Judy

 It’s interesting that we’re talking about Anonymous this week, with the current situation of RU Wireless being DDOS’d and having been unavailable for the past few days. Though the intent of the proclaimed “Rutgers hacker” isn’t necessarily clear, he or she is no doubt quite anonymous and is possibly not organized. In many ways, this “ExFocus” (his or her Twitter account name) person is representative of the actions and agenda defining the collective group of hacktivists (hacker-activists) and geeks, Anonymous. According to Gabriella Coleman and Jessica L. Beyer’s essays on Anonymous, the “group” is not led by any particular leader, and began very simply on 4chan as people who participated in “lulz”, or online trolling. Anonymous entered the political activist realm when they decided to being trolling the Church of Scientology, then further amended their agenda to promote and ensure the freedom of the Internet. Their agenda evolved to incorporate radical hacking and activism in the Middle East, with cases such as Anonymous challenging the Syrian government or supporting Egypt’s Internet revolution.

Imagining the Rutgers hacker as an anonymous hacker who decided to DDOS the Rutgers network for whatever purpose, he is endorsing Anonymous’s banner of an “anti-leader and anti-celebrity ethic”, attacking Rutgers University as an institution. What’s significant about Anonymous, however, is that the banner targets organizations and even the government, left unchecked. Anonymous’s actions are mostly unaccounted for, since it identifies itself as a banner rather than as a collective group. Similar to Exfocus’s actions, Anonymous’s actions are considered controversial, and even problematic; however, their prominence on the Internet “has become a political gateway for geeks (and others) to take action”, representing ideals of information freedom and radical activism (Coleman). 

The beauty of the Internet is that it’s a place of free, uncensored, online discussion and networking. Sites like WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and 4chan essentially dominate the Internet with trending, unfiltered news; however, should these organizations follow the same code of ethics as modern-day journalists? Should they be responsible for what they’re reporting? Because of the nature of some organizations like Anonymous (who essentially can and do remain anonymous), the content they create as hacktivists remains unfiltered and unchecked. But, it’s important to note that these organizations have opened the frontier into a new era of journalistic transparency while still remaining controversial topics.

Social media has no doubt become of tool of dissidence thanks to the millions of users who spread and share information across different platforms. Bill Wasik examines a very important aspect of the significance of social media as a tool of revolution: it brings together crowds. According to Wasik’s research, “crowds [are seen] as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed by a shared self-conception and thus a shared set of grievances.” Especially through social media, people are able to come together through a shared cause and express themselves. The power of social media essentially comes from us, the public. Information is powerful, and the ability to share it with others is even more powerful.

A great example of a group that employs resistance through the use of social media is Anonymous, the group of cyber hacktivists (hacker-activists) that are a completely anonymous, decentralized group who DDoS organizations that they consider to be oppressive. They associate themselves with the ideals of net neutrality and Internet freedom. They have “declared war” on the middle-eastern terrorist group ISIS through Facebook and Twitter, used YouTube to reprimand music artist Kanye West, and have attacked the Church of Scientology for their controversial beliefs. Though it could be argued that this group itself can be considered controversial for its vigilante actions, Anonymous demonstrates a profound usage of social media in organizing dissidence against what they consider oppressive organizations.

There seems to be a negative connotation surrounding the idea of fandom and other forms of popular culture worshipping. I think that, in many ways, being a brony allows individuals to “break down stereotypes” and other “socialized gender norms... [that] dictates [things like the fact] that boys are supposed to like things like trucks, while girls are supposed to like princesses and pink stuff...” (Watercutter article). In the Watercuter article, many bronies are shown to be afraid of deviating from what they view as acceptable gender norms--essentially, they’re afraid of admitting that they’re bronies. However, as the article finds, being a brony is empowering. Those who fan-worship “My Little Pony” are revolutionizing fandom culture, and they shouldn’t be afraid to embrace it. 

The pathologization of fandom isn’t only limited to bronies and gender norms, however. In “ Making Monsters: Lady Gaga, Fan Identification, and Social Media”, the authors explore how individuals who celebrity worship Lady Gaga can benefit from their fandom. According to the research composed by the authors, individuals who identify with particular celebrity figures “ ‘superimpose attributes of the self, their beliefs and their value systems” (363). Fans can potentially identify with famous media figures, influencing their self-reflection and what they see as relationships with their role models. 

When the Disney star Demi Lovato suffered from severe depression so much that she had to enter rehab, her fans gathered in support and identified with her. Many fans who suffered from clinical depression or body weight themselves found relief in her music, much of what was expressive of her experience being in rehab. Because these fans idolized her, they essentially developed an invisible relationship with Lovato, and incorporated her “ ‘value and plans’ in their own attitudes and behaviors” (363). 

It’s interesting that Eklund focuses her casestudy on World of Warcraft.

I myself play “WoW” ritually, and I’vewitnessed firsthand the “social context of play that deters women” and how the gender of women is portrayed online (324). As Eklund analyzes in her introduction to the composition of gender in cyberspace, “we do not have bodies online but are ‘performances’ and that it is through these that we come to be” (326). When I play WoW, I understand how avatars are created to be based on set gender roles, and a majority of female friends I know have adopted female characters to express identification. From my own experience, I’ve always played as a female avatar and all of my characters have been and are female. When I tried to make a male avatar, I couldn’t play because I couldn’t identify with my avatar. I embrace the idea of “performing gender” in online video games since I believe in empowering female identities online. Regarding incidences like #Gamergate, I acknowledge that misogyny exists as a prominent issue in many video games online. Personally, I play WoW because I enjoy it as a “virtual career,” what Nick Yee calls the work of playing video games in his piece, “The Labor of Fun”.

Rentschler, Wotanis and McMillan make a similar, but very important argument concerning the nature of social media and the online environment: these sites act as “aggregators of online misogyny” (Rentschler 65). In Wotanis’s piece, she examines how Youtube has explicitly failed to enforce an environment free of hate speech or “other abusive behaviors”. This, as a result, has allowed the YouTube forum where users can comment on videos to become embodied and exhausted with misogynistic remarks. Another form of misogyny that has also become prevalent on online social media sites is rape culture. Explored by Rentschler to be a “complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women,” rape culture can very much exist online as it does in the real world.

From my personal experience, I have a female friend who regularly plays on online MMORPGs and her boyfriend plays League of Legends, another online MMO game. Even though it was brief, her boyfriend let her play for ten minutes—where she could talk on a microphone and communicate with her team. She had very little experience playing the game before, but she tried it because her boyfriend encouraged her. And even though she had just logged on, she was met with misogynistic hostility and violence: her teammates began yelling at her and insulting her for being female and attempting to play an online game. They put her down for not having experience and they expected her not to be able to learn, because she was female.

The issue with our modern-day society is that online environments are either filled with or already conditioned to be places of misogyny, in which women are targeted, demeaned and contrasted to male counterparts. Social media platforms become unchecked sites of anonymous hate speech and violence against women, where women are automatically forced into a powerless position.

Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus make an interesting argument when they examine the structure of social media networks like Facebook, contending that these sites act as a place where user participation becomes “immaterial labour”. The “free” and “immaterial” labour that Coté and Pybus are referring to is the participation and traffic users generate for corporations when they visit social media sites. Not only do we forfeit our information when we consume content on sites like Facebook, but the newsfeed on Facebook acts as “a ‘performative’ virtual playground that drives the production of subjectivities on-line, while simultaneously acting as site of capture for the immaterial labour” of its users (Pybus 6). Users stay online and interact with each through a network--in this case, the Facebook newsfeed--which encourages participation but also mines data from its users. 

What stuck out to me, however, is that the authors mention that there may be a greater power at work here: people’s consumption on social media sites has become the new, modernized form of economic capital that our society operates and revolves around. I think this idea is very relatable to what I studied in another class about Karl Marx’s notion of culture in a society as being dependent on its working class’s “mode of production”. In this particular case, our current generation is the working class, and our participation on social media sites is the “mode of production”. The data and information users like myself produce on Facebook is the kind of content that capitalist corporations and advertisers desire and thrive off of. They want our information, and we involuntarily provide it to them through our “immaterial labour”. 

Dubrofsky's "Posting Racism and Sexism" reading brings to mind the question of tabloids--and how tabloids are, in a way, operating with a self-reflexive gaze on women celebrities. Tabloids operate in a way that is similar to Twitter, which as Dubrofsky states, Twitter is a great example of a "newer-media practice" that "operationalize[s] and reproduce[s] a masculine gaze", in which female celebrities and their bodies are scrutinized. Even though female celebrities like Miley Cyrus may be posting through their Twitter with an "authenticity," "presented as behaving in ways that are not pre-meditated", she is nevertheless judged and criticized for the way she portrays herself and her body image (Dubrofsky 282). Tabloids, similarly, reproduce this same effect: they use pictures of celebrities without their permission, and examine them with a critical gaze to be broadcasted to the public. Take US! magazine, for example; they use pictures of women celebrities without consent and create false rumors about them. 

Banet and Weiser bring to mind an important moral concern about online spaces and the construction of female identities within these spaces in respect to cultural settings. The “construction of the self” in an online space involves understanding “a dynamic between the self and others” (281). This dynamic entails how one views herself in respect to how society views her. For example, a young female artist creates a music video on YouTube to accompany her new song. The way she construes herself in the music video and the kind of feedback she receives from posting the content reflects her self-identity in the online space. She’s posing for the camera, lip-syncing the lyrics to her song, broadcasting herself to become “a product within a neoliberal context; she authorizes herself to be consumed through her own self-production” (283).

The importance of understanding how female self-identity is constructed through an online context explains how women are portrayed in a “post-feminism” self-branding in which they become products of a capitalist, neoliberal society. Banet and Weiser essentially examine the cultural and economic contexts behind the discourse of the production of women’s images online. Being a video gamer, I have experienced this context in many different ways. Online-streaming is a recent cultural phenomenon and a very unique example in which women’s identities are self-branded and sold as a product. In online-streaming sites like twitch.tv, many female streamers may choose to broadcast their real-time video while playing video games. Despite the fact that their streaming may seem like any other ordinary video, male video gamers flock to these streaming sites and create a large amount of feedback. The audience feedback focuses mainly on the portrayal of the female gamer, perpetuating the economic context that surrounds the culture of female identity online.

Interaction between people has become increasingly simpler, thanks to new innovations within the Internet. A message can now be sent with a simple click of a button to someone who's as far as on the opposite side of the planet. Interestingly enough, these advancements in communication has also led to the effect of online dating. And has dating become easier, thanks to the Internet? That may seem so, as Bratich introduces the idea. New interactive games allow "[p]eople to encounter each other as enfleshed online profiles, as corporeal information" (598). And these online profiles, to which Bratich refers to as avatars, unconsciously become extensions of its users. Users reach out to each other and imagine themselves through avatars, essentially forming and developing invisible online relationships with one another.

"Internet dating, much like the practice’s counterpart in 'real life,' exists within a specific environment that in many ways, not surprisingly, shares similarities with the other social contexts in which teens find themselves." (Clark 697) The Internet has become the new platform of interaction between increasingly younger and younger audiences. It's extremely easy to log on, access your avatar, then send a message to a stranger with a few clicks. In contrast to real-life, teens face less consequences in online dating than in real-life dating, and participation is anonymous and straightforward. For example, there exist many online chat rooms and RPGs (role-playing games) in which users can create online profiles and avatars. 

An example of a RPG specifically designed for online interaction (and presumably online dating tiered for younger audiences) is IMVU. Users create their own avatars that appear to be noticeably attractive, 20-something year-old characters that are designed specifically to appeal to opposing users who also control their own avatars. People can then navigate these avatars to simulate a fictional world in which they interact with each other, and more than likely develop online relationships in which the consequences of participation can be overlooked. Cybering, the act of simulating sex online, has become increasingly popular in games like these. People can use their avatars to "cyber" with one another in simulated worlds, without worrying about the consequences of what a real-life relationship may entail.

Week 4

When I first made Facebook, it was a monumental milestone that marked my transition from middle school to high school. At the time, Facebook was the place to socialize with others after school ended. I felt a sense of accomplishment for the amount of likes I received, probably because I felt like these likes represented a symbol of accomplishment. As boyd examines, "[t]eens have flocked to social media because they represent an arena to play out these means of status negotiations even when they are away from the school yard" (4). It was important to be on Facebook. At a young age, teens create statuses in which they feel a sense of acknowledgment by their peers, and establish a foothold in a network of friends online.

“Celebrity can also refer to astate of being or cultural phenomenon…” (Marwick, boyd 140). Interestingly enough, Marwick goes on to explore celebrity as a process in which the representation of one’s image becomes a commodity. What does this mean? There are many numerous examples of this in everyday life: famous people sell their image. For example, take the widely popular Kardashian family. They sell their image by broadcasting their day-to-day lives through Reality TV. And who watches the show? Millions and millions of people. How many Instagram followers do each of the Kardashian daughters have on Instagram, and who knows, even on Twitter? At least over 10 million each. Why? Because the family is marketed as a cultural phenomenon, as a commodity.

According to “Spectacle” by Vejby and Wittkower, our everyday experiences have “receded into a representation” (98). Essentially, the authors are referring to how ourlives have become defined by a spectacle: the media. Because the media are found everywhere, it occupies a large factor of our lives; slowly, our experiences become “inauthentic” because we “passive[ly] spectat[e]” trending culture. People today would rather sit in and watch what they find on TV than go outside and participate in a personal activity with others. Gradually the public is becoming more and more dependent on consuming media and less concerned with physical interactions or experiences.

Hey guys!

My name's Judy and I'm a junior double majoring in Political Science and Journalism & Media Studies. I worked at the Rutgers Institute for Women's Leadership as a research intern... and I'm proud to say I'm getting acknowledged in two of the books I helped edit! I also interned in a skin care/dermatology company, helping research and manage the affiliate marketing and social media programs!

I'm still figuring out my future, but for now, I'm just going with the flow.

I Netflix every day and I love reading and writing. I've also got a love for all animals (however I have three hamsters since I'm allergic to cats and dogs). I also looove makeup. It's all I ever follow on Instagram.

I also play video games (Warcraft, Halo) and listen to rock music... and I love cars. (I've got different interests.) I'm in love with Mercedes AMG. Anyway, I look forward to blogging more and connecting with everyone in class!