreeing -- to the degree that the micromanaging Salaita did.

I bring up Cole's name because he had a similar experience with the hazards of a having a noticeable social media trail for those on the academic job market. Like Salaita he was also perceived of as an intemperate activist for anti-Israeli positions, and he failed to land a tenured job at a new institution as a result. In 2006, a story in the Yale Daily News reported that Cole -- then at the University of Michigan -- had been denied tenure at Yale "in one of the final phases of the appointment process." According to Yale's reporting, Cole had been characterized by fellow professors who had weighed in on his case as a potentially "divisive colleague" Shortly afterward The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a forum called "Can Blogging Derail Your Career?" and invited seven prominent academic bloggers to expound on the crisis.

Cole's travails ultimately didn't have the legs to stay a national story, and he didn't galvanize a movement of sympathizers to agitate for greater academic freedom in more digital contexts. I would argue that there were a number of reasons that the firestorm of controversy around Cole's case was extinguished relatively rapidly.

For one thing, Cole was doing something that only a statistically small fraction of the scholarly population did at the time: academic blogging. Even though academic blogging was actually in its heyday, in retrospect, this activity might have made Cole seem like an outlier. He was pursuing an enthusiasm for a rare form of hybrid writing and propagating an alien genre of self-sponsored op-ed with pretensions both to journalism and to short-form hyperlinked scholarship. Today, in contrast, Tweeting is an activity that many more academics do than did blogging -- and if academics don't Tweet they are at least aware that the activity happens all around them at conferences. Moreover, short-form and very-short-form digital postings by scholars circulate to a broader audience via Facebook and other social network sites.

In the eight intervening years faculty have also become much more aware of the contingency of their own appointments. Fewer faculty members have tenure, legislative support for state-sponsored higher education seems more arbitrary and more dependent on political whims, and institutional governance structures are being eroded by risk averse administrations afraid of unhappy donors, bad press, and lawsuits.

There's also been a sea change in public relations for universities. Every campus worries about its YouTube channel, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and other conduits of social media presence. Every institution compares its social media profile to those of its rival institutions. Social media "experts" (read "idiots") are hired to manage college messaging, and these drones from the public relations hive mind may find themselves directly vying for attention in opposition to faculty, students, and staff who might seem noticeably more human and appealing to the public. Resentments build about "unofficial" messages getting out from challengers, and online behavior is policed by those who are both digital regulators and digital content-creators.

In The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University I discuss how students' digital rights to expression are often trampled, because faculty assume that their own privileged positions when it comes to the Internet could never come under attack.

Not surprisingly, current definitions of academic freedom already provide more rights for faculty than for students when it comes to free speech, and the leveling practices of digital culture seem to have relatively little effect on challenging divisions created by existing status barriers between teacher and pupil. As both consumers of web-based content and producers of it, students generally have fewer recognized rights and protections than faculty. Administrators loath to meddle with academic freedom often say little about faculty web pages, for example. Faculty content-creation on official institutional pages includes a heterogeneous collection of material that ranges wildly from the confessional to the satirical. On university Webpages, one can find testimonials about personal trainers with links to their gyrating bodies, narratives about dieting that show shirtless faculty, heartfelt warnings based on personal tragedy about never leaving infants unattended, step-by-step instructions for destroying marshmallow peeps with lab equipment, and obscene mock-scientific acronyms. Ironically, political blogging and electronic civil disobedience may create more serious problems for faculty perceived as radical subversives than would more obviously off-topic or off-identity material. This might seem strange given how academic freedom is often defined in terms of political tolerance and the open marketplace of ideas, but the Internet has also generated cadres of students policing political utterances by professors. Otherwise, administrators generally do little to keep the online conduct of faculty in check.

Administrators didn't police faculty behavior online, because it was largely invisible to them, but now those days of mutually assured obliviousness seem to be over.

Recently I was interviewed by Henry Jenkins, who asked about how the University of Kansas Board of Regents had imposed new restrictions on the use of social media by faculty.

In the book I argue that part of the reason that faculty have been slow to advocate for their students when it comes to their informal learning practices and online knowledge networks is that faculty have been much less coerced than students by administrative efforts to police their computer use. Faculty bloggers might come under pressure for disclosing information that colleges don’t want shared, but they have been such a tiny minority that not many people took notice. Faculty hacktivists might be threatened for acts of electronic civil disobedience, but they are an even smaller contingent.

Twitter users like David Guth at the University of Kansas, who was suspended for an anti-NRA Tweet, are also still relatively rare among academics, but faculty see Twitter being used at conferences, and they know Twitter is part of a continuum that includes Facebook, which they might use to communicate with friends and relatives, so I am hoping that the water is finally getting hot enough that the frog might finally jump out and protest in good faculty fashion.

In the boiling frog anecdote it is supposed that an amphibian might leap out of hot water sensibly -- if dropped in -- but foolishly stay in cold water that is slowly heated to the boiling point because incremental change discourages prompt action. Let's hope that the temperature doesn't get any hotter in these digital expression cases before faculty collectives finally intervene at the policy level

The War on Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 05:11:00 +0000

The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University is out! Check out the first review (which appeared in Nature), a great three-part interview by Henry Jenkins, the official podcast, and this excerpt in Salon.com. Many thanks to all of the colleagues who shared ideas and the many readers who provided feedback on the manuscript.

DH without the DH

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 05:25:00 +0000

Today I did not tag any content with metadata. Today I did not write any code. Today I did not work on my Scalar project. Today the plugins for Neatline did not get installed.

Today was the Day of DH, except it seems that I didn't do anything recognizably associated with digital humanities work, even though the entire day -- like almost every day -- was devoted to the digital humanities.

Which is to say that a lot of DH isn't coding or hacking or tagging or building. A lot of DH is just about regular typing. A lot of DH is writing e-mail, instructions, reports, and even text messages. It's about filling out Doodle polls, filling in spreadsheets, and filling in names in Google hangouts.

Some of the day was defined by the Academic Scholarly Print Industrial Complex (otherwise known as ASPIC). I am working on finishing an article for an open-access online journal, which I promised to the wonderful Annette Vee, but the whole process of working with a stack of library books is basically the same as the one I follow for a print publication.

Of course, a lot of the day was doing digital humanities work that one can't write about on a blog. It's about serving on committees that handle the business of people getting hired or people getting reviewed. It's about the strange set of knowledge domains that prove to be useful to the institution that are gained from being part of the DH community for over a decade: digital archives, open access publishing, information literacy, multimodal scholarship, rich media production, and hands-on experiential learning. It's about the need for campuses to have people to assess if they have the right people and enough people too. It's about the Weberian bureaucracy of files, files, and more files, which are conveniently accessible online but differ little from their paper counterparts.

Yet, like most days at UC San Diego's Sixth College, it was an interesting day. As soon as I came into the office, I sat down to do a Skype interview with Pia Mancini of the Net Party in Argentina for DML Central. Purists would say that her work with Democracy OS isn't really a DH project. After all the NEH Office of Digital Humanities prohibits work with a political agenda. But I tend to argue that the continuum between politics and culture includes blended areas, and hacktivism and the humanities are not so separate.

Then there was the teaching I did today. In an upcoming volume edited by David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svensson, I argue that teaching is often a marginalized activity in the digital humanities. Right now I am teaching an exciting FemTechNet course with the amazing Lisa Cartwright, in collaboration with many people who have built scholarly databases and digital collections. It was true that much of the day's communication with students entailed educating them about their Blogger IDs and Twitter hashtags for the course. But the bulk of our dedicated face-to-face class time involved chalkboards, raised hands, and a presentation by a performance artist.

Future projects mostly require coordinating with other people. It turns out that the most important tool for executing our Innovative Learning Technology Initiative Grant will probably be the humble calendar.

Jacque Wernimont and I are also planning to teach a Digital Humanities Summer Institute course together, but we weren't debugging code in Processing or tinkering with our Arduinos, which are the activities slated for June. Today we were handling more mundane tasks, such as slimming down the size of our course-pack PDF.

As usual, not every effort to coordinate was successful. Today Jessica Pressman and I had to cancel a planning meeting. We have an upcoming DHSoCal event slated for April 18th to prepare for, but she had an ASPIC obligation too.

On Twitter, Ian Bogost quipped that "Digital Humanities is the process of creating infrastructure in which to discuss the concept of 'digital humanities."' Given the nature of DH work, that might be a fair assessment. If only there were time for conceptual speculation and discussion in my typical day. If we do it, we have to spend twice as much time scheduling it first.

The MLA and Continuing and Distance Education

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 23:12:00 +0000

This year I was honored to be nominated as a special-interest delegate for the MLA in "continuing and distance education." Now I am officially on the 2013 Modern Language Association Ballot that goes out to thousands of instructors in literature and language departments across the country to support the governance of the major scholarly association for the discipline in which I was trained. The MLA handles influential publications, conferences, job resources, and policy statements and advocates for the role of the humanities in public life.

Adeline Koh has also been nominated, and knowing her work I have to say that she is a great candidate too.

No matter which nominee you choose this year, I would urge MLA members to do some research about the issues involved. Too often the discussion about distance education has been dominated by snippets from op-ed columns or sound bites, but the issues are actually very complex, and technologies of remote instruction inevitably impact faculty at all types of institutions because the informal learning practices of students are very difficult to control.

The growth of university-sponsored MOOCs has spurred a national conversation about institutional practices in higher education. Yet even as the “massiveness” and “online-ness” of MOOCs seems novel, this kind of “course” does little to promote innovation in teaching or learning. Unfortunately many distance learning efforts often replicate modes of scientific management from the industrial age that are poorly adapted to collaboration based on social and ubiquitous computing. Others remain willfully blind to the problems of plagiarism, cheating, harassment, and invasion of privacy that may characterize online learning environments. Yet we can't divorce ourselves from huge archives of knowledge or ignore the desires and voices of our students without regrettable consequences, so we need to figure out sensible and respectful strategies to adapt.

As a candidate I combine the perspectives of theory and practice developed over a decade as a scholar of the digital humanities and new media theory. I have published peer-reviewed criticism about digital pedagogy for over twelve years, and the rhetoric of distance learning is one of my major research areas. My forthcoming book from MIT Press, The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University, explores the assumption that digital media deeply divide students and teachers and that a once covert war between “us” and “them” has turned into an open battle between “our” technologies and “their” technologies. It covers current trends that range from gamification to iPad distributions with a critical eye, and the work is grounded in substantive theories about new media, procedural rhetoric, embodied interactions with technology, and co-presence.

I also direct a writing-intensive interdisciplinary "core" program that satisfies the university's composition requirement devoted to the study of Culture, Art, and Technology. Having come from a Humanities Core program in my previous position, I am sensitive to how the mission of a traditional English department may be under pressure to change radically in response to technology, globalization, and deskilling with little infrastructural support or long-term vision for preserving the values of an institutional culture.

I am an organizing member of two national efforts to support progressive experiments with networked learning: Reclaim Open Learning and Dialogues on Feminism and Technology. With my colleagues, I believe that it is important -- in a time of pressure for rapid adoption of new instructional technologies -- to consider the theoretical frameworks, historical legacies, pedagogical philosophies, and objects of study that have shaped our profession, even as higher education continues to be transformed by social interactions shaped by computational media and distributed networks.

As a longtime digital humanities practitioner who has engaged in many debates, I have had to negotiate conflicts created by new forms of digital labor and intellectual property with attention to complexity. I am committed to representing the concerns of many different types of stakeholders and will continue to emphasize the mature scholarship and multi-campus collaboration that has characterized my career. Feel free to e-mail with questions about my candidacy.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:53:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:13:00 +0000

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.)

Day of DH

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 06:08:00 +0000

Today for Day of DH I thought it worthwhile to write an actual blog post for the first time in many months. Like others who have switched over to short format postings on platforms such as Twitter, most of my blogging activities have been suspended in recent years, although I still write for DML Central and a few other places. Since becoming Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at UC San Diego during a time of devoting myself largely to conventional print publications, it has been difficult to find time for even one posting despite having written over a thousand such entries in previous years.

Of course, blogging has been important for expressing solidarity with a distinctive kind of digital politics, even if -- as Geert Lovink points out -- so often that politics only merits a "zero comments" response. On Wednesday, Lovink presented a talk about "Wikileaks beyond Julian Assange" at UC Irvine, which raised a number of interesting questions about how anonymity and celebrity function as part of particular algorithmic rhetorics. The talk also reminded me why I continue to argue for more "hacktivism" in the digital humanities, as I do so here in the Debates in the Digital Humanities collection.

Lovink noted that Wikileaks was made possible by the confluence of the decreasing costs of maintaining a megabyte of data and the increasing strength of technologies for anonymous encryption, such as those documented by Andy Greenberg in This Machine Kills Secrets. However, Lovink argued that Assange had fallen prey to the "hacker as hero as trap," and that photo ops with Lady Gaga Issue detracted from online advocacy desperately needed for the pending court case against famed Wikileaks informant Bradley Manning. Although Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler may make the argument for leniency publicly in "The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case," what Lovink calls the "global fallout" of this particularly Wikileaks case, primarily involving the release of diplomatic cables, has been featured in news coverage in India, Zimbabwe, and many other countries. (To understand the narrative of stakeholders, Lovink recommended Wikileaks: The Secret Life of a Superpower from the BBC.)

Like any Internet meme Wikileaks has spawned many imitators. As Lovink observed, websites with leaked documents now range from the Al Jazeera-sponsored The Palestine Papers to Porn Wikleaks, which is devoted to providing the real names of actors in adult films located from an HIV/AIDS testing database, to the GuttenPlag Wiki that locates plagiarized passages in the dissertations of German political leaders. Some links are now defunct among Lovink's list of copycats, such as the now defunct Murdoch Leaks website. Yet, as Lovink also pointed out, the work of Wikleaks continues with The Syria Files, even after the defection of Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Wikileaks also clearly inspired The Afghanistan Papers, Balkan Leaks, and Global Leaks.

Although Lovink appreciated the aesthetic gesture of works like "Delivery for Mr. Assange," he was concerned that the narrative of the cyber-outlaw obfuscated the work of coalition building and the importance of how Wikileaks once functioned in a larger ecology of free software and online activism. For example the temporary allegiance between Wikileaks and Anonymous, Lovink argued, indicated that tensions between journalism (the supposed mission of Wikileaks) and activism (the supposed mission of Anonymous) and that leaking information and mining information to leak could involve two very different kinds of user practices.

Having taught a course on Digital Journalism, I know that major news stories often depend on affiliations with media organizations that are well-financed enough to fund lawsuits that force information to be released. With media conglomeration and free culture norms weakening newspapers and broadcast news, investigative journalism is rapidly becoming defunded, so anonymous submission of leaked material becomes the only way to break big stories.

What does this have to do with the digital humanities? Large corpora of documents that are not carefully curated -- such as those on leak sites -- invite intrepid digital humanists to do creative data mining, and

Program or Be Programmed: Computers and Writing 2012 Town Hall 2

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:45:00 +0000

The central concept of this panel “Program or Be Programmed” might immediately bring up performance anxiety issues for many people in this audience. As Stephen Ramsay put it recently, the very notion of the tech-savvy digital humanities as the newest “hot thing” tends to bring up “terrible, soul-crushing anxiety about peoples’ place in the world.” For those in composition, the anxiety might be even more acutely soul-crushing in light of existing labor politics. Every time the subject of learning code comes up, one can almost see the thought balloons appearing: “How can I learn Python in my spare time when I can’t even see over the top of the stack of first-year papers that I have to grade?” And for those who care about inclusion, what does it mean to choose the paradigm of computer programming culture, where women and people of color so frequently feel marginalized? Furthermore, if all these powerful feelings are being stirred up, what questions should we be asking about ideology as an object of study. For example, Wendy Chun has argued that a desire for mastery over blackboxed systems or access to originary source code shows how a particular dialectic of freedom and control makes it difficult for us to have meaningful discussions about technology and to acknowledge our own limited access to totalizing understanding, even if you are a software engineer.

Fortunately, after hearing these talks, people in the audience should feel a little less anxious. They should know that doing-it-yourself means doing-it-with-others, whether it is imagining Picasso and Braque building a flying machine, as David Rieder suggests, or installing Ubuntu with the help of a neighbor, as Alexandria Lockett describes. The message to instructors in this panel is comforting: relax, be confident in your own abilities to learn new things, ask questions, facilitate the questions of others, and network in ways that help you make new friends.

However, if you are an administrator as well as an instructor, don’t get too relaxed just yet. These talks also bring up some very thorny questions about disciplinary turf. After all, who defines how digital literacy should be taught and who will teach it? Computer scientists? Media artists? Librarians? Us?

Although he uses the word “craft,” Karl Stolley asserts that “source literacy” doesn’t require an elaborate apprenticeship. All it takes is moving toward a set of everyday common-sense practices involving command lines and file structures. Mark Sample suggests the term “code competency” as an alternative to “code literacy,” because of all the cultural baggage associated with the word “literacy” itself. Trebor Scholz has suggested “fluency” as a better characterization of what we are trying to teach, but Sample notes the limitations of that term.

In a 2010 essay called “Whose Literacy Is It Anyway?” Jonathan Alexander and I pointed to Michael Mateas’s work on “procedural literacy” as a way for compositionists to begin to engage with these issues. Mateas worries that universities are often too eager to adopt the training regimes of computer science departments, which is great for graduating computer science majors but not so great for teaching students in other majors or with other passions to use code. So what should be the relationship between writing studies and computer science in the academy?

People at this conference are probably more likely to be able to say that line about “some-of-my-best-friends-are-computer-scientists” than those at the MLA. (I personally carpooled with computer science faculty for ten years when I worked at UC Irvine and learned something about discrete math and number theory in the process.) But what does that collegiality get us? Both Sample and Vee mention Edsger Dijkstra, who was also the author of “On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science,” a decidedly anti-humanistic diatribe on the superiority of formal logic and mathematics as the keys to supposedly real knowledge.

Given the fact that badly written code can overdose patients with radiation or knock out someone’s retirement savings, I’m not sure that I always agree with Vee that clean, legible, rationalized code is not worth teaching to everyone, but I’ll put in my own GOTO command for writing studies to keep this spaghetti-like discussion going with our colleagues elsewhere long after this panel concludes.

MLA 2012: Debates in the Digital Humanities

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:24:00 +0000

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.

Mobile Money, Digital Learning, and the Virtual State

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:08:00 +0000

This year I finished up another round of guest blogging for the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion, which has received a four million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support research on how new forms of e-commerce and e-finance are transforming (or sometimes not transforming) the developing world. You can check out the IMFTI Blog to see stories from IMFTI researchers about mobile money in Palestine, Kenya, Uruguay, Ghana, India, Tanzania, The Philippines, and many other countries. Given my work on digital expressions of the virtual state and the importance of informal learning practices in connection with distributed networks and computational media, I feel this annual experience always improves my scholarship by orienting my own work more to other reference points in the world.

Can Public Education Co-Exist with Participatory Culture?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:07:00 +0000

At Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning Summit Henry Jenkins (Team Cultural Studies) and Elizabeth Losh (Team Critical Theory) offer a progress report on whether and in what ways the public schools and universities are going to be able to absorb or meaningfully deploy what Jenkins calls “participatory culture.” Rather than an abstract discussion of a theoretical construct drawn from their supposedly opposite positions studying fan culture and institutional rhetoric respectively, the two will discuss concrete experiences of young people acting appropriately or not, inside or outside the classroom. What might a participatory learning culture look like? What policies make it hard for even supportive teachers to achieve in their classrooms? What stakeholders would need to be engaged in order to change the current cultures of our school? How might participatory learning take place beyond the schoolhouse gates? What is everyone afraid of?

Home is Where the Logo Is

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 20:11:00 +0000

Like many who follow digital culture, I am interested in the design aesthetic of the so-called "Google doodles" that often grace the home page of the giant search engine's website. Many different occasions have been commemorated by the one-time Google doodles, from International Women's Day to the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. (My UCSD colleague Lev Manovich has created a visualization of their logo "stylespace" here.)

This weekend all around the world -- with the exception of China -- the Google doodle commemorates the 75th birthday of Muppet creator Jim Henson. The launch of the Henson doodle is also an event of considerable personal significance in our household, because the current Google doodle was created by my husband of twenty years, Mel Horan. Those who follow this blog might know that Mel created the innovative web series Garbage Island back in 2000, designed the "Free Culture" scout patch that was picked up on Boing Boing, and is known to occasionally blog his daily hand-drawn lunchbags for our son Felix's own brand at Brown Bag Dad. A video about the creation of the Doodle, which involved two months of intense work between the two corporations, shows some of the stakeholders involved in the process and includes an interview with Mel.

In recent years Google has attempted to move away from its famed white design aesthetic of extreme minimalism to doodles that encourage more interaction, more sharing, and more remixing of Google's brand identity on social media sites. Perhaps the Les Paul doodle, which was used to strum everything from Happy Birthday to Lady Gaga, was the most notable example of this online strategy. Of course, these efforts also showcase the engineering feats of Google programmers, since millions of users could easily overtask their servers with mouseovers and mouse clicks with a poorly designed interface. The Henson doodle, which uses digital puppetry with a 3-D CGI design, is putting HTML5 to the test today.

Those interested in more casual interactions with their screens might interact with the logo for mere minutes or seconds before entering their search terms. An article in PC magazine explains the principle, but the interface was meant to be intuitive to those who want to bring the characters to life.

This Google doodle was also designed to appeal to two distinct classes of more devoted computer users: those searching for cheat codes and those interested in making music video mashups.

Soon a "secrets revealed" video appeared on YouTube, which showed how to make the first animated "o" in Google lose his glasses, although a more satisfyingly humorous "secret" involves manipulating the mouse so that the final "e" devours the "l," as the video below shows. I won't reveal any more secrets here, however, and would suggest instead a visit to the comments of this page at BeatWeek to understand my reasoning for reticence.

As an article in TIME notes, "puppet karaoke" is another emergent phenomenon of today's doodle. Using either real-time puppeteering, as those involved in dance parties in Star Wars Galaxies do or more advanced digital editing machinima techniques, users can create short films in which the five characters play either speaking or singing roles. TIME points its readers to the example below that has the characters lip synching to the Black Eyed Peas.

Given the Henson's company's alliance with Disney, known for its policing of copyright in the Sad Kermit case, this acceptance of the existence of user-generated content created by what Henry Jenkins has called "participatory culture" may be worthy of note. Although the Henson doodle is already off the main page for Google France, one can still join the "list of mashups" being curated on the web.

Performance Anxiety

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 03:55:00 +0000

In a recent class I taught about "the Art of the State," students were encouraged to think about the values matrix of government as it is represented in the visual rhetoric of the state. In the case of the Obama administration values like "transparency" may even get their own designated .gov websites. Now the White House has launched Performance.gov, which uses the language of corporate discourse and key phrases like "acquisition," "financial accountability," "human resources," and "customer service" along with stock photos of shaking hands, calculators, and generic clients to establish more associated with capital ventures than the social contract. I've been thinking about how "performance" differs from "efficiency" in its connotations and why the administration might choose a rhetoric of magnified returns rather than limited investment at this particular historical moment.

Where Is Governor Moonbeam?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:16:00 +0000

Last week California governor Jerry Brown announced his veto of the state budget in a "Budget Veto" YouTube video. The governor opens his direct address to the voter with a moment of flourishing penmanship before her pushes a document away to give some straight talk about the state's need to address its fiscal crisis responsibly. The camera then zooms in on the seventy-three-year-old politician during the entirety of the sixty-second clip.

Delivering this kind of stern talking-to can be politically disastrous, as it was for former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, after he gave his extremely unpopular 1977 Address to the Nation on Energy. But Brown now can refer to a number of rhetorical models, as legislators now speak directly to constituents frequently in the YouTube venue in carefully studied scenes of executive authority and public trust.

He probably should avoid the style of unpopular UC President Mark Yudof, whose UCofficeofpresident YouTube channel often garners far more "dislikes" than "likes" when Yudof takes a starring role, particularly when he spoke about state employee furloughs here and here. (Lately the channel features other spokespeople for the University of California system.) What's wrong exactly with Yudof's YouTube persona isn't entirely clear, but he does have a tendency to look down as he speaks, and he is likely perceived as a "fatcat" who fills up the frame with his bulk.
Governor Brown chose not to emulate the Obama White House YouTube style that emanates cool and reserve. In these videos the U.S. president never appears behind a desk, and the luxurious domestic spaces of the White House are often noticeable in the background. Naturally, the famously frugal Brown could never highlight the opulence of the governor's mansion, and his desire to seem like a decisive chief executive probably makes the desk a necessary prop. Brown's handlers also decided to forgo achieving the intimacy of a close-up with an actual cut, a signature feature of Obama addresses; instead the governor seems to favor a continuous zoom that seems to emphasize Brown's relentless intensiveness and his unblinking engagement with the viewer.

At least Brown avoided the theatrics of his predecessor, now disgraced former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who actually brandished a knife in his budget-cutting online speech and appeared flanked by kitschy elephants to signify his loyalty to the machismo of the Republican party. In speaking to his Twitter followers and praising their input, Schwarzegger even used his dog as a prop once. It is worth noting that Schwarzenegger eventually approached the genre of the online address with more gravitas in imitation of the Obama style, as his farewell video indicates.

Although Brown has only posted six YouTube videos, he does seem to be aware of how the platform functions rhetorically. He has refined his style on GovernorBrown's YouTube channel, since he posted his first Governor Brown Checks In With the People of California video in which Brown seems to be burning the midnight oil in a scene shot in the dead of night in which his cluttered desk establishes his interest in researching the state's budget problems, which seems to be contained in large white binders. (There is also a weird outlier in this group of addresses that opens with Brown's disembodied head on a TV screen.)

It's important to remember that Brown announced his candidacy in a YouTube video that thematized his straightforward unvarnished rhetorical style with a wall of unfinished brick in an office that even lacked bookshelves.

Flying without a Flight Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:30:00 +0000

United Airlines has become well known for its failures coping with criticism from social computing venues, as the airline immortalized in the YouTube viral hit "United Breaks Guitars" that has received over ten million views that could only provide the most anemic response to the torrents of online hatred it has experienced since the video's debut. The corporation's new media arm, which includes the UnitedItsTimeToFly YouTube channel has been panned by experts for its lack of content and responsiveness. (The fact that United was scooped on getting the United YouTube channel by someone posting blurry video of friends and family probably says a lot.) The company's blathering Twitter stream has also caused critics to opine "Dear United Airlines, You Don't Get Twitter. At All."

Now the hashtag #unitedfail has become associated with another high-profile fiasco for its Internet image, a story bearing the New York Times headline "United Flights Resume After Five-Hour Computer Failure," which describes how travelers were stranded all over the country last Friday as they struggled to reach weekend destinations. Apparently mobile boarding pass technologies utterly failed, and passengers planning to check in using their smart phones found themselves forced to substitute hand-written boarding passes like this one.

The company's Facebook page shows an interesting story about digital rhetoric unfolding, one in which commentators frequently pile on those with complaints against United. For example, people trapped in the terminal with crying children were told to be more effective disciplinarians as parents and not to be crybabies themselves by calling everything an "emergency."

Of course, comments like these inevitably got "likes" from other disgruntled customers:

Nice pictures, United. Those check-in kiosk photos clearly show how many people are lining up to fly you. And nice work with the computer meltdown, World's Leading Airline.

Flight from LAS to IAD was cancelled. Gate agent provided an 'apology voucher'. Followed the instructions on the voucher and used the www.united.com/appreciation web site, and I got nothing. United sent an email and has said a customer representative will contact me within 10 days, but I got nothing. Can someone tell me how to go about? Thanks.

So it seems united decided to "invest" in executive bonuses instead of IT systems that work. They get rich we get s.....d

Nice pictures, United. Those check-in kiosk photos clearly show how many people are lining up to fly you. And nice work with the computer meltdown, World's Leading Airline.

Nonetheless, United fans were busy working the Facebook page with reminders about the failures of other airlines and other technology services and sermons about the value of patience. However, not all of these people seemed to be genuinely neutral parties: it wasn't hard to find a United employee and a person with only one other Facebook friend who also was also an upbeat commentator on the Deepwater Horizon page.

Mobility Shifts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 21:07:00 +0000

There are only a few more days before the call for Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning Summit closes. Like the previous conference organized by Trebor Scholz on digital labor, The Internet as Playground and Factory, pre-conference discussion is already an important part of the critical discourse around the event, and the mailing list for the Institute for Distributed Creativity is already abuzz with introductions from keynoters like Cathy Davidson of HASTAC.

Matt Gold and I are co-chairing the "Digital Fluencies" track at the conference, and we're interested in expanding the meaning of what digital learning means on a very fundamental level to get away from the charity-case after-school computer lab paradigm and the romance with the digital native and to look seriously at forms of learning that involve mobile devices, political engagement, and much more ambiguous narratives.

What are new pedagogic approaches for learning with mobile platforms? What are the limitations of the “digital literacies” paradigm and its first world/third world assumptions?

How do we promulgate digital fluency as an understanding of the particular features of global information flows in which data, attention, capital, and reputation might move both to and from individual actors and communities?

How can mobile media platforms be used for more than the one-way delivery of content? What are new pedagogical approaches for real-time mobile learning that make full use of the potential of mobile phones, iPods, laptops, PDAs, smart phones, Tablet PCs, and netbooks in formal and informal contexts? How can global participants use mobile media to create rich social contexts around important learning tasks? How can such platforms be leveraged to teach digital rights and the value of collaboration across cultures?

How can we dispel the myth of the digital native?

How can mobile networks reshape our experiences of space and place through interactive architecture, locative art, geo-caching games, and real-time object recognition? What opportunities for networked teaching and learning might we find in such media-rich, responsive environments?

Check out the call for participation here. The deadline is July 1.

(Sixth College is one of the partners of the project and plans to sponsor faculty and TAs from the Culture, Art, and Technology program to attend the event.)

Why Is There No Motherhood.gov?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 21 May 2011 11:55:00 +0000

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.

Songbirds, Lovebirds, and YouTube

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 23:16:00 +0000

Boy scout and local boy Jason Pitts has become the talk of Santa Monica with his video "Prom?" that has attracted over two hundred thousand views as the likeable teen seranades his potential date with his "Lianna, you're so beautiful refrain." Pitts, his date, and his backup singers were all flown to New York to be on this segment of Good Morning America.

Given that most viral videos that merit TV coverage have jumped over the million view mark, I was surprised to see Pitts recognized by ABC. It wasn't until the hosts mentioned corporate parent Disney and the upcoming release of the movie Prom that the media synergy made sense.

Of course, some might say that I'm likely to be cynical about teen festivities, given that my own prom date went on to direct Saw 3D, but it's far to say that network TV wants YouTube to follow more traditional story arcs.

ABC also ran a story about letting "YouTube Do the Asking" last year. (Their broadcast about the teen who shot this video to plead for the company of a Maxim model on prom night is here.) YouTube prom proposals also have used stop motion animation, rap music, and green screen footage to be shown on the morning announcements at the school.

It's noteworthy that Pitts doesn't actually use YouTube as a technology of distance to ask his date and eschews digital effects in favor of strolling into the classroom with an acoustic guitar.

Loud in the Library

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:38:00 +0000

UCLA Student Alexandra Wallace is all over Facebook today, but not for all the reasons that the buxom co-ed who created an anti-Asian YouTube video might desire. Despite the recentness of the hullaballoo over the weekend, coverage of Wallace's three-minute rant on "Asians in the Library" now ranges from the local LA Weekly blog to the global Daily Mail. The racism of her comments about diverse campuses and her insensitivity toward tsunami victims were particularly egregious. The video was such a black eye for UCLA that the chancellor of the campus has already issued both a text press release and a video statement at "Chancellor Block appalled by student video disparaging Asians."

Although the original video has already been pulled down, it has been mirrored and reposted in a number of places, including here. Asian male students have posted responses like White Girls in the Library and this spoof that emphasize both Wallace's foolishness and their own interest in interracial sexual dynamics on campus. Wallace has apparently complained of losing her privacy now that she has been named, and ad feminem attacks like this text-based video probably explain the Chancellor's call for civility in response.

Of course, like all viral videos, it has already been autotuned and dance remixed. What surprises me is that little has been said about the fact that the UCLA library also played a role in another YouTube controversy when a student of color was tasered on cell phone camera by campus police.

(Thanks to my wonderful CAT 125 students Nikita Shah and Jonathan Hu for their insights on the controversy. I now have 200+ people keeping me current on Virtualpolitik.)

Update: One of the most watched videos thus far is this one that mocks Wallace with declarations that "we grow our food!" and "there's a reason that you outsource your jobs!" Also worthy of note is this response from a self-described "gay Asian Jew" at my own institution, UC San Diego. And, yes, the dance remixes will be unstoppable, as this example demonstrates.

More Updates: This video of a digital one-man band song to Wallace has already earned hundreds of thousands of views. It points people back to the original video, the crooner's a capella Mario song and Britney covery, and an iTunes version of his serenade available for purchase.

DML/Kairos Webinar

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 07:48:00 +0000

If you missed the webinar with David Parry, Mark Marino, Katherine Harris, and me, you can click on this link and see the archived version.

It began as a Twitter conversation between Harris and Parry, which can now be followed with the hashtag #infoarts. As people involved in teaching writing, we asserted that the main issues have less to do with tools and more to do with linking facts and creativity, as Harris argued. Parry noted that moving from "information" to "knowledge" involves engaging students rhetorically in "information arts" rather than "information science." I argued that thinking about information flows is central for this kind of teaching and cited Siva Vaidhyanathan's Critical Information Studies Manifesto.

In particular, we discussed the limitation of using the term "digital literacy," because it is 1) excessively text-centered, 2) often perceived as remedial by students, 3) invites turf battles between different departments and academic units, and 4) ignores the importance of digital rights. Mark also questioned the assumption that "digital natives" were competent at search or able to understand how to author metadata and use social bookmarking tools, and Parry claimed that teaching these skills involves thinking about a new kind of reading, the reading that a computer does, so that students learn to "write for the machine." (Parry also observed that reading web stats was useful for students to "dig into.")

The conversation contained a number of assertion that might seem at odds with traditional pedagogy. For example, Harris insisted on the value of "play" and making students "comfortable with being uncomfortable," Parry argued for both "loose" or "unstructured" assignments oriented around time limits rather than page limits, as well as the importance of "failure," and Marino describes his class as on of the "workaround" and "Zen patience." Our unconventional assignments include telling a lie on Facebook or photographic surveillance cameras in their daily lives.

We also grappled with some hard questions about student privacy, academic labor, corporate interests, and the unintended consequences of engaging with the "real world." (See Parry's blog entry on "It's Not the Public Internet; It is the Internet Public" for more.)

As Harris pointed out, by describing a "Food and You" class with a public audience and lots of face-to-face tasting time, we aren't talking about distance learning in the conventional sense.

When the Sheen Is Off

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:36:00 +0000

As someone who has written about web generators and mash-ups, I have to say something about the latest series of Internet memes involving rehab-refusing actor Charlie Sheen and his wild statements in recent transgressive public appearances. In the mash-up category, we have Cats Quote Charlie Sheen and online quizzes about "Whose Line Is It Anyway: Gaddafi/Sheen," as well as a YouTube video in which Sheen serves as Gaddafi's translator.

The Charlie Sheen Random Quote Generator is also making the virtual rounds. You can even have a quote generating widget as a Wordpress plugin.