Space, Place, and Identity in the Digital Age

Discussion Prompts/Questions

• A question posed last class: What is a whole person? What does a whole person do? How do they communicate?
• What conclusions can be drawn strictly from footprinting data? And what does that tell us about connections with others and what does it leave out?
• Ito and Fischer deal with different methodologies to get at similar questions about the nuances of social interaction Fischer is only concerned with fiends that have direct relations with others while Ito is concerned with the creation of private space and alternate approaches to personal interaction facilitated by PCT. Can the Ito provide the electronic gadget Fischer laments about on pg 21?
• The notion of lack or absences seems to permeate all the readings. What is the relationship between connectivity and disconnection in terms of absence?
• Is it possible to talk about connectivity and dis-connectivity in terms of tactics and strategies of social engagement?

Are We Ever Alone?

1. Place: In Sherry Turkle’s, “always on”, she stated, “ A “place” use to compromise a physical space and the people within it. What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent?” (155-156). I think this brings me back to earlier discussions of a place requiring bodies.  From this quote we see places having bodies but these bodies are still not present. So for me place requires intentional connectivity but at the same time it can represent escape. Place provides comfort because you have created that place, or given meaning to it through the ways that you interact with that place.

Questions:

1. While reading Turkle’s chapter, I was intrigued by her discussion her discussion of relationships. What type of relationships are we creating? What do these relationships actually look like through our devices? How do they carry on into our daily lives? I think this brings us back to explore the relationship between the actual and virtual. The distinctions are helpful and require us to understand at what point do we completely cross over to the virtual? Is it a possibility that our relationship can remain completely in the actual or the virtual?
2. I also appreciated Turkle’s use of the word “pleasure” for describing our desires for technological connection.  I found this important because the devices we use to connect are often seen as negative. People are always questioning why someone would want to create another life or place to reside in virtually. I think pleasure allows us to understand some deeper dynamics of corporeality and more generally our lived experiences. Why are technological devices pleasurable? Is it just about creating a new self? Or does it allow people to be visible in places/spaces where they were once rendered invisible?
3. Is it possible to discuss the online realms we create that make us feel more like ourselves our subconscious? Is it possible that being technologically connected makes the subconscious tangible? Maybe through our creation of new places and the recreation of ourselves we are tapping into a subconscious that allows us to feel more like ourselves in the virtual?

Week 10: Alone-ness and Connection

1) I have very mixed feelings about Turkle’s article, perhaps because her argument itself is mixed. While overall I felt that her argument was one of doom and gloom around technologies effects, she also recognizes the benefits.  On one hand I have personally experienced the stress and anxiety that comes from the immediacy of being connected all the time and constantly receiving information.  I find myself compulsively checking email, or feeling as though I should always be getting work done.  (I think this is also the nature of grad student life–without regular hours there is a sense that one could/should always be working.)  I also multi-task, often to the detriment of my concentration.

As Turkle points out we then try to build un-connectedness into our lives.  I relish my 1.5 mile walk to campus for the 25 minute thinking space it gives me.  I can listen to music, but other than that, I am walking and thinking, nothing else.  (of course, regardless of the unconnected benefits, walking is good for my physical health.) So, there are downsides to this ever-connectedness.  However, technology–email, cell phones, computers–have allowed me to stay in touch with relatives and friends who I would not have been able to be in touch with in the same way.  Thus, for me at least, my answers to survey questions as in the Fischer article about being connected with relatives would def. depend on technology to do so, especially as most of my extended family lives in Europe.  I guess I see technology as something that needs to be balanced, but mostly is a benefit/augmentation to relationships and networks that I currently have.

2) One of the themes of these readings was connectedness and the idea of some types of connections and relations being better than others.  Kinship ties are assumed to be tighter than non-kin (Fischer) and surveys ask if people have someone to talk about”important matters” with, as though those relationships would automatically be more fulfilling than casual encounters with people.  In person is supposed to be better than online.  I wonder how we might think about a discussion around the ways in which people connect, the different needs that people have for relationships? Some people find socializing to be draining, others find it to be energizing.  Also, what does it mean that we have the concept that we are less-connected and lonelier, even though the Fischer article shows us that in general people are just as committed to their families, and have just shifted types of activities and have less children?

3) I liked the concepts of “cocooning,” “camping” and “footprinting,” particularly cocooning and the ways in which it can be used to create space within crowded space or protect against harassment.  I wonder about the implications for understanding private/public space.  I also am trying to think through the implications of cocooning as a response to violence and the ways in which this gives individuals power over space and the ability to move through space safely…but also does address the problems that they are avoiding in the first place—like street harassment.  In these public spaces, what about the response from others when someone is dealing with violence? How do we feel responsibility or not for others who are moving through space with us?

Side-Note:  In related technology news: here is an article about children in an ethiopian village learning how to use tablet PCs without any instruction.  I was reminded of it by Cassy’s comment on what “elite” and tech savvy means.

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

DEFINITIONS:

Space: The ways in which people interact and connect is different depending on the space–whether both individuals are physically present, or interacting online.  While spaces are becoming ever more connected through technology, this does not necessarily mean that people feel closer to each other.

cyborg life ::scoff::

1) Perhaps this is more of a small qualm with the methodology of Ito et al, but the diary, shadowing, interview method seems problematic. As we’ve seen how technologies like location based ones alter the way we interact with our surroundings, wouldn’t being followed or forced to be conscious of acts that have become inherently naturalized into our routines not truly be able to reflect how ‘savvy’ or the amount we use the technologies? Likewise, I’m concerned that the subject pool are ‘young professionals’ under the assumption that they would be more technically proficient? If anyone knows me, they know I can’t even work my iPhone..

2) Ito et al notes, “more and more of our articulation of personal and social relations to urban space is being delegated to different technologically embodies infrastructures, accessed with portable technologies of various kinds” (84). I wonder what these findings can be applied to? What is at stake when our identity becomes so intimately linked to various city infrastructures? These research conjectures don’t seem to imply that there is any implication of these findings, other than we should fear the possibility of ever-present surveillance that is mapping our identities.

3) I’m a little confused with Turkle. Maybe it’s because my book review book kind of speaks to this idea and refutes the social distinctions between ‘real’ and online, but her discussion of this bifurcated personality based on myth seems contradictory to studies that have been conducted. The notion of a “cyborg life” seems oddly dismissive of the kind of relationships/identity formations that can be forged in online spaces. I don’t know, it just seems kind of contradictory to everything we have discussed thus far, regarding space, physical vs digital, etc.

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Territory: a use of space that is comprised of material, symbolic, and imaginary concepts that work to define community, nationhood, citizenship and identity in multiple spatial formats

Week 10

1. This first question stems from a Facebook conversation between me, Alyssa, and Avery. Oh, the irony. In “Always On,” Turkle argues that pervasive computing and communication technologies are changing the way we live in the world, and not for the better. E-mail, Facebook, mobile phones, mp3 players, laptops, and the like are anxiety-provoking, experience-destroying, and beyond our control. As one who has acutely felt the anxiety of a Facebook conversation gone horribly wrong (you know, once you’ve said something on someone’s Wall, they disagree, and a string of back and forth ensues to the point where seeing that red little notification bubble makes you want to vomit), I am aware that this “problem” is not—cannot—be the only or the most important site of danger in the age of technology. One need only to turn to Giles Slade’s work on planned obsolescence or the film “Pyramids of Waste” to see that there is more to technology’s potential for harm than Turkle’s fear of hyperconnectedness and social anxiety. Why, then, does her argument carry so much weight? This might be a good moment to talk about transnational flows of material and information and the ways in which certain conversations about technology reflect global circuits of privilege and power.

1. Ito et al’s discussion of mobile media “kits” led me to a similar series of questions about power and class. The authors explain that they “focused on individuals transitioning into the workforce from study at elite universities, as they could be expected to be both technologically savvy and confronted with novel challenges, and thus potential early adopters and influencers” (69). Hold the (smart) phone. While these generalization undoubtedly have some truth to them, is there not space to discuss the particular class dimensions that make this demographic capable of being “savvy?” How does graduation from an “elite university” impact your use of these technologies and these modes of use?

1. Finally, I found myself thinking about the general deployment of the authentic in all of these readings, to some degree or another. What are authentic interactions, authentic experiences, and authentic relationships/social networks? This takes me back to our very early discussion on the distinction between “space” and “place” as it seems that much of the way we grant something authenticity revolves around the notion of shared physical place. The home, school, the workplace, the neighborhood, the grocery store are all recognizable as places, and coincidentally enough, these are also the places where interaction is deemed authentic. Online spaces are then formulated as just that, spaces in which the interaction is inauthentic and therefore lacking.

Definitions

Body: The physical/corporeal form which, in a complex process of internal and external discipline, is shaped to interact with that which is outside of it in a temporally, culturally, and socially specific manner. Not necessarily organic but often implied to be, especially in terms of authenticity and relationship-forming.

Place: A space whose specificity is connected not only to the bodies that occupy it, but also the ideas that are mapped onto it. Like body, it is implied to be somewhere physical in which interactions may take place and lay claim to some sort of authenticity.

P.S. Sorry all, I’ve been forgetting to tag these as Weekly Posts.

Discourses, analysis, and identity

1. Discourses: One of the things that I got from the readings this week is the way in which, through discourses, we refer to the phenomenon of connection and disconnection in the digital age. Being “tethered”, being “connected and disconnected”, living in a “network”, constructing “workspace encampments”, “creating a cocoon”, among others, are just some ways that have been used to explain the influence of the digital age in our daily lives. I am really fascinated by the way in which academia, the mass media, and people in general use the language to talk about technology and interpersonal relations. However, I think that such discursive strategies are not unified. Perhaps walking towards a dead end, but I wonder how linguistics and some of its working paradigms (pragmatics, (critical) discourse analysis) is able to analyze something like this:

“Share. Interact. Experience Smarter. The Galaxi S III is so advanced but so intuitive, it’s simple. With technology that makes it easier than ever to share your world -with your devices, with your friends or groups of people” [Online Advertisement of the Galaxi S III].

My background as a “linguist” makes me think that these discursive items are not only related to marketing strategies, but also appeal to the “new” experiences of human activity. It’s true, this is not related to space, but to the way we talk about technologies, but isn’t language a way to describe how we model and experience the world?… Does this make any sense?

2. Research on mobile activity and (inter)personal relations: I find the study carried out by Ito, Okabe & Anderson as a very important advance in the research of mobile devices, space, and temporality. Although, I don’t want to create a debate here about differences of social class or socio-cultural capital, I wonder what could we think of those people whose access to mobile media (or even movement in urban spaces) is limited. Let’s see…: Cocoons “involve a complex set of negotiations that take into account the presence of others in the vicinity, while also working to shut them out” (Ito et al., p. 74). So, there is an analysis of “what” users of devices do when creating their “own” space. But what about those that surround them and who lack of those means to change the sense of space? What type of analysis would we do here?

3. Multiplicity and identities: It seems that the way in which we interact with certain technologies does not only expand, constrain or multiply space, but also the identity(ies) of individuals. What are the implications of these “varieties” of identities in cultural studies? What does it mean to be part of a specific society where some cultural values are assumed to be shared, when these cultural values could be challenged when our identity changes in a virtual environment?

Connectivity and Worlding

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our embodied social practices or relationships with other bodies (including objects).

Place: those specific spaces or locations to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects), through embodied practices of power (biopolitics), and through practices of representation, visualization, and mapping; those spaces or locations that gain meaning through technologies of surveillance.

Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities; the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance; and the imagination of self in relation to virtual and actual others or communities.

Questions:

1. This week’s readings were frustrating to me in that, in attempting to grapple with the complex idea of “connection,” they all to some degree took relationships at face value, necessarily simplifying the many nuanced layers or levels of connection in order to isolate modes of relating across multiple scales of space and time, variously shaped by changes in mobile communication technologies. I found Ito, Okabe, and Anderson’s “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places” to be the most useful in that, rather than assuming the self-evidence of the overladen term “connection,” the authors instead pay attention to spatial practices, arguing after Susan Leigh Star that “it is crucial that infrastructure be examined from a social and cultural perspective, and that these embedded and often unnoticed structures represent some of the most pervasive and foundational scaffolds of everyday life” (71-72). By attending to the ways people interact with what they call “technosocial” spaces and places (72), they are able to avoid what I read as Turkle’s technological determinism, thereby allowing the agency of their participants to manifest in the construction of “mobile kits” as well in daily routine interfaces with infrastructure and uses of technology. I found this interesting from an ethnographic perspective, in contrast to Fischer’s approach. As scholars interested in identification and community formation, how might we come to an understanding of our participants’ social practices of emplacement and local, as well as virtual, meaning making? How do we account for the real effects of imagined connectivity?
2. Questions of authenticity, or at least the real and the artificial, depth and surface, seem to hover throughout these readings. Turkle seems invested in nostalgic, “pure” forms of communication, attention, and presence. Is there some way to reformulate these debates? For instance, Turkle suggests that we make ourselves absent through certain uses of technology in public spaces (255), implying that this “lack” or diversion of attention could be construed as rude. There are certainly occasions when I find this behavior rude, yet theoretically I am reluctant to agree that we are any less “really” connected because we can engage many virtual and actual relationships simultaneously. What can affect lend to this discussion? How do socially sedimented structures of feeling shape our interactions with technologies of connection and vice versa?
3. I find Fischer’s focus on personal networks compelling, if somewhat formulaic in this iteration. These chapters are useful to me in attempting to develop a language around social worlds and “worlding,” the processes by which we assemble social “life” around us through people, things, and events. I want the language of worlding to be able to account not only for how we access those connections or nodes in the network that are most immediate to us but also how such connections seem to bridge or even transcend disparate times and places, existing virtually or potentially. How do these notions of connection, space, and place help us define a world? What can be said to constitute a world, and is this even generalizable or is it specific to each person? How might the concept of “worlding” enable us to think the interconnectedness of people, places, and things?

Weekly Post 10

1: Putting aside the Turkle reading’s romanticism over communicative technologies (I honestly find the term “cyborg” a bit tiring in academia), I was very interested in the point raised via the man on the subway train. She claims that people seem to go out of their way “not to listen” to people on the phone in public, but I’ve observed the opposite effect, especially in situations where being on one’s phone is frowned upon. I think that her second notion, though – that the rest of the world becomes invisible to the individual using digital communication – is meritous and feeds back into ideas if disembodiment and digital technology, as well.

2: Ito’s article raised an interesting idea for me very early. In his “kit” notion, he raises the presence of credit and transit cards as “digital” technology. I just bought something earlier today, and going back over the process, I realized that if someone got my debit card they could use it for any number of things. Given how signatures work, they don’t even have to know my name. That goes double for my Metro card. This state of affairs raises a question for me. Are we directly connected to our identities anymore in day-to-day life? Certainly, many banks have measures in place such as demanding photo ID that would stop someone from walking into a bank and taking my money, nothing would stop someone with my metro card from spending it. Does this mean that they, in a sense, become me? Has my identity become separated from my actual body when someone possesses my digital device?

3: A question I believe is raided in the Fischer reading, particularly by the notion of “friends” in a digital age, is if we hold our online and offline friends to different standards. I know growing up, my parents were pretty clear that my online friends did not constitute “real” friends, and to a degree I wonder if a lack of physical proximity to someone does impact the ability to make friends with someone. On the other hand, some of my most enriching relationships at least began online, so even if there is a barrier I wonder if it’s a permanent one or one that will become thinner as the people born in the digital age grow older.

Definitions

Disembodiment: I consider this a major theme in this chapter, especially with the second question I’m posting. With the presence we’ve established in the digital world, do we maintain our identity when separated from our devices

Social Network: I think the use of the term in the Fischer reading perhaps calls for a comparison of how physical social network (inasmuch as they exist in the physical world) “look” compared to digital networks, and how the two have begun to intertwine.

Life, The Internet, and Everything In Between?

1. In terms of the Reconstruction of Space and Time I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about two of the ideas presented (a) camping and (b)cocooning and how these terms are similar in their construction but different in their location. Both are designs that focus heavily on personalization, from the physical device to the use of technology within that space, from which device is being transported and to what it is being used for. When reading the section on camping I made a note to myself “silence? You’re writing in a public café” (in regards to Bob who goes to his local café). Then I started thinking, the location is his to navigate but it is not his to control – the control comes from the portable technologies and what the infrastructure of the public space allows him the opportunity to do as well. The silence is his lack of interaction with the occupants of the space, so he creates his own cocoon. This cocoon is his way of privatizing a public space and creating his own sonic space. I’m also thinking about private cocooning. This idea needs to be fleshed out a bit more, but this is something I’m interested in researching and looking at a bit more, the idea of cocooning oneself within their private space, what about people with agoraphobia, who have a constant fear of leaving their own space, how do they experience location based media devices (other than cell phones)?
2. While reading Still Connected I couldn’t shake this sense of loneliness as a meta term for everything and anything that could potentially describe aloneness (which was mentioned in the first chapter). The idea that these reports used such meta terminology as a scare tactic of some sort. I also think its language like this that perpetuates misinformation and the misled public into believing that technology is the root of all evil. Or language like this that forces me to do the research that I do and inform the public that technology does not necessarily create loneliness and can be a factor in the perpetuation of communities and community ideals. I think it’s also interesting how the differences from the 1970s to today is mostly societal, albeit there have been technological innovations that have changed the ways in which we live our everyday lives, the societal changes have affected us across the board. With the lowering of the birth rate, the raising of the average marriage rate, all of these things change the ways in which we interact with each other.
3. One main thing that I was struggling with in Turkle’s chapter was the idea that the Internet is this heavenly thing that allows for consequence free experimenting – so much so I used an interrobang to show my confusion and somewhat disdain for this type of thinking. This isn’t to say that the Internet is not used to explore identity; however, the case can be and has been made the body still gets read in very racialized and gendered ways, especially through the use of language that it is nearly impossible to reach a utopian picture of the Internet. Communities are still forming around specific ideas and allow for people to explore within the community same as the material world, but the idea of the Internet as utopian is a bit of a stretch. I also find it interesting that she uses The Guild’s “Do You Want to Date My Avatar?” as an example of the body in virtual worlds saying that “once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life — and both robotics and networked life do that — we become less willing to get out there and take a chance. A song that became popular on YouTube in 2010, “Do You Want to Date My Avatar?” ends with the lyrics “And if you think I’m not the one, log off, log off and we’ll be done.” I struggle with that because it is a parody of what MMORPGs are and do. I would argue that in this instance there is no removal of ones self from this physical, untidy life, because MMORPGs represent a place that is a replication of the material places in which we exist. There is a life that we start living that gets messy, untidy, but is still physical. In short I think she gives the Internet too much credit and fails to acknowledge the actualities.

Week 9

Space: as multiplicity, being able to occupy multiple spaces through virtual extension

1. I am interested in the discussion of authenticity and real and how these concepts can apply to our understanding of nation and belonging. What makes an authentic citizen in the digital age? What makes one an American? Or a transnational subject?  I am trying to conceptualize/ complicate the transnational subject in the virtual.
2. I think the concept of being everywhere and now where is interesting way to play around with the Diasporic subject.  Where and what point in time does one become or stop being a Diasporic being. Stone’s article made question these ideas of being and becoming with in the virtual. Are we always becoming the space of the virtual?
3. When dealing with the virtual we are is always fragmented and complicated. The extensions of who we are in the virtual force us to question how that impacts the real. How does one create a transnational virtual subject? What is this subject allowed to do post deportation? Are they able form virtual communities that allow them to have embodied experience while no longer being in the states?

Liveness and the Digital

I found the discussion of photography, particular Barthes’s take on it, kind of quaint coming from the perspective where photoshop is the norm and the idea of an image being proof of something is almost laughable. We expect images to be manipulated, and indeed an inexplicable amount of digital space is devoted to memes of manipulating and juxtaposing images. However, I do agree with Dixon in his assessment that in performance the images wield more power than bodies, so has the power and seeming veracity of the image remained even though we know images can and do lie?

Of anything, I think Stone’s descriptions of Stephen Hawking and phone sex did more to bring home the idea of how the digital could replicate actual space for me than anything else. I think the Stephen Hawking story also illustrates the debate between Auslander and Phelan pretty aptly. I just had my undergraduates read Auslander and they get so upset (as do I) at his dismissal of the importance of the live, and I am always still left with the question of why we care about being present in the room, even if Hawking is speaking through a digital device?

When thinking about liveness and the digital, there is also the phenomenon of temporal liveness. This is particularly important for things like sports or the presidential debate. No one wants to watch these things on TiVo, because they have very little meaning once the moment has passed. This brings to mind for me Anderson’s concept of simultaneity, and how it is perhaps changed by the different ways we can consume and interact with information in the moment.

Live: Witnessed a) in person at the time of performance or b) simultaneously but remotely.

Virtual: replicated in some way that distinguishes it from the real.

Prosthetics, Language and Space

1) Stone briefly addresses technology and the shift from sleekness to leaking and derelict looking items. I wonder, what does this say about apple? Not only is there a palpable shift back to sleek and streamlined accessibility, I wonder about the (now outdated) notions that apple products were impervious to viruses, much like prosthetics are sleek imaginations of human body parts, but they operate outside of the human body system. Your prosthetic leg cannot get a blood clot. Where does the apple/pc debate fall in line with this discourse aligning technology and digital spaces with physical topographies/commodities?

2) I’m interested in this idea of authority and agency in digital environments. If authority and agency, as Stone notes, is predicated on ‘presence,’ then I’m interested in the way language acts to impose some sense of presence to digital spaces. For instance, using shields for virus protection or calling the gateway to the Internet an ‘explorer.’

3) In the same vein, with Sobchack in mind, what are the ways language creates a terrain that’s imaginable in physical terms, to incite both self-surveillance and notions of physicality to understand this landscape? Also, how does shifting the use of a descriptive word (using it as an adjective or noun, etc) alter our understanding of both what it is describing as well as what it signifies physically?

Life is a cabaret

My question in relation the Dixon article is about power and authority. Firstly, I wonder how the real gets marked as valuable and is the reader to assume that the real is sacred or just a supreme paradox and then I would have to ask from what cultural and social locations is it deemed an paradox—basically to whom is reality a problem? This isn’t a question about bodies and identity but rather about power. Barthes writes that “the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation” in arguing for the ability for photographs’ to be a certain kind of reality. What power? From where does it emanate? Does the power come from authenticity? And if so is authenticity a disciplining discourse that categorizes reality so that different facets of reality can be acted on unevenly by power? Auslander is also noted to give authority to live and mediatized forms so that he can argue for their reciprocal relation list in the live performance of Pps Danse’s Poles (124). There is also a reliance upon the language of domination to characterize the role of the virtual in live performance. Again, is the authority, power, dominance, and authenticity of the forms of representation and performance in this article given by the theorist summarized, assumed by the reader, or assumed to be a universal cultural phenomena?

Dixon notes the Phlean in particular fetishizes ephemeral experience by privileging it to a point where its divorced from its material conditions and becomes as stand alone, temporary expression.  Sobchak explains how the metaphor of prosthetic has become fetishized because it is used as a floating signifier that has no grounding in its literal material functioning. I’m trying to think about the work of fetishization in how we express lived reality. Is fetshiziation necessary for the articulation of experience where experience is always about privileging being present in something in relation to not privileging being present in something else? And does the fetishization of certain formations whether it be the prosthetic as metaphor, or the ephemeral experience as the essence of performance, help us point to how sensing or making sense of experience is an ability? Sobchak writes “the current metaphorical displacement of the prosthetic into other contexts because of its analogical usefulness in pointing out certain…structural and functional resemblances between idea also—and mistakenly—displaces agency from human to artifact… (212).” Do we need the fetish to reveal these structural and functional resemblances?

I think Sobchak’s piece speaks not only to the problematic use of the prosthetic as metaphor but also to a certain preoccupation with explaining the chasm between ideal and material existence. She writes, “That is, the prosthetic’s many inconsistencies in use and its combination of elements that are theoretically paradoxical yet creatively functional not only account for the fascination it holds for others but also open up imagination and analysis to an expanded range of both action and description (216).” How is liveness implicated in these same paradoxes’? Is it implicated in them?

Space: A infinite processes whereby interconnecting systems of global, social, cultural and embodied knowledges inform the value of place. Space is a right.

Place: Fixed in the material and moving freely. Facilitated by place marking objects like maps.

Identity: The processes of having the ability to sense your presence in space—to know you are alive. How you make sense of places’ relationships to the idea of individualism.