Blog #10: Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Internet

In this photo, you see a younger attractive couple sitting on the couch.  You see the beautiful woman (most likely a girlfriend or fiancé) giving a massage to an attractive rugged male who looks like he’s had a hard day of working. This image shows a stereotypical image of what couples are. This picture implies that as the woman, it is her job to care for her man because he’s the one who works hard all day while she stays at home. This reinforces the idea of the female as the caregiver and basically the man’s mother; and the strong man who spends his day working to bring home the bacon to his beautiful lady.  This image is dangerous because in this day and age, these popular social constructs are no longer the common place. It is no longer uncommon for the woman to be the primary breadwinner while the men can be the homemaker. 

When I placed this image into a Google image search, I was given links to websites concerning spas. These links also had information about couple’s massages. These results were what I expected when I chose this image because I looked at it simply as a couple and one of the members of the couple was receiving a massage.  When I see images like this I do not think of it as somehow belittle one gender or shows how one gender relies on the other to care for them. I don’t see it in the way that this class believes I should react to this image. I tend to look at things at face value because I don’t believe everything should be turned into an issue.  This is one of my biggest complaints with society because culture has become hypersensitive to everything that could be deemed slightly offensive or just something that someone doesn’t appreciate.  This sensitivity has become of everyday life and has created the idea that if you don’t give everyone an equal share, then someone is being put out. I’ve grown to hate this because I am tired of everyone complaining about nothing. 

I do see the internet as a normative place. The internet can be the most honest place one can go because of the anonymity that it creates. This allows everyone to voice whatever thought is in their head. This lets everyone see what the current power relations are by reading the uncensored beliefs of everyone and then compiling the data together to get an accurate image of the world as we know it.  It can also enforce current power relations because many of the more ignorant members of the internet can project old ideas of the world. You can see how some people are still quite racist and misogynistic. This can be quite terrifying to realize that some people still think this way and are so unprogressive. I hope that one day people will get past old ideals that are terribly offensive to others, but I also hope that one day some people will learn to lighten up a bit. 

Blog #9: User Generated Content-Outsourcing the Culture Industry

I have never read the terms of use for any social networking sites that I participate in, and I do not really intend to ever read them. You may call this ignorance, but I just do not really care. I am aware that once you agree to the terms of use that you turn over a lot of your rights, but I have the mindset that I don’t mind because it is a privilege for me to use it so I don’t mind signing away some of my  rights to use these websites. I feel like you don’t give up when you agree to the terms of use because I’ve never read any of them, and I have not encountered any issues with it because most of the terms of use is just legal speak that protects them if anything you do causes a lawsuit. 

I do not agree with the neo-Marxist concern about “free labor” when it comes to social networking sites. I do understand this stand point because I know that with websites like YouTube rely on free labor to provide content which creates income for the website, but I feel that it would be greedy to expect any sort of payment for a cheap 30 second video that you uploaded to the site.  You do not have to contribute to YouTube if you do not want to. This website is designed for people to get their videos seen, there’s no inclination that anyone will get paid for these videos so video uploaders shouldn’t expect anything for them. I believe that anyone who expects anything from something that they sign up to do for free is driven by greed and should stop thinking what they do is so much more important than anyone else. I do agree with the thought that social networking sites are just a new twist on the Culture Industry because these websites have become walking advertisements and have driven a culture of sameness. 

When thinking of what Burgess calls the “new networks of cultural production” within Web 2.0 architecture, all that comes to mind is the popular video sharing website YouTube. I think of this because YouTube produces so many videos in a day which has turned them into one of the most prominent websites ever.  YouTube has been continuing the Culture Industry because it sheds light on everything in everyday life and gives insight into what people want to be. This allows for corporations to tool their products to the culture of kids that are glued to YouTube and then advertise to them in a way that closely resembles the videos they spend all day watching.  The best thing about YouTube is that it encourages a participatory culture.  Since YouTube is free to use, anyone can post whatever creative project they wish. This is great because it allows for people from all corners of the world to get noticed and start trends, and if they’re a band they might even get a record deal for a video that they’ve posted. 

Blog #8: Cyborgs

This example has probably become a little bit overplayed, but I will use it anyways.  The Terminator is the most popular story of a cyborg in American cinema.  The progression of the character The Terminator takes up two films (I know there is Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but that movie was terrible and doesn’t deserve to be mentioned). These two films are the most thought of films whenever anyone discusses robots, cyborgs or any sort of artificial intelligence; and for a good reason.

The story of The Terminator consists of a cyborg that was created by the artificial intelligence network Skynet. This cyborg was created to go back in time to kill Sarah Connor who is the mother of John Connor, who will eventually lead the human resistance against the now self aware machines who are engaging in a nuclear holocaust of mankind.  The Terminator locates Sarah Connor and attempts to kill her, but in the end he is thwarted and then Sarah goes on to give birth to John Connor.  In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the Terminator returns, but this time the T-800 has been reprogrammed by John Connor to protect his younger self from Skynet’s T-1000 who is now hunting down young John Connor. 

Over the course of Judgment Day, the T-800 builds a friendship with young John Connor and begins to learn to care for people. You see this cold and emotionless machine start to develop emotions and try to protect John and Sarah Connor from the new T-1000. Only some of this film falls into Haraway’s framework of cyborgs being the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” because these machines were designed for military purposes, but they have nothing to do with capitalism because with the machines in the story, there is no need for any economic structure since their purpose is the eradicate all of humanity.  Despite this only partial comparison, this film does stand true to the quote “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” because the T-800 changes from trying to murder Sarah Connor to protecting Sarah and John Connor.  The story of the T-800 tells us that power can shift, even with machines, and that anyone could change the series of events that shape the future.

Haraway discusses the idea of “Cyborg Writing” which “is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.” Many of us engage in Cyborg Writing already. I see writing on social networking sites as a form of Cyborg Writing because you are permanently marking and changing the internet everytime you post something on Facebook or tweet anything at all. This writing, no matter how insignificant it is, documents our lives because we are putting our thoughts out for the world to see and reply to.  If anyone were to come back and try to see what life was like for anyone during this time, they wouldn’t have to go any farther than the twitter history of anyone and observe our “struggle”.

 

Blog #7: (in)Visibility: Technology and Intersectionality

The internet has made the lives of everyone that has access to it much easier, but not without an added learning curve.  The internet has become something that we cannot live without in our everyday lives. My generation has become so completely dependent on the internet that if they are forced to be without it they don’t know what to do with themselves and they act like they have been forced into Lord of the Flies. The internet has become something that controls our lives, but also enforces certain stereotypes and keeps the division of genders alive. 

The internet allows anyone who can afford a computer and a steady connection to use it. It is a place that likes to make you believe that there are no gender boundaries because of its high level of anonymity, but this anonymity ends up creating a problem that it was originally designed to solve. Everyone on the internet is faceless which should mean that everyone is equal, but this facelessness allows for people to voice opinions that aren’t always politically correct. While looking through comments on popular websites such as Reddit, one can find all kinds of disparaging comments towards people of all races, creeds and genders which shows how far society hasn’t come thanks to the internet. 

The internet quietly reinforces gender stereotypes. When people think of men and computers, they think of the men as problem solvers and they are seen as masters of the technology.  While men are looked at as masters of this realm, women are often looked at as incompetent and unaware of the finer points of the internet. Women are looked at as extremely casual users who only use the internet for shopping, or if they are middle aged women, playing Facebook games such as Farmville.  I’m not trying to sound sexist, but these are things that I have seen in my life. I don’t agree with these stereotypes, but I do recognize that they are accurate at times. Despite the stereotypes of women, men can be the exact same.  I know from watching my dad, that he is fairly incompetent with the computer and I often have to coach him. This, although, raises the question if incompetence with the internet is a question of gender or age.

The internet is looked at as the Wild West, where anyone can go and be accepted. It is completely open to anyone of any class, but there is a very fine division between these classes. The largest portion of the internet is casual users, those who mainly use the internet for homework and surfing. These people fulfill the main purpose of the internet, which is as a tool to make lives much easier. A much smaller portion of the internet, but arguably a much more powerful portion is the expert class of hackers. These people make up a feared minority due to their extreme intelligence in terms of hacking which allows them to do what they want on the internet.  

Blog #6: Social Networking and Consumption

In Gandy’s article, it is said that “social networking has an ideological character: its networking advances capitalist individualization, accumulation and legitimization.” This quote states that social networking has reinforced the idea of ‘capitalist individualization’ because of the emphasis that sites like this place on the individual which then allows for corporations to pinpoint you as an individual and tailor make their advertisements to you as a person.

Facebook has become the most common example for corporations advertising specifically to you.  They do this by viewing what you search for on the internet and then compile data on you that allows them to sell specifically to you what you have been searching for. This helps dispel that common belief that all advertisements are merely messages that are sent to millions of people to convince all of them to buy something. Now with this style of advertisement, the ads have become much more personal, yet just as invasive as before. 

This style of corporate involvement is the opposite of the beliefs of the social networking site which is designed to connect all types of people and create a feeling of connectedness and a sense of community. If the marketing on social networking sites stuck to this idea, all ads would be the same and not individualized like they are now. This style enforces the idea that we are all individuals and should thusly be treated like individuals, even by major corporations when they try to sell us their products. 

As I look at my personal Facebook page, the first ad that I see in the “sponsored” tab is an ad for Coca-Cola. This ad says: “Milk tastes to cats the way Coca-Cola tastes to humans, which experts say is proof of a parallel universe where cats love Coca-Cola. Visit that universe.” I don’t seem to quite understand what the people over at Coca-Cola are trying to say with this ad, but I don’t know if it is the most successful thing they could come up with.

This ad, along with the other ads on my Facebook such as: Mystic Metals Body Jewelry and City U; tells a story about the digital me. These ads are all based on what your friends like and by what you search on the internet. These ads tell a story about me via my search history and the people I associate with, and give corporations an edge in marketing to me as an individual. 

I don’t know if the correlation between social networking and consumerism is that much of a bad thing, I just think it shows the natural progression of society. No matter what time and place, someone will always try to sell you something. Advertising is a runaway train that can’t be stopped. It is taking over the internet, and more importantly social networking sites, just as it took over newspapers, radio, television and the city skylines. Social networking advertisements need to be accepted. And if you continue to be harassed by these advertisements, and don’t appreciate that they know quite a lot about you, you can always turn on AdBlock.

Blog #5:

Advertisements are everywhere. Whether you hear them on the radio, see them on TV, or mindlessly spot them as we’re going about our day, we can’t escape them. We have become so inundated by ads and logos in our everyday lives that we don’t notice them unless they make themselves completely obvious.  It can be quite alarming if you purposely try to focus on all the ads and logos you see in a day, because the list you would compile would be extremely long.  The first thing I see when I wake up is my Samsung phone, and then my Vizio TV. As I get ready for the day I notice every brand in my bathroom, I see the brand of shoes I’m wearing for the day and my computer. As I leave my apartment I notice the brands of every single car in the parking lots I walk through, and the brands that everyone I pass is wearing. Once I get to class I notice almost every single brand that everyone sitting around me is wearing.  Here I am in class, not even an hour into my day, and I’m already being heavily bombed by brands.

This influence of brands creates an unspoken social hierarchy amongst everyone we come across.  Everyone knows what brands are better and what brands are worse than others, and so when we see someone wearing a certain brand we automatically place those people into a certain slot and make assumptions about what their social standing and income are.  These are people we have never seen or talked to before, but after just one short glance we think we have them completely figured out.  This can be an extremely toxic mindset because it closes off the minds of the people so that they won’t interact with certain people because of what they’re wearing or what they own. 

Most of the ads I see during the day that I am very aware of are commercials on TV, but the ads that work the best are the ones that I am not aware of. These ads come in the form of brands of cars I see as I walk to class, or the shoes people are wearing.  I don’t always notice them, but that is the point because subliminal advertisements are much more effective than obvious advertisements because people are more prone to disliking advertisements if they’re constantly getting slapped in the face by them.  So these subtle ads become the driving force behind how we dress, what we eat, what we drive, and what types of music we listen to.

These ads greatly affect our perceived notions of race, gender, sexuality and class. When people are looking to buy something, they may be turned off by certain brands because of their prejudice towards groups of people. They might not buy something because only girls have that, or poor people use this product or only liberals drive Subarus.  These presumptions aren’t always true, but just coincidental that certain people use certain products. 

Blog #4: Liberation Technology

I read Bruce E. Levine’s essay entitled: 8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance, and I liked what I saw. In this essay, Levine brings up the fact that young people are the ones who generally begin wide sweeping movements, and have been the ones to make the changes that affect the world. Whether the changes caused by the younger generation are for better or worse is neither here nor there, what matters is that young people are the driving force behind change…or they used to be.  Levine’s argument for why young people aren’t the driving force behind change like they used to be is because their spirit is being crushed by various institutions that everyone is forced into being a part of.

When older generations look at young people today they think that they are lazy and have no drive to do anything with their lives. This is true for most, but not because they’re just lazy and always have been, but because they have been trained to be that way by corporations and educational systems.  In this essay, Levine says: “Young Americans-even more so than older Americans-appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it.” From watching the world through television, the internet, or just talking to people my age, I have seen that this rings true.  I have seen a great sense of malaise when it comes to the younger generation, who seem to just be going through the motions and just trying to get good grades so they can graduate and get a good job.  The younger generations have a skewed belief of what happiness is. Instead of trying to find something they enjoy, they believe that happiness will come after they go through 16 years of schooling which isn’t always necessary. Levine argues that schooling has taught kids to be fearful of authority and to be submissive. This leads to a void of fresh new minds bringing in ideas that will help the world for the better because they are too afraid to stand up in the face of the established norms.  Levine also states one of the biggest causes of the crushed spirit of the younger generations is the growing student-loan debt.  He says that during the 70s tuition was so inexpensive that almost anyone could get a B.A. or graduates degree without any student-loan debt. He relates this lack of student-loan debt to the social upheavals in Iran and Egypt, because they didn’t have any debt to work off, students weren’t afraid to protest. 

I strongly agree with the points that Levine listed in this essay.  I’m saddened by the apathy seen in today’s youth, but I feel like a hypocrite because I also feel this way because it is true that it has become harder to stand up and create a movement because we are constantly being subdued by outside entities. 

Blog #3: The Culture Industry and the One Dimensional Society

Adorno and Horkheimer believe that the Culture Industry and cultural goods are used to manipulate mass society into docility.  I do agree with Adorno and Horkheimer’s beliefs, because evidence of this being true can easily be seen.  Corporations know the general public and how they act, so they take advantage of the public to calm them down. If you need any proof, just watch the news leading up to the release of the new iPhone. Even though a new iPhone is released almost every six months, it will still be a major news story, and people will still line up around the block to be one of the firsts to get a hold of this brand new product who’s features are still pretty similar to the last generation of iPhones.  This demonstrates how corporations know how to control people, and get them to act a certain way. Businesses like Apple know that everyone likes new things so they plan releases of their new products to occur right as their customers are starting to become tired of the products they do have. This lulls the general public into a routine where they are trained to like something for only a certain amount of time, and then buy a replacement when a new one comes out even though the one they have works perfectly fine.  This leads to a social hierarchy where those who have the newest device are placed above those that don’t, which leads to everyone going out and buying to reach a certain social status, which only leads to a culture of sameness.

I believe that I associate more with the Culture Industry/One Dimensional Society of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse more than Liberation Technology, Multitude and Cyber-Marx from Negri, Hardt, Diamond and Dyer-Witheford.  I believe more in Culture Industry and One Dimensional Society because of how prevalent it is in the world today. It is easy to see how the Culture Industry has turned people into mindless spending machines. I am a Communications major with a focus on advertising and I have seen that for companies like Apple, advertising is almost unnecessary because everyone knows Apple and their products, so most people don’t need any convincing, all they need is to see that Apple has announced a new product and they will go out and buy it.  This Culture Industry has led to a One Dimensional Society. With everyone trying to achieve a higher social status by buying the things that others have, listening to the music that everyone else listens to, and acting the way everyone acts, the world has become very one dimensional.  People are trying so hard to be like those who are higher up on the social ladder that they don’t notice that they are trying more to be like someone else and follow a path that has already been heavily traveled instead of trying to be an individual. This blindness has created a culture who sees being someone else as a more desirable option, and those who aren’t the same are looked at as outsiders. To see this One Dimensional Society in effect, one only has to look at a college campus. It’s unfortunate, but especially in the Greek system you will see people who all dress the same and act the same. Not to say that these people are all the same, but the appearance that they put forward is the same as those they surround themselves with.  One can only hope that at some point, individuality will take hold and people will stop following the herd. 

Blog #2: White Privilege

In this day and age, privilege is still very prominent in all of the things we do.  No matter what you do, you can be assured that race will most of the time play a factor in one way or another, whether it is in a good or a bad way.  In which way race affects you depends solely on your skin color and your gender.  Most times, those who end up in the best position are white males because they are often looked at as the most respectable or trustworthy, or safest group of people, even though that isn’t always true. 

Privilege plays a large role in almost everything, but one major example would be in the workplace. If you look at the upper divisions of any business or corporation most of the people you will see will be white men. This is allowed to happen because of stereotypes that white men are better employees and better management material than anyone else, which were brought on by past generations and have yet to leave the public consciousness.

Peggy McIntosh’s essay on white privilege begins with the quote: “I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” This beginning tagline really sets the tone for what her essay is about.  In the body of the essay she discusses her personal experiences with witnessing privilege.  She mentions how men are usually unwilling to acknowledge that they are over-privileged, yet they will acknowledge that women are disadvantaged, and then goes on to say that the denial of one’s privilege protect male privilege from being fully acknowledge. This means that privilege will never end if those who are privileged don’t admit that they are. 

For a majority of this essay, Peggy McIntosh lists all of the privileges that she experiences as a white woman.  Such privileges include: neighbors will be friendly to her, she can protect her children, she doesn’t have to educate her children of systemic racism for their personal protection, and that if she has low credibility as a leader, she can be sure that it isn’t because of her race. While jarring to read, these examples ring true. It might not be pleasant to read, but these privileges are experienced by white people almost every single day. This essay serves an important purpose, which is to bring the notion of white privilege to the forefront of public consciousness so that it can be widely recognized and then be ended. 

Since this essay was released, some things have changed, most notably the election of a black man as president of the United States.  Society has slowly begun recognizing white privilege and have begun reversing it, which has mainly been brought on by the younger generation. With that being said, white privilege is still enjoyed by older generations because of the long underlying influence of racism that has burned itself into the public consciousness. While I believe that white privilege is being slowed down, it is still very prominent.

Colorblind Racism

In this spoken word video, Jason Chu discusses the subject of colorblind racism specifically directed towards Asians.  Jason Chu delivers a fantastic spoken word performance which draws attention to the fact that there still is an underlying racist way of thinking in America, and he makes his point by attacking the entertainment industry. In the video, Jason Chu states that Asians aren’t looked at as being able to be in television unless they’re playing a character who knows a lot about technology, or they know kung fu, or if they’re playing a stereotypical villain.  This is a great point that he brings up because if one were to spend a day streaming through TV and movies, one would be hard pressed to find an Asian person playing any role other than the ones that he cited.  Jason Chu says he is the same as everyone else because he dresses, talks, and acts the same, but despite these similarities, he is still looked at as different than non-Asian people.  He mentions that he only saw an Asian face twice in The Dark Knight Rises, and that no Asian was ever on the show Cheers.

Jason Chu, in his spoken word segment, is calling attention to the still covered up idea of colorblind racism.  In our society we claim that everyone is equal and everyone is afforded the same opportunities and jobs, just as long as you have the right skill set, but many times people of an ethnic background other than Caucasian are passed up for a white person with the exact same skills.  It seems that our culture will never reach a point where people aren’t judged by the color of their skin, or their cultural background, even if we say that that doesn’t happen anymore, it still does, and the problem needs to be addressed. Jason Chu is getting the ball rolling with this spoken word segment, and we can only hope that others stand up as well.