Identity and Cyberspace continued: Gender

1
Identity and Cyberspace continued Gender

• MUDs (multi-user domain)
• LambdaMOO
• 10 genders
• male
• female
• spivak (indeterminate)
• neuter
• splat (a thing)

2

• egotistical
• royal
• 2nd
• either
• plural

3
Sexuality

• Men pretend to be women to attract the attention
  of real women, who are in fact themselves other
  men pretending to be women. The practice of such
  cross-dressing does nothing to unsettle the
  assumption and practice of cyberspace as a
  process of heterosexuality
  (Wakeford
  1996 99).

4

• not surprisingly, non-heterosexual
  performances are at the margins of cyberspace
  (Wakeford 1996 99)

5
Cyberspace and Community

• Why debate about cyberspace communities so
  prominent in cyberculture theorising?
• it highlights the tensions between different
  standpoints on the promises and limitations of
  cyberculture.
• has as its heart an argument about the
  relationship between online and offline life.

6

• it involves making arguments not only about the
  status of cybercommunities but of face-to-face
  communities as well

7
Community

• examine the contemporary characteristics of face
  to face communities - and whether broader
  social, political, economic and cultural
  transformations have altered our sense of
  membership and belonging in communities
• globalisation

8
What is a community?

• Community. Its a word we all use, in many
  different ways, to talk about . . . what? About
  belonging and exclusion, about us and them.
  Its a common-sense thing, used in daily
  discussions, in countless associations, from
  care in the community to the Community Hall
  from community spirit to the business
  community. . . . Many of us would lay claim to
  belonging to at least one community (Bell and
  Valentine 1997 93)

9
Nation as community

• The nation is generally regarded as the
  strongest group identification in the modern
  period and thus perhaps the most real community
  of this era (Mark Poster 1995 34).

10
Benedict Andersons imagined communities

• Benedict Andersons idea of imagined
  communities is vital for any discussion of
  community. Nation states are examples of
  what Anderson calls imagined communities.

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Imagined communities

• In modernity, power is mobilised and used by
  nation states (and other forms of organisations)
  through the storage and control of information
  and symbols.

12
Anderson and imagined communities

• Four ways in which modern communities can be
  described as being imagined.
• members of an imagined community will never know
  most of their fellow members and will never meet,
  yet in the minds of each lives the image of
  their communion.

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• they are imagined as limited, in that even the
  largest of communities is finite and has
  boundaries beyond which lie other communities.
• these communities dream of being sovereign and
  free from the
• interference of outsiders.

14

• these communities always exhibit a deep,
  horizontal comradeship (Bauman 1992 xix)
  regardless of the inequality and exploitation
  that may exist among its members.

15

• Communication media help the representation of
  this constructed reality by the transmission of
  shared histories, of common stories which
  reveal the shared essences or underlying
  qualities

16
Globalisation

• Globalization is defined as a social process in
  which the constraints of geography on social and
  cultural arrangements recede and in which people
  become increasingly aware that they are receding
  (Waters 1995 3).
• (This is only ONE definition of globalisation)

17
Using a postmodern device to cure the ills of
postmodernity?

• It does seem clear that people make use of this
  technology to combat the symptoms that are
  characteristic of . . . the postmodern
  condition. The technologies themselves are
  highly characteristic of the postmodern by virtue
  of their fluidity and malleability. Ironically,
  however, it is their fluid and malleable nature
  which leads them to be used to combat
  thatcondition(Bromberg 1996 147).

18
Central debates online communities

• Howard Rheingold
• best known work is
• Virtual Community homesteading on the
  electronic frontier.

19

• In cyberspace, we chat and argue, engage in
  intellectual intercourse, perform acts of
  commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional
  support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud,
  fall in love, find friends, and lose them, play
  games and metagames, flirt, create a little high
  art and a lot of idle talk. We do everything
  people do when they get together, but we do it
  with words on computer screens, leaving our
  bodies behind. Millions of us have already built
  communities where our identities commingle and
  interact electronically, independent of local
  time or location.
• (Rheingold 1999 414)

20
Building communities online inevitable?

• First, because folks are going to do what people
  always do with a new communications technology
  use it in ways never intended or foreseen by its
  inventors, to turn old social codes inside out
  and make new kinds of communities possible
  (1999 415).
• Second, because cyberspace communities are a
  response to the hunger for community that has
  followed the disintegration of traditional
  communities around the world
• (Rheingold 1999 418).

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• In the place of these face-to-face communities we
  are left with the
• automobile-centric, suburban, highrise, fast
  food, shopping mall way of life (1999 421),
  which is lonely, isolated and empty.

22

• In terms of the way the whole system is
  propagating and evolving, think of cyberspace as
  a social petri dish, the Net the agar medium, and
  virtual communities, in all their diversity, as
  colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri
  dishes . . . Whenever CMC technology becomes
  available to
• people everywhere, they inevitably build virtual
  communities with it, just as microorganisms
  inevitably create colonies (Rheingold 1993 6).

23

• You cant simple pick up a phone and ask to be
  connected with someone who wants to talk about
  Islamic law or California wine, or someone with a
  three year old daughter or a 30 year old Hudson
  you can, however, join a computer conference on
  any of those topics, then open a public or
  private correspondence with the
  previously-unknown people you find in that
  conference (Rheingold 1999 423).

24
What makes an online community?

• sufficient human feeling,
• rules regarding behaviour,
• longevity
• (Rheingold)

25

• Baym (1998) argues that participants in
  cybercommunities imagine themselves part of these
  communities through
• stable patterns of social meanings, manifested
  through a groups on-going discourse.

26
Establishing and maintaining social norms in
Cybercommunities

• eliminating specific commands in the software
  (such as the shout command, to stop rowdiness)
  
• instituting gag commands to silence trouble
  makers
• restricting the rights of troublesome
  participants
• banishment
• introducing admission policies

27

• registering participants identities (to increase
  accountability and prohibit anonymity)
• forming regulatory committees
• establishing frameworks for mediation
• vigilante action.
• The less extreme end of this spectrum includes
  elements of netiquette, which covers minor
  transgressions such as shouting, cross-posting,
  lurking and flaming.

28
Critics of cybercommunity

• we must always locate any work we do on
  cybercommunities in the world we live in
• virtual communities do not exist in a different
  world. They must be situated in the context of
  the . . . new cultural and political
  geographies of our time (Robins 2000 86).

29

• in arguments for cybercommunity we can see the
  sense of virtual reality as an alternative
  reality in a world gone wrong. Technosociality is
  seen as
• the basis for developing new and compensatory
  forms of community and conviviality (Robins
  2000 87).

30

• what we have is the preservation through
  simulation of old
• forms of solidarity and community. In the end,
  not an alternative society, but an alternative to
  society (Robins 2000 89).

31

• virtual culture is a culture of retreat from the
  world (Robins 1999 166).

32

• bunkering in is about something really simple
  being sick of others and trying to shelter the
  beleaguered self in a techno-bubble. . . .
  Digital reality is perfect. It provides the
  bunker self with immediate, universal access to a
  global community without people electronic
  communication without a
• social contract, being digital without being
  human, going online without leaving the safety of
  the electronic bunker. (Kroker and Kroker 2000
  96 7)

33

• The situation in which we find computer-mediated
  communities at present is that their very
  definition as communities is perceived as a good
  thing,
• creating a solipsistic and self-fulfilling
  community that pays little attention to political
  action outside of that which secures its own
  maintenance.
• (Jones 1995 25)

34

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