My…Space?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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