<div dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,sans-serif">Hi all: </span><br style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,sans-serif"><br></span><div>
<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,sans-serif">I wanted to draw your attention to an American Studies panel review that Dan Greene, from the University of Maryland, was kind enough to write up for those of us who couldn't attend the conference. The panel included work from Dan on Internet entrepreneurs, Laura Porterwood Stacer on media refusal and striking in the social factory, Anne Cong-Huyen on Voces Moviles and day laborers, and Lisa Nakamura on Antiviral Media. </span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,sans-serif">Tara McPherson responded, raising a question that may be of interest to those on this list: W</span><font color="#000000" style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:21.81818199157715px">hy Marxist feminism in media studies and why now?</span> The review is posted below. </font></div>
<div><font color="#000000" face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,sans-serif">-- Karen </span><br></div><div><div><div><br></div><div>******</div><div><font color="#000000" face="arial, sans-serif"><br>
</font></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal">Panel Review: Identity Work and Identity Play Online</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Last Sunday, I was lucky to be able to convene a panel with
my colleagues Laura Portwood-Stacer (NYU), Lisa Nakamura (University of
Michigan), Anne Cong-Huyen (UCLA), and Tara McPherson (USC) at the American
Studies Association in D.C. that was intended to act as a retrospective on
digital cultural studies and a conversation about its future. The plan was to
give quick 10 minute talks on current research, and then have Tara respond to
them and moderate the discussion. After everything wrapped up—with a packed
room on a Sunday, thanks all!—I confessed to the panel that my thinking in
bringing everyone together was basically “These are good, critical people who
both stand out in the field and know how it works, they'll have keen
observations on the politics of digital communications and and the politics of
studying them—we all get along and something good will come out of that.” But I
was delighted to see a more focused debate emerge, alongside a series of questions
we felt we needed to keep asking: What counts as work and how far can you get
by telling someone that their play is work? What gets described as a feature of
the social Web and what gets described as a bug? Why are pervasive atmospheres
of racism or sexism written off as 'trolling'? How do we move beyond tired
debates of exploitation versus empowerment? Is it ever worth talking about one
'internet'? </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Karen Gregory was kind enough to offer me (<a href="https://twitter.com/Greene_DM"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">@greene_dm</span></a>) this platform to share our
conversation with a broader audience. Below I'm going to quickly summarize each
of our talks and some of McPherson's responses to them before commenting on
some of the themes that emerged from our roundtable discussion. The latter
includes both the questions above and interventions specific to the field such
as a return to Marxist feminists such as Selma James and Silvia Federici, and a
turn, prompted by Nakamura's talk on race and virality and McPherson's coinage
of the phrase, to a 'critical platform studies' that moves us from media
archeology’s focus on the thing itself to the social infrastructure that makes
the thing work or not work in different political and cultural contexts. Please
also take a look at the original <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JwsDmJr0CN177L9ghgUlLvMpu_UCgvJPB5KITJky6vU/edit"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">abstracts</span></a>
for the panel and our talks, as well as Jack Gieseking's <a href="http://jgieseking.org/reflecting-on-identity-work-and-identity-play-online-2013asa/"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">Storify</span></a>
of the Twitter backchannel. Let's keep talking. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="docs-internal-guid-161c6383-af47-f46c-be"></a><b><i><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Access to Self
and City: Internet Entrepreneurs and the Politics of Presentation and Space</span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I'm involved in long-term fieldwork with different
communities in different positions in Washington, D.C.'s <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/12/is-washington-broken-not-for-the-citys-exploding-startup-scene/"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">booming</span></a>
information economy. D.C.'s
municipal government, like so many other cash-strapped cities, has embraced a
version of Richard Florida's 'creative class' policy which pins our economic
future on recruiting and maintaining creative class workers—especially the tech
entrepreneurs that are the favored sons and daughter of the present
moment—through place-making projects that focus on friendly forms of diversity
and lifestyle amenities. Working with tech entrepreneurs who design and
produce, but also work on and through, various social media platforms, I have
been struck by how the production of social media spaces neatly parallels the
production of gentrified city spaces through creative class policy. Twitter,
Facebook and FourSquare may gentrify our self-presentation in a manner similar
to how cities are gentrified by creative class policies, creative workers, and
real estate investment designed to capitalize on them. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tech entrepreneurs often use social media to erase the line
between work and play so that every interaction is a potential networking
opportunity. Formerly private information is made public in the name of
authenticity; though some information, such as political or religious beliefs,
is scrubbed in the name of more seamless sharing. This information—where you
are, when, with whom—is both a useful interpersonal wedge in business
negotiations and the raw material of the data economy. But these social norms
end up alienating those who cannot or will not lifestream—including one of my
participants who is a new mother. Gentrification of city spaces does not only
replace housing stock and push low-income residents out, it is also an uneven
process that filters attention to specific high-status areas (i.e., D.C.'s
venture capital, condo-building, and restaurant opening booms all overlap in
the same 20005 zip code) just as social media creates 'filter bubbles.' And just as lifestyle amenities (parks,
restaurants, clubs) are the chief place-making recruitment tools of creative
class policy, so too are they the chief check-in points for location based
social media, and the backgrounds for the most shareable group photos. Why do
these overlaps exist? At this early stage, I hazard a guess that both social
media and gentrification act as <a href="http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2008/2436/pdf/gr2_01_Ess02.pdf"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">'spatial
fixes'</span></a> for desperate capital: social media outsources value
production to previously uncapitalized areas of everyday life and provides a
profit-making opportunity via speculation in unprofitable companies; while
gentrification of downtown D.C. kicked off during the recession, when other
real estate markets were tanking, and already shows signs of a potential
speculative bubble not unlike that in social media companies. So it looks like
creative class policy, and the cultural and financial hype over creative workers,
may actually be a symptom of capitalist crisis (the addict's search for a
'fix') rather than a bulwark against it. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="docs-internal-guid-161c6383-af6a-0d36-1d"></a><b><i><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">The Work of
Social Media Refusal: Thoughts on Labor, Productivity, and Identity among
Facebook Resisters</span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Laura Portwood-Stacer (<a href="https://twitter.com/lportwoodstacer"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">@lportwoodstacer</span></a>) just
published a <a href="http://www.lauraportwoodstacer.com/publications/lpra/"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">book</span></a>
on lifestyle activism in anarchist communities and continues that vein of research
in her current work on the refusal of social media sites like Facebook—asking
whether the choice to stop Liking and checking-in can ever constitute a
collective politics or whether it's just the 2010s version of “Oh, I don't own
a TV.” Many of her participants, and the various anti-Facebook manifestoes that
have emerged from these protestors, readily identify the alienation and
exploitation on which Facebook's business model is based. They complain of
their time being colonized, their every interaction being commodified by a
company whose processes and profits are not shared with its billion-strong user
workforce, their conversations and emotions being translated into sterile Likes
and shares. But what happens next? Facebook refusers often want to quit so that
they can focus on real, important, waged work. Or they use the act of quitting
as a status symbol; a case of bourgeois refinement framed against the social
excesses of Facebook zombies, often framed in feminized terms of too much
flirting and baby pics. As McPherson noted, Portwood-Stacer is here less
concerned with whether refusal <i>works</i>—whether it functions as a strike
that threatens Facebook—and more concerned with what work refusal <i>does </i>for
refusers. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Portwood-Stacer thus theorized a question with which we were
all concerned in one form or another: What does it mean to strike from the
social factory? And is 'strike' even the right way to think about the
relationship between society and value today? She wants us to think past
notions of consent and exploitation—after all, we all consent to our EULAs and
most refusers acknowledge exploitation but opt out of it instead of rally
against it—and ask what free labor feels like, and what it means to tell users
they are laborers. She looks towards the historic wages for housework campaigns
as a useful corollary. Getting paid for housework was only ever one goal of
those campaigns. The real thrust was to show that value is only ever produced
via uneven social relations, that corporate profits would not exist without
unwaged labor. This is what Kathi Weeks calls <a href="http://libcom.org/library/problem-work-kathi-weeks"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">the utopian
demand</span></a>: Not just a request for a policy change, but a call to rally
around particular social perspective, the distance between this world and
another possible one. In this perspective, social media is just the latest
development in capitalism's exploitation of free labor (we could also think
about the control of native traditions or our very genes through intellectual
property) and the recognition of that relationship is just as important as any
call for better privacy, more consent, or pay for free labor. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><font color="#000000"><span style="font-family:Arial">Voces Móviles and the
Precarity of Work in Online/Offline Spaces</span> </font></i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><font color="#000000"><br></font></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Anne
Cong-Huyen (<a href="https://twitter.com/anitaconchita"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">@anitaconchita</span></a>), an important voice in the <a href="http://transformdh.org/"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">#transformDH</span></a> collective, presented a piece
of her dissertation research, which focuses on close readings of technological
precarity. Here she <a href="http://anitaconchita.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/2013asa-and-voces-moviles-and-the-precarity-of-work-in-onlineoffline-spaces/"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">walked us through</span></a> the <span style="color:rgb(64,64,64)">Voces Móviles </span>online
storytelling project and work space, which allows migrant day laborers, called
'reporters' on the site, in and around Los Angeles to share life histories,
working conditions, and photographs. Many are anonymous, some are linked into
ongoing narratives, but all work against the sanitized images of Southern
California as either sunny paradise or fast-moving media mecca; images which
erase the blood and sweat that goes into maintaining those lawns, pools, and
offices. Indeed, the creative class lifestyles and consumption-oriented
gentrification I reviewed in my presentation would not be possible without the
human infrastructure which <span style="color:rgb(64,64,64)">Voces Móviles makes
visible. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(64,64,64)">In a political climate where day laborers are painted in broad
strokes as at best disposable workers and at worst social leeches, Voces
Móviles emphasizes the diversity of these communities: their different skills
and work environments, different ethnic and national backgrounds, and different
struggles with the naturalization process. Indeed this variation emerges in the
design of the site, where outsiders struggle to tie the different images,
voices, and stories together into coherent narratives. There are thousands of
posts, over 660 pages. This work required of the reader reminds them not only
of the invisible work of the day laborers but the additional work they take on
in order to tell their stories—and forces us to distinguish between different
kinds of work and the value placed on each. Again, as with Portwood-Stacer, we
see parallels between traditional analyses of social reproduction and newer
critiques of free labor online. Voces Móviles also forces us to recognize that
the seemingly ephemeral nature of any information economy is always rooted in
the material: devices and their construction, service work catering to
creatives, but also the time it takes for a body to get off a ladder, take out
their phone, snap a picture, and get back to work. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><span style="font-family:Arial;color:rgb(41,47,51)">Antiviral
Media: The Market for Primitive Africa in Internet Vigilante Trophy Websites.</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family:Arial"></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Finally,
Lisa Nakamura (<a href="https://twitter.com/lnakamur"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">@lnakmur</span></a>) closed the presentations by using the culture of <a href="http://www.419eater.com/"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">419eater</span></a>—a site which documents the
various humiliations <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_scam"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">African internet scammers</span></a> are subjected to by Western
internet users—and other digital pillories to intervene in two debates: media
archaeology and the marketing-oriented conversation over 'spreadable media.'
For Henry Jenkins et al, memes that don't spread are dead. But Nakamura wants
us to remember that memes don't appear out of thin air, that hate spreads as
quickly as laughter and is always culturally bound (e.g., lynching postcards
and the Abu Gharib photos could be read as cultural ancestors of the scam
baiters), and that some memes deserve to die—we just don't know how to kill
them. So now we have a series of ethical questions: Why share? Why is it better
to spread? And what makes something 'spreadable' besides technical features
that make it easy to send and receive? This is another moment where we're
reminded that what is often labelled as an invasion of the social web—the
racism and sexism written off as 'trolling'—has been there since the beginning;
that the colonial relationships re-enacted by the scambaiters are features, not
bugs, of global internet cultures. Decolonizing the internet is thus partly
about building alternatives to current social spaces. <span style="color:rgb(64,64,64)">Voces
Móviles is one example, but so too </span><a href="http://www.criticalcommons.org/"><span style="color:rgb(64,64,64);text-decoration:none">Critical Commons</span></a><span style="color:rgb(64,64,64)">, </span><a href="http://vojo.co/examples"><span style="color:rgb(64,64,64);text-decoration:none">Vojo</span></a><span style="color:rgb(64,64,64)">, and </span><a href="http://www.mukurtuarchive.org/"><span style="color:rgb(64,64,64);text-decoration:none">Mukurtu</span></a><span style="color:rgb(64,64,64)">. </span> But this is also a critical project that asks us not
necessarily to jump to build another tool but to sit and reflect on how we got
where we are. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Similarly,
Nakamura critiqued the formalist, Kittlerian media archeology tradition for
searching for this or that previously unseen or unknown innovation, the heroic
recovery of glitches and roads-not-taken by 'digital ghostbusters.' This
archaeological urge to excavate and exhibit is a close relative to the abject
spectacle of 419eater—where technological backwardness is found, displayed, and
made viral—or memes of feminine vulnerability. Here Nakamura is not uncovering
some hidden racist agenda in media archaeology or fan studies, but sketching an
alternative project that doesn't separate container from contents and asks
after the labor, racialized and otherwise, of spreadable spectacle. This
'digital archaeology' would track genealogies of racism and sexism that otherwise
seem to just appear from thin air and go viral in different media. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><span style="font-family:Arial">Response and
Discussion </span></i></b><b><span style="font-family:Arial"></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I've
integrated some of McPherson's (<a href="https://twitter.com/tmcphers"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">@tmcphers</span></a>) comments on specific papers into the preceding discussion,
but want to sketch out two more themes that emerged from her closing remarks
and the discussion that followed. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">First,
why Marxist feminism in media studies and why now? This was a largely unplanned
collective turn that we and our audience found ourselves making together—though
it is a turn signaled by work like Weeks' and a possible renaissance of Marxian
political economy across disciplines dominated by poststructuralism in recent
decades. Marxist feminism seems better able to cope with the messy materials of
everyday technologies than poststructural approaches. Within James, Federici,
Dalla Costa and others, we find an intimate understanding of how value is
socially produced by marking certain spaces and activities as more or less
socially necessary; a keen attention to the collective politics around
individual questions of what counts as an act of work, love, or play; and a
general attention to the <a href="http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">feminization of work and poverty</span></a> in the current era. They help
us ask better questions about who is building our machines and why, whether
refusal is consumer democracy or free labor strike, and how the free labor
critique can become more politically mobilizing. On that last point, Marxist
feminism helps chart a third way between 'spreadable media' critiques of social
media as empowering (which ignores political-economic relations) and <a href="http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/13/2/139.abstract"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration:none">more
traditional Marxist critiques</span></a>
of social media as exploitative, alienating labor (which ignores what people
actually do online and why they keep doing it). </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Second,
how do we balance the critique of the platform with that of the social
relations in which it is enmeshed? This is an open question. The Californian
ideology that dominates our common sense of what information technology is and
what it does stresses spreadability but also transparency. But sometimes small
is good, growth is dangerous, and the DIY imperfect is more powerful than the
smooth and shareable. We can see this with <span style="color:rgb(64,64,64)">Voces
Móviles and similar projects which showcase the messy processes of democratic
technologies, but also puncture the fantasy that the commons, technological,
intellectual, or otherwise, are every truly open. The free and open commons is,
if not a myth, then a “limit case”, for McPherson. And any critical platform
studies that we build together must read, analyze, and make with actually
existing politics of technological use and abuse in mind, and with an eye to
other possible technological worlds—even if they're only temporary spaces of
refusal, privacy, or play. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This review was originally posted on the Digital Labor Working Group blog: <a href="http://digitallabor.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2013/12/02/panel-review-identity-work-and-identity-play-online/">http://digitallabor.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2013/12/02/panel-review-identity-work-and-identity-play-online/</a></p>
</div><div><font color="#000000" face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font><div><div><br></div>-- <br>Karen Gregory<br>PhD candidate<br>Department of Sociology<br>
The Graduate Center<br>City University of New York
</div></div></div></div></div>