Cyberspace

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Cyberspace

• Identity in cyberspace
• race, gender, sexuality

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Learning Outcomes for this lecture

• By the end of this lecture you should be able to
• Identify and use Jean Baudrillard, a key theorist
  in these debates
• understand the main debates in relation to
  issues of identity
• race, gender, sexuality

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What is cyberspace?

• A consensual hallucination experienced daily by
  billions of legitimate operators, in every
  nation, by children being taught mathematical
  concepts . . . A graphic representation of data
  abstracted from the banks of every computer in
  the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines
  of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind,
  clusters and constellations of data. Like city
  lights receding
• (William Gibson 2000 67)

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Jean Baudrillard

• Key thinker of postmodern perspective
• Theorised the notion of simulation
• Representation becomes simulation effect of
  proliferation of images
• Simulacra (plural) simulacrum (singular)
• eg Disneyland,
• eg Gulf War (1991)

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Hyperreality

• Culture of hyperreality the distinction between
  real and imagined, surface and depth, reality and
  illusion can no longer be made

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• It is an illusion, yet its principal aim is to
  make us forget that this is the case. It
  constructs us as passive consumers of assorted
  false promises and manages to keep us in its
  thrall by making us forget that we are the worlds
  inmates rather than free agents.
• (Cavallaro 2000 212)

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Cyberspace and Identity

• A questioning of the notion of unified identity
  - identity now theorised a being contructed
  rather than innate or essential (as in essence)
• The question of the self-construction of identity
  - through text based mode of communication (we
  type ourselves into being)

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Race and ethnicity in cyberspace

• Does race disappear in cyberspace? How is race
  visually represented in popular film and
  advertisements about cyberspace?

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• Do narratives that depict racial and ethnic
  minorities in cyberspace simply recapitulate the
  old racist stereotypes, do they challenge them,
  do they use the medium to sketch our new virtual
  realities of race? (Kolko et al. 2000 11)

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Race and ethnicity is cyberspace colonised?

• Cyberspace as the latest manifestation of western
  (and especially US) cultural imperialism (Sardar
  2000 732 752 and Stratton 2000 721 - 731).

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• the dominant use of English on the Internet
  suggests the extension of American power, as does
  the fact that email addresses in the United
  States alone do not require a country code. The
  Internet normalises American users (Poster, M.
  199528).

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Gender

• Cyberspace as a new space for women?
• Cyberspace and feminist intervention
• women must not be left behind in the gap between
  those that have access to the new information
  technologies and those that do not

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• be active agents in ensuring that the star-like
  potential of information technologies is directed
  towards enhancing human well-being rather than
  strengthening existing power monopolies

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• the meanings of tomorrow must be created today
  and women, especially young women, now have
  greater freedom of spirit and of experience to be
  creative

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• the possibilities that new forms of communication
  and expression have placed in our hands are
  awesome. It is up to us to navigate them for our
  place-based knowledge and action.
  
  (Arizpe 1999 xv-xvi)

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Recoding feminism?

• Sites
• Cybergrrl
• geekgrrrl
• nerdgrrl
• homegrrl
• Grrrls enjoy their femininity and kick ass at
  the same time.

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MUDs

• multi-user domain
• LambdaMOO
• 10 genders
• male
• female
• spivak (indeterminate)
• neuter

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• egotistical
• royal
• 2nd
• either
• plural

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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).

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Minute paper

• What are 2 things you have learnt today?
• What question or issue is not yet resolved for
  you?

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