Typically, I love brainstorming activities. Although I sometimes struggle to come up with ideas, I find it easy to give myself over to the ~*process*~ and try to make connections quickly without thinking too deeply about it. I realized during the brainstorming activity in class that rather than focusing on my thesis questions, I accidentally started to move far beyond the scope of my initial question. Instead my brainstorming turned into a dumping-out-my-brain-onto-the-table activity unintentionally. This led me to coming up with categories that initially felt far away from my more specific, initial brainstorming question regarding pleasure and joy in our everyday technologies more specifically. While this initially left me feeling frustrated and with a fair amount of confusion, I decided to home in on a few questions:
- How did the larger picture represented through my brainstorming encapsulate my initial question?
- Why did I find focusing on my initial question less exciting? Or more generally, why did I move away from it?
- How might I move forward?
To categorize the broad strokes of this particular exercise, it mostly brought up intimacy, safety, searching, love, and spirituality. As time ticked down in our brainstorming session I became overwhelmed realizing I couldn't quite categorize the results of the exercise within the framework of my original question. Though this felt like a challenge at the time, I decided to let the two exercises sit with me and percolate. In the meantime I turned to my other favorite brainstorming activity: research.
Through research I found a great article by Adrienne Shaw and Katherine Sender entitled "Queer technologies: affordances, affect, ambivalence". My MS2 project last year thought a lot about technology through the lens of queerness, and part of my final product was motivated by the drive to "queer" technology, and render it less effective in a capitalistic sense, but more “effective” in a human sense. Two questions the two authors posed are:
- How can taken-for-granted technologies express queerness?
- How can hacking and resistance of heteronormative technologies offer alternative forms of engagement and experience?
It dawned on me that these two questions hit the mark when it came to what my MS2 project was attempting to do, and also encapsulates the overarching theme of my thesis questions. Originally focusing on this idea of joy over the addiction-triggered pleasure in our everyday technologies is, ultimately, an attempt to queer these technologies. The pleasure component is largely engineered into design interfaces to increase face-time users have with the app, platform, etc. This tends to be in service of gaining capital, rather than, or at least over, serving the service's user base. Queerness in this context instead takes a critical look at design features that go unquestioned. Ultimately I'd love to have my thesis focus on a particular technology or technologies, and dismantle and rework core design principles that we take for granted. While I think the questions above may generally encapsulate my design questions for the semester, I'd like to combine and tailor them to fit exactly what I'm interested in pursuing.
Though this feels like a step back in some ways, and I know we were told that specificity is a greater than generality, I think it’s really important for me personally to identify what it is that is driving these questions. In order to move forward, in this case, I need to take a step back.
Below is my venn diagram or what I'm calling a "venn-map" with my more general question in mind:
I decided to focus on three domains: Queerness, Internet, and Intimacy/Connectedness. I'm not totally sure about "Intimacy/Connectedness" as my third domain but, because it appeared so strongly in my initial brainstorm, I thought it might make sense to include it for this particular map. I found this format especially challenging, as I wish I had a way of processing the positive and negative elements of each domain and how they might interact in a clearer manner. Right now, there's no distinction between the two which makes the map a bit hard to read. This exercise was helpful in some way, though! I think it really helped me think deeply about aspects of my domains that I hadn't quite connected the dots with yet. In future brainstorming exercises I think it’ll be useful to dive into this map and pick out specifics of each domain at random to create “what-if” scenarios. I also think that having this information out there percolating now will yield some good.
Having these three “puzzle-pieces” that I can mix and match has actually brought me an immense sense of relief. I no longer feel quite as trapped within my thesis topic, confused about where to go next, but rather, like I can easily explore within the confines that I have now set up for myself. I’m really happy with the progress I made this week, and I hope that I can continue to face the frustrations and challenges that arise during thesis by taking a breather, and maybe taking a step back, as difficult as it might feel.
My goal for this week is to confirm "the internet" as my technology or dig into other taken-for-granted technologies or elements of technology. Luckily I found a massive archive from the article referenced above and I feel confident that looking and reading through that will help give me an idea of what interests me. I also plan to come up with a series of questions that think about queering various technology within the framework of intimacy/connectedness. Ultimately I think the technology that I choose will inform the third domain and what I plan to focus on queering within that specific technology. So, if I complete my first task, hopefully I can make a list of aspects of the tech that I find ripe for hacking , radicalizing, etc!
