Eunice Pang

Crawford relates the old-school weight scale to today’s wearable technology, showing that the human curiousity for self-knowledge is deep-seated and extends back to the first iteration of self-tracking devices. These devices mediate our relationship with our body by promising that the user would have the agency to lead a healthier life or obtain a desired body once they are endowed with the metrics of self-knowledge. It has moved from the entertainment of the penny scale to subjective, pseudo-scientific data. The multitude of devices on the market do not follow the same consistent indicators or baseline datasets to compare users’ data, bringing into question the accuracy of their datasets. What the companies do not tell you is that what the user sees is just a tiny speck of data that they have harvested from silently observing them 24/7. Users are handing over their data, with no say as to what corporations plan to do with it. The wealth of free data they have collected from humans around the world represents tons of economic dollars, to be bought and sold on the capitalist market. With these data, they are able to shape our preferences, alter our habits, and may even use it to act against us in legal proceedings. The user loses agency over how or when their bodily data is used when they exchange access to their data for metric-based self-knowledge.

Lambert wrote about how intimacy radically evolved due to technological, socio-cultural, and political changes. He combines two opposing ideas, intimacy and cosmopolitanism, into cosmopolitan intimacy. He questions whether technology facilitates or inhibits intimacy in being expressed, disseminated, and adopted. The digital affordances provided by the Internet had fundamentally changed the way we experience intimacy. I wholeheartedly agree with his analysis of intimacy being mediated beyond the need for physical meetings, where intimacy can be stored and transmitted in artefacts. What used to be private, sacred happenings between two people can now be shared with a global village, treated as an economic commodity to be bought and sold.

When one posts a birthday dedication to a friend, a Mother’s day appreciation photo collage, or one’s outing with one’s partner, they are revealing intimacies experienced with another person. They may detail the memories they had, the places they had visited together, and the conversations they had. The audience/followers are privy to these details of their life, and these followers may never have even met the person writing the post. These displays of intimacy are widely accepted and even encouraged. But what about the intensely private moments of emotional and physical intimacy between a couple? Physical intimacy goes beyond sex. It is making love, it is the act of holding your partner’s waist while crossing a busy intersection, it is brushing the hair behind her ears, it is carrying all the groceries so that your partner doesn’t have to. There is a market for this type of intimacy, which costs a premium over just sex. People have termed it “The Girlfriend Experience” without all the strings attached, and Snapchat was rife with creators ready to offer the products. Before the advent of OnlyFans, girls sold lifetime access to their private Snapchat accounts for around USD$50. They posted a mix of sexual and non-sexual content, sharing their likes, dislikes, quirks, hobbies, and risqué photos. They are also able to develop seemingly reciprocal relationships with their fans through one-on-one chatting on Snapchat. Instead of selling methodological sex (which can be easily found on pornography websites), one can sell and mark-up the price for intimacy by delivering “embodied authenticity”, making their fans feel as though they are having an authentic encounter even if it is the product of an economic exchange.

Pelletier utilises interpassivity, as defined by Žižek, to analyse gaming in an educational context. Interpassivity refers to gamers fulfilling demands of a game actively and passively, surrendering their agency in the process. Games allow its players to dance around the rules by changing their identity and social realities, in a world where there are no consequences, which enables players to learn from their mistakes more readily. 4 versions of the cyberspace are postulated, that is 1) games as pain relievers, 2) as sensual temptations, 3) as replicas of non-virtual life, and 4) as dramatic stages for reality construction. Being present in cyberspace allows us to detach from the social realities of the capitalist/class system, remove ourselves from oppression/constraints, and align with new political ideologies. A game format that has become extremely popular recently is that of interactive adventure games, where the gamer plays a character and has to make choices for the character, with every choice setting off a “butterfly effect” and changing the outcome of the game in subtle yet important ways. “Detroit: Become Human” is a such a game. I will be relating this game to the 4 versions of cyberspace as postulated by Žižek.

The game “Detroit: Become Human” is set in 2038, where androids are sold to consumers as do-it-all objects, housekeepers, caregivers, companions, etc. They have been engineered to look, speak, and walk exactly like humans. The story starts with androids “malfunctioning”, that is, becoming conscious and having agency. The gamer gets to play different characters, making choices for the story based on the gamer’s value and judgement system. This game acts as a pain reliever by providing the gamer with escapism, transporting them into a fictional reality of the future, where their choices influence the outcome of the game. It can also take up to 400 hours of gameplay to complete one specific route of the game timeline, and there are up to 10,000 possible timelines a gamer can play. This ties in with version 2, where a player can get enamoured with unlocking all possible routes by repeating certain scenes and making different choices at every stage of the game. As for version 3, it encapsulates the tension between being free to choose an avatar yet having to commit to only one avatar, as the game does not let you backtrack and make a different decision until you have completed one entire timeline from start to finish. There are so many different choices to make in the game, yet, once you make one choice, you are closing yourself to a dozen other choices. This tension drives gamers to feel as if each choice is momentous, no matter how trivial the subject matter might be. Additionally, one has to play the game within the constraints of the game world, subject to the choices displayed at any given point in time. The player cannot deviate from the set choices given by the game developers and must make a choice between the options that are already laid out. This ties in with interpassivity, that by acting in accordance with the game designer’s orders and rules, we recognise it as a game and that enables play.

In Understanding Bourdieu, it seems that objects imbued with social capital are informed by cultural intermediaries or ‘tastemakers’, as manifested preferences of what it looks like to be from the upper-class. Such specific tastes are physical representations of differences between groups, who seek to normalise such differences. The habitus is ever-changing and always challenged (i.e. what is defined as normal today can be weird tomorrow, and vice versa) due to unregulated flows of globalisation.  

Let us look at Crocs. I used to have a pair of these shoes, but not anymore. For a long period of time, they were shunned and deemed a lower-class good. The notion of being poor and its so-called “ugly” design saw Crocs being viewed as a lower-class symbol. Even the poor would not be caught dead in those shoes. 

Then, Crocs produced collaborative products with famous rappers (e.g. Post Malone), singers (e.g. Justin Bieber), fast food chains (e.g. KFC), actors (e.g. Drew Berrymore, Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and even high fashion houses (e.g. Pleasures, Balenciaga). The irony-fuelled rise of the foam clog started as one of 2018’s most unlikely trends. 

Ravenelle (2019) alludes to the point that the sharing economy is not as perfect as it sounds. The technological companies claim to solve many problems in society, such as inequality, lack of connection, and unemployment. Ravenelle disagrees, arguing that they actually exacerbate the issues at hand. The sharing economy disregards the lower income people working for them by ignoring their safety, disregarding the value of their work, and increasing discrimination. Those with a higher income are able to profit off platforms like Airbnb, where they possess the capital to secure multiple properties and rent them out on the platform. To a lesser extent, this is applicable in Singapore. I will be looking into her argument from a local view, through the website FastJobs in Singapore.

Personally, I have used the website to find quick part-time jobs throughout the years. Employers often post job descriptions on the website to call for workers. It is a great website to search for temporary jobs during non-school days or holidays. It helped me earn a few hundred dollars a month while I was waiting for university to start. I could choose the time and dates I wanted to work, as my schedule was flexible and I was privileged enough that I didn’t have to worry about not being able to make ends meet. I was not dependent on it as a means of survival, as my parents made enough to provide for me. It also brought in some lessons from my experiences of working in a service industry. As mentioned in the reading, this platform looks like flexibility to me due to my upper-class standard of living, but for others, this could be what puts food on the table. These descriptions are often about the job is easy, or fun, and flexible. They highlight how much they are encouraging others to chase their entrepreneurial dreams. What they don’t say is that sometimes the gig worker does not get paid from the company, receive no CPF contributions/medical benefits or they are called down to work at the last minute with no opportunity for rejection. Without a full-time job, gig workers are not covered for their medical needs. If they fell sick and weren’t able to work for weeks, they might not have enough money to survive in our metropolitan city. Additionally, some job ads specify the race they are looking for, preferring Chinese Singaporeans to other races. This furthers the racist agendas (where consciously or subconsciously) of the job posters, where they are choosing to include some people and exclude others from having the opportunity to work.

In Fuchs (2014), the term participatory culture is defined as content creation by users, audiences and consumers. This involves sharing, co-creation, remixing, reuse and adaption of content on social media platforms, according to Jenkins. Fuchs points out that Jenkins sidesteps the involvement of the political economy in his arguments and definitions of participatory culture. This leaves out the important questions of power, profit, prestige and misses out on the capitalist perspective of oligarchies and corporations. Jenkins asserts that the purpose of the users’ willing participation in content generation is to fulfil their socio-cultural desires, of which cannot be considered as exploitation of digital labour. Fuchs argues that the exploitation of users is understated, as their perceived power over their content is merely an illusion. For example, Tiktok owns the rights to all content posted on their platform and are able to use it in any way, shape, or form without the creator’s permission.

Attention spans are shortening. We are pulled in a dozen different directions, each vying for our time and attentiveness. The ability of a platform’s algorithm in retaining and sustaining users’ interest is proportional to its success in today’s competitive attention economy. Old social media platforms feed users’ active online behaviour (e.g., liking, following, clicking) into their algorithm to recommend related posts to the user. Tiktok, however, takes cues from our passive behaviours (e.g., how long we watch a particular video, how fast we swipe away from specific content, how many times we share a video, and our reaction to specific effects or sounds) in real-time, as we consume videos. Their system is hyper-responsive in recommending related content based on past behavioural patterns, allowing the user to remain relatively passive while the app delivers an engaging, personalised, infinite feed of videos, at a speed quicker than any other platform. Additionally, Tiktok relieves one of the performative social burden of accumulating friends, building a network of followers and cultivating an enraptured audience. Unlike other social media platforms, it does not rely on users’ existing social networks to recommend content to other users. Users’ are able to achieve virality without any follower base, provided they create engaging, relatable content. Tiktok’s rise to global prominence has been driven by an increased demand for relatable content, which is the third most powerful driver of online video shareability currently. How does this relate (haha) to capitalism and profit-making? According to the Nielsen Consumer Trust Index, 92% of consumers trust UGC more than that of traditional advertising. Organic and relatable content performed extremely well on Tiktok, with the app’s top influencers being those who displayed more authenticity and realness than those who post precariously manicured and curated content.

My personal experience with Tiktok has been fairly exciting. It started when I needed to piece together a video quickly on my phone and Tiktok provided the affordances to do so. In order to save the video, I had to post it. Within 2 minutes of posting my first video, it hit 200 views, and the number kept climbing every second. I was thoroughly confused as I had zero followers. I was glued to my phone, refreshing the page every other second, watching the view count jump like a Vegas slot machine. By the next day, it had 109,000 views. It left me befuddled but also, pleasantly surprised. Spurred by this rush of dopamine, I created more videos. I was hooked onto consuming content on the app, searching for new trends I could mimic for new videos. In this cycle of consuming and producing content, I spent nearly 3 hours on Tiktok daily. I was exposed to numerous mid-feed advertisements. Tiktok succeeded in hooking me to watch advertisements and create content that would sustain other users’ time spent on the platform, all for the nifty price of zero dollars. The app is designed to make you pay with your attention, while the developers reap the monetary rewards of you doing so. It seems as though users have the autonomy to participate in content generation, but there exists a host of psychological tactics engineered to make users addicted to Tiktok. It would seem ignorant to not acknowledge the capitalist motives of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company. It is their aim, as with any for-profit company, to maximise profits.

I will be briefly touching on the introduction and chapter 2 of The Cultural Industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). Hesmondhalgh refers to the cultural industries in plural form to highlight complex and differing logics at work in different types of cultural production. He also mentions that audiences are active in resisting the commodification of culture, unlike the passive audience as envisioned by Adorno & Horkheimer (2012). In this blogpost, I will examine how American cultural goods achieved media internationalisation and the reaction of their audiences – small, 3rd world, developing countries.

Lupton’s paper is on meaning-making of personal data, and how self-tracked data can heighten visibility and induce emotional responses. Self-tracking is seen as empowerment and the harnessing of bodily knowledge. It transforms sweaty tennis matches, menstrual periods, and monetary transactions into numerical outputs to be arranged in pie charts and bar graphs on an Excel spreadsheet or iPhone application. This is not to say that the data spat out by our electronic wearables or tracking devices can be taken as objective, verifiable fact. Rather, there are constant negotiations between what is measured and what our memory/awareness affords us.

I am an avid self-tracker. I use a host of tracking applications, mostly related to health and finance.  

Daily step counter: This is displayed on my homepage so I’d always see it. I don’t make a conscious effort to complete the ring (10k steps), but I bet it subconsciously prods me to move around a little bit more. Splitwise: This is an expenses-splitting application. I used this with big groups of friends when we travelled overseas as it afforded the flexibility to include different people in different transactions. It became so relevant in my life that I use it with 2 of my closest friends in Singapore, as we meet every week for meals and coffee. They have been complaining that they have a massive debt, as I always happen to pay for the bill first. My friend dramatically remarked that the application gives her anxiety as she watches her debt stack up week after week. Clue: This is a period cycle tracking application. I used to have really irregular periods. They came at random times every month, and I felt so powerless whenever it would surprise me in school, before an exercise class, or in the middle of a busy day. The distress and foreboding dread I felt every month waiting on my period’s arrival gradually disappeared as Clue predicted my cycle so accurately. Seedly: I use this to track my expenses. It links to my credit card, so the transactions show up immediately. I’d still have to manually tabulate the cash or debit card purchases, though. They have budgeting tools for every category, visual materialisations (e.g. graphs, pie charts) of my expenses, and even a forum for users to share tips and ask questions. Screentime & Bedtime: These are from Apple’s Health application. I found that my screentime across all devices is almost equal to my waking hours. I have a newfound interest in Bedtime as I am currently taking a module in the cognitive neuroscience of sleep, which I am trying to apply in my daily life.

Spigel followed a timeline of how the TV impacted our lives from 1950s till the current day. It saw the invention of the television and how it impacted the domestic sphere in the 1950s, where it was depicted as a family-uniting apparatus, and also as a divisive force against intimacy and gender. Then came the home theatre, presented as luxury, but came with concerns of privacy. Mobile privatisation allowed people to virtually travel and find their tribe in spaces not ensconced by their immediate surroundings. Telepresence allowed people to feel as though the show is live, creating a sense of real time and space. He mentions that TV, like other technologies, affords possibilities that have different outcomes depending on the time and space in question.

Spigel mentions that television merges material spaces with virtual presence. I see this happening in daily life, where everyone is either using their laptop, phone, iPad(s), television set, or a combination of all. An average person has 2-3 devices, and we are constantly hooked onto the Internet. My screen-time on my phone and laptop comes to about an average of 11 hours per day. I assume the rest of my waking hours off the phone were spent eating with friends or when I’m on a date. More than half my life will be spent on the virtual sphere, where I will be thinking, consuming, interacting. We spend less time ‘in the moment’, and we are always thinking about our next step and making plans for the future.

This quote from Michael Bull illustrates my point clearly, “As we become more and more immersed in our mobile media sound bubbles of communication, so then those spaces we habitually pass through in our daily lives increasingly lose significance and progressively turn into the ‘non-spaces’ of daily lives which we try, through the self-same technologies, to transcend.” It really shows how our usage of technology causes the reality to become a little faded and grey, prompting us to use technology to search for meaning in the everyday. This is demonstrated in a scene from the movie “Soul”, where the main character, Joe, laments on how the NYC metro “wears you down”, showing the entire train cabin dressed in drab grey, mindlessly scrolling on their mobile phones. This is in stark comparison to Joe’s handsome blue suit and elevated state of mind, due to his near-death experience. Unfortunately, it does seem as if the entire world is glued to their mobile phones, oftentimes choosing it over real human connection or solitary, disconnected experiences.

Couldry and Hepp postulate that our reality is shaped by communicative practices that are tightly bound to the role of media; this process is termed mediatization. Our everyday life is heavily dependent on media. I completely relate to their point of how media communicative streams have deep roots in our constructed reality of life. I use Instagram and Telegram upon waking and just before sleeping, spending the first and last 30 minutes of my day on these applications. Throughout the day, I check on what my friends are posting, and have an extended text conversation with them. In this post specifically, I would like to touch on Instagram and its links to the local dance scene. Being a dancer myself, I have seen how the experience of taking an open class at a dance studio has transitioned from being unrelated to media to being heavily influenced by media. I started taking classes in 2013, and saw how Instagram played a pivotal role in a dancer's journey. It used to be quite simple. I would try different genres and styles by signing up for many different classes. We would always end the class with 'video runs', where we would break into smaller groups and perform the choreography while being recorded. The intent behind it is to allow you to watch the recording and pick up mistakes, strengths, and room for growth. People rarely shared these videos online, as the studio was a safe space to explore and try new styles. 

However, in 2021, it is wildly different.

Firstly, we have the pre-class hype, when the instructor of the class posts his/her song choice on Instagram, occasionally including a practice video/sneak peak of the choreography to drum up excitement. Then, we have the 'camping', a colloquial phrase used to describe people waiting to book tickets for the class once the slots are released at 0000, a few days before the class is held, with the classes being sold out in 30 seconds. Ever since the safety distancing protocol was announced, the capacity of the studios have been greatly reduced. People would post on Instagram how they managed to or was not able to secure a slot. This, again, would create a buzz for the class. Then, the actual experience of taking a class is very different as well. It is no longer the mindset of "I am here to learn, explore and make mistakes.", but sounds something more like this, "I am here to look good doing this choreography during the video run, so that I can post it on Instagram and receive compliments". Personally, I am guilty of having this mindset, of only taking classes that I am comfortable in and no longer pushing myself to extend my diversity and versatility. The chase for adoration on social media for one's dance skills can be very pressurising. This is especially valid in the case of the dance instructors. Instagram has become the main point of reference when someone wishes to enroll for a class. They view videos of the instructor's past choreographies, see who usually attends their classes, and whether or not this instructor is "popular" on the social media reality of the local dance scene. This point is particularly important as an instructor is paid by the amount of students attending the class (i.e. a commissions basis). This pushes instructors to create more visually appealing and eye-catching choreographies for the purpose of posting them online, in a bid to increase their social media presence and potential salary. 

Thus, the choices made by instructors and students of a class is very much influenced by the content consumed on Instagram. Students wish to "look good performing" in every class, sacrificing diversification of skills. Instructors pursue clicks and likes, instead of creating choreographies that truly represent their passion for this art form.