The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online
- lenses of Black feminism, political economy, cultural studies, critical theory
- need for theoretical and methodological approaches to intervene as the organisation of social relations in digital tech
- how power relations are organised through technologies?
- race as an ‘instrument of social, geographic and economic control’ (Guinier, 2004)
- acknowledging both the importance of individual agency and the institutional forces that shape and reflect us
- scholars calling for analysis of power relations beyond individual variables (Davis, 1983)
- ‘a field of study situated within the power relations that it studies’,
- an analytical approach and critical praxis to inform social justice projects.
- A constellation of knowledge projects (Collins, 2015)
- ‘intersectional critical race technology studies’, a means of doing a closer reading of the politics if the Internet from representation to infrastructure
- denaturalisation of the impartiality of hardware and software
- ‘what the Web means’ in differential ways, in ways imbued with power
- examine how information, records and evidence is weaponised over the marginalised
- Black women and girls are ‘racially engaged’ through algorithmic imperatives that foreground profits
- how under acknowledging culturally situated and gendered information technologies are affecting the possibilities of participation with/without the Internet
- profitability of racist narratives circulated online (Noble, 2014)
- Whiteness and maleness as default identities that define the culture of the Internet (Lipsitz, 1998; Kendall, 2002; Broch, 2011) and Whiteness as a fundamental property right in the US (Harris, 1995)
- commercial search engine (Google) profitting from hypersexualised misrepresentations of Black women and girls (Noble, 2013)
- racial landscape of adolescents online mental health and behaviour (Tyne, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2014)
Part 1: Cultural Values in the Machine
Section titled “Part 1: Cultural Values in the Machine”- dearth of research on intersectionality + technology
- need to approach techno-cultural beliefs from a structural perspective
- tech’s effects on perceptions of intellect, sociability, progress, culture, as mediated by tech
- within real-world cultural interactions rather than a future socio-political reality
- ICTs create social worlds that retain ideologies born of physical, temporal and social beliefs
- past cyberculture researchers worked hard to convince us otherwise (uncharitable framing but i see your point)
- hashtag ethnography
- white feminism online
- conditional visibility of Asian Americans
- online gossip of Black bloggers as ‘discourse of resistance’
- peer-to-peer networked TV for marginalised voices, YouTube
- racially underrepresented populations in Facebook Groups
- video game tropes in the context of racial violence and police brutality
Part 2: Cultural Values as the Machine
Section titled “Part 2: Cultural Values as the Machine”- addresses the materiality of the digital, the politics embedded in systems
- how cultural values are articulated through technology design in hardware and software
- don’t want to highlight technological determinist perspectives on society and culture
- tech can be understood as an amalgam of an artifact, the associated practises, and the beliefs of its users
- focused on the design of software and platforms
- examines politics, infrastructure and labour that supports them
- commercial content moderators, politics of acceptability
- intersectional political economic critique of online dating systems
- national censorship, Turkish state and Facebook/Twitter, political neutrality (nope) of social media companies
- Latina in STEM, invisible information labourers - hidden labour
- personification of virtual agents
- Internet as material infrastructure - the internet as physical infrastructure, media production and power
- media codes and dominant ideologies in social media