Ok everybody, time to get provoked. First, broadly, I don’t think we can treat ‘failure’ as an absolute quality. I think any definition or consideration of failure demands to be understood within its own social context. When failure matters, failure names a relation of accountability, and thus a relation of power–the failure to live up to a certain standard designated by someone with the power to bestow a desirable identity or status. I think that there is a vogue now for failure, and that this vogue has a lot to do with the social and political-economic dynamics we read about in last week’s readings on digital labor.

So I wonder if failure is something of a poisoned gift. When you’re in on the joke, failure can be transformative (as Carr puts it), even ecstatic in its beauty. When you’re called a failure, on the other hand, you feel like a stranger in your own skin. In its present fashionable condition, failure enjoins us to certain affects and stances that are germane to capitalism. In other words, failure in its present guise invokes a certain style, affective posture, or libidinal economy that capitalism (in its current appropriation of user-generated content) can appropriate to its own ends: everything from the popular Jackass movies to YouTube stars, from the glorification of ‘white trash’ on Jersey Shore to the Silicon Valley startup culture of ‘fail fast’ that we saw in the reading of 37 Signals. The libidinal economy is this: ‘don’t worry if you fail, liberate yourself to be free!’ That’s not in itself objectionable, but in practice it often gets deployed within a shallow politics of visibility and lifestyle-expression that means buy, baby, buy. Let’s be honest, failure’s fun!

I say all that just to signpost that we should be critical about the redemptive qualities of failure. On the other hand, I’m rather besotted with the possibilities of failure as a critical praxis, exemplified in this week’s readings on pedagogy. My only question is, if we succeed at failing, have we really failed? In other words, if we enshrine ‘failure’ in order to appreciate its illumination of textual craftsmanship (or social construction, social hierarchies, gender, or anything else), do we domesticate its radical and subversive potentiality? In that way, there’s a certain banality to a text like Allison Carr’s (which is otherwise quite raw and compelling), and I wonder if that banality is simply an aesthetic effect or rather a root cause of failure-as-praxis. So this goes back to my first paragraph and the dangers of fetishizing failure. There’s so much else I want to elaborate, like: does the glorification of failure represent the zombie-like claim to power of an identity–let’s provisionally say whiteness, privilege, masculinity–within a postmodern moment that otherwise enshrouds us in uncertainty? What about those who can’t afford to fail?

I haven’t addressed the texts directly here, rather obliquely–hope I’ve failed. 😉

Holy smoke! I was blown away by the discussion of digital labor brought forth in these pieces, primarily because of how useful they are in rethinking my own dissertation research. Full disclosure, I’m still reading, but I wanted to post these reflections in good time for everyone. In my first reading, these readings raise a challenge to our endeavors as a class. On one hand, they illustrate the potential that technology brings in revolutionizing access: not only through scalability, knowledge preservation, and new modalities of interdisciplinary collaboration; it also creates new knowledge by appealing to the cognitive and affective affordances of the digital ecosystems that permeate students’ lives. We might hope that this ‘openness’ reveals  unspoken practices and norms in the production of academic theory in ways that provide footholds for subjugated knowledges and critique from institutional outsiders. On the other hand, as these readings make clear, access to the digital is unequally distributed, and the communicative literacy and knowledge systems the digital sphere requires often exclude dissent through the pervasive process of privatizing and commodifying unpaid digital labor.

I found Jung’s piece about “Wages for Facebook” utterly fascinating. With an ethnographic sensibility, Jung reveals how the ethos of unpaid digital labor has become hegemonic, in terms of Ptak’s students who struggle to even comprehend the idea that they should be paid for their activities on Facebook–as Ptak puts it, “it was almost like I had said, your mother’s really ugly.” I found it fascinating and more challenging to read Terranova’s overview and critique of intellectual approaches to digital and ‘immaterial’ labor; especially her readings of the popular (for example, corporate management lit) books on the subject, which reveal how these thinkers perform the logic of capitalism from within by mouthing utopian fantasies of digital labor as an emancipatory new condition of sharing and ‘gifting’.

So my provocation is, how do we use technology and pedagogy in our classrooms in ways that avoid reifying social inequalities based on students’ differential abilities to access, use, and learn from new media technologies? In other words, despite the ability new technologies have in terms of revolutionizing access and collaboration, do we risk further entrenching the dialectic of ‘digital labor’ as a new house-pet of capital accumulation if we simply use these tools without contextualizing their conditions of operability for our students? Furthermore, can a caveat–explaining the argument to them about the conditionalities of digital labor within capitalism–undo its force? Are we just training students to be “excellent sheep” (Deresiewicz 2015) in the new marketplace of skills-based corporate flexibilization? Does the simple praxis of using digital media make the logics of unpaid digital labor performatively true (‘performative’ in the sense that, as J.L. Austin puts it, ‘place your hands together in prayer and you will believe’), and if so how might we work around them?

I’m still reading and thinking through, so I’ll very much look forward to your comments.

Final Project Idea (Anders): For my final project, I would like to build an interactive website for my digital dissertation research using Scalar. My dissertation research in cultural anthropology examines the production of masculinity and the phenomenon of “seduction communities,” including dating coaches and their followers, who train each other in interpersonal skills and ‘charm’ to attract women. This website would act as an interactive online ‘museum’, and a public portal through which to present some digital data (as well as results of my dissertation research), and to connect my work with audiences beyond academia. In many cases, this digital data takes the form of pedagogical media produced by dating coaches and designed to inculcate particular understandings of self and other. Using Scalar (http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/), this project will invite readers to navigate open-ended, inverted, and non-linear pathways through multimedia archives of data including textual, video, and audio-based media gathered over the course of my research. Specifically, the site would be designed to allow readers to explore connections among—and discover new relations within—ethnographic data (text, video, audio and photography) that will be annotated, tagged, indexed, and deposited in the website. Text-based captions can accompany the multimedia ‘objects’ to explain, contextualize, or critique the objects. By allowing users to create divergent pathways through the archived materials, interact with and comment on pages, as well as to connect and dialogue with other users, the site will hopefully create an online safe space for community building around progressive and inclusive gender identities.