*sigh* we need a new education system *sigh*

Cloaked website - Check out a white supremacist website featuring information on Dr. Martin Luther King

Coming into my teaching assistantship at BGSU, there was a series of of talks meant to acquaint us with the millenial students.  Frequently, the potency of their digital literacy came to the fore of the discussion and people's experiences revealed that regardless of millenials' submersion in a more digitized environment, their skills at discerning quality sources from less qualified sources was low, their ability to do in-depth research on the internet was lacking, and despite their experience on the web, the scope of their digital geography was shallow.  This is Considering the prevalence of mimicry in the fast-paced, rapidly evolving cultural zeitgeist, it becomes more and more important to be aware of inauthentic wolves in sheep's clothing.  Given my interest in media literacy for the K-12 students here in America, I found myself drawn to Daniels's chapter "Searching for Civil Rights, Finding White Supremacy: Adolescents Making Sense of Cloaked Websites."  This also required dabbling in the previous chapter and then I was just so interested I kept reading.  That alone marks a well-done writing job! 

The interesting distinction Daniels makes regarding the damage beyond misinformation that cloaked websites bring is that they also threaten the cultural value of racial equality (140).  Considering the questionably free space of the internet and America's protection of free speech in website content, now more than ever we need a combination of digital literacy and critical race consciousness.  This thesis is backed up by the ethnography conducted on a small group of teenagers where they used whatever search engines to conduct a faux research project on MLK or civil rights.  Students were swayed by official sounding URLs, visual cues like professionally crafted websites versus homespun, the presence of images, and their discernment (correct or otherwise) of what they considered to be bias.  These things are easily mimicked and without a background of critical race theory, none of the digital literacy training (which is what taught them to be aware of those four things) will help them critique information sources.  Additionally, in a system that breaks things down to simple binaries, the spectrum of racism and its tenuous methods of disseminating white supremacist information.  You have to consider both form and content to fully explore this kind of communication.

What is key to this chapter and possibly the theme of the class is the notion of uncertainty.  Not so much the unexamined life or anything like that, but it's cloaked websites' "attempt at the discursive production of uncertainty about racial equality" that has to be shutdown.  How do we do that, though?  How can we dispel uncertainty while embracing that which we can't know (kind of how I've been considering affect)?  And I want it to be an answer that doesn't start at the elementary school level....so get on that world!

Conspiratology Archipelago

The 9/11 Truth Method

The ever problematic but quickly informative Wikipedia link

I chose to read Jack Bratich's "When Collective Intelligence Agencies Collide: Public vs. Popular Intelligence and Network Suspicions" from Post-Global Network and Everyday Life because it coincided with Andrejevic's iSpy, as well as my burgeoning interest in public memory.  Typically, I avoid 9-11 research because I am weak and it makes me sad and frustrated in a non-constructive, debilitating way.  I know that I should have a stronger constitution as an attempted scholar, but for some reason this affects my brain in the same way that math does: it should work but it doesn't.  Additionally, I hate being lied to and everything surrounding 9-11 reads like a pack of lies, but voicing this concern renders you to the level of raving conspiracy theorist and disqualifies all of your opinions.  And that is kind of what this chapter is about.

The term COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE (CI) is one that I think fits nicely with my understanding of affect.  In summation, CI is the technologically enhanced, decision-making and community formation that works with the new models of belonging and organization.  It works through digital interactivity in distributed knowledge and network forms like P2P sharing, feedback, interactive marketing, etc. (please refer to your Andrejevic for more examples, as well as a more cynical appreciation of these technologies).  Pierre Levy, the cat who initially worked with the notion of CI suggests that "Intelligence as networked knowledge production will be the foundation for the reconstruction of the social bond," and JB insists that it is a "SPECIES response to power inequalities and the ruinous division of intelligence" (12).  Not that we're keeping score and it's not like I am right, but I do feel a little vindicated with this last bit.  Affect, and apparently collective intelligence, seem to be re-connecting human beings on a P2P level.  Now JB talks a lot about intelligence in the chapter, but this usage seems a little bit different and I wonder if it might align with the national, ethnic, and religious divisions that Levy proposes.

Anyway, above I included the links for the major case study of the chapter and I definitely recommend giving them a gander.  Especially because they are to be considered alongside the 9-11 Commission.   Now I don't expect you to spend the weekend getting riled up over this info, but what you need to understand in terms of JB's chapter is that BOTH of these are networks of suspicion and attempting some level of collective intelligence.  One works outside officially sanctioned knowledge (9-11 TM) and one works to craft intelligence as a repressive state apparatus (the commission).  The former is "refuses to be recruited into a state identification" and the latter is a "project of constituting emergent norms and practices (e.g. investigation [like Andrejevic's lateral surveillance]) amidst the ruins of established institutions" (21).  Importantly, while these networks are separate, both are weighing in on that pop culture battleground Stuart Hall talked about; they are attempting to restore society's sense of sovereignty or subjectivity in the post-9-11 world.  

It's clear that I have fallen under Andrejevic's iSpy spell, but I really do feel like their are these threads running throughout our readings.  In particular, technology and the anonymity, connectivity, interactive qualities within these networks are working to reform or reconstruct connections.  I am still not sure if this process is wholly new or if it is a regurgitation of past plots to regulate subjectivities but with more bells and whistles. 

There is a lot here and I'm still unraveling it a bit.  This may require some later edits!

Cyberheteroglossia

I love it when class topics overlap completely by accident!  This week in Intro to Feminist Theory, the group presenting tied the readings to the news coverage of Egyptian protests, the internet kill-switch, and the visibility of women.  Given the overlap with Anna Everett's "Digital Women: The Case of the Million Woman March Online and on Television" I want to focus on this chapter within Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace.

Everett uses this chapter to explore the scant television coverage allotted for the 1997 Million Woman March on Philadelphia compared to the reports coming from the internet.  I think it's important to keep the historical and technological timing of this disparity at the forefront of our understanding; the internet was not nearly as commonplace in everyday life in 1997 as it is now or even over the course of the past ten years.  We had been debating interactive media and social networking's efficacy in motivating people.  We ended up differentiating between its ability to ignite versus maintain a movement and how to assess exactly what these ideas suggest about internet technologies in motivating a movement.  Frankly, at this point in time, I am very skeptical at the success rate of a predominantly technologized movement because for every amazing thing I see people getting out and doing on the internet (I'm thinking flash mob videos for whatever reason), I am met with a resounding vacuum of apathy expressed by students, colleagues, etc.  Enter A.E. with an example of how the internet could at one time do amazing things by connecting people and providing a genuine alternative to the mass media.

So during the Million Woman March, CNN gave it hardly any air time (between 1-3 minutes per half hour) and predominantly ran the same snippets of footage.  Not only did it cease to update, but it took a sensationalized angle regarding drugs in the black community instead of focusing on the major points expressed by the group.  Frequently, the news reported 300,000-500,000 participants while other sources suggested that it was more like 1.5 million.  Additionally, the reporters were all white and the information presented did not take into account the Afrikan perspective.  Participants were shocked by the lackluster and limited presentation of the television news media, especially contrasted to the 1950s and 60s civil rights movement and the Million Man March coverage in previous years.  Granted, the representations put forth on TV in those examples still struggled to convey full disclosure of the groups' motivations, but the presence was there.  A.E. also mentions that the public and domestic spheres in representations of women have never justly demonstrated a women's roles.  She argues that this invisibility to white eyes is what allowed so many black women to seize such dramatic, active roles in the civil rights movement (54). 

To compete with this willful blindness toward black women gathering and fighting for their rights, the Million Woman March actively sought video footage, photographs, and personal stories in order to self-construct the memories of this event.  Women who were in support of the event but unable to participate physically searched the news networks for coverage, but could only see the stilted and minor footage already discussed.  Instead, people started to run their own commentary about the news media's crappy coverage of this important event.  It is in this way that the internet really becomes a site for "black women's dissenting voices and cultural image" in order to disrupt mainstream media's occlusions of black women's difficult realities (73). 

Cut to the monumental presence of women protesting in Egypt and the coverage of this event.  Granted, given the global representations, this topic is even more troublesome than the Million Woman March because the levels of mistranslated information, misunderstandings regarding historical, social, and cultural aspects to these events, and misuse of the imagery coming from the streets.  There is a lot to consider when attempting to empathize or access an affective connection to the struggles and outrage of the Egyptian people.  Can we expect any semblance of truthful reporting to come out of the notoriously biased news media?  Can we expect anything better from a highly corporatized internet?  Andrejevic has made me incredibly dubious of Facebook's ability to connect beyond the superficial or supersocial levels and the amount of data collecting to me suggests that our political actions on the web will one day be used against us.  Hells bells, didn't that teacher get fired for calling her students a bunch of germ bags in a blog; that is a far stretch from saying that the president is doing a bad job and should be deposed.  And the "temporary" aspect to temporary autonomous zone is disconcerting - it seems that we assumed the autonomy of the internet is permanent and that is part of why it is so easy for corporations and bigger thought entities to move in and take over these spaces.  Creativity was such a huge part of the feeling of belonging, I worry that the combustive energy inherent to a revolution will be rerouted for some capitalistic goal.  I know this is a negative way to approach the internet's potential, but I just feel like there are some serious issues with the people using the technology and until some systemic analysis and self-awareness or reflexivity occurs in a major way, the power of the medium and the message are both squandered.