I never do this, but here I am liveblogging from the concluding keynote at MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning conference, one which heralds the arrival of “our field,” as Eszter Hargittai put it during last night’s keynote panel.  Generally I am finding this conference really really good.  One of the reasons is the evocativeness of the work here.  Even when it’s not pushing out paradigms that I want to use, it’s giving terms to react against or through from different contexts, such as education.

One of the educators’ panels asked us to come up with a definition of “digital citizenship.”  This was a lot more productive a paradigm than the “digital natives” discourse I’ve been seeing that takes off from John Palfrey’s popular recent book.  Digital native implies a special, exceptionally enabled sort of person, independent of race, class, or other factors–but as Livingstone’s ethnographies show, there is actually quite a low level of skill in young people’s use of the Internet, something that Siva Vaidhyanathan and Hargittai have noted.

Digital citizenship implies instead rights, soverignty, and a sometimes vexed relationship to affordances which works better to my mind.  The rights to free movement (across platforms, standards, virtual worlds), the rights to speak your own language, the rights to access–these are less utopian ideas than “digital natives,” who seemingly need nothing and “naturally” know how to do everything.

I am almost out of batts!  more later.

It’s been a long time with no blogging by me, but I think about Difference Engines all the time and have resolved to do better with it this year. I believe very much in collective blogging, in women’s blogging, and in the people who do this blog. Lily Irani and I got some F2F time at the New School conference on Virtual Labor, “The Internet as Playground and Factory.” Fun times, and I need to post about it before the memory is entirely gone.

This weekend I’ll be presenting at the first DML conference in LaJolla, entitled “Diversifying Participation.” I will try to blog some from there. I’m presenting on two panels: one paper is called “unfree labor: working at playing with race in digital games” and the other is “virtual labor migration in digital games: factionalized identities and racial minorities in world of warcraft” but since the presentations will be 5 minutes long or so I doubt it will be getting too deep.

So that’s the update.

Lately I’ve been thinking about conferences as performative venues and how esp. at digital media conferences the use of stickers on the laptop function like signage or endorsements, usually for causes rather than for products, though with new media those things sometimes blend together. I’m including two images of laptops to illustrate this: mine and my partner Christian Sandvig’s.

My laptop, which is what people are looking at when I give papers at conferences and sit at meetings, has four stickers on the red Speck plastic case for the macbook Air (solid state, thank you University of Illinois!) I made one myself, was given two at conferences, and the fourth was given to me by my eight year old daughter, who made it at school as part of a project to sell parents artwork that can be printed on mugs, tshirts, and other commodities. We did not choose to buy any of these things, but got the stickers for free. The one she made, of a flower, is also on Christian’s laptop:

I got the GLS sticker from the Games, Learning, and Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin last summer, along with a pair of socks with the same elf-girl knitted in them. I got the same sticker the year before, and put it on my ancient Mac g4 tower at work. The Spaceshift.org was given to me at the Internet as Playground and Factory conference by an Israeli software designer who makes an open source software project that is “an opensource layer above any website.” He seemed cool and his product is free and interesting and I like the sticker.

The little blue sticker that say “Good Job” has an interesting story. I have a Brother p-touch label maker at home, and my daughter uses it to make stickers sometimes. She made this one, which is pretty clearly imitative of the stamps that her teachers use on her homework, and I found it, and decided to put it on mine because my scholars and colleagues HARDLY EVER HEAR OR SEE THESE PARTICULAR WORDS. Digital media is, like all academics, a spectacularly praise-free environment. I wish that it was bigger, and that I could see it myself, but hopefully when people read it it does something.

I can’t decode my partner’s stickers for him–that’s really his job. I can say that he is a Berkman Fellow this year and that the ostrich sticker came from a cafe in North Portland where they had a glass dish of them.

There are lots of stickers around at cafes, conferences, and other places where people who would put them on their laptops gather. These remind me of zine culture in the early nineties–I was given a sticker from a student of mine at Vista Community College when I taught there while looking for a tenure track job. He was a skateboarder who had a zine, and was giving them to people–I put it on a notebook because I didn’t own a laptop then.

These are pretty clearly about declaring cultural affiliation. Cory Doctorow had a really big collection of laptop stickers, some of them about the EFF, last time I saw him speak at a conference. Now when I see them at conferences I see them as advertisements: for the projects/events that they reference, but mainly for the person who displays them. They seem to show that you’re still young, and will replace your laptop often enough to keep them fresh, and that you think that consumer culture *must* be modified in order to make a point about making and participation. I put mine on a case, which is totally wussing out. Though I don’t expect to keep this laptop for more than a few years, it makes me feel a little better about “taking care of it” correctly. This is no doubt about being raised as a thrifty Japanese American woman by two parents who spent time in internment camps during the war (Heart Mountain and Amache). We rarely threw things out and were not allowed to deface any parts of the house with Wacky Pack stickers; I never asked because there was no question that this was *absolutely forbidden.*”  What kind of cultural affiliation was important enough to risk damaging the value of a commodity that you might need to sell in the future?  Having consumer goods was all about preserving them.  None of our cars (Fords and Lincolns, and later, a Volvo and a Jaguar) had stickers on them.

I wonder if the relative absence of stickers on women’s and maybe people of color’s laptops (as well as the absence of these people themselves) at digital media conferences is reflective of a thrift-culture that has to do with a different stance towards obsolescence, thrift, value, and preservation?  There is a different sense of an object’s futurity if you are one of these people perhaps–”re-making” is a luxury if you know you’re handing down your machine to a relative who doesn’t have one, or selling it on Craig’s List when you get a new one. When my computer is replaced, it will return from whence it came–to the warm bosom of the University of Illinois.

Apple gives out stickers but I have never seen them on an actual computer. Weirdly, I have seen them on cars–one Saab and a few VW’s. I threw mine away, but not without a pang, because like everything that Apple does they are nice (again, thrift). Portland Oregon is the best place for bumperstickers I have ever seen: my favorite is “my other car is a broom,” which was often found on a weathered Subaru wagon or an elderly Toyota Tercel wagon with the long-throw manual transmission shifter and a Mexican blanket covering the back seat.

It would be good if I could get some stickers from Sarai: that’s a cause that I’d like to advertise a lot. But I don’t think that they make them.

This Fall, I will be presenting at the Institute for Distributed Creativity’s conference “The Internet as Playground and Factory” from November 12-14 at the New School for Social Research.  This looks to be a really interesting conference.  As its website states, “This conference confronts the urgent need to interrogate what constitutes labor and value in the digital economy and it seeks to inspire proposals for action. Currently, there are few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy.”  I figure that my job is to represent for the person/woman of color perspective in this.  This writing is some work towards that end.  So, how are bodies of color engaging with the digital economy as both labor and value, or to paraphrase Lisa Lowe through my friend race and gender scholar Grace Hong, how are bodies of color both labor and capital?  What do the Mechanical Turk worker, the Twitter user, the citizen journalist, the gold farmer, and the game level author or modder have in common?  And how are their interests (part of what makes this conference exciting is that it views digital laborers are both more numerous and a broader category than we thought, and also as even having interests, rather than simply demographics) similar to or different from those of people of color?

As Trebor Scholz writes on June 24 in the Institute for Digital Culture listserv, “Why do so many people care more about digital rights management on iTunes, intellectual property, and privacy on Facebook than about the suffering of people in Rwanda or indeed Neda Soltani (or the other Iranian students whose death was not recorded)?”  Yet rather than seeing these two struggles—the struggle for racial justice and the struggle for the digital commons—as being two separate and opposed causes, it makes sense to me to see them as structurally linked.  Both are social justice struggles that identify and challenge the mis-allocation of resources.  As Andrea Volpe writes, “So the problem for the study of internet cultures, not unlike the pre-digital study of media and popular culture, is that any attempts at appropriation are complicated by top-down control of the means of expression.”

Critical race feminist theory and digital labor theory can benefit from each other—watching the Neda Soltani images on CNN I was struck by the ways that her phenotypic whiteness, beauty, youth, and gender gave her a claim to the “white woman in trouble” status that largely determines the style and extent of news coverage dedicated to violence against women in our news media.  Her light skin, blue jeans, white tennis shoes, and unveiled but headscarved face permitted her to be “seen” as white, and thus as legible as a female subject to American viewers.  The veil or hijab, which as Mimi Nguyen notes in “You Say You Want A Revolution (In a Loose Headscarf)” is “made to stand as a visual shorthand for Islamic oppression in the West.”  Soltani’s dying body is a racialized digital image that was captured by a citizen journalist’s cell phone, and circulated via social networks like Twitter and Facebook and other pages on the web before ending up on the evening news.   This is surely an epochal moment in digital media history; those of us teaching courses on new media will have to change our syllabi this year.  Yet rather than viewing this as a triumph of born-digital media and the power of disenfranchised people to “get the truth out” faster and better than for-profit or commercial mass media, it is important to remember that its standing as a media event depends upon of the veil’s absence—a sign of the secular state’s power over women’s bodies– and because of the victim’s approximate whiteness.  As Nguyen notes, the veil is always a sign of power over women: “both forced veiling and forced unveiling operated as disciplinary state edicts –often enacted violently on female bodies by male soldiers or police– at discrete political times to instrumentally shape a feminine civic body.”  Suffering bodies are not telegenic when they belong to black or brown women in different contexts.  Images of dead or dying Rwandan, Somali, or Chinese women and their children victimized by civil war, ethnic violence, famine, or the depredations of the modern slave trade fail to engage the sympathies and the air time of either legacy or “new” media: CNN and Twitter alike both earn a fail in this regard.   There is, however, an immense appetite for mediation regarding black performing bodies, as the recent almost-crashing of the Internet by Michael Jackson’s recent demise attests.

As Scholz writes, DRM, privacy, and IP struggles may seem like luxuries of the moneyed class, one of the many minor irritants of the privileged digital consumer, yet they are linked to people of color issues quite intimately.  In my recent work on worker-players in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games like World of Warcraft, I describe how laborers or “gold farmers” create and sell virtual money, goods, and characters for real money.  These workers are creating new racialized forms of labor.  The term “Chinese gold farmer” has come to stand for all worker-players in MMO’s, just as the term “Mexican gardener” comes to stand in for all dark skinned men cutting lawns and trimming bushes in other people’s yards, be they Guatemalan, Salvadoran, or Brazilian.   (The racialization of labor is a persistent effect of race classification itself—in my grandfather’s days “Japanese gardener” was a term that described him and many other Asian men in the Bay Area before the war, whether they were Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese.  Today, the term “Indian computer programmer” can come to stand for Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, and all other brown people from South or West Asia.)  The work that these digital migrants do is affective and embodied work within virtual worlds, yet forbidden by Blizzard’s terms of service.  Blizzard’s ownership of World of Warcraft, a virtual world that is successfully marketed as and that is viewed by many of its users as a digital playground drives these forms of labor underground, where they come to resemble virtual factories.  Just as in other leisure spaces, the work that maintains it must be hidden, just as is its racialization.  The struggle against this type of value-extractive ownership of virtual worlds and of all digital communication forms is a racialized one, if only because it effectively criminalizes forms of transnational trade like gold farming that less fortunate people need to survive.

Neda Soltani’s death is a tragedy. I hope that nobody reading this thinks that I’m diminishing that.   I mean to point out instead that beauty, gender, youth, race, and modernity came together in that piece of video that we saw to engage our sympathies in ways unavailable to other female suffering bodies.  As sociologist Bonilla Silva writes in Racism Without Racists “phenotype will be a central factor determining where groups and members of racial and ethnic groups will fit—lighter people at the top, medium in the middle, dark at the bottom.”  The digital labor that went into creating and distributing that piece of galvanizing media was multiply borne by thousands of people who formed an informal network, one that looked for a moment to have displaced commercial networks like CNN. It is important to track the ways that the event was quickly recuperated by the mass media industry—within hours of the story breaking CNN had altered its broadcasting to “promise” that it had “more news” about the story than any other source, presumably including the Internet.  It is equally important to look at why and how this could become the particular spectacle that it did in the first place.  War will always trump famine, slavery, and domestic violence as a visual event, even in “real time,” and the image of a “white woman in trouble” still represents the sine qua non of media palatability.  The war became individualized and personalized—“real”–through the intimate images of Soltani’s face presumably at the moment of her demise. 

The paradox of race in America is that race is both hyper-visible and commodified in both politics and media, yet simultaneously made invisible and unspeakable by individuals in social interaction as well as within the public sphere.  Bonilla-Silva documents the halting and tortuous rhetoric that characterizes racial discourse, and is utterly constitutive of neoliberal racism.  It is literally hard for people to talk about race.  The Neda Soltani case makes this abundantly clear; pundits initially read and continue to read this as a story about the triumph of social networks and citizen journalism as an allegory for the power of the people.  Race has not yet entered into this discussion at all, for some racialized bodies are not either on or in social networks.  They cannot be, for reasons having to do with phenotype, access, gender, class.

This is the same paradox of the Internet itself.  Value is extracted from race as it is from the Internet, but unfortunately, the proceeds are not often directed towards people of color, nor the “users” who make “user generated content.”  Serious racial and class divides continue to exist and to worsen, as the furor over ownership of digital music, intellectual digital property, and virtual world currencies continues apace at academic conferences and corporate boardrooms alike.

Lilly’s intervention into the Digital Turk has gotten me thinking about this kind of labor as the same type of digital piecework that women of color have done since the early days of digital culture.  My grandmother worked in electronics assembly right after the war because she saw an ad recruiting Japanese American women as workers–this was right after the war in Santa Clara, when many of them had returned from internment camps.  Thus, they were a fairly emiserated and jobless group of workers who had an excellent reputation for manual dexterity.  As Donna Haraway wrote years ago, women of color, especially transnational ones, have always done the piecework of the digital age.

The Mechnical Turk makes digital piecework seem game-like, done on one’s own time, but it is also a mockery of the “creative industries” form of labor, done for love/interest/personal development rather than for the (meager) pay.  Amazon is a platform for consumption, and hosting the Turk there makes working that way look like play.  Lots of types of sweated/semi-sweated labor like this seem like play rather than work, and are also a mockery of the creative industries–like gold farming.

Lilly knows that I am obsessed with gold farming, because it is sweated labor done by Asian men in actual sweatshop conditions, but also because it is so overtly about play as work.  These jobless and unemployable Chinese men play World of Warcraft and other MMO’s and sell their avatars and virtual money through third party virtual goods resellers like IGE.  If we look at what they do, it’s also a mockery of the creative industries that the digital revolution was supposed to make available to so many.

In film and television studies, there’s new interest in studying “below the line” workers, like secretaries, script girls, craft workers, and personal assistants.  So many of them are women, and they are so seldom talked about–they’re not auteurs or stars.  If we look at digital games like other media, can we talk about gold farmers as “below the line” workers in the digital entertainment industry?  They make the “play” of other more privileged people more easy and fun, they do the boring stuff that needs to get done to make the game accessible to busy Americans and even busy Asians who want to play at a high level but don’t have time to earn all this gold, and they are despised as a workforce for these very reasons.  Are they Mechanical Turks?  To free associate a bit, the Turk was an Oriental–exotic, inscrutable, and tricky.  Chinese gold farmers are so marginalized, they are pallet-sharing, bleary eyed information workers a world away whose work is always viewed as harmful and antisocial in world of warcraft, yet their labor is essential; 20% of players have bought gold, and they are tolerated because Blizzard knows that without them many players would drop out in frustration (Mia Consalvo’s book _Cheating_, MIT Press, discusses this strategy–game manufacturers often leak cheat codes and tolerate farmers because otherwise new players would get too frustrated and stop being good customers.)

I wrote a paper about this which will appear in a communication studies journal.  I’m posting it here because the journal is a paper journal and isn’t out yet. I wrote this article almost exactly a year ago, and I thank Difference Engine’s editors for letting me post it here so that people can read it. Any feedback welcome, as always.

WordPress doesn’t like my attachment, so I’m having to link it: click Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft to get the pdf.