Women on YouTube

http://www.flickr.com/photos/butterberries/3879989340/

Content is the final layer of the internet cake. “Content is king.” Even though in the Long Tail, Chris Anderson says, that “in a world of infinite choice, context, not content, is the king.” (22) Clearly, the issue is that we are still talking about kings not queens.

 In Unmarked, Peggy Phelan said that “If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture. The ubiquity of their image, however, has hardly brought them political or economic power.” (23)

These wonderful halcyon days, where the ‘apple at last hangs.. indolent-ripe on the tree’ (24), pose a question. Who eats the apple now? Almost exclusively, public debates about gender and the internet have focussed on issues of the digital divide. As if the problems facing women can be solved simply by giving them enough computer skills and internet access to freely provide the bulk of the content that men can mine for money.

Since getting access to reliable contraception and abortion, women have had the freedom to engage in sexual activities in a way unprecedented in civilization. However, there is no evidence of changing socio-political dynamics other than a post-feminist YouTube culture of exposure and exploitation. There are no women winners in the porn industry, although it was the practically the first public content on the internet.

From the moment the internet became commercial in 1988/89 sex became the big business traffic. In 1995, 4 out of the 10 most popular bulletin boards were sex related (alt.sex). Adult businesses developed uuencode to transform text code into pictures. HTML set the stage for the picture porn explosion which has continued with development of streaming video. There is a lot of money in porn on the internet, but it is not flowing into female purses. Tera Patrick, infamous as one of the few exceptions, believes that the industry won’t see another female star reach her relative power due to market saturation of free content and the lowering of entry barriers for content producers. (25)

Phelan said that you can’t protect porn under the guise of free speech. Porn perpetuates dominant gender power relations and is a continual enactment of oppression.  In 1965, Marcuse wrote that “what is practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.” (26)

Marcuse believed that tolerance should be subversive, undermining dominant ideologies rather than perpetuating them. It follows that whenever tolerating a freedom of speech is at the expense of a section of the community, then there is a power imbalance at the bottom of things.

Angela McRobbie says, “The new female subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom.” This individuation goes hand in hand with the self government of the modern neo-liberal subject in which wrong choices are always individual not societal. (27)

The poor postfeminist girl must try to embody sex, gender, career, beauty, porn, popularity, individuality and happiness in her visible identity. Failure to do so is her problem alone. In silence.

Internet governance must encompass all these things, because the internet and its governance produce and reproduce all of these things. Lessig calls for a new breed of technocratic philosopher kings to dispense wisdom and be our guardians. (28)

Kings, you note, not queens. May all the queens of cyberspace arise and reclaim their realms.


22. Anderson, Chris “The Long Tail” (2006) Hyperion: New York


23. Phelan, Peggy. “Unmarked - the politics of performance” (1993) Routledge: New York


24. Whitman, Walt. “Halcyon Days” in “Leaves of Grass” (1891-92) Retrieved on May 27 2010 from http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/324


25. Nowak, Peter. “Sex, Bombs and Burgers”. (2010) Allen&Unwin: Crows Nest, Australia


26. Marcuse, Herbert. “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) in “A Critique of Pure Tolerance” (1968) Boston Beacon Press. pp 95-137


27. McRobbie, Angela. “Postfeminism and Popular Culture” in “Interrogating post-Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture” eds. Tasker, Yvonne & Negra, Diane. (2007) pp26-39 Durham, NC: Duke University Press


28. McCullagh, Declan “What Larry Didn’t Get” (2009) Cato Unbound Retrieved on May 20 2010 from http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/05/04/declan-mccullagh/what-larry-didnt-get/

Is the Internet an Ogre?

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/19melissa68/

The internet, like ogres and onions, has layers. Layers, transparency and the end-to-end principle are considered the defining characteristics of a free, accessible and innovative internet. Lessig describes the internet as the most important ‘innovation commons’ the world has ever seen, both through culture and architecture. (6)

  

The end-to-end principle means a network should be as basic as possible and intelligence should be located at the ends. This can be traced back to Paul Baran’s shift from circuit to packet switching network design but was first articulated in 1981 by Jerome Altzer, David Clark and David P. Reed. It is NOT the default property of networks but a constructed one that is critical to the operation of the internet as we know it. (7)

The internet is really a network of networks, combining so many different technologies, companies and countries that as the internet has grown, problems of governance have arisen. Internet architecture was based on the layers principles as described by Solum and Ching, where the first corollary is the ‘principle of layer separation’ and the second corollary is the ‘principle of minimal layer crossing’. (8) The internet is arranged in a vertical hierarchy of layers and wherever possible issues within one layer should be addressed within that layer only. If layers must be crossed, either literally or legislatively, then the least distance crossed is the best ‘fit’.

The idea of utilizing internet architecture principles to inform the governance of the internet is generally credited to Yochai Benkler, Harvard Professor of Law. This was developed further by Lessig, Solum and Chung. Currently the UNCTAD (post WSIS2005) proposes, in the Information Economy Report 2006 (IER), to use the layers principle for internet governance. (9)

Benkler	Solum&Chung	IER
The Content Layer—the symbols, images and material that are communicated.	The Content Layer—the symbols and images that are communicated.	The Content Layer—the symbols, images and material that are communicated.
	The Application Layer—the programs that use the Internet, e.g. the Web.	The Application Layer—the online technologies or programs
The Logical Layer—TCP/IP, the ‘code’ or software that enables data to travel across the wires and cables	The Transport Layer—TCP, which breaks the data into packets.	The Logical Layer—TCP/IP, the ‘code’ or software that enables data to travel across the wires and cables
	The Internet Protocol Layer—IP, handles the flow of data over the network.
	The Link Layer—the interface between users’ computers and the physical layer.
The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc.	The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc.	The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc.

Lessig explains that the internet mixed free layers with controlled layers. The infrastructure or physical layer is fundamentally owned. The content and application layers are partially owned, but the center, the code, was free.

The internet is an ogre analogy can now be extended. As the donkey replied to Shrek, “You know, not everybody likes onions. Cakes! Everybody likes cakes. Cakes have layers.” (10) The code is the cream in the cake.

(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)

6. Lessig, L. “The Future of Ideas” (2002) New York: Vintage Books Chapter 2 p23. Also available at http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/the_future_of_ideas_is_now_fre_1.html

7. Lessig, L. “The Future of Ideas” (2002) New York: Vintage Books Chapter 3 p34. Also available at http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/the_future_of_ideas_is_now_fre_1.html

8. Solum, Lawrence B. and Chung, Minn, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law" (2003) U San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. p4. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=416263
9. “Information Economy Report 2006” (2006). UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Paper E.06.II.D.8. Available at http://www.unctad.org/Templates/WebFlyer.asp?intItemID=3991&lang=1

10. “Shrek” (2001) Quote from http://www.billionquotes.com/index.php/Shrek 

The Internet Architecture of Gender / Decoding the Layers

The internet, like any new technology, has a disruptive effect on society and governance. As Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project says, “For a while, when its effects are new and unanticipated, it empowers in a relative sense some actors at the expense of others. This relative empowerment alters the composition of interest groups, further promoting political change.” (1)


The rise of the internet economy has occurred at a time when the gender gap has actually been increasing in many indicators of highly developed countries, which is somewhat of a surprise to those who believed that the second wave of feminism in the 60s and 70s had born legitimate fruit.


It seems, on reflection, that legislation of equal opportunity and the rhetoric of empowerment has failed to have any effect in some crucial areas, most noticeably computer science, ICTs and engineering, where the numbers of women in higher education and employment have actually declined since the 1970s. (2) 

an example of gender division by workplace from The Guardian, UK.


Technology is not gender neutral although much of the rhetoric, like the end to end principle, simplicity and net neutrality, obscures this. Technology is socially shaped. As Hrynyshyn says, ‘values are embedded in a technology through a social process of the interaction of different groups of relevant actors who are involved in the process of design…. Often what is not recognized is that the decision about the development of technology are made by agents with different locations in structures of social power, and the different locations create differences in the extent to which different agents are able to participate successfully in the process of social shaping.’ (3)


I am taking a social shaping of technology approach to this situation (as described by Mackenzie and Wajcman, Williams and Edge), where at every stage in the development of a new technology a decision is made, a fork in the branching logic paths is taken that incrementally changes the direction of development, and of necessity excludes some directions. As Lessig puts it in Code 2.0, 'The ‘nature” of the Internet is not God’s will. Its nature is simply the product of its design. That design could be different.’ (4)


I am using the Layers Principle as adapted by Solum and Chung from Lessig’s work, and endorsed by the WSIS in 2005, for my analytic framework. The six layers that constitute the Internet are:


• The Content Layer—the symbols and images that are communicated.
• The Application Layer—the programs that use the Internet, e.g. the Web.
• The Transport Layer—TCP, which breaks the data into packets.
• The Internet Protocol Layer—IP, handles the flow of data over the network.
• The Link Layer—the interface between users’ computers and the physical layer.
• The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc. (5)


These layers were defined for internet governance but also serve as a way of examining how different structures have evolved in seemingly comparative isolation from other layers and how these isolated instances are part of the interrelated whole. How the internet has created a society in which women, in many important areas, are further from equality and self determination than they were in 1960. How we can decode the layers of gender discrimination to see how the architecture of the internet limits our global society.


(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)

1. Milton Mueller, "The New Cyber-Conservatism: Goldsmith/Wu and the Premature Triumphalism of the Territorial Nation-State: A review of Goldsmith and Wu's 'Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World'" (June, 2006). Internet Governance Project. Paper IGP06-003. Available at http://internetgovernance.org/pdf/MM-goldsmithWu.pdf

2. Maria Klawe, Telle Whitney, Caroline Simard, "Women in Computing - take 2" (February, 2009). Communications of the ACM. Volume 52, Issue 2. Inspiring Women in Computing. Pages 68-76. ISSN:0001-07682. Available at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1461947#

3. Hrynyshyn, D, "Globalization, nationality and commodification: the politics of the social construction of the internet" (2008) New Media and Society. Volume 10 (5): 751-770. Available from http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/10/5/751

4. Lessig, L. "Code 2.0. Chapter 4: Architectures of Control" (2006) Available at: http://codev2.cc

5. Solum, Lawrence B. and Chung, Minn, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law" U San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=416263

Hyper Reality (extended mix)

Hyper Reality

The extended mix. For a transcendental materialist version far beyond this I recommend Flatline_Constructs Mark Fisher http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/FC2s6.htm
and for the medium theory I recommend FibreCulture Journal Issue 12 John Potts http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue12/issue12_potts.html

HyperReality Summary for ARIN6902

Hyper Reality Summary

I recommend reading the extended version, also at scribd http://www.scribd.com/full/28685677?access_key=key-1y4tumx33avy7exrfoq1