Recently, a colleague posted this image on Facebook:

A student had sent him a .jpg image file of this cat saying “Meh” and changed the file extension to .docx so that the teacher would think it was a corrupted .docx file, which would earn the student more time to finish the assignment. Luckily, my colleague had friends who could explain why his computer treated this .docx file like this. Evidently, as someone explained in their comment on the image, this tactic was featured on Reddit a few weeks prior. And other tactics exist, like corrupting a .docx file. But when students learn about these practices in online forums, so do teachers (see the last link, there’s some teachers thanking them for having this post). And with social networking sites where it’s easy to ask questions and crowdsource answers, even those teachers who don’t know about these tactics can quickly and easily learn from each other.

There’s some limitations to their system, of course (like, what if my clothes are from Goodwill, not the Gap?), but you wind up with a result that estimates your Slavery Footprint. Here’s an image of mine:

The website tells me that this is largely because of my clothes, and to a lesser degree my body wash. I imagine that if the technology questions were more nuanced, that my estimate would be higher. I scored 40, and thus far, the average user is at 24. Yikes!

This is a pretty cool site for raising awareness, but I wonder if that awareness leads to any changed behavior. It probably won’t for me (and I’m someone who used to refuse to shop at places that I knew supported child labor or poor wages), and the “Take Action” focuses mostly on sharing the information via social networking sites, downloading an app, and earning “Free World” points by sending notes to companies through an app.

Recent example, which I wouldn’t know about except I follow @DJKidAV (great DJ at Indigo here in town) on Twitter. Remix Report posts that some sites that are quite useful to DJs are being taken down, possibly because of a deal the RIAA and MPAA are making with ISP providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. Additionally, the ad agency GroupM has created a 45-page “blacklist” of sites that it forbids companies from advertising on. (GroupM services many record labels.) I like DJKidAV’s video response he made tonight:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1O3sGgRYQ0

This on top of Congress considering the PROTECT IP Act, which would allow the government to force IP providers to block access to sites that have been accused of copyright violations. Eek.

We read work by Charles Morris III, Chris Castiglia, and Chris Reed this term about queer memory: all three authors brought up the incessant cultural attacks on gay and queer collective memory. Morris, in his discussion of rhetorical responses to claims that Lincoln was gay, outlines the “mnemonocide” influeced by homosexual panic of historians. Castiglia and Reed, in discussing the memory work of Will and Grace mention the virulent attacks on gay memory, including the prevention of education on queer history in school, the objections to designations of gay neighborhoods, the ways mainstream presses stress generational differences among gays, the focus in mainstream press on martyrs like Harvey Milk (at the expense of other aspects of gay history), and calls for breaks from the past. Castiglia especially explores this call for a break from the past in his discussion of how queers remember the 70s, explaining how collective memories influence our sexual consciousness and how “willed amnesia” toward the past might be harmful for creating new ways of relating to each other.

My students, who have little knowledge of queer history (this isn’t a history course, though at times I wish I had included more historical work to build up a deeper, complex shared history), were disturbed by the attacks on gay history. One of them expressed that “our history is broken.” And then we had the wonderful question in class: What can we do? We had a fairly good conversation for the rest of class about different things that students here at Penn State could do, and about what larger culture could do.

As we discussed, I couldn’t remember the exact year that Matthew Shepherd was murdered. I didn’t really think it mattered in the moment, but a student looked it up on his cell phone, which I applaud. But then a student made the observation: with the Internet, where we can look everything up in a second, do we need to discuss history? Can’t we just look it up?

I was disturbed by this reduction of history and memory work to mere information and facts, and I countered that memory is used and deployed and shared, not just information. Memory is about the stories we share to build collective identities, collective potentials and futures, and a shared sense of selves. This might be possible in Internet forums, but not if we view history as just information.

The other situation came a week or two later, as we discussed Michael Warner’s work and his explanation of the attack by NYC zoning laws, health codes, mainstream gays, and others who want to clean up public spaces, making sex publics harder to access through isolating themselves from each other, making the harder to find, and closing places down. This makes not only information about sex harder to find, but also has the added effect of destroying other public venues: when queers go somewhere for sex or information about sex, eventually a quantitative change leads to a qualitative change: other people come to the public place as well, and a vibrant public with many different types of people can share a space and interact with each other.

A few of my students were disturbed by this but quickly expressed gay Internet hope: If I can get porn, learn about sex, and find sex toys online, do we really need these sex publics in physical spaces? Which misses the point that Warner makes that this is not just about sex, but about queer world building.

Clearly, if you know me, I’m a huge fan of the Internet, but I’m concerned about how it is viewed and used at this point: language like “information technologies,” the “information superhighway,” etc. have the effect of making the Internet a sort of place where information is retrieved, not where people congregate to create worlds. I am doubtful that the Internet offers the type of forum that allows for the type of memory work and queer world building that public more physical spaces might, though I do believe those potentials exist in some ways online. Mostly, I’m concerned about a larger issue: the reduction of culture, memory, and shared experiences to information and information access. We don’t have to know because we can find out; History is information, not shared experience; My sexual interests are private and can be explored through a screen, rather than worthy of being explored and shared in public spaces.

Not that this is a “gay” problem, but rather speaks to larger cultural logics. My concern here in this post is particularly about queer culture building and queer memory work, but could easily be expanded to incorporate a larger concern I am developing about our “culture” as a whole: the reduction of lived and shared experiences to information and information retrieval.

h/t the blogora

Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect is a journalistic approach to the development and changes in Facebook as a platform and company since its inception. The book is easy and fairly quick to read, and chock full of details. At times, I think it was a bit too heavy on advertising approaches and financial issues, but overall, it was enjoyable. The book also serves as a nice counterpart to the dramatized The Social Network, and provides some factual accounts that the movie glosses over, dramatizes, or changes for filmic and dramatic effect.

Kirkpatrick spends a chapter chronicling the beginning of Facebook, from Zuckerberg’s Facemash (23-24) to the development of Thefacebook at Harvard, which he notes was “from the beginning driven by the hormones of young adults” with the ability to mark what one was “Looking for” and “interested in” (32). Later chapters place Facebook in the context of other social networks at the time, explore how they got investors and advertisers, changes in the platform and reactions to those changes, the move from Harvard to California, and other issues and experiences.

One of the issues that Kirkpatrick discusses is privacy, and the constantly shifting privacy policies and new privacy issues that Facebook constantly dealt with as they rolled out new features. Part of the reason people trust Facebook, Kirkpatrick claims, is that the platform relies on and requires a real identity. He quotes Chris Kelly, who heads privacy at Facebook: “Trust on the Internet depends on having identity fixed and known” (13). Zuckerberg also believes that to have multiple identities shows “al lack of integrity,” and that the world is becoming more transparent, so it’s pragmatic to have just one identity on a social networking site (198). Zuckerberg also attributes people’s willingness to be open and “real” on Thefacebook to the platform’s orderliness: unlike Myspace, which allowed users to do just about anything, Thefacebook was structured and ordered from the beginning (100). Kirkpatrick devotes an entire chapter on Privacy (Chapter 10).

With almost every new feature, Facebook was critiqued for harming privacy. For instance, the News Feed, which was developed to make content more easily accessible (because before, you had to go to users’ pages to see if they’ve updated), led to many feeling that Facebook was allowing for stalking. Facebook responded with new privacy features (188-194)

Facebook’s platform itself gets a lot of attention in the book. Zuckerberg had a vision of a platform where people would use it as they needed, and he understood Facebook as helping people “understand the world around them” and other people, not as a waste of time (143). He called Facebook “a utility,” attempting to get the platform out of the way so that people could just interact (144, 160). Aaron Sittig, a graphic designer who worked for Facebook, said, “We didn’t want people to have a relationship with Facebook so much as to find and interact with each other” (144-145).

This perspective is a bit ironic given how much they tried to create the “Facebook trance,” where people would just keep clicking through Facebook. In fact, the photos app that added was designed just for this: just by clicking a picture, not by clicking “next,” allowed users to fly through photos quickly and easily (154-155). However, it’s clear Facebook was about relationships, as the photos showed. Unlike Myspace, where photos were about self-presentation, on Facebook they are about showing relationships (156).

Zuckerberg seems to have a bit of a utopian perspective on Facebook, wanting to create a platform that could be the entire Internet experience. Also, interestingly, there’s a hope that Facebook could improve relations, that somehow getting more information about others “should create more empathy” (278) and that Facebook works as a gift economy (287-288).

Overall, this was an enjoyable and easy read.

Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.



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Other videos cover phishing and peer-to-peer filesharing.

Bruns’s Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond is a solid argument about how the Internet is changing the way we produce content. Bruns explains that content creation online “operate[s:] along lines which are fluid, flexible, heterarchical, and organized ad hoc as required by the ongoing process of development” (1). He argues that the term “production” is outmoded for much online content creation because it implies a final product, instead of an ongoing process of creation. He proposes that we understand content creation online as produsage to highlight how the roles of consumer and user are disappearing, replaced by a system where “the distinction between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance” (2). This change in creation processes is made possible by develops of the Internet as a media. Bruns specifically points to differences between the Internet and previous mass media: an increased access to the means of production and distribution, the ease of peer-to-peer communication, and the ability to share, manipulate, modify, and edit content (13-14).



Bruns outlines four principles of produsage that signify when it works best: 1) open participation and communal evaluation; 2) a fluid heterarchy that leads to an ad hoc meritocracy; 3) creation of unfinished artifacts through granular changes; and 4) the development of communal property that results in individual rewards (particularly social capital) (24-30).



After extended discussions of open software creation, citizen journalism on blogs, and wikipedia, Bruns turns to how “we [. . .:] identify, collate, process, evaluate, combine, and synthesize the diverse range of content now available to us from a variety of sources” (171). Bruns explores metadata — data collected about usage, information, and behavior, often through automation, or through links and tags (174, 178-179). The book is a rather extensive and detailed discussion of various aspects of online produsage. Worth a read (or a skim, at the very least — the book seems to get repetitive at points, but offers some useful insights).



A few quotes on new media and developing relationships: “The social, collaborative basis of the content creation communities engaged in produsage also indicates this: in produsage projects, the object of the communal effort is almost always as much the development of social structures to support and sustain the shared project as it is the development of that project itself” (23). “content creation is an act of maintenance and construction (of both content and the social relationships among participants) at least as much as it is one of production” (23).



Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang 2008.


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obviously, the timestamp is wrong, but otherwise, it looks pretty cool.