virtualpolitik

MLA 2012: Debates in the Digital Humanities

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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 (Liz Losh) — 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.

Off a Cliff

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 01:57:00 +0000

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

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

Not Your Mother's VJ

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 01:42:00 +0000

Recently Henry Jenkins has highlighted the work of Egyptian-American Laila Shereen Sakr, otherwise known as VJ Um Amel in a posting called "Media-Making Madness: #Arab Revolutions from the Perspective of Egyptian-American VJ Um Amel (Part One)." Sakr uses certain alienation effects in her video remixes of political crowds that have drawn praise from Alexandra Juhasz:

I'd like to reflect on the differences between the video you made that is a more abstract data visualization and the mix tapes of live "realist" footage. I have written about how viral YouTube videos of protest move quickly because of their simplistic, iconic effect which is often easy to consume and as easy to misunderstand given that it flows without context and because of the strong associations linked to verite images. For this reason, I think your experimentation with non-verite renditions of revolution are really exciting (for communicating across difference, as well as to communicate more complex ideas then, say, "freedom," or "courage," or "arab" that iconic images can reduce themselves to)

(Juhasz was a guest in my online rhetoric class this week, and like me she seems to be struggling to keep up with fast changing social media events in the Middle East and North Africa.)

Ballet at BART

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:25:00 +0000

Two years ago I wrote about the shooting of Oscar Grant as an example of the way that police brutality videos shot by cell phones circulate through both broadcast news and YouTube. This video adopts a different series of generic conventions that draw viewers who watch either vernacular dancing videos or "improv everywhere" style clips.

The filmmakers also make an interesting decision in choosing not to incorporate footage of the actual shooting of Grant at the Fruitvale BART station or depict anything other than a highly stylized representation of the event. Unlike many of the human rights remixes that Sam Gregory and I will be talking about in our DML workshop Thursday that use gory images of graphic violence, those who memorialize Grant in this case do so in a highly abstracted hip hop ballet.

People Who Live in Glass Houses

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:55:00 +0000

My UC San Diego colleague from the Department of Engineering Joe Goddard once taught a course on glass, rubber, and steel in the Culture, Art, and Technology program that I now direct, so it is interesting to see how glass as a material intimately tied to technological advantages considers to shape the cultural imagination and the aesthetic ideologies of consumers.

In this clip called "A Day Made of Class" from Corning we see an ideal professional family with children in private school go through a day of transportation, consumerism, and social interaction in a world of heads-up displays and urban screens.

If Vannevar Bush imagined the Memex as a kind of desk-computer, it is interesting to see that the coffee table and the large, plate glass window -- the icons of mid-century modernism -- are imagined to be the computational furnishings of the future.

It is interesting that the company has not disallowed responses, which now include over 4,000 comments that include witticisms and jibes like "A Day Made of Greasy Fingerprints" and "The World is my iPad." What I find surprising is that most viewers don't point out how obviously the technologies shown are merely the product of digital visual effects.

Thanks to my wonderful former student from my UC Irvine digital rhetoric class, Heather Pedrami, for the link.

The Attackers and the Bystanders

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 05:16:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Victor

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:19:00 +0000

The digital rhetoric surrounding the victory of artificial intelligence in a match against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter seems to benefit both the corporate sponsor, IBM, and a last-century television gameshow that is now hoping to promote its various digital brands, which range from a Wii game for at-home family entertainment to an iPhone app for would-be contestants on the run.

The heavily hyped "man-machine" competition designed to garner ratings and media attention seems to have had its desired effect. It even has merited its own TED talk to narrowcast to the digerati, and the company is declaring broadly that "humans win" in presenting its own teary online drama about the computer scientists behind the scene.

Certainly the technical challenges faced by the IBM team grappling with the rule systems of human language and knowledge representation made former victories by IBM computers against human chess champions seem like relatively simple feats by comparison. Based on the company's triumph on the game show, their corporate public relations is now promoting the machine's efficacy in fields like health care, although those who remember the computer's bungled answers might not yet be ready to place their lives in its care.

In a statement, longtime Virtualpolitik friend and former Jeopardy winner Jerome Vered doesn't give as much credit to the technology as he does to the way that the game itself is structured as a competition between self-interested agents that unfolds according to the logic of an individual game.

Note also that "Watson" is not named for Sherlock Holmes' famous sidekick in solving crimes, but for the father-son successive IBM heads "both named Watson," as Peter Lunenfeld tells us in his "genealogy of digital visionaries" in The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine.

Virtual Auschwitz

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 21:23:00 +0000

In yesterday's New York Times, an article on how "Auschwitz Shifts From Memorializing to Teaching" notes that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which is slated for a major renovation and overhaul of its exhibits, will avoid incorporating digital technologies in its galleries.

There will be few bells and whistles, Mr. Cywinski insisted, few if any videos or touch-screens in the main galleries, which would be impractical for masses of people.

Unlike the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is known for its interactive passport experience and banks of multimedia portals, curators feel strongly that the mute testimony of piles of hair, luggage, and shoes needed to continue to have a central place in what many describe as a "shrine." Apparently the abstraction of online installations like the Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands in which Anne Frank is reduced to a mere flickering pixel on the display seems inappropriate to the caretakers of the heavily touristed site in Oświęcim, Poland where visitors come in pilgrimage.

Reading the story I think of the words of my former UC Irvine colleague Ruth Klüger, who was so critical of the "museum culture" that surrounds the genocide of the Jews. For Kluger, as a survivor, it was impossible to imagine that anything be learned from the Holocaust; it defied any pedagogical logic that she could see.

My own grandparents spent their honeymoon in the Weimar Republic. In seeing the sites of what was then still cosmopolitan Berlin, they elbowed their way through a crowd to see Hitler. In retrospect, their cultural tourism seems in obvious bad taste. But thinking about that particular historical moment of peeking at the bogeyman of totalitarianism and the racial state, I think about all the digital Hitlers that we peer at on the Internet, whether the Führer is walking on sunshine with parading admirers or complaining about consumer electronics in one of the thousands of videos in the Downfall meme.

Toasting with Water

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 22:00:00 +0000

They say that it is bad luck to toast with water, but you wouldn't know it from this image of corporate jollity. This photograph, from the official White House Flickr stream, shows Obama toasting at a dinner in Silicon Valley at the home of John Doerr, a member of the White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board. To Obama's left is Apple's famous former CEO, Steve Jobs, who has appeared less hale and healthy in the tabloids of late, and to Obama's right is Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and not up for an Oscar this year, although his thespian Doppelgänger Jesse Eisenberg is.

Assembled around the dinner table are many other tech gurus: Carol Bartz, president and CEO of Yahoo!, John Chambers, CEO and chairman of Cisco Systems, Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle, Reed Hastings, CEO of NetFlix, John Hennessy, president of Stanford University, Art Levinson, chairman and former CEO of Genentech, and Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google.

Although this photograph has circulated widely in the tech blogosphere, the other photo on the White House Flickr page from the dinner, which shows Obama in a tête-à-tête with Zuckerberg, has received much less attention. In the image, the visual rhetoric shows the President literally talking down to the social media entrepreneur, as what appears to be a blurry Eric Schmidt hovers in the foreground.

These shots are typical fundraising fare with a clear messages about inclusion and the president's social graph. In contrast, Michael Shaw at BagNews Notes argues that the visual rhetoric around Obama's "Sputnik moment," on view at the White House page for "Winning the Future," may be much more compelling to his constituents.

Obama's latest corporate tour features the Intel corporation, which Obama chose to be this week's site of his weekly online address. Of late, I've been writing a lot about the ways that Obama appears with computational media, and the ways that he is rarely shown facing a screen. Often computer monitors surround the president in scenes of what I have called "transparent mediation/mediated transparency" that draw attention to the apparatus of his online media presence, but when he is captured actually facing a screen (at his secretary's desktop machine or peering at his Commander in Chief Blackberry) we are signaled, by either the awkwardness of his body language at workstation or his use of mobile devices outside or in the dark, that such engagement with technology as an actual user is unpresidential.

(Thanks to Garnet Hertz for pointing out the photo.)

Teaching Writing as an Information Art

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:47:00 +0000

Webinar: Teaching Writing as an Information Art
Feb. 28, 9am PST/12pm EST
50 minutes. Cost: FREE
Online or on campus (@ USC ACB 238)
Twitter: #infoarts

Featuring:
Katherine D. Harris (San Jose State U), Elizabeth Losh (UC San Diego),
Mark Marino (USC), and Dave Parry (UT Dallas)

Sponsored by
DMLcentral
Kairos
University of Southern California Writing Program,
The Center for Scholarly Technology,
& The Center for Transformative Scholarship

Contemporary writing courses have been taking on computational tools, from word processors to wikis, for over two decades now, and for a large portion of that time, the tools have taken center stage. However, contemporary talk of media “literacies” has changed the place of tools in the classroom — or rather, has reframed the role of language as information. When students begin to study the role of words as tags, metadata, or search optimizing keywords, they are studying not just semantic structures but the logic and rhetoric of the flow of information. This panel discusses the idea of reframing those courses and their lessons under the title of Information Arts.

Come join our round table discussion as we explore the implications of this reconceptualization of the contemporary writing course.

Weigh Station

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:41:00 +0000

I've never been a person of religious sentiments, so it has been difficult for me to have much faith in dieting. Much like systems of spiritual belief, confidence in different ideologies of weight loss have always struck me as suspect.

However, thanks to the advent of online video, it is hard to deny that there really should be less of me. For example, the difference in size between a performance in 2008 at the Annenberg Center and one in 2010 is particularly marked.

So I find myself polling people at the university, from an administrator who swears by consuming only brussels sprouts for a month to a faculty member in the Math department, who has posted his conversion story online.

I'm tempted to solve this problem of daily life with my iPhone, as I do most everyday needs. So I downloaded a pedometer app and soon went out to walk, jog, and run to burn calories and participate in a new culture of self-monitoring where people track stats from the most intimate aspects of their lives. Each day of personal surveillance I can peruse charts where my vital signs have been tracked from second-to-second much like an intensive care monitor.

After testing out this application, I soon discovered a number of technical flaws. First, like many apps, the pedometer seems to turn off when the phone rings or a text message arrives. As someone who often checks e-mail while waiting for a crosswalk to be greenlighted, this is a significant design flaw. I'm not sure that one can listen to the mp3 player on the phone while exercising and still keep track of one's steps. Second, it measures distance much more accurately if stored in a pants pocket rather than the pocket of a sweater or jacket. This led me to a frustrating search for exercise pants with pockets, which were strangely unavailable at a number of retail outlets. I actually found a number of pairs with fake pockets merely for decoration!

If only I could download an iPhone app like the music recognition app Shazam where I could point my phone at a plate of food and be told the calories it contains.

Rigor Mortis

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 04:16:00 +0000

More and more often when I teach blogging, I feel like I am teaching Latin.

It seems as if blogging is now considered a discourse essentially dead in its vernacular practice, but the language of blogging still holds some recognizable pedagogical virtue as a way to build students' communication skills with public audiences and as a gateway for understanding related digital practices that might appear more demonstrably alive in the present day.

Today I found out that I will be part of a roundtable discussion titled "Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other" at the Computers and Writing conference at the University of Michigan. The proposal from Steve Krause begins as follows:

In one fashion or another, the short history of blogging has always been about dismissal. Blogging has consistently been labeled a fad, discredited as little more than amateurs keeping public diaries, criticized by mainstream media for their shoddy writing (compared to the mainstream media), and so forth. And yet Rosenberg (2009) argues that blogging was “the first form of social media to be widely adopted beyond the world of technology enthusiasts,” a development that provided a “template for all the other forms that would follow” (p. 13). Blogs perforated the borders between author and audience, reporter and reader, diary and pulpit in ways that launched careers, destroyed campaigns, and illustrated, perhaps, the communal philosophy of the digital age. That said, as Facebook and Twitter have eclipsed blogs, perhaps the death of blogging has finally arrived. Perhaps the medium that showed the way has been superseded by the forms following. Or not. Or maybe it has become something else. Something other.

Of course, the news of blogging's demise is not a terribly stunning announcement. A year and a half ago, a report from the Pew Research Center announced that it was already judged an archaic practice among the young.

Yet the blogs in this quarter's digital danse macabre continue to show a certain vitality conceptually, rhetorically, stylistically, and even technically. Offerings from my students like Eat Dirt, San Diego, Greener Strides, Cinesia, Digirights, and The Social Documentary speak of students continuing desires to have their voices heard by the public. The class blog is full of suggestions for alternative lectures that I could have given with the same subject matter.

I can't imagine trying to get to know my students otherwise in a lecture hall of over two hundred souls. I may be a schoolmarm essentially drilling them on their conjugations and declensions, but at this point I don't know what else to do.

The Social Contract

noreply@blogger.com (Liz Losh) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 05:23:00 +0000

In today's White House press conference, President Obama credited technology for mobilizing dissenters in Tunis and Egypt to topple authoritarian regimes.

You can’t maintain power through coercion. At some level, in any society, there has to be consent. And that’s particularly true in this new era where people can communicate not just through some centralized government or a state-run TV, but they can get on a smart phone or a Twitter account and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people.

There are three things that immediately strike me about this response to a reporter's question: 1) It follows a discussion of "young people" and a "young, vibrant generation," which suggests a belief in a "digital generation" as central civic actors, 2) Twitter must be thrilled with being credited in so many news organizations with the overthrow of governments, particularly at a time when its own user base in the United States may be moving on to new technologies at the same time that the young seem not to have chosen to adopt this particular microblogging platform in the first place, and 3) Obama's use of the language of the social contract has its ironies, given that the actual user agreements of most mobile technologies and social media platforms require consent unconditionally.

This last point is important for understanding how the issue of "Internet freedom" has been championed this week by the Obama administration. In a speech given today by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she compared the divergent outcomes of digital activism in Egypt and Iran to argue for "the power of connection technologies" as both an "accelerant of political, social, and economic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extinguish that change."

Clinton presented a much more sophisticated argument than many cyberutopians, one that focused on how technology can service both liberation and repression. Unlike the President, she also seemed to mock associating particular Web 2.0 brand names with civic participation and political change.

Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

She then launched into a familiar Habermassian reading of cyberspace before defending the concept of a cosmopolitan, multinational structure of governance.

The internet has become the public space of the 21st century – the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there, all 2 billion of us and counting. And that presents a challenge. To maintain an internet that delivers the greatest possible benefits to the world, we need to have a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us, what rules exist and should not exist and why, what behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how.

The goal is not to tell people how to use the internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square. The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should. But if people around the world are going come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.

One year ago, I offered a starting point for that vision by calling for a global commitment to internet freedom, to protect human rights online as we do offline. The rights of individuals to express their views freely, petition their leaders, worship according to their beliefs – these rights are universal, whether they are exercised in a public square or on an individual blog. The freedoms to assemble and associate also apply in cyberspace. In our time, people are as likely to come together to pursue common interests online as in a church or a labor hall.

Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I’ve called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same. Because we want people to have the chance to exercise this freedom. We also support expanding the number of people who have access to the internet. And because the internet must work evenly and reliably for it to have value, we support the multi-stakeholder system that governs the internet today, which has consistently kept it up and running through all manner of interruptions across networks, borders, and regions.

When thinking about what "Internet freedom" might mean, however, Clinton draws limits on "access" and "transparency" to defend the "private" as well as the "public." What I find interesting is that much like the recording industry and how it defends intellectual property, Clinton focuses on the rhetorical figure of "theft."

Now, I know that government confidentiality has been a topic of debate during the past few months because of WikiLeaks, but it’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts. Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise.