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Category Archives: Professorial Musings
Walking In a Bubble
From the Sloop and Gunn article:
The use of any means of communication materially alters the body (and its movement) and strongly encourages a change in the way we understand our world and our identities through the expansion of the body in space and time.
Note this Gothamist.com post on a topic we spent at least twenty minutes talking about in the class the other day. Note both the picture (which I mentioned in class), and the figure for average speed at which someone wearing headphones walks. I think that qualifies as having the way we move our bodies materially altered. It should also be of interest that headphones are generally banned during competitive running events, although mainly only for elite runners and with enforcement being at the race directors’ discretion. For any of you who work out or run, or even if you just listen to your iPod while walking down the street, do you feel a change in your stride when you listen to music? Do you sometimes notice this change only after you’ve already been doing it? This non-conscious change is what Sloop and Gunn mean to imply when they are using Marshall McLuhan’s concept of technology being “prosthetic.” It is an extension of our bodies, one that sometimes we neglect to really notice.
The Public Sphere, Wikipedia, and the Gender Gap
A recent study conducted by Wikimedia Foundation and reported on in the The New York Times highlights a severe gap between men and women contributors to entries on Wikipedia. According to the study, only 13% of contributors, those who write and edit all the entries on Wikipedia, are women. The Times makes an argument that it is possibly the very openness of Wikipedia that is that is the cause of this problem.
But because of its early contributors Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women. “It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.” Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.” Mr. Reagle is also the author of “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.”
Reagle’s argument here, however, brings to mind a number of the arguments one encounters around the gender gaps inherent in the traditional understanding of the “public sphere.” As we read in the Wikipedia entry for “the public sphere,” feminists like Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib pointed out way before the Internet was a regular part of our lives that the public sphere has always been a male-dominated space that uses a masculine hegemonic ideology to push what is considered of “woman’s interest” (this designation in and of itself being determined by men) into the private realm, creating a boundary (a region, perhaps, in the Goffmannian sense) between what is and what is not worth discussing. Hence, if we take Wikipedia and other open, collaborative Web 2.0 websites as inheritors of Habermas’s public sphere, then Joseph Reagle’s analysis seems to push the historical causes of the gender gap in Wikipedia contributors up about 2500 years.
Stereotypes and Social Media
“Technosociologist” Zeynep Tufecki argues in her most recent blog post along similar lines to what I brought up in class last week, namely, the idea social media has the potential to obviate the need for the use of stereotypes. As I mentioned in class, the stereotype is often understood to be a universal aspect of human thought. Especially in a modern globalized world where the things that effect our everyday lives most often occur in places beyond our immediate control and awareness, the need for generalized understandings of others (particularly others that one has no direct experience with) is particularly acute. There a number of sociologists who make these types of arguments and only argue for gentler, less denigrating stereotypes. However, if the idea of “direct” experience is expanded to include the type of knowledge and experience one can attain from interacting with someone online through web 2.0 social media, does this need for generalized, relatively fixed understandings of “the other” become obsolete? Tufecki contrasts the “peer-to-peer” structure of social media with older forms of technology like television and radio which where also heralded as the harbingers of the end stereotypes yet ended up being tools of the powerful used to only reinforce negative and destructive stereotypes (an extreme example being the use of radio in the Rwandan genocide):
Will social media break this pattern of co-optation by the powerful and the hateful? I am more hopeful for this medium because the Internet combines peer-to-peer structure along with rich-media broadcast capabilities. No previous technology had this particular combination. Telephone was peer-to-peer but you could not truly talk to strangers and it was limited to voice. Television barely had a chance to be anything beyond a vehicle for delivering eyeballs to advertisers in most countries, and has never truly been controlled by a non-state or non-corporate entity.
Although I sometimes share Tufecki’s optimism, I think pointing to the peer-to-peer structure and web 2.0 broadcast capabilities of sites like youtube, facebook, and twitter without also understanding that they are more than just open forums for new types of human relations but also capitalist enterprises subject to the logic of both markets and governments is overly simplistic. It’s hard not to feel optimistic as we watch protests all across the world be organized through social media and feel that the very nature of social media is to breakdown stereotypes and bring enlightened freedom everywhere. However, we forget that internet, cell-phone, and television access is routinely cut by governmental bodies under attack from protesters and companies scared to lose access to markets just as routinely fold to the demands of despotic regimes. Social media may have the power to help us break our dependence on stereotypes and be more capable of developing positive understandings of others, but as stereotypes are profitable and convenient tools of oppression, the mediums used for dismantling them must be kept safe from systems based in the logic of profit and oppressive power.
Your Personal Life Isn’t Protected . . .
But your work life is! All workers rejoice! Maybe. Probably because the National Labor Review Board can get involved in this case (as opposed to Stacey Snyder who was still in the process of getting certified as a teacher and was still in school), Dawnmarie Souza’s wrongful firing lawsuit against American Medical Response came down in her favor this week. Souza was fired and denied union representation when she bad mouthed her boss with other colleagues on Facebook. As much as people discount the importance of unions in America, her denial of union representaiton was what brought her to the NLRB and probably what saved her. In the case of Stacey Snyder you have a student-teacher on her own at the whim of her school administration. Because Souza was able to argue that her firing was a violation of labor law, the NLRB, a relatively powerful government agency, took up her case. Aside from the issue of what kind of workers should be protected by the NLRB and other federal laws and just how much leeway teachers in training should have, the real sticking point here for me is that Souza’s speech was protected because it was directly work related. Snyder’s “drunken pirate” photo was not protected because it was not work related. Work related speech, ostensibly”public” in that it effects a number of people, remains something that we are willing to protect. Private speech and the life we live outside of work, evidently, is something we don’t really think is worthy of protection In American labor law at-will employment means at-will firing and people should realize that what they think is private and not related to their work life actually has a way of becoming public enough to warrant their termination. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and other social media ride the line between what we understand to be public and private, so much so that maybe we need to do away with these terms in defining types of communication. It should be no surprise that the legal system is struggling to understand the separation between the two when it comes to social media.
Knowing Your Audience?
A Cautionary Tale: As we will read later in the semester, our social media presence is both a way for us to have an easier time keeping track of the world, but also a way for the world to have a much easier time keeping track of us. Stacey Snyder, the “drunken pirate” pictured above, is often cited as one of the first instances of social media usage actually ruining someone’s career. This article details Snyder’ s dismissal from a college student teaching program and the denial of her teaching certificate all due to her posting this picture with the caption “drunken pirate” to her Myspace profile. Snyder sued but her suit was eventually dismissed on the grounds that the post was not a matter of public concern and was therefore not a First Amendment issue. This incident brings up a number of issues relevant to our course (the difference between what is public and what is private being the most obvious), but I find Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of social interaction to be quite applicable to this particular situation. When presenting oneself in everyday online life, the ability to know, and therefore control in someone, one’s audience is increasing difficult. As Facebook’s privacy settings make more and more of our profiles “public” and anyone with internet access can google your name, the audience witnessing your online performance is undergoing exponential growth. The stages that we perform on are changing dramatically. Is it time to come start changing our performances as the audience gets bigger and bigger while acquiring greater and greater access to the our everyday lives? Or will the audience become more accustomed to witnessing what has traditionally been a part of what Goffman calls the backstage? Has it become impossible for us to know our audience while the audience itself knows us even better? What kind of defensive or protective practices are possible when we don’t even know who or what is watching us?
