Racing and Queering the Interface - SAGE Journals - Sage Publications

Racing and Queering the Interface:

Qualitative Inquiry Volume 14 Number 7 October 2008 1110-1133 © 2008 Sage Publications 10.1177/1077800408321723 http://qix.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Producing Global/Local Cyberselves Radhika Gajjala Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH

Natalia Rybas Emporia State University, Emporia, KS

Melissa Altman Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH

This essay is concerned with social and cultural problems of producing, consuming, and using technology. Based on epistemologies of doing, we race and queer the interface while doing technologies as they are located in specific contexts and moments. Our multi-vocal cyberethnographic engagement explores the production of selves at the intersection of online/offline activities. Our narratives shed light on how power works in multiply mediated contexts and reveals how ideology, discourse, and material practice interweave in the production of global/local cyberselves. Situated in her own specific socio-cultural personal context, each one of us attempts to understand the processes of identity production at the computer interface and to capture the (in)visible code that serves as the framework for the interaction. Keywords: epistemology of doing; cyberethnography; social networks; identity and power online/offline

Introduction

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n this essay, we are concerned with social and cultural problems of producing, consuming, and using technology in various contexts. We therefore consider a research practice based in epistemologies of doing (Gajjala and Altman 2006) in order to explore the production of selves at the intersection of online/offline. Our effort is a multivocal cyberethnographic

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engagement that emphasizes the examination of how power works in multiply mediated contexts at the intersection of online and offline practices. This reveals how ideology, discourse, and material practice interweave in the production of global/local cyberselves. We employ performative writing to illustrate how techno-mediated environments engaged ethnographically allow us—each situated in her own specific socio-cultural personal context—to understand processes of production of identities at the computer interface. Therefore, some of what we do here strives to capture our habitus online, which is created not only through our interaction with the environment but with the (in)visible code that serves as the framework for the interaction. As we struggle to individually articulate selves in these contexts, the coded interface permits, shapes, and disallows subject positions. As cyberfeminists, we negotiate the given technological infrastructures through attempts to subvert code and context in technical and social terms. Race, gender, sexuality, and other indicators of difference are made up of ongoing processes of meaning-making, performance, and enactment. For instance, racialization in a technologically mediated global context is nuanced by how class, gender, geography, caste, colonization, and globalization intersect. Raced subjectivities thus get produced against the specific contextual backgrounds incorporating local and global economic and social processes. Further, while cyberspace is not a place (Enteen 2006), it is a locus around which modes of social interaction, commercial interests, and other discursive and imaginative practices coalesce (Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman 2000). To explore such practices, we analyze specific ethnographic encounters emerging in the research and pedagogical activities of the courses we teach, participate in, and observe.

MOOing Transcript from the instructor’s screen You move to Diva’t hut. Bubbles arrives. You view Diva’s hut … Obvious exists: [there] to gungadin, [to_the_Point] to diva point kanchanagunga, kickboxing_queen, Szandor, Foam, stusz, Jamie, Kevin, Bubbles, and Trash are standing here. Belka arrives.

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Bubbles is getting sleepy. Bubbles wants to take a nap. kickboxing_queen says, “it is great to hear that.” kanchanagunga teaches sillybilly a new word. Bubbles SHOUTS does anyone know why we are here? I’m not exactly sure why we what this has to do with COMS 729. kanchanagunga says, “bubbles is confused;)” Trash falls to the floor, wondering why Bubbles must shout. Bubbles is happy to be understood. kickboxing_queen helps trash up […] Belka says, “can I have a cookie, I’m hungry” Bubbles says, “sure Belka” Bubbles hands Belka a cookie Belka says, “ow doe it teste? are there nuts? stusz says, “if you give a belka a cookie, it’s want a glass of milk” Macintosh_Guest says, “: Belka, how does the cookie taste? You say, “yes what’s the taste?” Bubbles hands out milk and cookies to all You eat the cookie Belka giggles […] You sigh You say, “objects are easy” You say, “type “take panopticon”” belka picks up panopticon You say, “somebody might have taken the panopticon” Szandor says, “where’s the panopticon?” Trash yells “Belka has the panopticon” Bubbles wishes trash wouldn’t yell so loud Kickboxing_queen says, “you need to share” Belka cries Belka says, “i don’t know how to drop it” Belka says, “it got stuk on me” Trash whispers, “throw “drop panopticon” Belka throw panopticon Belka says, “sorry, I did not mean to keep it” Bubbles says, “easy for you to say panopticon-stealer” You cackle Bubbles catches the panopticon […]


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Transcript from the classroom Radhika: Today we are going to try MOOing in class. So go ahead and sign into LinguaMOO. (Radhika logs in as cyberdiva and checks who has already signed in). (Melissa registers and logs in as Bubbles). (Natalia registers and logs in as Belka). (Other students log in). Natalia (to herself): I am lost and disoriented. What am I supposed to do with this black screen and disjointed sentences running up? Who enters where and takes what? I have a very slight idea about MOOing: “the strange, half-real terrain occupied by the human animal ever since it started surrounding itself with words, pictures, symbols, and other shadows of things not present to the human body” (Dibbell 1998). Fictional mansions, cafés, offices, parks,

and other rooms as well as tools, weapons, toys, and other objects make the virtual space of MOOs, populated by human, animal, and fiction-like characters enlivened through descriptions and action commands (Dibbell). Aha, commands! I can control the space: I could move, and walk, and travel in the rooms, but what rooms, how to make those steps? What commands? Melissa (wonders what the point of all this is). Natalia (to herself): Dr. Gajjala mentioned “help” command, I should try it. I type “help.” The script of my MOOing cries help a few times, and the program spits out bundles of possibilities. I try and type a couple of options and somehow erase half of the script. I can hardly remember how I did it and why—experimenting turns out to be too dangerous for the text, it can disappear. I type and type but the program refuses to understand me. I do not talk much, and what I say sounds a bit disjointed. My spelling is horrible—MOO does not spellcheck. It refuses to understand me. Finally, I emote my smile and manage to greet the guests. The characters in the room do not talk to me much. They were chatting with each other and I was observing them. Do they see me? What do I say to them if they are already talking to each other? Melissa (gets involved in the cookie sharing). Natalia (to herself): Oh, it is so exciting that Bubbles has given me something. It is so generous of Bubbles. Radhika (to herself): They are getting it, maybe? I wonder if there is any point in trying this. Natalia (to herself): What’s next? In MOO or MUDs, “main activities involve hanging and chatting” (Kendall, 1998, p. 133), or socializing and making oneself comfortable in the new environment. However, I do not want to fall into the customary conversations, which are about the position I occupy: international student, married, Russian, lived and worked in Thailand, teacher, living and studying in the US. Nine of ten times people start asking who I am, what I am doing here in the US, and, finally, if I am planning to stay or if I like it

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here in America. I participated in these Question-and-Answer sessions so many times that I try to avoid them. I assume that the materialization of my multiple positions takes place through certain highly regulated practices, i.e., what I (don’t) do, how I do things, what and how I (don’t) speak, how I (don’t) dress, what I (don’t) eat, who I (don’t) hang out with, etc. My performance dialogically interacts with the normalized materializations taken for granted in this Ohio locality. Since my performance reiterates and cites practices that do not belong to this locality, I am considered as different, as Other. In this dialogue of our practices, we become “viable … within the domain of cultural intelligibility” (Butler 1993, 2). Both sides actively participate in this process of negotiation whereby we constitute each other as subjects by the force of exclusion and abjection (Ibid., 3): I am not like them, they are not like me, she is not like us, we are not like her. I try to limit such conversations—I do not want to be recognized and named, thus I prefer not to start conversations with people in the street or just with anybody I meet online. Instead, I try and see what is around me. The text moves too fast for me and I don’t really get their conversations; I think I’d better explore the objects in the room. I see the panopticon. I type “take panopticon,” and I type “look.” And then there is that hullabaloo about me taking the panopticon and not giving it to others. They demand that I put it back and share with others. Well, I am sorry but I discovered it first! Honestly, I did not know how to get rid of it … When I took it I did not realize there must be a command to put something back as well. Radhika is smiling, waiting to see what Natalia will do with the moo object she “picked up.” Natalia (to herself): Cyberdiva suggests using “throw”—I did it. I got rid of it— so much noise, about me. Natalia wonders what the point of all this is. Melissa (wonders): Melissa wonders how she did that …

Social Networks Recent social panics over social networking spaces such as MySpace and FaceBook emphasize the dangers of computer-mediated communication, including the “innocent” dangers of being misunderstood and the more sinister dangers of being deceived for someone else’s benefit. What’s striking about the new moral panic is that it’s not new, nor is it particularly surprising. “Social networking” technologies did not begin with MySpace and FaceBook, nor did these even make them widely available. Net communication tools such as bulletin boards and listserves made asynchronous social networking available from the very beginning of the Internet history. And the synchronous and “space” options were historically available on text-based MOOs and MUDs long before HTML interfaces were commonplace.


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In addition, moral panics about the impact of new technological practices is not new either. Scholars such as Carolyn Marvin, in When Old Technologies Were New have traced the way the introduction of new social practices enabled by new and existing technologies provoked anxieties about social order, from the introduction of the telegraph to the use of telephones for social purposes, to the introduction of the Internet itself. The anxiety about the way that today’s “social networking” technologies might re-order the social world has an established historical precedent. In the context of the current debates over the nature of social networking technologies, we offer our explorations of social networking through epistemologies of doing. Each of us engages the network from the same “geographical” location, a mid-western state university, but brings with us perspectives from distinctly different positions—graduate student versus tenured faculty, U.S.-born versus foreign-born, recent immigrant versus long-term resident, married versus partnered, parent versus non-parent, etc.

Natalia “Social” Networks I ventured into the “yet unknown” network. The registration was quick and easy—just filling the blanks with required info. A well-disciplined holder of multiple online accounts, I am familiar with the registration drill. In the “society of surveillance,” the program automatically organizes each and every one out of the multiplicity. Such accounts fix an individual as a profile in order to observe and regulate the movements and clear up the confusions about unpredictable individual wanderings. This collection of separate individuals with accounts is thus permanently located in the database and constantly available for observation and supervision (Foucault 1977). As usual, the program asked for my name. I chose Belka_inbg but it did not work; the error message marked the demand to correct the name in red. The program wanted my full name. Such a request almost compelled me to use my real name. How does the system know that a name is full, or real for that matter? With Belka Inbg I could proceed. The panoptical authority imbedded in the process of registration reminded me of self-monitoring drive built through the belief that one is under constant scrutiny and control. I corrected myself and could continue the process. Next I needed to choose which network to join. Without much thinking I chose Russia, why not? I clicked “Join” and the box froze. Then I realized that I had connections to Thailand, United States, Ireland, Germany, and Israel, and in Russia I wanted to identify with my region not the whole 17 million square

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Figure 1

kilometers of the country. I proceeded nevertheless, clicked OK, and completed my registration. Looking at my empty profile with a dozen blank spaces to put myself into, I decided to fill in my profile information and started with the section called “basics”: It included such categories as sex, relationship status, looking for, birthday, etc. I was not sure why I needed to post this information and for whom? I thought I would write my home town in Russia since I joined the Russia network, yet the list of states featured only states in the U.S. I was confused. If it was a regional network, what region did it represent? I moved to explore the menu further. “My account” allows changing password, time zone, e-mail, and, to my utter surprise, name. Some rules preceded the box: Only real name is accepted and fake names are not allowed, at least the full first name and the first letter of the last name are


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requested, unusual spelling is prohibited. I did not understand again: I had to provide my name at the very beginning, and it should have been the full name. Now I saw an option for changing name, but I was asked to provide the real name. Was there a possibility to change the name or not? The programmers seem to realize that using a fictional name is a common practice in netplay; however, they insist on verifiability of the profiles and users. Another blank asked for my phone number because: Facebook uses security tests to ensure that the people on the site are real. Having a mobile phone helps us establish your identity. Please verify your account by confirming your phone. I had to skip this step as I prefer not to share my phone number. The sincere attempt to ensure that the people on the site are real deserves admiration, especially that the reality status becomes connected to having a mobile phone. Again, drawing from Foucault’s panopticism, this digital system strives to identify, classify, compare, differentiate, and homogenize the individuals who join the network, according to multiple categories: favorite movies, political views, birthdays, partnerships, political views, and others. Phone number is the most unique identifying information, and even though it can be changed, it remains more or less consistent, especially with the popularity of mobile phones. Thus it can serve as a relatively permanent way, almost like a social security number, to identify a person. Foucault (1977) would suggest that with these convenient tags, FaceBook can exercise individual control function in a double mode. First, the “binary division and branding” (p. 199) takes shape in multiple categories, such as “relationship” or “looking for.” Even though each of these categories prompts six or five options, the assumptions of being in a relationship and looking for something or somebody become active. Second, according to Foucault, individual control functions in “coercive assignment and differential distribution” (p. 199): Fitting into the options formulates rigid boundaries of who the user is, how she can be described, recognized, and observed. I felt lonely in the network and was almost ready to kill the account when I found an option to change the network. My hope of belonging to multiple networks was revived again. But I stumbled into rules again: “You can only have one regional network at a time, so if you switch, you will no longer be a part of the Russia network. You will not be able to see people from the Russia network, and you will be removed from all groups and events you have joined or created on this network.” Ouch! Why? Why can’t I join multiple networks? I logged out. The limitation of users’ affiliation in geographically defined networks, and in only one at a time, reflects the popular misconception of the

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Internet as a physical territory. Even though connectivity and information exchange occupy no territory, contemporary users-coders-programmersoperators envision cyberspace as pinned to the map (Enteen 2006). Operating in the spatial metaphor, the social network system distributes individuals in space. Such arrangement “individualizes bodies by location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations” (Foucault 1977, 146). The profiles create assigned individual standardized places and provide a series of distinctions; the explicit geographical affiliation emphasizes and strengthens the tendency to classify and order users. Such discipline of assigned and voluntarily chosen categories plays into developing and sustaining perfect consumerism in support of global capitalism.

Melissa “Social” Networks I come to this research with intimate knowledge of the experience of trying to produce impossible subjectivities. I come to this research as a person, who, in everyday life, experiences code switching, schizophrenia, multivocality, multiple personalities. I come to this research as a person for whom the notion of “performing” and “producing” the self is intuitive—moving throughout my day requires many shifts: my identity my appearance my subjectivity my demographics my statistics my clothes my self Postmodern scholars have theorized about whether each of these selves is still me, whether and in what ways the selves can be integrated, even whether an attempt to mend such fractures can or should be pursued. Meanwhile, like many other folks, I go on with my daily life, enduring, negotiating, strategizing, accepting, and resisting the ways in which my subjectivity is produced in each shifting context.

Those contexts constitute the discourses within which my self is produced—discourses that are mediated by social networking technologies, discourses that are mediated by face-to-face expectations such as school (the practices of attending graduate school), work (the practices of running a


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horse boarding and lesson barn), as well as the way I get produced at the intersection of online and face-to-face discourses—for example when I engage a social networking listserve such as AOIR-L (Association of Internet Researchers Listserve) as a graduate student. Because discourse works to regulate what can be said, to regulate what has meaning in a particular context, when we consider cultural representations we have to understand how they can come to have meaning within the relations of power of a particular historical and geographical discourse. As such, discourses not only facilitate certain meanings, they also create certain subject-positions: Discourses themselves construct the subject-positions from which they become meaningful and have effects. Individuals may differ as to their social class, gendered, “racial” and ethnic characteristics (among other factors) but they will not be able to take meaning until they have identified with those positions which the discourse constructs, subjected themselves to its rules, and hence become the subjects of its power/knowledge.” (Hall 1997, 56, emphasis in original).

What this means for any particular speaker is that in order to produce my subjectivity in the context of a particular discourse, in order for representation to become meaningful, it must be constituted within the framework of discourse, in relation to the hegemonic meanings available in a particular context. Meaning can adhere to subject-positions only insofar as they reference or connect to ideas that have meaning within the discourse. Of course, they can contradict hegemonic notions central to the discourse, but to do so they still must reference, and in some ways centralize, those notions. My point of entry to this research comes from the daily experience of occupying multiple im/possible subject/ivities. My identity is subsumed into categories and labels created hegemonically. I cannot speak without this discourse—yet this discourse itself shapes how I am produced as I move throughout my daily contexts, and each experience shapes how I will be molded the next time (like playdoh pushed through a mold).

MOO researcher Jenny Sunden (2003) states that a distance—both spatial/physical and between the mind/body—is created between the typist and subject typed into existence in such an encounter:

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The distance is on one level introduced in text-based online worlds through the act of typing, and further reinforced by the mediating computer technology itself. By actively having to type oneself into being a certain gap is at the same time created. The mediation between different realms, the very creation of texts by the means of computers, makes the interspace that always exists between myself and the understanding of this self particularly clear. Following the idea of a subject that can never have direct and unmediated access to herself, that the I writing and the I written about can never be seen as one, cyber subjects are always at least double. (4) I cannot claim selfhood, identity, substance, unless I do so in relation to this ever-present hegemonic discourse. I may not be reflected within the discourse, but this means that I will be reflected outside of it—othered as it were. I must exist in relation to this discourse, somehow, and in return this shapes my subjectivity. I began this research, intrigued, like many, with the possibilities of technology for circumventing some of those daily fractures—I was interested in how as a cyborg I could escape the “meat” of everyday interaction, rise above my messy, everpresent body and the way it is coded culturally, ascend into a world of words and pure meaning. What I found was that online I still have to negotiate the production of subjectivities. I do not escape the liminality I experience daily when I go into MOOs, e-mails, chat spaces, or virtual classrooms. The fractured self that I integrate into the I that speaks as author here is not less fractured online.

The fractures/overlaps/shadows look different in different online spaces. But as someone who moves through this kind of shifting maze daily in the various windows of my “real,” non-virtual life (e.g., the spaces not mediated by computer technology), the introduction of a computer interface to mediate communication with others does not solve the crisis of representation. What I found, and continue to encounter, is that production of subjectivity is mediated culturally in every context, and that online and offline contexts overlap and interact in complex ways, just the same as various offline contexts do. Work and school are two contexts—but personal e-mail and staff meetings are two others. When we think of the self as moving through these contexts, we simplify with the spatial metaphor a process that


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involves the production of the self—culturally mediated within and across each context. Many times each day “work” and “school” and “home” intersect as we check the e-mail from the boss, chat with a friend, and research articles, all in the same body, in the same chair, facing the same computer. The spatial metaphor is useful for understanding and separating the tasks, prioritizing our everyday life. But it can limit our ability to understand how these spheres, roles, and selves overlap, shadow, and impact each other.

Radhika [The Teacher/Researcher Off-Stage] My writing, traveling selves have led me into ongoing (aborted, incomplete, questioning) acts of building and inhabiting multimediated heterotopic technospaces (Munt 2001). Re-designing and re-booting continually—I have re-birthed in various forms in my four decades of life. At various stages the mirrors in my life have reflected me, and both allowed and hindered processes of reinvention. —Gajjala, personal reflection, February 2003

What happens when real-life contexts travel through texts? What happens when they are communicated and translated to audiences across contexts and when reproduction of contexts through texts is mediated by unequal power relations? Further, these exchanges are situated within a hierarchy that privileges “transmission” of (empirical) experiences, as we convert them into (theoretical) knowledge, through a back-and-forth yet uneven exchange between various epistemological structures of thought and practice. How do each of our personal investments, complicities, and resistances influence the further reading and traveling of concepts derived through such engagements, given our lack of control over readers’ interpretation of our texts? What concepts and conclusions will be drawn out of these dialogues in spaces where we have no voice or in situations where just one of us has more voice than the other? What new “buzz words” will emerge? Finally, what does “Access” mean in this situation? What is the exigency driving the researcher’s attempts to access Other contexts.

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[MOO-Poetic Interlude: Cyberdiva ponders on layered epistemologies and ontologies … Questions of translation, looping postcoloniality relational object (ivitie) s…] Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 22:31:07 -0400 To: [email protected] From: radhika gajjala Sender: [email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] I have such stories to tell … how will I tell them to you? what will I weave them into weaving in and out talking in code which code will you understand will you understand why why i use code? is the code I use what you can read in between? what are you reading in the code I write today? why are you understanding this and not that that and not this i will sit under my virtual tree and tell you the stories sentencesrunningintoeachotherstoriesrunningagainsteachot heryoursandmineaswespeakandweaveweaveandspeak and listen … and interweave… . what story does my coding say to you today? what raaga is my tune falling into? Denise’s mobile home Denise’s aura lives here … the stain of her thoughts … left behind with diva … the shadows … the echoes… . You think you see Our Lady of Guadalupe in a corner … sometimes she possesses you … sometimes Denise possesses you … sometime Denise possesses her … sometimes you possess Denise … Sometimes our lady turns in to Saraswathi (who is also dwelling on another moo … (type ways to look for exits))


You see watcher here. out The details are kinda hazy but you are no longer where once you had been. Diva’s_cloud a cloud of course! type junk to go to junction. You sometimes see Gayathri spivak and Linda alcoff in conference here—you sometimes see dipti naval and dimple kapadia chatting—or even cher dropping by and chanting the gayathri mantram— maybe even… . You see diva’s tent, stephanie’s project, perhaps it’s melissa’s metaphor?, Robert’s Banyan tree, ekalavyudu, and Denise’s mobile home here. enter perhaps The details are kinda hazy but you are no longer where once you had been. perhaps it’s melissa’s metaphor? Seems multiplicitous and freeing, and yet in a way it is inescapable … permission denied to get out of melissa’s own world view, no matter how open she sees her world view as … no matter how nonconcrete she thinks it is. [Type ways to find exits out of here]. You see crone’s fish, saussure, derrida, bhartrhari, kalidasa, humpty-dumpty, observing the metaphor, dome’s cracked mirror … , and aura here. aura | cyborgwati teleports in. aura | cyborgwati enters the room somehow. ghosts_of_sages (#11345) recycled. The details are kinda hazy but you are no longer where once you had been. aura | cyborgwati teleports out.

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Figure 2 Bubbles

I hadn’t started out interested in “computer” technology at all, but was interested in the production of subjectivity in relation to existing dialogues of identity. What I found was that the introduction of a new technology, like the introduction of a new category of identity, either functions as the introduction of a new interface in order to disrupt the notion of the self resting in a particular place/category/definition. So for me the technology becomes a way to introduce the disruption … —M, speaking of her first experience as student in one of R’s classes

Students could just build, and this would be interesting to us as researchers. This would mean we’d be looking at how culture is built in a particular place/technology-mediated space. But we wanted to see how the context of readings/class discussions etc. could be translated to the technological environment, and we were really asking how these concepts work in the broader cultural environment. If we asked students to talk about marginality and then go out in the world and practice nonmarginalizing strategies, they’d be very defensive. The reason marginalization is so pervasive is that it works well—it is highly adapted to work in many social cultural situations. So it’s not so easy to just overcome. In addition, the meaning of language isn’t what we expect


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it to be necessarily, when we put it out into the world in a particular rhetorical situation. (This reminds me of the difference between perlocutionary effect and illocutionary intent as discussed by Shannon Jackson. Students need to understand these things, and this is one way for them to learn it.) So we asked them to build an object in the moo, where even though they know there is a connection with “real life,” the pressure to “get it right” is lessened by the strangeness, learning the specific practices of technology building, etc. Then we asked them to reflect on it, and what they find is how these ideas function in a particular cultural/social space. The reflexivity is key to both the student learning and to our research. The students need to learn what the ideas actually mean in a real cultural space, not just in an abstract way. But for our research, we want to know how they come to mean that to a particular person occupying a particular subjectivity, so we need to hear their reflection on the process. Otherwise we risk a sort of “outside gaze.” In addition, students can learn how a particular technology can be used to build particular cultural/social practices. The outside gaze is often applied to technological cultural studies. This is what happens when someone goes onto a moo archive, picks up a transcript, and does a textual analysis of it to write an article. You don’t get a sense of how culture is produced in the space, nor do you get a sense of what the culture produced might mean/have meant to those folks as it was produced. Hence the methodology we use suggests you should engage in the production of culture and subjectivity in the specific context, in order to be able to really talk about the meaning-making that goes on there.” —M after she became a collaborator, participant, co-teacher, and researcher within settings designed in R’s courses.

Belka My first attempt to become familiar with computers happened when I was in 8th or 9th grade (about 1989–91). Every school in our city got equipped with a computer class with a dozen grey-greenish-colorless machines. Each group of up to 30 students had a few lessons there. Mainly we marveled at those creatures and none of us knew what to do. The classes, I remember, focused on describing monitor, keyboard, and CPU, and mastering the keyboard through games. Then we were offered an elective course (unthinkable in the all-required school system) of basic programming. I don’t know why, but I was totally fascinated with the idea of computing and really thought of taking the course. Yet I did not sign up: It was scheduled

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too early in the morning, before the first regular lesson (that is at 7:10 am), and only a few boys signed up. A helpful moment on the way to taming computers was a course on typing and office management, where I learned how to type and how to create documents professionally. In high school, there was a classroom with real computers—I mean color monitors and each student had an individual station. To my surprise, I became the best student of the cohort. At that time there was no Windows or the Internet, only the Norton operating system and DOS commands, and Lexicon. I could manage all these programs—successfully! I did not only earn As, which was not a big deal, but was extremely proud of myself that I was able to learn technology. After high school, my freshmen year was a rollback—no computer class and no access to computers. We had a ridiculous course in computer science, but it was in a lecture hall; we never turned on the exciting machines. Only in my last (5th) year in college (1997), I took a face-to-face course in another university; with my instructor—a computer science major of that university—we studied Corel Draw, MS Word, Adobe PageMaker, and planned to touch upon the Internet but it did not work. In 1998, Internet cafés and game parlors started popping up here and there in my city. I did not have an e-mail address, friends with one, or anybody else to write to. I had already graduated from college. The only person I could write to was an American journalist from Chicago who had taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer. As a friend, Eileen left us her e-mail address when she was planning to go back to the US. We ventured to send her a couple of e-mails: To do that one had to go to the post office and ask the clerk in the widow to send a message after filling in a certain form. I had to have an e-mail address by February 1999 because I was applying to an American exchange program and needed to send a few messages and get responses from the sponsoring organization. Without academic training and support, e-mailing was so troublesome and tedious—the computer lab attendant could show only which buttons to click to send and receive e-mails and failed to explain how things actually work. I was disappointed, irritated, and almost broken, and preferred to make brief long-distance calls. My techno history per se started when computers became a part and parcel of my everyday life—that is when I stepped on the campus of an American university. When I arrived at a certain university in Ohio in August 1999, computer technologies swallowed me. Computers were everywhere: in computer labs, classes, libraries, and halls. I did not only have to type papers and use the Internet for research but I relied on the Internet to get in touch with my husband. International calls were expensive and letters too


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slow, while e-mails and chats were much more instantaneous. If the time difference permitted, we could spend some time on ICQ—he was still using the same café I had left behind. Now without any formal courses, I had to learn by trial and error, by watching my colleagues and mentors work. I had to master the necessary skills in order to survive. Since that moment I often combine work, play, and experimentation with information technology. Reconstructing my personal cyberhistory, I cannot fail to notice that I talk about technology as a skill, ability, something I had to learn, in other words, as literacy. The skills and knowledge of computer technologies, which I associate in my narrative with specific software and hardware, build on an intimate connection with educational processes and institutions: I progressed and climbed up the technological literacy steps as I took more courses and moved from one institution to another. Commands, codes, programs, links, and buttons had to be learned and instructed, explored and trained—they did not come naturally, especially at the beginning. However, the skill-based understanding of literacy may not be sufficient for its emphasis on individual abilities and neglect of context and arrangement of society. The educational institutions approach technological literacy as “access, analysis, evaluation, and content creation” while leaving historical and cultural contingency of these skills unacknowledged (Livingstone 2004). Understanding literacy in cultural and political terms makes the UScenteredness of information technologies salient. It is the focus on the US—first, trying to e-mail my American friend, second, applying for an exchange program, and third, actually coming to Ohio to study—triggered the reliance on the new ways of interaction. The US has been consistently making claims to the center and the originator of information technologies as well as the claims to globalism, sovereignty, and the over-arching hegemonic power (Enteen 2006; Stainberg and McDowell 2003).

Radhika My first exposure to computers was when, after having read about Seymour Papert and others’ work in relation to children and creativity (I was a mother of a 5-year-old at that time), I enrolled in programming courses in Bhopal, India. I learned how to use a basic word processing program and some programming languages such as BASIC and a little bit of COBOL. Soon after I traveled to the United States and ended up studying for my master’s—this was when I first encountered e-mail and Usenet bulletin boards—both of which I used for both personal and work-related communication. By 1992, the

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main synchronous forms of communication I encountered were the “talk” feature and Internet Relay Chat programs. I started to use e-mail lists very frequently—participating in listprocs centered on topics related to my academic and creative writing interests. My dissertation and research interests led me to become involved with moderating and facilitating discussion lists via the “Spoon collective.” At the same time, I was involved with a South Asian Women’s network (and e-mail list) and volunteered to help moderate that too (SAWnet ended up being the focus of my dissertation). Eventually, in 1995, I learned about the “World Wide Web” and went for “HTML” (hypertext markup language) workshops in my university. I “became” cyberdiva in 1997 and I developed my cyberdiva identity further by building cyberdiva.org. [MOO-Poetic Interlude: Cyborgwati invokes the goddess of learning] fetch saraswathi Saraswathi is already at perhaps it’s melissa’s metaphor? drop saraswathi Saraswathi | Diva’s_cloud Saraswathi | a cloud of course! type junk to go to junction. You sometimes see Gayathri spivak and Linda alcoff in conference here— you sometimes see dipti naval and dimple kapadia chatting—or even cher dropping by and chanting the gayathri mantram— maybe even … Saraswathi | You see diva’s tent, stephanie’s project, perhaps it’s melissa’s metaphor?, Robert’s Banyan tree, ekalavyudu, and Denise’s mobile home here. Saraswathi | cyborgwati is drowning in sorrows. Dropped. Saraswathi | cyborgwati dropped Saraswathi. aura | Saraswathi teleports in. Saraswathi | Saraswathi | perhaps it’s melissa’s metaphor? Saraswathi | Seems multiplicitous and freeing, and yet in a way it is inescapable … permission denied to get out of melissa’s own world view, no matter how open she sees her world view as


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Computer skills as mobility. Internet communities as embedded in US centric academic and professional societies. Cyber—feminist practices—situated in cultural literacy and linguistic and material access to computer-mediated cultures. Yet, unless the mainstream feminist hears responsible critique, the feminist status quo will continue to provide an alibi for exploitation. —Spivak 1996

“a” in Gajjala 2004 states that: A genuine concern and a genuine need for solutions is something I can participate in. As a technologist who is somewhat experienced in integrating technology and people, I am clear that on any effort, community needs to be built to create space for discussion. I can be part of such a community. I refuse to be a lone “rebel.” I therefore object to feminism as it is exclusionist in its definition, as I understand it. If it is not so, the fact that it is perceived to be so is bad enough for me. We are divided enough without defining spaces that are divided (in a real sense or in a virtual one). It is the separation of real life from the virtual one, whether on line or as a feminist that disturbs me. Your articulation of your work as a feminist excludes me; at times your articulation as a third-world woman excludes me. Sometimes just the fact that you are speaking only online and not offline excludes me the most.

I question what it means to be cyberfeminist or feminist in academia if I cannot create spaces for voices to emerge and to talk back … I wonder about the role of liberal feminist “empowerment” in capitalist patriarchies. I wonder what places are being subsumed by a quest to create cyberreal space. My pedagogy is purposeful to my quest only insofar as it makes you question who you are. But that is not what you came to learn, you say? You say you came to learn certain livelihoods? You say you expect the skill to build will provide you certain livelihoods? I wonder if you really want what you ask, I say … But I cannot presume to know what you need … The certain authority I should have as I administer education and skills does not come easily to me … I question you too much. I question my authority too much. I ask that you question you and me … too much.

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So I must design an environment for you to engage … so you may “fall into it” as Alice did and perhaps understand … So I will teach you what I know …

Knowledge coding in static formats separates theory and practice locating each in separate spheres generating hierarchies that either privilege “practice” or “Theory.” The artificial separation ensuing from static and well-settled binaries based in Academic traditions, allows the illusion of the separation of “theory” and “practice” through a process of making invisible the power dynamics and cross-context hierarchies (whether colonial, classbased, linguistic, technological, economic, social, political—you name it). Therefore the illusion of “objectivity” and “generalizability” is carried forth across time and space without accountability and responsibility to the contexts to which this knowledge is applied (e.g., replication of best practices in relation to technological innovation). In actuality, knowledge building is a process of building theory through praxis—there is no other way.

Conditions for Such Understanding Producing cyber selves at the intersections of online and offline, as we do in the MOO, FaceBook, and other technologies, each one of us makes the habitus, or embodied social knowledge (Bourdieu 1990), visible and available for scholarly analysis. Sterne (2003) argues that “at the level of actual practice, technologies are always organized through (and as) techniques of the body” (p. 385), or in the performative moments. Living in spaces we explore, we engage in cultural performances that “make social life meaningful, they enable actors to interpret themselves to themselves as well as to others” (Conquergood, p. 34). As Butler (1993) explains, “a performative [act] is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names” (p. 13). The instances of confusion and frustration, happiness and success that we enliven in our narratives rupture habitual routines and make us reflect upon how we construct technologies constructing us. We build from previous encounters and experiences by connecting them in logical sequences in order to search for reasons and common threads. We purposefully politicize living with and through technologies and participate in social struggles related to techniques of body distribution and surveillance in order to contest the meaning of technologies as neutral tools and instruments. The


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instances of the bodily involvement with technology—the experiences and negotiations of our movements in cyber-physical space—provide nuanced insights into social practices and allow seeing how power and privilege are located in the moments of interaction. We analyze how bodies become marked by the categories of difference—race, gender, geography, literacy, sexuality, physical ability—and marginalized at the expense of sanctioned or encouraged practices. In other words, we race and queer the interface while doing technologies as they are located in specific contexts and moments. We describe our experiences and this allows the possibility of making sense and interpreting the world. Jennifer Daryl Slack writes that Technology is not simply an object connected in various ways to the institutional and organizational structures from within which it emerges to be reconnected in a new context, but … it is always an articulated moment of interconnections among the range of social practices, discursive statements, ideological positions, social forces, and social groups within which the object moves. (1989, 339, italics mine)

How are these articulated moments of interconnections manifested in relation to the Internet? Could it be that the vocabulary and binaries generated (such as online and offline, virtual and real, and so on) actually shape social practices and discursive statements through specific ideological positions and power dynamics? Scholars such as Marvin (1988), Slack (1989), and Sterne (2003) have pointed out how social ideological struggles are negotiated in relation to technologies and how various practices produce hierarchies around the use, consumption, production, design, reproduction, and circulation of such technologies. How might this impact our view on qualitative inquiry into techno-mediated environments. If we are to take ideological struggles and material-discursive hierarchies into consideration as we approach the study of technology, through critical lenses, we would have to draw on particular kinds of ethnographic encounters where the researcher lives both online and offline and in relation to the digital technologies and everyday artifacts that allow her to produce her cyborg selves. Thus production of cyber selves through the experience of doing—where the practices of being simultaneously online and offline, here and there in her everyday negotiations of society and culture become integral to the study of these environments. Ethnography thus conducted is situated, immersive and critical—not distant and “objective.”

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References Bourdieu, P. 1990. The logic of practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex.’ New York: Routledge. Marvin, C. 1987. When old technologies were new. New York: Oxford University Press. Conquergood, D. 1983. Communication as performance: Dramaturgical dimensions of everyday life. In Jensen lectures in contemporary studies, edited by J. Sisco, 24–43. Tampa, FL: University of South Florida Press. Dibbell, J. 1998. A genealogy of virtual worlds. Retrieved February 1, 2007, from http:// www.juliandibbell.com/texts/history.html. Enteen, J. 2006. Spatial conceptions of URLs: Tamil Eelam networks on the world wide web. New Media & Society 8, 229–249. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Random House. Gajjala, R. 2004. Cyberselves: Feminist ethnographies of South Asian women. London: Altamira Press. Gajjala, R., and Altman, M. 2006. Producing cyberselves through technospatial praxis: Studying through doing. In Health research in cyberspace, edited by P. Liamputtong, 67–84. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publishers. Hall, S. 1997. The work of representation. In Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices, edited by S. Hall, 13–74. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kendall, L. 1998. Are you male or female? Gender performances on MUDs. In Everyday inequalities: Critical inquiries, edited by J. O’Brian and J. Howard, 131–154. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Kolko, B., Nakamura, L., and Rodman, G. 2000. Race in cyberspace: An introduction. In Race in cyberspace, edited by B. Kolko, L. Nakamura, and G. Rodman, 1–14. New York: Routledge. Marvin, C. 1987. When old technologies were new. New York: Oxford University Press. Munt, S. 2001. Technospaces: Inside the new media. In Technospaces: Inside the new media, edited by S. Munt, 1–18. London: Continuum International. Slack, J. D. 1989. Contextualizing technology. In Rethinking communication: Paradigm/exemplars (v. 2), edited by B. Dervib, L. Grossberg, B. O’Keefe, and E. Wartella, 329–345. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Spivak, G. C. 1996. “Woman” as theater: United Nations conference on women, Beijing 1995. Radical Philosophy 75, 2–4. Stainberg, P., and McDowell, S. 2003. Mutiny on the bandwidth: The semiotics of statehood in the internet domain name registries of Pitcairn Island and Niue. New Media and Society 5, 47–67. Sterne, J. 2003. Bordieu, technique and technology. Cultural Studies 17, 367–389. Sunden, J. 2003. Material virtualities. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Radhika Gajjala is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication Studies, Bowling Green State University (Ohio). She has published various journal articles and book chapters. Her book Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women was published in 2004 by Altamira Press. She is currently finishing up a book length single-authored project on


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Technocultural Agency and Identity at the Interface and is co-editing a book on South Asian Technospaces. Natalia Rybas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre, Emporia State University (Kansas). Her research interests concentrate around cyberculture, technology-mediated communication, critical studies of technology, and cyberethnography. Her doctoral dissertation explores technocultural practices in social network systems. Melissa Altman is a Doctoral Candidate in American Culture Studies program at Bowling Green State University (Ohio).