I found this week's reading to be one of the most captivating yet -- perhaps because the topics are involved so intimately with the human condition, health, desires, and emotions its most salient points of engagement.
The Gershon piece seemed to focus on an ideas the anthropologists coins as media ideologies. The concepts of media ideologies centers around the idea that users of technology, or rather media of communication, have distinctive paradigms regarding acceptable usage of a medium in terms of formality or informality. It is these often strongly held opinions that informs and impacts usage of various media by individual persons. This question of (un)acceptability and the formal versus information is examined in the context of romantic break-ups. What one partner might visualize as an acceptable method of break-up might be read as far too informal or disrespectful. The message sent through a given media might even be read as unbelievable, as seen in the case where a break up occurred through text when it was usually reserved for light-hearted jokes at someone's expense. In addition, individual preferences and beliefs regarding appropriate uses of media are often informed by what Gershon calls "idioms of practice," stating that people believe certain things about media and act upon them based off of established practices of an in-group. These groups include collections of friends, classmates, or work colleagues who together determine their own digital culture, the particularities of how they will communicate digitally with each other on a regular basis. According to Gershon, it is these idioms which are in conversation (literally) with each other and have the potential to give rise to a point of conflict. People involved in communication through digital media can look to past examples of someone else's communication in order to glean a sense of their media persona, in what contexts they might prefer one method versus another and the degree of formality they might attribute to it.
The Banner piece was a captivating one describing the process of women's experience of cyber-biosociality on the site Patients Like Me (PLM). According to Banner's analysis, this platform exists as a method for women to offer sentimental and emotional support on a "counterpublic" platform within narratives of medical mistreatment and negligence. She also discusses the ways in which women discuss how their illnesses, namely fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, affect their jobs, family life, and livelihood and subsequently seek solidarity online via sharing of illness experiences. It also offers women the ability to quantify themselves and become "informatic subjects" which other women can engage with virtually in order to gauge and assess their own cases against a litany of others. However, there appears to be a certain ulterior motive to this platform, and users seem to be used as a means, their own uploaded data being utilized for medical surveys and to obtain clinical trial users of new pharmaceuticals while working an easy system of informed consent (they indeed volunteer). In this way, the women on this website reaching out for support buy into a process where they are used as pawns in a system of biomedical development. In fact, PLM is very candid about this, saying its goal is to improve the biomedicine industry and to enable research. I wanted to be super critical, and then I remembered the trade-offs: the solidarity and sense of belongingness and affirmation when one sees people with the same symptoms as themselves. I wonder how these women feel about their data being used this way, if the "violation" of privacy is worth the pursuits online that can't be accomplished off platforms such as PLM.
Chapter 6 of Boellstorf's Coming of Age in Second Life was interesting because it talked about the new forms of intimacy which can arise in virtual worlds. Here, friendship appears to be the primary form of intimacy fostered inside SL. The prevalence of such friendships arises from the fact that a culture of freedom and egalitarianism abounds, where nobody is above or possesses more power than another. In doing so, we are able to create new forms of online intimacy, where people get to know each other without physically meeting, but often get to know each other fast. Friendships and love are highly accelerated, and people feel that they can get to know each other on a deep, intimate level, from the inside out. I took this to mean that an avatar, and a resident's comportment inside SL represents what a person would ideally envision him/herself as, or as some embodiment of their ideal essence, personality, etc that exists as an acting, moving figure within the world of SL. In this way, I suppose that people do have the potential to get to know each other well because while interacting, they are engaged with the idealized version of somebody's lived experience. The presence of the BDSM subculture was also of particular interest to me, I guess because it represents a kind of fringe that is able to be out in the open without shame in SL. Perhaps that explains why such a large presence exists there. Freedom of expression to be oneself in all aspects (personality and sexual) seems to be a recurrent theme here.
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