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Articles Conference Reviews |
200776VieSession 7.6: Disappearing Sidewalks, Digital Neighborhoods, Virtual Violence: New Media’s (Un)real Estate
Devon Fitzgerald, Marie Moeller, and Jim Kalmbach (Illinois State University) Devon Fitzgerald, Illinois State University: “Won’t You be My Digital Neighbor? Narratives of Preference on lastfm and Vox” Fitzgerald, a Ph.D. candidate at Illinois State University, began by musing about her experiences growing up and moving around a great deal. She noted that while neighborhoods are traditionally created out of physical space and proximity, technology has played a major role in connecting and disconnecting us despite the lack of physical space online. Looking at lastfm and Vox, Fitzgerald asks how neighborhoods are constructed, created, or formed in/on/through these two distinct online spaces. For the uninitiated, Fitzgerald provided clear explanations of these two online services. lastfm, a social music platform, offers a plugin called “Audioscrobbler.” This plugin automatically tracks songs users have listened to and adds them to the user’s profile, calculates a user’s relationships to other users, and makes recommendations for other artists or music based on the music it has already “scrobbled.” Thus, neighbors on lastfm consist of individuals with similar musical tastes. The site uses a collaborative filtering algorithm to make its recommendations, while lastfm users look for similarities to make their own connections. Fitzgerald invoked Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of how taste can classify: “Taste classifies and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make … in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed” (6). So lastfm presents us with an intriguing opportunity to examine social critiques of the judgment of taste. For example, when a user sets up a user profile in lastfm, he or she can turn off or delete songs so that “guilty pleasure” songs don’t then represent the user’s musical tastes. Why, she asks, don’t we want these guilty pleasures represented? Fitzgerald noted that she herself “plays songs she wants others to know she likes.” Her neighborhood therefore represents an identity she’s chosen for herself with its particular cultural capital. The speaker then turned to a discussion of Vox, a blogging site with a social networking aspect. Here, a social network is made up of people “who really care about you,” as Vox encourages users to share their lives with friends and family. Like lastfm, taste is still prominent in this site, such as content labeled “this is good” based on suggestions from other Vox bloggers. Fitzgerald’s discussion of these two social networking sites provided an intriguing angle on taste and preference as applied to online social networks. Marie Moeller, Illinois State University: “It’s Rough in the Hood: (Textual) Violence in Online Writing Classrooms” Moeller began by describing the particular context for her talk; she taught online courses for two different community colleges in Midwest in which she felt keenly the “reduction of [her] body to text.” While the course management systems she had to use “forced [her] into a particular identity,” she maintains that she is “thirty different identities at once, one for each of her students.” As a feminist instructor, being represented by the course management system as the “capital-I Instructor” disturbed Moeller. Other aspects of the course management system bothered her, such as her inability in an asynchronous mode to control how she or the text appears. Similarly, answers in the class come from her, tech support, or administrators—everyone is labeled in terms of where they appear in the course management system hierarchy. Because messages regularly appeared from those higher up in the hierarchy, Moeller felt like “someone with more power” (such as the president of the school) was constantly watching them. Students then inferred that the president of the college was a participant in the class and felt stifled. While Moeller described her efforts to foster online community and to resist the textual violence she saw in these courses, she noted too that students in her class were concerned about sharing personal narratives with random strangers in an online class and were hesitant to share even with her. She maintains that the issue wasn’t the classroom community but rather how we as instructors ask online classrooms to function. In closing, Moeller noted that we need new media to do the work of community building in online classes. It would be fascinating to hear how new media might be able to accomplish this goal, but unfortunately the speaker did not have enough time to address this in her talk. Jim Kalmbach, Illinois State University: “The Uses of Sidewalks: Virtuality and Digitality in New Media” Unfortunately, wee missed the CW @getinfo session where Kalmbach was going to portray Mr. Rogers: “Can you say new media? I thought you could.” Illinois State University, where Kalmbach works, was hiring a new media specialist this past fall; as such, at the MLA conference, all candidates were asked, “What is new media?” Kalmbach notes that there were two competing approaches broached. The first, following Anne Wysocki, asserts that new media texts do not have to be digital. The second, following Lev Manovich, focuses instead on new media as a computable form—the translation of all existing media into numerical data accessible through computers. For Manovich then, new media involves graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, and text that have become computable. Wysocki in turn is part of a long rhetorical tradition drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s ideas of hypermediacy and immediacy, Lanham’s “looking at versus looking through,” and Rosenblatt’s aesthetic versus efferent reading. While each of these binaries implies a subject position—someone reading, looking, using—Manovich focuses on new media objects, stories that can be told without any reference to the people, readers, or writers involved. Kalmbach paused to pose the question, “You might ask, who’s right?” It’s a deliberately provocative question. Whether context versus object, virtuality versus digitality, or Wysocki versus Manovich, everyone wins. It’s counterproductive to have one without the other and wee need broad approaches as well as narrow.
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