Papers
“The Physiognomy of Dispersed Power”
Leonardo Electronic Almanac 16 (4–5).
The web of post-modern power appears nomadic, elusive and always elsewhere. Like our online presences, it has no obvious boundaries and appears as spirit-like, a magic life haunting the net and the world. Government becomes liminal: 'Liminal identities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom and ceremonial' to quote Victor Turner. This liminality has changed the balance of power between the corporate and non-corporate sectors, however this does not mean that power is straightforward. When everything is interlinked through information technology then exercises of power may even increase confusion and undermine the bases or legitimacy of that power. Modes of ordering can produce perceived disorder. Knowledge of the system becomes divination and trapped in magic. It is suggested that an awareness of this, and focusing on contradiction, or oscillation is more useful than focusing on simplicity.
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“Hair and Chaos”
in Suzanne Boccalatte & Meredith Jones (eds) Hair, Trunk books, Bocallatte Press.
Explores the order and disorder complex in the mythology of human hair.
“Gender in Online Communications”
in D. Leu, M. Knobel, C. Lankshear, & J. Coiro (Eds.), Handbook of Research on New Literacies, Erlbaum & Associates
Gender, as providing a context in online life, is connected not only with issues of identity and its truth and of power privilege and proficiency, but also with issues around finding intimacy and support online and the complex shifting divisions of public versus private events. Gender gives us experiences of ways of conversing, and these seem to be transferred to life online. It also affects the way people interact with computers, what they use the Internet for, and how they interpret the behavior of others.
Gender is a major category with which people organize knowledge about each other and themselves, regulate the ways that they interact, and claim access to cultural privilege, knowledge, and status. Thus, it will be of continuing importance online, especially when other ways of gaining knowledge about others remain relatively undeveloped. Gender also seems to condense much of the anxiety and strangeness of online communication and requires careful research, tracing the complex ways in which it is deployed and the factors that affect salience, without expecting that these deployments will necessarily be uniform, or open to immediate inspection. Gender may even take new importance, as it becomes potentially vaguer online. The precise focus of these issues may change as new generations work out their own conventions, but there is little to suggest that the effects of gender will disappear.
“Cybermind: Paradoxes of Gender and Relationship in an Online Group”
in Samantha Holland (ed.) Remote Relationships in a Small World, Peter Lang.
Living online, for people on the Mailing List 'Cybermind', is embedded within relations that currently appear to be paradoxical, ambiguous, or contradictory. Sometimes these paradoxes seem to result from the medium and the way communication is structured, and sometimes they seem to result from paradoxes and ambiguities imported from the offline world, or which result from the interactions of the supposed polarities of offline and online. Gender is an important principle in both organization and the interpretation, or resolution, of statements. It is a framing that organizes expectations and guides behaviour, and it too is embedded within paradoxes and ambiguities.
“Introduction to the Cybermind Online Gender Project”
Transforming Cultures Ejournal 2 (2): i-xxxv.
The primary objective of this journal issue is to compile a collection of writings that present a multi-voiced ethnography of the internet Mailing List ‘Cybermind’ and its members focusing on issues of gender. The authors wish to explore how issues of gender might be generated and interpreted by List members, and to observe how gender affects List member’s interaction with each other in daily online life and in the intersection of the online with their offline and offlist lives. We also aim to investigate how, or if, existing offline factors influence these issues.
This introduction provides some background about the Mailing List Cybermind and the role of gender both on it and in the modern world. In particular it explores gender as a social category amongst other, often overlapping, social categories.
“The Mobilisation of Race and Gender on an Internet Mailing List”
Transforming Cultures E-journal 2 (2): 52-86.
This paper explores an incident in which race and gender categories were mobilised on the Internet Mailing List Cybermind during an incident of conflict. The people on this Mailing List would resist easy classification as ‘racist’, yet race proved an issue of fracture, while gender appeared to function as a way of universalising sameness and attempting integration. The process of cultural construction is shown to involve the rhetorical deployment of categories, and deployment of these categories often makes sites of ‘expertise’, which become justifiers and motivators of behaviour. This suggests that cultural barriers are not so much latent but created in response to crisis and debate. Competitions between multiple viewpoints, uneasy truce, or resolution by departure, are all hallmarks of Mailing List life.
“Categories, Gender and Online Community”,
E-Learning, 3(2)
This article presents a sketch for a theory of the rhetorics involved in categorisation and the creation of culture in online communities. Persuasion, or shaping perceptions of the world, is never incidental to social life, but living online necessarily involves persuasion as it is difficult to bring force to bear, although people can be temporarily excluded from different groups to different degrees, and the modality of persuasion may be influenced by the structures of communication in play. Communication almost always involves an attempted act of power aiming to produce a response in another. It is argued that linguistic categories, especially self-identity categories, are to some extent flexible, and that they exist in connection and contrast with other categories. The meaning of categories depends upon the ways they are framed (frames can also be categories), and framing and category content can be the subject of argument. Among the most important ways of framing online by Westerners are by space, public/private, authenticity, gender and community. The rest of the article explores the nature of online communication and power; how gender is used as a category; the kinds of effects that this categorisation has had; and how this category becomes salient within the framework of people making a ‘community’ on the Cybermind mailing list.
“Online Life and Gender Dynamics”, “Online Life and Netsex or Cybersex”, “Online Life and Gender Vagueness and Impersonation”, “Online Life and Online Bodies”
in Eileen M. Trauth (ed) Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology, Idea Group.
Brief literature reviews, summarising some of the arguments I present in more detail elsewhere.
“Negri, Hardt, Distributed Governance and Open Source Software”
Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 3(1).
This paper investigates the idea that governance has changed in the contemporary world so that there is no longer, if there ever was, simply a dominant power, or set of powers, which are able to exert control. Governance is distributed, rather than centralised or territorialised, so it is not clear where responsibility lies or where the fulcrum of control resides. While distributed governance may offer new strategies of radical or democratic subversion, there is no cause for easy optimism that these new systems of power will automatically lead to democracy. Information and communication technology is a central tool in distributing governance, but this technology is not inherently destabilising of arbitrary power.
This paper proceeds first by briefly describing the Autonomist history of Negri’s thought, his earlier pronouncements more overtly ambivalent than his recent works. Then Hardt and Negri’s ideas about Empire are described within the context of prevalent views about the information society. Examples of distributed governance being used to reinforce power are presented to show that distribution is not necessarily democratic. Networks such as the internet developed more out of the needs of military and corporate expansion and mobility rather than democracy; thus they may retain features of their original purpose as much as they may challenge the dominant powers. Finally, open source groups do not replicate the democratic features assumed by Negri and Hardt. While agreeing with the general sentiment of Negri and Hardt’s work, this paper aims to shift the analytic emphasis in discussions of distributed governance, and to temper over-optimistic views of its democratic potential.
“Apparitions, Ghosts, Fairies, Demons and Wild Events: Virtuality in Early Modern Britain”
Journal for the Academic Study of Magic. Issue 3: 141-75
Apparitions are common throughout the world, with many local ways of classifying them, explaining them and of allocating them powers. Despite this, it seems rare for historians to show much interest in them. There are probably thousands of pages considering witchcraft for each one considering apparitions, yet the two are often linked in contemporary sources. This paper explores how apparitions were used in religion, politics, morality and philosophy in 16th and 17th Century Britain. The range of sources shows that interest permeated all parts of society.
Writings about apparitions inform us what various people think is important about their psyches and selves, about truth, error, mystery and the constitution of the world. Apparitions are made to conform to, or confirm, existent worldviews and political positions, and may be subject to dispute by different groups of people – cultures may not present a coherent view on this subject. The categories involved are not pre-existently clear, but make different linkages to suit the positions being utilised. Lack of system and variegated categories may give apparitions some of their magical and ambiguous appearance. Explanatory objects are virtual in that they often cannot be perceived directly but are inferred or imagined, sometimes forming almost parallel worlds, and problems of veridicity, experience and illusion have a long history.
“Governance, Structure and Existence: Authenticity, Rhetoric, Race and Gender on an Internet Mailing List”
Proceedings of The Australian Electronic Governance Conference 2004, Centre for Public Policy, University of Melbourne
Analysis of internet governance on the large scale is furthered by the study of the ways governance is already emerging online as this elucidates the dynamics of organisation and events and the ways that effective governance may manifest or be disrupted. This paper argues that there are three main factors influencing such governance: the organisation of communication (whether the forum is a mailing list, MOO, Newsgroup, weblog etc); existential issues of ‘being’ online (such as suspension of being, flame, and patterns of exchange); and the rhetorical mobilization of offline categories.
The paper focuses on the governance of a Mailing list called Cybermind, and gives short case studies of the processes arising in its formation and in two disputes. It shows the ways that issues of organisation, authenticity and categories of gender and race influenced the course of the arguments. In all cases offline issues and categories were fundamental to the disputes, but mediated by the existential factors of online life.
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“The Online Body Breaks Out? Asence, Ghosts, Cyborgs, Gender, Polarity and Politics”
Fibreculture Journal, Issue 3
Representations of the online body seem constantly involved with issues of imprecise, crossed or broken boundaries. Online boundaries, both personal and group, appear especially fluid when contrasted with moves towards establishing impermeable boundaries offline. This contributes to perceptions of disembodiment or potential unity with machines. Online bodies are thus described in terms reminiscent of other constructs such as ghosts – partly because experiences of materiality can be described in terms of boundary issues, and partly because it is difficult to bring offline bodies to bear. From another angle, gender, when constructed as a polarity, also serves to “ghost” experience. However, online bodies are also connected to constructions and feelings of offline bodies to reduce ambiguities and to establish authenticity online. For example, mood, as sustained by the offline body, acts as a framing for communication in netsex, mourning and flame.
Another popular body metaphor in this context involves the description of people as cyborgs. It is sometimes claimed that cyborgs form radical “hybrid” entities. Yet cyborgs also get caught in boundary issues. The cyborg is, for example, caught in narratives that further capitalist technopower, whatever our intentions.
The situation becomes even more complex when we consider that both the ghostly body and the cyborg body are often contrasted with a virile and active offline body. This provides a further set of paradoxes if we consider the possibility of online action affecting the offline world. There are no easy answers
“Resistances of Gender”
M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,
People often claim gender is unimportant online and you are free ‘to be yourself’, on the other hand there are repeated tales that online life is full of cross-gender impersonation and betrayal. Others claim they can instantly detect gender via clichés. However, if gender is unimportant online, then why is it such a source of anxiety and why is it people seem more concerned about males impersonating females than the other way around?
“Internet Politics in an Information Economy”
Fibreculture No.1
The Internet, and information technology generally, is not separate from the social world in which it is embedded, neither does it fully determine that world. It may, however, allow modifications, intensifications or even subversions to occur. This paper will discuss some of the problems and paradoxes of the "Information economy" and its regimes of property; issues around the so-called hacker ethic and open source software; and some of the expectations which have been held for the Internet's role in fostering democratic politics. It is possible the idea of the "information economy" itself has a negative effect by suggesting a whole new range of property to be appropriated and kept from common use. The term "information" is not a concept which links things together because they are similar in the same way. It is an open and magical term, which may hide as much as it reveals. Its popularity may even suggest it serves some kind of existing social agenda. Even if the equally vague term "knowledge workers" does prove useful in analysis within this kind of framework, such people are not in a strong position relative to expanding corporate power, especially given problems with the volume and inaccuracy of data available to them.
“The Sexual Life of Cyber-Savants”
The Australian Journal of Anthropology 14(2): 229-248.
This paper describes the role of sex within an Internet mailing list, and the spillage of that sexual contact into offlist and offline life. The ethnographic data comes from the mailing list 'Cybermind', where netsex seems to have been an important, but relatively hidden, part of list activity. I briefly describe the kind of group being studied and the practicalities of the acts, and then attempt to show how these acts and their representations work in ‘everyday’ online life. I claim that netsex serves to stabilise the divergence of meaning within a communicative structure which accelerates uncertainty, and that netsex is part of the framing conventions which revolve around the problems of authenticity.
“Reading Paul McHugh: Politics, Psychiatry and the Response to Terror”
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, 1(2).
A critical response to an important figure in American Psychiatry's attempt to psychologise terrorism, so as to legitimate the policy of President Bush and eliminate social fields altogether.
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“Cyberspace or Cybertopos: The creation of online space”
Social Analysis 45(1): 81-102.
This paper argues that communicative and behavioural patterns used online and the intersection of these patterns with offline conventions (particularly those about the role-regulatory and interpretive functions of locale, and the distinction between public and private), give people their sense of the 'space' in cyberspace. Cyber'space' is deeply implicated by the use and categorization of offline spaces
Online 'space' is created by the structures of communication and the patterns of naming and exchange which eventuate. Cyber'space' does not hold objects but is created by the use of objects. The objects being processes initiated by people, and primarily language based, are influenced by offline categorizations of space.
The involvement of communicative organization in the construction of space means that List space differs from MOO space and from Web space and has consequences for the kinds of social action and conflict which can eventuate. The relationship between onlist and offlist spaces is explored, and it is shown how this relates to gender and intimacy. In particular the offlist category of the locale, which gives indications of expected behaviour, allowing interpretation, is of particular importance in the construction of Cyberspace, as is the distinction made between public and private.
Online social space in many ways revitalizes the analytical similarity between topic and place which features in the rhetoric of Aristotle and the social poetics of Vico. Topos determines the method of persuasion, or poetic figuration which determines the nature of place which in turn determines topos. People making political arguments about the Internent, or commercial organisations trying to exploit the Internet, often try to define it as a particular type of place to mobilize the persuasive topos associated with that locale.
Online space both expresses and reflects the status, productivity and aims of participants and produces a 'mood', or mode of being, which can stabilize the divergence of meaning in such a world.
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