A (very) belated workshop 4 response

Like many of you, I have had a Hotmail account for some years, but I went back to the Windows Live sign-up page to refresh my memory of the process. Most of the things I noticed were already brought up by Emily in her post - assumption of a Western middle-class background, for example, but I did notice that the default "Country/Region" box was set to United States, and the section for "account information" included State, Zip code and Time Zone - the states were American states, and the time zones were American time zones, as well as the fact that the "zip code" is a USA method. So, the site assumes that, as an Internet user and a subscriber to Windows Live, you are probably American with a middle-class and probably Western background. Also that you are either male or female, or identify as such. The site claims that these details can be used to reactivate your account should you forget your password...to me it seems slightly more intrusive than necessary, but I'm guessing most new users will fill out the required sections on the form without a second thought.

Yahoo! was slightly different, in that it detected that I was accessing the sign-up page from Australia and offered me the option to switch to the Australian version of Yahoo! to set up my account - the email address of which would end differently to one set up on the default US version. This could conceivably be an incentive for some Australian users to stick with the US version to avoid problems when giving others their new email address.
I switched to the Australian version, where the secret questions assumed that you were: in a stable relationship, grew up knowing your father, had been privileged enough to own a car, bike or pet, went to at least two schools, and that your high school had had a "mascot" - more of an American tradition, but still included in the Australian version...
The Marketing Preferences box was automatically ticked to be sent ads for special offers and the like, but this I think was more of a marketing ploy.

On to Second Life, where, yes, your gender was male or female, and you were also by default a young person with a slim physique. Possibly customisation options are available later in the game? Though both Caucasian and dark-skinned races were represented, it was difficult to tell whether avatars with Asian characteristics were represented in Second Life or not. There were options for avatars with dark hair and slightly darker skin tone, but their facial characteristics didn't seem any different to those of the Caucasian avatars. There was also nothing for Arabic, Indian, Polynesian, American Indian, Australian Aboriginal, Hispanic, or a myriad of other "races" - though this could be excused by the fact that it is the sign-up page, and giving the user a limited set of options to start with encourages them to customise more once they enter the game.
Your first name was your choice, but your last name had to be selected from a list of available last names - probably to prevent avatars with the same first and last names, as well as reducing the incidence of "joke" names. The names ran the gamut of foreign backgrounds, but strangely there were very few Asian-sounding last names. Whether this was due to them all being used or because of a bias against identifiably Asian avatars is unclear.
Like the last two sites, Second Life also assumes a privileged background, with questions such as "What city were you born in?", "What street did you grow up on?" and "What is your favourite vacation spot?" Since users will be spending money on the site this is quite possibly a fair assumption - someone with enough spare cash to spend it on Second Life has a high probability of being at least middle-class.

Lastly, Lavalife. As suggested on the workshop sheet, the default search assumes you are a single, straight female, seeking a 25-34 year old male for casual dating - a reflection of the most common type of Lavalife user. It is interesting that, even on a dating site for people unable to otherwise find romantic relationships, the only genders available for selection are male and female - the site does not appear to cater for transgender, polygender, transvestites or others, though you do have the option of searching for the same gender as yourself.

In conclusion, most of the sites seemed as if they were catering to what they perceived to be the demographic most likely to use their services. It seemed to me to be more of a tool to maximise efficiency and make the site more user-friendly to the majority of users, thus attracting more traffic. The "menu-driven identities" seen in these high-traffic sites are thus less a product of Western society's ingrained expectations of the "normal" Internet user, and more a result of marketing strategy - making the sites easier to use for the type of user most likely to access them, increasing traffic and therefore increasing profit for the site's owners.

Tutorial Presentation: The Ethics of Porn on the Net

I'm getting in early with my tutorial presentation. I've tacked on a few discussion questions at the end- more to come when I think of them.

The Ethics of Porn on the Net

It's a Woman's Prerogative to Change Her Mind, and I have changed my mind so many times when it comes to my stance on pornography; I’ve loathed it, loved it, and been everywhere in between. However, I was distinctly uncomfortable with some of Kath Albury’s arguments.

She structured her essay by first giving a poor summery of the Judeo-Christian view of the problematic aspects of pornography, then presented a slightly better take on the problems of pornography, from a Marxists view. Albury then puts forward the following question: “if pornography is immoral, does that make it unethical?” Her answer was at first a definite NO, however, she later qualifies this by saying ‘the answer depends on what definition of ‘ethics’ on chooses’.

Albury spends a large portion of her essay discussing amateur porn (I couldn’t help but think of Paris Hilton). But it got me thinking, there is such a big difference between making home videos (which I think is perfectly fine, and fun!) and putting those home videos up on the web. Albury cited that perhaps up to 70% of online porn is produced or modelled by non-professionals. I wonder how much of this percentage has been leaked/put on the net without the consent of all contributing parties.

Overall, Kath Albury gave me a lot to think about. I agree that amateur are a completely different kettle of fish when compared to commercial porn, but the issue confuses me. I find the idea that regular people want to pretend to be strippers/porn starts, i.e. people who are paid to imitate sexual arousal (I’d bet everything I own that at least 80% of the ‘supposed female orgasms you see in commercial porn are faked) problematic. Albury, on the other hand, views it as ‘’an ‘everyday experiment’, a form of new sexuality that is both a part of, and separate from, mundane domesticity”. Albury’s work, published in 2002, has become a little outdated, as she claimed that people viewed the attraction to women over 40 as ‘unusual’ and ‘kinky’, however, in this day and age, with a little help from popular culture (think American Pie), MILF has become normalised and mainstream.

Albury claims that “this proliferation of [unusual, deviant and kinky] sexual imagery is a perfect example of Internet porn’s ethical sensibility”. This is where I seriously differ from Albury. From my limited experience of internet porn, it seems to be full of (mostly) strangers having sex. Sure, some of them are from different ethnicities, some are larger/taller/hairier/more dwarf like than others, but the formula is the same; they all love rooting strangers (ok, and sometimes their teacher or boss). I find this the most problematic part of pornography. It rarely explores any of the mental, emotional, spiritual or psychological aspects of sex and instead presents a very simplistic, purely physical view of sexual desire.

Other questions to consider:

· Do you agree with Andrea Dworkin, that women who participate in porn are practicing prostitution?

· If porn is immoral, does that mean its unethical?

· Are ethical systems medium-specific? Should they be?

· If one of your close friends/ family members told you they had decided to become a porn star, would you be supportive of them? Would it make a difference to you if they were entering the commercial or amateur industry?

· Given that a digital culture is interconnecting via a global World Wide Web, is a global system of ethics required? How do the existing legal boundaries of nations complicate such a goal?

· Does digitisation challenge the ethical underpinnings of a capitalist culture? Do we need a new ethics of consumption in the era of mass and ‘illegal’ peer-to-peer movie downloading?

· Check out these statistics on pornography. Do they concern you? Shock you? Or are they exactly as you expected?

workshop 4 - a belated and incomplete response

I started to go through last week's online workshop, but I never finished it (I looked at Window Live ID, Yahoo! and Second Life, but didn't get around to Lavalife). Since I'm terribly busy at the moment, I'll very likely not get around to to finishing it, so I decided to post my thoughts on the part I did anyway, although they're rather rambly. I thought looking at these three websites threw up some interesting points.

For one thing, in terms of gender, all of the sites presented it as a binary, even though not everyone is born unambiguously male or female. (This, of course, is a common assumption.)

Mostly I noticed that the sites assumed a privileged Western user. For instance, all of them asked for a precise birthdate, but although it's normal for us in the West to know our birthdates, it isn't necessarily going to be true for every user. In the same way, Windows Live ID and Yahoo! both asked for first name and surname, although there must be people on earth who don't have a surname. The choices of "secret questions" on all three sites also had a tendency to assume a privileged Western background, with questions referring to things like the user's high school mascot or favourite place to holiday.

I'm not sure whether to put this down to racism. The kind of discrimination this shows is more in terms of life experiences and knowledge than race. I think I would label it as a symptom of thoughtless racism (if that makes sense), not direct racism - the developers simply assumed that users of their websites would be much like themselves, and didn't think much about how this might make things difficult for other users. In general, it's a fair assumption - but it's a dangerously self-perpetuating sort of assumption, I think. Users will tend to come to websites that cater for "their sort" of people. If websites don't fit them, they will either avoid those websites or fit their identities to the sites' categories.

some thoughts...

When I was reading the second article in this weeks reading (sorry the name escapes me- was written by the Korean/American guy who used a black avatar online) one of the things he said got me thinking.
He was talking about a university (I think) who has introduced policy to forbid any racial identification on any of its online services. The author identified the problem with doing this in that it would 'silence' an aspect of many users of non-white race (I hate using that word by the way, its so Victorian and problematic) who define their identity, at least in part, by their background.

My ethnicity is Scottish and English aka: white, so the issues of race online have never occured to me before.
But I wonder if anyone on this blog with an ethnic background easily identified by either name or appearance, would like to offer an opinion- if you were a member of this university, would it be nice sometimes to be race-anonymous? Would you enjoy not having to worry about the issues that arise from what the author described as unconcious racial profiling, or would you resent the censorship that doesn't affect your fellow white students (as they are probably complicit in the 'whiteness=assumed' camp) ????????

In response to Therese's question, I do believe that whiteness is assumed unless otherwise stated, although this depends on what kind of site you are on. That was interesting about the Hong Kong site in the first article-that despite it being a HK site, the 'native' (another problematic word) Chinese were scorned and writers were judged on their proficiency in English- talk about cultural cringe!

Anyway that is the end of my rambling monlogue. Any thoughts?

Week Seven: E/Racing Markers of Difference / Menu Driven Identities

Some questions to get us started:
Is race less fixed in cyberspace? Is it voluntary or experimental? And do you think race is more overt in virtual environments? Why?
Is ‘whiteness online a racial category or a universal assumption unless otherwise noted?
Is all identity ‘menu driven’?
Are online interactions inherently gendered? Do gender relations operate differently online compared with face to face interactions?



For me, facebook puts the questions of fixed categories and gender relations into context. I’m sure everyone knows someone who has freaked out over a supposed lover whose online status remained single despite promises of commitment and a number of ‘more than friendly encounters’. Real life relationship ‘status’ is a lot more fluid than the limited and stark options facebook presents. But sometimes, if sufficient time is wasted on the site, the facebook status options can start to define your physical life.

In relation to race, definitely, at least in the websites I access, whiteness is assumed. Whiteness is a vague, ill-defined race as such, however i think that 'white supremecy' is probably more fixed in a virtual environment.

useful online book

I just came across A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, and thought some of you might find it handy for this unit. It's simply an online version of a print book, but since it's an expensive print book that the UWA library doesn't have a copy of...

The article on blogging looks interesting. Although it doesn't seem to cover much more ground than the articles we studied, it's much more recent - A Companion to Digital Literary Studies only came out this year. There are also articles on virtual worlds and computer games, which might be handy when we come to those topics later in the semester.

(The same website also offers an online version of an earlier book, A Companion to Digital Humanities. The UWA library does have a copy of this book, so it's perhaps not as useful.)

JenniCAM and Facebook

As I read the article on JenniCAM, I was amazed that someone would actually be doing stuff like what she did. At the same time, I was also impressed!! I agree with what Anna has posted that this is similar to Big Brother...hahaha! As I started to read the article, I asked myself this question...why would someone do this...I would not want to reveal my personal life to the public...then again, she had a purpose...I suppose.

Now, to specifically answer the question posted:

Does the internet need regulation?

Yup, I think it is necessary for the internet to have some form of regulations. This is to prevent the “newcomers” from being preyed upon. Also it gives parents a form of satisfaction and security that their children are safe. Being an international student, my husband is in Singapore while I am here with my daughter and yeah, our relationship has survived despite the ‘separation’, thanks to the internet, MSN messenger and Google talk...so yup, I am comfortable with this online business but, still am careful not to mess too much with it and talking to strangers...Like in the good old days where our parents discouraged us from talking to strangers, now I am careful not to talk to strangers online.

I was recently introduces to Face book, much to the pleasure of my best friend in uni. I am amazed how many people I actually knew are on Face book and I was able to contact people I have hardly contacted in years...amazing how the world has become so small since the coming of the internet. As such, I am now able to contact my friends...and ignore my 'not-so' friends..so yeah, in a way it's an invasion of privacy...yet I have the choice to select my friends or ignore those I don't want to have contact with...so I still have my privacy intact...to a certain exent!!hooray for that...