Institutions, Infrastructure and Information
I’m not exactly sure when in the last few months I first noticed Google’s subway advertising campaign, but whenever it was, I was immediately confused. The ads relate to Google’s Good to Know initiative and focus on privacy, security and netiquette. More than anything, the ads reminded me of seemingly well-intentioned and yet always-already obvious PSAs. But even assuming that Google is manifesting its Don’t Be Evil mantra through giving people a heads up about things like password security and the (alleged? ostensible?) reasons for locative functionality, the ads were weird. Were they proactively attempting to curry favor with at least semi-net savvy folk who use Google but have concerns about privacy? Or reactively working to deflect or dispel some form of anti-Google criticism?
Google is far from the first company to launch a subway ad campaign that’s perplexed me (how weird are these Tidy Cat ads??) and it wasn’t until I happened to see the Google ads right next to a series of promotions from the MTA (simultaneously documenting and advertising progress on various station, line and service improvements) that I started to think about the ads in terms of institutions and infrastructure. To back up for a second, I am not an urban studies scholar, but my work on immigration and information practices in city space often leads in that direction. In particular, I’ve been puzzling through issues of information, navigation and infrastructure. A few weeks ago, my advisor and I were talking about interviews from my dissertation, and I mentioned the MTA as an NYC institution that migrational individuals learn to navigate. Mor objected to my labeling it an institution, at which point I suggested that it was, instead, infrastructure.
The line between the institutions and infrastructure is not always all that solid. According to Mary Douglas, “Institutional structures [are] forms of informational complexity” (p. 48). where past experience with institutions encodes expectations, thus shaping rules of behaviour and controlling (or managing) moments of uncertainty. In contrast, Bowker and Star argued that infrastructure refers to “hybrid creations of work practice and information medium” (p. 132). In reviewing these texts to disambiguate institution from infrastructure, I was struck by the use of the term information for both. Douglas argued that ”nothing else but institutions can define sameness, similarity is an institution” (p. 55), meaning that institutions are tied up in expectation, sameness and predictability, manifest (partly but significantly) through information about what an institution does and how to interact with it. For Bowker and Star, infrastructures embed modes of practice, of informational acumen, where knowing what to do with any given piece of information speaks to the organizational infrastructure at play.
By using a form of communication that echoed a PSA and a progress report, Google and the MTA obscure the extent to which they are institutions and position on themselves as infrastructure. We’re used to thinking about the politics of institutions, much less so (I think) than we are in the politics of infrastructure (Langdon Winner and Bruno Latour notwithstanding). Some of the SMC folks have been working on the ethics of search engine algorithms, and it’s partly because I’ve seen some of those conversations unfold that I can’t help thinking about it here. MTA subway ads broadcast themes of progress and improvement, but for whom? Other than extending a general benevolence to other New Yorkers (and during a busy rush hour on the A train, I wouldn’t bank on that kind of goodwill) why do I feel a sense of satisfaction at the MTA’s announcement of renovating stations I don’t use and services I don’t need? These ads act as both a justification for the burden (of time, money and patience) placed on New Yorkers who take trains, subways and ferries as part of their daily urban lives. When Google points out the affordances of its security precautions and its SNS as socially responsible, it elides the other kinds of ethics at stake in daily uses of Google products. In both sets of ads, the MTA and Google present information about themselves as infrastructure, rather than as institutions.
I think part of my confusion about the Google ads and part of the sneakiness of the MTA campaign is tied up in the extent to which they encourage thinking of the MTA as co-constructed with daily acts of moving through the city, and conflating Google with daily acts of being online. What’s happening is an institutionalization of infrastructure, an obfuscation of the ways in which daily practices of information and technology are bound up in the ethical, in issues of access and in privilege. I don’t think I’m completely satisfied with how to divide institutions from infrastructure, but I do think I’ve worked out an awareness of how the performativity of information can conflate the two. I’m used to thinking of daily practices of technology as indicative of privilege, but tend, I think, to be less aware of institutional coopting of infrastructure’s perceived impartiality. Not, perhaps, the goal of the Good to Know campaign nor the MTA progress ads, but useful as a researcher of information practices, social context and urban space.
P.S. Shout out to Aaron Trammell for helping me work through some of these ideas over a Cinco de Mayo beer!
Microsoft Research opens New York City lab
I am giddy with pleasure to share Jennifer Chayes’ announcement that Microsoft Research is opening a new lab in New York City that will be filled with computational social science types. The New England lab that I call home combines qualitative social science, empirical economics, machine learning, and mathematics. We’ve long noted the need for data science types who can bridge between us. And now, to my utter delight, a new lab is emerging to complement our lab. The folks who are going to serve as the founding members of the new NYC lab are computer scientists, physicists, experimental economists, and data scientists. Many of them are interested in social network analysis and big data problems but – or shall I say crucially – they all see the value in collaborating with ethnographers. In other words, we’re building a cross-lab team that’ll create new possible interdisciplinary collaborations that make my heart go pitter patter.
The new team will include Duncan Watts, David Pennock, John Langford, Jake Hofman, Dan Goldstein, Sid Suri, David Rothschild, and Sharad Goel. For the social scientists out there who were oohing and awing when we announced that MSR hired Nancy Baym, Kate Crawford, and Mary Gray, just imagine the amazing connections that can occur when you mix these computational social scientists and the great group of researchers we have at the Social Media Collective. ::giggle::bounce:: <evil grin>
Here’s to new relationships connected through Amtrak!
Is Anonymous vetting presidential candidates?
Anonymous Hispano's announcement on Twitter
Anonymous Hispano, the Spanish-speaking branch of the famous hacker collective, issued a statement a few weeks ago announcing that, despite their efforts, they “could not find any evidence of corruption” to incriminate the Mexican presidential candidate López Obrador. The group prefaced their message by clarifying that they “do not have any partisan agenda and do not support any one” of the candidates. The message ended with an invitation to followers to send evidence of corruption; a second tweet quickly followed, inviting the public to submit evidence of corruption of any candidate, suggesting specific hashtags for each of them.
The newspaper El Economista spoke with collective members and reported that Anonymous Hispano acknowledged having hacked into López’s financial accounts without finding any transactions that would indicate wrong-doing:
[T]the collective broke into the computer systems linked to payments or any kind of money transactions, or political influence, stored in the digital files of AMLO [the candidate's initials] and his colleagues, and found nothing incriminating him, so the collective is still looking.
The statement received a fair amount of attention beyond the Twitter-sphere, reaching influential political blogs, Reddit, and mainstream news media.
Beyond the supposed lack of evidence against this particular politician, or whether Anonymous actually hacked into his accounts, there are a few aspects of this story that I find particularly interesting.
First, the coverage of Anonymous’s evidence-free statement might indicate a substantial amount of symbolic capital accumulated by this group. For example, they could have released evidence of their breaking into the candidate’s accounts; however, they confined themselves to a statement on Twitter. In the sciences, negative results are almost never reported, and more generally, the lack of evidence for something does not prove or disprove anything. So why did they get media coverage? One possible explanation is that Anonymous, after a long (by Internet standards) history of hacktivism, has accumulated the necessary credibility to pull this off. Do they have enough symbolic capital to achieve this in a country with stronger institutions? What would have happened if they had issued a similar statement about a US presidential candidate?
Second, an obvious question: why this candidate? One possible answer is that this could be a means to publicly vet and, in a way, endorse this candidate by using their tools at their disposal. It is hard to know if there a direct link between Anonymous Hispano and the rest of Anonymous, but it would be interesting to see if this signals a direct incursion on mainstream politics in the future.
Third, does this represent a move from public shaming to public endorsement? For the most part, Anonymous hacktivism has focused on public shaming by “doxing” government officials and corporations. I think this might be the first time Anonymous has changed their method, resembling a role more common to governmental transparency organizations. It was interesting that none of the reactions I read raised any questions about the ethics of hacking into politicians’ accounts.
One thing is clear to me: traditional institutions need to figure out how to grapple with Anonymous, or collectives inspired by them, as their presence and political power is only going to increase in the future.
Cross posted at Culture Digitally.
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Why Data Havens Don’t Work
Seven miles off the English coast in the North Sea stands a steel and concrete platform that was, for a time, the world’s most impractical data center. A pair of American entrepreneurs launched HavenCo in 2000 as a “data haven”–a place for gamblers, freethinkers, and dissidents to put their bits far beyond the reach of censorious governments. They set up shop offshore there because since 1967 the platform’s occupants, a former pirate radio broadcaster and his family, have called it the independent Principality of Sealand; they promised to uphold HavenCo’s right to take on the rest of the world’s governments.
It didn’t work–and the reasons it didn’t tell us something important about the Internet. In a pair of recent articles in the popular Ars Tecnica and the scholarly Illinois Law Review, I explore the history of Sealand and HavenCo and conclude that “HavenCo failed not from too much law, but too little.” A remote island “nation” with a single-digit population can’t offer the kind of security and legal stability that a serious business venture requires. HavenCo, by its very nature, couldn’t turn to any other legal system in the world for protection without conceding the very point on which its existence depened: the sovereignty of Sealand.
HavenCo is long gone, but the dream lingers on. Napster clones, the Pirate Bay, and even WikiLeaks have talked about putting servers on Sealand, in the hopes of escaping from what they see as repressive national law. But freedom doesn’t come from some farcical aquatic ceremony. It comes from building institutions resilient enough to stand up to power, and self-restraining enough not to misuse the power they themselves posess. That requires engagement in politics, social movements, legal processes, and society–everything that HavenCo rejected.
In addition to its larger lessons, the Sealand/HavenCo story is also a ripping good nautical yarn. Roy Bates, Sealand’s founder and Prince, is a scalawag of the first order, and Sealand has always reflected his charismatic scheming. He seized it by force in 1967, then defended it with molotov cocktails against competing pirate broadcasters. He’s held on to his de facto independence for decades thanks to a native genius for working the press. HavenCo’s founders were a bunch of libertarian computer geeks, but in their love of liberty, fondness for firepower, and prowess at publicity, they were very much kindred spirits. As Bates put it when talking to a reporter in 1978, “We may die rich, we may die poor. But we certainly shall not die of boredom.”
And no, this post is not an April Fool’s joke.
- Short vrsion: Death of a Data Haven: Cypherpunks, WikiLeaks, and the World’s Smallest Nation, Ars Technica, March 28, 2012
- Long version: Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law,2012 Illinois Law Review 405
Reflections on Fear in a Networked Society
I’ve been trying to work through some ideas on how fear operates in a networked society. At Webstock in New Zealand, I gave a talk called “Culture of Fear + Attention Economy = ?!?!” Building on this, I gave a talk at SXSW called “The Power of Fear in Networked Publics.” While my thinking in this arena is still relatively nascent, I wanted to make available what I’ve thought through so far in the hopes that you have feedback and critique.
- If you want to engage with my ideas in video form, the Webstock version is available here: “Culture of Fear + Attention Economy = ?!?!”
- If you want to read the written form, I made my SXSW crib available here: “The Power of Fear in Networked Publics”
Enjoy!
Mike Daisey lied to us – but how much you think he lied depends on how you think about ‘truth’.
Some background: in his one-man show ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,’ and a highly popular This American Life episode, Daisey tells several stories about how Apple manufactures products in China. He presents stories—powerful in their details and emotional resonance—not just as examples but exemplars. That is, they aren’t meant to be seen as isolated incidents with limited scope. In his show and on This American Life, he presents them as rich and rigorous accounts that are typical of wide-spread practices and systemic problems for Apple and other Western manufacturers. The problem is, as This American Life painstakingly detailed in its hour-long retraction this weekend, much of Daisey’s story wasn’t true.
He fabricated sources, exaggerated the number of people he talked to, invented conversations with his translator, presented his own age-estimates as well-sourced truths. He seems to have intentionally used This American Life and its genre of communication—long-form journalism that works to verify its sources and claims—to underpin a different kind of communication: theatrical storytelling meant to evoke emotional connections to states of the world the storyteller believes to be true.
Reactions [e.g., 1, 2, 3] to Daisey’s fabrications have been varied. Some say he’s simply from a different tradition and is being judged unfairly. He’s a storyteller who personally believed something to be true, took too much license in his retellings, and erred in lying to This American Life. Essentially, he’s a storyteller who strayed too far from his craft and mislabeled his work. He’s a less skilled, modern day version of Upton Sinclair who didn’t carefully enough distinguish his love of his subject from his responsibilities when doing genre-bending work. He’s still saying something that’s essentially true (backed up by NYT reports) and we shouldn’t let his personal failings distract us from the larger goal of labour reform. In one respect he failed because he lied; but in another sense he succeeded because his lies resonated enough to draw attention to a situation we feel to be true.
Others say that labour reform must be a fact-based endeavour that aims to affect policy. Thus, storytellers who work in this space (performers and journalists alike) cannot ever play fast and loose with the truth or walk fine lines between genres. Reform will come only from rigorously researched facts that can cause companies to change their behaviour. It matters a great deal that Daisey strayed from the theatre and into the press: the theatre is where emotions might resonate, but the press is where facts can convince. Daisey’s failings make it easier for manufacturers to earn a pass on labour compliance because he’s shown that advocates let their love of storytelling overtake their interest in reform.
There’s a lot here to untangle, but what I want to focus on is this knotty question of “truth”. This is a huge simplification, but pragmatist philosophers (people like John Dewey, Charles Peirce, William James) essentially believed that truth—social truths, not stuff like 2+2=4—cannot live in the head of any one individual or system of knowledge. Essentially, the very idea of truth (what people understand to be a fact) is tightly linked to epistemology (how people come to know). Truth is what we find it impossible not to believe. It’s what our minds, hearts, friends, families, classes, races, ethics, ideologies, histories, and imagined futures demand that must believe, if we are to be functioning people in society. Truth is what makes us act, makes us do things in the world to achieve change. Truth isn’t a mirror of reality, it’s what we can’t doubt.
The pragmatists help us see three levels of truth in the whole Daisey debacle. The first—a mundane kind of level—is about the details of Daisey’s narrative. Did he talk to 3 people or 10 people? Did he talk with someone who had used n-hexane or not? Was the girl he talked to 12- or 13-years old? These details matter for sure. The second type is focused on what different genres have to say about truth. Is a theatre story that makes us feel something “true” because the emotions are real, regardless of their origin? Is a journalistic story “true” because we trust news organizations to follow fact-checking conventions that we might not understand first-hand, but that tradition, professional scrutiny and investigative reporting outcomes have convinced us are the gold standard of fact-based public storytelling? Do we trust Daisey more or less to influence our beliefs if we know which genres and traditions he’s using?
The third type of truth, though, is where pragmatists are the most helpful and where internet-based learning is trickiest: what do we want to do because of the story? What is it about the mix of emotion, evidence, argument, and narrative compels us to action – to believe something or do something? What do we want to be true? What do our social worlds make it hard for us to doubt? What makes us act because of—or in spite of—the story? Would we let ourselves believe that Daisey is telling us about a problem that does or doesn’t exist?
This whole incident is definitely about journalism, storytelling, labour practices, and fact-checking. But it’s also about how belief, trust, and doubt intersect to make us make things true for ourselves. On the internet there are countless sources, genres, stories, traditions, networks, and appeals to authority. The case of Mike Daisey, Apple, and This American Life isn’t about the internet per se; but it does serve as an examplar for thinking about contemporary truth-making.
The Daisey incident can help us understand why we believe and why we act. (It means, for example, being able to distinguish between the three kinds of truth-making described above the next time an incident like this happens.) Such beliefs and actions are at the heart of internet-based ways of knowing and the accompanying shifts away from traditional sources of power and truth-making. Being a good pragmatist means always being open to questioning not only what you believe but how you believe. It not only means knowing how to work across multiple epistemologies (when to use journalism and when to rely on theatre, when to tell stories and when to use statistics, when to use an example as an exemplar) but understanding the impact that different ways of knowing can have on your openness to believing later what you might doubt now.
(The pragmatist philosophers probably didn’t anticipate being so relevant today, but they’d surely have been open to considering the possibility.)
Putting aside for a moment questions of labour reform, Daisey’s lies, journalistic traditions, and genres of storytelling: what is it that’s impossible for you to doubt in this story? Where does this impossibility come from? What needs to change for you to doubt a little more – and thus be a different kind of certain?
Reflecting on Dharun Ravi’s conviction
On Friday, Dharun Ravi – the Rutgers student whose roommate Tyler Clementi killed himself – was found guilty of privacy invasion, tampering with evidence, and bias intimidation (a hate crime). When John Palfrey and I wrote about this case three weeks ago, I was really hopeful that the court proceedings would give clarity and relieve my uncertainty. Instead, I am left more conflicted and deeply saddened. I believe that the jury did their job, but I am not convinced that justice was served. More disturbingly, I think that the symbolic component of this case is deeply troubling.
In New Jersey, someone can be convicted of bias intimidation for committing an act…
- with the express purpose of intimidating an individual or group…
- knowing that the offense would cause an individual or group to feel intimidated…
- with which the individual or group on the receiving end believes that they were targeted…
… because of their race, color, religion, gender, handicap, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.
In Ravi’s trial, the jury concluded that Ravi neither intended to intimidate Clementi nor believed that his acts would make Clementi feel intimidated because of his sexuality. Yet, the jury did conclude that, based on computer evidence, Clementi probably felt intimidated because of his sexuality.
As someone who wants to rid the world of homophobia, this conviction leaves me devastated. I recognize the symbolic move that this is supposed to make. This is supposed to signal that homophobia will not be tolerated. But Ravi wasn’t convicted of being homophobic, but, rather, creating the “circumstances” in which Clementi would probably feel intimidated. In other words, Ravi is being punished for living in a culture of homophobia even though there’s little evidence to suggest that he perpetuated it intentionally. As Mary Gray has argued, we are all to blame for the culture of homophobia that has resulted in this tragedy.
I can’t help but think of Clementi’s parents in light of this. By all accounts, their reaction to their son’s confession that he was gay did more to intimidate Clementi based on his sexuality than Ravi’s stupid act. Yet, I can’t even begin to imagine that the court would charge, let alone convict, Clementi’s distraught parents of a hate crime. ::shudder::
I can’t justify Ravi’s decision to invade his roommate’s privacy, especially not at a moment in which he would be extremely vulnerable. I also cannot justify Ravi’s decision to mess with evidence, even though I suspect he did so out of fear. But I also don’t think that either of these actions deserve 10 years of jail time or deportation (two of the options given to the judge). I don’t think that’s justice.
This case is being hailed for its symbolism, but what is the message that it conveys? It says that a brown kid who never intended to hurt anyone because of their sexuality will do jail time, while politicians and pundits who espouse hatred on TV and radio and in stump speeches continue to be celebrated. It says that a teen who invades the privacy of his peer will be condemned, even while companies and media moguls continue to profit off of more invasive invasions.
I’m also sick and tired of people saying that this will teach kids an important lesson. Simply put, it won’t. No teen that I know identifies their punking and pranking of their friends and classmates as bullying, let alone bias intimidation. Sending Ravi to jail will do nothing to end bullying. Yet, it lets people feel like it will and that makes me really sad. There’s a lot to be done in this realm and this does nothing to help those who are suffering every day.
The jury did its job. The law was followed. I have little doubt that Ravi did the things that he was convicted of doing. But I am not celebrating because I don’t think that this case made the world a better place. I think that it simply destroyed another life.
To many people unfamiliar with Invisible Children, the Kony 2012 campaign looked like a brilliant example of “viral” media spread. The center of the campaign is a compelling 30-minute film where a father talks to his son about the evil practices of the Ugandan war lord Joseph Kony. The father makes it clear that his number one goal is to make Kony a household name in order to “raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” In the days that followed, critics stepped up and critiqued the simplistic narrative (and colonial rhetoric) put forward by Invisible Children. (If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend Ethan Zuckerman’s “Unpacking Kony 2012.”) Yet, what about the media campaign itself? Activists (and brand marketers) everywhere are in awe of what appears to be a magical campaign that came out of nowhere. But there’s more than meets the eye here.
- how pre-existing networks helped create the viral spread;
- how people targeted celebrities to garner attention philanthropy. There are many important aspects of this blog post, but I want to focus on the role of youth in this process.
Invisible Children is not a new organization. They have spent tremendous effort over the last decade reaching out to youth. They have widespread reach in high schools, colleges, and churches throughout the United States. Many youth are (uncritically) committed to helping stop bad things from happening to other children in Africa. Invisible Children has focused for years on the value of attention philanthropy. They work diligently to do whatever it takes to get people to pay attention to bad things happening in the world. They raise money to raise attention. They leverage celebrities and Hollywood film tactics to reach wide audiences in a hope to activate them to create more attention (and, thus, both funding and political pressure). They engage directly with churches, where word-of-mouth networks in the U.S. are strongest. For the last decade, they have worked on creating films and bringing in celebrities to raise attention to what is happening in Africa, first in Sudan (Darfur) and then in Uganda.
Much to the horror of many human rights activists, Invisible Children is not known for spreading accurate information as much as it’s known for spreading information widely.
Most of how they’ve gotten the message out is by engaging youth. Earlier films have been shown directly to youth (in schools and churches) and youth are actively encouraged to join the organization and participate in their campaigns. They provide toolkits for participation with the primary goal being to amplify attention to a particular issue.
The stories that Invisible Children create in their media put children at the front and center of them. And, indeed, as Neta Kliger-Vilenchik and Henry Jenkins explain, youth are drawn to this type of storytelling. Watch Kony 2012 from the perspective of a teenager or college student. Here is a father explaining to a small child what’s happening in Africa. If you’re a teen, you see this and realize that you too can explain to others what’s going on. The film is powerful, but it also models how to spread information. The most important thing that the audience gets from the film is that they are encouraged to spread the gospel. And then they are given tools for doing that. Invisible Children makes it very easy to share their videos, republish their messages on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr, and “like” them everywhere. But they go beyond that; they also provide infrastructure to increase others’ attention.
Invisible Children knew that it was targeting culture makers and youth. And Twitter users no less. Indeed, check out the list of “culture makers” that they encouraged youth to target. It’s an interesting mix of liberals (George Clooney, Ellen Degeneres, Bono), conservatives (Rick Warren, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly), geeks (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg), big philanthropy names (Oprah, Angelina Jolie, Warren Buffett), and pop stars (Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber). Plus others. They also recommended contacting political figures. (Interestingly, they start with G.W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice and don’t list Obama at all.) As Lotan points out, these celebrities got pummeled with thousands upon thousands of messages from fans, predominantly young fans. And many of them responded.
When celebrities receive this kind of onslaught from their fans – and, especially their younger fans – they pay attention. And so they post out about this. This is exactly where the fuzzy feelings towards attention philanthropy kick in. Young people feel like they did something by getting a celebrity to pay attention to a cause. A celebrity feels like they’ve done some by talking about the cause to a wide audience. And, voila, Invisible Children taps into the attention economy to get their message out.
Yet, there’s more to this. It’s not just anyone who’s paying attention or a small cluster of people that are paying attention from which things radiate. This tag cloud from the SocialFlow blog represents the words that were in the bios of the accounts of those who posted about #stopkony or #kony2012.
Now, check out this network graph of the tweets:
The initial tweets that came out came from seemingly disconnected youth living in Midwestern and Southern towns who frequently refer to Christian values in their bios. In other words, these tweets appear to be coming from communities that Invisible Children had already activated prior to launching Kony 2012. Not only did they then each turn on, but they spread the messages to their friends. This allowed the conversation to “pop” and then spread. The one profile that does have a lot of cluster is the Invisible Children profile, highlighting how their audience was indeed ready to respond to them. But you also see tight clusters that geographically disparate who bridged from the organization and then spread in their local community with a level of intense density. With this kind of graph structure, it’s not surprising that it quickly became a trending topic on Twitter. And then, it could easily spread. Attention begets attention.
I’m especially intrigued by Gilad’s note on the role of religious youth in all of this. Gilad has only begun looking at the data so he doesn’t have a good scope on all of what’s happening, but I’m not surprised by the presence of religious language in the accounts of those who tweeted this message. I very much suspect that a lot of what made this pop has to do with strong pre-existing Christian networks. I’m always surprised at how often people in the tech community regularly underestimate the power of religious networks.
Architecturally, this is a brilliant campaign. It’s really too bad that the message is so deeply flawed. (Again, if you haven’t read Ethan’s post, read it now.)
The fact that privileged folks – including white American youth – can spread messages like this is wonderful, but my hunch is that they’re structurally positioned to spread information farther and wider than those who are socially marginalized. What happens when they try to speak out on behalf of marginalized voices instead of helping marginalized voices be heard? I’m really bothered by how Kony 2012 is all about white people – and primarily white Americans – talking about what should be done in a foreign country to help “poor black people.” I’m glad that NPR and a few other news organizations have sought out Ugandan/African perspectives, but none of those perspectives have broken through the tornado of chaos that has followed this event. So I can’t help but wonder… with the rise of attention philanthropy, are we going to see a new type of attention colonialism?
Is blocking pro-ED content the right way to solve eating disorders?
Warning: This post deals with eating disorder and self-harm content and is potentially triggering.
Following up on Tarleton’s terrific post on moderating Facebook comes Tumblr’s announcement that it will no longer allow pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) or pro-self-harm blogs on the site.
Active Promotion of Self-Harm. Don’t post content that actively promotes or glorifies self-injury or self-harm. This includes content that urges or encourages readers to cut or mutilate themselves; embrace anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders; or commit suicide rather than, e.g., seek counseling or treatment for depression or other disorders. Online dialogue about these acts and conditions is incredibly important; this prohibition is intended to reach only those blogs that cross the line into active promotion or glorification. For example, joking that you need to starve yourself after Thanksgiving or that you wanted to kill yourself after a humiliating date is fine, but recommending techniques for self-starvation or self-mutilation is not.
(The remainder of this post focuses on eating disorder content, because it’s what I know the most about. I’d love to hear more from people familiar with self-harm communities.)
Pro-ED content has existed on the internet for many years, and it has been studied by many researchers. It is primarily created and consumed by girls and young women, ages 13-25. There is evidence that the viewing of pro-ED websites (pro-ana, anorexia, and pro-mia, bulimia) produces negative effects in college-age women — lower self-esteem and perception of oneself as “heavier” (Bardone-Cone & Cass, 2007). But pro-ED websites have been sensationalized in the media as cults that encourage young women to kill themselves, even ending up as the case-of-the-week on Boston Legal.
At the same time, the cultural pressure on young women to conform to normative body types is intense. In Am I Thin Enough Yet? The Cult of Thinness and the Commercialization of Identity, feminist sociologist Sharlene Hess Biber looks at the complex interactions between media, schools, peers, family, and the health and fitness industry that systemically undermine young women’s self confidence, send the message that appearance is more important than intelligence or personality, and emphasize the importance of thinness overall. Often, the messages found on pro-ana or pro-mia sites– such as “nothing tastes as good as thin feels”, attributed to Kate Moss but actually a Weight Watchers slogan that has been around for decades– are extraordinarily similar to those found in magazines like Self and Women’s Health, or on websites like My Fitness Pal or Sparkpeople that promote weight loss in a “healthy” way. These media emphasize different weight loss techniques, but the message is the same: it is very important to be thin and conform to an attractive, normative body ideal.
Pro-ED websites are a female subculture, with their own vocabulary, customs, and norms. Moreover, the women who frequent these sites are well aware that their practices are stigmatized. In general, women with eating disorders go to great lengths to hide them from friends and families. This is primarily for two reasons: one, they want to keep losing weight and are worried that they may be forced into treatment, and two, they are afraid of being ridiculed or called out by others. The anonymous or pseudonymous nature of pro-ED sites allows these participants an outlet for their social isolation, and (to a certain extent) emotional support from others going through the same experiences that they are.
Jeannine Gailey, a sociologist of deviance, wrote a paper on pro-ED websites using ethnographic methods. She concludes:
They need a place where they can share their stories and fears with others who are similarly minded and have had comparable experiences. They, as Dias put it [another ethnographic researcher of pro-ana sites, paper here], are seeking a sanctuary. The internet provides the women with both a sanctuary and a medium in which to express the sensations and intense emotions they experience as they struggle to maintain control over their bodies and lives…. The women’s narratives I explored indicate that they participate in the central features of edgework, namely pushing oneself to the edge, testing the limits of both their bodies and minds, exercising particular skills that require ‘innate talent’ and mental toughness, and feelings of self-actualization or omnipotence.
Gailey frames EDs as “edgework,” a concept from criminology/deviance that describes practices of voluntary risk-taking, like skydiving, rock climbing, ‘extreme sports’, stock-trading, unprotected sex, and illegal graffiti. The skills Gailey describes as part of edgework are similar to those emphasized by other body-related extreme communities, such as those devoted to bodybuilding, crossfit, veganism, and paleo dieting. On such communities, members swap tips, ask for support, show progress, share information and share vocabularies and normative practices.
Obviously, Tumblr isn’t focusing on any of these communities. I’m not arguing that eating disorders aren’t dangerous, or even that they’re potentially empowering. They are not. But the focus on young women’s online practice as deviant, pathological, and quasi-illegal is in line with a long history. Young women and their bodies are often the locus of control of social panics, from teen pregnancies to virginity to obesity to dressing “slutty”.
More importantly, Tumblr banning this content won’t do anything to make it go away. It does take Tumblr off the hook, but even the quickest search for self-harm or thinspo (serious trigger warning) finds thousands of posts, many heartbreaking in their raw honesty. One Tumblr writes:
if tumblr blocks all our blogs then things will be worse. off than they were before, we’ll feel alone again, outcasts! Who can we share our problems with if our blogs have been taken off us? We share our deepest and most darkest secrets on here and if our blogs are taken where are we supposed to put our feelings? They will build up inside of us and things will get worse and worse. Well done tumblr you bunch of arseholes, you’re going to make things worse.
Pragmatically, many of the thinspo content has simply migrated to Pinterest. Others have password-protected their blogs and spread the password to people in the community.
Eating disorder prevention needs to be structural as well as medical. Realistically, eating disorders aren’t going anywhere as long as we have a complex set of mediated images and discursive tropes that pin the importance of young women on their bodies. These issues exist on a continuum that includes everything from Shape magazine and The Biggest Loser to well-meaning anti-childhood obesity initiatives. Young women participating in pro-ED communities are acting upon messages they get from many other places in their lives. While there is no agreed-upon way of dealing with pro-ED communities– and it’s great that Tumblr is going to implement PSA-type ads that appear on searches for these terms– there are more productive interventions that can be made. We must understand the reasons these young women are in such pain and, more importantly, be willing to engage with these communities, rather than painting them as horrific or abhorrent.
Alice Marwick
Alex Leavitt
danah boyd
Mary L. Gray
Jessa Lingel
Laura Noren
Germaine Halegoua
Mike Ananny
Heather Casteel
Christian Sandvig
Tarleton Gillespie
Andrés Monroy-Hernández
Bernie Hogan
Kate Crawford
Nancy Baym
Limor Shifman
James Grimmelmann
