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.

But there is a big difference between individuals cooperating with law enforcement — carefully, thoughtfully and with discretion, to reflect the presumption of innocence — and an online mob that has taken the job of law enforcement into its own hands. A Facebook page is gathering pictures and comments from thousands of people who are offering to help identify riot participants. A Tumblr site is crowdsourcing the creation of a Vancouver 2011 Riot Criminal List. And now Premier Christy Clark is going beyond a simple request to share pictures with police, and suggesting that people do so publicly

Instant Messaging: ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat

Video Chatting: Skype

Social Networking Sites: Facebook, MySpace, Diaspora, Ning, DList

Location-Based Services: Gowalla, FourSquare, Google Latitude

Events: Meetup.com, Evite

Reading Sites: Goodreads, Amazon.com

Social Bookmarking Sites: Delicious, Diigo, Google Reader

Dating or Hookup Services: Match.com, Adult Friend Finder, Manhunt, Gay.com, Adam4Adam, Grindr (iPhone app), Recon, SKOUT, theXchange, Loopt Mix

Music Sites: Last.fm

Video Sites: YouTube

Photo Services: Flickr, Google Picassa, TwitPic, Instragram, Plixi, Photobucket

Blogging Platforms: Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox

Microblogging: Twitter, Google Buzz

Document Management and Sharing: SugarSync, Dropbox, Google Docs

Presentation sharing: SlideShare, Scribd

Virtual Worlds: Second Life

This list ignores the various applications and devices used to access these services. For instance, I’ve access Twitter via their website, their desktop application, their iPhone and iPad apps, Brizzly’s website and iPhone app, and other iPhone apps like TweetDeck, Twitterific, Tweetcaster, and Echofon.

Note: This account is university-owned and thus not private and may be solicited by anyone via the Freedom of Information Act, as I am a public employee. Matters of a personal or political nature should be sent to my gmail account: [Email]

I’ll admit to not being entirely certain if this is necessary, but perhaps it’s just better to remind myself and others that personal communication is better on a non-university account.

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

In Information Please, Mark Poster asks how information works differently when it is mediated through digital machines, arguing that much cultural theory has ignored the importance of specific media in understanding subjectivity, relations among people, and culture (4). He begins with the basic contention “that information increasingly appears in complex couplings of humans and machines” (9). One important aspect of this coupling for Poster is a “new hermeneutic, one that underscores the agency of the media,” meaning that we can no longer posit a simple subject/object dichotomy that sees subjects as fundamentally different and separate from objects (10).

Through his discussions of various schools of thought, including postcolonialism, Hardt and Negri’s theory of empire, theories of identity, postmodernism, and media theory, Poster argues that these theories, while informative and helpful, often fail to take into account the specifics of media, especially digital media, in their theorization. He argues that digital public spheres “constructs the subject through the specificity of its medium in a way different from oral or written or broadcast models of self constitution” (41). Digital media constructs users as producers, “who are present only through their textual, aural, and visual uploads” (41, 195-196).

He argues that digital technologies are “not prosthesis, not a mechanic addition to an already complete human being, but an intimate mixing of humans and machine that constitutes an interface outside the subject-object binary” (48). The self becomes embedded in various digital databases, which disrupts our understanding of identity as consciousness (92); information about oneself is exteriorized (100), and so “Digital networks thus extend the domain of insecurity to objects that had previously been relatively safe” (101). Identity thus can no longer be understood as consciousness: “Identity is thus a double operation of material trace and consciousness bound together in a configuration that solidifies the figure of identity” (112).

Poster also argues that perhaps we need to reconfigure ethics for digital media, because we are uprooted from local communities, come into contact with a wider array of human behavior, and disrupts the public/private distinction so that we encounter things that we’d prefer to think of as “evil” but would rather not encounter and just let be (149). Additionally, the ease of just removing yourself from a digital encounter raises ethical questions, and Poster posits that perhaps “virtual ethics entail a different, perhaps more demanding, type of obligation. The moral imperative might be ‘act so that you will continue to maintain the identities you have constructed in relation with others’” (153).

He argues that “The screen is thus a liminal object, an interface between the human and the machine that invites penetration of each by the other” (175).

I particularly enjoyed Poster’s discussion of how images travel and move in planetary ways online, how “identity theft” is a recent development, and other developments he discusses.

Poster, Mark. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.



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