Space, Place, and Identity in the Digital Age

Identity from Imagined Communities to Virtual Communities

Identity from Imagined Communities to Virtual Communities

1) Reading Boyd’s article about MySpace as a digital ghetto and thinking about the digital great white flight and digital ghetto decay made me consider how Facebook can now be read as a digital space where urban meets suburbia. In real space minority groups follow the migration patterns (flight) toward the suburbs for employment, better schools, etc., basically chasing the ideal “American dream”; i.e. they want the house with the picket fence as well. Now that the digital suburb is co-habitate(d) by marginalized identities that were left behind on MySpace and privileged identities, how does this intermingling of multiple identities transform Facebook or even Twitter? I wonder can the metaphor be extended to think about digital suburban sprawl? If even possible in digital space, how can this process be read?

2) What about digital red light districts (communities) or digital spaces read as deviant?  For example: Xtube and the many other pornographic social networking sites online, the personal section of craigslist, and even queer social network sites such as Adam4Adam and GayGirlNet.com (I’m not suggesting that they are pornographic sites but are read by some as deviant). How can digital spaces read as sexually “deviant” provide information for us to think about identity and space?

3) Not to exclude Anderson or Sengupta from the conversation by not directly engaging their work with a question, but I think that reading their work helped me to think more about identity, power, privilege, and oppression’s relationship to space and community when considering Boyd’s work. In regards to how white middle-class journalists considered MySpace “dead” because they did not know anyone who used it still, and assumed that their readers had migrated to Facebook (Boyd, 219), what is at stake when marginalized identities are made invisible in a digital space that is created to provide visibility? (This question may seem redundant but I feel that it is important when thinking about technology that is geared toward creating visibility)

Definition

Identity: Can register as a social and political construct used to mark bodies as normal or deviant and privileged or marginalized through national, class based, age, global, cognitive, intellectual, racial, health, body image, gendered, sexual, familial, and disabled contexts. Identities are nuanced and intersecting and can be contained or imagined spatially and temporally.

My…Space?

1. Admittedly, I’m having some trouble getting behind Sengupta’s argument about identity categories and the claiming and deployment of identity as always functioning as a potential weapon of either defense or offense. The call for what I can only conceive of as a post identity takes Benedict Anderson’s explication of imagined communities too far, theoretically overextending Anderson’s argument that nations are actually constructed in the imaginary created by certain historical processes. That is, simply because identity is a construct or “imagined” does not mean that it is not “real” or does not have value or importance beyond what I can’t help but consider (un)affectionately the litany of oppression Olympics in the first part of this article. In general, I am wary of any calls for “a nonspecific, tentative universalism,” as I always wonder (in my very identity-focused way) if universalism of this sort works differently for some people than it would for others.
2. As I read danah boyd’s chapter, I was particularly drawn to the constant references to the aesthetics of MySpace versus Facebook. MySpace, it was variously argued by boyd’s interviewees is/was ugly, cluttered, “cheesy,” and overly filled with “bling,” all of which are caused by the fact that MySpace can be personalized with images, songs, backgrounds, etc. Facebook, of course (and rather tellingly) “is just plain white and that’s it.” This distinction is often seen outside the “digital ghetto” to the “real” physical “ghetto” characterized by what could arguably be considered customization in the form of street art, graffiti, and a general lack of standardization of space. I wonder, then, what are the processes by which concepts of visuality such as “clutter” or “crampedness” come to stand in for or at least signal urban space and particularly urban space in which People of Color reside?
3. In an attempt to connect the above question to Anderson’s Imagined Communities, I wonder if we could consider the ways in which even imagined communities are solidified into “real” (whatever that means) communities. For example, how does the visual rendering of spaces (graffiti, American flags, etc.) function simultaneously to perpetuate the imagined but also to make it tangible and physical?

Place: the social construction of a space via particular cues, often visual

Imagined Communities and Identities

Identity is not only ascribed to the body, but also the space in which that body occupies. The victim of certain oppressions can easily go from the oppressed to the aggressor or oppressor. In each space any identity that is not the norm can be oppressed and treated with disrespect (sometimes this happens within their own country as well). Can someone exist in two identifying categories? Sengupta it would seem says no, your identity falls on one side of the dichotomy – I don’t know how I feel about this. Although I would agree that identities can be weapons to be used against other identities. I also liked the idea of reversing some dichotomies of oppression so for women to oppress men and Sengupta’s response of “Men do not oppress women because they are men; they do so because one of the forms in which oppression gets articulated happens to be patriarchy, which in turn has relationships with the ways in which forms of control over sexual or reproductive agency are tied to patterns of control over scarce resources (635).”

boyd is suggesting here that digital spaces parallel or reflect physical spaces more so than originally thought. I’m not entirely surprised about the migration from MySpace to Facebook because of underlying ideas of race – albeit some may not know that these migrations are fueled by race. If in physical space we separate ourselves by race, education, and class, why would these not translate into our digital spaces or digital personas? I find it also somewhat unsurprising that Facebook is used (or was used) by a majority of white affluent and well-educated persons. The lack of segregation by race in this article is also interesting – in physical space people will say that they are not segregated however, they will utilize language that suggests otherwise.

The idea of the imagined community can be extended to the realm of digital space just as easily as digital spaces can reflect physical spaces. The imagined community is something that bonds people or a group of people together, even though they may never technically meet. Digital communities are imagined communities in that they share common characteristics and ideas – which is why they belong to the community – but given the mass number of people that belong to the community itself not every body would be able to meet (whatever that body may be e.g., avatar, Facebook persona.).

Weekly Post 7

1: In Boyd’s reading on “white flight” on the internet, I wonder if the phenomenon she documented has occurred in other countries as it seems to have in the United States. I’ve seen a lot of news and press about how social networking sites like Facebook expanding into international markets. How will their social norms and ethnic divisions translate into digital spaces in their own internet usage and social networking as these media become more prominent?

2: Speaking from experience and some research, it is a common complaint that Facebook is becoming “too much like MySpace”, and I find a lot of truth to that in both function and aesthetics. What does this say about Boyd’s assertion that there is a certain “look” different ethnic groups like. Is Facebook marketing to those groups? Was the change to Facebook, as she noted was possible, more about social groups than function? Are we not seeing the same flight simply because Facebook has no other major competitors than MySpace?

3: Given that Boyd had labeled the movement from websites as “white flight”, are there social and economic consequences to this digital movement that mirror or are similar to that of the white flight in America’s urban centers in the 20^th century? Maybe it’s too soon to reasonable gauge the impact of what may be an ongoing phenomenon, but with the Facebook IPO debacle it has been shown that the digital world can have very significant repercussions in the physical world, and I think it’s a question worth asking.

White Flight: In its strict sense, the exodus of whites from America’s urban centers. As used in the article, it seems to be used as a way to describe the self-segregation of youth on the internet, both in cases of white and non-white social organization and how the phenomenon of this self-segregation has imprinted itself on the internet.

Surveillance

I remember in a previous reading the idea that surveillance (on campus) is as much about protection of property as it is about discipline or control, which lead me to think about whether all surveillance really boils down to economic concerns. However, this doesn’t necessarily work for online surveillance or self-surveillance, does it? Is there something about knowing what people are up to in and of itself that drives this?

In the Butler article, surveillance footage is used in the court case and grossly misread. This in conjunction with the concept of the panopticon and the abundance of cameras in virtually every space creates an even more frightening scenario, but also makes me question the original purpose of surveillance. If certain bodies are guilty, or violent, or whatever they are interpreted to be without evidence, what is the point of surveillance in the first place?

The question of how information shared online might be used against us come up a lot when thinking about social media, but with the increased awareness of participatory surveillance in the form of online sharing, might we eventually see the opposite effect where not having a readily accessible online footprint could be seen as having something to hide?

week 6: surveillance

Thinking about the panopticon and notions of constant surveillance (and thinking in the context of today rather than Foucault’s 18th C. example) I wonder what is happening in the spaces when we forget we are policed, where transgressiveness is an imminent and unconscious possibility. This is sort of an abstract thought, but with surveillance being so present and pervasive in every facet of our lives today in the forms of actual video/photographic policing, but also social policing via how we present ourselves and our obsessions with ‘checking up’ on others, what is the value/implication of unconscious transgression? I’m drawn to the person picking their nose in traffic sort of thing, or when I catch myself making overt facial expressions on the bus because I think of something cute or funny.

Butler notes the white racist epistememe in ‘reading’ the body (18), and this made me think about the ways that the racialized body intersects with surveillance. I suppose in my previous readings of Foucault, I never really connected an intersectional approach to the notion of surveillance (why I haven’t is baffling to me as its painfully obvious), but I’m interested in looking deeper at the ways that race, sex, class, sexual orientation, etc, interact with surveillance and in particular, discipline and punishment. Butler gives us the Black male body against the white epistememe, but what about other bodies?

I suppose this is less of a question and more of an observation and area of interest, but Albrechtslund’s discussion regarding participatory surveillance was really intriguing. I couldn’t help but think about aspects of performance and ‘reading,’ to go back to Butler, in regard to empowerment. There is a certain social currency that is connected with the amount that one interacts with their friends and the way we present ourselves (I.e. hipster instagram photos). I admittedly am not ‘on’ facebook as much as others I know, so when I do go on, I sometimes feel awkward about which friends and what updates to acknowledge and which ones to pass over. Even further, Albrechtslund uses MySpace as a case study in the beginning, so I’m interested to know how issues of perceived ‘deviancy’ come into play, particularly in the post Facebook migration from MySpace.

Panoptic Spaces

Panoptic Spaces

Space: In the previous weeks I have thought about space mostly for its physicality. During this weeks reading on social networking and the article by Judith Butler I would like to add that space is also located in the visual. Within the visual there are “text, images, audio, and video.” Understanding space as visual forces us to look at the ways we interact with space through all of our senses.

Place: has a story, a legacy, a narrative created around it. It is important to think of this narrative as being imbued with race, gender, class etc. Place is where contestation occurs. There is a conflict surrounding the real and imagined boundaries of place.

Questions:

1.  While reading Anders Albrechtslund’s article, “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance,” his discussion surrounding subjectivity and empowerment were of particular interest to me. It appears that he is trying to trouble to idea of the gaze by asserting that social networking is about of identity construction. Although I understand this assessment, I am not sure if one is ever roomed from the gaze of dominant structures and power relations. For instance, social networking is not only about people producing their own information, they are also producing information about others directly and indirectly. I thought about sites such as WorldStar Hip-Hop where images of people of color are usually posted without their knowing. Is it possible that people are simultaneously making themselves subjective while taking away the subjectivity of others? I’m just trying to think through the ways that power works within these scenarios.

2. Albrechtslund also discusses social networking as another component of ones identity that is similar to race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. It is clear that he trying show that surveillance and social networking doesn’t always have to be negative.  This is a point that I appreciate. I want to think about how surveillance works when compounded with all these other components of identity. What does surveillance look like when we are talking about the policing of bodies of color on social networking sites?  This question adds to my prior question.  I am not sure if power switches the hand of the watcher when we think about issues of race and gender.

3. Judith Butler’s, “Endangered/ Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” forced me to consider the multiple ways bodies of color are read and reimagined within nation making. How does myth making become a part of the surveillance of people of color and confine them to certain places? I was also thinking of this in terms of deportation.  The types of narratives and moral panics being created about immigrant bodies of color allow the state to deploy deportation as a tool of surveillance.  Does surveillance take on a new meaning when we it is read against bodies of color?

Surveillance, Cyberspace and the Panoptican

1. Each of these articles point to the ways in which the visual and ways of seeing are linked to surveillance and to the functioning of power and discipline.  Not only does being seen and watched function as a mode of (self) discipline, as seen by the Panoptican (Foucault) but the visual itself is always already implicated within power structures and is not only seen, but read (Butler).  Thinking about surveillance online shows that a body does not need to be present and seen to be surveyed; I wonder how we can further think about surveillance in terms that are not visual.

2. Others have commented on the watcher watching back, and ways in which those in power are surveyed.  Continuing that I wonder how we might think about participatory surveillance as not only connecting people and cementing identities but also speaking back to power.  How might Albrechtslund’s argument change or be expanded in light of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movements use of the internet to connect and pass information around about those in power? On a related note, how do we read the videos of police brutality against the Occupy protesters? As Butler points out, race matters–and we can also see how age and gender will have acted to produce sympathy for certain victims of police pepper spray.

3. As we create our surveillance map on campus today, I wonder if we can also think about the other ways that bodies are disciplined on campus.  Why do certain student groups require police presence at their parties/functions and others do not? How does the classroom operate as a disciplining space? Also how does power work to hide certain bodies and practices on campus, for example the work that is done by custodial staff)

Definitions:

Space: relationship between bodies and objects; understood in relation to our embodied experience of the world, the meaning that we attach to the  areas that we move through–be they virtual or physical. Cannot be separated from our concepts of time.  “we are just as much spatial as temporal beings, that our existential spatiality and temporality are essentially or ontologically coequal, equivalent in explanatory power and behavioral significance, interwoven in a mutually formative relation.” (Soja, 16).  It can not be seen as merely physical or philosophical, it is also social. Furthermore, space is always in some way disciplined or surveyed, and spacial relations are always embedded in particular relations of power.

The body: that through which we experience the world, connected intimately with our conceptions of space.  “Everybody has a body, nobody can escape from their body, and consequently all human activity–every form of individual and collective practice–is a situated practice and thus geographical.” Furthermore, the movement of bodies through space is something that is surveyed and disciplined.  Our relationships with our bodies is also implicated within power relations and the self-discipline that we impose on ourselves and identities.

Participatory Panopticism

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our bodily presence, by virtue of our relationships with other bodies (including objects), and by virtue of practices of representation (digital or otherwise).

Place: those specific spaces to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented toward 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 that come into being 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, and the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance.

Questions:

1. In his essay “Panopticism,” Foucault describes Bentham’s panoptic prison as arranging space so that the prisoner “is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication” (200). While this is how the panopticon functions, forcing the prisoner to discipline himself since he cannot tell whether or not he is being watched, I wondered if this description was not too reductive when it comes to resisting surveillance. Even if the prisoner does not know if he is being watched, can’t he still gaze back? Can’t he communicate in some albeit highly limited way? Similarly, despite the distribution of the panoptic principle throughout society, don’t people find creative ways to resist or subvert surveillance, such as Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience project? I think this is partially what Anders Albrechtslund is getting at in his essay, “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance.”
2. I am particularly interested in Judith Butler’s framing of “white paranoia which projects the intention to injure that it itself enacts, and then repeats that projection on increasingly larger scales” (22) in order to protect the “always already endangered” white subject from imagined or perceived racial threats (21). Butler shows that what we “see” is never self-evident, but is always evoked through a reading process. Thus, in spite of the desire for surveillance that is continuous across space and time or that can capture everything, surveillance can never be “neutral” but is always marshaled in service of particular regimes of power. If there is no opting out of surveillance, what are forms of surveillance that can draw attention to our contested and conflicting readings, or that can highlight the underlying epistemes that Butler argues shape the visual field?
3. To dovetail off both of these questions, it seems somewhat trivializing to ask how surveillance can be “fun,” via Albrechtslund, in light of its use by those in power to reinforce dominant ways of seeing and knowing. It is clear that we are already accustomed to “playing” with surveillance and the creation of identity in a primarily visual mode. Considering increasingly nuanced mobile technology, what new forms of surveillance will arise to monitor aspects of our lives that cannot be accessed through the self-evidence of sight?

Panoptic Spaces

1)   When discussing constant visibility created by the Panopticon, Foucault says that, “Visibility is a trap” (200). He continues later to assert that a person knowingly “subjected to a field of visibility…becomes the principle of [his or her] own subjection” (203). In the case of social media, I wonder if our desire and willingness to constantly connect socially to others, whether strangers or friends, is truly transgressive or is our hyper-visibility in cyberspace governed by a form of self policing that limits our potential to escape the material trappings of our realities?

2)   As explained in “Participatory Surveillance,” by Anders Albrechtslund, “online social networking is an opportunity to rethink the concept of surveillance” by considering the ways in which “participatory surveillance is a way of maintaining friendships” and “constructing identity” (9). Not trying to negate the entire point of his argument, but when thinking about participatory surveillance by teens to build friendship, given that there is always a potential for children to be exploited in cyberspace, which manifests in unthinkable ways in the “lifeworld,” I feel that there should be parental surveillance that occurs to ensure the safety of the child. Also, I am interested in thinking about the idea of participatory surveillance via social media as a form of public pedagogy that helps to facilitate the formation of broader representations of nonheteronormative black masculinities.

3)   While contemplating her argument that “reading” race became an act of “seeing” danger in Rodney King’s black male body for the predominately white jury, I couldn’t help but to think about media coverage of Hurricane Katrina more than a decade later. Judith Butler writes, “The visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful” (17).  Black survivors captured on video leaving stores with necessary supplies after the water had flooded the streets of New Orleans were “seen” as looters. Even with the live footage of black bodies in the midst of despair and devastation, a racist “reading” was “imposed upon the visual evidence” of their fight for survival (17). The gaze automatically transformed victims of a violent act (the breaking of the levies), which could have been prevented by the Bush administration, into criminals.

Surveillance: Close visual or auditory watch placed over a person or a group of people in order to police and restrict physically and/or mentally; a means to transgress cultural, political, and personal restraints imposed on an individual or group of human identities.

Object(ivity) and participatory surveillance

1. With the introduction (and the development) of instruments to capture reality in action (photography, video, sound recording), the way we ‘observe’ or ‘perceive’ our practices in the world seem to constantly change. Butler (1993) reflects upon the acts of ‘seeing’, which are mainly based on the schematization of different fields (racism in Rodney King’s case). Something important in Butler’s analysis is that those devices that (supposedly) capture reality do not really serve such purpose when being the evidence of violent transgressions. Now that we have tools to modify video and photography, it is difficult to think that it is possible to capture reality in its basic form using such devices. Does this mean that until there is a modification in the ‘schematization of fields’ we cannot trust in the ‘objectivity’ of such devices?

2. Albrechtslund (2008) makes an important analysis of surveillance in our society. The concept “participatory surveillance” is something that makes a lot of sense in the context of social networking. While reading the article, I was thinking about not only social networking but also the way we generally interact in the context of telecommunications. Nowadays most of our ‘professional’ lives function around the Internet or communication. Think for example that our professors, bosses, supervisors, etc., are able to exercise certain type of power due to the notion of availability. In other words, we cannot escape the space of work because we must be always ready to perform work related activities in our “private” life. Foucault (1995) mentions that “the Panopticon […] must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men” (p. 205). Could be availability part of those functioning structures where power is exert power? How is such notion of availability different or similar to that of [participatory] surveillance?

3. Small silly question… What happens if you are not ‘wired’? Could you just consider that you are not being surveilled?

Spatial discourses (Space and power?): We could consider those types of discourse in which space is idealized, analyzed, and explained. Albrechtslund (2008) mentions that the spatial discourse of cyberspace is conceived due to the “desire to organize and classify” (p. 2). It is also possible that such discourses intend to trouble the understanding of space at its most basic meaning. For example, Foucault (1995) explains that space is organized through power since “(power) has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up” (p. 202). I think that although Lefebvre might agree with Foucault that power is an essential part of space, he would consider that spaces are constructed through agency, social relationships, and the presence of the body.

Surveillance, Access, and Bodies

1. Drawing on danah boyd, Albrechtslund argues that “[e]ven though people obviously communicate online with a specific audience in mind, e.g.  their friends, the public nature of online social networking makes the information available to a much larger audience, potentially everyone with access to the Internet” (5). With the inundation of my inbox with spam, the text I just received from some sort of weird Romney-bot (ask me tomorrow, I’ll show you!), and various other non-person entities to which my information is apparently available, I am wondering if the idea of horizontal/participatory surveillance really “maps.” That is, are the ads on your Facebook page, the ads on the side of your Gmail, and spam examples of the potential verticalization of social networks and social networking?

2. Heads up, this is a question I’ll probably bring up in class. What is the relationship between surveillance and space? More specifically, what meanings are read into a space when it is the object of surveillance? How are issues of safety, danger, value, and other meanings mapped onto a space when we recognize it as surveilled?

3. Finally, a really general question that will always bother me: Who is being watched? Who isn’t? Or, whose bodies are deemed more necessary to watch than others? This was a major contention I had with the Albrechtslund piece, and I found part of the answer in Butler’s discussion of the ways in which Rodney King’s body was seen and interpreted as always already dangerous. Still, I wonder if there are any people (or even place) that are not surveilled. My mind immediately went to high-powered, heavily guarded government figures, but as Watergate and the recent obsession with the incredibly photogenic First Family demonstrate, they too are heavily watched and scrutinized. So, back to the original question, who is/n’t being watched? This, I argue, is necessarily attached to another question, becoming “who is/n’t being watched and for what purpose?” So, why are some things news and others aren’t, why are some faces, stories, names, etc. familiar and others are covered up or brushed aside?

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.

Place: A space whose specificity is connected not only to the bodies that occupy it, but also the ideas that are mapped onto it.

Panopticism and Perception

Butler starts by saying that bodies, although vulnerable, can be seen as aggressors – using the case of Rodney King and the jury reading his body as threatening, even though he was the one being brutally beaten. Further reading suggests that the beating was justifiable in the eyes of the jury who stated that King had threatened the police and therefor received justifiable punishment – because racism is not an apparent factor in this.  What is seen is not necessarily the truth. Butler seems to be getting at the fact that the seen is not visible. Things are being read rather than seen, which in this context is racism and black male violence and the potentiality for misconduct. The expectation of violence exists due to historical factors that are taken into account e.g., racism/racial prejudices (although many may not read it as such). I’m more interested here in context as well — what is the context in which these bodies are being read aside from racism or past presumptions?

Foucault mentions the dichotomy that exists between the leper and the plague victim in relation to the panopticon and surveillance. Suggesting that the lepers were too concerned with exiling one another while the plague victim was meticulous to separate people into groups based on their disease or lack there of – they were too concerned with differentiation. The idea here is the power over the people – the community or self-preservation through discipline. Here I’m more interested in this idea of the panopticon as cure – constant surveillance as a way to undo illness.

Definition (cont’d)

Seeing: To have perceptions or identifications (whether true or false) read onto the body, multiple bodies, or things.

Visible/Visibility: A body is made visible when it can have social or spatial constructions read onto it by those seeing them.