Also, make sure to check out the other presenters and their abstracts on the website, it’s a fantastic lineup!

Braman’s main thesis unites the national backdrop and individual engagement to create an argument about how future developments in both arenas could result in stronger relationships between individuals and the nation-state, or just as possible, could weaken identification with the nation and thus a weaker national security environment. Braman explores how the increasing technical capacity of ICTs, a shift in the global network map to favor regions previously little regarded, and a general lack of knowledge about vulnerabilities and potentialities of these ICTs combine to create a new set of national security concerns for the US. Braman then narrows in further on the impact on the individual by examining new features that impact political engagement on the individual level: increased communication capacity, the ability for individuals to create and distribute content, and the emerging practice of activism across various media channels.

Braman’s argument is at its foundation based on the assumption that maintaining a strong national identity is essential to protecting national security. Similarly, her argument assumes that trust is a central component of identity or affiliation with an imagined community. She argues that in a best-case scenario, social cohesion is afforded by “trust in the authoritative knowledge of the nation-state and, therefore, decisions made by the US government” and at the other extreme, trust would be limited to small intimate groups and would result in “a growing reliance on nonrational modes of argument and decisionmaking.” One of the report’s most provocative scenarios lies in its description of alternative forms of citizenship. Cultural citizenship, global citizenship and thin citizenship are proposed as alternatives to national citizenship, which brings with it a set of political affiliations.

The report also presents software applications which facilitate forms of one-to-one and one-to-many communication. Braman makes the point that decreasing transparency in the federal government and increased surveillance of individuals has a damaging impact on trust. This is a very cogent point. The current administration (which changed after this report was written) has made a priority out of reversing this dynamic in an obvious attempt to restore trust in the federal government. See the data-driven Recovery.gov with its tagline “Track the Money.”

In describing the global context of emerging ICTs, the report focuses on threatening global examples like how China was unable to suppress the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and how Muslim extremists are able to organize online. When looking at the individual level, the report takes more positive examples of increased agency from US academics like Clay Shirky to describe the redrawn map of communication and power. While overall the arguments are extremely compelling and have already been borne out in many ways in 2010, the focus on threats to national security limit the scope of the report to reinforcing the national identity. Organizations like Avaaz and Amnesty International provide positive examples of global citizenship, while growing diasporas present cultural forms of citizenship that reshape global politics in less than threatening ways. Less positive examples of internal discord within the US among individuals are also ignored. Recent examples include challenges to the authority of the Obama administration on media services like Twitter and Facebook that have attracted attention from the Department of Homeland Security. Because of this narrow focus and selective examples, the report, while astute in its analysis, presents only a limited set of conclusions that reinforce the US’s historically isolationist attitude.

Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangaremba
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Season of Migration to the North, Tayib Saleh
The Hunger Games, Sue Collins
Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
“A Raisin in the Sun,” Langston Hughes
“New Boy,” Roddy Doyle
“The Siege,” James Lasdun
“The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle dir.
La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz dir.
A Raisin in the Sun, Daniel Petrie dir.
Besieged, Bernardo Bertolucci dir.
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella dir.
New Boy, Steph Green dir.

various, U2
various, M.I.A.
various, Fela Kuti
various, Justice
various, IAM
various, Lady Gaga
various, Madonna
various, Cyndi Lauper
various, David Bowie
various, Tricky

excerpts, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Peter Weiss
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus
excerpts, Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
Speeches and writings from Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X
excerpts, Subculture, The Meaning of Style Dick Hebdige
excerpts, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, Stuart Hall
excerpts, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
excerpts, The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
excerpts, Antonio Gramsci
excerpts, Michel Foucault
excerpts, Edward W. Said
excerpts, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
excerpts, Sound and Vision: the music video reader by Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin, Lawrence Grossberg

When I first heard about M.I.A., the Sri Lankan Tamil rapper from London, it was in 2004 ago amidst the buzz about her forthcoming debut album Arular. I was instantly intrigued — a Sri Lankan musician being featured in Pitchfork? What was her style? Was I going to like it? I wasn’t born in Sri Lanka, a beautiful island with a turbulent political past and present, but most of my extended family still lives there. M.I.A. spent a lot more time there than I did, but her hybrid upbringing in Sri Lanka and London combined with a musical background that included support from Justine Frischmann and Peaches assured me that I was going to connect with her sound.

I instantly took to M.I.A.’s music, which incorporates as many far-flung styles as possible from Bollywood disco to Brazilian baile to Jamaican dancehall and more. But her lyrics puzzled me — sometimes they sounded like nonsense, sometimes they sounded like they were supposed to be politically charged. But I didn’t hear a cohesive agenda or message, beyond, “this is underground, yo!” I knew she was making a lot of references to the Sri Lankan civil conflict, but I couldn’t tell whether her references told a story or not. There’s no doubt, though, that her music, imagery and media interviews have attracted mainstream attention to the country of Sri Lanka, and have publicized her experience of Sri Lanka’s civil war based on an upbringing that took her from Britain to Sri Lanka to India and back again to Britain as a refugee.

Messages of Conflict
M.I.A. has proudly positioned herself in numerous media interviews as an artist motivated by her background as a refugee of Sri Lanka’s decades-old civil conflict. In her music and associated imagery, M.I.A. drops references to her life story, political ties, and other minority stories to straddle a hybridized cultural and political identity that subverts and rejects mainstream Western narratives of gender and politics. She’s forged a complicated identity for herself as both a cross-cultural pop musician and political spokesperson for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, and she has explicitly acknowledged her power to educate people about the conflict. By scanning music blog postings across the web, it is clear that she is an influential disseminator of information, not just music, to audiences (Bennet, Harthun, Starbury).

She’s recently gained enthusiastic acclaim in the world of music, winning album of the year from Rolling Stone and garnering nominations for both a Grammy and an Oscar in 2009. But even her early collaborations with Philadelphia-based producer Diplo from 2004 and her first album from 2005 were already inviting questions. In March of 2005, Scott Plagenhoef wrote in Pitchfork that “M.I.A.’s detractors claim her flirtations with terrorism and revolutionary politics reveal the biggest case of sufferer’s envy since Joe Strummer but little depth of thought.” Plagenhoef asked, “But if the latter is true, so what? … An argument can and has been made that her political lip service is unique enough to get those topics onto your tongue or into your brain, prodding listeners to at least examine them.”

I can’t say I agree with Plagenhoef’s sentiment that raising a topic is more important than what is said about the topic. But then, I grew up with the topic in question and have been hearing about the death tolls for over a decade. When I was five, my family spent our summer in Sri Lanka, arriving in time for a series of ethnically-charged riots that perpetrated horrific violence against Tamils in the city of Colombo. One day, I saw the shop across the street from my grandmother’s house being attacked with torches by a shouting mob. One of my older cousins, vibrating in her fury, wanted to throw rocks at the crowd around the smoldering building.

Later, my mother explained that it was not the local residents of my grandmother’s neighborhood, but a traveling gang who had destroyed the Tamil shop. We didn’t go back to Sri Lanka for another eight years. I’m ethnically Sinhalese, from the roughly 70 percent majority that dominates the country, while M.I.A. is Tamil and a member of the next largest ethnicity on the island at about 20 percent. So in the mainstream Western media’s understanding of the conflict, it’s ostensibly our peoples who are at war against each other. Religion is often casually thrown into the labeling too, as in “Sinhalese Buddhists” versus “Tamil Hindus.” Of course it’s far more complicated than a simple case of ethnic conflict, but more on that later.

One of M.I.A.’s acknowledged influences is her largely absentee father, who was a member of a Tamil separatist group historically aligned with internationally proscribed terrorist group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). M.I.A’s art school past informs her self-created album, video and live show art, which features tigers, tanks, palm trees, and other symbols of the Sri Lankan conflict. The tiger imagery is commonly interpreted as a nod to the LTTE, the only Tamil separatist group to feature a tiger in their name. When asked about these visual references in one interview, M.I.A. responded, “How come people are allowed to say M.I.A. equals a tiger print shirt equals suicide bombing? If anyone else wears a tiger print shirt, it means nothing. Converse has put out a tiger print shoe and I wore it in my video and that means terrorism” (Cosyns).

This is arguably a disingenuous way to avoid explaining the significance of the reference, as M.I.A. is clearly a politically engaged musician and performer. A tiger print or image, situated within the rest of her visual symbols, is hard to accept as signifying “nothing,” although the significance is not necessarily positive. For example, one of her videos features children dancing in front of a tiger, which could be interpreted as a reference to child soldier recruitment, known to have been practiced by the LTTE. But M.I.A. has declined to acknowledge any signification at all — and to what end? I still don’t understand.

Another Sri Lankan rapper named DeLon has revived the controversy through a YouTube video remixing her popular single Paper Planes, juxtaposing violent imagery from the LTTE bombings and other violent acts with images of MIA performing and posing. His rhymes over the melody ask why tiger imagery is so common in her works if she doesn’t support the LTTE. M.I.A. has dismissed his video as “self-promotion” and her label Interscope Records has served DeLon with a cease-and-desist, claiming the video endangers “M.I.A.’s reputation as a freedom fighter” (Starbury).

Plagenhoef’s argument back in 2005 was that as a musician, M.I.A. should not need to explain why her art contains references to not only the conflict generally but the LTTE specifically. Today, it is much harder to make the case that M.I.A.’s references to terrorism and revolutionary politics do not need to be interrogated for deeper meaning, as she’s become the most prominent Sri Lankan in mainstream media and has also identified herself as “being the only Tamil…in the Western media,” seeing it as a “great opportunity to … bring forward what’s going on in Sri Lanka” (M.I.A.). In the same interview, she states, “I’ve turned into the only voice for the Tamil people…the twenty percent minority in my country.” Understanding the importance of her role requires visiting the Sri Lankan civil conflict.

The Sri Lankan Civil Conflict
Sri Lanka is a small island country with a bloody history. A civil conflict along ethnic lines has slowly emerged and intensified since the country gained independence from British rule in 1948. During British rule, a strategy of promoting English-speaking Tamils to leadership positions within the society created state, commercial, educational and other professional sectors that were dominated by Tamils (Bowen). In the wake of independence, a Sinhalese nationalist movement combined with laws intended to rectify imbalances created by British policies resulted in widespread discrimination against Tamils, and inspired the Tamil separatist movements of the 1970s (Bowen).

Since then, most of the distinct Tamil movements were destroyed by the LTTE through assassinations of Tamil political leaders who participated in the democratic process or through consumption into the LTTE, who then turned to suicide bombing and other violent means to make their case. The Sri Lankan government attempted to create local power sharing structures to entice the LTTE to lay down arms and transition into a legitimate political organization, but with no success. Today, the war is between the Sinhalese-dominated majority government and the LTTE. By their account, the Tigers are fighting for regional autonomy for the Tamil population. By the Sri Lankan government’s account, which is now dominated by Sinhalese nationals, the LTTE has been terrorizing the country for decades and needs to be destroyed if the country is to move forward.

According to a report from the Council on Foreign Relations, the LTTE is blamed for a dozen high-level assassinations and over two hundred suicide attacks (Bhattacharji). The same report estimates that that the LTTE has murdered approximately 5,000 people just since 2006. And in recent months, the LTTE is accused by the Associated Press among others of using Tamil civilians as human shields and firing at civilians as they flee the area (Mackenize, Nessman).

While one front of Sri Lanka’s civil war is being waged on the ground between the national army and the LTTE, another front has been intensifying in a theater with a much larger scope—the media. In part due to its small size and minor role in the global economy, Sri Lanka has never been heavily or consistently covered by international media services (Gabony). But another factor has been the Sri Lankan government’s hostile attitude towards journalists, both international and domestic, which has made it impossible to report from the frontlines. Reports are instead confined to a few sparse details and casualty numbers reported by spokespeople for the LTTE and the government, whose reports almost always directly contradict each other (Buerk 2008). The BBC, the only media source with significant coverage of the conflict is reviled on both sides for its bias in favor of the opposing side (Gabony). With so many lies and half-truths it is near impossible to discern the full story.

M.I.A. and the Genocide Movement
It is into this contentious space that M.I.A. offered her assessment of the conflict. On January 28, 2009, M.I.A. appeared on the Tavis Smiley show, an LA-based PBS news magazine with a national audience and online distribution. Given the opportunity to educate the primarily US-based viewers of the show, the majority of whom know little to nothing about the conflict, M.I.A. spoke extensively about the plight of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, repeatedly referring to the war as a “genocide.” She stated that from the time that she left the country to now, “there’s been a systematic genocide” and that “Tamils make up twenty percent of the country and they’re getting wiped out.” In another interview with The Daily Beast two days later, she calls the situation “systematic genocide, ethnic cleansing” and compares it to Nazi-Germany. In a recent assessment of that claim by the New York Times, Thomas Fuller writes that “M.I.A.’s claims that the government is carrying out a genocide against Tamils place her on the outer fringe of opinion about the conflict.” In the same article Fuller quotes Yolanda Foster of Amnesty International, who observes, “The Tamil Tigers have a long history of child recruitment, hostage taking, forcing civilians to the front lines. It’s complicated to assign blame.”

M.I.A. is not alone in assessing the conflict as a genocide; newly formed Tamil groups in the diaspora have initiated efforts to reframe the conflict as a genocide. Significantly, high profile efforts to have the conflict officially recognized in the US and in India date back to around the same time as her interview. The group Tamils Against Genocide has been in existence at least since August of 2008, when their legal representative Bruce Fein contributed a commentary to the Washington Times comparing the Sri Lankan conflict to Nazi-Germany and the Bosnian genocide of the 90s. NGOs have been formed in the United States and in India to push the genocide framing through both media and legal channels, with most of the activity taking place in January through March of 2009.

The Genocide Movement Timeline

• August 20th 2008 – Bruce Fein, legal representative for Tamils Against Genocide, publishes commentary in the Washington Times. The commentary compares the Sri Lankan conflict to Nazi-Germany and the Bosnian genocide of the 90s and introduces Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s Defense Secretary, as a US citizen who should be investigated for war crimes.
• January 26th 2009 – In India, Dr. Ramadoss, founder and president of the Pattali Makkal Katchi party, a Tamil political party in the Indian government, gives a press conference urging the Indian government to recognize Tamil Eelam as the only solution for the Sri Lankan Tamil population.
• February 5th 2009 – Tamils Against Genocide files charges with the US attorney general charging both Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and Sri Lanka’s Army Commander, Sarath Fonseka, for genocide, war crimes and torture against Tamils in Sri Lanka.
• February 9th 2009 – Mr. Fein publishes a second commentary in the Boston Globe.
• February 13th 2009 – Dr. Ramadoss describes the conflict as “a clear case of genocide” of the Tamil population.
• February 14th 2009 – A new NGO announced in India called Indians Against Genocide
• February 20th 2009 – Tamils Against Genocide holds a genocide rally in Washington DC.

Interrogating the Genocide Claim
Genocide is defined by the UN as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” There are significant numbers of Tamils living in Sri Lanka in state-controlled areas without danger. Colombo, the largest city in Sri Lanka, is populated by every ethnic group in the country. Daily life is peaceful and involves much mixing between the groups. In a response to M.I.A.’s interview, Dr. Palitha Kohona, Foreign Secretary for the government of Sri Lanka, notes, “In Sri Lanka, fifty-four percent or more of the Tamil population does not live in the areas controlled by the Tamil Tigers. They live in the south, in and around Colombo, [in areas] under government control.” At this time, the majority of Tamils who were initially part of the LTTE are now participating in building a political process in the East and the North with the Sri Lankan government, belying the claim of widespread discord between the two ethnic groups. The Mackenzie Institute in Toronto which studies political instability and terrorism writes, “Genocide is not happening in Sri Lanka…. Anybody who takes the charge seriously betrays a highly annoying ignorance about the state of affairs between Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).”

The Sri Lankan government is by no means blameless. It has been heavily criticized for its lack of transparency, hostility towards media, and breaches of human rights. Currently, as tens of thousands of civilians are trapped in the conflict zone, reporters, aid agencies, and humanitarian efforts are banned from entering the area (“last Tamil Tiger town”). The Sri Lankan government claims this is because they cannot guarantee anyone’s safety, but such secrecy is inexcusable. The Sri Lankan military, too, has a lot to answer for in the conflict—in the past, both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan military were accused of engaging in abductions, extortion, conscription, and the use of child soldiers (Bhattacharji).

The Final Countdown
After an aborted 2002 peace treaty during which the LTTE rearmed, the army has launched a no-holds barred attempt to destroy the LTTE once and for all. Down to the final months, atrocities are being perpetrated left and right by everyone involved. According to the BBC, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights Navi Pillay has described the level of civilian deaths as “truly shocking,” and called on the two warring sides to suspend hostilities immediately. The Sri Lankan government refuses to pull back, fearing that as soon as they do, the LTTE will immediately re-arm, as they have repeatedly done. Neither side will let up, which leaves the trapped Tamil civilians nowhere to go but to the grave. We also have no confirmed numbers about how many people are caught up in the fighting, since all numbers come from either the government or the LTTE media machine.

So what do we call this situation? I call it a futile tragedy of epic proportions. I don’t know if M.I.A. is aligned with the LTTE’s objectives, but I do know I am with her in wanting the world to protest the deaths of innocent people, Tamil and Sinhalese both. Sri Lanka is searching for a way to end the conflict permanently, but there is no easy solution here. Suspending hostilities means the LTTE can recover and keep spreading violence through suicide bombs and other terrorist means. Continuing the assault means that civilians in the war zone keep losing their lives. But a genocide? This is not a term to be taken lightly, overused or misapplied. I want the international community to know and care about what is happening in Sri Lanka, but not by framing it as
something it is fundamentally not. Diluting the meaning of the word borders on an immoral act by diminishing the true genocides taking place, ones the world has already turned away from and populations who urgently need international intervention.

Do I think M.I.A. is a terrorist? I seriously doubt it. But I think she is irresponsible with her words through her passion for her people. I want M.I.A. to choose her words as carefully as her beats. Give up a little of that swagger in favor of a more nuanced and historically accurate representation of the Sri Lankan conflict.

Works Cited
Bennet, Miles. “M.I.A. Denies Claims That She Supports Terrorist Groups.” Baller Status. N.p. 8 Aug. 2008. Web. 23 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.ballerstatus.com/article/news/2008/08/5238/>.
Bhattacharji, Preeti. “Backgrounder: Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (aka Tamil Tigers) (Sri Lanka, separatists).” CFR, Council on Foreign Relations. 10 Feb. 2009. Web. 24 Feb. 2009.
Bowen, John R. “The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict.” Journal of Democracy. National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University Press, 7.4 (1996) 3-14. Project Muse. Web. 23 Feb. 2009.
Buerk, Roland. “Numbers game clouds Sri Lankan war.” BBC News. BBC, 21 Mar. 2008. Web. 23 Feb. 2009.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7307349.stm>.
Cosyns, Simon. “‘I may be a bit mouthy…but I’m no terrorist.’” The Sun. 31 Oct. 2008. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 22 Feb. 2009.
DeLon. “M.I.A. Paper Planes Diss.” Ceylon Records, 4 Aug. 2008. Web. 22 Feb 2008. <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5604080449246618908>.
du Lac, J. Freedom. “M.I.A.’s World Tour de Force.” Washington Post. The Washington Post Company, 21 Aug. 2007. LexisNexis. 23 Feb. 2009.
“English media’s coverage on Lankan issue criticised.” Press Trust of India. 14 Feb. 2009. InfoTrac OneFile. Web. 22 Feb. 2009.
Fein, Bruce. “FEIN: A Genocide Inquiry?” Washington Times. The Washington Times LLC, 20 Aug. 2008. Web. 23 Feb. 2009.
<http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/aug/20/a-genocide-inquiry/>.
Fein, Bruce. “Genocide in Sri Lanka.” Boston Globe. NY Times Co., 15 Feb. 2009. Web. 23 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/02/15/genocide_in_sri_lanka/>.
Fuller, Thomas. “The Dissonant Undertones of M.I.A.” New York Times. 10 Feb 2009. Web. 23 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/world/asia/11mia.html>.
Gill, Harjant. “On the Significance of Salting and Peppering Mangoes.” Metapedia. Georgetown University, n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2009. <http://www.metapedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Harjant>.
Harthun, Jon. “M.I.A. and the art of terrorism.” Three Imaginary Girls. N.p. 7 Aug. 2008. Web. 23 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com/blogentry/2008aug/miaandtheartofterrorism>.
Kohona, Palitha. Interview by Tavis Smiley. Tavis Smiley. KCET, 28 Jan. 2009. Web. 22 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=tavi08s1ddeq6f6>.
“LS members seek govt intervention to end strife in Lanka.” Press Trust of India. 13 Feb. 2009. InfoTrac OneFile. Web. 22 Feb. 2009.
Mackenzie, John. “Enough Already with the Genocide Talk.” The Mackenzie Institute. n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.mackenzieinstitute.com/2009/genocide-talk020609.htm>.
M.I.A.. Interview by Tavis Smiley. Tavis Smiley. KCET, 28 Jan. 2009. Web. 22 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=tavi08s1ddeq6f6>.
Nessman, Ravi. Interview by Tavis Smiley. Tavis Smiley. KCET, 18 Feb. 2009. Web. 22 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=tavi08s1ddeq6f6>.
Plagenhoef, Scott. “M.I.A.: Arular.” Pitchfork. Pitchfork Media, Inc. 22 Mar. 2005. Web. 23 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/20218-arular>.
“Ramadoss: Tamil Nadu Parties should pressurize Indian Government to recognize Eelam.” TamilNet. 26 Jan. 2009. Web. 23 Feb. 2009. <http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=28147>.
Starbury, Allen. “M.I.A. Accused Of Supporting Terrorists By Sri Lankan Rapper.” Baller Status. N.p. 6 Aug. 2008. Web. 23 Feb. 2009. <http://www.ballerstatus.com/article/news/2008/08/5221/>.
Tamils Against Genocide. Website. Tamils Against Genocide. N.p. n.d. Web. 22 Feb. 2009. <http://www.tamilsagainstgenocide.org/>.
“Timeline: Sri Lanka.” BBC News. BBC, 6 Jan. 2009. Web. 24 Feb. 2009. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/country_profiles/1166237.stm>.
Touré. “M.I.A. Goes to War.” The Daily Beast. RTST, Inc., 30 Jan. 2009. Web. 24 Feb. 2009. <http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-30/mia-goes-to-war/>.
“Troops ‘at last Tamil Tiger town.’” BBC News. BBC, 24 Feb. 2009. Web. 24 Feb. 2009. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7907282.stm>.
United Nations. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 12 Jan. 1951. Web. 23 Feb. 2009. <http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm>.

Every free moment I’ve had for the past month has been consumed by planning and dealing with the logistics of the Internet as Playground and Factory conference, a conference about digital labor. As the volunteer coordinator, I was responsible for staffing and recording the 3 day conference at the New School. The event finally happened on Thursday to Saturday, and our team accomplished so much in that time.

Together, 26 volunteers provided full coverage for 24 different events over 3 days in 7 different locations in 4 buildings. We provided a staggering 266.5 hours of work over the two-and-a-half days, with many people working 8+ hour days. The video team deserves a special mention most of whom pulled 8 hour days both Friday and Saturday, sharing 3 sets of equipment among 6 people, trading cards between sessions and successfully covering 15 sessions without losing a single cable, card or camera. And in terms of the attendees, panelists and hosting institution, the event was a huge success, as well as seeming to be an important marker in labor studies.

Was it worth it? Well, so far, I’m not really sure. My interest in volunteering in the first place was to be more intimately involved in the experience, and to be able to network with panelists and get really familiar with the arena of labor studies, particularly in the digital space. By that measure, my experience was a complete and utter failure. Since I was command post for all questions, problems, and fixes, I didn’t get to attend a single session, so I didn’t learn ANYTHING about the field academically.

I volunteered myself for this project with pretty high hopes, but ultimately it ended in the familiar experience of taking volunteer jobs as a way to push forward professionally, but without the anticipated payoff. Similarly, my internships have been less than the key to professional advancement I expected them to be. And while one volunteer experience turned into a regular consulting job, I was never paid at a competitive level, which I suspect is in part due to its free origins debasing its value for my clients.

In my experience, volunteer labor as a means of professional development is not adequately valued, an issue which has been written about in a New York Times series on internships by Douglas Martin and Anya Kamenetz among others. I know IPF included at least one session on extremely cheap labor that is essentially free in Second Life, and I hope they addressed strictly volunteer labor as well. I should add, there is a big difference between casual volunteering, like reading stories at your local library or helping with a fundraiser on the day of, versus being a part-time employee who just doesn’t get paid. And I’m definitely talking about the latter type of volunteering.

So this conference has left me a little sadder as I catch my breath before trying vainly to catch up in my three graduate classes, while teaching a 1.5 hour class to English Language Learners (also unpaid) and leading data research on an animation project at Eyebeam (also, you guessed it, unpaid). One of my few consolations is that I will be presenting a paper at the MLA conference at the end of the year, and will have a chance to immerse myself in a conference the way I want to — hearing interesting people talk about interesting subjects, and being able to engage in dialogue with them.

It would be remiss in me to not mention my other major consolation, which was recruiting, meeting, and working with the volunteers for this conference. Being part of a team is a really nice feeling, one I miss from my old days doing policy events and strategic communications full-time. And this team was one of the nicest I’ve worked with. The student life can be one of isolation, writing papers that engage in private conversations with often dead scholars and seen by a single professor, who may write only perfunctory comments back to you. Having the chance to hear everyone discuss the sessions they worked and saw was a pleasure, and I’m glad I got to be a part of that.

Will I stop doing big volunteer projects? I guess it depends on whether people stop doing really awesome things I want to be a part of. So come on people, stop being all creative and interesting! Right now. Stop it.

From the article:
“The top 30 websites [serve] up 30 percent of net traffic, either from their own sets of pipes or from data centers around the world that connect much closer to your computer — and for much cheaper — than ever before.”

“In 2007, the majority of the internet’s traffic came distributed by 30,000 blocks of servers around the net. In 2009, 150 blocks served up half of the net’s traffic.”

“The real money is in the ads and services in the packets, not in moving the bits from computer to computer. The cost of bandwidth has fallen and so too have the profit margins for moving bits.”

Join us at The New School for Changing Labor Value a panel discussion this Tuesday September 29, 2009 at 6:30 pm at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics

Drawing from critical perspectives on labor, digital technology, and social and political theory, this panel addresses the work done by Internet users. It focuses on the relationship between invisible labor and the production of value.

Panelists include Andrew Ross, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and author of the recently published collection of essays Nice Work if You Can Get It; Richard Sennett, professor of sociology at New York University and author of The Craftsman; and Tiziana Terranova, associate professor of sociology of communications at Università di Napoli L’Orientale and author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. Moderated by McKenzie Wark, associate professor, chair of Culture and Media, and associate dean for faculty affairs, Eugene Lang College. An installation of Web-based art projects accompanies the presentation.

Location:
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

Admission:
$8; free to all students and New School faculty, staff, and alumni with ID

Box Office Information:
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The project as it was implemented (as might be befitting a pilot or demonstration project) seems more concerned with public education than with technological affordances. The developers mentioned that the transactional model in which the plants are killed if overloaded by “greedy” behavior was inspired by a micro-credit bank in Bangladesh, where if an individual defaults, the whole group is responsible for that loan. The project works on the premise that “we are all part of the production of the city” (Urban Omnibus interview).

But this model explicitly designates actions based on ethical intent (the switch is labeled Off Selfless or Greedy) as opposed to straight power usage. Additionally, intentionally killing off the plant as a result of ethically-driven behaviors rather than simple overuse seems the opposite of useful. Rather than designing the technology in a way that aids the user in making the right decision naturally, the system embeds a possibility that is negative for everyone. In other words, the project acts as a teaching tool about community behaviours rather than as a functioning and efficient community power grid.

William Gaver states that people “perceive the environment directly in terms of its potentials for action, without significant intermediate stages involving memory or inferences.” This is an excellent explanation for why limiting access to smoking in public places has had a much larger impact on decreasing smoking than public education campaigns that stigmatized the activity. I would suggest that the Natural Fuse project in actual implementation would benefit an approach more in keeping with the “ecological” alternative introduced by J.J. Gibson and discussed by Gaver.

For example, showing a healthy plant for the switch in the Selfless position and a dying or dead plant in the Greedy position would be an easy symbol for users to understand, and convey the very literal effects of overuse. It would also not require an inference to make the leap to understanding that the greedy switch would result in killing a plant. Finally, the stigmatization of human action seems an unnecessary element, given the ability to design into the system a way to reduce human action to a sustainable level.

Of course, in actual practice, the plant network would be controlled by a much more sophisticated system of regulators than a simple switch. But a red light indicating consumption levels close to detrimental effect before automatic switch-off might be a more useful inhibitor than relying on humans to flip the switch. People are not always near a switch or monitoring their behaviors, and a self- regulating system may be more ecologically sound in practice than one that requires human action.

Here’s a little retrospective of some of my favorite pics, in no particular order, to commemorate my loss.

Goodbye.

Moving up the stairs to the permanent collection, the space becomes radically different. This is not one of Paris’ star museums, the collection is modestly sized and displayed. Going to the website later, I discovered that it was divided into three categories: photographs, objects, and artistic representations. And this is what I found most problematic about an otherwise earnest exhibit: the collection is divided by physical nature rather than tied into a more cohesive historical context.

The historical aspects of immigration are covered, in embedded videos and some placards, but the information is often situated away from the relevant items in the collection. If we examine the collection as trying to create what Pierre Nora calls a meaningful lieu de mémoire about immigration, it is difficult to count it a resounding success, although it has its moments. Personal family histories dominate the collection, which offers a more positive representation of immigration than is often found in French discourse around the topic. But without an abundance of contextual information or experiential exhibits, I found it a muted impression of objects and photos that evoke a vague sense of some of the powerful travel histories that have shaped the contemporary world.

The Musee du Quai Branly on the other hand, offers a shock to the senses. The museum is located in the heart of Paris, very close to the Eiffel Tower, signaling a deliberate move from the outskirts of the city to give more prominence to the collection. In many ways, the design of the museum overshadows the objects housed in it. Joan Gonchar describes the organizing principle of the museum’s architect Jean Nouvel in Architectural Record: “In place of a customary museum environment, Nouvel has created a “fictional map” with the collections organized by geographic origin.”

When a building is specifically commissioned for a project, rather than repurposed, it is often as important an object of analysis as the collection itself, carrying as it does messages about both the use and nature of what it houses. In the case of Quai Branly, many surveyors have derived the same message, but interpreted positively or negatively depending on the critic. In a fairly representative piece, Tom Hennes writes in Curator that the museum environment is “unabashedly self-assertive” in its exoticization and othering of the cultures represented within.

The entrance is itself a testament to the nature of the experience. From the very white, very well-lit lobby, a long, winding passage gradually transitions to a deeper, darker, tunnel that takes viewers to the collection, which is presented in a spooky and dramatically lit space that can be confusing to navigate. As Sally Price mentions in “Art of Darkness,” the transition is reminiscent of Conrad’s allegorical novel Heart of Darkness. The transition from light to dark, from the civilization of the lobby to the “jungle” of the interior, can be seen as both regressive and patronizing.

But the artifacts presented within are displayed with the very best of intentions, in that they are beautifully lit, staged with care, and, as our guide explained, preserved with the utmost integrity for a long life. But as Sally Price points out, some exhibits are presented in “tight little cages” which evoke a sense of peep show around the figures.

As for context, again, the museum seems to miss the mark entirely. As is discussed in “Glass, Gardens, and Aborigines,” social criticism is rarely even hinted at throughout the space. Hennes notes that the little explanation that is offered is most often derived from iconic anthropologists and other thinkers of the late colonial period of the 1920s and 30s. To quote primarily from Western thinkers like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Margaret Mead, who were still rooted in a colonial world and have been interrogated for problematic worldviews in more recent times, is to remain rooted in a tradition of exoticizing “primitive” cultures – even if the name “Museum of Premiere Arts” was dropped in favor of Quai Branly.

In fact, the choice of name itself is presented in a revealing way. Our guide explained that to call it primitive was considered insulting so the name Quai Branly was adopted because “it means nothing.” This lack of meaning, or void, is an apt metaphor for what Quai Branly ultimately offers. While the objects are undeniably beautiful and treated with care, any use value or other tradition associated with it is discarded into a void. The fact that no other name could be chosen is indicative of the problematized environment of how the Western world, particularly France, chooses to engage with the rest of the world, by removing it behind glass walls to explore as something alien.

This is further highlighted by the fact that the artifacts of Europe are noticeably missing from the collection. Had the curators decided to include cultures of Europe in the same way, brought into the same setting, the display wouldn’t feel one-sided in its relentlessly superficial and aestheticized approach. But such objects remain at the Louvre, and retain an aura of celebrity and respectability that is comfortably within the same old traditions. Instead the collection at Quai Branly feels part of a long tradition of colonial exploration and conquest. As Sally Price discusses, exhibition of cultural difference was intimately linked to “the celebration of nationalism, colonial conquest, and the civilizing mission.”

Finally, while the uncomfortable juxtaposition of a Tarzan exhibit upstairs (again, strikingly and creatively displayed) was in keeping with the overall blindness to context of the museum, there was one object in particular that stood out to me: this ad for Lavazza coffee.

Displayed as if it were just another object in the exhibit, the ad presents a seemingly European woman on all fours snarling at the camera wearing a small fur, while two cherubic infants are staged in a position to suckle—even if the babies seem more bemused by the setting than ready to feed. The ad is for coffee, and draws on the Romulus and Remus myth of Italian origin, cleverly tying into the Tarzan exhibit. The museum’s commercialization of their displays is almost less offensive than their willingness to include an ad with the same tired tropes of exoticization, hypersexualization, and objectification, again with no discussion of the appropriateness of such a juxtaposition with the collection downstairs.