Working Together to Make the Future

How Free is the Internet?

"if you think you're free,

try walking into a deli"

At the most basic of levels, no, the internet is decidedly not free, just as it's not free to walk into a deli if you expect to get a sandwich; "The most widespread myth about cyberspace is that it is truly free and ungovernable" (154, An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures). I don't know about you, but I pay about $60 a month for the internet. It's $7.99 a month for Netflix, and $100 or so a year to rent a URL and server space for my website. Even before that, it's around $100 or so a month to just keep the electricity on to run my devices. There are more miscellaneous charges if I want to get a movie or an e-book from Amazon. There are other less tangible costs even for the free websites, as well. Facebook has access to all of your information which they sell in packages to advertisers. Instagram feels free to sell the pictures you provide.

I know that for a full-time college student with more than a couple of jobs, the monetary cost represents a great expense, and the intangible cost is troubling. I'm also aware that, even in our own country, the minimum monetary threshold necessary to have access to the internet represents an impossible expense to a great many people: 

In itself, the availability of a medium of communication does not guarantee a truly public 'public sphere.' Racial, economic, gender, and regional inequalities in access mean that the public sphere in cyberspace is once more constructed by the (techno-) elite, while the marginal (often racial/ethnic minorities or women) remain at the periphery. ICTs have helped the already empowered to acquire greater power while the disadvantaged remain on the margins. (151, An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures)

 So, even though we may not think of ourselves this way, we are the techno-elite in our own country and especially the rest of the world. In the article "The Internet Is Still a Man's World in Developing Countries" which Nathan shared as a trend on our Digital Culture and Social Media page, it states that "In the U.S., the gap between the number of men and women who use the internet is about 4 percent." So, even in our own country we can see the marginalization of women on the web. In developing countries, however, the gap is even more apparent with a "global gender gap of 23%" where even the internet access for men doesn't break above 50%. These statistics reflecting the connection between the gender/socioeconomic status and the internet access disparity show how:

Cyber-public space is the augmentation of existing public spaces and an extension into another realm of the communities, sites of political action and agency that exist in the real public sphere. This also means . . . that cyberspace is a fiercely contested zone, where ideological battles are played out between commercial interests and justice movements, neo-cons and radicals, businesses and environmentalists, the state and civil society. Even with radical and subversive movements in cyberspace, control is exerted by commercial interests. Even as the latter push for state governance of the Internet, alternative media escape legislation and hackers disrupt the profiteering narrative of mainstream technocapitalism. (137, An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures)

 So, while there is a marked disadvantage in cyberculture for those who cannot afford access to all of the goodies that are offered on the internet, "hackers" as Nayar calls them—though the correct term in this sense is pirate—work to free the internet for public use. Pirates do this by cracking the copyright protection codes on software, music, movies, games, and e-books and distributing them freely and on a large scale using Peer-to-Peer transfer networks via torrents on sites such as Kick Ass Torrents. Technocapitalist corporations are fighting back, though:

Issues of copyright have exercised legal thinkers in the digital era. When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was enacted in 1998, it was an attempt to ensure copyright protection for software and digital products. The controversies over NAPSTER and music-copying technologies have been cultural debates: who can own copyright, the freeing of knowledge and technology from monopolistic control, and the government's right to monitor usage, among others. (154, An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures)

Technocapitalists are using new laws to impose severe repercussions for pirates. However, this seems counterproductive in that laws are made by the government which is supposed to represent the interests of the public. Pirates are freeing up media on the internet for public use; yet, the laws made by the government are advancing the interests of the technocapitalists, instead. Indeed, even the premise that preventing piracy protects the profits of the entertainment industry is faulty. In one of many articles expounding upon this point, "Why Most Artists Profit from Piracy" sheds light upon how piracy actually helps promote the music industry.

In conclusion, a free internet—whether in terms of cost or access—is not a thing that is naturally occurring. Lots and lots of people and organizations, however, are in constant battle to create that freedom—including everyone from pirates liberating media products to public libraries which offer free access to the internet. They are in constant confrontation with technocapitalists and the governmental laws they force through which begs the question "whether the task of ensuring security, safety, privacy, and equality (of access) is now the prerogative of private conglomerates and corporations rather than the state" (155, An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures).

How much truth is on the internet?

Clients From Hell is what Chapter 12 of Turkle's book Alone Together terms a "confessional site" (230). As a web designer, it also happens to be my favorite. On Clients From Hell, I can read the anonymous stories from other design professionals and commiserate with them over things that have happened to all of us, such as your boss REALLY liking that terrible font...but has that really happened to all of us?


As Turkle points out, "market incentives are, after all, at work; each story competes with others. Exaggeration might increase readership. And since all confessions are anonymous, who will ever know?" (230). I had always just accepted these stories at face value as truths because logically, they seem like they could have happened. However, many people take a similar stance to the forty-year-old college professor that Turkle interviewed: "he takes on the persona of 'everyman.' For him, anonymity means universality. What he says on the Web does not necessarily follow from his actual experience" (240). So, just because it's not true for him doesn't mean it's not true at all. After all, the people who visit Clients From Hell are mostly designers like myself who can relate to the statements, and they ring true whether or not they are 100% truthful. Like the quote from Alan Moore states, "Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself."

Anonymous confession groups like this became a way to deal with the emotional friction that pops up in our lives. No matter how great your boss, eventually you will disagree with her/him about something. So, instead of registering that complaint where it will only do harm, you can go online and move on by sharing your experience. It seems much different than the scenario in the chapter where a woman confessed to using her parents' retirement fund to go on vacation--twice. That is a workaround to get all of the feel-good of confessing without having to own up to your actions. Clients From Hell is a way to get rid of emotional grist that would only harm a working relationship or remain bottled up until all of the little things finally made you explode. Even that use could sour if you used it as an excuse not to confront your boss or client about reoccurring problems, though.

So, like in all things, prudent use is the key...and often the very thing we're missing in the technological onslaught of our new age.

Indeed, in chapter 11, Turkle discusses how we are reducing our interpersonal communication to resemble our communication with bots or completely replacing them all together. Where games like Second Life could be a method for "working through" problems rather than "acting out" (214). Working through problems is a positive way of using virtual reality to impact our corporeal lives:

A young woman who had lost a leg in a car crash and now wore a prosthetic limb felt ready to resume a sexual life after the accident but was still awkward and anxious. She created an online avatar with a prosthetic leg and had virtual relationships. Online, she practiced talking about her prosthetic limb and taking it off before being intimate with her virtual lovers. She grew more comfortable with her physical body through the experience of her virtual body. (214)

However, many more people resemble the story of Adam who "disappears [into his game worlds] for up to fifteen-hour stretches. Adam gets little sleep, but he does not consider cutting back on his games. They are essential to his self-esteem, for it is inside these worlds that he feels most relaxed and happy" (219). In fact, "to make ends meet, he provides technical support for an insurance company and takes care of an elderly man on the weekends. Neither of these “real jobs” engages him. He is barely holding on to them" (219). Adam moved away from other people by degrees. Having first started gaming as a social event in his work place, he now prefers to play with the in-game intelligences of Civilization. So, instead of gaming being a tool to help him socialize, he's now acting out his problems every day by reinforcing his antisocial tendencies. In other words, he's stuck in a developmental moratorium and is making no progress.

Stories such as this seem to affirm Turkle's fearful question "does loving your Second Life resign you to your disappointments in the real?" (219). Adam is getting just enough reliable and predictable gratification from his game life that he doesn't put the monumental effort in that is needed for more substantial rewards in his real life, such as pursuing the singer/songwriter and screenwriter careers in which he expressed interest. Instead, he's holding down unfulfilling jobs just to keep the electricity on for his games:

Success in simulation tempers Adam’s sense of disappointment with himself . . . it is not creation but the feeling of creation. This is the sweet spot of simulation: the exhilaration of creativity without its pressures, the excitement of exploration without its risks. And so Adam plays on, escaping to a place where he does not have to think beyond the game. (223-4)

So, truth online seems to inhabit its own sphere of meaning separate from what we think of as truth in the corporeal world. Confession site entries don't necessarily have to reflect the subjective truth of one's corporeal life so long as it hits upon an objective truth. In fact, this is a healthy way to work through slight problems at work where confrontation is not useful. The trouble online comes from acting out our problems, fooling ourselves into believing we have accomplished something when what we've really done is replace human interactions with computer ones. Instead of the woman confessing to her parents that she had used their retirement money, she anonymously told the internet so that she could continue living her lie with her parents. Adam also used online games to lie to himself. He started gaming as a way to socialize and then abandoned real people for the illusion of friends the game provided. Thus, the most pervasive and harmful form of lying on the internet is our own self-deception.

Introverts and Communication

"electronic media “levels the playing field” between people like her—outgoing, on the soccer team, and in drama club—and the shy: “It’s only on the screen that shy people open up.”

Turkle, Sherry (2011-01-11). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (p. 187). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition. 

We Are All Cyborgs Now

"In this new regime, a train station (like an airport, a café, or a park) is no longer a communal space but a place of social collection: people come together but do not speak to each other. Each is tethered to a mobile device and to the people and places to which that device serves as a portal. I grew up in Brooklyn..."

Wait a minute.

Steve Rogers, did you write my digital media textbook? O_o

The above photo is a still of the Captain America deleted scenes from The Avengers (2012). Just a kid from 1920s Brooklyn, Steve has been transported into a future where nobody really talks to anybody. Everyone is plugged into a device of some sort designed to take them out of their immediate surroundings. From left to right we have an MP3 player, an eReader, and two smartphones. Steve Rogers, the man out of time, is the only one actually on the train.

Earlier in the clip, when Steve is walking through New York, a cellphone street vendor barks out "Buy some time! Buy some time!"



Is that what we're all doing now? Trying to "make more time by multitasking, our twenty-first-century alchemy" at the expense of living in the moment? I know of one person in particular that is notorious for this type of behavior. I'll have her over at my house, and she will interact with her cellphone every five seconds while we're eating. Trying to have a conversation with her feels like I'm intruding upon the world she really wants to be in. Even my best friend is slipping into this habit now that she has a smartphone. I have to cover up the screen to get her to answer a simple yes or no question. My dog even feels the immediate social disconnect caused by technology; just while I was writing this, he pawed at my leg until I picked him up so he could sit in my lap while I type.

With the immediacy of all of our technology, we are not "existing in the moment" as my yoga teacher likes to say. Recently, however, I've made a concerted effort to stop this, to become a better cyborg by knowing when to turn off the display flickering at the edge of my vision so I can fully experience one event. After all, is all of this connectivity really enhancing our lives when we're sort of--but not really--paying attention to five different things? Well, yes and no. Sometimes, like in class, I use technology to look up supplemental information. That's the beautiful side of technology when online you and real life you is working together towards the same goal. Most times, however...

We're doing five disparate things that detract from each other. I'm not saying this is always a bad thing. Entertainment in itself is not an unworthy pursuit. However, this type of technology is not so shiny new anymore, and we need to learn how to put it down in the right situations. After all, that smartphone is not literally sewn to your hand. Part of the obligation of being a consumer is knowing when to cut yourself off so it does not become an addiction. So, just like the liquor ads always tell you, please

Chapter 1 & 2

So, today's blog is prompted by chapters 1 and 2 from the textbook An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures from my Capstone class in Communication. A major theme of both chapters focuses around discovering how much of ourselves we take into the cyber world with us.

Earlier theories presented in chapter 1 "such as that by Howard Rheingold (1994) celebrate virtual worlds for enabling the user to transcend geography and the body." However, chapter 2 develops a very different stance based upon more recent--and perhaps more realistic and less ideological--theories:

The artifact is the environment through which the audience moves, and the artifact-environment is shaped by this movement of the audience. "Interactivity" is this mutual linkage: the rootedness of the artifact in the audience and the audience-experience being shaped by the artifact. Art forms that depend on cybercultures once again highlight the fact that cyberculture cannot be studied independently of the real and the material.

 Because the cyber world cannot be completely disconnected from our corporeal selves, then, there is a place to discuss the disparate experiences that different genders go through. The hybrid state between human and computer is known as a cyborg, a key staple in cyberpunk fiction. Ironically, though, in the early eras that claimed that virtual reality allowed one to escape the confines of the body, cyberpunk literature reflected the predominantly white male participants of the technological world through the "macho-cyborg" protagonists. Any transcendence for women and minorities, then, would have come from the fact that cyber culture "rarely identifies the 'console cowboy' as 'white male' because it is assumed that white male bodies are the norm." One of my favorite cyberpunk novels Ender's Game from this time in the late eighties to the early nineties even holds true with this assumption of the white male as the active agent in the cyber world.

From this was born a cyberpunk feminist response that: 

...demands a new genre that emphasizes women's experience of high tech. Feminist cyberpunk begins with the assumption that cyberpunk reinforces existing gender inequalities. The genre foregrounds technology in the material conditions of the real world, where control over technology is concentrated in male, capitalist hands and serves the purpose of racialized and gendered exploitation. The woman cyberpunk, when not a part of the underclass, becomes a code for the alien Other. 

However, it seems just as we move away from the assumption that the body can be transcended is actually when we begin to see this happening. The real world and the cyber world impact upon each other simultaneously in that the more women are introduced to cyber culture, the more the technology is opened up to them and the more they participate. For instance, in the early days of the computer even into the 2000's, computers and their career fields were associated predominantly with men. Now, though, my womanly self is tech savvier than 80% of the guys I know--which is saying something as I tend to hang out with some awesomely geeky individuals. Also, a majority of the individuals I tutor in Web Design are women, and I work with technologically empowered women such as the awesome Graphic Artist Elisabeth Shabi.

Furthermore, rather than the contrived cyberpunk feminist movement, female protagonists now appear naturally in cyberpunk literature such as my favorite recent cyberpunk series Uglies by Scott Westerfeld.

If you read the reviews, I haven't seen a person yet that even comments on how the protagonist is female. It's because it just doesn't matter. Women in technology spheres have become so commonplace that the event is just not remarkable--which is exactly as it should be. Rather than shouting out our special snowflakeness by setting up a separate genre for female cyberpunk, a more effective method is just running a silent invasion into the technology that had been dominated by males. Before long, we're there, and they don't know how long ago it was that they just accepted that fact. We didn't announce our plans to take over their cyber world; we just did it and didn't demand special recognition for it.

That's what the cyber culture I live in is about. Yeah, we are inextricably attached to our female bodies, but it's really quite incidental to our participation in cyber communities. It might even be a benefit in terms of hardware as guys burn their junk on the hot underside of laptops all the time...though I suppose boobs can occasionally get in the way of viewing the screen when you're laying down...

Aaaaaaaaand that's where I end this blog for today. Feel free to contemplate how your own bits influence your online life (answer: probably not much).

Purple Hair and More, Coming to a Classroom Near You!

Hello, people I've now known for three years! Assuming you've all picked up amnesia over the break--or that we might have people looking at this blog who don't know me--allow me to once more introduce myself. My name is Angela Harkins. I'm 22 and a senior at Reinhardt University. Next year, I hope to start working towards a Master's degree in Human-Computer interaction at Georgia Tech. Mostly, though, I'm known as the girl with the purple hair.

 This purple hair, to be exact.

In fact, that picture is one of me in Spain where I studied abroad over the summer. As a web designer, I was able to continue doing some work for Cherokee FOCUS, a non-profit located in Holly Springs, Georgia whose website I built and maintain. It is in this way, then, that cyber culture has quite an impact upon my life. Even though I was half a world away, I was able to participate in my workplace culture almost as if I were there in person. 

It's a little bizarre, when you think about it, to realize that cyber culture has developed over the past few decades to the point that I don't have to be physically near anyone in order to participate in a community. I go to work online, I pay my bills online, and I interact socially online. In fact, since most of my interactions occur on the web, most people's mental representation of me is my avatar rather than my actual face.

However, with this new field suddenly open to us, a lot of the major ethical questions of our day are being raised. I recently received an email about a lawsuit against facebook for using personal information of its users in their advertising. Is it okay for them to do this? After all, we did voluntarily give them the information.

What about the problems over at Instagram where they're selling pictures and user information?

Or, more broadly, should the internet come under the control of the United Nations, or are we doing okay on our own?

What about online piracy, the use of online information by police, and the existence of vigilante groups like Anonymous?

We're setting the example that all future generations will follow. In order to make sure we are laying a solid foundation of moral responsibility, we need to understand the cyber culture in which we are participating before making decisions about issues such as those listed above.