All posts tagged with 'Internet'
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Katie McGowan is a third-wave feminist, public radio advocate, media creator, and DIY craft enthusiast. She has spent four years with the Peabody award winning non-profit radio project StoryCorps, whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. In 2009, she facilitated the launch of StoryCorps’ 2nd annual National Day of Listening campaign, which asked everyone to spend the day after Thanksgiving recording and sharing our loved ones stories. In her free time, she builds databases, websites and most recently, YouTube instructional burlesque videos for the New York School of Burlesque. Her undergraduate degree is from Smith College and she is currently a candidate for a Masters degree in Media Studies at the New School. She hopes to continue advocating for progressive arts and new media communities throughout her professional career, bringing tools for grassroots media creation to a wide public audience.
“Leave Britney Alone!” Online Queer & Transgender Vlog Communities and the Commercial Implications of YouTube’s “Don’t Be Evil” Policies
This paper examines the current scholarship on virtual blog communities, most recently video bloggers (vlogs) where transgender communities and sexual identities are forming or making a presence on forums like YouTube. This paper examines the implications of creating a global transgender online vlogger community and the implications with which YouTube selectively includes or excludes these voices as part of their paying preferred partner program. The paper argues that while there are benefits among the transgender vlog community towards gender, sexual, and identity expression online, the commercial incentives provided by YouTube to create and promote content is within a normative and constrained view of sexual identity & expressions and therefore financially incentivize certain expressions and sexual behaviors over others. The paper borrows from critical feminist, media, and literature theories to attempt to understand a new media platform with little scholarship.
Colin Nusbaum is an aspiring media artist, theorist, and filmmaker. He received his B.A. degree in Political Theory from The College of Wooster and is pursuing an M.A. in Media Studies and Film at The New School. His research interests include Power and Governance, News Media, Cybernetics, Film Theory and Cinematic Practice. In addition to academic study, Colin also works professionally as an archival researcher and producer for documentary film and television in New York City, and he is a founding member of Rustbelts Media Group.
Cyber-Governmentality in Saudi Arabia: Filtering Online Content toward the Institutional Administration of Life
This report sets out to examine how the philosophical and practical roles of modern governments as online policing agencies can actively sustain institutionalized worldviews. The focus is on the role of Saudi Arabian Internet filters as disciplinary tools of governmentality, as outlined by Michel Foucault. The paper examines the impact of regulated information and social behavior online as it contributes to shared beliefs, values, and mores. Specifically, the research engages the case of Saudi Arabia as it overtly and admittedly impedes access to Internet content that is either socially or politically undesirable. The paper finds that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia engages in the exchange of power in ways that reflect a disciplinary society and a community that resists neo-liberal globalization. Ultimately, the goal of the report is to consider the aims of these of truth-crafting filters and consider citizens’ options for sanctioned dialogue or resistance.
Andrew Hare is currently completing his Master’s degree in Media Studies at The New School in New York City. His current work focuses on intersections between globalization, politics, philosophy and technology. Mr. Hare graduated from The University of Iowa with a Film degree and Art History minor. Mr. Hare works full-time as a primary research associate at an independent media research and consulting firm. He is also a regular contributor to gnovis, Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology blog.
A State-Run Internet: Developing an Authoritarian Internet Ontology of Control
While it is easy to relate the concepts of open source architecture and net neutrality as logical corollaries for the transformative and liberal possibilities of the Internet in the developed Western world, a vastly different Internet has begun to emerge during the last decade inside authoritarian societies. I argue this provides yet another major turning point in our understanding and conceptualization of the Internet. No longer must the Internet be seen as a media with a specific set of inherently democratic values, but instead as a broader socially constructed global technology strongly dependent on individual state’s ideological sovereignty. By taking a survey of the methods of control and the evolution of Internet governance, it appears that instead of moving towards democracy as many Westerners have predicted, the space is becoming more authoritarian in many parts of the world.
In case studies taken from Iran, China, and Russia I’ll demonstrate that the implementation of a sophisticated and diverse set of IT controls can provide us with a model of how authoritarian power is structured and constructed online. The analysis uses a social construction of technology framework to uphold three theoretical assumptions about the ontology of the Internet in authoritarian countries. First, I posit that the Internet does not inherently favor any particular political morality or moral philosophy. Second, I argue the contemporary authoritarian state has the technology, resources, and institutional support to remain the primary motivating actor in a new media environment. Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, I prove that the Internet is being used in authoritarian society as an effective tool of coercion and dominance that serves to reinforce and legitimize the state’s ideological goals. Ultimately, I believe the development of Internet Technology in the authoritarian world provides a new working ontological model for understanding how a variegated technology can function and evolve alternatively around the world and how acting on this knowledge might shape the future of the global Internet.