#cheryl-lit

[cheryl-lit]

anonymity

It’s interesting to see that 4chan was based off of a Japanese site, especially when you consider the type of culture that is predominate in most Asian countries (Dibbell, 2010). Japan is a very high context culture, what constitutes proper behavior changes, sometimes dramatically, from one situation to another. Things like who you are with, who else is around, the location you’re in, what part of the world you are from, all of these and probably a lot more are taken into account to decide what is ‘correct’ and what isn’t. This sort of environment can confuse the hell out of Westerners, we consider it two-faced or false to change how we act from situation to situation. The base for 4chan was built with that high context cultural influence, and I think you can see that in aspects of 4chan. Looking at high context, when a person shifts from one event to another, it’s like a reset, a clean slate. 4chan’s no pseudonym anonymous rule has the same effect. The ability to put an idea, opinion, or observation out in public, and have it exist only for a few minutes is a way for Westerners to have that new environment where they can completely change behavior without having their sense of self judged or questioned. Whether the 4chan universe is more valuable as a social steam valve, or a sub-culture creative forum is up for debate, but it’s not something the internet population can do without.

[cheryl-lit]

Social Movements

The use of social media to draw in what would usually be fringe groups, like the techno fans Wasik mentions in the #Riot article, is bringing a new method of communicating for idiocultures (Wasik, 2011). Small groups that identity through something fairly specific are usually confined to geographical location, but with the hashtag movement the way of sharing in-group symbols, language, and rituals lets these groups stay relatively small while spreading across the globe. In the past idiocultures haven’t had a huge impact on society at large, and in my opinion, that’s due to limited communication methods. Now that the reach for niche groups is widespread, the standard definition of idioculture may need to be reexamined.

[cheryl-lit]

Game On

People instinctively categorize and define everything, it’s a basic part of our cognitive process. Ignoring any religious aspect, the first part of the bible describes the separation of land from water. The word define is related to the Latin word boundary, and we frame our activities as belonging to one separate piece or another. To go with Yee’s example, we can take an activity such as collecting ingredients, using those to make an item, then selling it, and the only way to determine if we are playing or working is by cultural definition (Yee, 2006). When Yee talks about the amount of time and effort that gaming takes it’s easy to see that gaming echoes working.

  A lot of people are pouring time into a job that they don’t enjoy, and possibly actively hate. Capitalism has a vested interest in the labor force staying in that sort of mid-level employment range, and people suffer through it with the help of escapist games. Sold to them by capitalist corporations, of course.

[drcknowledgeandpower]

Transgender Info

http://www.buzzfeed.com/transstudent/10-things-you-can-do-for-transgneder-day-of-visibi-1djow

[cheryl-lit]

Body Horror

The visceral thrill and shock value of being shown bodies that are beyond the limits of ‘taste and decency’, as Tait puts it, is something we aren’t supposed to acknowledge (Tait, 2008). As a society take that desire to see and experience that thrill and clean it up, we create horror/slash/gore films and have a collective suspension of disbelief that the fiction of the film makes the viewing fall into ‘good’ behavior as opposed to ‘bad’. The binary of viewing this sort of thing for either moral edification or a deviant thrill is, like most binaries, a hierarchical one with morality being the better option, and there’s an extreme stigma to admitting that you look to get the thrill. I think most people will hide the thrill they get from body horror under a mask of moral edification, to the point where they are hiding it from themselves.

 What exactly creates/created that stigma though? And why are we still buying into it? The worrisome part is that it’s not just movies or extreme porn where the thrill gets fed. Cultural or societal framing that we do turns news reports into a ‘valid’ way to see images of tragedy for some sort of higher purpose. It’s so thinly veiled though, that I’ve always been angered/disgusted by it to the point where I wouldn’t let my kids watch the news when they were young. I would let them play Manhunt though, a fairly violent video game for the time period. The notion that it’s okay to lie to ourselves about the internal emotions or reactions to horror worry me, and I’d love to see unbiased studies done on why.

[cheryl-lit]

8: Labor

Cote and Pybus used a term that struck me as particularly vibrant; cognitive capital. Discussions about the import and export of expertise and innovation, as opposed to physical products, have been used in the past, and this new phrase, to me at least, does a better job encompassing not only corporate innovations and scientific theories, but cultural creative products as well. Digital art, poetry, fan works, as well random repurposed items that show up in life hacks list, all fall outside of the old definitions of ‘labor’-- some sort of physical activity, and ‘product’-- some sort of tangible touchable item. The way that the capital is traded, tagging, sharing, re-blogging, etc., makes it much more cooperative than it has been in the past. The type of community effort to create is so widespread due to the connections we can make through social media is reminiscent of the commune movement from the Sixties. Adding corporate entities to the mix is where it gets messy, though. The interactivity that’s touted as something fun and unique is extremely appealing to our tendency towards self-branding, as well as giving us a way for our efforts to be recognized, and fuel that desire for acknowledgement. Advertising companies are taking the ‘fun’ part of being involved with creating, and the fulfilling part of creating with a community and coopting it. Doing that strips, at least some, the value away from the individual’s creative production. It’s very glossy and fun, and it’s doing a good job of turning the spending part of these interactions into a secondary component. Until people see that the business practice of ‘cutting through the clutter’ (Andrejevic, 2007) isn’t used to make a better product but to increase the bottom line the creations we are making won’t be truly ours.

[drcknowledgeandpower]

Finally!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nikkacy/nik-kacy-luxury-footwear-designed-to-fit-all-gende

[drcknowledgeandpower]

New Media as a Mirror

We’ve talked a lot about identity, (as well as lots of other things!), but diving into the social media here got me thinking about the sheeramount of people we have access to in the net environment. I know there is a lot of negative implications regarding the interconnectivity of our world today, but I have to think that this one point is a positive. When we look out at our media community, we don’t just see the corporate view of ‘normal’ any longer. There are hundreds of people on Twitter and Facebook, all of them with at least one picture, and a wide range of social status so to speak. Popularity is usually tallied by Likes, hits, and reblogs, all things that are driven by the user as opposed to a marketing division somewhere in Corporate America. We are deciding what normal or popular looks like, and there’s a lack of competition for that popularity. If you’re shopping for a designer purse you’ll get this one instead of that one, but there’s no limit to what we can approve of and/or support on the net. All this leads to my ‘Hallelujah’ thought. The chances of us looking out into the world and seeing a positive portrayal of someone like us are a hell of a lot bigger than they used to be.

Cheryl