“Political economy?” “Symbolic analyses?” Post-whatism?” Semester after semester, my advanced anthropology students told me they couldn’t remember the theories they had learned in their introductory anthropology course (even, they sheepishly confessed, if I had been their professor for that course). In response, I built a review of general anthropological theory into my classes and developed a theory course for junior and senior anthropology majors.

But re-teaching theory at the advanced level was not enough. I needed a better strategy for teaching theory at the very beginning level of anthropological instruction which, for me now as professor and earlier as graduate student, meant in a large lecture class of anywhere from 100 to 550 students. How could I teach theory so that introductory students could retain and use this knowledge beyond exam day? What new pedagogies would enable students to carry the theoretical messages of Levi-Strauss or Mead or Ortner with them? My strategy was to turn to social media, to teach theory by putting students in dialogue with each other: I created two new course assignments, a student-generated theory wiki and a theory blog.

Inspiration came from online discussions about pedagogy among digital humanists, from folks such as Cathy Davidson at Duke University’s HASTAC collective, Howard Rheingold’s Social Media Classroom project at Berkeley, and here at the University of Colorado, our ASSETT program‘s focus on teaching with technology. In the summer of 2010, grad student Marnie Thomson and I crafted the wiki and blog assignments as complementary and required components of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course I taught that fall with an excellent team of graduate student teaching assistants, including Marnie as Head Teaching Assistant (TA).

We had no idea what to expect. Would the students really be able to create a theory wiki as first-year anthropology undergraduates? Would they theoretically engage each other on the theory blog in the ways we hoped for? The answers were ‘sort of’ for the wiki, and ‘yes’ for the blog, where their work went beyond even what we had imagined. Here is what we did:

Food and love. All students wrote two 500-word essays applying two different anthropological theories to a topic of their choice under the rubrics of food and love. Essay due dates were staggered over the semester, with some groups of students writing first about food, then love, or vice versa, and applying the theories they were learning at that particular moment in the course. TAs graded the essays, and selected those to put up on the blog. We posted the essays under gender-neutral pseudonyms, and students were required to submit six “substantive comments” on the blog (three on food essays, three on love essays). Their Theory Blog + Wiki Assignment explained:

What do we mean by substantive blog comments? We are looking to create a truly dialogic space for exchange about anthropology. We ask you to engage with the posted essays—for example, offer your thoughts on the author’s argument, raise questions, make connections to other course topics or cultural phenomenon, in general, participate in such a way that conversation is started, continued, or otherwise enabled.  

All comments were moderated, meaning they were not made public until a TA or myself had read them. Any student who did not want to post under their real name created a pseudonym for their comments. The essays and blog comments were 50% of their recitation grade, which made up 40% of their course grade.

Did it work? Beautifully.

Students had respectful, intellectual conversations not usually possible in a large lecture class. They read, responded to, and benefitted from each other’s writings, rather than just writing for the instructor. Collectively, the students turned the blank blog into a space of intellectual exchange and growth. The TAs and I decided not to participate in the blog but to allow it to be a student space for discussion (except for the time a middle-aged man not in the course commented on the “cougar” essay, and I as professor had to reply; a teaching moment, indeed).

We posted six “food” essays and ten “love” essays (turns out as much as we all love food, we love “love” more). In one essay, a student analyzed the US locavore movement using structural-functionalism and cultural ecology. Another wrote about “bromance” from functionalist and Boasian perspectives. A third student critiqued Facebook profiles using symbolic and feminist anthropology. Following each essay are student comments, which were extensive, thoughtful, and productive. The format was a great success in terms of getting students to think with rather than about theory. Again and again, they asked each other “what would a ______ anthropologist think about this?” and thought through the different theoretical approaches to any one topic.

While the course was in session, students gave positive feedback on the blog, and their understanding of theory was evident in the essays they wrote on their final exams as compared to prior semesters. Students from this 2010 class who have since taken more advanced courses with me are comfortable with theory, clearly retaining knowledge from the earlier class, and thus further marking the pedagogical impact of the blog.

The wiki was not as successful and remains unfinished. Each theory (and a handful of topics) were given a page with four sections: main points, key figures, key texts, and critiques. Some sections are competent, while others are incomplete or even convoluted in places. Designed to accompany the course blog as an introductory theory resource, the wiki covered contemporary and classic theory (rather than just classic theory as some sites do). Course students wrote all entries, and frankly, one semester was not enough time to get to a baseline of content for further refining, editing, and developing. Anyone interested in helping out with it—as part of a course, or on their own—is welcome.

Not all of my Digital Anthropology experiments have been a success (cough, cough, Twitter course feed), but the theory blog was successful beyond my expectations. There is no anthropology without theory, and so teaching it well to our newest students is important, giving them a base on which to build as they go forward. I offer our model and experience in the spirit of sharing and would love to hear what has worked for others, as both instructor and student.

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She regularly teaches theory classes to undergraduate and graduate students, and just debuted a new course this semester on “Reading Ethnography.”

Finding Sayun is a superb new anti-aboriginal romance film by Laha Mebow (陳潔瑤), a Taiwan indigenous director. The film revisits the 1943 Japanese propaganda film Sayon’s Bell about an indigenous girl from Nan-ao, a “rural township” in northeastern Taiwan, who drowned trying to carry luggage across a river for the man she adored: a departing Japanese officer. (Sayon and Sayun are two different transliterations of the same name.) Sayon’s Bell wanted to reassure the Japanese public that, a decade after the Wushe uprising in 1930, Taiwan’s indigenous peoples had been converted to imperial subjects, and to convince aboriginal braves to fight for the emperor: it would be hard to resist after hearing Sayun singing the inspiring Song of the Taiwan Soldiers:

After the Second World War, the KMT relocated Sayun’s people from their old mountain village to a new village on the plain. Laha Mebow is one of Sayun’s people, and her new film is ostensibly about finding Sayun, but finding Sayun is not the point of the film. Instead, Finding Sayun has two aims: 1) to critique the use of romance in aboriginal films (which is to say films about but not by indigenous people) like Sayon’s Bell, and 2) to document the everyday worlds of three different generations in a contemporary indigenous village.

Avatar is only the most flagrant example of an aboriginal romance film in the past few years. In Taiwan, Song of the Spirits (心靈之歌) was about a Chinese man who falls in love with an indigenous teacher (played by a Chinese actress) in a remote mountain village, while Waiting For the Flying Fish (等待飛魚) reversed the formula: an indigenous fisherman falls in love with a swimming teacher from Taipei. How does Finding Sayun critique the use of romance in aboriginal films? First, by questioning the story told by Sayon’s Bell. Sayon’s Bell was very loosely based on a true story, a news report from 1938. Sayun’s death was celebrated as an example of imperial devotion, and a bell was erected in her honor. Sayon’s Bell introduced romance: the actress who played Sayun, Shirley Yamaguchi, acted in many Japanese imperial romance films. In Finding Sayun, episodes from Sayun’s life are reimagined several times as a “student-teacher romance” (師生戀) in sepia-filtered video:

This preview switches back to regular coloring when it returns to the present, and in the end the skepticism of Sayun’s people in 2011 interrogates the “student-teacher romance” idea. One person suggests that Sayon was carrying the luggage because she had to, while another says flat out that romance was Sayon’s Bell’s spin on Sayun’s story.

Finding Sayun also critiques the use of romance in aboriginal films by introducing a young Taiwanese casting director character who goes to Nan-ao to scout talent for an aboriginal romance film. She video auditions the local people and asks the most videogenic among them to star in her film. She even finds a high school student named Sayun! – Sayun turns out to be a fairly common girl’s name – as well as a boy named Yugan who is fond of Sayun. So far so good. But Yugan refuses to act in her film, and Sayun has her priorities straight: she’s too busy studying for the high school entrance examinations to fall in love, let alone act in a movie. As a result, the commercial aboriginal romance film does not get made. But through the device of the film pre-production within the film, Laha Mebow has already made the audience more self-conscious about how a typical commercial aboriginal romance film is constructed, and hopefully more critical of commercial filmmakers like James Cameron who cash in on a simple formula: nature+aborigines=romance, sometimes as pure entertainment, sometimes as an ideological vehicle. Yet Laha Mebow’s criticism is warm-hearted, and not heavy-handed. Indigenous peoples might well feel some hostility towards outsiders who want to commercialize their cultures, but the young Taiwanese casting director character in Finding Sayun is very likable and even somewhat perceptive. She’s not exactly a visual ethnographer, but she has a notion of “participant-observation” – she hangs out with the people in the village and adopts local customs, such as wearing rain boots (she’ll need them on the trek up to the old village).

So what kind of story does Laha Mebow offer instead of aboriginal romance? At first, there is no strong narrative line, and the casting director’s efforts soon fizzle out. Yet not every feature film needs to have a good story, just as plot is not the point of every novel. Initially, Finding Sayun seems like a fictional documentary evoking the everyday lives of three generations in contemporary Nan-ao: 1. Young indigenous students like Sayun and Yugan hoping to get into university and do something with their lives out in the wider world. Sayun plays the organ in church and Yugan is a hunter who hopes to get into college on the strength of his soccer skills. 2. Their parents’ generation tend to engage in low-pay high-risk labor, and one man actually dies in an accident at the beginning of the film (his death caught on camera by the casting director), leaving behind a wife and son to cope as best they can, relying on the support of others in the community. 3. Their grandparents’ generation has never been to the big city; rather than the wider world, their minds are on the old village. Yugan’s Grandpa, one of the original Sayun’s classmates, takes Yugan and the casting director on a final trek back up to the old village. On the way, he jokes around, saying that the original Sayun was his girlfriend so many years ago, but when he reaches the old village the only words he has are for his mother and father, for the ancestors.

Grandpa’s return to the old village is the closest thing Finding Sayun has to an Aristotelian plot with a clear beginning, middle and end, but instead of an aboriginal romance that is consummated in accordance with audience expectations, Finding Sayun gives us a web of unfinished, ongoing, interrelated stories of people in the community. For the most part, these stories are presented not through seamless, continuity editing but rather documentary style. The casting videos seem like part of a “making of” or “behind the scenes” documentary for the commercial aboriginal romance that never gets made, and the shaky footage of Grandpa’s final homecoming is filmed on a consumer video camera. Shot in standard professional quality video, the other scenes – going to church, going to school, swimming in the waterfall pool, hunting, having a drink at the bar, playing ball, chasing pigs – have some sort of ethnographic significance.

Laha Mebow’s film is an community-oriented anti-aboriginal romance film with a documentary aesthetic. That might make it sound a lot less watchable than Avatar, but in addition to being informative, Finding Sayun  is also appealing. It is poignant (without being sentimental) and very funny. It’s worth going out of one’s way to see. See it while you can!

Note: the Chinese name of Finding Sayun is “Light of a Different Moon,” which opens a page in Taiwan’s film and pop music history. In 1941 a Japanese language song called “Sayun’s Bell” was released (listen for the sound of the bell). This is the song grandpa sings on his last trek up to the old village. In the 1960s the song was remade as a Mandarin pop song called “Moonlight Nocturn.” This is what the title of the film is referring to. But Grandpa’s version is best, sung to the light of a different moon.

Note: I’ve gone and written two other posts on the film, one on the mainland Chinese presence in the film, the other on the definition of indigenous film.

Nutrition has been medicalized in the West, but humans enjoy the taste of food as well, ensuring that food and nutrition have become part of consumer culture. Each time we sit down to a table, or put something in our mouth we do so in the context of this culture. There are good foods (vegetables, fruits, organics, whole) and bad foods (fast food, convenience food, GMO’s, pesticides). Western society also has a somewhat collective understanding of snack food and comfort food, healthy food and unhealthy food, food for babies and food the elderly. There are foods that men eat, and foods that women eat. This is food, but this is NOT food.

Biological necessities such as food and nutrition do not develop outside of the context of culture and human interaction. In fact, we can probably say that one of the roles of “culture” has been to modify these biological dispositions, and the most rudimentary ways we do this is through categorization. George Lakoff explained in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things “…the chain of inference–from conjunction to categorization to commonality–is the norm. The inference is based on the common idea of what it means to be in the same category: things are categorized together on the basis of what they have in common”. Creating and understanding categories helps us reaffirm our shared identity that is culture.

There are multiple and contradictory categories of food and nutrition globally. Because nutrition and food are inextricably linked both politically and economically to health, however, what foods are categorized and why, matters. Food and nutrition are packaged and marketed for things like taste and enjoyment. But food is also packaged and sold to promote health, oftentimes by corporations with the blessing of global health organizations. This is primarily done through our understanding of the biomedical model of nutrition. Worldwide, however, traditional categories of what foods are healthy and why do not always integrate well into this model.

Food Categorization in China
In the dominant Chinese medical paradigm, food and nutrition is used as an integral part of health and healing that is much different from this biomedical paradigm of the West. The categories of protein, carbohydrates and fat make sense to Chinese people, who understand the biological and chemical premise behind these concepts, but are much less important to their everyday understanding of the interaction between food and health.

When many Chinese people sit down to a meal, everything on the table is there for a reason not, in fact, having to do with taste. Thousands of years of collective history dictates what is on that table and why. This one is good for your skin; this one will help calm you down. This food is excellent for your digestion, but this one you can’t eat with that one or it will cause harm. You can NEVER eat that food in the summer. There are foods that increase your “qi” (energy), and ones that cause it to slow down. A menstruating woman should eat this, this and this, and not that, that or EVER that.

Because China is currently transitioning to a consumer-driven economy, this idea of nutrition as health in both a Western and Chinese sense is being sold to the masses. This article last year by the Wall Street Journal wrongly states that Chinese people are becoming “more health conscious”. What the article meant, I’m assuming, is they are becoming more aware of Western concepts of health and nutrition. In the “Western” concept, we add more to our diet and foods (vitamins, health foods, organics) in order to make ourselves more healthy. There is a belief that adding medicines, adding supplements, adding culturally and biologically defined nutrients to our everyday routine, we can make ourselves healthy, wipe out disease and increase wellness. This concept does not work in the dominant Chinese paradigm, however, as there is more a focus on balance and harmony. But because our idea of “adding more” has shaped the way we treat micronutrient deficiencies through food fortification globally, trying to integrate this in China is turning out to be problematic.

Food Fortification and Health
Food fortification is the process of adding nutrients to foods where they don’t naturally occur. The premise is by adding micronutrients that lack in the diet (for whatever reason) to foods that are widely eaten, we can decrease the incidence of these deficiencies. It has been very successful in many parts of the world, China included (see this blog post for more information). China implemented an iodine salt program a few years ago, and has essentially eliminated iodine deficiency from its populace. Outside of the iodized salt program, however, China has been unable to implement other nationwide food fortification programs for folic acid, iron, or vitamin A (among others).

To illustrate this point and its significance, I will use my current research area of complementary feeding in infants. Complementary feeding includes all foods other than breastmilk or its alternatives, and is strongly influenced by culture. Western concepts of complementary feeding, including those recommended by the American Pediatric Association, are based on our ideas of nutrition and medicine more than traditional beliefs. Here is a complementary feeding guide that I use on my own website and blog that shows what is appropriate and why. If you notice the very first food we recommend to give a child, it is iron-fortified infant cereal.

There are a variety of foods that babies need at around 6 months that breastmilk no longer provides, including iron, zinc, protein and extra calories. American companies saw this, and baby’s propensities towards allergies as a business opportunity and created iron-fortified cereal. While I won’t go into the small details of why they recommended iron-fortified cereal (or some of the problems associated with this), it has turned into a cultural norm in the U.S. to feed your baby iron-fortified cereal as the first food.

This has not worked in China for a number of reasons, but first and foremost is the way the dominant Chinese paradigm has categorized foods. There is no straight concept of “baby” food; this has been created by corporations in the Western world and has only been introduced to China recently. There is no difference between “baby foods” and “adult foods” intrinsically; in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, “baby foods” are in a jar and pureed and labeled by “baby food” brands. In China, “baby foods” are categorized by other things, including texture and traditional food ways.

For now, “baby food” has not gained popularity in China for a variety of reasons. But because of this, coupled with the dominant global model for preventing vitamin deficiencies being through fortification of baby foods, iron-deficiency anemia remains a problem in all areas of China. In other words, the way we have categorized foods has shaped how we prevent “disease”, but these categories do not exist in other parts of the world. The question nutritionists and physicians are grappling with in China, then, is how do we prevent iron deficiency if the dominant paradigms for prevention it (i.e. fortification and supplementation) aren’t widely accepted?

There is much value by scientific categories assigned by the dominant Western biomedical model of nutrition and food. More than a few researchers, Chinese and Western, however, are mystified at how to integrate these cultural systems created from categorization. It is not news that food is culturally relevant, and it is not news that public health campaigns need to be more localized to be successful. But the last 30 years has seen the integration of China, India, and other parts of the “non-western” world into the global market. This is not only affecting consumerism of food products globally, but also how food and nutrition interacts in global public health programs.

Please give her a Savage welcome!

This is how others describe her:

A third year graduate student in Cultural Anthropology, Eleanor came to the University of Iowa with an M. Div from Union Theological Seminary in New York.  Before landing in Iowa with her two cats, Eleanor worked a variety of non-profit jobs from facilitating social justice seminars at the Church Center for the United Nations to assisting elderly New York and displaced New Orleans jazz musicians through the Jazz Foundation of America.   Eleanor’s interests are diverse, but she continually returns to issues of ethnographic representation, technology, desire, the (gendered, racialized, sexualized) body, and new formulations of personhood and “life”. After writing her Master’s paper on voice, language ideology, and early film narration in Japan, Eleanor continues to explore the effects of new technological forms in Japan.  For her dissertation research she will be looking into the relationships, subjectivities and affects created between humans and machines, and the ethical implications of such encounters.

One of the amazing things about the work of each of these artists is how resonant it is with what we do as anthropologists. Like ethnography, their images are not simply about ‘documentation.’ They are about conveying something of lived experience that allows us, provokes us, to ask questions about how some particular lives come to look they way they do. They invite us to linger on the lives of soldiers long enough to think about how they are, and also are not, like others.

It strikes me that in our disciplinary conversations about what various modes of anthropological engagement might look like, we often fail to recognize the possibilities of such resonances. These possibilities are especially promising when the lives we explore are characterized, in one way or another, by war. Here, issues of politics and ethics lie both close to the surface and close to the bone. Tim Hetherington’s work was powerful proof of these possibilities.

For example, he said many times that he hoped Restrepo, his thoroughly ethnographic Afghanistan war documentary, co-directed with Sebastian Junger, would offer a new and more productive starting place for thinking about the war and US military intervention.

As Tim put it in an excellent interview at Guernica where he responds to Leftist criticism of the film:

While moral outrage may motivate me, I think demanding moral outrage is actually counter-productive because people tend to switch off. […] Sure, the face of the U.S. soldier is the “easiest entrée into the Afghan war zone” but it has allowed me to touch many people at home with rare close-up footage of injured and dead Afghan civilians (as well as a young U.S. soldier having a breakdown following the death of his best friend). Perhaps these moments represent the true face of war rather than the facts and figures of political analyses or the black and white newsprint of leaked documents.

In a more personal mode, Tim offered the experimental film Diary, which reflects something of the compulsions, rhythms, and senses of his movement into and out of ‘zones of killing’, as he suggested we might think of such spaces. Here too, we can find resonances with anthropological explorations of the particular vertiginous experiences of being in and out and in such spaces of violence, and of the uneven geographies of deadly violence.

News continues to unfold about the incident in Libya that may have also killed photographer Chris Hondros, and that seriously injured photographers Guy Martin, Michael Christopher, among others. And as we continue to hear more of Tim Hetherington’s death, and more remembrances of his life and work, I’ll also be thinking about what his work, and the work of other artists and journalists, has to offer us anthropologists; the places where our various projects meet, and the possibilities for thinking and acting that might begin from there.

There’s a new sociological variable in town, one which I call performing technical affiliation. Technically speaking, it is not a new way of thinking about identity. For many years, perhaps millennia, people have enacted aspects of identity by interacting with and through technologized objects, forms of knowledge and related practices and values. Nevertheless, technical affiliation is not recognized on the same level of analytical importance as are traditional variables—such as class, sex, gender, ethnicity, and social race—that are most often cited in anthropological studies of sociality. It is time that technical affiliations are brought more systematically into analyses of identity and negotiations of the self.

Performing technical affiliation means displaying in words or actions, alliances to objects, values, beliefs, or practices that are often assumed to be associated with particular technical cultures (Lange 2003, 2011). A basic example might be someone declaring, “I can’t live without my iPhone!” meaning that they prefer this device and its interactional implications over those offered by other devices or other brands of mobile phone. When people affiliate toward something, they also tend to affiliate away from something else. Performances may be much more subtle and complex. They refer to more than purchasing decisions (which are of course laden with many other beliefs). Performances can indicate how people accomplish being a competent, moral person in the world. For instance, some people believe that learning about technology is best accomplished in a self-directed way, rather than through taking classes in schools. How one should learn to use technical systems, or how one should share information through media are important aspects of everyday identity performance. Performing technical affiliation routinely occurs in offline, as well as online contexts.

The concept draws on Goffman’ (1959) notion of performing the self in everyday life, but does not imply a simple binary that equates performances with being “onstage” versus hiding a more true self “offstage.” Such a notion has often simplistically been applied to studies of computer-mediated communication to dichotomize online (onstage) versus offline (offstage) behavior. But writing many years ago, Goffman (1963: 9) demonstrated that such an assumption over determines how much identity information is actually shared in person. Speaking about in person interaction, he used the term “virtual” identity to refer to incorrect assumptions that people impute onto others, such as assuming they have never been in prison, have never had a depression, or have never harbored other stigmas. A binary application of the performance concept also under determines what identity information is shared online. Studies too numerous to list here have shown how much identity information is given and given off (in Goffman’s sense) in online contexts.

The concept of performing technical affiliation instead draws on Goffman’s (1981) work on footing, which acknowledges that people may exhibit different levels of intensity or commitment to beliefs and practices. Some people may be animating someone else’s original statements and technologically-inflected worldviews. Others may be the authors or originators of such beliefs, and hold them to be very influential in their everyday decision making. The concept is purposefully broad to accommodate many levels of affiliation. An analogy may be drawn to the metaphor of affiliation to a club. One person may receive the newsletter and read it now and again; another person may be the club’s president.

Another vignette may illustrate the concept. Years ago, I gave a talk at the American Anthropological Association meeting. At one point, a speaker who was using a laptop PC struggled to get his audio-visuals to display properly. Another person on the panel quipped, “You should have used a Mac.” A few knowing chuckles traveled around the room. Later, after hearing my talk, this panelist told me that his quip was not a good example of performing technical affiliation, because he had no personal affiliation to the Macintosh computer. I assured him that it was an excellent example.

Recall that the concept takes into account different levels of performativity and varying commitments to the affiliations contained therein. His remark performed affiliation to the idea that Macintosh computers are better for manipulating media than are PCs. He was animating a notion that was commonly held (although may or may not be true), among Macintosh supporters, and others who believe it. His was a performance that would not be intelligible if people did not think that this belief was common. The joke would unintelligibly fall flat if everyone “knew” that PCs and Macs were equally effective for working with media. He himself does not have to believe the idea in order for the joke/performance to “work.”

Performing technical affiliation is a part of human life; people cannot get particular jobs or have certain kinds of successful relationships if they do not convincingly display particular orientations to specific technologies or technically-inflected worldviews and values. But sometimes performing technical affiliation can be problematic not only for individuals but society as a whole. For example, in her classic ethnography of physicists, Traweek (1988) noted a competitive tension between the theoretical physicists and the experimental physicists in an advanced research lab. The latter designed experiments to test the theories of the former.

Advances in physics could not proceed without their collaboration, but identity displays often coded in-group members as superior to out-group members. A theoretical physicist told Traweek that it was appropriate for an anthropologist to study such a “primitive tribe” as experimentalists. Each group learned to display a “studied disregard for each other’s judgment” (Traweek 1988: 112). One empirical question is, to what extent do such displays advanced or impede the production of human knowledge? How might their collaboration change if their cultural disregard was seen as a performance of technical affiliation that, if changed, could advanced the field much further?

It may be objected that technical affiliations only apply to specialized groups or elite technologists. But such an assumption ignores the anthropological record, and how technologies influence how people conceive of the self and how they choose to be a moral person in the world. For example, consider Gershon’s (2010) book on breaking up on the social network site of Facebook. She argues that people held definite ideas about how one should end a romantic relationship. Using particular media was seen to reflect something important about the morality and sensitivity of the person breaking up. If a person chose to break up over Facebook rather than in person, people used this information to make moral judgments about other people. Their media choices often had more salience in determining a person’s social character in those situations than any of the other traditional identity variables. To argue that Facebook is or is not a true “technology” are performances of technical affiliation.

Another objection may be that people do not consciously orient toward technical affiliations in everyday life. Yet, the impact of any identity variable such as class, ethnicity, gender, and so forth must be empirically shown to be important in analyses of social behavior. Just because people do not verbalize or understand the impact of their affiliations is not sufficient proof that the variable is unimportant for understanding contemporary self-construction. The same argument may be forwarded with regard to other variables, such as class. Americans often say they are in the “middle class” and do not necessarily orient around class. Yet these elisions do not prove that class is irrelevant for people’s social negotiation of the self, nor that society is “class-blind” with regard to determining socio-economic opportunities.

Perhaps hesitancy about adopting the construct exists because identity variables such as gender and class may influence people’s technical affiliations. But such variables are not predictive of technical affiliations. Knowing that someone is a man of a certain economic class, for instance, does not determine his views on whether computer platforms should all be open source, or whether he should take certain drugs to address health issues, or whether learning the programming language of Python is a good use of his time. Certainly, technical affiliations have interactions with other variables, as is the case with traditional identity variables. For example, in reaction to second wave feminism, which explored universalized experiences of womanhood, third wave feminists convincingly showed that other variables such as ethnicity and class brought much to bear on the experiences of being a woman in particular cultural groups. The same is true of technical affiliations. Important interactions between such affiliations and other identity variables should be empirically studied to broaden understanding of how technologized worldviews impact self-construction.

The time is right to acknowledge what has been discussed for a quite some time. As long-standing cyborgs, people’s technologized identities have historically been part of the human condition (Haraway 1991). Affiliations to technologies and related values and world views speak volumes about who we are as people, as members of cultures, and as individuals. Technical affiliations are crucial aspects of social identity. Scholars should systematically incorporate them in analytical studies of social behavior as routinely as any other traditional sociological variable.

Patricia G. Lange is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the Transforming Audiences 3 conference, September 1-2, 2011 at the University of Westminster in London. Website: patriciaglange.org Email: plange {at} usc(.)edu.

REFERENCES

Gershon, Ilana. 2010. The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Lange, Patricia G. 2011. Video-mediated Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Technical Competencies. Visual Communication 10(1): 25-44.

Lange, Patricia G. 2003. Virtual Trouble: Negotiating Access in Online Communities. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Michigan. Available from UMI at: http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb.

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

I sometimes joke that I’ve been working in new media so long I can’t believe we still call it that. But longitude is no laughing matter in an age of time-space compression: and the persistence of novelty no accident. Yet, there is much to be gleaned from histories of the new. At least that’s what I contend in taking up Adam’s invitation to post about my 10-year study of Cyborganic, an influential group of early web geeks—producer-consumers of new forms, social imaginaries, and practices of networked communication and techno-sociality. Cyborganic spored and faded away by 2003, yet many of the genres, imaginaries, and practices that emerged out of this milieu (San Francisco’s South of Market area in the 1990s) have since become predominant on the Internet. Cyborganic members brought Wired magazine online; led the open source Apache project; and created dozens of Internet firms and projects, from bOING bOING to Craig’s List and Twitter.

Rather than tracing the paths of particular forms (messaging to wikis and blogging to tag-clouds and aggregators), or looking at convergence and transmediation, or the popular proliferation of geek culture, as I do elsewhere, I want to talk more generally about three trends in “social media” that were significant in my mid-1990s fieldwork and have only become more pronounced since. There are interconnections among them and all are tied with the emergence of new cultural dominants (à la Fredric Jameson) and new dominants in the experience of time and space (e.g. David Harvey’s “time-space compression”). But let me leave these connections aside to identify the trends or dominants I mean.

(1)  Short Form Messaging

Whether texting or tweeting, brevity is a norm and value—both pragmatic and aesthetic. In many forums, it is also a self-enforcing law, a coded constraint, for example, the 140-character limit on Twitter and 420-character limit on Facebook status updates. The short form might seem the obvious result of mobile messaging–which, after all, runs on protocols known as SMS for short message service–but it is no mere technical limitation or by-product of communicating “on the go.” It’s a feature by design, not a constraint. In the 1990s, with the proliferation of email and hypertext, digital media seemed to some “the word’s revenge on TV.” Though text remains the backbone of social media, it is remediated toward the short form and in other ways I touch on below.

(2)  Configurability/Control

Another clear trend is toward increasing configurability, or control, over interpersonal communication. Again, this might sound obvious, especially to fans of Beniger’s Control Revolution. Yet, the rise of social media is usually told as a tale of increasing access and real-time, “always on”, connectivity, whereas anyone who’s ever had voicemail or an answering machine knows that limitingaccess (via call screening and later caller-ID) is just as, if not more, significant than increasing it (via sending/receiving messages out of real-time). Filtering, screening, squelching, and otherwise using technological means to limit and control contact has been a significant aspect of networked communication since the ancient days of Usenet, BITNET, FidoNet, and BBSs. It remains so for Facebook and Twitter. Control, rather than simply access, is the name of the game when it comes to the application of technology to interpersonal communication.

(3)  Presence Casting

Finally, there is the emergence of what I call presence casting, a practice I saw in and across media during my Cyborganic fieldwork, and have studied in a few contexts since. Status updates, away messages (afk), and, in some contexts, simply being logged in are all forms of presence casting. I noticed the practice in Cyborganic’s chat forum when people starting using the fields made to display a nickname and email to post, instead, short messages about their location, mood, or status. Today, millions are prompted daily by Facebook’s  “What’s on your mind?” or Twitter’s “What’s Happening?” (originally “What are you doing?”). The wording doesn’t matter: the question is not so much literal as phatic (in both Malinowski’s and Jakobson’s sense). Its social task is to elicit contact or presence in the channel.

However they answer, whomever they allow to see their answers, and whomever’s answers they see, in whatever social media, all engage in particular norms and forms of presence casting. As is so often the case, these norms tend to be visible in the breech—for example, the pull to presence (interpellation) becomes apparent when one is going to be absent in a forum where one is a regular (at whatever interval is considered regular there) and feels compelled to give notice.

Mostly, though, in regular, day-to-day life, presence casting is about presence and visibility. If you don’t post something in a channel, no one will know you’re there. Whatever else one has–or doesn’t have–to say there is always the function of saying “I’m here.” It was this function, so key to social media, which a student of mine could not appreciate when she told our class she didn’t understand how others felt the need to post every insignificant detail or thought on Facebook. “I just don’t have that much news or that much to say,” she explained. Her reading of the feeds was clearly dominated by older expectations of linguistic meaning (where you have to have something to say to publish), rather than newer norms of presence and performativity (where you have to say something).

All three—the short form, configurability/control, and presence casting—are bound up with currents that flow more broadly throughout contemporary society. I was reminded of this recently by an essay on the incorporation of text in interactive art by Roberto Simanowski. In discussing the turn against interpretation and toward the materiality of signs and the performative in art and critical theory, he explains: “text moves from the “culture of meaning” to the “culture of presence.” Though Simanowski writes about art, what he says about “transforming text into image, sound, action or into a post-alphabetic object (i.e. depriving the text of its linguistic value)” has resonance with the trends I’ve described in social media. Even as text remains central, it is changed and constrained by new forms, norms, and social imaginaries of production and consumption.

Works Cited

Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Jameson, Fredric.1991. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press. Two sections from Chapter 1 reproduced here: http://homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/jameson/jameson.html

Simanowski, Roberto. 2010. Digital Anthropophagy: Refashioning Words as Image, Sound and Action. Leonardo 43(2): 159-163. (doi: 10.1162/leon.2010.43.2.159)

Author-archived PDF: http://dichtung-digital.mewi.unibas.ch/cv/Simanowski-Textual%20Objects.pdf

How do you define “ordinary” video makers? Given that online video is being generated at phenomenal rates (YouTube 2010), it is not surprising that studies are tackling previously ignored sets of everyday video practices. A number of important and insightful studies have been concerned with a special kind of the everyday, that which focuses on the so-called “ordinary” video maker. Such a figure is often ostensibly defined as a non-professional in the film industry. They have neither been trained nor are participating in mainstream film production or critique.

The focus on the ordinary video maker is initially a logical one, given that many researchers would like to understand how people learn to make videos, why they share them, and how everyday video impacts online attention economies in comparison to professional works. It some quarters, the focus on the “ordinary” is a reaction to what some see as well-covered fandom studies that focus on advanced amateurs producing cool stuff. However, it is time to re-examine what is meant by the “ordinary” and to consider how such a mythic figure threatens to reify the binary between the novice and the professional that grass-roots video making has long had the potential to challenge. It is time to explore lenses, such as collective nostalgia, that appeal to many different types of video makers. Researching generational or cultural forms of nostalgia and its influence on video making could provide a wealth of insight into the cultural desires and practices of particular social groups.

At this juncture, it is time to dust off our Stebbins (1977) and realize that the world of everyday video is quite complicated and consists of overlapping continuums not only of video making roles, but of individual talents that contribute to expressing the self through media. We also need to reconsider why the “ordinary” video maker seems to capture scholars’ imaginations. What are the consequences of seeking that ordinary person who seems to be untainted by professional or even fan-driven image making? Why are their experiences deemed more valuable, say, to the study of informal learning than people who lie somewhere in between, or engage in multiple kinds of practices?

The term “ordinary” video maker is not necessarily isomorphic with all ethnographically- observed everyday video creation. Although the “ordinary” video maker is often defined as someone who operates outside of the film industry, its assumed ontological parameters raise important questions. For example, why is a person who is a professional photographer, but not a professional filmmaker deemed “ordinary” for the purposes of studying everyday video? One study (Buckingham et al. 2011), which did not focus on photographs, did count such a person as ordinary, while another, which did examine home photography did not (Chalfen 1987). Others may define the ordinary video maker as “any amateur working outside the institutional structures of the television and movie industry” (Strangelove 2010: 3). By this definition, would someone who photographs a movie star for television be excluded from a study of ordinary video making? What about someone who photographs, say, nature pictures for magazines?

Yet, what crucial skills and literacies images might a professional or amateur photographer bring to the enterprise of making videos on the web? I have seen video bloggers commend professional photographers for their beautiful videos in the video blogging community. Clearly, people with photographic skill sets are bringing something very important to the exercise. We can ask the same questions of many other professionals, including web designers, authors, advertising executives, marketing specialists, interior designers, painters, sculptors, artists, scholars, and others who bring extremely important talents and skills to the craft of mediating a message.

Conversely, a number of people would be excluded from most such studies, even though they might be rather ordinary, in terms of their overall knowledge and approach to actually making videos. The “professional” label may over determine assumed success of osmotic learning. Are all professional actors and actresses equally knowledgeable about operating cameras, writing narrative scripts, working lights, or editing?

In addition, what does it mean to include people who fall outside the category of professionals, yet have important ties to people who are in these industries? Anthropologists and ethnographers may very profitably contribute to media studies by examining the social networks and practices of everyday media makers that are often ignored in ego-centric media studies that focus on the sole media creator. What does it mean to have a brother, parent, uncle, aunt, cousin, or other peer who is a professional media maker (Lange Forthcoming)? Studies often carve out the binary of novice- professional in a way that reifies this binary, without considering the effects of social networks that people participate in.

Finally, the category of ordinary is largely presented as a synchronic one in prior studies (Lange 2008). It freezes a video maker into an ideal type that sees no progression or change. But the term “ordinary” is, in linguistic terms, a shifter; its meaning shifts according to context and over time. What of the former television editor who decides to video blog and share her message with the world? It is quite clear that such a person is not really “ordinary,” given her skill set.

On the other side of the coin, a few people on YouTube who have no professional ties to media making have been quite successful attracting attention on the site. A person who succeeds in an online attention economy (say receiving millions of views on their videos) may not be operating in the traditional television and movie industries, but they clearly have non-ordinary skill levels or literacies of some variety to attract such substantial attention. Studying everyday and commonly-observed practices is not the same as searching for the mythic “ordinary” user, with its connotations of purity, ignorance, and mediated innocence.

If pushed too far, the notion of seeking the “ordinary” video maker as the only or most relevant category for understanding everyday media-making patterns can resemble what Rony referred to as visual taxidermy (1996). For Rony (1996: 101), ethnographic taxidermy referred to making a dead thing seem to “look as if it were still living.” If future studies overly rely on finding video makers innocent of imagery in a heavily mediated world, they risk concocting falsely authentic or “pure” media innocents who have not been too swayed by the so-called “mental pollution” (Sontag 1997: 24) of professional imaging. Characterizing intensive interactions with images as pollution rather than as opportunities for acquiring media production or interpretive skills is quite telling. Why do scholars seem to wax nostalgic for the ordinary? And what are the implications for studies that seek to freeze “ordinary” video makers’ abilities in time?

It is perhaps time to stop looking for the pure, “ordinary” non-professional video maker and seek other research questions and agendas that acknowledge the more sociologically slippery and interwoven landscape in video-making craft and online attention economies. Nostalgia offers a potentially rich area of investigation. What is of interest is not latent nostalgia for media thrown in a drawer and not seen again, but rather, active nostalgia of viewers in different age cohorts or cultures. YouTube is filled with countless clips of old professional media including television shows, commercials, parodies, and many other forms that people annotate and share with other people. It also includes videos of people who are nostalgic for places they used to visit and experiences they used to share. Why is it important to keep re-experiencing particular events of one’s past? Notably, nostalgia is a “democratic affliction,” (Boym 2001) meaning that people’s longings for the past are not purely individualized, but are often felt among cohorts of people who are dealing with similar changes in their life course (Lange 2011). Anthropologists are well-equipped to understand the relationship between media, life cycles, and different cultural cohorts’ mediated meanings and desires.

Studying nostalgia is not dependent upon binaries. Many people who are rank novices, advanced amateurs, and professionals all seem to gravitate at one time or another to creating, viewing, or sharing media that serve important cultural functions. Researchers may ask, what is accomplished for the self and social group when media or mediated memories are re-worked or circulated for large social groups online? How does the nostalgia-inflected media of one generation or cultural group differ from those of another?

Surely there are many other lenses to pursue that do not depend upon reifying particular binaries. If we are all going to wax nostalgic about video, let us not do so by seeking to taxidermy a mythic ordinary user, but rather to embrace video making as it exists in all of its non-binary, messy complexity. Let us study other people’s visual taxidermy, or rather, their nostalgic attempts at managing mediated, collective responses to change.

Patricia G. Lange is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the Transforming Audiences 3 conference, September 1-2, 2011 at the University of Westminster in London. Website: patriciaglange.org Email: plange {at} usc(.)edu

NOTES

Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic.

Buckingham, David, Rebekah Willett, and Maria Pini. 2011. Home Truths? Video Production and Domestic Life. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Chalfen, Richard. 1987. Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Lange, Patricia G. Forthcoming. Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies (manuscript in progress).

Lange, Patricia G. Forthcoming 2011. Video-mediated Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Technical Competencies. Visual Communication 10(1).

Lange, Patricia G. 2008. (Mis)Conceptions about YouTube,” Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, Eds. Pp. 87-100. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, Retrieved February 28, 2011 from http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/files/2008/10/vv_reader_small.pdf

Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press.

Stebbins, Robert A. 1977. The Amateur: Two Sociological Definitions. The Pacific Sociological Review 20(4): 582-606.

YouTube. 2010. YouTube Blog. Great Scott! Over 35 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute to YouTube. Retrieved February 28, 2011 from http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/11/great-scott-over-35-hours-of-video.html

…

I wanted to join Scott Walker for his Fireside Chat on Tuesday evening. (Transcript here.) I was ready for some exciting debate, especially since the riots and chaos I had been promised by FoxNews were either exaggerations or (though I find it hard to believe, coming from such a reputable news organization) total lies. Alas, I was not allowed anywhere near Mr. Walker’s fireplace.

The past couple of weeks have been exhausting. Even more exhausting than my usual school schedule, which — I don’t mind telling you — is exhausting enough already. By Friday evening, my wife and I are usually worn out to the point where an evening out with dinner and a movie is usually replaced by delivery food and a rental DVD. On weekends we grade papers and try to regain our sanity before school starts again. (I teach at Sun Prairie High School; she works at the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, and teaches at Madison Area Technical College.)

So when our pugilist governor announced his plan recently to (among other drastic measures) abolish collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees (which have been protected by Wisconsin law for 50 years), I knew I was facing a whole new level of physical exhaustion and psychic fatigue.

It’s On!

It began when the state teachers’ union WEAC urged us to protest at the capitol building during the day on Thursday 17 February. In ten years as a teacher, I have never chosen to be absent from school, so (like all my colleagues) I thought deeply about this decision. Wouldn’t I be letting my students down? Didn’t I have an obligation to my fellow teachers (and workers)? In which direction did the compass needle of conscience point?

I decided to join the protests, and because so many teachers were gone, the schools were closed. Although I originally claimed my absence was due to “illness”, I wrote an open letter to the district superintendent and my building principal on Friday explaining the truth about why I was gone. (Fortunately, they have both been very supportive; I will probably have my salary docked for the day, and possibly face a letter of discipline, but my job is not in jeopardy.)

As I said in that letter, I wish to apologize to the parents and families in Sun Prairie whose lives were made more difficult by my decision. I know some last-minute childcare/supervision arrangements had to be made, and I hate making other peoples’ lives more difficult. I consider teaching more than a mere job or profession: it is a calling, one which I approach with zest and passionate conviction. (I learned this from my mother, a relentlessly devoted lifetime educator.)

But those of us who do what we love (and love what we do) — even those of us who are prepared to sacrifice wealth, luxury, and material comfort in order to make the world a better place — must still insist on a decent standard of living and some power over workplace decisions. As I’ve said elsewhere, we need a revolution on the way to the revolution. We must sustain our spirits as active participants in this grand democratic experiment, and not abandon our right to leisure as guaranteed by Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Who Gets to Bargain and Why?

Anyway, back to Walker’s Fireside Chat. I would love to sit down with our C-student governor and discuss the nature, purpose, history, and legitimacy of collective bargaining among public-sector employees. I feel strongly that Wisconsin law is correct to protect the rights of collective bargaining among public-sector employees, but I also recognize that our employment context is very different from that of workers in the private sector. (The collective-bargaining rights of the latter are enshrined in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.)

Early in this process, I fell in love with a quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from 1937: “The right to bargain collectively is at the bottom of social justice for the worker, as well as the sensible conduct of business affairs. The denial or observance of this right means the difference between despotism and democracy.”

As I quickly learned, however, President Roosevelt was in fact opposed to collective bargaining among public-sector workers. Also in 1937, he wrote a letter in which he declared: “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. [...] The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. [...] Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. [...] Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”

Clearly, there is room for discussion. I’m still thinking about these matters, and I don’t enjoy a secure certainty about my arguments against Mr. Roosevelt’s articulate statement. However, as Paul Krugman recently noted: “In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. [...] On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate. Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.” Given the power that corporations and wealthy individuals exert on government decisions, I believe that collective bargaining is a necessary counterweight, even for public-sector employees.

Finance: State, Local, National, and International

Where was I? Right, Walker’s Fireside Chat. I keep imagining what I would say to our Koch-brothers-and-WalMart-supported governor. I would try using logic, I suppose, since that’s what I usually start with.

I would remind him that this isn’t about the money, and never has been. As the Economic Policy Institute recently reported, public-sector employees in our fair state actually make less in wages and benefits than their private-sector counterparts. Most of us could probably make more money if we so chose, but we’re drawn toward professions that help make the world a better place. (As one superb lyricist said in a song about the protests: “I’m not here for the paycheck, but I can’t live without it / Could Walker do what we do? Somehow I kinda doubt it.”)

We teachers make concessions and sacrifices all the time, for the sake of state and local budgets. Every time we negotiate a contract, we accept larger class sizes; fewer teachers and education support personnel; less-frequent resource renewal; more personal payments into health and retirement accounts. Not long ago teachers in Sun Prairie agreed to consolidate our health-care package into a more restricted plan with Dean Health Systems, Inc. I, personally, am pretty happy with Dean, but I’ve heard that others face delays, limited doctor choice, sketchy controls on what is and is not covered, and other complaints not uncommon to HMOs.

I would remind Mr. Walker that labor leaders have indicated that we’re willing to accept the cuts in benefits, if the collective bargaining rights remain unmolested. On Wednesday 23 February, Wisconsin state superintendent Tony Evers made an identical statement. Walker has refused to consider the offer.

If I had the time, I would go into the root causes of our state’s budgetary crisis. I would remind readers that Walker has promised corporations (in the estimation of State Assembly Representative Mark Pocan) $5.3 billion in tax breaks. If I were feeling especially verbose, I might explore the national and international implications of our money woes. I might cite Richard Wolff in The Guardian, who explains how corporations shifted the tax burden onto the middle class after World War II. (And I would encourage everyone to read Donald Barlett and James Steele’s vital 1992 text America:What Went Wrong?)

I might also remind the US public that economies across the nation are suffering largely because of the reckless and insatiable lust for profits among Wall Street executives, as detailed in the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. I would point out that we’ve seen only minor surface-level baby-step regulatory changes since that catastrophic house of cards came crashing down, and we are probably 99% as vulnerable to a future economic apocalypse as we were when this all began.

If I wanted to get really crazy, I might even connect our current struggle to the transformation of the global economic superstructure that has taken place over the past 30 years, particularly with a focus on the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. I would urge people to read Noam Chomsky and Ha-Joon Chang and Jon Jeter.

I would remind working people around the world that these changes are not inevitable, nor are the outcomes (particularly the concentration of wealth into a few hands, and the ubiquitous demands for austerity made of everyone else) a matter of chance. We are all suffering from a deliberate, concerted campaign of policy making and global rulebook revision.

The Personal is Political

Wow, that was quite a tangent! Back to Walker’s Fireside Chat. Maybe logic wouldn’t be enough to convince Mr. Walker to alter his budget-repair bill. Maybe I should go for a personal approach if I ever get the chance to speak with our campaign-rule-violating governor.

After all, Frederick Douglass famously said, when discussing a somewhat more dire situation than the one we now face: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

To this end, maybe I should describe the demoralization, suspicion, and fear that will surely result in every Wisconsin school — elementary, middle, and high — when our collective bargaining rights are abolished. Despite Walker’s claim to the contrary, local governments and school boards have not been asking for the elimination of collective bargaining. The executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators said such steps will “create a very problematic work environment because right now we have an established system and everyone knows how the systems works and there’s a comfort with everyone having a seat at the table. If you take that away, it leads to an uncertain work environment”.

Which leads to some fundamental questions about the nature of workplace democracy. We all seem to agree that citizens should get some say in how the government is run. So why should the same not also be true about the workplace? We deserve a voice in determining the conditions of our work, the distribution of materials and supplies, personnel decisions, and other key areas. Without collective bargaining, our voice is harshly weakened.

Or maybe I should discuss the money. (After all, as the Wu-Tang Clan said: “Cash Rules Everything Around Me”.) Maybe I should tell Walker about the veteran teachers who keep informing me that they won’t be around next year. Every time I hear this, I become more and more saddened. Last year I had
to bid goodbye to a good friend and a great teacher named Jim Dahm. He was smart, funny, dedicated, and compassionate. The soul of our district constricted a bit when he left.

And now our district’s soul will wheeze painfully as many of our most experienced, talented, and wise women and men are forced out because of cold economic realities. The soul of our district will be further constricted as young teachers leave to find the aforementioned private-sector jobs that don’t require such painful personal financial sacrifice. One new teacher recently explained to me in precise numeric detail why she simply cannot afford to teach next year. All of this is before the inevitable layoffs.

These things matter. Esprit de corps is important to us as educators, and watching it wither in the face of a partisan powergrab makes me sad. (This is a good spot to drop in a George Washington quote I recently encountered, from his 1796 farewell address: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension [...] is itself a frightful despotism.”) We teachers sometimes describe ourselves as being “in the trenches”, and although I lack the courage or endurance (or view of violence as a legitimate means to resolve political disputes) to join the military, I often think of myself as a kind of soldier, doing battle against the deadly hordes of ignorance and apathy that threaten to consume our civilization.

Miso Soup (and Free Pizza) for the Soul

Fortunately, the explosion of warmth, solidarity, and friendship in and around the capitol building has been glorious. The protests have been remarkable, as they often are. I feel my heart smile when I see my fellow Americans (or humans anywhere on the planet) come together to demand peace and justice. I draw strength from the young people chanting angrily against unchecked executive power, and from the burly men (and women) decked out in workboots and hardhats, telling The Man to get off their backs and respect their rights.

When I arrived in the morning on Thursday, a trickle of yawning students (and other people) traipsed past, clutching sleeping bags and pillows. We applauded and thanked them loudly for burning the midnight oil. Later in the day, boxes of hot pizza appeared and we joyously inhaled slices of cheese and pepperoni, a generous antidote to the bitter cold and lunchtime hunger. These gifts continue to arrive for protesters, funded by supportive citizens in Wisconsin (and elsewhere). Hot chocolate may not do much to sway the powers that be, but it’s a splendid balm for the soul of a frustrated teacher.

And as frustrating as it has been to watch government leaders scapegoat a vulnerable workforce, I have been encouraged mightily by other state legislators working overtime to fight back. After I sent my first wave of emails to all assembly representatives and state senators, I got back many encouraging messages promising solidarity and resistance. While I am troubled by the sight of elected officials fleeing the state, I feel that this is a courageous act of defiance against a legislative body that has subverted the process of democracy.

We are sustaining each other, and these past few weeks have shown the loving spirit of solidarity. It is the same loving spirit that drove William Lloyd Garrison, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk, Paul Robeson, Emmeline Pankhurst, Bertrand Russell, Wangari Muta Maathai, Jody Williams, Utah Phillips, the people of Egypt, and countless others to push human civilization forward.

Wisconsin has a proud legacy of progressive activism, and I am proud to stand in the river of tradition that includes Bob La Follette, Tammy Baldwin, and Russ Feingold. I am lucky to find myself at this unique crossroads of history, where the people have stood up and recognized the power of their own voices. Whatever the outcome of this particular battle, we will continue working for a better tomorrow. In a state with such wealth and opportunity, there is no reason for us to accept mediocre public services, inadequate funding for education, or draconian assaults on the rights of working people.

The struggle goes on.

…

Before I let you go Eric, I can’t resist sharing your remix of Public Enemy’s epic Welcome to the Terrordome! Keep fighting the good fight buddy. I’m ordering ya’ll some pizza right now. –Matt

Last Monday, February 14th, having heard a preview of the budget proposals to come, the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) of the University of Wisconsin, Madison decided to try a different sort of tack in protest. Perhaps one that had never been tried before. They organized a campaign to get thousands of undergraduate and graduate students to sign valentines, big cards with hearts on them, saying “I <3 UW. Governor Walker, Don’t Break My Heart” (image below). It was a great idea, or at least it seemed so at the time, when we didn’t realize just how uncompromising Governor Scott Walker was going to turn out to be.  It goes to show how naive we were.  We knew something bad was coming, but we didn’t know how bad it would be.

Gwen Protesting

At first, I think, like many other TAs at UW-Madison, I was convinced to protest this farce of a “budget repair” bill because we looked at it and saw how it might negatively impact our own personal lives, financial stability, and the future of the university in which we have invested so much of our energy and ourselves. We looked at it and thought about the prospect of losing our health care and tuition remission, benefits and good working conditions that only exist as the result of collective bargaining over the past 40 years. But given just a week to watch the situation unfold, and to step outside of narrow self-interest, I think we all, or at least I, have come to realize that this isn’t about us. It’s not about the budget, and it’s not about ‘fiscal responsibility’.  It’s about an attack on the right to collectively bargain, an attack on the rights of all Americans.

Tuesday February 15th was the day the s**t really hit the fan. It was the first day of protests, the first day we tried to find our footing. It was the first (and only) day that both Republicans and Democrats of the Joint Finance Committee of the Wisconsin State Government actually heard the public testify about their thoughts and feelings on the bill. That day, we were suddenly thrown into gear, and nearly two thousand people signed up to testify. The testimonies were limited to two minutes, though early in the day, they were often allowed to go on much longer. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the vast majority of them were against the bill. At first I don’t think I understood what it was we were trying to do. I had never filibustered before. But then, as the word spread, I came to understand that the point was to stall the committee vote, and therefore the State Senate and Assembly votes, to give the TAA, the other unions, and the concerned public, a chance to sway some of the Republicans to vote down or amend the bill.

That night the Joint Finance Committee heard testimony until 3am, when the Republican chair Senator Robin Vos, declared that they would adjourn. In the hallways echoing through the Capitol building, we chanted “LET US SPEAK!” It was around 1am, that Democratic Senator Lena Taylor came out to let us know the Republicans were planning to end the hearing and go home, but the Democrats would continue to hear us out.

At 2am we were quiet, listening to hearings. Senator Taylor tweeted out “Are you still there?”. I tweeted a reply “Yes, we’re here!” with a picture I’d taken on my phone of some of the masses of students sitting and listening. At 2:12am @sentaylor replied “@gwendok WOW! Look at yall! Thank you – you inspire me!”

I testified that night at 4:10am, having found a relevant quote by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 on Wikipedia, I read it to the committee:  “The right to bargain collectively is at the bottom of social justice for the worker, as well as the sensible conduct of business affairs. The denial or observance of this right means the difference between despotism and democracy.” I cited the source, and told them they might want to verify that, as I always tell my students not to trust wikipedia as their only source. Though they were tired, they still laughed.

I’m a graduate student teaching assistant in the Anthropology department at the UW, with a new-found awareness of my identity as a public-sector worker. Because the University of Wisconsin is a public institution, and I’m a member of the TAA, the teaching assistants union, I find myself in the good, but somewhat unexpected position of shared solidarity with firefighters, cops, snow-plow drivers, health care workers, and more.

Though we find ourselves in the shared position of being under attack, we obviously come from different backgrounds in terms of class, education, and urban/rural upbringing, among other things.  As TAs, we are future (hopeful) members of academia, a position and trajectory which might represent upward mobility for many, or at least the maintenance of middle to upper-middle class position. We are also faced with the possibility that such hope of tenure-track jobs may not pan out for all of us. Given the current economy, and the fiscal policies of the current Governor of Wisconsin and many other Republican governors and policy makers, we are confronting the very real possibility of downward mobility. As a result we share the anxiety of so many about our financial futures.  We will likely end up in precisely these kinds of jobs, if it turns out we can’t get academic positions.

Scott Walker’s bill is clearly designed as a divide and conquer tactic, aimed at taking advantage of the fractures that exist in the lower middle class. He’s using a rhetoric of a widening economic gap between public sector workers who he calls the “haves”, and private sector workers, the “have-nots”. Whether that economic gap really exists is still up for debate.

A number of non-partisan studies have been shown that unionized public sector workers in Wisconsin are actually compensated less than private sector workers of comparable education by about 8%, even with benefits taken into account. But unfortunately those who still support Walker and this bill are not convinced that these are valid or unbiased. They seem to have been persuaded by Governor Walker’s and others’ (Republicans, Tea Party, Glenn Beck and Fox News) rhetoric that their suffering is the fault of the public sector workers. Or at least that they have suffered, while the public sector workers have had it easy.

At the same time, regarding the rhetoric of “fairness” it may be fair to say that those “private” (i.e., industrial, agricultural and service) sector  workers have indeed borne the brunt of the economic down-turn in terms of layoffs, mortgage foreclosures, and more. For those that are not unionized, they have had no other recourse, no protection. They technically have the right, but no actual ability to collectively bargain.

Even while Walker has attempted to use divide and conquer tactics on some part of the lower middle class (splitting the public sector workers from the so-called private sector workers), this bill has also served to unify a lot more people, including TAs like myself. Until recently I did not see myself as a “worker” in the Marxist sense, and of course I’m not really. But because we are now unified by this bill, and the attack on our collective bargaining rights, I can now say I feel the solidarity, and it is good.

I am proud to be a member of the TAA, proud of our co-presidents Alex Hanna (PhD Student in Sociology) and Kevin Gibbons (PhD Student in Geography), and proud of the Anthropology Departments TAA Stewards Alison Carter and Katie Lindstrom (who has made a big difference even though she’s in the field in Pakistan). I am proud and grateful for the many others who have been working without rest over the last week to try to kill this bill.

When it became clear that Governor Walker could not be swayed, and likely that the other Republican Senators won’t either, I started to feel some despair. I wondered what it is that we had accomplished. But then I thought back to Senator Taylor’s tweeted reply to me: “WOW! Look at yall! Thank you – you inspire me!” and I realized it is true. Without the amazing response and passion of the TAA, the other unions, AFSCME, AFT, AFL-CIO, the Firefighters, Cops, and the generally concerned and supportive citizens, we wouldn’t have the “Fighting 14”, now famous 14 Democratic state senators who fled the state of Wisconsin to prevent a quorum which would have allowed the senate to vote, and the bill to be passed. We wouldn’t have protests on the order of 80,000 people marching on the Wisconsin Capitol, with more protests in Ohio and beyond. We wouldn’t have national and international media attention.

We have accomplished something, and so has Scott Walker. This bill has galvanized a new movement of people to support the rights of workers, to support the right to bargain collectively. And I’m proud to be a part of that. I also hope it’s also more than that. I hope that this is the beginning of an opposition movement across the country to push back against the right-wing agenda in its many forms.

Gwen Kelly is a Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Assistant in Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research is primarily on the organization and technology of craft production in Southern India during the Late Iron Age and Early Historic periods. She is also interested in the archaeology of European colonialism, missionary activity, and tribal cultures in India. She is the founder of IAWAWSA, the International Association for Women Archaeologists Working in South Asia. She blogs and can be found on twitter @gwendok.

A guest post by Jenny Cool cool {at} usc(.)edu

The elevators I encountered at the 2010 AAAs were for me a kind of ethnographic readymade: those redolent objects and gestures through which “the social world seems more evident…than in the whole concatenation of our beliefs and institutions” (to cop a phrase from David MacDougall, 1999: 3). No doubt many of you made your own observations of the lifts at the Sheraton New Orleans. Hervé Varenne’s post “On an education into elevators” touches on some of the same phenomena I do in describing “impromptu conversations” that broke out in and around these elevators. And others have written more generally on “the anthropology of elevators” (Leslie, D’Costa) Like Varenne, I focus on the social and discursive learning I participant-observed riding the vertical rails at the AAAs.

Here were people negotiating a radically new interface—not alone at their keyboards or mobile devices—but in a pubic place, surrounded by fellow meeting goers. It was a rare opportunity to watch the encounter in a social setting quite unlike others I’d experienced in my research of computer-mediated communication and control.

Max Weber wrote of the “fleeting ‘togetherness’ in streetcar, railroad or hotel” as kin to “every permanent or ephemeral community of interest that derives from physical proximity” (1978: 361). Here it was in vivo and brought to the fore by an unfamiliar “smart” elevator system

For those who haven’t seen the lifts at the New Orleans Sheraton, they run a under centralized system. Rather than traditional “up” and “down” buttons, would-be riders are presented with a keypad and small display. A sign instructs you to enter the floor you wish to go, and step to the car whose number appears on the read-out. Inside, the elevator car offers no controls other than an alarm, door open and close buttons. Floor numbers showing where your elevator will stop light up on inset LED panels that run down the left and right of the doors.

“This is a very totalitarian system,” said a woman in an accent I took to be Brazilian as we stood waiting for an elevator. In terms of user-interaction design, she was right. The system was optimized to do one thing as efficiently as possible—get people to the floors they key in. Yet in doing so, it ignores other practices and possibilities of elevator riding to which people have become accustomed since the introduction of the hydraulic elevator in the mid-19th century. There are other systems for optimizing elevator traffic that don’t require algorithms, that aren’t “smart.” For example, having cars go to different sets of floors (e.g. 1-11 and 12-24), like express trains. While these merely divide the menu, the “smart” system constrains riders’ communication and control more profoundly, in a manner one might well call totalitarian.

The degree to which norms of elevator riding had become habitual and embodied in muscle memory was made clear to me just after I stepped into one of these cars for the first time. As soon as I was in, my body turned subconsciously, first to the right and then the left of the door and my dominant hand reached out feeling it was supposed to push something…but what? When it registered there were no light-up buttons to push, I remembered I had already selected my floor in the lobby. Over three nights and four days at the Sheraton, I watched several others turn and reach for a standard elevator interface that wasn’t there, performing the same pantomime I had.

The “fleeting togetherness” of the elevator car became evident in what I noted as bugs in the system, though technically speaking they could be considered side effects. One evening, a woman hopped in the fairly full car I was riding up in and, after the doors closed, realized her floor was not on the lighted list of stops. I overheard her talking with those around her. “Just get out at the next stop and punch in your floor,” someone said, “We’ll hold the doors.” Then the person who was getting out next asked what floor she wanted, saying, “I’ll punch it in, you don’t need to get out.”

That was a darn good work around and a lovely, crystallized example of Weber’s ephemeral community. Together these riders generated and published a novel solution on-the-fly, a user-hack to get around the “smart” system’s neglect of a great many of the possibilities and practices (error and use cases) entailed and embodied in elevator riding in everyday, life. To me, that’s a smart system.

I happened across several such bugs on these elevators. There were the people who wanted to get off and go back to their room when everyone onboard had selected the lobby. They would have to ride all the way down and back, unless our car happened to stop for someone on the way down. If it did, “Was there a stairwell?” they wondered aloud, could they find it? And there were those clearly vexed by the unfamiliar system. For example, my friend ST who pointed out that the old-style controls (the buttons) were locked away behind a chrome panel with instructions to fire fighters to “use key.” That these controls were right there but shut away, as if behind a childproof door, annoyed her considerably. Varenne also reports negative responses to the Sheraton elevators and critiques them as the work of “engineers, backed by powerful corporations, and by unimpeachable discourses about efficiency.”

While it’s true I can’t recall anyone extolling the new elevators, what struck me was a mostly pragmatic, “just figure out how to work it,” adopt and adapt attitude. Sure, some folks waxed critical, like the alleged Brazilian mentioned earlier, but whatever was said, it was not, from what I saw, in any sense addressed to those who’d installed or designed the elevators. The feedback loop didn’t feed back that far.

Instead, everything occurred as if such dramatic changes to everyday interfaces were inevitable. The conjecture “These will soon be everywhere,” I heard many times. Whatever its powers, the fleeting togetherness of the elevator car, which Varenne also notes in terms of “temporary consociates” and “ad hoc congregations” isn’t a polity. It is a more elementary social form which Weber called “the neighborhood,” “an unsentimental brotherhood” that “is by and large oriented toward maintaining the greatest possible distance in spite (or because) of the physical proximity” (1978:360-361).

What interests me in these elevator encounters is the coincidence of physical and temporary proximity. Most riders had no experience of such elevators before the AAAs. Besides being in confined space together, they were also new together, i.e., at the same time. This coincidence, I would argue, is a significant factor in the volume and pitch of discourse and social action precipitated by the Sheraton elevators. It is also what makes this a special case of people encountering a new technology in public.

NOTES

MacDougall, David
”Social Aesthetics and The Doon School,” Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 15, Issue 1, pages 3-20, March 1999. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/var.1999.15.1.3/abstract

Weber, Max
1978 Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://books.google.com/books?id=pSdaNuIaUUEC&printsec

So one of the reasons I was motived to write a post about the aesthetics of Anonymous was due, in part, to some problematic representations of the phenomenon in the mainstream press. The Guardian, in their latest article on Anonymous, managed again to offer up what is at best a crime-show television grasp of reality, when it comes to social communicative norms in digital spaces. I know that sounds especially harsh but I guess since I was misquoted, this time it is now personal.

One of the reporters emailed me letting me know he enjoyed the Savage Minds post and asked some questions, which I answered but none of that material made it in there. They instead provide this summary of my “position” providing a link to an Atlantic piece I wrote last week. They write:

Members of the group and outside experts such as Gabriella Coleman, a New York University professor who has studied Anonymous, estimate that up to 1,000 people are members of the broader network, who make their computers available to co-ordinated cyber attacks.

The irony is that my article they link to actually deconstructs the idea of a group and members. So they  use language of groups and members that I otherwise challenge in the piece they link to!! Also the numbers do not match at all: I never ever told them that up to 1,000 people are members of the broader network. The Atlantic mentions that thousands were involved, again not using a language of members or group. As to the theme of the article—hierarchy–to be sure, the issue of leaders and power must be interrogated and  there have bee discussions of this very topic among some Anonymous, but I would hardly call it a rigid hierarchy much less characterize it as some “group” where 1% hold the power and the other 99% are useless chaff.

You can read more about how some of anon has received the piece here.

UPDATE: See Gabriella’s follow-up piece: Anonymous vs. The Guardian.

As an anthropologist of the digital I tend not to treat digital media as exceptional, except when it comes to the few exceptions that seem to rub up against our traditional categories and methodological tools. Anonymous, the online entity that has recently erupted full force engaging in wave after wave of protest following the Wikileaks drama, seems to be one such exception.

For those that know nothing about Anonymous it is a challenge to characterize in the course of a few sentences. But largely because of the recent distributed denial of service attacks, journalists have been on a spree to describe Anonymous, so far, largely telescoping on the DDoS and as one journalist put it, the “darkened” chat rooms many an anon are to be found. In the process, a number of them have correctly characterized the social dynamics that unfold on these chatrooms but they have also at times fallen prey to problematic descriptions and it is no surprise that I have highlighted “darkened chatrooms” to kick off the critique of the coverage of Anonymous that relies on outdated and inaccurate stereotypes of computer users. I will provide an alternative view focused on the aesthetic faces of Anonymous.

While it is partly accurate to describe some irc programs as “dark” in so far as some of the popular clients like irssi, have a black background, many do not. Here darkened functions rhetorically to conjure images of pimply basement dwellers who are raising havoc on IRC, an underground bunker (think dark, damp, and moldy) where great nefariousness is concocted, which in fact the TV show CSI once portrayed in exactly the same terms (though inaccurate, it is quite humorous).

Another Guardian piece, makes some good points but also makes a questionable statement that anonymous is “a loose collective mainly of teenagers.” This may true; it might be reasonable to suggest this as it is likely that many teenagers are involved but there is no way to state as fact, as it is quite hard to characterize things like the age, gender, and background of participants on IRC, especially when there are thousands of folks logged on, some of them also being journalists, researchers, bots, and lets’ not forget the FBI, which are the subject of some of the best humor on the chat channels.

But I do think it is safe to say that at least on IRC, Anonymous is composed of geeky types since they tend to know how to get on IRC whereas non-geeky types, have a bit of trouble doing so (for those that want to try, it is easy). But geeks come in all ages, not just tweens and teenagers. From my experience working with another face of Anonymous, there were a handful of teenagers, although the composition of Anonymous I was interacting with (which is not All of Anonymous) tended to span 20 to 30 year olds, with some older folks also intimately involved and more women than I see in some geek circles and I was only able to make this characterization once they moved to the streets.

But does should I use my experience working with Anonymous vs The Church of Scientology to make claims about this iteration of Anonymous?

Yes and no.

There are some commonalities across the difference faces of Anonymous; there is a common stock of cultural knowledge and aesthetic imperatives that helps shape tactics but what holds true for one iteration of Anonymous, does not hold true for all for Anonymous has a built in system for insatiability and change.

So with this in place I want to make some points more general points about the cultural dynamics of Anonymous:

1. Anonymous is rooted fully in our digital present. And yet, the phenomenon of using a name to make political claims is by no means new, Ned Ludd and Luther Blissett are two of the most famous examples of what Marco Desirris has argued in his dissertation is a improper name: “The adoption of the same alias by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors.”
2. This is important because it is the condition of possibility for its generativity, democracy, and instability. Anyone can claim that x material (a video, a manifesto) has been produced by Anonymous. It also means that some objects made by Anonymous have been produced by one person, as is the case with some of the images, a small team as happened with this this very famous video, or in other instances, it could have been produced collectively by a larger number as I saw with the production of the MasterCard manifesto.
   
3. Where is Anonymous? Lots of places: IRC channels, Pirate Pad, message boards, image boards, Facebook, other social networking sites, Skype and sometimes they eventually leave the Internet and hit the streets as they will soon. Perhaps Anonymous is even in your house (your father, mother, husband, wife, or that strange uncle of yours chipping in). By following Anonymous over the course of time, one can start to map the connections between these as I have done for the protests against Scientology.
4. Is Anonymous composed of hackers? Well, there are certainly some hackers involved, others have some technical skills and perhaps might characterize themselves as geeks but not hackers, (Here is probably my favorite morsel of someone from Anonymous poking fun at themselves for not having mad hacker skillz). There are others who are not geeks nor hackers, but just got sucked into this group and some hackers have condemned the DDoS attacks. It is a multitude, although let’s face it, it is a multitude with some limits for not everyone is in the social circles where knowledge for how to participate is found (but Google can help). As I will get to, Anonymous also has folks with mad design and art skillz.
5. Anonymity is not only tactical and practical but has a particular ethical valence when seen in light of our celebrity obsessed culture (this is what Mike Wesch has argued in a forthcoming chapter) and do so without simply celebrating Anonymous. It is good stuff.
6. There may be no individual celebrity but there is certainly art. And this is perhaps one of the reasons I like to study Anonymous—and something that is rarely addressed—is that Anonymous is interesting for making great art, in the form of videos, images, manifestos. They are effective in grabbing attention for their masterful command of art, channeling the material under a shared aesthetics, spectaclish in orientation, and under the moniker Anonymous, all the while delivering constant news. It would be far weaker as a phenomenon without the masks, without their fantastic art work, without those videos. We can create a picture of Anonymous only as basement dwellers or we might also take a look at their own pictures and representations to form ours; Anonymous is a faceless phenomenon that is everywhere represented via their artistic output.
7. Its aesthetics also helps ensure some coherence. While not everything produced by Anonymous follows its dominant aesthetics, much of it does. So while anyone can claim to be Anonymous, you will likely more more credible if you follow and play with established patterns and yet of course, there is always the danger of becoming hackneyed. I suspect we will see innovation within the shell of existing forms, which is so often how so much of art gets produced.

So in conclusion: I don’t think I have ever used a term that was enormously popular to describe the net in the 1990s–rhizomatic–but Anonymous does seem rhizomatic: yet there the rhizome exhibits some consistency, even as it morphs and spreads. Anonymous of the past set into a motion an aesthetic and set of tactics that help guide, even if they don’t determine, the shape and form that Anonymous will take in the future.

UPDATE: Some small changes at the request of the author.

Why Thin is Still In

In her new documentary, Picture Me, Columbia University student Sara Ziff chronicles her 4-year rise and exit through the fashion modeling industry, zooming her personal camcorder onto supposedly systemic abuses—sexual, economic, and emotional—suffered by fashion models.  Among the many complaints launched in the film is an aesthetic that prizes uniformly young, white, and extremely thin bodies measuring 34-24-34” (bust-waist-hips) and at least 5’10” in height.  It’s an aesthetic that many of the models themselves have a tough time embodying, pushing some into drastic diets of juice-soaked cotton balls, cocaine use, and bulimia—in my own interviews with models I discovered similar, but not very common, practices of Adderall and laxative abuse.  It’s also an aesthetic that has weathered a tough media storm of criticism, set off in 2005 with the anorexia-related deaths of several Latin American models, and which culminated in the 2006 ban of models in Madrid Fashion Week with excessively low Body Mass Indexes (BMI).  And yet, as a cursory glance at the Spring 2011 catwalks will reveal, thin is still in.  In fact, bodies remain as gaunt, young, and pale as they did five years ago, and it’s entirely likely that in another five years, despite whatever dust Picture Me manages to kick up, models will look more or less the same as they do now.

What’s the appeal of an aesthetic so skinny it’s widely described by the lay public as revolting?  As a feminist sociologist, I know the usual suspects:  capitalist and patriarchal forces that damage women’s self-esteem; an industrialized economy of abundance that affords upper-class bodies distinction not through corpulence but slenderness; our cultural value on self-control and restraint.  Perhaps all of these social forces operate simultaneously as models walk the catwalk, but we can’t understand what kind of gaze imagines the female form at “size zero”—and to what ends—without researching fashion’s tastemakers.

When I interviewed modeling agents and clients in New York and London, I wanted to learn how they make potentially problematic decisions to hire—or overlook—certain models.  What I found was a lot of empathy with critics like Sara Ziff, but also a lot of fear.  As workers in a cultural production market, bookers and clients face intense market uncertainty when selecting models; after all what counts as beauty and fashionability are continually in flux, and by definition, a model’s value is a subjective matter of taste.  When choosing models for high-end catwalks, campaigns, and fashion magazines, I found that clients’ choices of models tended to be isomorphic.  That is, they choose looks that they expect everyone else to choose too.  They widely perceive that white-washed ultra-skinny models are most likely to be types chosen by their peers, and to deviate from this tried-and-tested formula would be to risk professional status by being “out of fashion.”

Like any culture industry, fashion modeling should be thought of as an institutionalized production system, where the goods produced – the models – are embedded in an historically-shaped and market-driven network of agents, designers, and casting directors.  Every actor in the system tries to match what she expects will complement the demands of cooperating actors, and they make these predictions based on past records and experiences.  Agents are trying to supply what they think will go over well with designers; designers produce shows they predict will appeal to magazine editors; editors favor the kinds of images they think will resonate with readers’ tastes.  Ask a designer why they book skinny models: because that’s what the agents are providing.  Ask an agent why they promote skinny models: well that’s what the designers want.  And so on.

I was in London conducting interviews with casting directors and designers in 2006, at the height of the media furor, and the only thing that did seem any different backstage of Fashion Week was simply the amount of skinny models talking about skinny models.  At one show casting in London, I listened as photographers and models discussed the size zero media attention; they came to the conclusion that the issue was a ludicrous and lame attempt to sell papers, and that the matter would soon die down, in the words one casting director, “They’ll just go back to normal and the girls will continue being thin.  They have to, for the clothes.  It has to be a certain size.”

He was partially right.  Designers cut samples based on standardized measurements of size 2 or 4, and when they’re in a pinch days before showing a collection, alterations are the last thing they want to deal with.  But sample size clothes are not born out of thin air; they are measured, cut, and made.  When you ask a designer why they make their samples in those particular dimensions, they do it because that’s “the way things are done.”  Like the QWERTY keypad, we end up with a certain working order of things because over time conventions get locked-in, and it becomes easier to not change them, even if we don’t like them.

This puts model managers like Melissa Richardson, co-founder of London’s now-defunct Take 2 Models, in a tough spot.  Being the mom of a teenage girl herself, she isn’t keen on recruiting 14-year olds into the business, though their bodies are often well-suited for sample sizes.  Yet she still does it, she once told the BBC:  “Because other people do, and if I don’t, I lose out of it.”

Of course it’s possible to imagine a more just world of fashion modeling, where pre-pubescent girls with bony limbs are not used to market adult women’s wear.  That world exists; it’s in your everyday mail-in catalogues and commercial advertising, and in posters for designer’s affordable diffusion lines, which are aimed at the mass market.  It’s at the couture and high-end collections where size zero models are put to work.  Designers’ high-end collections make relatively small profit margins, but they drive the brand images that are sold in product-licensing agreements on diffusion products—the sportswear items, the handbags, the high heels, sunglasses, and scented candles—where the real money is made.  High-end fashion models, known as “editorial models,” are essentially branding vehicles, and they are chosen principally for their unattainability; they aren’t relatable to the every-day shopper.  That’s the point.

In the commercial world you are more likely to see those healthier, over-18 models.  It is also, importantly, where you’re more likely to see some ethnic variety in models, for those concerned with the conspicuous absence of black models in high fashion.

The commercial realm is also, you probably guessed, regarded as the less prestigious end of the fashion market.  And here’s a lesson from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on the field of cultural production:  as a general rule, the credit attached to any cultural product tends to decrease with the size and the social spread of its audience.  Hence the lower value, perceived or real, attached to commercial models.  Visually, we can picture fashion models as grouped along class hierarchies and their corresponding dress codes; there is the blue chip “editorial” model in Prada and Gucci on one board, and the commercial middle classes donned in Target on the other.

Designers report having a personal aesthetic vision, one that just so happens to be their designs hanging on a thin woman.  In the words of one London casting director, who said to the laughing amusement of models at his casting, “you know, it’s really hard to find size 12 or 14 girls that are fierce, I mean they’re all just–” and here he puffed out his cheeks and raised his eyebrows, vaguely resembling the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man.  “It doesn’t look good,” he concluded.

Indeed, “fierce” as defined by the high-end editorial field of fashion is an institutionalized aesthetic of female beauty built upon an elite sensibility of unattainability.  What could actually put a wrench in this aesthetic isn’t more media coverage of the issue, but Sara Ziff’s larger goal to unionize fashion models.  With a functional union, in the vein of the Screen Actor’s Guild, to regulate working conditions and to keep tabs on ageist and racist practices, I think it’s possible for models to wrestle some control over a work process that as presently arranged puts them at the mercy of the whims of their agents and clients.  And that is something worth picturing.

Everything Flooded with Red

Add another one to the list of recent environmental disasters. Just for fun go to Google Maps and search for Kolontár, Hungary in satellite view. The rust-colored square that you see there is a visceral reminder of the a red tsunami that overtook parts of Hungary last week when the metal reservoir of an aluminum plant burst. The deluge killed at least 8 people, over 100 were injured, and the residents of the village of Kolontár were evacuated. The country now prepares for a likely second spill.

Amidst the shocking images of houses and streets slathered with a substance reminiscent of blood, workers knee-deep in sludge, and, most disturbingly to dog lovers, a red-tinged komodor (a breed of dog typical of Hungary), come reports that it may not be as bad as expected. Hungarian and international officials are still trying to determine how severe the effects of the spill will be. Apparently, the levels of contaminate in the Danube River is at an acceptable level for human consumption. Fears that the sludge will enter the Danube in mass amounts have abated. The sludge itself is not fatally toxic in the short term and, although medium and long term effects are not known, if cleaned up efficiently should cause minimal long term damage. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán acted quickly to find someone to blame. The head of the company has been detained and documents have been seized. The government is taking over plant operations and trying to get people back to work.

The residents of Kolontár tell a different story. Veronika Gulyás, covering the story for the Wall Street Journal, reports that the villagers will not return to their village. The land is polluted and unsuitable for growing crops. All life in a nearby tributary of the Danube has been extinguished. And this will not be the last of it. The wall of the reservoir is expected to collapse releasing another wave of the red sludge, likely to be more toxic than the first. If this is not bad, what is it? If we cannot yet call this an environmental disaster, when can we?

Environmental concerns are not new to Eastern Europe. The Soviet era left its legacy in the form of polluted rivers and soil. High rates of blue baby syndrome (methemoglobinemia) in Romania are attributable to high levels of nitrates and human fecal matter in the drinking water supply. Much of the soil in Slovakia is contaminated with cancer-causing byproducts. The Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine and the contamination of the Tisza and Danube rivers in Hungary with cyanide from abandoned Romanian factories are still in recent memory and are causing untold health effects (see Krista Harper’s work on environmental movements in Hungary). Many of the worst ecological offenses have been cleaned up with the help of EU and US funds and increased surveillance and regulations during pre-EU accession negotiations. However, it seems that many lesser offenses easily slipped through the cracks.

When they joined the European Union in 2004, Hungary was ahead of the curve when it came to cleaning up environmental messes which is why this latest catastrophe comes as such a surprise. Hungary also had the longest wait between application and admission to the European Union. During this time they were scrutinized on everything from environmental concerns to ethnic relations. One would expect that potential environmental threats would have been addressed. It begs the question, is this disaster an anomaly or a sign of things to come? What does this bode for the neighboring countries of Romania and Bulgaria who, in comparison, had a very short period of pre-accession negotiations?

The red sludge in Hungary, like the oil spill in the gulf, seems to be a sign of the times. Environmental disasters are becoming more and more common and it serves no one if we continue to downplay their severity. Hungary is a small country with a largely rural population with 30-40% living below the poverty line. The populace cannot afford a disaster of this magnitude. Orbán can be credited with acting quickly to find one responsible for this case of what he calls “human negligence”, and, I must admit it is refreshing to see someone jailed for environmental crimes. However, it is unlikely that the chief executive of MAL Hungarian Aluminum is wholly to blame.

Clean up efforts continue, the UN is sending a team to investigate the disaster, and EU officials have sent relief workers. In the meantime, however, mindent vörös elöntött – everything is flooded with red.