This week’s post is a recap of an event in which I participated on Monday, April 2. It’s housed over at the blog of the organization that hosted the event, the venerable Unit for Criticism at the University of Illinois.
So please do head over there and check it out: Hack This Post! Contesting Technological Neutrality at Technology in Theory and Practice
I’m going to be presenting this idea later this year at the International Communication Association conference, and I gave a talk on some other research using these methods at the Association of Internet Researchers conference last October, so it’s maybe not entirely vital that I blog about it, but something I read a while back that made me want to do it, and now there’s the time in the schedule to do so.
So I’m going for it, in part because this platform has broader accessibility than either conference. Though, as of yet, not a broader audience. Someday.
This blog post had its genesis, as many of mine do, in something that I read. Embarrassingly enough, I can’t remember how I found this particular article, though I have a strong suspicion that it came to me via being cited in something I read from Culture Digitally, though I can’t find it again there.
Regardless of how I came by it, however, Mary Hodder’s TechCrunch post, Why Amazon Didn’t Just Have a Glitch, pointed to the kinds of issues that make one of my methodological innovations in fan studies vital.
In the piece, Hodder described an incident in which all books with LGBT content were filtered out of general Amazon.com search results because they were classified as “adult,” thus resulting in, among other outcomes, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality (to which I will NOT be linking, thank you very much) being the top result for a search for “homosexuality.” This generated a flutter of Twitter activity under #AmazonFail. But, as Hodder explains:
The issue with #AmazonFail isn’t that a French Employee pressed the wrong button or could affect the system by changing “false” to “true” in filtering certain “adult” classified items, it’s that Amazon’s system has assumptions such as: sexual orientation is part of “adult”. And “gay” is part of “adult.” In other words, #AmazonFail is about the subconscious assumptions of people built into algorithms and classification that contain discriminatory ideas. When other employees use the system, whether they themselves agree with the underlying assumptions of the algorithms and classification system, or even realize the system has these point’s [sic] of view built in, they can put those assumptions into force, as the Amazon France Employee apparently did according to Amazon.
That idea about the “subconscious assumptions of people built into algorithms” and the ways in which, as employees use a system, “whether they themselves agree with the underlying assumptions of the algorithms and classification system, or even realize the system has these points of view built in, they can put those assumptions into force,” is exactly why my research operates from the premise that it’s vital to take the interface seriously as a way power/knowledge gets enacted—that is, as a discourse.
In my dissertation, I examine technology—specifically, the interface of official media company websites for objects of fandom—in much the same way as certain branches of cultural studies (a field to which I have an uneasy relationship, to be sure) examine representation. Technology, I argue, is—like representation—not natural or inevitable but the product of social processes. (I am, of course, not alone in this contention, but I do seem to be the only proponent among those studying fans.)
Once socially produced, then, technologies render certain uses possible and not others, and I investigate this through the “affordances” of these official websites—defined by H. Rex Hartson in his 2003 piece, Cognitive, Physical, Sensory, and Functional Affordances in Interaction Design as what a site “offers the user, what it provides or furnishes” (p. 316).
The key terms I’m deploying here are Hartson’s concepts of “functional affordance,” which is what a site can actually do; “cognitive affordance,” which lets users know what a site can do; and “sensory affordance,” which “enables the user in sensing (e.g., seeing, hearing, feeling) something” (p. 322, emphasis removed).
With these latter two types of affordances, I consider the role of the site’s menu labels, how easy it is to tell what a feature does (and distinguish it from other features), and which features are easier or harder to locate due to their position on the page or how noticeable they are (Hartson, 2003).
I also build Mia Consalvo‘s 2003 discussion, in Cyber-Slaying Media Fans: Code, Digital Poaching, and Corporate Control of the Internet, of the ways in which “corporations have created new multimedia formats that circumvent the easy ‘copy and paste’ usability of older standards,” as with the advent of Flash video, to consider other technological processes that remain below the threshold of the user’s perception, such as cookies that track behavior (p. 82). Finally, I examine the sites’ Privacy Policies and Terms of Service to determine how they frame the site-fan interaction
In part, I begin from the common argument made in evolutionary psychology and design research that affordances exist only in relation to a user and read affordances back to uncover what type of users an interface implies, considering the ways in which the interfaces of these official sites work to, as Ian Hutchby put it in his 2001 piece Technologies, Texts and Affordances, “configure the user” (p. 451). In this sense, my project also resembles that of Michele White whose 2006 book The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship examines how interfaces work to gender and embody an ideal user.
Ultimately, I seek to examine how the industry’s decisions about features work to both a) produce a particular set of behaviors and bodies as what counts as fandom and b) consume this preferred mode of fandom as a source of value for the company, keeping in mind, as Hodder does above, that this doesn’t require ill intent or even awareness of these processes on the part of employees.
Assumptions, as things that both reflect and produce a sense of how things are or should be, are powerful things, and I want to work to bring them to light.
Posting a day early since I’ll be traveling tomorrow. Because I know everyone would feel deprived otherwise
Plenty of ink has been spilled (or, I guess, pixels? Ones and zeroes? What is it we’re spilling these days?) over #KONY2012 and its problematic premises. That critique extremely important, but it’s been done and done far, far better than I could, so I’m not going to make that intervention. (I’m also not wading into Jason Russell’s naked rampage, because that’s what late night television hosts get paid for.)
What I’m interested in, instead, is the viral-ness of this campaign, the ways it has traveled. Because, though there’s a long tradition of white liberals rushing in to a situation they don’t understand to save brown children half way around the world, this feels different.
#KONY2012, as Nick Dyer-Witheford pointed out recently when a seminar he gave on my campus turned to the subject, is about seeing social media as coextensive with reality.
Part of this is that, unlike, say, singing for famine relief, point-and-click activism (which I want to dub clicktivism but has apparently has been nominated as part of slacktivism) is light-speed. It requires no effort, which makes the self-congratulatory white-savior thing, old though it is, new by virtue of magnitude. (Confession: I make this critique as someone who “signs” almost every petition Moveon.org puts in my inbox but deletes the mailings that ask for money. In my defense, I do read them and decide if I agree first. I just happen to usually agree. I also sometimes show up at rallies and stuff.)
The very power of that frictionless travel is manifested in the graffiti that has sprung up in seemingly every women’s bathroom on campus. 
Now, 100% of the bathrooms in my (pun alert) convenience sample say “Stop Kony” and include the website. But this Sharpie scribble particularly caught my eye (and made me sorely tempted to retaliatory/corrective graffiti) because of the massive irony of the writer putting “Do some research on the LRA if you don’t know this man’s name” when clearly she had herself not done any research.
On the other hand, my Twitter feed has been inundated with critique of #KONY2012. Like, for real, it took over. In just the 24 hours before I began this post I got: Bosco 2012: While We Hunt Kony, Another Indicted War Criminal Lives a Life of Leisure published in the New York Times, Kony 2012 screening in Uganda results in anger, rocks thrown at screen published at boingboing, Kony Heads from Timothy Burke, and a rundown on Child Soldiers Worldwide published by Human Rights Watch, among others.
What’s important here is that I don’t follow any of the original sources. I got all of these announcements at the very least second hand and likely through a longer chain of retweets—there’s no real way to tell how they traveled before they got to me (At least, I don’t think so. And if I’m right about that, somebody should really write an algorithm that can parse that, because it’s interesting. Call it the epidemiology of Twitter). They didn’t even all come to me from the same source (though my colleague who knows a lot of politically active Africans contributed more than most).
There was, in fact, not a single person in favor of the campaign in anything that I’ve seen in the period since the video took off, which led me to temporarily forget that the people I follow are not representative of general public opinion. (Despite having just written a post in which I was surprised to realize I didn’t have a good handle on public opinion of the NBC show Community. Slow learner, I guess.)
And thus it came to pass that I was startled to hear a student in my fitness class profess support for the campaign and state that she’d ordered some of the merchandise.
Let’s parse that moment: Because of who I’d been listening to, I assumed “everyone knows it’s stupid.” Because of who she’d been listening to, she assumed “everyone knows this is the right thing to do.”
And, while I will continue to maintain that the people I’m listening to are working with better information and education than the ones my fitness classmate is, the fact is that I’m just as bad as the restroom writer whose handiwork is displayed above. I haven’t done any research. I’ve just believed what people told me because I trusted those people. This isn’t to now proclaim that those people aren’t trustworthy. They are. But it’s still a bad way to make a decision about world events and public policy.
And that recognition that the educated-person echo chamber is just as bad as the superficial-crisis one is sobering.
Another outcome of Saskia Sassen‘s late-February visit to my campus was the realization that lefty internet-is-freedom types, including proponents of the “fans are liberated now” model, are actually using the same logic as righty small-government-is-freedom types.
Say what?
Bear with me—this requires some backing up, some reframing, a deployment of one of my favorite theorists, and a disclaimer that I’m taking Sassen out of context. It also requires some sympathy for the ways in which graduate school is a nonstop exercise in finding the links between disparate things while thinking on one’s feet, and it’s hard to shut that off.
Okay, so, I think it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that the right-wing, Tea-Party-style position is that less state centralization is more freedom.
It is, I believe, also relatively uncontroversial to contend that lefty folks who identify the Internet as freedom point to its decentralization as the enabling feature.
What I’d like to contend is that this identification of less centralization as more freedom by both groups shows that they’re operating by the same logic.
N.B.: This post is going to be a little under-cited because, though I realized this while doing the reading for a seminar with Sassen, the key piece that inspired it seems to have been available only to seminar participants as an email attachment. Accordingly, I’m doing my best to respect that it isn’t public by paraphrasing rather than direct quotation.
Sassen pointed out that, though digital media are technologically suited to being “distributive” (that being the point of the military research that ultimately produced the ‘Net, after all), they still get used in cultural contexts, and this means that contextual social logics have bearing on how they get used.
Thus, to pay attention only to the properties of the technology is to fail to recognize those other factors, just as to say that only government control matters is to fail to recognize other factors. In both cases, institutions like capital are just as constraining.
Importantly, this isn’t to engage in some grand Marxist reductionism of all power to capital, but to pay attention to the ways in which, as a result of the given-ness of capitalism, especially in the US, this type of control is perhaps worse because more insidious. That is, sheer lack of awareness makes this form of constraint far less transparent than even the relatively opaque world of legislation, because people aren’t even looking.
Related to this, both the internet-is-freedom left and the small-government right are operating with a set of false opposites. As Sassen pointed out in her 2008 piece Neither Global nor National: Novel Assemblages of Territory, Authority and Rights, there’s a tendency to think that as things de-nationalize they are inevitably global, which is a false dichotomy (p. 75); correspondingly, people are misidentifying de-restriction or the diminishment of certain kinds of restriction as freedom.
This, of course, is where I break out the Foucault and point out that just because an institution stops saying “no” to certain things doesn’t mean that those things begin to operate freely. Both the pro-Internet left and the anti-government right, that is, are operating with a sense of power only as repressive, only as that which prevents you from doing certain things, which prevents recognition of the ways in which one might be equally constrained (and, again, more insidiously so) by being encouraged to do certain things.
Sassen’s “critique of the notion of the common notion that if something good happens to the powerless it signals empowerment” in her 2011 piece, The Global Street: Making the Political (p. 574) is in line with this kind of calling out of false opposites. I also appreciate its snarky quippiness.
Thus, when we think about Internet-enabled freedom or political activism, we need a lot more subtlety and complexity, and a broader view. As Sassen points out in terms of the contemporary articulation of territory, authority, and rights, “proliferation does not represent the end of national states, but it does begin to disassemble the national” (2008, p. 62), and I find this really productive.
To understand state power, or Internet power, or, indeed, capital’s power, that is, we have to think in terms of disassembly, fissure, and change rather than a binary determination of the continuing existence or end of certain forms of repression.
Hats off to fans; they get stuff done. The latest evidence of this is the ways in which shippers (Vocabulary lesson for the unfamiliar: Shipper, n.: short for relationship-er; people who advocate for particular couples in media objects)—and particularly shippers of non-canon (i.e. not officially existing in the text of the media object itself) couples completely took over E! Online’s 2012 TV’s Top Couple Tournament.
The site’s “weeks-long bracket-style tournament” started with 64 couples, many of which were “real” on the show and therefore might be considered to be more legitimate than those existing only in the slash goggles of the beholder(s).
Slash Goggles, n.: A prosthesis enabling one to see desire where it might otherwise be invisible; though the “slash” part indicates specifically same-sex desire, there are surely heterogoggles as well, though less often required. For a great rundown—and the place where I first heard the term—see Julie Levin Russo’s Hera Has Six Mommies (A Transmedia Love Story). Because apparently I can’t blog without Julie.
Despite the potential for legitimacy deficit, as the voting went on, many of the goggle-authorized pairings advanced through round after round, handily defeating couples for which there was explicit textual evidence. By the final four, there was just one canon pairing, which was same-sex: Brittany and Santana from Glee. And there was just one heterosexual pairing, which was non-canon: Castle and Beckett from Castle.
When the voting came down to the final two, lo and behold, both couples were same-sex and non-canon: Faberry (Quinn and Rachel, played by Dianna Agron and Lea Michele from Glee) and Destiel (Castiel and Dean, played by Misha Collins and Jensen Ackles from Supernatural).
The surviving pairs weren’t, however, incestuous, which was a real possibility given the popularity of Wincest in Supernatural fandom. See Catherine Tosenberger’s 2008. piece “‘The Epic Love Story of Sam and Dean’: ‘Supernatural,’ Queer Readings, and the Romance of Incestuous Fan Fiction.”
E! staffers seem to have been pretty surprised by how the tournament went. In round two’s post:
Wow. Just when you think you know which couples have the biggest fan bases… Lots of shockers in the first round of our annual TV Couple’s Tournament! A Glee favorite knocked out, unconventional pairings triumphing over long-established love affairs, and a very normal married couple taking down a supernatural romance. These are all reasons we so thoroughly enjoy our TV Couple’s tournament, because no win is guaranteed.
The tone became surprised and condescending by round five: “Don’t go changing, shippers. Especially now that we’re down to only four in our TV’s Top Couples tournament and we need your crazy Internet ways more than ever.” Then, in the last voting post: “Holy fandemonium. You Glee and Supernatural fans are passionate when it comes to this final round of our TV’s Top Couple tournament. How passionate? Well, let’s just say you nearly crashed the entire site yesterday!”
E! found the intensity to be surprising and indeed suspicious enough to warrant verification:
Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) and Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron) from Glee have won our TV’s Top Couple megapoll! Now, when we say “mega” that is, in this case, apparently an understatement. The fans for “Faberry” (Fabray/Berry) as they call themselves, set a new record high for page turns on E! Online for any single post in the entire history of the website. Umm…yeah, we are just as stunned as you. Also, we did an investigation into this voting and it showed no signs of false play among “Faberry” fans: Just a group of hardcore, dedicated shippers who organized mass-voting times (all hours of the night), and obviously took this thing very seriously.
But it’s perhaps a sign of the times that the non-canon nature of the outcome seems to have been more distressing to them than the same-sex aspect. Or, rather, the same-sex aspect was distressing because non-canon:
Now, I know what many of you who casually watch Glee are thinking: What the what?! Are Rachel and Quinn even a couple? And wait a minute, aren’t they straight? Why yes, yes they are, as far as we know. But the “Faberry” fans believe these two belong together. And from the very first step of this Top Couple tournament, they represented, making sure that the pair received a nomination. As you may or may not recall, we left the nominations solely up to you. And after starting with 64 couples, we are left with the winners, Rachel and Quinn.
However, for all of E!’s shock and awe, the incident didn’t surprise me. (Well, I was somewhat surprised by the scale—almost 400,000 votes in the final–but not the outcome). People who are denied official acknowledgement of their desire already have to be more affectively attached and put in more work to make it happen.
Moreover, the poll as a chance to make extremely visible to the people making Glee that this desire exists probably had something to do with it. Certainly, one fan site had it that the winning couple would have an interview—which I can’t find substantiated at E! anywhere, but was probably inspiring even if untrue.
It just goes to show that shippers and slashers, for all their supposed “resistance” to the text, would ultimately really love for their couple of choice to be legitimized by appearing explicitly in the text—even if they would reserve the right to critique the execution—and this sort of entertainment-website poll is one way toward that goal.
Certainly, the actors involved in the couples in question felt a need to respond to this desire on the part of the fans. E! posted
a little message we got from Misha Collins (who is in the final two) after his pairing (Dean and Castiel) beat out Community’s Jeff and Annie in the second-to-last round: “So often Hollywood and pop culture portray relationships that don’t reflect real life and relationships that lack a moral compass. I think it’s nice to see a stable couple with grounded values getting this attention over that perverse relationship between Joel McHale and that girl on that other show. I mean, look how they’re kissing. It’s disgusting—you can tell they’re not even using tongue.”
Quipping, “Just when you thought you couldn’t love him more.”
And then Agron tweeted this picture of herself and Michele, 
captioned: “In honor of the voters! @luanarama: @DiannaAgron @msleamichele Faberry won the best couple on E! http://www.eonline.com/news/watch_with_kristin/tvs_top_couple_tournament_winner/294212 http://yfrog.com/es75gsknj“
So, you know, here’s another way in which fans may be powerful, though I say that with a sizeable grain of salt (perhaps even a salt-crystal boulder). By sheer dedication and time put in, they got to see what they wanted, even if only for a minute, and even if the (platonic) Faberry scene that appeared in promos was ultimately cut from February 21st‘s episode over their #DontCutFaberry trending topic objection.
And, if we’re thinking about the power of fan desire, it may be a total coincidence, but I’m quite suspicious about the timing of Agron publicly smooching the guy she supposedly broke up with in December the day those results came out. Maybe even straight girls need beards if people think they’ve got the gay. (Commenter Phil at this thread had the same suspicion)
