Reed Digitized Lives Summary Part 1

This summary is written based on the following text by T. V. Reed:

Reed, T. V.  Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print

This summary is pretty much a traditional summary because I read the book, wrote the summary, and THEN read the directions, which is very me...  So this time, below it, I'll state the book's intention, three direct quotes I find related to the main argument, two issues I found compelling, and perhaps a cool meme. Next time, I'll actually make it flow a bit better, if this form doesn't jive well.

T.V. Reed’s Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era begins by prefacing that it couldn’t possibly “fathom” the great scope of the net (1), but it can work toward understanding the ways in which the digital world certainly affects human interaction.  Reed makes a point to acknowledge that we are all a part of various discourse communities and that these are constantly in flux with one another.  There are no defined boundaries and the cultures are always shifting. What Reed suggests about cultures being fictions was interesting.  He states that “cultures are fluid, not neatly bound entities…cultures are always fictions, are always artificial constructions of observers…boundaries or key characteristics of the imagined cultural group are always blurry…cultural meanings are in fact never settled” (2). What Reed is getting at is the fact that we never truly belong to the same culture as our perceptions are entirely different person-to-person. Reed’s aim in his book is to get at what technological devices and platforms, on the internet or not, are doing to us and what we can get out of them and how they affect our cultures. Reed makes a point to explain that we need to think of technology as a tool. He discusses how new media is not ending the world but changing the way we know the world. For quite a while in the first chapter Reed relates some statistics on access to digital culture.  He also focuses a bit on the fact that some cultures and languages are thus underrepresented.  This all creates “digital divides” and Reed is quite concerned with representation. He says that we cannot separate digital and culture (7). The rest of chapter one highlights key terms that are central to the rest of his book. Technological determinism, Reed relates, presents the problem that it ignores the fact that technologies emerge from many different cultures and that those cultures play a huge role in creating and altering those technologies. “Techno cultural approaches argue that technologies and cultures can never be neatly separated because technical innovations are always created by individuals and groups deeply shaped by cultural assumptions and biases…” (11). Reed discusses components addressed by digital cultures: production analysis, textual analysis, audience/user analysis, and historical analysis. (This particular section of the chapter was helpful because it helped me to realize that my research is largely content analysis).

Gibson’s quote on cyberspace as a hallucination was an interesting and poignant metaphor.  A large part of this section was devoted to helping the reader understand that cyberspaces are indeed grounded. There are, as between “real world cultures” no actual set boundaries between cyber cultures. The online world is a reflection of the real world. The rest of chapter one is focused on dissecting how the filed has no real name and different emphases. He also asserts the focus of the rest of the book in chapter one and more key terms and topics he plans on covering.

Chapter Two works to show internet as a process through first a historical look and then through a socio-cultural lens. The section where it is discussed that early thought of cyberspace was on the ways in which it is beyond gender/race/etc., however I completely disagree with this notion.  If anything it perpetuates those caste systems.  More of the history of the internet is present in the text, including Steve Jobs, Netscape, Internet Explorer, the Time Warner/AOL merger, and Web 2.0. Reed discusses the implications of producing the material objects of these developments: third world manual labor, Apple’s labor issues, and wage disparities. The rest of the second chapter is devoted to “presuming,” the fourth tier of digital cultural production, “the process by which culture consumers have become culture producers via the WWW” (43) and to the growing amount of e-waste and environmental harm caused by the raw production of these products, comparing the techno-production to the blood diamond controversy.

Reed then discusses the generating of representations of oneself online, primarily from a dualistic approach, as if one only has one identity online. He explores the idea of masquerading as someone else online. He says, like Judith Butler would, that our identities have always been performative and variable, but that we don’t know how greatly our “real-world” identities are being shaped by online performance. In the privacy section, Reed questions political freedom, he discusses how it is easy to betray each other’s personal information, and that we are not actually protected in what we generate and disclose online. He discusses how our identities are literally sold, that we are constantly watched, and because of this, algorithms generate text/content/consumerism that we, in effect, continue to buy into. Questions of anonymity as a falsehood in online spaces and the information gained from the disinhibited nature of being online are also explored.  Reed shifts the focus to a more positive one when he discusses how online communities, “real world” communities, and cultures have formed because online spaces are typically not dependent on time, space, and cost. The chapter also explores how this type of communication is affecting our day-to-day communication in non-online spheres.

            Chapter Four discusses the ways in which online spaces both perpetuate and challenge cultural norms of gender, ethnicity and disability. “Subject position” explained and then how culture is “unintentionally built into hardware, software and digital cultures” (84), (which is interesting when we consider what happens in the rest of Ch 4 and 5 with the very structure of Reed’s book).  One example the author relates is how the interface between users and computers is called a “desktop.” Underrepresentation of women and languages beyond English are other issues discussed to highlight “default identity” online (87).  Reed believes that full equity is still far from being achieved but that work on the gender gap is a major challenge being grappled with right now. He later discusses the increase in bullying, sexual harassment, and stalking that is enabled by the anonymity of cyberspaces. The section on dis/ability highlights ways in which cyberspaces have grown to become more inclusive of those who are disabled as well ways in which there are still gaps in equality.

            In Chapter Five, “Digitizing Desire? Sexploration and/or Sexploitation” begins by discussing the prevalence of porn in cyberspace and how the kind of sexual content online shows a major relationship to the offline world. The second section focuses on the varieties of cybersex we now have available to us and how it facilitates “safe sex” (111).  Porn is then discussed again, how it helps “teens and young adults just discovering their sexual identities” (114), issues with child pornography, perpetuating cultural stereotypes, and feminism within sex work. Reed discusses how the web has created safe spaces for same-sex desire but has also created spaces for gay bashing and heteronormativity.

Main Argument in my own words: As we become more digital, as we continue to take part in various discourse communities engaged and disengaged in digital spaces, we must acknowledge that those structures, beliefs, and rituals central to their cultures will inevitably be in/directly challenged and altered, that divides will close, open, merge, and shift, and that we must explore the implications of our identities in flux.

Direct Quotes:

"Recent anthropology theory argues that "cultures are always fictions, are always artificial constructions of observers. The question of what typifies or is essential to a given cultural group is always subject to debate within that group. The boundaries or key characteristics of any imagined cultural group are always blurry, and often in process and changing...anything claimed about a given cultural group can be challenged, and that is a good thing" (2).

"[T]echnocultural appraoches argue that technologies and cultures can never be neatly separated, because technical innovations are always created by individuals and groups deeply shaped by cultural assumptions and biases, and technologies are always used in particular cultural contexts which reshape them even as they reshape the cultural contexts" (11).

"We simply don't know yet how deeply identities are being reshaped by online masquerade, digital cross-dressing and other forms of identity gaming" (56).

Issues:

One issue, which is illustrated in especially Chapter 3 and then in the first quote above from the intro/Ch 1 is the idea of where our identity sits, the fiction and the "realness" of it. When Reed discusses the idea of performing our identities in digital spaces, he's getting at the multiplicity of identity. I think it's fascinating as to how much opportunity we can have to re/create ourselves, generates ourselves in ways we did not know of, literally discovering new representations of ourselves through using different interfaces on different platforms.

The biggest issue Reed presents is kind of meta in a way and hard for me to articulate. It's an issue related to the book's main argument because I can't help but wonder if online spaces conditioned the structure of this book to sexualize queer persons, and in turn, further their othering. I don't mean to be critical of the book in this way but I had a visceral, physical response to two chapters. When I got to Chapter 5, I decided to skim the pages because I was taken aback by the content in Chapter 4. Chapter 4 discusses feminisms, inequalities within gender, race, and ability. He considers sex trafficking, cyberbullying, and exclusion. I don't normally think of how writers approach queer issues when I'm reading a textbook because I think I assume that they are approaching it in a very traditional way--there's always a space next to Race, Gender, and Dis/Ability-- but it was fascinating to me as to where he placed LGBT issues. I found it to be incredibly heterocentric when I skimmed chapter 5 because along with sex and porn we have queer issues.  I find it both heterocentric and heteronormative because to assume that queer persons' identities are entirely defined by their sexual practice is highly offensive. I don't understand why this section is placed where it is because "sex and desire" don't solely define queer persons as queer. I think the section, because of where it is placed, only continues to highly sexualize queer persons as other. Certainly, he discusses gay bashing and heteronormative hate speech and cyberbullying as the result of anonymity and disinhibition in cyberspaces, and he discusses safe spaces for same-sex desire, but what makes the issues he relates in this section, "How Queer are Cyberspaces? Alternative Sexualities in Cyberspaces," so different from Chapter 4? Why is placed in sexploration and sexploitation, with cybersex, porn and child pornography, with "teens and young adults just discovering their sexual identities" in online spaces when the issues/hate facing queer persons online are those that are similar to gender, race, and ability?