What if Anon is A Woman - Lit Review -

I woke up way too early this morning with a brilliant idea. Last night I felt discouraged with what I thought was a smart move in my project from Anon as a Woman, to micro-celebrity and ambient intimacy. I intially like the move, because I felt it was a move away from a subject that I perhaps selfishly was interested in - as a woman - to something that could connect with more people and be read more postively - When I woke up I realized - they mix....So here is a new literature review. This works a lot better because I can draw from the research I am doing for my thesis and new works that are intriguing me - clearly I have more research than required but since I am also doing my thesis on identity construction within SL I have more to work with - I hope it is not too much.

I want to ask the question what if Anon is a woman? The editors of Race in Cyberspace point to the need to ask such a question; "You may be able to go online and not have anyone know your race or gender-you may even be able to take cyberspace's potential for anonymity a step further and masquerade as a race or gender that doesn't reflect the real, offline you-but neither the invisibility nor the mutability of online identity make it possible for you to escape your 'real world' identity completely." (Kolko Nakamaur Rodman 2000, p.4). Early scholarship online held a utopic vision of cyberspace as gender and race free (Rheingold 1993, Turkle 1995). Yet these utopic dreamers have been proven wrong post the critical turn in cyberstudies (Silver 2000).
Feminist media outlets have criticized the group Anonymous for their cyberbullying characterizing the gorup as white male patriachrs (Bitch 2008). But what is lacking in these analysis, is a more complex view of Anonymity as a constructed identity. Choosing to affiliate with anonymous can be seen as a feminist strategy that has a deep historical basis. Other feminist groups have taken similar strategies such as SubRosa and Guerilla Girls (Rizada 2007). Gender is the most common focus of online identity (Cherny & Wise 1996; Herring 1994; Harcourt 1999; Hawthorne 1999; Green & Dam 2001; Flanagan & Booth 2002; Kendall 2002). When asking if Anon is a woman, I am also asking if Anon is an American Indian, a Palestinian Refugee, a Black Child, a Chinese lesbian - I am asking - if Anon is a marked identity.

As Silver points out, “little published work on the topic of race and cyberspace and even less on sexuality and the Internet. Furthermore, when such work does appear, it usually focuses solely on issues of access. Seldom does scholarship tackle more social and cultural dimensions” (2000 p.135.) There is a need to move beyond material access and expand work on liberating tacitcs and pedagogies online (Banks 2006). Race is an understudied area of cyberstudies, as well is anything that moves beyond the material access debate or visual representation of race online. Nakamura (2000) criticizes high-tech companies ads, and the notions of a global race free village. Lockard examines online nationalism, which as a part of techno-universalism, “camofouflages gross social inequalities and the global economic effects of racialism by announcing the advent of a new historical era” (2000, p.180).

Haraway made famous the post-human subject ‘Cyborg’. Cyborg identity provides fertile grounds for politicizing cyberspace (Haraway 1998; see also Kolko, Nakamuram Rodman 2000 p. 7). Anonymous is a cyborg figure that emerges within the context of a celebrity obsessed culture. Celebritty is a spectator sport, that privilegas a male gaze, which consumes the passive female body online (Mulvey 1975). In this light Anonymous emerges as an ethical collective. Anonymous may be the voice of the end result of ambient intimacy. Ambient intimacy refers to the new loose but increasingly collectivly aware social networks being formed online through newfeeds, and twitter like updates (Thompson 2008). Ambient Intimacy has been studied in relation to teenage use and has been found to paradoxically increase real world social ties (Boyd 2008). In a similarly paradoxical move, Anonymous group members come to know each other, through street protests and private message boards. I want to examine ambient awareness as a form of consciousness raising, that may be seeking to raise self awareness and responsibility in the larger internet community. Anonymity in this light is both an aspect of its members larger constructed online persona, and a social collective that engages in strategic constructions of non-identity, necessary for agency within the hyper-visible world of micro-celebrity.

Banks, A. J. (2006). Race, Rhetoric, and Technology. Urbana: NCTE.

Boyd, D. “Friendship” (2008) Digital Youth Research. http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/book-friendship

Cherney, Lynn and Wise, Elizabeth eds. Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Seattle: Seal Press, 1996.

Elmer, G. (2006) The Vertical (Layered) Net. Critical Cyberculture Studies. Silver, D. Massanari, A. eds. New York; New York Press.

Harcourt, Wendy. Women@Internet: creating new cultures in cyberspace. Zed Books

Hawthorne, S., & Klein, R. (1999). Cyberfeminism. Melbourne, Australia, Spinifex.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Herring, Susan. “Politeness in Computer Culture: Why Women Thank and Men Flame,” in Cultural Performances: Proceedings of the Third
Berkeley Women and Language Conference, Mary Bucholtz et al., eds. Berkeley Women and Language Group, 1994.

Kendall, L. (2002) Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinites and Relationships Online. Berkeley University of California Press.

Kolko, B. &. (2000). Race in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge.

Mulvey, Laura (1975). "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Screen 16(3):6–18
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema

Nakamura, Lisa. “Where Do You Want to Go Today?” Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality” In Race In Cyberspace. Kolko, Beth, Nakamura, Lisa and Rodman, Gilbert eds. 2000 Great Britain Routledge


Raizada, Kristen. “An Interview with the Guerilla Girls, Dyke Action Machine (DAM!), and the Toxic Titties”. NWSA Journal 19.1 2007, 39-58

Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electornic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.
Silver, David. (n.d.) “Introducing Cyberculture”. Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies.
http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp

Silver (2000) Margins in the WIres: Looking for RAce, Gender and SExuality in the Balcksburg Electronic Village In Race In Cyberspace. Kolko, Beth, Nakamura, Lisa and Rodman, Gilbert eds. 2000 Great Britain Routledgep. 133

Sterne, Jonathon. The Computer RAce Goes to Class: How Computers in Schools Helped Shape the RAcial Topography of the Internet. In Race In Cyberspace. Kolko, Beth, Nakamura, Lisa and Rodman, Gilbert eds. 2000 Great Britain Routledge p.191-212

Thompson, C. (2008 September) "Brave New Worlds of Digital Intimacy" New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html

Turkle, S. (1995). Life On The Screen. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Ambient Intimacy - Deva's Thoughts

Reading Response - Clive Thompson on Ambient Intimacy

This article outlines Facebook's rise from an idea that Zuckerberg had - to what the article deems the de facto public commons:
"Facebook became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing."
Noticing that Facebook required too much browsing to keep updated on friends status Zuckerberg introduced the news feed which at first caused panic. Users were afraid that Facebook would become the big brother of the internet - Zuckerberg was suprised and added a privacy function but suspected that quickly people would realize they liked the news feed feature. And he was correct - after the initial response people found that they enjoyed using the omnipresent info at their fingerprints.
They had felt
""ambient awareness." It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye."

The rise of online networking is a response to social isolation that Robert Putnam identifies in Bowling Alone. As we have become increasingly isolated with the rise of industrialism - post-industrialism - with nuclear familys and laptops etc. the individual begins to see themselves as seperate from their community ---
---"This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting."
At first sites like Twitter and Facebook seem to give an overwhelming amount of trivial information - but this information is actually connecting people. Unlike emails these small updates do not require 100% of your attention and thus you can pursue them - forming loose but important social networks. Knowing that your teacher or your 'friend' across the world is sick - you might extend yourself in a way that has became impossible without knowing this information.
Dunbar an anthropologist is famous for saying that 150 is the top number of contacts humans can have and still know who they are. But this number is increasing - sort of. The number of loose ties is increasing but your closest friends does not necessarily change. This helps people solve problems - I know this personally I needed to get to an appointment and my phone was dead as well as my car. I changed my facebook status to need a ride ASAP - within 30 seconds I was instant messaged by a former member of the debate team and given a ride to my appointment. These connections are making clear the potential of joining with social networks to get things done - while the most successful have always known this - it is becoming undeniable in the internet age. Everyone is only 6 clicks, 6 friends, 6 twitters away from you.
But not all is cheery - while increased loose networks can help solve problems it can also cause a loss of intimate relationships - due to 'parasocial' relationships. We become more involved in fictional TV Show characters or Celebrities than with people in our own lives. We get more tied into our weekly TV shows than our friends - but this is why the internet to me offers exciting possibilities that TV did not. TV was not interactive - it was harder to 'be the media' but now its all a click away - if we engage our creativity we can form networks of our own that encourage creativity and the causes we care about.
So it appears we are not entering an unknown world where we know everyone's business but instead returning to small town lifestyle - you cant hide anything - and that might not be so bad. We are going to have to start caring about people for who they truly are - who we all truly are. A little bad, A little good, A lot of human - The constant updating - CyborgDeva is tying her shoes, doing her homework, walking through a door way is what Thompson refers to as a highly philosophical questioning. I am reminded of practices taught in a book about the 1970's Shaman/Cultural Guru/Lucid Dreamer Carlos Castenada that said one practice to become awake in life - and in dreams was to write down what you thought every time you walked through a door way. This causes a sense of realizing what you are doing - not just walking through life on robotic autopilot but really wondering- what am I doing?
For all the cynics out there I strongly reccomend you read this article - it raised some important questions for me, and as the article implies - perhaps what we are realizing in the increased anonymity of the internet is not a loss of identity but a much stronger self-awareness.

Methods Post-Human Anthropology

Whitehead, Neil. (2009) "Post-Human Anthropology" Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 16: 1-32

This article explores performance ethnographic work that Neil Whitehead did while studying the Goth Industrial music scene and cyber space.
Whitehead addresses the sexualized nature of violence, a difficult topic for the average scholar or everyday American to deal with. Whitehead writes that, "violence is always more than its material appearance, that part of the instrumentality of violence coudl be its endemic and persistent affects on imagination and subjectivity" (Whithead p. 2). Within the virtual world's disembodied communication space the possibility to engage socially taboo forms of sex and violence become possible and suggests that sexual experience is seperated from the physical experience. Think of the massive amounts of online pornography or virtual sex within communities such as Second Life.

Whitehead explains the expression of sexuality and violence from a psychoanalytic perspective - the internet blurs our notions of reality and fantasy, violating the structures of reality and thus may be what Freud entitles, "uncanny". Lacan refigured desire in relation to lack and desire. But these perspectives do not speak to production within a pomo world - and over focus on lack denys the larger networks and societies ---so we must understand desire a bit differently.

Understanding desire requires a larger understanding of the cultural world of cyberspace and Whitehead draws on Deleuze and Guattari's (1983) idea of desire as "being productive rather than imaginary ("not theatre but a factory") and about the "desiring machines" which we become as a result of these productive and socially situated desires" (Whitehead p. 3)

Whitehead formed a group Blood Jewel that had 50,000 hits on YouTube before being deleted for profanity. For his ethnography Blood Jewel was on myspace, LiveJOurnal, Vampirefreaks, LiveVideo, FaceBook, and HateBook. Whitehead entered the field he was studying, "in order to understand desire we must become desiring subjects ourselves." (Whitehead p. 5).
In order to account for a silence about violence and sexuality within anthropology Whitehead calls to changes in methodology that leaves behind participant observation in order to also participate in a study. Methods of ethnography that fail to pay attention to the ethnographers participation in the culture they study have led to repression of sexuality and violence, as he writes:
"reinforce a status quo in which Western observers are invited to perpetually colonize the bodies and imaginations of others, resulting in an 'ethnopornography'" (Whitehead p. 6)
His performative ethnography undoes the binaries subject/object, vistor/visted to question the ethnographic method itself and theorize the desire of an ethnography which leads to a certain perspective about the world.
His work embraced mixing audio/visual/video expression in order to help students understand the ways in whihc Western modes of violence and sex are a fetish. Embracing artistic mediums was a way for Whithead to mix creativity and critical learning.
"Artistically fetishized sexuality is represented as a medium for self-empowerment and an erotic response to the threatening and potentially toxic nature of off=line sexual encounter, escpecially for women...the major portion of our active fan base is women" (Whitehead p. 11)
My research on Suicide Girls found similar results, unlike Playboy, Suicide Girls an alternative erotica page that featured myspace like profiles of its members featured women who performed their sexuality through tattoos piercings etc. and their membership features more women than sites such as Playboy.
"The Blood Jewel project is focused on not so much sexual fluidity in gender terms as how gender imaginaries generate erotics, and particularly a gender imaginary which is heterogeneous rather than homogeonous. In othe rwords, the power and erotic dynamic of sexual othering using ideas of gender." The site used sexually provocative images of female bodies, he claims this is not a philosophical or scientific choice - I take problems with his justificaiton as beign inable to deal with male bodies because it is not avaible as an object of contemplation. But I greatly appreciate his attempt to theorize the desire of his subject of study - and his honesty about how scholarly projects choice of subject is never sceintific rather "iti is subjective and a prgmatic reflection of who with, and where, we feel we can achieve a given intellectual purpose" (Whitehead p. 20)
Whitehead explores the construction of fluid identity within Amazonia as challenging post-humanism for tow reasons.
1-Amazonian ways of understanding the world and self explore the blurring between human and animal which the West has recently turned to - extending the rights of humans onto animals
2-Amazonian understandings of the human as distinct has not always existed, and dehumanization has been a political goal such as during colinization saying Indians were not humans.
The englightenment created a rational world view which created a collective humanity laying the groundwork for modernist world view. This world view is focused around an empirical epistimology and sees the self as a Cartesian subject who knows and then acts upon the world. Thus he asks if the post-human is around the corner. As we become technological subjects and disembodied through cyber relationships.
"The post-human condition then is a reconfiguration, rather than erasure, of embodiment; however it is a reconfiguration in which the human subject emerges episodically, almost as a cipher for a form of subjectivity rather than functioning as the boundary of, or necessary condition for, the experience of being human. One of the most dynamic cultural fields for this unfolding process is cyber-space." (Whitehead 24)

---What it appears is needed now as we enter a post-human stage is "enscapulation of the human spark" ----What is the spark that can realize our desires in order to understand and positively use them to engage in creating a post-human future where the individual is an active creator? I see his project as well as ours as taking something that is deemed 'bad' by a superficial glance through engaging the medium - YouTube - Blogs- Etc. In order to write about the process of realizing our own desire, our desire to create something new - something positive -something empowering - this requires both production and realization of our own desires.



Performative Ethnography - moving the method from "discreet" performance Whitehead is addressing the idea of ethnography as cultural tourism.

Some Quotes That Have Made Me Think

Definition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop Cey Adams with Bill Adler
"Like the Dadaist and the Surrealists, the pure writer is one who pushes the envelope, breaks the rules a little bit. and, in the process is a thorn in the side of the status quo and conformity-a necessary role in a democratic society where those in power are known to consistently flout the rules themselves. Like any other artist, the writer makes art because he or she has to. Guided by a streak of good old-fashioned anti-authoritarian ambition and driven by an urge to be heard, these writers their art in their souls. As graf king Lee Quinones has said, "graffiti is an art and if art is a crime, let God forgive all.' In order to keep up with the increasing mitilarizaiton of civic police, today's rebels have retained the graf pioneer's sense of guerilla tactics and elaborate planning."

I have started reading Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in The Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
"The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological - and of course not only technological - reproduction"(Benjamin 21)

I am interested in revealing the frames of video editing - the possibilities - the ability to cut to show layers so that the corporate techniques of flattening of adhering to a certain static image can be undermined - Benjamin talking about film says "The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus" (37) ---Those who create the film - such as fake youtube blogging - advertisments that create themselves as memes - working in the service of $ and Control - work to soothe the rupture b/t film and life - but I want to speak about the tools necessary to create - the ability to see through the forest - our eyes have been trained through the tube in our living room, now our vision jumps to a hyper connected medium - and we feel an illusion of true connection - which may be real. But it may be a lie and the only way to see through it is to see the tools necessary to speak to create to film etc. How can we unveil the YouTube inorder to envision a future - to create to refuse the silence of the Eye we believe is always watching us. The Eye that we are investing so much in. Why not unveil the I and then?!?! Instead of passivly watching the image we should go out and activly engage the image - How do we awake within the dream world? How do we awake within the Net?