Start Here: Welcome
Welcome!
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I joined the Internet when I was eight years old. I snuck onto the family computer and joined random chat sites, watching as strangers talked and snuck off into private chatrooms. My mom found out and got furious – the Internet was dangerous, and I was too young. I didn’t know any of the people online, and bad things could happen to me. I got my computer privileges revoked for a week.
Her warning didn’t stop
me from being curious about the Internet: a strange, amorphous thing that was
still kind of in its infancy when I first joined that chat room in 2009. I made
an Instagram account. I posted cringe selfies with cringe captions. I talked to
strangers in comments sections. I joined tumblr and made black-and-white edits
of my favorite celebrities. Everything was new and exciting – a world at my
fingertips. A world that was vastly different, and vastly larger, than the
suburbs I was growing up in.
I’m twenty-four now. That
means I’ve spent most of my life online. For sixteen years, I’ve screenshotted,
scrolled, watched, Insta-stalked, Tweeted, reblogged, reposted, saved, shared,
pinned, liked, hearted, subscribed, followed, and unfollowed. Through an
ongoing series of digital encounters, I have learned to navigate the digital
landscape: a landscape that is ever-changing and unpredictable.
Over the course of this semester, I've found myself increasingly interested in the digital landscape, and the encounters that occur within it. Though our readings mostly focused on the natural, I kept wanting to apply these theories to a nonphysical environment. How do we interact with the "stuff" online? What are the materials of our digital environments? How are trends connected to bigger conversations around sound, visual aesthetics, and our interactions with physical space, other humans, and nonhuman living creatures?
My “self”, my profiles, and my feed have been “polluted by histories of encounter” (Tsing 29). Interactions with other users, and a larger interaction with the feeds/algorithms that dictate these social media platforms, have created entanglements that are “complicated, often ugly, and humbling” (33). I have a layered and complicated relationship to and with the Internet. It’s not unlike a celebrity relationship, rife with drama and gossip and unflattering paparazzi photographs. I love the Internet because it has helped me identify and shape my “tastes” (literary, clothing, music, etc. Hell, I even became a feminist because of the Internet); I hate the Internet because it has exposed me to content that is, at the very least, troubling, and, at its extreme, sexually explicit and/or gory. As part of a generation that was labelled by educators as “digital natives” (Prensky), I know I am not alone in my complex feelings toward and around this landscape.
My project, entitled “Woman, Online” is an attempt at documenting and analyzing these contaminations, combining the digital, theoretical and creative mediums. Interrogating the Internet’s “stuff”, or material – trends, videos, images, accounts – is not unlike staring into a mirror, or doing a Rorschach Test (if you believe in that sort of thing). We understand ourselves, our culture, and our individual/collective subconscious by reflecting on the images we are inundated with/assaulted by/existing alongside/creating.
While you can certainly read these essays in whatever order you wish, you may find it more useful to read them in the numerical order I've created (Essay #1, Essay #2, etc.). Feel free to navigate over to the Liked, Saved, Pinned page for additional information and resources.
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