Comments on: Tuesday-More Archive

By: Christi Nielsen

Christi Nielsen — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:48:28 +0000

It’s a bit difficult for me to have a non-biased response to this week’s reading since I am a blogger, I am a female blogger, and I blog about women’s issues. So I don’t find myself in that supposedly sub-par group of women who blog about unimportant things such as life. Oops – I mean life as women see it.

I never have found myself wondering where the female bloggers are, but then again, my blogging experience from the start put me right in the middle of the female bloggers… female bloggers, I might add, who use their voice to affect political issues.

I also find myself in line with Meg on this one. Accessibility issues do exist, but I hardly believe that it’s racism on purpose.

By: jduff

jduff — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:22:00 +0000

Even though I do not blog, read or subscribe to any blogs I still found the reading interesting. It does not surprise me that the gender divide carries over from the real world to the digital world of blogging. As I am sure the racial and ethnic divides carry over as well. Personally, I do not know if that is much call for an alarm. Males and females talk, blog, etc the same way they always have. Is it any surprise that the same questions that apply to the real world apply to the digital world as well? Where are all the female bloggers? … The answer to that lies with the same answers for the oppression of any group of people.

I found the section about cybertypes (p.319) interesting from new media, old media. I do feel the perspective that one might have in the real world can be heavily distorted in the digital. When so many factors are taken away by the digital world like race, ethnicity, dialect, etc, initially I tend to think that might be a good thing to fight oppression. However, if I have been reminded of one thing this semester it is that you can not have one without the other. Even by taking away those factors, one can be assured they will get replaced by others.

By: Emmanuel

Emmanuel — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 07:33:11 +0000

I thought Nakamura’s essay was interesting in that cyber practices have strong implications for our understanding of our identity or who we are, particularly in cybertyping. Whether we are chatting, emailing, participating in online gaming, or surfing the web, we are in fact building our identity. Definitely, web pages, online games, PDA’s, cell phones and other forms of new media technologies are reshaping our understandings of how we live and work and of what it means to be human.

I think there is this kind of myth of the digital age that promises a raceless, bodiless future enabled by technological progress. Typing, imaging, and posting ourselves into being, it seems as if we can create and recreate ourselves over and over. In text-based or 3D avatar-based (like in Second Life) mode of communication there are implications that the user has a choice in their self-representation thus they can leave the body behind.

I find it kind of scary that digital media can fundamentally alter the nature of the human self.

By: Megmo

Megmo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 05:29:04 +0000

This week I find myself in the peculiar position of wanting to defend the rich white guys. I value Nakamura’s perspective- it is clearly very different from my own, and I agree with her on her major points. I agree that the problem of unequal access is a big concern that needs to be considered and dealt with, and also with her view on “identity tourism”. However, our opinions differ on the question of intent. On p. 321, she says:
“Rhetorics which claim to remedy and erase gender and racial injustices and imbalances through expensive and difficult to learn technologies such as the Internet entirely gloss over this question of access, which seems to me THE important question. And it seems unlikely that this glossing over is entirely innocent.”
Are the people who say these things classist? Absolutely. Either that or they’re thinking in sci-fi mode, as in 50 years from now everyone will have access, and won’t it be great. Are they being deliberately racist? Personally, I don’t think so. The rhetoric is silly for our present situation, yes, but there’s a lot of techno-utopianism going around. As she points out herself, the Internet is billed as the new chemistry- it’s supposed to cure all ills. Rhetoric such as she describes has always struck me as more an attempt to get rid of racism. It’s like they’ve read the Power of Positive Thinking and they’re saying, “Voila! No more racism.”
I’m a white girl. I’ve never experienced active racism, and I do recognize that my own views and experiences tend to skew my thoughts on the subject, as does wishful thinking. I know there’s racism on the Internet, and that papers like this one represent a fierce effort to combat it. There’s a lot in this article that I agree with. I just don’t think that the commentators that say the Internet will cure everything are racist- I think they’ve drunk the Koolaid.

By: Dblair

Dblair — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 04:13:55 +0000

The Nakamura essay is interesting. It addresses something I have been thinking about for the past few months now. Can the technology of the internet allow the “true” erasure of race and gender? I agree with her ideas about these things becoming refashioned in the digital space.”Cybertyping” is something i never thought about and I found the example she used of Kozmo.com disturbing. Either way, if the internet can’t allow for liberation from race and gender, how do we as individuals rid ourselves of these stigmas in order to allow for a communication that is unaffected by these factors?

By: ValerieT

ValerieT — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 02:39:07 +0000

The section of reading this week really made it clear to me that new media is a refashioning of old media. Maybe it’s better to say that there is no new media. As much as we try to make it distinct, there really isn’t much difference. With Nakamura describing the internet and it’s means of advertising, new vocabulary, new communication, it’s really not that much different from writing a letter or watching television, just at a much faster rate. I think it would be better to call new media as evolution, per Mirzoeff, a system that is always changing but still holds on to elements of the past. To say new media is unique and can be separated from history is, well, silly. It seems to be common, to me, for professors to praise new media and treat the internet as the greatest invention and old media could never dream of. But we all know better then that and I really think the readings this week hit upon our need to respect the past…maybe it’s just my interpretation. I’m not saying the articles weren’t praising new media, but there appeared to be more acceptance on the past and new media really isn’t all that new.

By: lo

lo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 02:11:55 +0000

I had the complete opposite impression concerning blogs and gender from “Posting with Passion.” My personal impression was that there were more female bloggers than male bloggers. I had no idea there was the adage, as Melissa Gregg writes, “blogs are for boys, journals are for girls”. Wasn’t it once “journals are for boys, diaries are for girls?” Then again, I’m not a blogger, I don’t visit blogs, and I have never kept either a journal or a diary (is there a difference?), so my impression is wholly unjustified.

I’m not too sure about the last sentence that says “valuing our distinct perspectives between and across genders puts us in the best position to fully realize blogging’s still unknown potential.” First of all, I disagree that different genders have distinct perspectives. “Distinct” sounds too rigid of a word for describing general viewpoints of genders. Secondly, why is across gender the best position for blogging (rather than, perhaps, across compatible people who may or may not be of different genders)? It seems like people feel the need to rate practices as much as they feel the need to categorize objects, and I’m not sure if we should consider thinking in a different way.

From the New Media Old Media readings, Chapter 23 has a section about indifferent gazes. I don’t see any gaze as being indifferent, but maybe I need clarification on interiority and exteriority of images or maybe a more concrete example. Becoming your own media seems like the epitome of narcissism, but that also seems to be what artists or what people expect artists to strive for. Although I don’t believe realistic drawings and stylized drawings should be considered better than the other, people seem to always want more realistic things—namely, more realistic humans—and that somehow the great artists are the ones who have the ability to accurately depict the human body. I think people have always been media, not just in “advanced capitalist societies” (343). Were cave paintings not using human images to tell a story?