Mapping nodes where my research and personal journeys have (and continue to ) overlap online/offline

over the years …its mostly a personal journey on my own, not surprisingly.

Last week (not yesterday) on Saturday, I was walking the streets of London looking for an Internet Cafe where my first experience of a f2f meeting of friends (flesh meet we used to call them?) formed fully through online discussion spaces (this group were from the spoon-collective list “cybermind” http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/spoons/).

It was akin to meeting a group of pen pals – but with hardcopy snail mail letters we would not have shared the same letter with a *group* of people – some of whom we did not know we were “broadcasting” to since we were still writing as if we were writing one to one letters (I think I said something of this sort in my dissertation way back in the 90s when this was all new in my understanding and experience and it was considered a research “finding” through my cyberethnographic investigations)….

I had my 11/12 year old son with me then – and we both figured out the London underground to get there (this was our first actual venture into London city – previously we had only been at Heathrow airport en-route to the US etc) – and little did I know at that time, how much the online/offline social world would be shaping his skills and personality – future social and professional life. But knowing this and being aware of this in this very personal, applied, concrete and historically contextual manner makes me able to connect with how my undergraduate students (not just grad students) live through these contexts. The fact that I have many nieces, nephews and even a grandniece and grandnephew who are not only sophisticated with-body world travelers but are also sophisticated navigators of online/offline social networks in their personal, educational and professional lives, enhances this understanding.

I think how commonplace it is now to weave online and offline social networks and how the younger generations no longer think about this … and of course the social networks that form through each of the platforms (multiple and multifarious in present times) and software available in present times are of such a wide range…

Now, as I continue my ethnographic investigations in virtual worlds – am waiting for an upgrade again so I can re-join the 3D worlds and continue to follow the RMTs…

It would be another kind of personal journey, no doubt, if I also tried to stretch my mapping to physically travel through
all the places (not just the countries – but the actual places, nooks and crannies) I recollect from my journeys hopping from country to country in my childhood.

[excuse the sloppy erasures in the image below ]

My research journeying to where money is being exchanged through online software is taking me into various muddyings of ideology, finance and socio-economic practice – in places of work through play.

click, click, click…

Start with the fluff and move to essentials…. microtransact away… or make essential the fluff (which is a bit different from essentializing fluff…)

[there's an interweaving commentary I have that's being staged in my head on the interweaving of social entrepreneurship, microtransactions, crowdfunding and micropolitics - but you can ask me about that f2f sometime]

Virtual worlds and social networks… looking at crowdfunding, microtransactional software, RMT and so on.

Practices of money exchange have always been “virtual” so this makes me think anew about the binary we have in the internet era – between “virtual” and “real” – in the context of money.

Parallel -ly, examining historical descriptions of finance communities and parallel as well as alternative practices of production, consumption, marketing … seeing how these trajectories allow me to push at the teleology of modernity ….(that [in]visibly underpins various current day political approaches to money and transactions of value).

So reading about Money and Liberation … Micropolitics and microtransactions – money as discourse (but of course it is – I dont see that as “new”) – exchange value, after all, is based on valuing through discourse and practice – and this connects back to Virtual worlds, RMTs and Virtual Economies (at least in my writing that is forthcoming). In that sense I am taking these issues in a different direction than that taken by some researchers of gaming cultures and virtual economies.

From my post to Radha ki Betiyaan pvt blog:

Okay – even though everyone [on RkB] almost is on facebook and some are on twitter – and several of you may have individual blogs. And we have once again started mass emailing each other.

This is still a different way of being, communication in this “space” we call Radha ki Betiyaan.

I am returning to posting and getting a sense of how I feel as I post in each of my many blogs – or some.

So I blogged some research notes on my livejournal – that only a. has an account on amongst all of you – and has access to when I set it to a certain type of private post setting.

I will go blog again on my cyberdiva.org blog and other spaces (all semester my students and I have been on tumblr.com because we are class blogging there).

Facebook allows different kinds of interactions – scattered and sudden and on impulse even. Twitter allows me to be very very scattered with no dialogue until I or someone else on my twitter list chooses to (similar to facebook status responses – but not with such a potentially large audience – so its not that kind of theater).

I’ve noticed that many many in P’s generation and S’s generation have a custom of keeping public blogs. The public theatricality of bloggling, facebook and twitter (and I am not even getting into youtube here because I speak only of written text) subconsciously shaping their way of being…

Add to this mix the act of posting and typing via Iphone interface.

thinking aloud and ending abruptly as always with my thoughts in-progress (and this is part of the website culture that I started out in since 1990s and that continues now in blogger culture)…

link to aoir list archives – the discussion thread is titled “etiquette for reusing or reposting blog posts” – around the date of July 25th

____

The contradiction regarding our expectations of use of online spaces continues to surprise me (and this includes my own expectations and unarticulated responses as a user/consumer too) …

We want to be public here on our own terms. Even while knowing how surveillance oriented the Net is…

we still want to maintain the illusion of “individuall” liberal humanist agency in online spaces….

hmmm

my knee-jerk response at this moment is to say dont blog if you dont want to be appropriated…

but is it that simple?

PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS ASAP  (deadline is still tentative – so if you are working on something relevant email me anyway with a query).  Title: Everyday 3D Lives: Digital Embodiment, Performativity and GlobalizationEditor : Radhika Gajjala[ http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik ](Lexington Press is interested and I am discussing this collection with them)  In the recent past, there has been much talk of “web 2.0 “ and “web 3D” as new media. Educators and researchers all over the world are debating the pros and cons of such environments. MMORPGs (Massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft (WoW) and online 3D environments for social and economic activity. Immersive environments such as secondlife are being examined from multiple disciplinary lenses. This edited will include articles based in examinations of embodiment, performativity, gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and globalization critically, and will be open to multiple disciplinary intersections.What sorts of convergences, conjunctures and connections emerge in relation to embodiment, identity and globalization specifically in 3D environment (such as secondlife) and MMORPGs? Researchers examining presence and absence or voice and voicelessness are increasingly mobilized to speak of identities emerging online, while binaries such as embodied/disembodied and global/local are deployed unproblematically in both utopian and dystopian viewpoints regarding the Internet. Performativity begins to shape exposure and privacy. Thus while claims are being made that the Internet is a “public sphere” in a Habermasian sense (Poster 1995) corporate privation and surveillance comes upon us in Internet mediated environments and we learn to negotiate our speaking within interstices of presences and absences, cooperation and isolation, community engagement and individual consumerism. Simultaneously hegemonic structures invested in particular ideologies of globalization and “free” markets learn to co-opt diverse identities and voices. Voice thus becomes a strategic construct in both cases. Notions of voice/voiceless and empowerment/participation in such instances are appropriated by status quo discourses and are themselves mobilized for the oppression of the subaltern (Gajjala, forthcoming 2008).In the book on “Pedagogies of the Global”, the editor, Arif Dirlik writes that”Rather than erase difference by converting all to Euro/American norms of modernity, however, capitalist modernity, as it has gone global, has empowered societies once theoretically condemned to premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of globalization “(Dirlik, 2006, 3).Digital media plays a significant role in aiding these connections and shaping these re-presentations. I am interested in research that examines these connections, representations and productions through critical theoretical lenses based in postcolonial theories, feminist theories, critical race theories and so on.500 word abstracts due by January 1, 2008 and full articles of no more than 8000 words length due by September 2008.Email me with any queries (Deadlines are still flexible at this time – so keep checking) – radhika@cyberdiva.org.

DEADLINE EXTENDED:

PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS BY DECEMBER 1, 2007.

Title: Everyday 3D Lives: Digital Embodiment, Performativity and Globalization

Editor : Radhika Gajjala

[ http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik ]

In the recent past, there has been much talk of “web 2.0 “ and “web 3D” as new media. Educators and researchers all over the world are debating the pros and cons of such environments. MMORPGs (Massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft (WoW) and online 3D environments for social and economic activity. Immersive environments such as secondlife are being examined from multiple disciplinary lenses. This edited will include articles based in examinations of embodiment, performativity, gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and globalization critically, and will be open to multiple disciplinary intersections.

What sorts of convergences, conjunctures and connections emerge in relation to embodiment, identity and globalization specifically in 3D environment (such as secondlife) and MMORPGs? Researchers examining presence and absence or voice and voicelessness are increasingly mobilized to speak of identities emerging online, while binaries such as embodied/disembodied and global/local are deployed unproblematically in both utopian and dystopian viewpoints regarding the Internet. Performativity begins to shape exposure and privacy. Thus while claims are being made that the Internet is a “public sphere” in a Habermasian sense (Poster 1995) corporate privation and surveillance comes upon us in Internet mediated environments and we learn to negotiate our speaking within interstices of presences and absences, cooperation and isolation, community engagement and individual consumerism. Simultaneously hegemonic structures invested in particular ideologies of globalization and “free” markets learn to co-opt diverse identities and voices. Voice thus becomes a strategic construct in both cases. Notions of voice/voiceless and empowerment/participation in such instances are appropriated by status quo discourses and are themselves mobilized for the oppression of the subaltern (Gajjala, forthcoming 2008).

In the book on “Pedagogies of the Global”, the editor, Arif Dirlik writes that

“Rather than erase difference by converting all to Euro/American norms of modernity, however, capitalist modernity, as it has gone global, has empowered societies once theoretically condemned to premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of globalization “(Dirlik, 2006, 3).

Digital media plays a significant role in aiding these connections and shaping these re-presentations. I am interested in research that examines these connections, representations and productions through critical theoretical lenses based in postcolonial theories, feminist theories, critical race theories and so on.

500 word abstracts due by December 1, 2007 and full articles of no more than 8000 words length due by September 2008.

Email me with any queries – radhika@cyberdiva.org.

Who took Pedagogy out and put Technology in to replace it?

There is a very interesting discussion going on on the AIR-L list that I am trying not to get drawn into replying to posts on. Too much stuff to do here with Grad step week and all (and last week the Digital Mirror and New Faculty presentation as well as prep for Grad step week took up most of my time).

This post is mostly a public note to myself (yes Public – if it is on a blog it is public and however stupid my public comment may have been or is – yes it can be traced back to my “real” self – even if I use a psuedonym – it can… how many times do we rehearse these arguments on lists anyway?)

Performativity and everyday negotiation of online existence as a not so “new” thing is a point (among others) that gets missed in some discussions of “privacy” and the internet as “public space” arguments – but more later. Just as digital literacy and digital divide discourses are still stuck in early generations of Internet user paradigms even as they use buzz words such as “web 2.0″

Nuances are so easily disappeared in the focus on static in looking at online existence/texts as if (implicitly) they were either just speech on the one hand or written text (as defined by print paradigms) on the other while viewing online engagement as unproblematically “disembodied”…

more later

cyberdiva.org » Use of Secondlife in WS780/COMS780 Feminist Research Methods (summer 2007

My team has set up the stream at

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Brouwer/88/173/43

Since none of us can be online at 9 am today – we wont be able to troubleshoot or to check if it is streaming.

Only play the video – do not play the music (or it will be totally confusing).

The screen looks like a huge sheet of fabric (of course) – you’ll figure out where its play ing once you get in.

I am asking my team to lay out some cushions – but really you can sit anywhere you like if you can see the videos.

see image to get a sense…