#55, choose to be digitally productive rather than reactive

In 5 #hardtruths and 2 new pledges @#50 I wrote:

“Producing internet content, rather than simply consuming or sharing it, feels productive; in this time of desolation and destruction, good feelings and actions have real use and value.”

As much as I believe this—I said it—I’d like to use this format, another blog post, to develop some of the contradictions that underwrite my cliché, starting with some of the founding illogics of writing and reading in various internet formats. This is to say, one of the deepest paradoxes for me in this, and every online effort, is how the tight grip of digital architectures, capitalism, and other infrastructural truths that seed these platforms also produce norms for digital cultural production and consumption that both enliven and deaden all that we do here, and all that it might mean or matter:

• Twitter holds platitudes and their illustrative pix. Facebook is for emotion and its depletion. Instagram centers images and flattens their affect. And blogs are dead because the devil’s in the details (see the following two bullet points)
• Every morning I wake up and work on this project. There’s a lot of steps: I read the news and my various other feeds, choose a subject, write a post, find images and links, then move it to Facebook, Twitter, its website. This all takes real time and effort. I have to think hard. I know some people will read it, that it will last, and perhaps might even be returned to in the future at the end of its 100-day cycle of high-speed production. By the end of the process I feel invigorated. It has given my 100 first days under Trump some shape and purpose. I honor this feeling. It is mine.
• As the day continues, however, the underlying morass of truths regarding internet habits, uses, and infrastructures—and their linked contradictory feelings—begins to build. I am pretty sure only a small number of people engaging with this project actually read this far into the post (there’s too much other content competing for their precious time and energy, and it might not even be that interesting or useful to others. So be it. Plus, they’re finding it on platforms that dissuade their deep reading, but I was the one who put it there in the first place!). This makes me feel dejected and duped, like, why did I waste the time and energy? Then I think: do I write for others, anyway? what is it that I want or need from you? how much of this need and pressure and desire is baked into false promises of the internet, like I have or even need an “audience”? And why and how are those who are reading actually engaging with this, or any other internet project, anyway? I am pretty sure people only hit “like,” or maybe “share,” if I write a pithy title or share a meaning-rich photo, and also to signal to me that they are there (with me), which feels great for a second, with an intense buzzy warmness attached as good as caffeine, and then something sort of lousy, too, comes to bear, with a more lasting interior dig like a sucker-punch. I’d prefer for you to engage with me through my words, which we most likely will never do here (because of how the title or the picture that drew us together in the first place is such a small place from which to interact). So, I feel swindled, and worse still, that I am the biggest swindler of myself.
• Having this place for expression, “audience,” friends, interaction, validation, non-validation, the production and consumption of knowledge and culture, feels like something. It’s not a nothing. Here I am doing it. Yet, I know it is a sorry substitute for the building, engaged, place-based, interactions that sustain me and other people and movements. I have often called it (the production, movement, and connecting to and through well-made digital words and images) proto-political, a step toward well-being and world-changing but not those things themselves. But here I’ll go farther, and name it is a kind of proto-being, a half-life pointing to great possibility.
• Thus, the real use and value of producing internet content is the potentiality written into words and images and their reception: mine, yours, and ours. Online, alone together, we acknowledge to ourselves that we are here, and momentarily heard and seen, if not really in the ways that feel most human, or that might be most productive for change.

Now look at that! Without planing to, it appears I have just authored my own version of my 2nd #100hardtruths at halftime: Choose to know, name, and share your own internet truths. I feel good about that circularity for now.

See More:

• Zero Comments, Geert Lovink
• Blog Theory, Jodi Dean
• “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” Hito Steyerl
• #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy

 

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Why Don’t I Blog? On Internet Cultural Production in 2016

I started blogging here on August 21, 2007. At first, it was exhilarating and challenging. Blogging helped introduce me to a robust and complex life online. On May 29, 2012, now an old-hat, I blogged exhuberantly about the many affordances of that practice: Why Do I Blog? On (almost) 5 Years.

Today, nearly 9 years later, I blog again on a related  theme—why I don’t blog anymore. My last blog was almost a year ago! on the film Jason and Shirley, a serious piece of writing with a purpose and audience in mind. It went on to be re-blogged on Indiewire and then shared (on Facebook and Twitter) by its intended readership (fans [and critics] of Jason Holliday, Stephen Winter, Shirley Clarke, and queer black cinema). Like so many others in this moment of the Internet, I used this minor platform (WordPress) to efficiently move off it and onto other ones.

In the past few years many people—basically everybody—have noticed that the internet feels awkward, too. It is obviously completely surveilled, monopolized, and sanitized by common sense, copyright, control, and conformism. It feels as vibrant as a newly multiplexed cinema in the nineties showing endless reruns of Star Wars Episode 1. Was the internet shot by a sniper in Syria, a drone in Pakistan, or a tear gas grenade in Turkey? Is it in a hospital in Port Said with a bullet in its head? Did it commit suicide by jumping out the window of an Information Dominance Center? But there are no windows in this kind of structure. And there are no walls. The internet is not dead. It is undead and it’s everywhere. Hito Steryl

Thus, with deserved hesitancy, some humor, and I hope a little humbleness, I will attempt to briefly outline why I have absolutely no reason to blog this here in the world of myself and you, the undead (except that I will capture my thoughts, I suppose, perhaps for my own use later), and about how strange and silly, really, it feels to today be in this form and format that is everywhere and nowhere. These conditions, or lack-of-affordances, tell me a great deal about my own current (critical) Internet-practices (hello to self!):

• This format is too long: in length/time to read, in length/time to write. In the past few years, the time-span and page-space of Internet activity has radically constricted.
• I don’t have an audience (if I ever did). When I was an active blogger, as is true for all social media, a significant amount of my labor was not actually spent on writing but on reading and linking: building and nurturing my audience and connections. I never had a large readership, or a particularly active one, nor did I seek one. I was thoroughly pleased and fed by the loyal interlocutors who grew with me.
• I don’t read blogs. There is too much writing on the Internet and I am overwhelmed. Where I used to cherish going to my blog-reader, almost daily, to get access to smart thinking by people I respect who were writing about things I cared about, I would rather die than read my blogroll. That (now unlooked at) list fills me with dread and sadness and shame. This is a matter of volume. I can’t comprehend all that is there that I might need to know. And I do read! I even read in long-form; but I need someone, anyone, to manage it for me, and yet here I am, alone (with you?)
• I read and read and read and then, I don’t write. Given the deluge of writing on today’s Internet, my time and labor is devoted to volume management of others’ writing. I use Facebook for this (hypocritical, I know: but oddly, even as my “friends” grow, this corporate holding-bin feels just small-enough to breath). Many of my colleagues and peers use Twitter for this, which is probably just-right, but is simply too fast and constricted for me. I have drawn that personal limit, simply as a matter of tempo of compression. I can’t engage in that space without my blood-pressure rising unnaturally and in ways that feel unhealthy.
• I don’t write because I don’t have time, what with so much to read, but also because I am humbled and overwhelmed by the cascade of well-thought, beautifully-penned, biting, scathing, intelligent, sensitive, personal, political, erudite, simple, short and long prose that envelopes me. Where I once felt authorized to contribute (by way of my training, my commitments, my engagements in my sub-fields of choice: activist media on the Internet, video, and film, especially around AIDS, queer and feminist issues, black queer expression, YouTube, anti-war and anti-Zionist activism), like my voice might be needed, I am now awash in a sea of as-prepared and as-able and ever-more-ready voices. Whatever more needs to be said?
• There’s too much here, so I want to get off the Internet. I didn’t then. I do now. I’d rather talk about it. With a friend. In a room. With my students. At dinner. Hey, that doesn’t mean I actually do get off the Internet, or that I don’t know the affordances of my time and labor spent here, but I will prioritize not doing things here whenever possible even as this gets harder and harder to do.
• Because here I’m nothing more than a consumer and a commodity, even when I write, and always when I read, click and share. I do not want to self-brand and never did. I do not want to make more connections; I feel too connected. I do not want to hear more of myself. I have become too present too myself online.
• Instead, lately I’ve found myself working to make more monumental, more collaborative, more impossible mixed-reality things and better yet experiences where I can reside, feel, and enjoy locally and communally, online and off, even as, and in response to, the exhaustion that so many link to our current “digital tailspin.” I hope to make breakable, temporary, incomprehensible, untweetable, nonsearchable, daily and local and shared initiatives. Good luck with that. And anyways, this is a very weird desire. “Welcome to digital realism. the 99% have all become survival artists in our austerity networks … the content potlatch is over. You share — but who cares?” (Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz)
• Yes, in our world where everyone is making, I reiterate, we all lack audiences. With so much cultural production, abundance and exhaustion produce our current climate where any invitation to engage with another’s work, online or off, leads to a quick set of ready, friendly, loving responses … articulating regrets: I’d love to but am just too busy (or exhausted) to attend.
• This isolating digital busy-work and exhaustion, leads us into the strangest and most cynical and sorry spirals yet, where we crave easier interactions, faster connections, effortless interfaces. Quick hot links, breezy hashtags, dashing fleeting likes, these feel right and yet also utterly wrong. Obviously, reading, sharing, tweeting, and chatting (within corporate Firewalls) are forms of activity. And sure, I do them all the time. I blogged earlier: “Activism that happens only on the Internet–like posting, reading, liking, and linking on Facebook–is not without use or value (for movements or individuals) but is proto-political, and needs to be followed up (for things of real consequence, like a war) with engagements in the world (of media): like protests, conversations, and even media secession.” (To and From Facebook: Being Together in our World of War).
• I don’t blog, she blogs, because I’m exhausted by what I would have to say in the face of what I have already said. I could endlessly link to myself and my friends but I’d rather making something new with you.

YouTube Feminism: Not Medium but Métier

I taught Learning from YouTube (LFYT) for the fifth time this year. The first iteration was in 2007, fresh into the early years of the still short life of YouTube and social media more generally. I taught the course again this semester, after a several year hiatus, because I was interested in two things: accounting for what has changed in these 8 years as well as for the confounding relations between social (in)justice and social media (which I have reflected upon twice at Lady Justice a part of New Criticals committed to “reconsidering gender and technology in the age of the distributed network”).

While the most obvious changes on YouTube are 1) its unimaginable and consistently escalating scale (seemingly as large as the world, or at least the world of media, more on this later), which itself is connected to the ever shortening time-scale of memes (see video above by LFYT student, Samantha Abernathey, one of several videos made for 2015’s Meme Project) and 2) the marked consolidations of its professional and financial infrastructures and outputs (allowing for new modes of mediamaking and their monetization that sit precociously between amateur and expert media and which actually do make people/corporations/YouTube/Google money). What I will  focus on here is another glaring, although perhaps more variegated change, 3) the nature of feminism on YouTube as a way to think about the massive cultural, political, and personal shifts associated with the rapid maturation of social media. In the brief observations that follow, I will press my course (which, surprisingly [definitively?] was taken by 14 women, “feminists” all, and 2 men, probably “feminists” too; whereas in its past iterations it had been dominated by male students, often [definitively?] basketball players, probably not “feminists”) into conversation with another example of feminist media pedagogy, a memorable symposium I just attended at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan: Feminist Video Documentary Strategies in Social Dissent and Change (organized by Michigan art professor, Carol Jacobsen with Vicki Patraka and Joanne Leonard). There, in Ann Arbor, in conversation for three intense and fully-scheduled days with eleven hand-picked feminist scholars, artists, and activists, ranging from their mid-forties to mid-seventies, fully-formed, carefully-schooled, and highly– and deservedly-vetted for their diverse and stunning bodies of activist feminist documentary work, built in some cases beginning in the 1970s, and occurring all over the world and in regards to feminist issues as diverse as prison reform, domestic abuse, racism, homophobia and Chevron, and the dreams of female Indonesian domestic workers in training—an anti-YouTube if ever there was one—I encountered a feminist media space that itself put the changes at YouTube into another form of stark release.

Margaret Lazarus, Sally Berger, Patty Zimmerman, Karen Sanders, Joanne Leonard, Wendy Kozol, Jeannie Simms, Carol Jacobsen, Connie Samaras, Alex Juhasz, Meena Nanji, Regina Austin (Vicki Patraka not picture)

In 2010, thinking about my teaching and writing about YouTube within my video-book about this, I suggested that my feminism, and feminism more broadly on YouTube, was closeted. With a tip of the hat to both film scholar and critic, B. Ruby Rich and feminist poet and theorist, Adrienne Rich, I attempted to create sign-posts to better mark and see the “nowheres and everywheres” of this new closet, one which I named as holding many hidden-away in plain sites for feminisms:

• ARCHITECTURAL or ARCHAIC feminism occurs at a deep and structural level
• UN-NAMED feminism that in so doing sees itself newly
• MORPHING feminism transforms to encapsulate other beliefs in feminism’s name
• FRAMING feminism that umbrellas the social justice work of trans, anti-war, anti-racism and other activisms
• ASSERTIVE or INSERTIVE feminism that names its relevance in places where it wasn’t deemed important
• COMMON-CULTURAL feminism that assumes feminism is the shared space of production
• ACCESS feminism that doesn’t only speak to feminists and also speaks to feminists by opening access to unusual places
• TECHNO feminism that engages in collaborative, goal-oriented, placed, critical self-expression online
• ASSUMPTIONAL or PRESUMPTIVE feminism that always assumes that feminism counts and that feminists speak

While these terms sign-post places that are still very much alive and operational on YouTube, what I had not mapped then is how YouTube, like the world itself, a world itself, and as one of the places that makes our world itself, now also, at the same time, holds unimaginable quantities of visible, uncloseted, never-closeted feminisms:

• OVERT feminism that names itself proudly and often attached to equally proud descriptors (i.e. Black, trans, queer)
• TRENDY feminism that attaches to memes, celebrities, and products
• WARRING feminism that pits feminists against each other
• TWITTER and TUMBLER and INSTAGRAM and PINTERST feminisms that spread, link and grow transmedially
• TROLLING (against) feminism that harasses, stalks, demeans, threatens, bullies and endangers

YouTube is truly a (corporate) space where everything and everybody is (with notable blind spots both self-chosen and socially deployed). As proved true for the feminist demographic and associated conversations within my 2015 class, YouTube has become a place of, for and by feminists and this overt engagement has brought clarity and confusion. My students, like all of us who are engaged with social media, name an anxiety, cynicism, and consumerism that is core to their new media experience even when they are being “political” (in the production, or more definitively consumption of overtly “feminist” media) but especially when they are not, when they are taking a much-deserved break from the onslaught of “feminism” that now greets them there and so are watching the innocent, fun, funny, trivial (corporate) content that surrounds the feminist media also readily-available.

From class discussion, Learning from YouTube, 2015

Meanwhile, the Michigan feminists also attested to a level of fatigue, anxiety, and hard-to-manage overwhelmedness brought on by new and social media consumption practices. I suggested that media production and its feeding feminist process, now radically accessible to so many, is a final feminist frontier in that it can maintain attention, ethical conditions, non-corporate environments, and clearer boundaries of commitment that now seem nearly impossible in the space of new media reception given the noise, hyper-visibility, and corporate domination of this space. As you see, these conversations circled around architectural metaphors and material considerations attempting to describe possible feminist media spaces, norms, and histories that might be defined by counter-, concordant-, and/or immersive YouTube practices (a project I have being pursuing in my Feminist Online Spaces work).

The twenty-five year plus bodies of work shared by many of our group who have devoted their careers to ongoing, careful, connected, personal and political media projects help refine vocabularies for feminist media practices that can and do share the broader media ecology with YouTube and social media. For instance, our host, Carol Jacobsen, has been making photo and video for over twenty-five years as part of her work as the Coordinator of the Michigan Women’s Clemency Project, advocating for the human rights of women prisoners and seeking freedom for women wrongly incarcerated. Her feminist media work has been shown in galleries, used by activists, lawyers and policy people, and contributed to the release of nine wrongfully-incarcerated women. Some of it is on Vimeo while also sitting elsewhere across the Internet.

Conviction: Janis, 2006

I would like to conclude by thinking through the experiences in Michigan (where we sat for two-plus days in an isolated, quiet, and window-less conference room while each participant took an hour or more to present her work, and we listened and responded with heightened focus) as a way to also see some of the notable dark spots that are by definition lost to the eye within our (new) place of feminist hyper and over-visibility. Critically, these eleven women were significantly older than your typical “YouTube feminist.” Each had an institutional home that she may have fought to achieve over most of her career, that she had made herself by creating this counter-institution on her own or with others, or that she was precariously connected to or even retiring from. But notably, the diverse feminist media activism of this group shares certain core values, practices, and infrastructures quite different from the ones I have mapped through YouTube thus far, ones which signal time, space, connection and attention as core:

• SEQUESTERED feminism where the environment to share the work is small, closed, respectful, and supportive.
• SLOW feminism during which we took time,  were not rushed, and no one multitasked; we listened, watched and were focused (thanks to Meena Nanji for this term and the previous one).
• RESEARCH feminism where work is anchored in (often) funded and mostly multi-year engagements
• AESTHETIC feminism where the refinement of a personal practice takes place in conversation with other artists and traditions
• HISTORIC feminism that knows and marks where it comes from
• PLACED feminism grounded in and connected to a lived or political community
• VERSIONED feminism occurring over time and in conversation with other work, changing audiences, and history

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve already suggested that everything and everybody is on YouTube, which by definition puts all of these women, their methods, and projects there, too (or not if they inhabit the dark space by choice or exclusion).

Furthermore, a significant subset of “Hashtag” or “Twitter” feminism functions quite similarly to what I have named above. Lisa Nakamura’s recent work on This Bridge Called my Back on Tumblr being only one of innumerable examples of such practices. I am not suggesting that social media can’t or doesn’t attend to architectural, historic, or sustaining feminisms. Rather, I am curious about how these many feminist modalities map onto or next to each other, how they feed or frustrate us, how we can build experiences and media for feminisms with intentionality and purpose given the conflicting norms of the many media spaces that are now available to us. Thus, the current state of YouTube feminism is not a matter of medium (or age or even institution) and entirely one of métier: taking the time, making the space, producing the architecture, community, and history from which to make, receive, and relish our very best work.

Access Denied, Internet Dark: Technology, Prison, Education

I recently wrote a blog post for Lady Justice at New Criticals. It’s opening and closing are re-printed below. Go to that site for the full version!

On Sunday, April 5, an invaluable opinion piece was published in the New York Times: “Help Us Learn in Prison” by John J. Lennon. An inmate at Attica Correctional Facility in New York, Lennon makes a nuanced request about education and technology within the American prison. He considers why inmates are allowed and even encouraged to watch television all day while their access to the Internet is limited or more often than not prohibited. He ends with a plea: why not change the accessible technology of choice from TV to MOOCs?

Inmates watching television at Angola State Penitentiary, Louisiana, 2002. Credit Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images

In this post, I’d like to use Lennon’s piece as an opportunity to continue several avenues of thinking and activism of grave concern for me, namely:

• a situated critique of MOOCs
• a situated critique of education and technology in the prison
• a situated critique of education and technology outside the prison, particularly on YouTube and social media more generally

As a founding member of FemTechNet, the collective that successfully offers the DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) at places of higher learning around the world, I have worked with others to criticize MOOCs from feminist perspectives on education, technology, and neo-liberalism. One of our ongoing claims is that education needs to be situated in the lived environments of learners, whether that be institutional (are you at a community college or an art school?), regional (California or Calcutta?), cultural (what traditions and values matter where we live and learn and how do we speak about them?), or personal (what matters to me?) In their top-down, one-size-fits-all, elitist, scale-and-profit-driven underpinnings, most MOOCs are not particularly responsive to or even interested in the situated, lived differences that make learning (and teaching) both exciting and challenging.

This situated critique of MOOCs allows me to heartily second Lennon’s request. I believe that MOOCs are terrific for prisoners and support unlimited access to them as part of a technologically-assisted education.

…

I began to understand a critically unnamed truth about social justice and social media only made visible through the structuring denial of access to the Internet and other technology as a fundamental feature of contemporary punishment: technologies of care, conversation, and personal liberation through education need no more tools than access to each other. I was more than ready and able to teach about YouTube this Spring without an Internet connection. I was going to assign books on the subject (with a few pages excised, mostly due to their discussion of sexuality on YouTube), exercises where prisoners would write screenplays to be shot by their fellow-students who had access to cameras and the Internet, and conversations about the meanings of all of our varied and regulated access to technology. (Along this vein, prisoners’ near universal access to cellphones as a contraband of choice, despite prisons’ concerted efforts to keep phones out of the prison, radically underlines what it means to say “prisoners don’t have access to the Internet or social media.”) I had learned before that while the prison and its administrators can systematically strip me, and my students, of tools and technologies (pens, videos, the Internet), our desires and abilities to communally learn—and thereby escape its lines, signs, limits, and holes of available information, if only fleetingly—falls completely outside the of logic of technology-based punishment.

That is until I was denied access to teach and learn inside.

Which gets me to my conclusion: my situated critique of education and technology outside the prison, particularly on YouTube. For I am indeed teaching the class, again, for the fifth time since 2007 at Pitzer College. I did not get to stretch and learn and teach as I had hoped with my prisoner students who have so much to teach us about technology, as they are denied access to social media and are therefore uniquely situated to see it, but I have learned about social media and social justice this semester from other students and teachers.

Since I began teaching the class in 2007, in the matter of just these few short years, access to social media has exploded (for those not denied it as a condition of their punishment). We have been told (and sold) that this access is critical for our expression, community-building, political citizenship, and well-being. We have been led to believe that access to social media is a form of liberation. As Nicole Rufus, a current LFYT student explains in her class video below, YouTube matters because it has made her a better person and contributed to her education, just as Lennon suggests.

But two more related things have also become quite clear in the 2015 iteration of the class Learning from YouTube (sans prisoners):

• In contra-distinction to the experience of prisoners, for my students, the Internet is the very air they breath in a way that was simply not true in 2007 (as much as my students thought it was). Young people today (as is true of their teachers) inhabit the Internet, speak its language, and have an agility, familiarity, and jaded acceptance of its norms and (aspects of) its history that is at once stunning and enervating (see Samantha Abernathey’s class video on memes below):

Stunning is the speed and complexity of this familiarity; enervating is its occlusion of familiarity with and interest in the other norms, places, and histories that we might once have understood as part of being institutionally, culturally and personally “situated.” The current version of the course makes me feel at once stimulated and enervated because I have seemingly nothing and everything to teach them. Nowhere and everywhere to go. “The internet does not exist. Maybe it did exist only a short time ago, but not it only remains as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn’t see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we’re still trying to climb on board, to get inside, to be part of the network, to get in on the language game, to show up in searches, to appear to exist.”

I long for the views of my prisoner students: humans who can teach us a thing or two about place, liberation, punishment and control sans the Internet.

•  for, this place of liberation, the Internet, has quickly become its opposite (“emancipation without end, but also without exit” according to Aranda, Wood, and Vidokle)—a prison (although not a punishment, as it is always entered willingly and ever with the promise of pleasure); a highly-structured corporate-dominated sink-hole. “In the past few years many people—basically everybody—have noticed that the internet feels awkward, too. It is obvious. It is completely surveilled, monopolized, and sanitized by common sense, copyright control, and conformism. (Hito Steyerl)

“This moment,” according to my students, is defined by anxious, cynical, consumption-based Internet experience that is linked to ever more desperate Internet-based attempts at escape into a nostalgic (“old”) Internet that is imagined as low-tech, slow, user-made, fun, real, innocent, awkward, less-sexualized, and de-politicized (outside or before the petty, bitter Internet “politics” about the Middle East, feminism, racism, rape, and the environment from which escape deeper into the Internet is so desperately needed.) The new Internet is a prison from which escape is to fantasy of an older, innocent Internet.

“This Moment” as defined by LFYT 2015

In her contribution to the eflux journal issue “The Internet Does Not Exist,” from which I’ve been quoting extensively in this last section, video artist Hito Steyerl pens an article entitled “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” There she answers herself: “the internet is probably not dead. It has rather gone all out. Or more precisely: it is all over.”

But of course, Steyerl knows, as must we all, that while the Internet feels like it is the whole world, or perhaps too much world, there are blank spots on the map where the Internet can not see, there are ways not to be seen, and there are dark spots in our situated communities where the Internet can’t or perhaps is not allowed to go.

Abu Ghraib Prison: The infamous Iraqi prison where Saddam Hussein held political prisoners, and where U.S. soldiers were later caught torturing inmates. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2524082/All-US-Armys-secret-bases-mapped-Google-maps.html

If we theorize the Internet, or education, from these blank spots, from the place of too-little, (in)access, quiet, and darkness (as does Lennon), we see values, uses, and needs for MOOCs, YouTube, technology, and education that are not clear from an anxious state of hyper-abundance. This is not to romanticize the punitive lacks of the prison. Rather I ask us to draw from what becomes visible when we situate thinking about learning, technology, punishment and escape in places where education is not primarily linked to tawdry pop-songs, tutorials, consumer goods, flame wars, and self-reference to Internet culture but rather to the fundamental questions of liberation, learning, and empowerment that those stripped of technology have unique access to in the quiet and (in)access of their punishment.