I wrote this short essay for a collection on race that the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity is putting together. Their premise is as follows: by 2042 we’ve made a lot of progress on racial justice and equity in the United States. (Congratulations!) Q #1 – what does it look like? #2 — suppose we know that some of the seeds of transformation are in place right now, in 2010; what are some of those? #3 — how do we get from here to there?

I have never been asked to produce a utopian vision about what the Internet might do for racial equality.  I’ve spent most of my academic career as a buzzkill, a position that we’re much more comfortable with, and one that we are often compelled to occupy given the crazy-ass industrial narratives of Internet=democracy.  So here goes!

Gaming Our Way Towards Racial Equality: the Transformative Potential of Fun Times Online
Lisa Nakamura
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Craig Watkins writes that “the social ties and personal relationships that matter most to young people are managed through digital-media technologies.” (Watkins 2009)  This amount is only bound to increase as media such as music, television, and film migrate onto our digital devices.  The struggle for racial equality will only succeed if to the extent that it can involve digital media, since as Watkins writes, the Internet is increasingly where social interaction takes place.  In 2010, internet users spend more time playing digital games than they do on email. («Games overtake email as second top online time killer», Nielsen) What follows is a vision of how Internet-mediated networks and virtual world games might help us progress towards racial justice and equality in the United States.
It is 2040, and President Brittany Molina-Nguyen has passed the Digital Civil Rights Bill.  She is supported in this decision by the American public because by 2042 it has been recognized by most governments and individuals that unequal access to the Internet is a form of class, racial, and gender discrimination, and that this has stood in the way of racial harmony.   Because Americans have finally accepted that they are not currently nor will ever again be citizens of the world’s superpower, there is renewed interest in looking at alternative ways of socializing, taking care of citizens, and educating them.  In a radical move, the U.S. government, displaced by China as the world’s largest economy and the seeming inevitability of Brazil and India as contenders for the number 2 and 3 positions, pours funding into Internet access for all. The three priorities shaping the Digital Civil Rights Bill are 1) the promotion of multiracial social environments online, spearheaded by online games 2) digital media content production for a transnational audience 3) environmental transparency and accountability.

Years ago, in 2010, researchers found that most Americans were using the Internet to either form homogeneous social networks with people who were the same race and class as themselves, or were playing online games like Xbox 360 Live’s popular Modern Warfare 2 and using racist and sexist language within them. (Hargittai 2007), (Nakamura 2009).  In 2010, people of color and older were predominantly to be found in the “undesirable neighborhoods” of the Internet, within social networks and spaces like MySpace and AOL that were increasingly segregated along racial, class, and generational lines.  For example, as Internet researcher danah boyd discovered, MySpace suffered from “white flight” as white users deserted it in favor of Facebook, claiming that MySpace is “ghetto,” “ignorant” and “low class.”(boyd)  In a bold move to re-shape these practices, President Molina-Nguyen agrees to a proposal by Internet scholars who had recommended for many years that Internet access be free or state-subsidized for users who permit Facebook’s algorithms to identify users with common interests who are of a different race and class from themselves.  Because Internet access is quite expensive, as it has replaced all telephony, cable television, and other communication networks, there is plenty of incentive to participate in this program.  Those who choose not to participate in the program pay full market price, are taxed much more heavily, have slower connection speeds, and are not given access to all of its features.  In exchange for grouping with these users, Americans receive free access to any of the dozen virtual world games run by Zynga/Blizzard/Activision, the dominant maker of online role playing games such as World of Warcraft (now in its 20^th expansion, and boasting a user base containing half of the world population).  Because Zynga/Blizzard/Activision was acquired by Facebook several years ago, users find themselves enjoyably playing thrilling computer games in real time with their friends as well as with users from different races.

The best and most exciting online games can only be unlocked by hours of gameplay within a multiracial and multilingual/multinational “clan” or “guild.”  The close bonds that develop from having fun times together online creates new social networks that are much more diverse in terms of age, race, nation, and gender, and sexuality than ever before.  After a middle-aged Ivy educated white attorney has been saved from certain death in World of Warcraft 30 by the same African American teenage girl from rural Detroit, a member of his algorithmically-selected and multiracial guild, he feels a rush of relief and happiness every time she logs on.  As automatic Facebook friends and members of the same WoW guild they learn a great deal about each others’ lives by viewing each others’ pictures, updates, and sharing game strategies.  The benefits of the “old boys network” start to flow in different ways as these two and others in their multinational guild learn each others’ languages and help each other both off and online.

The penalty for the use of racist or homophobic hate speech or behavior online is a temporary loss of the Internet government subsidy.  Players who continue to engage in hate speech will eventually pay the full market price for these services, which now averages as much as a family’s mortgage.  Subsidies can be earned back by engaging in volunteer work online to improve impoverished communities here and abroad.  Formerly out of work journalists are now fully employed as fact-checkers in these online civility disputes, as paper newspapers have long disappeared and the news continues to be written by bloggers.

As a result of the Digital Civil Rights Bill, most Americans count at least five or six non-Americans as “close friends” whom they communicate with several times a week within their recreational gaming networks.  Rather than producing a nation of mouse-potatoes, the Digital Civil Rights Bill works beautifully to encourage the nation’s least wired to come online as multiple language speakers and savvy content producers.  Because the games produced by companies like Zynga/Blizzard/Activision are already popular by users around the world, it is an easy step to get users to join other groups of players in exchange for free access.  In 2042, the majority of the content on the Internet has been in Chinese almost 50 years, making Chinese one of the easiest languages to learn for non-Chinese speakers.  Phonetic charactersets have replaced ideograms, and language-learning has been accelerated tremendously by the Internet’s translation programs.  Doing business in Asia is only possible through participation in the networks produced by these social games, providing poorer Americans excellent jobs as translators, project managers, and businesspeople.

The third and last piece of the Digital Civil Rights bill requires bar-coding and RFID-chipping of all consumer goods, including fruits and vegetables.  Shoppers can use their cellphones to scan these goods and learn when they were picked or produced, by whom, under what conditions, and where.  Like calorie labeling efforts from the 2010’s, this has a strong effect upon consumer behavior.   Agricultural workers are much better protected, and the job becomes attractive to people from all racial groups.  Food starts to taste much better, people eat less of it, and obesity and diabetes rates decrease, and are evenly distributed throughout the population.  Americans are healthier, more digitally empowered, less xenophobic, and have more fun times.

References

danah boyd, Technology review: Blogs: Guest blog: Did whites flee the ‘digital ghetto’ of MySpace? b [cited 8/4/2010 2010]. Available from http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/25474/ (accessed 8/4/2010).

Games overtake email as second top online time killer- US study — today’s top stories a [cited 8/4/2010 2010]. Available from http://www.netimperative.com/news/2010/august/games-overtake-email-as-second-top-online-time/ (accessed 8/4/2010).

Hargittai, Eszter. 2007. Whose space? differences among users and non-users of social network sites. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 13 (1).

Nakamura, Lisa. 2010. «Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: Internet Games, Social Inequality, and Racist Talk as Griefing.» podcast available from http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2010/06/16/lisa-nakamura-dont-hate-the-player-hate-the-game/ (accessed 8/3/2010).

Watkins, S. Craig. 2009. The young and the digital: What the migration to social network sites, games, and anytime, anywhere media means for our future Beacon Press.

I would like to continue the discussion of our wonderful conference, STS-South Asia (UT-Austin, May 2010), by posing some thoughts and questions about the keynote lecture. This was given by David Arnold and titled: “Situating Technology: Reflections on the Rise of Techno-Modernity in 19th and 20th century South Asia.” Arnold provided a much-needed focus on everyday technologies during turn of the century India, and how they operated “in the home, the village, the street.” What really captivated me was his opening observation that many of the technologies of early 20th century India were global, and moreover, associated with women. Arnold made important observations about how narratives of femininity and sexuality often accompanied discourses and practices, as new technologies were introduced in daily life.

Why did I feel then, that a gendered perspective of technology was missing? I’m not an historian, but still as a feminist scholar, Arnold’s analysis raised many questions for me:

1. If women are the focus of the analysis as practitioners and targets of technology, and are the linchpin between everyday technologies and social realities, then why not even a hint of feminist theory in the analytical framework? Four different cases were presented as examples of the role of technology in everyday life (sewing machines, typewriters, bicycles, mills), and all were about women. Yet neither the significance nor implications of this link of gender to technology were discussed. Whether as a theoretical framing or as a method of understanding the cases, the analysis would have benefitted from some attention to the wealth of feminist literature on South Asia.

A case in point is Arnold’s discussion of the sewing machine. He points out how the Singer sewing machine from the U.S. was marketed in India for high caste women, who would be able to sew clothes in their households for sale to Europeans and Eurasians in India.

Reading Maria Mies’s classic piece The Lacemakers of Narsapur (1982), Arnold would have learned how this was happening as much as a hundred years earlier in the state of Andhra Pradesh. With the simpler technological tool of the knitting needle, Indian women began producing lace tablecloths, napkins, and rounds for the global market. This eventually became a full-fledged “invisible” production process, “submerged [in an] underground economy” of the household (p. 55).

With Mies’s analysis, we see the full implications (and complications) of the political economies of technology for women. The women in her 1970s study were poor and working in times of famine and economic hardship to augment the dwindling incomes of their husbands: “lace making is not a leisure time activity of all classes of women who want to earn some extra money” but rather an act of “necessity” (p. 125). Furthermore, the monetary benefits of lace-making ultimately lay less in the hands of these women than in the shockingly wide array of middlemen. Forming the transnational chain between the Indian women workers and the British, Australian, and German consumers were a number of male co-betweens: agents, hawkers, merchants and exporters. Thus, while the technology of the knitting needle, and by extension the sewing machine, may provide income sources for women, they are also embedded in a broader system of global patriarchal exploitation.

2. My next question: Is it possible that Arnold may be overstating the feminization of some of these particular technologies? For instance, Arnold presents a convincing argument about how Western organizations were targeting certain technologies to women: the YWCA in Calcutta encouraged women to use typewriters as a means of social uplifting. Yet, there is a difference between the intended user of a technology and its actual practice or use. Indeed, the ultimate success of these technology campaigns is a different story.

I would argue that it’s debatable whether machines like the typewriter were ever gendered “female” in a meaningful way in India. Even at the end of the century, the job of typing was still in the hands of male clerical workers within a majority of state and private firms. The truth is that the job of information processing did not reach a tipping point of feminization until the introduction of the computer, which was primarily after the year 2000. (In light of these points, I almost wonder if the strained link of femininity to technology by Arnold is an attempt to use women as a barometer of modernization, which I get to in point #4 below.)

One might also argue that the limited focus on mechanical gadgets is a misplaced way of understanding women’s relation to technology and science in the late 19th and early 20th century India. Here I’m drawn to Vandana Shiva’s (1989) work. If we are looking for the everyday participation of women in science and technology at this time – especially on a mass-populous level – what we find may not be an invention made out of metal, or even a consumer item at all (like bikes, typewriters, etc.). More abstractly, but still quite significantly, women’s contributions may have been in the scientific knowledge production of agriculture and environment, concerning seed cultivation, forestry, etc. As women were mostly rural during this period and doing much of the farming work for the household, their everyday lives revolved around technologies in those realms.

3. This leads to my next point, which is that several of Arnold’s cases are in some ways not about women at all, but rather about men. Deboleena Roy, one of our participants, noted that her father – not her mother – was the person in her household in India who was invested both practically and emotionally in the sewing machine. In fact, he wasn’t aware of any other gendered-association of sewing machines (like that of femininity), until he came to the US and encountered ridicule for using them.

This is not to downplay the significance of women in the social meaning of these technologies, but rather to reveal a deeper understanding when examining and interrogating masculinity as well. Again, there is such a rich gender literature available to fill in the gaps here. Many excellent historiographies on masculinity in South Asia have been written about the colonial period in India, such as Ashis Nandy’s (1983) analysis of hyper-masculinity and violence among the British, and Mrinalini Sinha’s (1995) exploration of effeminacy among Bengali civil servant men. There is also a growing field specifically on technology within masculinity, like Ulf Melstrom’s (2003) study of men and automobiles as everyday machines, Jeff Hearn’s (2009) work on virtuality, masculinity, and globalization, and my own work on Indian techno-masculinity in the IT industry (Poster 2009). Thus, in some cases, we should be asking not only why and how certain technologies are feminized, but why they are masculinized.

4. My last question arising is about the outcomes of technology for women. In most of Arnold’s examples, technology seems to have a positive impact on women, affirming of the modernist view that technology ultimately facilitates social progress. An example is the bicycle, which Arnold says was “liberating” for several groups of the 1930s, such as middle class women who gained independent mobility, and activist women could serve as couriers for the communist movement.

Feminist scholars of South Asia remind us that technology has not always been associated with benefits for women, however. Take the development process for example. With one of the earliest critiques of development, Ester Boserup (1970) revealed how technology can actually distort the development process for women. Based on research in the 1950s and 60s in India (as well as East Asia and Africa), she showed how agricultural technologies are often put in the hands of men. This leaves women with substandard tools for farming, lower yield crops, and exclusion from the anti-poverty programs.

Technology has come at a cost for urban women workers in factories too. Amrita Chhachhi, Sujata Gothoskar, and others documented how the automation of consumer and computer electronics production in Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Simla, etc., was quite disadvantageous to women, especially within the context of structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 90s. Women were disproportionately affected by layoffs, and then by the ensuing “casualization” of labor. This meant that, even if their jobs were female-dominated, those jobs were also degraded (with insecure contracts and inadequate wages) and pushed out of the organized (and thus unionized) labor sector (Chhachhi 1999; Shah et al. 1999).

True, as Arnold points out, new forms of employment technology at the turn of the 19th century – particularly the rice and jute mills – were often unfairly disparaged as bad for women by Indian cultural and political media outlets. In fact, this was the case from Gandhi himself, who argued the mills were a “disservice to women,” taking them away from their traditional way of life. This dichotomization (nature vs. technology, work vs. home, etc.) certainly placed unnecessary choices on women. Still, is the alternative to welcome all technologies as potentially good for women? I would argue an uncritical approach is equally unhelpful.

Indeed, feminist scholars of late are providing more nuanced gender analyses when it comes to current (and much celebrated) technologies in South Asia – the ICT industry. The shift to advanced information processing services at the turn of the millennium, which I study, highlights the complexity for women (Poster Forthcoming; Poster 2007a, b). It has opened hundreds of thousands of jobs in outsourced call centers and software firms (and many more in secondary industries). Furthermore many of these women are the first in their families to work outside the home or in the formal sector. Some South Asian scholars are optimistic (whether guardedly or enthusiastically) about potential empowerment for women from ICTs in these fields (Banerjee and Mitter 1999; Mitter and Rowbotham 1995; Kelkar et al. 2002; Ng and Mitter 2005). At the same time, this newfound economic power from IT has yet to relieve or improve women’s burdens and responsibilities in the household (Kelkar et al. 2005; Poster 2005; Poster and Prasad 2005).

Finally, the newest form of everyday technology – the internet – is providing some of the greatest challenges to the modernization thesis. Believe it or not, internet usage is not correlated cross-nationally with gains in major indicators of women’s status, such as literacy, GDP per capita, and gender and development indices (Huyer et al. 2005). It is associated, however, with over ten different kinds of cybercrime against women in India, including cyber-harassment, stalking, bullying, defamation, hacking, email spoofing, morphing, pornography, etc. (Halder and Jaishankar 2008). Future studies of everyday technologies will undoubtedly be about cell phones, for which India is now the second largest market in the world, and how men are using them to take compromising pictures of women without their knowledge or permission, and then to sell them online.

Clearly, technology remains an unknown for women and men in South Asia at the dawn of the 21st century. No doubt, technology can play a huge role in empowering women (Hafkin and Huyer 2006). This is especially true in global south countries, where ICTs can help women to leverage rights across economic, education, sociocultural, psychological, political, and legal arenas, especially when other resources and tools are less available. Feminist scholars are also showing how South Asian cyberwebs are increasingly crucial for women’s activism (Gajjala 2003, 2004). As technology is intrinsically multi-layered, socially variable, and highly dynamic, however, we need continued study on the way that gender is integral to technology in South Asia.

References

Banerjee, Nirmala and Swasti Mitter. 1999. “Women Making a Meaningful Choice: Technology and the New Economic Order.” Economic and Political Weekly December 19:3247-56.
Boserup, Ester. 1970. Women’s Role in Economic Development. London: Aleen and Unwin.
Chhachhi, Amrita. 1999. “Gender, Flexibility, Skill and Industrial Restructuring: The Electronics Industry in India.” Gender, Technology and Development 3(3):329-360.
Gajjala, Radhika. 2003. “South Asian Digital Diasporas and Cyberfeminist Webs.” Contemporary South Asia 12(1):41-56.
Gajjala, Radhika. 2004. Cyber Selves. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Hafkin, Nancy and Sophia Huyer. 2006. “Cinderella or Cyberella? Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society.” Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press.
Halder, Debarati and K. Jaishankar. 2008. “Cyber Crimes Against Women in India: Problems, Perspectives and Solutions.” TMC Academic Journal 3(1):48-62.
Hearn, Jeff. 2009. “Hegemony, Transnationalisation and Virtualization: MNCs and ICTs.” Pp. 1-13 in Changing Men and Masculinities in Gender Equal Societies Conference. Roskilde University, Denmark.
Huyer, Sophia, et al. 2005. “Women in the Information Society.” Pp. 135-196 in From the Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities, edited by G. Sciadas. Montreal, Canada: Orbicom.
Kelkar, Govind, et al. 2002. “IT Industry and Women’s Agency: Explorations in Bangalore and Delhi, India.” Gender, Technology and Development 6(1):63-84.
Kelkar, Govind, et al. 2005. “Women’s Agency and the IT Industry in India.” Pp. 110-131 in Gender and the Digital Economy: Perspectives from the Developing World, edited by C. Ng and S. Mitter. New Delhi, India: Sage.
Mellstrom, Ulf. 2003. Masculinity, Power, and Technology. Oxon, UK: Ashgate.
Mies, Maria. 1982. The Lace Makers of Narsapur. London, UK: Zed Press.
Mitter, Swasti and Sheila Rowbotham. 1995. “Women Encounter Technology.” London, UK: Routledge.
Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy. Dehli, India: Oxford University Press.
Ng, Cecilia and Swasti Mitter. 2005. “Gender and the Digital Economy: Perspectives from the Developing World.” New Delhi, India: Sage.
Poster, Winifred. 2009. “Subversions of Techno-Masculinity in the Global Economy: Multi-Level Challenges by Indian Professionals to US ICT Hegemony.” GEXcel Work in Progress Report V:123-135.
Poster, Winifred. Forthcoming. “Global Circuits of Gender: Women and High-Tech Work in India and the U.S.” in Women in Engineering and Technology Research: The Prometea Conference Proceedings, edited by A.-S. Godfroy-Genin. Zurich, Switzerland: Verlag.
Poster, Winifred R. 2005. “Organizational Change, Globalization, and Work-Family Programs: Case Studies from India and the United States.” Pp. 173-209 in Work-Family Interface in International Perspective, edited by S. A. Y. Poelmans. Mahwah, NJ: LEA Press.
Poster, Winifred R. 2007a. “Saying ‘Good Morning’ in the Night: The Reversal of Work Time in Global ICT Service Work.” Pp. 55-112 in Research in the Sociology of Work, vol. 17, edited by B. Rubin. Amserdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.
Poster, Winifred R. 2007b. “Who’s On the Line? Indian Call Center Agents Pose as Americans for U.S.-Outsourced Firms.” Industrial Relations 46(2):271-304.
Poster, Winifred R. and Srirupa Prasad. 2005. “Work-Family Relations in Transnational Perspective: Case Studies from India and the United States.” Social Problems 52(1):122-146.
Shah, Nandita, et al. 1999. “Structural Adjustment, Feminization of the Labour Force and Organizational Strategies.” Pp. 145-177 in Gender and Politics in India, edited by N. Menon. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Shiva, Vandana. 1989. Staying Alive. London, UK: Zed Books.
Sinha, Mrinalini. 1995. Colonial Masculinity. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Over at apophenia, danah boyd writes that quitting facebook is pointless and what is actually needed is for us to challenge facebook to be more responsive.

I find this rhetoric profoundly disempowering. Social movements and social pressure doesn’t happen only from everyone marching to the beat of one drum. I’m sure more moderate feminists told radical lesbian separatists that their actions were pointless too but the movement needed all these different ways of acting to build the solidarities and arguments that it did.

I think danah might be reacting to tech elites who are presuming that because they quit, they will be taste leaders. I think that is crap. However, calling quitting pointless misses that quitting isn’t just about affecting Facebook. Decentering Facebook, we might recognize that:
1) Quitting actually creates time and occasion for other modes of sociality. Making those other forms, in some cases by going back to straight up talking on the phone and in others, playing and experimenting (as my lab did by making LUCIbook with whiteboards). Quitting, then, is an opening to a set of experiments. But you don’t *have* to quit to experiment.
2) If quitting is meaningful and feels good to some people, why deny them that? Why slam it and call it pointless? Why use a position of authority as a prominent blogger to foreclose options?
3) Quitting (and switching, perhaps) seems, to me, a better alternative than hoping FB gets its act together, changes its corporate culture, and starts actually being responsible and responsive. It doesn’t even have to be an anti-corporate mobilization. Frankly, compared to Facebook, Google and Twitter are amazing at being responsive and simple to understand, and they are right there right now, ready to use. This doesn’t have to be about corporate purity, as I noted in my last post about platform pluralism.

The role of feminist argument ought to be deepening our analysis of complex power relations, open-ended possibilities, and agencies springing up in unusual places. It should not be making foreclosing claims about alternate social practices, whether that’s quitting facebook or staying on it.

I’m not sure this magazine means it ironically but the graphic is funny nonetheless.

Via zinc, who posted it in the comments and I had to front page it.

Liz Filardi, an artist based in New York, is trying to come to terms with her lack of ownership and privacy of her personal identity on social networking sites such as Facebook. Her work is timely– it foregrounds privacy issues and latent problems in the site, such as recent changes that allows anyone to see who is attending an event and linking Facebook data to other sites such as CNN (see here and here.) In her piece, Black and White, she imagines how a fatal stalking case that led to the first Anti-Stalking Law in California, could take place on Facebook. By logging in as the perpetrator or victim, you discover the messages that could have taken place between them.

Liz Filardi describes this piece:

Black and White:
http://turbulence.org/Works/stalkingsocial/blacknwhite/

Europeans arm in arm with their dog

What does this carving, made in Africa depicting two Europeans on a dog walk, mean to say?

Such works were often consciously double-edged, designed for dual clientele. A 20th-century doll-like carving by the Yoruba artist Thomas Ona Odulate of a European couple, arms around each other and walking a dog, broadcast satirical messages that the European buyers would likely miss. In Nigeria the couple’s affectionate gesture was unacceptable public behavior; keeping a dog, an animal reserved for practical use in much of Africa, as a pet was scorned as a foolish Western custom.

This figure is from a New York Times article on the Detroit museum exhibit “Through African Eyes”, an exhibit showing pieces of art in which African artists draw from, mock, and objectify figures of Europe. The pieces underscore how objects, artistic or technological, can never be assumed to mean the same thing to different people. Objects can be fundmentally ambiguous or even doubly-meaningful. This points to how when we analyze objects, we might talk about shared meaning but we should also talk about exchange, incommensurability, and the fact that we can never fully know what is meant. Coming off of my presentation at CHI 2010 on Postcolonial Computing, these tactics and sensibilities are particularly on my mind.

Other kinds of postcolonial interventions I’d like to see? Documenting innovations and technologies in Europe learned from African practices — not just slavery and raw materials flowing through metropoles, but also knowledge.