VIRTUALITY: FEM Winter 2019

/*FEM THE VIRTUALITY ISSUE*/ /*WINTER 2019*/

Apocalyptic and dystopian narratives tend to dominate conversations about the future in this historical political moment, but the concept of virtuality may provide more fruitful ways for us to understand our contemporary condition. We most commonly understand “virtuality” as a simulation of reality, exemplified most literally by the computer-generated images of virtual reality technologies. But these technologies inform virtuality beyond simulation – they visualize a distinction between the realm of information and the “real” world, while conceptualizing information as something that acts on life as we experience it. As a result, the material world is theorized as secondary; information patterns dominate how we understand subjectivity, knowledge, power, and desire. With this issue, we push back against the cynicism of technological determinism, making the case for an embodied virtuality that creates unique conditions for social transformation.

In her book “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics,” N. Katherine Hayles employs a strategic definition of virtuality, describing it as “the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns.” Key to this definition is virtuality’s orientation as a perception or sense of the world, rather than a static “fact.” There is a sense today that information is more fundamental and indispensable than life itself. With this information hierarchy, however, comes erasure – of the body, of marginalized experience, of different historical conceptualizations of information that did not seek to overthrow corporeal existence.

Feminism has always asked questions that seek to explode existing notions of subjectivity and embodiment. But it also has much to gain from grounding conversations about technology and science in its praxis. The liberal human subject – the heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender, white man – empowered by nothing other than his “God-given right” no longer dictates what the “human” is today.

The virtual subject is at play, but we have a hard time understanding that subjectivity politically; unlike the “universal” liberal subject, it is fragmented, composed of parts constructed by an equally disjointed history. This subject is no more ideal than its predecessors, but we

must take it seriously if we want to transform the powers that mold it. We must find pleasure in the deconstruction of boundaries, rather than yearn for an original, pure innocence that never was.

The conditions of virtuality show us what is at stake in this cultural moment – the everyday intrusions of technology assert that life itself is a surplus, while its vital information power is accumulated as capital. Virtuality has roots in U.S. militarism and imperialism, birthed from theories of communication and control that served the technological innovations of world powers since World War II. We ourselves are the illegitimate offspring of the shamefully public yet concealed incestuous relationship between patriarchy, capitalism, and neocolonialism. But in our illegitimacy, there is a faithfulness to something other than what we know now. It is this sense of “something other” that can guide us into transformative ways of being and belonging.

Feminist desires for a unitary wholeness in the category of “woman” are long past serving us politically. Our phallogocentric mythologies are coded into technologies that shape the world, but the fusion of femininity and intelligence is a legitimate source of patriarchal anxiety that we can explore. In this issue, virtuality demonstrates how gender construction mirrors the artificial (pg.

6). We expose how white supremacy spreads across the digital networks constructed by patriarchal capitalism and militarism (pg.

22). We examine how digital technologies are shifting the way we educate (pg. 24). We investigate how the commodification of our lives is exacerbated by the virtual (pg. 28).

Virtuality is a challenging concept, given its slippery nature as something that has crept into our subjectivities seemingly without notice. Crafting the virtuality issue proved to be as difficult as defining virtuality politically. Thank you to each writer, editor, and designer who stepped out of their comfort zone to produce an issue unlike any we have created before. This issue was conceived from our desire for a more just world, and we hope it sheds light on the political work that still needs to be done.

Becca Vorick

Editor’s Note

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6 Women Online Are Content

by Gabriella Kamran art by Eve Anderson

18 To Ghost or Not to Ghost?

by Katheryne Castillo art by Grace Ciacciarelli

8 After the Storm

by Elliot Yu photography by Joyce Ding

21 maybe

by Lily Bollinger art by Elena Sviatoslavsky

9 real life

by Sophie Poe art by Elizabeth Gomez

22 Why Nazis Thrive on the Internet

by Chiamaka Nwadike art by Elizabeth Gomez

10 The Gaze of Cyberspace

by Samantha Marmet photography by Joanna Zhang

24 Digital Humanities: The Evolution of Education

by Devika Shenoy art by Lauren Frank

12 Informational Studies Department Profile

by Natasha Cocke photography by Maddy Pease

26 Playing in the Virtual World: Transgender Representation in Video Games

by Sarah Garcia art by Malaya Johnson

14 Finstas: Symptoms or Safe Space?

by Jenna Welsh art by Shannon Bolland

28 Microcelebrity & the Virtual Self

by Annie Lieu & Catherine Pham art by Natya Regensburger & Jolene Fernandez

16 Burning Coals and Kitchen Knives

by Paloma Nicholas art by Emma Lehman

30 Faking It: The New Reality of Deepfake Porn

by Ashley LeCroy art by Jenny Dodge

17 Big Data: A More Efficient Way to Discriminate

by Emma Jacobs art by Jenny Dodge

Table Of Contents

5 Editor-in-Chief Becca Vorick Print Design Director Maddy Pease Online Design Director Jenny Dodge Print Managing Editor Jessica Sosa Arts & Creative Editor Christine Nguyen Campus Life Editor Sophia Galluccio Dialogue Editor Gabriella Kamran Gendertainment Editor Kerri Yund Politics Editor Jhemari Quintana _____________________________________ Assistant Editors Alana Francis-Crow Chiamaka Nwadike Heidi Choi Jemina Garcia Kayla Andry Lia Cohen Megan Anderson Jessica Sosa Victoria Sheber _____________________________________ Copy Editors Amanda Nelson Anya Bayerle Grace Fernandez Julia Do Leila Modjtahedi Marlee Zinsser Olivia Serrano _____________________________________ Writers Gabriella Kamran Devika Shenoy Elliot Yu Sophie Poe Samantha Marmet Natasha Cocke Jenna Welsh Paloma Nicholas Katheryne Castillo Chiamaka Nwadike Emma Jacobs Lily Bollinger Sarah Garcia Annie Lieu

Catherine Pham Ashley LeCroy _____________________________________ Designers Shannon Bolland Grace Ciacciarelli Malaya Johnson Elizabeth Gomez Emma Lehman Paloma Nicholas Joanna Zhang Eve Anderson Lauren Frank Emily Farag Joyce Ding Margaret Jackson Jolene Fernandez Elena Sviatoslavsky Natya Regensburger _____________________________________ FEM MAGAZINE dedicates itself to furthering the application of intersectional feminism to dismantle structures of oppression.

We recognize that oppression operates along a multitude of intersecting axes, and we strive to present perspectives that might be otherwise marginalized, erased, or silenced in the mainstream media. We aim to offer perceptive critique of pop culture, report news and current events that we believe are essential to the feminist cause, and provide a space for creative feminist work. _____________________________________

Finance Director Monica Day Website Managing Editor Zixuan Wang Social Media Managers Brenna Nouray Kelli Hsu Video Director Alana Francis-Crow Jemina Garcia Radio Manager Marion Moseley Community Outreach Director Heather Miau Social Coordinator Cindy Quach _____________________________________ Special Thanks to Jennifer Ferro & Arvli Ward Tulika Varma Brian Pea Jake Tillis Front & Back Cover Photography by Malaya Johnson Design by Maddy Pease

FEM Newsmagazine is published and copyrighted by the ASUCLA Communications Board. All rights are reserved. Reprinting of any material in this publication without the written permission of the Communications Board is strictly prohibited. The ASUCLA Communications Board fully supports the University of California’s policy on non-descrimination. The student media reserve the right to reject or modify advertising whose content descriminates on the basis of ancestry, color, national origin, race, religion, disability, age, sex or sexual orientation. The ASUCLA Communications Board has a media grievance procedure for resolving complaints against any of its publications. For a copy of the complete procedure, contact the publications office at 118 Kerckhoff Hall @ 310-825-9898.

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Women Online Are Content WRITTEN BY GABRIELLA KAMRAN ART BY EVE ANDERSON

Praised be Pinterest, vanguard of the thumbnail feminist revolution, sanctuary for suburban moms with cooking blogs who are shattering the digital ceiling imposed by archaic advertising firms that thought they knew what women want. Bless the @realgirl, influencer not of lifestyles but of epistemologies, her selfie a practice of aesthetic empowerment and her feed a testament to post-identity womanhood. Everywhere we see cyborg women, Haraway’s supposed legacies, hacking away at gender essentialism with clicks as their weapon of choice.

reality,” the political myth of the cyborg exists outside universality and primordial innocence, consequently disclosing “an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction.”

Haraway regards the boundary-blurring properties of technological mediation as a promising frontier in our understanding of gender. A “cyborg theory of wholes and parts” reveals the labor of identity construction and the precarity of the physical, making the binary gender essentialism that imagined “woman” as a cohesive category of meaning obsolete.

In a talk titled “Social Media and the End of Gender” given at TEDWomen 2010, USC media researcher Johanna Blakley presented the thesis that social media, turning as it does on the data economy, allows us to escape the demographic boxes constructed by media companies on the basis of old-school stereotype. As the primary users of social media platforms, women would be “responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre categories like the ‘chick flick.’” By simply using the Internet and feeding its voracious algorithms, Blakley suggests, women have the capacity to destabilize the corporate media establishment’s very center of balance.

Haraway’s definition of feminism as a politic of diffusion and deconstruction, a rejection of universalized political identities and embrace of networked affinities, bears a superficial resemblance to Blakley’s argument.

That is, the malleability of the virtual can facilitate heterogeneity among women, thereby revealing that the emperor of “womanhood” has no clothes.

Crucially, however, Blakley borrows this belief in the potentiality of technology without its necessary counterpart — the tools we are talking about are quintessentially patriarchal, fundamentally shaped by what Haraway calls our “phallogocentric origin stories.”

Taken at face value, Blakley’s theory doesn’t seem to stray far from the lineage of cyberfeminist thought that envisioned the fledgling internet as a radical playground for gender reconstruction. A seminal text in this canon is Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a critique of feminisms that rely on a totalizing definition of women as a homogenous class. As a “fiction mapping our social and bodily

This is where the two arguments diverge radically: Blakley’s hypothesis ignores the Internet’s nature as a tool for reinforcing the same stale misogynistic stereotypes, but in a way that is ever more impossible to detect as the digital threads seamlessly into our lives. Haraway presents us with the task of reconfiguring feminism in the language of advancements in science and technology, which always already

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shape our social and embodied reality. It is apparent that this is a language Blakley does not speak.

Blakley’s miscalculation is evident in the fact that technology, particularly social media platforms, has not dismantled the constraints and tyrannies of identity so much as it has replaced their raw material. To illustrate, in Rina Nkulu’s treatise on Glossier, the “first digital beauty brand,” she draws a clean parallel between the increasingly intangible nature of technology and Glossier’s “barely-there” approach to makeup branding. The company belabors the point that its products are “inspired by the people who use them” and “optimized for real life,” which in practice means they’re like any other commercial makeup product, but foregrounded by various shades of millennial pink. “Makeup is a choice,” the Glossier website declares, next to a photo of a woman’s full magenta lips that could be mistaken out of context for erotica.

There is nothing innovative about this pioneering digital makeup brand other than its fixation on the thin digital interface between simulation and reality. Nobody is actually buying this “real girl” bullshit in the age of VSCO editing, but no one likes a selfie that looks artificial either, and Glossier monetizes our balancing act on this familiar beauty bridge. Glossier is the cosmetic equivalent of posting ironically on social media, the chill and nonchalant shimmer of digital beauty obscuring the labor required to curate the look.

It cannot escape mention that this look is super freely chosen; it seems we’re supposed to believe that Glossier taps into a primordial garden of feminine inclinations, and poreless Instagram brand ambassadors show up at their doorstep. The fetishization of the feminine-natural is now mediated by the very technology that was supposed to kill it off, and no one seems to notice.

Racial identity, too, finds new, shadowy homes in the alleyways of the Internet. In “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” Aria Dean argues that internet memes transpose and extend the meaning of Blackness.

The Internet is itself an ideal medium for Blackness insofar as it is “always already a networked culture and always already dematerialized,” characterized by dispersal and circulation and the double-consciousness of performance — seeds sown by the African diaspora and the violence of the Middle Passage. Given the freefor-all nature of the Internet, memes are yet another avenue for Blackness to be appropriated, mined, and consumed for entertainment value (see: digital blackface, or the use of Black bodies for online expression via meme or GIF). If the accusation that memes are a channel for the exploitation of Black creative labor sounds vaguely absurd to some, we can attribute this confusion to the borderless, opaque terrain of the Web, which relies on infinite collaboration as its lifeblood. We are less post-identity and more what Nicolas Bourriaud called “post-productive” — beyond the limits of traditional ownership and embodiment.

because blackness’s only home is in its circulating representations.”

Dean also notes that “when society shines a light on it, what is atomized and multiplicitous hardens into the Black.” In calibrating targeted ads, it’s true that Facebook doesn’t ask for your race. But it does collect information that allows it to infer your “multicultural affinity.” Like frenzied memes, social network activities conceal race in digital code. Social media does not eliminate the stereotypes that ride on the coattails of racial identity; it scatters and submerges and obscures them until we hold them up to the light.

If the meme is Black, then perhaps it is also a girl. I say girl rather than woman because a meme is amusing and adjacent to cuteness, an aesthetic mode that Sianne Ngai theorizes as an infantilizing “way of aestheticizing powerlessness.” Memes are always already evolving, begging to be loved and go viral, never receiving attribution or recognition except as a youth culture novelty.

Girlhood has always been elastic, stretching to capture the ethos and anxieties of a nation (see: Shirley Temple movies as a repository for Great Depression suffering, or the contemporary existence of the not-at-all-satirical Teen Boss magazine for pubescent girl entrepreneurs). We now have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, who exist online not as congresswomen with actual policy platforms but as content-women, fetishized vessels of a post-Trump fever dream of liberal progress. Omar showing AOC her cute new Congressional Black Caucus jacket! Tlaib wearing a traditional Palestinian thobe at her swearing in! AOC dancing like a @realgirl from the Bronx!

In a paradoxical turn, the very fact of being online makes these congresswomen real. They are authentic and cool in the way Glossier desperately wants to be, although the brand of girl power being repackaged and resold here is political rather than a visual aesthetic. The patriarchy rears its head in the market once again, this time not as the determinant of what women really want but the antithesis of it. AOC isn’t like the other politicians, Glossier isn’t like the other beauty brands, and the Internet doesn’t exploit womanhood for consumption like the other ad companies — right, Blakley?

If there is a stake through someone’s heart, it isn’t gender’s. More likely, it’s the heart of our ability to recognize the way power infrastructures, now digitally enhanced, are capable of rearranging and manufacturing what women want. The revolution, unfortunately, will not be Instagram-storied. But with guidance from Haraway, Insta can help us find our torchbearer — not the real girl, but a monstrous cyborg.

In a sense, then, the meme enacts Haraway’s dream of a post-identity subjectivity, reminding us there is “no essential blackness, Dialogue

8

After the Storm

WRITTEN BY ELLIOT YU PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOYCE DING

Where do old gods go when they are forgotten? Do they die in glorious battles, or have they withered away long before then – sat in the back of dingy bars drinking away their glory days. Do they mourn? Do they fear? Or do they run like we do, with our urgent steps that seem less like a sprint and more like a desperate chase, hands pushed out and grasping at wisps of tomorrow. But what if tomorrow found a world without us. What if today was all we had, and every second after was time spent by others trying to understand us. Who remembers the old gods when their children are dead? Who will remember us?

In the early days, humanity would be best remembered by our digital age. There’s a family home in the West packed with bits of metal and plastic. Wires in rubber casings are twisted into the shapes of computers whose screens are rich with characters. There would be no guesswork. Voices could be played like records, and there would be no question about the moving pieces that made up faces.

These were a people more connected than ever.

After ten years, all those lives would be condensed into data locked away and deteriorating in hard drives, or bouncing between cell towers that have long lost power. Technology has done all it can.

Fortunately physical photos would still survive, but these would tell the story of a different generation. The images held on smartphones and laptops are now held just out of reach, but there is a framed photo on a bedside dresser that remains untouched.

Unlike those remembered in the digital age, the woman in the photograph has been dead for years. The expression on her face is stern, but the corners of her mouth are lifting up. If she smiles then the camera is too slow to catch it. Piles of photographs left around the house speak of moments uncaptured.

Is there anyone who remembers the way she used to smile?

One hundred years later, people would become the things they left behind. The woman is too hard to see now. The faded ink on photo paper has become an unreliable narrator, and what is left of life is now what has been packed away in boxes. There are children’s toys made of plastic, hidden away in attics and basements.

Knick knacks and trinkets that collect dust like some people collect coins. Rooms filled with handmade blankets, journals, cookbooks, and furniture.

After one thousand years, our memories will be pieced together by the foundations of our neighborhoods and our cities. Photographs have exhausted their lifespans, and our images are now captured in stone carvings and sculptures. Our lifestyles are wrapped tightly in synthetic textiles and tucked in the spaces between ceramic mugs.

Metal buildings and concrete jungles become the footprints of civilization. In one hundred thousand years, we are fossils and ancient tools, protected from time by layers and layers of earth. Whoever lived here had bones and thoughts that used to matter.

One million years have passed, and we are survived only by the artifacts that never die. We are just a collection of memories orbiting the sun. Remembered by over eight hundred spacecrafts that sit in a halo around the Earth. One particular satellite, the Echostar XVI communication satellite, holds an ultra-archival disc designed to last billions of years. On it sits one hundred pictures. The children of artists, anthropologists, scientists, and philosophers, the children of people who looked out into time and wondered what they would leave behind.

Over one billion years after we are gone, when the Earth has disappeared and there is nothing left for the Echostar XVI to lean on, we may still be remembered. If the future is sympathetic, then somewhere in space our memory is carried dutifully by the Voyager 1 satellite. A time capsule of sights, sounds, knowledge, thoughts, and our love. It will continue its journey, and it will hold us close as it wanders through the chaos of stars.

If tomorrow found a world without us, would the Earth keep spinning as it has always done, unbothered by whether or not we inhabit it? Would time and space continue without us there to mark the passing days? What would be forged in the burning hearts of stars if not us? We will be remembered, but will we be missed?

Arts & Creative

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real life

WRITTEN BY SOPHIE POE ART BY ELIZABETH GOMEZ

a final drop of dew glints in the morning sun as it falls it drips through the air, it wishes it had the power to stay back up on its leaf (be right back) it holds its molecules together by sheer willpower, anticipating the one final moment of vitality the dirt welcomes the gift and momentarily quenches perpetual thirst. (laugh out loud)

ok

the drop of dew no longer exists. does it matter what happens to its home?

Arts & Creative

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Our emotional dependency on digital technology is like never before: nobody knows us better than our smartphones. Digital technology, once a tool for information processing and exchange, has become an extension of ourselves. Widespread access to computers and smartphones, and the consequential growth of the Internet, contributed to the development of various social media platforms in the early 2000s that connect billions of people, introducing more efficient ways to communicate through online spaces. Cyberspace has disproportionately expanded the influence of external forces, like popular culture and capitalism, on identity formation. Social media is an architect of identity: it manufactures portraits of who we think we ought to be. We construct the digital, and, in turn, it constructs

The Gaze of Cyberspace WRITTEN BY SAMANTHA MARMET PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOANNA ZHANG us. Cyberspace provides democratized platforms where we can make a spectacle of our everyday lives. Thanks to apps like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, we know where everyone is and what they are doing. The content we post paints an image of the lives we want others to think we live, such as one of beauty, adventure, and status. This is changing the way we encounter and interact in cultural spaces, an example being the rise of “Instagrammable� public places. Social media platforms blur the line between our public and private lives, altering the way we understand the Euro-American notion of identity.

Politics

11 What does it mean to be? To understand how cyberspace impacts identity formation, identity must first and foremost be defined. The idea of a permanent self-existence — Plato’s presupposed notion of “essence” — is the standard principle of the classical understanding of identity. Plato presumed that every existing thing has an essence: a core set of properties that make a thing what it is.

This theory of essentialism postulates that people have an essence that exists before we are even born, and determines that we are born to be a certain thing. Jean Paul Sartre’s idea that “existence precedes essence” challenges essentialism by asserting that people define themselves as they live. We exist first, and then craft our own essence as an object-for-itself acting in the world. Honoring Sartre’s definition of identity, we generally conclude that there is no unitary, singular self or truth. Because we are dynamic living beings, we have no “core” self anchored within us charting our identities.

Identity is thus always constructed, fragmented, and ever-changing, translating quite seamlessly into the artificiality of cyberspace — the fluid, disembodied nature of our online identities find their form in these realities.

curating what we are exposed to. Algorithmic personalization can be dangerous because algorithms are not neutral — they contain biases because they are built by and used by humans, and are optimized for advertisers rather than users. The digital depictions of bodies, places, and lifestyles that we consume are often dictated by algorithms, yet this content helps inform our sense of self.

How much of our identity formation is in our control? Sartre posits that we become acutely aware of ourselves when confronted by the gaze of the Other because we are but objects in the presence of other people. We perceive ourselves the way we are being perceived, and therefore become what others perceive us to be. The gaze of the Other has the power to lock us into a particular way of being, which deprives us of our freedom to become. Today, our audience is boundless; through sound, image, text, and video, we are constantly in the virtual vicinity of others. Social media is defined by instantaneous feedback powered by likes, comments, friend requests, and follows. This feedback communicates whether or not we are popular, likeable, interesting, attractive, or desirable. We agonize over the approval of others, indicating a self-objectification and commodification that deprives us of the freedom to create our own essence. It appears that cyberspace has taken the shape of the watchful Other.

to an unclear and inconsistent self-concept. The cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence of the study illustrates the fragmentation hypothesis: the ability to project varied personas into cyberspace impairs one’s ability to develop a coherent identity. Social media trains us to perform as our doctored selves. What happens to our self-concept when the artificial feels more compelling than the real?

While the virtual nature of cyberspace allows us to explore multiple facets of identity, the ability to formulate nuanced online identities can be more limiting than freeing. Algorithmic filtering is a method of social engineering to shape what users think and know by

Social media has made the multiplicity of our identities a source of anxiety for its users. Our online identities are pure information, always avoiding any sort of digital individual wholeness. Our identity construction is formed against the identities of others, compelling us to create a “personal brand” that supposedly solidifies our reputation in cyberspace. While we strive to maintain a stable social media presence, what happens in cyberspace follows us into the physical world. The increasing pressure to be authentic to one’s online identity in real life erodes the boundaries of the person and the persona. A study titled “Intensity of Facebook Use is Associated With Lower Self-Concept Clarity,” published in the Journal of Media Psychology, reveals that increased social media usage contributes

Since I began actively using social media in high school, I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable in my own skin. I constantly internalize the rhetoric of popular culture that tells me I can be better than I am. My cyberself and self-image are inconsistent: my Instagram is colorful and carefully curated, but leaves no trace of my anxieties and insecurities. My approach to navigating cyberspace is to hide myself as much as possible — to exist as someone else. But in doing so, I don’t know how to be myself. This very inconsistency between who I am and who I portray online is what makes it so hard to accept that I will be this person for the rest of my life, whether or not I am enough. Herein lies my cognitive dissonance: I want to reclaim my self from the gaze of cyberspace, and I want to be desirable all at once.

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Information Studies Department Profile WRITTEN BY NATASHA COCKE PHOTOGRAPHY BY MADDY PEASE

From the #MeToo movement to #BlackLivesMatter, the Internet and social media have become integral to connecting with our changing world and advocating for social justice. As the distribution of knowledge grows increasingly virtual, the UCLA Information Studies department researches how our access to information has changed.

In the fall 2018 edition of the UCLA Graduate School of Information Studies magazine, Chair Jonathan Furner says the department is primarily interested in what people do with information today, as well as “questions of fairness, access and opportunity.”

Founded in 1958 as the School of Library Service, the school was not officially named the Department of Information Studies until 1999. The department is now ranked as the tenth best information school in the world, and actively investigates a variety of subjects pertaining to the preservation of, sharing of, and access to information and digital culture.

This variety of research provides multiple areas for intersectional feminist research. The Information Studies department provides specializations in Archival Studies, Informatics, Library Studies, Media Archival Studies, and Rare Books/Prints and Visual Culture.

These specializations allow cultivation of research that provides a variety of ways to understand the role of information in our lives, from studies of record keeping to archival policy, design information services, digital libraries, search engines, policies of librarianship, history of literary techniques, digital writing formats, and archiving of sound, images, and videos.

Faculty members work with various types of information, demonstrating intersectional approaches to academic research. Dr. Ellen Pearlstein studies the conservation of featherwork by Indigenous peoples from Central and South America. With a dedication to social justice, Associate Professor Sarah Roberts teaches courses in Library Studies and researches the social and political implications of social media.

More social justice work is being done in the study of socio-cultural informatics and the intersections of transnational culture and technology. Dr. Safiya Noble is one scholar in the department whose work focuses on these issues. In her book “The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online,” Noble writes about the way power structures the Internet and the impact social media networks have on social justice movements — particularly in the example of #BlackLivesMatter. She writes about how social media often commercializes violence against Black men, while erasing the experiences of women of color that are integral to liberation movements. Similarly, in her book, “Algorithms of Oppression,” Noble describes how search engines are created with biased sets of algorithms that exotify and discriminate against people of color,

favoring whiteness. She also explores the implications of data discrimination and how a culture of sexism and racism changes how information is sorted and presented through search engines.

In addition to Noble’s research on racial biases of the Internet, many other graduate students in the department research how social justice can be promoted through virtual communities. Ph.D. student Jennifer Pierre researches computer-mediated communication and social informatics, with emphasis on how people use information and communication technologies to form and maintain communities. Her dissertation work assesses the social media usage patterns of global youth and how this intersects with their real-life communal spaces.

In her research on youth media usage, she finds that many young people rely on social media to maintain ongoing contact with friends and family. “This constant contact creates the opportunity for ongoing social support among many other things,” Pierre explains.

When asked about how the Internet has changed our relationship to information, Pierre says, “The Internet and virtual communities have changed the way we share information and learn by creating more opportunities for communication and information exchange.”

Pierre also describes how the Internet can contribute to social change by providing spaces for large-scale communication, connection, and collaboration to ground common causes. “We have the ability to hear others’ stories and support others’ causes though crowdfunding. We find and articulate common themes across varied experiences through hashtags, and we broaden the perspectives we are exposed to through digital live grassroots reporting.”

Pierre’s research poses and investigates important ethical questions around current information systems. However, she notes that the Internet and social media create new challenges for communication, adding: “This creates a need for an increased awareness and thoughtfulness about how we share and evaluate information. It requires more work to appropriately assess meaning in digital content, identify information sources, and create healthy and appropriate personal boundaries with technology.” As personal information becomes increasingly accessible through digital networks, we must be conscious of new privacy risks and the ethical line between what is meant to be private and what is meant to be shared. For these reasons and more, Pierre encourages members of the UCLA community to learn more about the department and its research because of its relevance to our lives.

“I believe that the current research being conducted in the Information Studies department is integral to answering questions at the intersection of technology and society today,” she adds. “Our

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research investigates the role of documents in migrant refugee crises, the consequences of biomedical data sharing, bias in search engines, and the impact of augmented reality in interactions with physical space. The questions in our department’s work have applications in various contexts that we engage with every day.”

Although the department of Information Studies only offers graduate degrees, current undergraduate students at UCLA can take select courses with the department to learn more about the role of information in our daily lives. The Information Studies faculty teach undergraduate courses on contemporary, socially relevant topics, such as “Information and Power,” “The Internet and Society,” “Dig-

ital Cultures and Societies,” and support individual undergraduate research opportunities. These courses can strengthen students’ ability to critically navigate today’s ever-evolving information systems.

“Students should be aware of the department’s research because many of the questions we grapple with are ones they face as users of technology, media, data and other information elements,” says Pierre. While describing the importance of the Information Studies department and its work, she adds: “We hope that our research will help guide others to critically evaluate information in their lives and make associated choices and decisions that contribute to a more just society.”

Campus Life

14 Late one night while in the depths of midterms, I posted a picture on Instagram of my personal hero, Stevie Nicks, along with a rant about my precarious mental state. I typed out how I felt like my life was spiraling out of control: I was upset about my academic trajectory, my lack of social interaction, and how I was “allowing” myself to be treated by men. Getting out of bed to shower or go to class had become a Herculean task. I unleashed all of my inner emotional turmoil, most of it previously unexpressed, onto the Internet. But only a select group of people had access to my emotional ramblings: I posted the image and its accompanying rant on my finsta, or “fake Instagram” account, rather than on my public, more widely followed account.

Finstas function as alternative accounts for people to post embarrassing or socially “compromising” photos, memes, or, as in my case, impassioned rants about anything from hookup culture to deep-seated fears and insecurities. Typically, finstas boast a very slim and select group of followers, in addition to an anonymous name and profile picture. Many of us have heard enough cautionary tales to know that it’s risky to post a picture of yourself doing a keg stand on your public social media account, which your family and future employers may see. However, that’s standard content for an account that takes great lengths to remain anonymous. As a fellow finsta user puts it: “My life isn’t glamorous, it’s real and raw.”

Many people find it refreshing to publicly display the parts of themselves that are ugly, mortifying, or imperfect within the massive, dynamic archive that is the Internet, even when only a select few are able to view it. This is digital “self-care” at its peak.

Finstas: Symptom or Safe Space?

WRITTEN BY JENNA WELSH ART BY SHANNON BOLLAND

Indeed, when I feel alone, unattractive, empty, or otherwise dissatisfied with my life, my finsta is often one of the first places I go to vent. It’s almost a confessional for me — when I do something I feel bad about, or someone angers me beyond the point of forgiveness, I turn to my finsta. I cannot think of a safer space to express my pain, turmoil, or even joy than one that I curate myself, with a small group of friends as invited guests. While I meticulously comb through my pictures before posting on my “real” account, my finsta is a space that I utilize to proudly display my mess. The photo on my “real” Instagram with the least amount of likes is a picture of Anthony Bourdain, another hero of mine, posted on the day he died by suicide. It seems that my expression of sadness about the loss of an icon was not well received by my followers in comparison to my glamorous European vacation images. When I posted something authentic and raw, it was not received in the same way my airbrushed identity was — many of us find that posting on our finstas is a way to reconcile that dichotomy.

Some people also use their finstas as a reflection of their genuine day-to-day experiences, often as members of marginalized communities. As one finsta user explains: “I vent about tinier, easy to miss racist and sexist encounters on my finsta because only my close friends would understand why something so tiny would bother me.”

Another user said that they vent about frustrating encounters — relating to queerphobia, transphobia, ableism, and/or sexism — on their finsta because they do not feel comfortable publicly expressing their anger and frustration. In a sense, these accounts are also hubs Dialogue

15 of feminist and anti-racist thought within trusted circles of people, particularly useful when engaging in dialogues on a public account often entails emotional labor on behalf of the oppressed.

Additionally, when I asked friends of mine why they use their finstas, they almost collectively acknowledged that it was a great place to seek support amongst trusted confidants. After I posted my “Stevie Nicks” moment of crisis on my finsta, I received a good deal of concern from people both familiar and more distant. One of my best friends knew that I was in a rut but did not know the extent of my pain until I was able to articulate it in writing on my finsta. Posting my confusing mess of thoughts online helped me reach out to a greater network of support than I realized I had — I could be more vulnerable online than in person. But what does it say about us if we need phone and computer screens to mediate our most difficult conversations, rather than embracing face-to-face communication?

Other times, I fear that finstas create a toxic environment that perpetuates self-hatred and isolation. Another friend told me that she sees the competitive nature of public accounts manifest comparatively in finsta circles, just in a different way; rather than trying to airbrush one’s accomplishments, finsta users are in a competition to see who is going through the most bullshit. When I scroll through my finsta feed, I often see other accounts of stress and loneliness that I sometimes overlook because the very act of posting such a cry for help has become normalized. As Media Studies scholar Fredrika Thelandersson contends, social media “sad girls” romanticize emotional pain and turmoil in the echo-chamber that is the Internet. Emotional distress is a popular commodity on the Internet, and we’re producing, packaging, and delivering it. It reminds me of the phenomenon of bragging about how little sleep or food one gets during finals week: It’s a race to see who can overwork themselves to the highest degree, just communicated in the form of a picture with a caption. Finstas can also become placeholders for sustainable mental health treatment — it’s easy to go on a rant in a digital space but more strenuous to make time to seek professional help when you take into account the personal and financial costs that come with it. And, again, when the very act of posting an experience of emotional upheaval is “normal,” at what point are we supposed to consider therapy, rather than accept our emotions as “typical?”

lash, which thus encourages some to save these posts for a safer space. The existence of finstas, therefore, helps us understand why young people of marginalized identities struggle to connect with one another and subsequently find isolated expressions of emotional trauma to be the most relieving. Racist patriarchal capitalism breeds alienation not just from labor or work-product, but also between members of society, whether that be in physical spaces or digital ones.

In truth, finstas seem to be both useful instruments for processing emotional trauma, big or small, as well as a product of an industry that profits off of our narcissistic tendencies. For some, finstas have a definite function in the process of catharsis, but by the same token they create some unfortunate side effects, posing new problems in the form of a performative digital culture of self-destruction. More than anything, I’m ready for the day when our social media culture does not prioritize image and aesthetic over genuine expression of our triumphs and struggles. It’d be nice if we all understood that our “perfect” and genuine selves are one in the same.

The existence of finstas is curious in and of itself — if the point of social media is to connect with a wide variety of people, why do we relegate embarrassing content that we characterize as genuine to an isolated corner of the Internet? These accounts exist together as a symptom of the well-studied adverse effects of social media on individuals, manifesting particularly through a format like Instagram which privileges the visual and aesthetic. The lack of what appears to be authentic content in social media spaces may partly be what leads us to seek catharsis in a divergent way. It’s disheartening, though telling, that marginalized people may not be comfortable expressing their honest thoughts, opinions, and feelings publicly on social media, especially when the Internet is theorized as a space for connection and self-determination. The discrepancies between the beauty standards and tropes that womxn must embody on social media (think highly sexualized, perfect glamour shots) and the actual day-to-day realities of upholding those standards (not to mention dealing with the racist patriarchy) are also pretty stark.

For users who employ their finstas to condemn systemic oppression, candid articulations of racism and misogyny are not glamorous but emotionally exhausting. Publicly posting frank personal accounts of marginalization and discrimination unfairly puts the onus on the person sharing to defend their experience in the event of a backDialogue

See the finsta for yourself on your phone by inputting this QR code.

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Burning Coals and Kitchen Knives Mom raised me on truisms, yellowed recipe books, and the heroic tales of Mama Tere. At age eight, she moved from a poor urban colonia in El Salvador to Los Angeles with her three older sisters.

What remained from home were fleeting memories from her childhood, many of which involved her grandmother: “When your great-grandmother Tere discovered her nephew had been cheating on his wife, she was furious. She couldn’t have a liar in the family!

So she grabbed him by the ear, dragged him to the center of the village, and publicly burned his tongue with a hot piece of coal. No one messed with Mama Tere or her family name.”

Mama Tere was a bona fide legend. She carried a machete, slaughtered chickens with bare hands, and raised all four of her granddaughters by herself – all while an active war plagued her town.

“There would be bombs going off all night. Our little house was always shaking. But Mama Tere was never scared. If she thought a threat came too close to home, she’d walk right out the front door, machete in hand, ready to attack,” she remembered. Mom frequently revisited these memories while growing up in Los Angeles.

Although she moved away from her beloved grandmother, she grew tough like Tere.

When my little brother Moses called me a “bitch,” she dragged his body to the bathroom sink and washed his mouth with soap. No son of hers was going to be running around with a dirty mouth! And she made damn sure it was clean. My tía threatened to call Child Protective Services, but Mom didn’t even flinch: “Call them! It’ll be nice to showcase my loving home to a few strangers.”

Claudia Bautista is afraid of nothing. If she thought someone was in the house, she would grab a knife and check every room. When she has her blood drawn, she unveils her arms and tells the nurse exactly where to put the needle. I, on the other hand, am deathly afraid of needles, and once tried to make a run for it at the doctor’s office. She promptly slapped me and told me my weak behavior was “un-Salvadoran.”

“What do you mean Moses never got into a fight?” I asked.

“My Moses? Are you kidding me? He’s never been in a fight! He’s a lover, not a fighter,” Mom responded, matter-of-factly.

I had called my mom with the intention of asking her to recount the story of my brother’s first fight. From what I could remember, he got into a petty fist fight, and Mom chastised him for bringing shame to the family because “Bautistas never lose fights.” But she claimed it never happened. Even Moses didn’t know what I was talking about.“So you never said that thing about us not being able to lose a fight?” I questioned. “No! But that does sound like something I’d say, doesn’t it?” She chuckled.

Desperate to feel sane, I shared some more of my favorite Claudia stories. The rest of my memories were fairly similar to her own rec-

WRITTEN BY PALOMA NICHOLAS DESIGN BY EMMA LEHMAN

ollection. “No, I’ve never slapped you! I did sit on you, though. That way, you couldn’t run away from the needle,” she added proudly.

For the rest of the day, I revised the files of memories in my head.

How many of them are real, or at least somewhat tethered in reality? Embellishment is a given in storytelling. But have I embellished to the point that I’ve completely lost sight of the real memory?

Many believe recalling a memory is like rewinding a video. But according to a 2012 study conducted at Northwestern University, memory is more like a game of telephone. Every time you try to remember a past event, “your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time.”

I’ve told my favorite “Mom stories” for as long as I can remember.

Now I wonder, if each time I retell the memory, I inadvertently draw myself farther away from what really happened. My mother is probably just as guilty of creating memories as I am, rehashing old Mama Tere stories as long as there’s someone willing to lend an ear. If this study’s findings are true, my mother’s hero didn’t really exist. Yes, she was real, but the woman Mom remembers from her stories may not have been as resilient and swaggering in reality as she was in memory. Did she really publicly humiliate a grown man? Did she even own a machete?!

Confused and a bit disheartened – I felt like I practically lost a childhood hero – I tried to remember the first time Mom shared a Mama Tere story. I’m taken back to Northgate, a supermarket staple for my family. Mom was rambling on and on about the various tests produce must pass in order to grace our fridge.

A fine steak should always bounce back when it’s given a good jab. A peach should only be taken home if it is wrapped in a dark red coat.

And, most importantly, you must knock on a watermelon to determine its sweetness.

“Because a hollow-sounding melon hides the juiciest flesh,” she explained. “Back in El Salvador, your great grandma would pound her fists on every watermelon in our village. The merchants weren’t too happy with this method, but she always came home with the sweetest melon. You come from a long line of smart, melon-pounding women.” She smiled proudly, then motioned me to start knocking.

Maybe the stories are true, maybe not. Or maybe they’re halftruths. But who cares? Mama Tere was there for my mother when she so desperately needed a heroine. My mother served as my model of strength. We cultivate our own heroines from the women around us, adorning their memory with burning hot coals and machetes to showcase their “larger-than-life” personalities. In this way, our heroines shape us just as much as our memory may shape them. And even if the stories aren’t “true,” the lessons and wisdoms shared are very much real to the women in my family.

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Big Data: A More Efficient Way to Discriminate WRITTEN BY EMMA JACOBS ART BY JENNY DODGE

In the contemporary age of Big Data, idyllic visions of a future where marginalized groups have access to the same opportunities as heterosexual, cisgender, white men are hardly realistic. Big Data refers to mass data sets which are analyzed with algorithms to expose trends and patterns in how we behave and interact every second we are online. Big Data is a collective digital footprint continuously sourced from phones, social media, shopping, GPS usage, and general internet surfing. Unsurprisingly, implicit biases are coded into artificial intelligence, digitally reproducing violent realities of structural racism, sexism, and classism.

Rachel Goodman, a staff attorney for the ACLU Racial Justice Program, reports that Amazon created an algorithm in 2014 to optimize their hiring process that also developed a bias against woman applicants. The program compared the resumes of applicants to the resumes of the company’s predominantly male workforce. If an applicant’s resume mentioned a women’s college, it was automatically thrown out because it did not match the resumes of current employees. The misogynistic bias which informed the creation of Amazon’s initial, predominantly male workforce was built into the algorithm used to hire new employees. While Amazon stopped using the program after recognizing the issue, there is no legislation prohibiting the use of such an algorithm unless Amazon is taken to court. However, according to Goodman, even this potential lawsuit is unlikely, as women who are not hired likely do not even know they were discriminated against. This is how erasure happens within the confines of Big Data.

Algorithms also assist racist police precincts in the form of crime prediction software. In “Weapons of Math Destruction,” Cathy O’Neil mentions one such software created by PredPol used in Reading, Pennsylvania. The software determined the areas where crime was most likely to occur, and, as a result, more officers were assigned to patrol those areas. The surveillance software was devastating in low-income areas because it integrated nonviolent, victimless crime, such as drug or property crimes, into its code. Higher police presence in such areas increased incarceration rates in low-income communities, to which O’Neil attributes the eventual overpopulation in prisons. A negative feedback loop developed as police were continuously sent back to these same targeted communities because the software told them to do so, justifying racial profiling through code. O’Neil argues: “The result is that we criminalize poverty, believing all the while that our tools are not only scientific but fair.”

This algorithmic racial profiling also alters marginalized individuals’ access to insurance. Big Data is transforming the insurance industry

with algorithms that discriminately determine which individuals are more of a “risk” for insurers. In health insurance specifically, the ACLU reports that Black women are forced to pay higher premiums than white women. Furthermore, according to The New York Times, Black women are more likely to face health problems during pregnancy due to systemic racism within the healthcare system and racial bias exhibited when receiving care from doctors and nurses.

This means that Black women and children not only experience higher mortality rates in the healthcare system — Black women also pay more than white women for inferior care. Racial bias has always existed in the insurance industry, but Big Data is streamlining this discrimination and rendering it invisible in the form of digital information.

While algorithms, if left unregulated, seem to only facilitate discrimination, there are ways Big Data can potentially be used for good.

Big Data is currently being used to curb the effects of climate change and build smarter, more sustainable cities. According to Renee Cho at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, algorithms are being used to match high-resolution photos with data points on trees in rainforests, allowing scientists to understand how the composition of forests change when impacted by major storms. With tree damage, more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and forests are weakened, aggravating the effects of climate change. Big Data can thus help us understand how to better preserve rainforests. Additionally, IBM is currently producing a system that can predict air pollution and generate ways to combat it, like closing certain power plants. Overall, Big Data has the potential to improve our social reality, but can do so more concretely if its abilities are not confined by corporate powers who overlook discrimination in pursuit of maximum profit.

While Big Data has this potential, algorithms will always be tainted by the biases of their creators, as they must be programmed using existing data. The data sets generated, the algorithms created, and the technology used to manufacture them are predominantly produced by white men, meaning discrimination and other forms of erasure are couched in a digital structure constructed by white supremacy and racism. If we truly want to prevent the discrimination facilitated by algorithmic biases, we also need to understand how the lack of transparency surrounding shifts in algorithmic methods of data analysis is deeply implicated in the ongoing absence of privacy laws concerning our digital information. A more ethical approach that informs data privacy is crucial. Until then, Big Data has simply created a more efficient way for Big Tech to discriminate.

Politics

18 As the subject of countless Twitter memes, brunch conversations, and the title of a track on Ariana Grande’s new album, ghosting undeniably has a popular role in the digital age. A common tactic in the dating sphere, to ghost means to suddenly cease all communication with someone without providing an explanation. It is arguably the most common way to drop someone you are no longer interested in, especially if you met them on the Internet.

Ghosting has continued to prevail because many relationships in the 21st century are maintained over digital interfaces. Whether it’s FaceTiming your best friend who’s studying abroad, sparking a conversation with an international member of your fandom, or getting to know someone on Tinder, digital devices are now a common form for fostering relationships. There is a convenience in being able to create and nurture connections through virtual spaces; however, that benefit works the same way when deciding to break those connections.

To Ghost or Not to Ghost?

WRITTEN BY KATHERYNE CASTILLO ART BY GRACE CIACCIARELLI

The rise of virtual platforms as a medium for contact has allowed ghosting to become an act without consequence — for the party that does the ghosting, at least. Unlike a relationship formed at school or work, relationships on the Internet often don’t feature a physical meeting place in which the parties would see each other in real life. When you ghost someone you met online, it is easy to withdraw contact because you never have to face them again. As ghosting becomes more common, people have begun to debate what justifies the act of ghosting — or if it needs any justification at all. While some people dub ghosting rude, passive aggressive, and cowardly, others consider it a kinder approach to rejection. There are people who caution against ghosting because it robs a person of closure, thereby causing undue emotional harm. Others consider it a necessary means, and lose no sleep over digitally erasing themselves from someone’s life. Ghosting can also be a way for people — particularly women — to dodge harm themselves.

Ghosting has become a tool for women to safely exit a relationship they are no longer interested in. Because there is no way of gauging whether the stranger they’ve been talking to will take their rejection gracefully, many women find it most practical to virtually disappear from that person’s life. Ghosting as a precautionary method of defense is especially common with the increased media coverage of the violence against women. Whether it’s at a barbeque after filing divorce papers or in a school hallway after turning down a dance invite, thousands of women are murdered every year in what writer Jessica Valenti describes as “rejection killings,” or fatal attacks enraged men commit against women who reject their advances. This grotesque phenomenon has been spotlighted more recently by the media since the Isla Vista murders. In 2014, an incel man went on a shooting rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara after feeling slighted by women who refused to reciprocate interest in him. Although the female casualties in this case mainly consisted of white sorority members, rejection killings disproportionately affect women of color, as well as women in other disenfranchised communities. It is difficult to obtain accurate statistics on these brutal murders, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI do not always disclose the relationships between victims and perpetrators. They usually categorize rejection killings as domestic violence or murders committed by “someone the victim knew.”

This is all to say that many men feel entitled to women — their respect, their bodies, their attention, and above all, their subservience. When they do not receive that, many act violently, so it makes sense that a number of women use ghosting as a way to dodge the dangerous behaviors of rejected men.

Dialogue

20 This form of self preservation is particularly vital for women in the LGBTQ+ community, especially trans women, who, according to the National Coalition of Anti Violence Programs, experience the highest risk of death by hate violence, more than any other group. In 2018, at least 26 transgender people lost their lives in fatal attacks, the majority being trans women of color. Due to the fact that crimes against people in the LGBTQ+ community so often go uninvestigated and unreported (especially with law enforcement and the media constantly misgendering victims), the true number of these hate killings is unknown. What is known is that women, especially marginalized women, have great reason to fear for their safety when it comes to dating.

In an entry written for her blog Trans Philosopher, trans writer Rachel Williams says: “For me, ghosting is ultimately about self-care … the inherent dangers of dating as a woman justify via self-defense keeping up the pretense of liking someone until the date is over and you can go home and ghost the fuck out of them, blocking them on all social media.” With women so highly susceptible to sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic violence, ghosting often presents itself as the safest option in ensuring their safety.

Ghosting also frees women of a great deal of the emotional labor they are expected to provide when they decide to stop seeing someone. Through ghosting, many women can circumvent orchestrating a delicate break up, and escape the aftermath of having to be agreeable, nice, or nurturing to the men they are no longer interested in. By digitally disappearing, women do not have to deal with the stress and anxiety that comes with comforting emotionally immature and manipulative men. Just like women have the right to withdraw consent at any point during a sexual encounter, they also have the right to withdraw communication at any stage of dating, and men are not entitled to an explanation in either scenario.

Ghosting is therefore a powerful tool women can use to easily and safely navigate the dating sphere.

contact me again than suffer through days of anxiety, along with making excuses for them in my head.” On the other hand, there are people who appreciate ghosting as a method of rejection. Because technology makes digital contact so accessible and ubiquitous, abrupt cessation of contact tends to send a clear message. This ultimately makes ghosting a form of communication in itself: the radio silence is the message; it is the ultimate, most obvious signifier that a person is no longer interested. “Now you know when someone is uninterested by a few days’ worth of silence,” said another UCLA undergrad. “I kind of like that — rejection now comes quietly.”

Ghosting can indeed cause some level of emotional harm, especially when it offers men the option to treat the women they date poorly. Nonetheless, women, particularly trans and queer women, typically find it a necessary means in a world where millions of potential, albeit random dates are available on their digital devices.

All the while, the ability to easily cut communication in virtual spaces has transformed dating as a whole. Ghosting not only enables women to safely take autonomy in their dating lives, but it also qualifies them to be assertive while simultaneously remaining mute.

Historically, women have been consistently silenced, but today, ghosting empowers them to excersize control over that silence, and use it in their favor.

Women do not have a monopoly on ghosting — men also ghost women frequently. To an extent, men’s reasons for ghosting also include dodging unhealthy confrontations, but while men can be more upfront with women, as they statistically have little reason to fear vicious retribution, there are many who choose not to. This stems from how easy it is to ghost, and while men also are not beholden to any particular rationale for ending contact with women, the act of ghosting in this case treads dangerously along the lines of a common form of misogyny: objectification. Ghosting makes it easy for men to ignore women once they lose interest, which can contribute to the idea that women are disposable. Lifestyle blogger Stephanie Yeboah recently revealed on Twitter that after being ghosted by a man she met on a dating app, one of his friends emailed her to say the man only went out with her because of a bet he made with his friends over whether he could sleep with a plus sized woman. This type of behavior, enabled by the digital age, aided this particular man’s ability to treat Yeboah as nothing more than a game for him and his friends’ entertainment. Therefore, ghosting — a useful and sometimes essential tool for women — can also be a weapon used against them. It makes it easy to rob women of recognition as whole people with emotions and dignity, rather than just a smiling face on a screen that bored men can mistreat, then easily block with one touch.

It is inevitable that ghosting will render a detrimental emotional impact on at least one side, and controversy regarding the merit of the act continues. One anonymous woman studying at UCLA said, “I don’t want to criminalize ghosting, but I would appreciate honest, upfront communication. I would rather know someone will not Dialogue

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WRITTEN BY LILY BOLLINGER ART BY ELENA SVIATOSLAVSKY when I was a sprite I inhabited two bodies one was mine: I knew, maybe I knew the craving in her belly the long arms and tangled hair I knew her shrewd eyes the other: one I still existed within and yet, she was an alien I grew unfamiliar with the twist of her gut the thunder of her heart the knots around her wrists this body was not mine: she was his maybe mine knew he lied to me maybe she knew that his truth was not the body that belonged to him couldn’t have hated him if she tried he’d cultured within her skin wound her up so tight, but she loved to be held and each time she said I know that isn’t true he spun his trap, twisted every part of her he owned broken fingers sifted through his words like sand each time she found something solid, it crumbled beneath her touch “Why are you so upset?”

It’s nothing.

“Then would you stop acting like a child?” as a dream, I grew comforted in the body I didn’t know At least that was a body he wanted my life convinced, though nothing more than that— myth tasted like sugar in my mouth in the final year of my girlhood, I woke up maybe I wish his body died but she was more me than the body I thought I had I know her in her blood her panic, all too familiar her anger as taut as the muscle in her back as a woman, I faced him his web hung around my head the body he knew so well stirred in me, dimly lit reminiscent of a dual-reality, a distant memory of a time more fragile than insect wings a shared ownership of one flesh, I didn’t know when the idea was mine or his “you make me crazy” maybe crazy was mine

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Why Nazis Thrive on the Internet WRITTEN BY CHIAMAKA NWADIKE ART BY ELIZABETH GOMEZ

Within the short 28 years that the Internet has been accessible to the public, it has developed into a frequently used tool for groups of people looking to create communities in virtual spaces. If you’re looking for a larger group of vegan dog lovers, you’re in luck — there is a subreddit for you. If you’re someone who is looking for a group of people who enjoy alternative music, rock climbing, and wine tasting, there is a community for you somewhere within the world of Facebook groups, Twitter communities, or Tumblr blogs.

The Internet can also be used as a tool for garnering attention for progressive social movements. For example, the #BlackLivesMatter movement was birthed on the Internet alongside a number of other mass progressive movements such as #NoDAPL, #muteRKelly, #NoBanNoWall, and many more. These movements center violence against marginalized people — including brutality targeting Black lives at the hands of the police, violence against and erasure of Native people, and the confiscation of Indigenous land and agency for capitalist goals. The #muteRKelly hashtag, started by Black women, brings to light the violence against Black women and girls that Robert Kelly has enacted for decades. The #NoBanNoWall hashtag was created to highlight the ongoing struggle to resist racist legislation pushed by the Trump administration that targets undocumented and Muslim folks.

The power and impact of online platforms is not only evident within the development of progressive movements — the information circulated on the Internet is hardly regulated and typically biased, meaning tech companies and the Big Data industry are not held accountable for potentially harmful information. Falsified data and information about marginalized people have the potential to inspire violence against communities such as the LGBTQIA+, Black, or Indigenous communities.

Raymond S. Nickerson of Tufts University defines confirmation bias as a phenomenon in which someone is “seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand.” Confirmation bias is common online because endless amount of information, regardless of validity, can be found on the Internet. This means if someone seeks information to defend what they already believe, they can easily find it. Just as flatearthers can cite information that reaffirms their belief that the earth is flat, the democratized nature of virtual space allows right-wing nationalists in the U.S. to find and create inaccurate information that reinforces their xenophobic beliefs that immigrants are the root cause of “their” country’s problems.

The rise of violent, right-wing groups in virtual spaces is a problem facing many vulnerable social media users. Because of the spread of false information and the algorithmic exclusivity of many virtual communities, right-wing groups have been flourishing as of late, which poses a threat for many marginalized communities. For example, incel communities are made up of men who believe that women are inferior and deserve to be raped, punished, or killed when they do not submit to a man. The violent, misogynistic think

pieces and rants shared by incels are finding their way into real life spaces and creating real life consequences.

Right-wing communities target vulnerable, easily manipulated 15 to 25-year-old white men whose insecurities can manifest biases and negative feelings towards minority groups. These online right-wing communities radicalize these men by weaponizing their insecurities concerning race or class, placing the blame on members of marginalized communities. This creates a problem aggravated by the violent structure of the cisgender, heterosexual, white supremacist patriarchy that we are all subject to, which leaves members of marginalized communities susceptible to all kinds of violence.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018 that YouTube’s algorithm was guiding users towards videos containing “misleading and often false content.” A YouTube user noted that after watching a far-right white nationalist’s video out of curiosity, the next time they visited YouTube, their usual list of recommended videos included many conspiracy videos from other right-wing nationalists who went on similarly racist rants. YouTube’s algorithm led the user into an entire community of white nationalists after only watching one video. NBC also reported in 2018 that YouTube’s algorithm utilizes machine learning to recommend videos that are potentially harmful for users.

This speaks to how quickly someone in a more vulnerable state can quickly, and inadvertently, find themselves in a radicalized white nationalist space — simply because it was recommended by YouTube. Right-wing groups can grow quickly and efficiently because they are not only allowed to have a platform in virtual spaces, but also encouraged to recruit in a very deliberate fashion.

The conversation surrounding right-wing groups in virtual space has moved more towards holding the people in positions of power accountable. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, was called out on numerous occasions because Twitter’s algorithm apparently favors and protects Nazis. On many other social media platforms such as Facebook and Tumblr, users report similar problems with the sites protecting right-wing groups. Similarly, reporting by Vox and other media outlets exposed how Reddit, infamous for being the virtual breeding ground for many contemporary right-wing, conservative groups, has been protecting alt-right groups and allowing them to remain on the site.

CEOs of various social media platforms have publicly made similar arguments that their platforms are for “all people,” and limiting “freedom of speech” is not within the core values of their platforms.

News outlets such as Vox and Business Insider report that social media companies are hesitant to censor users because it is not in their best interest to limit “free speech.” It has become very clear to users that Twitter’s lack of initiative to prevent the development of Nazi communities on the site was purely a matter of economic gain.

The hesitation to limit hate speech translates into the very protection of these right-wing groups while placing many marginalized people in danger of harassment and violence. For example, Black Twitter users reported online harassment, and on multiple occasions

Politics

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were called racial slurs by white nationalists on Twitter. No action was taken by Twitter Support to suspend the white nationalists’ accounts.

In December of 2018, Tumblr announced its plan to phase out all adult content on the site by banning Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content. Although this censorship may seem like an act of justice in the face of digital abuses, this decision severely limits how sex workers navigate the site. Sex workers and other advocates see this as a blatant attack on their community that further criminalizes and demonizes sex work. Users were also quick to call out the hypocrisy of Tumblr CEO Jeff D’Onofrio; he’s more than ready to limit how sex workers operate on the site, yet hesitates to stop right-wing groups from developing.

Tumblr’s decision to censor sex workers and NSFW content is a demonstration of the power these CEOs truly have in curating their social media platforms for who they want to serve. Their hesitation to limit the way Nazis operate on their platforms is a clear indication of their role as the gatekeepers of white supremacy and other violent structures that impact marginalized people today.

The truth behind why Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook refuse to ban Nazis and other right-wing groups is linked to clicks, likes, comments, and retweets — user data generates unimaginable profits for these companies. Social media platforms are valued based on how many people use them on a monthly basis. Currently, statistics indicate that Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are among the most powerful social media platforms in the U.S. due to their high number of monthly users. If these platforms started regulating which groups are allowed access, this action would slash the value of these companies, as well as significantly decrease the wealth of the already grossly affluent CEOs. Under capitalism, the monetary value of these companies are held at a higher level of concern than the lives of marginalized people who are the most vulnerable to the attacks of right-wing groups.

realities for marginalized people, as media coverage of far-right inspired crime makes this discourse visible to the public. The types of conversations held within these right-wing spaces include incels commenting on how they fantasize about raping the women they came into contact with in real life; white nationalists creating xenophobic propaganda, and racists discussing whether people of color are human beings who deserve rights. This dialogue is grossly romanticized and portrayed as the epitome of “open discussion” and “free speech.” Liberals and conservatives alike protect Nazis’ “right” to engage in hateful discourse for the sake of “free speech,” “free thinking,” and “diverse dialogue.”

In October 2018, the white supremacist who opened fire at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was radicalized on the social media platform Gab. According to The New York Times, Gab is a social media platform that prides itself on “free speech” – allowing white nationalists to gather in yet another digital space. This social media platform is exactly what emboldened the shooter to commit an anti-Semitic hate crime.

When the livelihood of historically marginalized people is put into question in the form of open discussion, it is very easy to see whose lives are valued under the cisgender, heterosexual, white supremacist patriarchy. All of humanity’s darkest shames are becoming hypervisible, taking on a new life form that is protected and encouraged in virtual spaces. Those who possess power have digitized violent power structures and are being encouraged to continue doing so under the guise of “free speech.” Marginalized people are disposable under violent structures; therefore, they are not worth protecting nor valued more than the data that right-wing radicals generate.

The conversations held within these rightwing spaces harbor violent ideologies that translate into more hostile and dangerous Politics

The CEOs of these major virtual platforms have made their decision as to who they will protect while these right-wing spaces expand on the Internet. They are choosing to permit violence. They are choosing to allow the aggressive structures that plague the lives of dispossessed people in physical spaces to be reproduced in virtual spaces, simply because it is profitable. They will continue to profit as long as clicks and views are valued over human lives.

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Digital Humanities: The Evolution of Education WRITTEN BY DEVIKA SHENOY ART BY LAUREN FRANK With the dawn of the Digital Revolution at the end of the 20th century, a new interdisciplinary field known as “digital humanities” emerged in academia. We can conceptualize the digital humanities as a set of tools, theories, and information used to advance a variety of other disciplines, ranging from environmental justice, to archaeology, to linguistics. UCLA’s Patrik Svensson describes the digital humanities as “never about only one field or tradition being challenged; it is about allowing curiosity, exchange, and sharpness to drive intellectual and material development.”

Why should we care about the digital humanities? After all, academia and knowledge production are historically dominated by white, cisgender, male voices. Radical Teacher — a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal dedicated to the theory and practice of teaching — demonstrates how tools offered by the digital humanities can empower marginalized communities through organized, meticulous research. Published by a Professor of Ethnic Studies, Stevie Ruiz, and a group of colleagues, the study “Radicalizing the Digital Humanities” focuses on the concept of environmental justice.

The group launched the study in response to student advocates who stressed the necessity of using digital archives “to transform the dialogue about environmental justice as it pertained to Chicana/os, since studies about conservation, climate change, and mainstream environmentalism were dominated by whiteness.” In other words, the digital humanities can offer alternate methods of data analysis and representation that the traditional humanities may erase.

Ruiz’s study analyzed the archives of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a public work relief program founded by Franklin D. Roosevelt that operated from 1933 to 1942. Using spatial data, the researchers concluded that “the same neighborhoods in Los Angeles where there are the highest school/work dropout rates among Chicanx and Latinx students also face the highest pollution burden indexes in the same city.” Such research shows us how the digital humanities can enforce academic accountability. When information is digitized and made public, the process of obtaining information through digital archives becomes significantly easier, and this accessibility can provide marginalized communities with information that justifies long-standing demands for increased inclusivity. “In this way, our research on environmental injustice in CCC camps hoped to aid in filling that gap within the digital humanities which concerns itself with mixing the digital technology and humanities, but falls short on including diversity components,” Ruiz said.

The implications of Ruiz’s research extend beyond proving that digital humanities can encourage diversity. As emphasized in the study, the students themselves could conduct the research. The digital humanities embodies the potential to radically democratize educational spaces, which historically assume hierarchies in “valuable” knowledge initiated by structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and Euro-American scientific and intellectual authority.

To better understand the role of the digital humanities in education, I spoke with Professor Willeke Wendrich, a core faculty member in the Digital Humanities program here at UCLA and former director of the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities. Professor Wendrich is primarily an Egyptologist, a field that focuses on archeology in ancient Egypt, which she notes “is making use of digital approaches.”

When asked what the term “digital humanities” means, Professor Wendrich explained that she defines the digital humanities “as a critical approach of making use of digital means of data collection, data analysis, and data presentation. That is a very general definition, but the word critical is important, because we would be extremely naive [to] think the way we present information does not affect the way we perceive information.”

While digital technologies are capable of storing and sharing vast bodies of information, Wendrich indicated that such information still may be susceptible to biases: “For instance, take GIS, or geographic information systems, [which] seems to be a very objective way of presenting information. However, whatever you do in presenting the spatial information, you make a simplification of reality. So, the way that it is perceived is very dependent on the way that you present the spatial information.”

In reference to the example of GIS, Wendrich noted: “If you start, like Google Earth does, with a globe, and you zoom in, you are getting this top-down view of the world that is very removed from being on Earth and interacting with people around you. What you are trying to express in GIS or in Google Earth will be colored by the way [the information] is presented.”

Wendrich’s definition led me to question how the humanities are taught: what has the digital humanities program allowed professors to teach or learn hat traditional humanities has not?

What Professor Wendrich finds “most important in the digital humanities is that it moves students from being consumers to being producers. Rather than sitting in classroom and listening to me droning on, digital humanities enables you to involve students in research and have them produce something in that research. For instance, I am the Editor-in-Chief of the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, which is a digitally born online encyclopedia. It differs from Wikipedia in that it is highly mediated; we request specialists in these fields to write the articles. They are all well vetted and peer-reviewed. We have a student version of this Encyclopedia, and I teach a class where the students choose a subject, for example, a certain history or theme [in Egyptian history], and divide the subject up into different angles. We have groups working on research studying these different angles, and writing from these different angles.” In other words, the Digital Humanities program at UCLA offers unique opportunities for both professors and students to perform research using the transformative tools of the field.

Professor Wendrich adds: “This means they do the research into the subject matter, but they learn all the things that are important in digital publication. They go through all the steps [needed] to create a digital resource, but they also have very particular roles, [including the] manager for the group of students, the copy editor, the image editor, [and] a content specialist. What it does is give you an idea of how group work can be organized, and how collaboration can be formalized in a way to avoid the duplication of tasks — instead you still [perform the task] together and have a very strong division of responsibilities. That is part of it. In the end, they see themselves published. They get their name out there.”

Campus Life

25 Professor Wendrich and Steve Ruiz both emphasize a central aspect of the field: the digital humanities is about creation and collaboration. The pedagogy of the digital humanities works to affirm student agency within their educational environment — professors and students become equals in knowledge production. As crucial aspects of the field, creation and collaboration must operate simultaneously to create such a learning environment.

The idea of the digital humanities as a space where students can be researchers and researchers can be students is only one of the many pedagogical transformations that the field is bringing to the humanities. According to Wendrich, it is specifically “the idea of making something, rather than the idea of receiving something.”

She also speaks to the value of virtual reality technologies, “which can further optimize the students’ learning spaces. If you study ancient society, the problem is that it does not exist anymore, or in some cases, its existence has changed a lot. At some point in the past, whenever I was teaching Egyptian archeology or history, I tried to explain the Karnak tem

ple complex, which is a huge temple complex [in Egypt] that has developed over at least 3,000 years. Compare that to the Vatican, which is less than half that time. This is a temple complex that has grown over time from a tiny temple into an enormous complex in which there were different temples, different gods, a lot of rituals that took place. If you try to teach about this temple complex, and you want to show how big the temple was at the very beginning, you cannot do that with simplistic technology.”

Virtual reality has allowed Professor Wendrich to create a 3D space where archeologists, historians, and artists worked together to create accurate reconstructions that depict distinct transformations and growth over time. The visualizations of the Temple at Karnak can be found online via the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology under the title “Karnak: Development of the Temple of Amun-Ra.” Similar to all other fields, digital humanities has its flaws — some that demand more immediate resolution than others. Patrik Svensson emphasizes one key issue in “Introducing the Digital Humanities:” Is there enough humanities in the digital humanities?

discussions do often elide the difficult and complex work of talking about racial, gendered, and economic materialities, which are at the forefront of ethnic and gender studies. Suddenly, the (raceless, sexless, genderless) technology seems the only aspect of the humanities that has a viable future.”

The idea of digital humanities as a valuable commodity — of a broader field that inherently entails a departure from specificity due to its scope — is in itself a conflict that must be continually interrogated by scholars in the field. Without this continual examination, the field risks solidifying a problematic status quo. This intellectual “normal,” defined by whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexualiy, is nevertheless an issue that dominates all fields of study, indicated that academia as a whole needs to consistently scrutinize and negate this hierarchy.

Roopika Risam, whose work focuses on the role of the digital humanities in African diaspora studies, further elaborates on the pitfalls of the field.

She reminds us that access to the digital media and its corresponding technologies may inherently exacerbate inequalities. Low-income schools and underprivileged communities may lack access to the technology needed to use the digital archives that allow for new, influential research. On a larger scale, government-mediated social media blackouts in countries with authoritarian regimes demonstrate the depth of the aforementioned inequalities.

The future of the digital humanities relies on greater accessibility to digital technologies and intersectional analyses to account for flaws in the growing digital cultural record.

The future of education stands strong with

fields like the digital humanities transforming traditional methods of education. In “Notes towards a Deformed Humanities,” Mark Sample, Associate Professor of Digital Studies at Davidson College, explains how the transformative practices of the digital humanities, which he calls “deformed humanities,” create a “legitimate mode of doing and knowing” in spheres where access to a digital record is critical in advancing the field itself. Whether we are building a more environmentally just future or a more visually representative past, the digital humanities represents a promise to revolutionize education practices.

The question emerged from a discussion about the rise of the digital humanities, which chronologically corresponds with the fall of several ethnic studies programs. “Though the apparent rise of one and retrenchment of the other may be the result of anti-affirmative action, post-racial, and neoliberal rhetoric of recent decades and not related to any effect of one field on the other, digital humanities Campus Life

26

As virtual spaces, video games aren’t usually seen as places of acceptance, inclusion, and community. When you think of a gamer, you probably imagine a white, cisgender, heterosexual man. Despite this, a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center stated that 49 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 29 reported playing video games. Another study from the Pew Research Center in 2017 demonstrated how video games are not always a white-dominated space either, with 44 percent of Black adults and 48 percent of Hispanic adults claiming to play video games often or sometimes in comparison to 41percent of white adults.

Playing in the Virtual World: Transgender Representation in Video Games WRITTEN BY SARAH GARCIA ART BY MALAYA JOHNSON

Reliable research on the number of LGBTQ+ gamers, sometimes going under the umbrella term “gaymer,” is much harder to find.

However, representation for queer characters in video games has steadily been on the rise over the years, from well-known “blockbuster” games like the “Dragon Age” and “The Last of Us” series to more indie titles like “Undertale” and “Gone Home.” While there is room for improvement, queer sexual orientations in games like these are receiving considerable attention and support from game companies.

Gendertainment

27 Despite some progress, video games tend to vilify and mistreat trans and gender nonconforming characters. This can be dated all the way back to Birdetta from “Super Mario Bros. 2,” released in 1988. She is consistently cited as the first transgender character in a video game. However, she is also an enemy character who is immediately vilified. The game’s manual also refers to her by her deadname (the name assigned to a trans person at birth before their transition) and deliberately misgenders her: “He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He’d rather be called ‘Birdetta.’” Many years after her creation, Birdetta is still officially known by her deadname rather than the name the manual clearly states that she has chosen for herself, showing a complete disregard and disrespect for her transgender identity.

Outside of the games themselves, gamer communities often directly harass trans women, whether they are characters, players, or game creators. The slur “tr*p” is often used against them. Trans YouTubers The Pedantic Romantic and ContraPoints define “tr*p” as referring to cis male crossdressers and trans women. When the slur is used, it conveys that the “tr*p” has tricked people into believing they belong to a gender identity that does not match their assigned birth sex. This is an extremely dangerous idea because it plays into the trans “panic” defense, which the National LGBT Bar Association defines in conjunction with the gay “panic” defense as “a legal strategy which asks a jury to find that a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity is to blame for the defendant’s violent reaction, including murder.” The slur “tr*p” implies that trans women deliberately mislead people about their gender identity, and thus, under the trans “panic” defense, it is justifiable to assault and kill them for this perceived deception.

“Tr*p” has become frequently used in contemporary gamer spaces.

During the Game Awards 2018, trans composer Lena Raine went onstage to present the award for Best Game Direction. When she spoke, the Twitch chat for the event flooded with transphobic slurs, including “tr*p.” This example shows how the slur “tr*p” results directly from transphobia and has become part of the gamer vernacular, a situation compounded by negative trans portrayals in video games.

While Birdetta is an example of an early canon trans character, Samus Aran from 1986’s “Metroid” is an even earlier character who is debated over in regards to her trans identity. In 2015, many articles came out discussing this point. Video game developer Brianna Wu and queer writer Ellen McGrody argued strongly in favor of Samus being a trans woman in The Mary Sue. Meanwhile, in response to their article, conservative writer Brandon Morse argued against this on The Federalist, using transphobic language and misgendering Wu in his piece. One thing both articles agree on, however, is that Samus is among the most famous and heroic women in video games. Given her well-loved status, Samus being canonically transgender would be an immeasurably positive step forward in the representation of trans people in this virtual medium.

As for more modern games, the character Chihiro Fujisaki from 2010’s “Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc” plays heavily into the ideas surrounding the slur “tr*p,” showing how transphobia persists in the current video game landscape. Chihiro, who goes through the game using traditionally feminine (she/her) pronouns and wearing feminine-coded clothing, is revealed to have a penis after being murdered, with characters discovering this by feeling Chihiro’s corpse. This disturbing act of the characters essentially groping Chihiro conflates sex with gender. Sex describes things like genitals and chromosomes, while gender is socially constructed and refers to someone’s personal identification of themselves, regardless

of biological sex. By using the discovery of a penis to prove Chihiro is a boy, the game reinforces the false idea that sex and gender are the same and always match up. This supports the inordinate amount of scrutiny placed on trans people’s bodies as well by focusing on genitals as proof of gender identity. The game also explains that Chihiro actually identified as a cisgender boy and only pretended to be a girl to escape bullying for being weak and not ‘manly.’ This plays into the harmful idea that being transgender is not serious or only a phase and that “tr*ps” truly exist to trick and deceive others.

Despite all these negative portrayals, positive representations of trans people, as well as non-binary and gender nonconforming individuals, have existed in small amounts in well-known video games. “Dragon Age: Inquisition” features the side character Krem, who is a trans man. While the game has him voiced by Jennifer Hale, a cis woman, despite his gender identity, the narrative still provides mostly positive representation by never suggesting that Krem’s gender identity is false and having his backstory deal with transphobia in a respectful way. “Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator” allows for the player to create a character who is a trans man and to romance Damien Bloodmarch, a trans father. “Monster Prom,” a competitive dating sim and visual novel, lets players pick between she/her, he/him, and they/them pronouns. “Undertale” features Mettaton, a character hinted but not confirmed to be transgender, and several non-binary characters who use they/them pronouns, like Frisk, Napstablook, and Monster Kid. While all of these serve as good representation, none of them have trans women as their canon protagonists, doing nothing to rectify video games’ previously mentioned transphobic history. This is why video games by trans game designers like Anna Anthropy are extremely important and deserve more attention. Making use of the immersive medium, her games deal directly with trans and queer identity in complex ways, giving the player the chance to listen to Anthropy’s own experiences in the autobiographical “Dys4ia” and explore the deep intimacy between two queer lovers in “Queers in Love at the End of the World.”

Even games created by non-openly queer game directors, like Swery’s 2018 game “The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories,” can write positive trans protagonists if done with proper research and respect. The game never misgenders its protagonist J.J., a trans woman, and brings empathy and eventually hope to a painful situation most other games would ignore, sideline, or portray as signifying a “tr*p.” “The Missing” is a sign that non-queer game developers can represent trans characters in positive ways if prejudices aren’t present and effort is actually made to understand beyond one’s own limited perspective.

If video games like “The Missing” and trans creators like Anna Anthropy got more popular, maybe the transphobia lurking in gaming communities will die along with slurs like “tr*p.” Video games can become a greater medium for change and acceptance. They could even help more people come to terms with their sexual orientation and gender identity. While virtual spaces can fuel hate and bigotry, they also have the potential to do incredible amounts of good by giving a platform to people who often can’t express themselves openly in the real, public world.

Gendertainment

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Microcelebrity & the Virtual Self

WRITTEN BY ANNIE LIEU & CATHERINE PHAM ART BY NATYA REGENSBURGER & JOLENE FERNANDEZ

Celebrities are well-known public figures, and they are products of their contemporary social culture. They must fit the attitudes and standards that define their elevated social currency, and manage to flaunt their wealth and fame while still staying “relatable” and “down to earth” to their audiences. Often, the audience doesn’t see the careful mechanisms maintaining this star image, the institutional support and teams that help manufacture what is perceived through the screen. These celebrities are often in entertainment (actors, singers) or sports, with exceptional accomplishments or talent that set them aside from the general public. But staying relevant and popular is more than talent, it’s staying “on brand” and safe. These celebrities have an entire team of management and professionals behind them that dictate what to say, how to say, and when to say things to keep in line with the trends and concerns of the public.

In his article “Approaching celebrity studies,” Cultural Studies Professor Graeme Turner states that for individual celebrities to benefit from their status, they must recognize that “their celebrity is a commercial property which is fundamental to their career and must be maintained and strategized.” As they rise to fame, they must mold and curate their public image to secure the relevance and recognition needed to continue working in their exclusive industries.

Regardless of their work, celebrities are expected to showcase an “authentic” off-screen self, and position themselves as a separate brand from their glamorized, professional personas. Before they are a [model, actor, singer-etc], they are a person, just like you.

This expectation and delivery of the “self-brand” has intensified with social media, which not only allows but, in fact, relies on user engagement with this brand. In other words, social media platforms — because of their seemingly “democratized” nature — are key in the creation of this self-brand, and encourage an interactive navigation with the commodities born in its spaces.

Social media influencers especially base their entire livelihoods around this concept, on their ability to successfully present the glamorous details of their lives while retaining a sense of intimacy

with their audiences. Influencers aim to make it feel like they are your friend — not an inaccessible mythical figure. But the cost of relying on thousands of followers to make a living is the sacrifice of privacy. It is no longer enough for fans to know the main personal details of celebrities’ lives, they must now know how they take their coffee, the entire order of their skincare routine, the color of their bedroom wall. Influencers offer themselves to the critical, arbitrary gaze of their followers, who also surrender a sense of self by immersing and investing themselves in a stranger’s digital life.

One example is Emma Chamberlain, a social media influencer who started her YouTube channel in the summer of 2017 as a sophomore in high school and, within only a year, rose to 4.7 million subscribers.

According to Forbes, her Instagram engagement is around 25 percent, a number that even popular traditional celebrities cannot claim. The engagement to follower ratio is important for the statistical “success” of an influencer because their popularity determines their profitability.

For instance, an user with 5,000 followers and an average of 1,000 likes per post does not figure as a good investment for companies looking to advertise through influencers, whereas Emma’s 2 million average likes to 6 million follower ratio does.

Influencers are better able to profit off of this digital intimacy because they know how to sustain attention, an increasingly scarce — and therefore profitable — commodity. Their product engagement is guaranteed. They are trusted by the public; they aren’t saturated in the traditional airbrushed commercial or magazine cover, and don’t explicitly endorse products, but instead integrate these items within their content of their lives: “I use Care Of Vitamins and Glossier in my morning routine every day.”

The various products that circle casually in and out of their lives are enfolded into the desire and adoration of its viewers; their good, glamorous life is propped up by these swear-by products, and those products then become tokens of that life for aspirational consumers. Buying that highlighter that an influencer swears by is like buying something a friend recommended, not buying something you saw an ad for. In other words, life, in its “up-close,” everyday form, is increasingly a form of capital in itself.

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In “Jennifer Lawrence, remixed: approaching celebrity through DIY culture,” Celebrity and Media Studies Professor Akane Konai says that celebrities must perform emotional labour to exist in the public arena in return for their fans’ continued loyalty. They must perform certain feminine forms of labor — beauty, work/life balance, heterosexual love — yet present these standards in a manner that is effortless, yet relatable and “authentic.” Actress Jennifer Lawrence has been revered online for publicly presenting herself as quirky and “real,” for laughing at herself in interviews, stating that she loves to eat and watch TV at night, while still remaining thin and beautiful — maintaining the perfect balance between relatability and celebrity. Celebrities must still be seen as human, even though they are simultaneously perceived as better than human, role models for “the rest of us.” If they are unable to live up to this expectation, public criticism quickly follows. Their audience has the power to both glorify them or destroy them.

Oftentimes, influencers — especially women — who grow popular attract backlash when they take advantage of their successes, using their newfound riches on luxury goods, while networking with other popular influencers. Chamberlain, the same YouTuber who rose to prominence so quickly, also attracted a wave of hate videos when her content started populating the Trending page. Videos like “the downfall of emma chamberlain,” “everything wrong with emma chamberlain,” “is emma chamberlain a scammer,” and “why everyone hates emma chamberlain” get 500,000 to 1 million views regularly, almost rivaling her own channel’s influence. The same quirky, funny, and relatable behavior that she showcases is also considered cringey and annoying by other users. Her fans and critics alike are deeply and collectively invested in her celebrity status, either in supporting or vilifying her — clearly showing that audiences feel a sense of responsibility to engage with celebrity figures.

Celebrities must now present dimensions of their own sincerity on personal platforms, which are usually carefully curated by third-party publicity teams. The veil between mainstream celebrities and their fans is shrinking as the personal becomes increasingly commodified. Now, audiences are no longer satisfied with tabloids or news stories — they must be able to consume “spontaneous” images, video, and text from their idols that they can constantly access and respond to, knowing their responses are as public as the content, and have the potential to be incorporated in its public display. The consistent production of public content requires even more labor from the celebrity, but it also grants them the perception

of more texture and personality, increasing the devotion and size of their fanbase.

Within the new dimensions of sincerity and accessibility, there are even more guidelines to staying relevant. Celebrities that manage to incorporate “social justice” into their platform personalities, and continuously actively do so, fare better on trending pages than their colleagues. Regurgitating trending buzzwords on liberal hot-button issues grants them a marketable status as “woke,” and establishes them as someone who cares and pays attention to things in the “real world.” Both the celebrity and the fan feel safe in this relationship: the fan, in that they’re supporting a socially aware and liberal icon, and the celebrity in that they are the “good” people to look up to, role models, and garner a loyal fanbase in being so.

However, this relationship has a foreboding mechanism third-wheeling it: cancel culture. In a digital era that continues to network the world at large, what is now known as “cancel culture” can sometimes be a good thing. It’s an ethos that has its roots in marginalized people on the Internet searching for ways to expose injustice and hold community members accountable for their present actions. But its current form involves “pulling receipts” of things said, tweeted, or posted years ago that are now considered political faux pas. It seems that the almost eager anticipation to find the next “receipt” on a popular figure shows that audiences’ outpouring of adoration and support can just as quickly be replaced with an onslaught of criticism and disappointment.

But the takeaway here is not that internet audiences can be fickle or vindictive — it’s that the Internet makes possible a new presentation of a virtual self that millions of people can feel personally and emotionally invested in. Celebrities and influencers’ lives are products in and of themselves, there to be consumed, reviewed, improved on — and this includes everything from their dietary habits to their political beliefs. Influencers especially are both their own product and manufacturer; their virtual selves serving to market products and lifestyles, are subject to the rapid, strict demands of both the virtual and non-virtual social landscape. Despite the onslaught of content followers are readily given, they are participating in an one-sided interaction, behind a screen and always viewers of a hyper-commodified spectacle: life itself.

Gendertainment

30 With the rise of digital communication networks, we live in an era of global interconnectedness that makes it easy to get caught up in the wonders of tech that we witness every single day. However, the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a dark side which is becoming more pronounced with the advent of deepfake technology.

According to Variety, the term “deepfake” itself is a combination of the word “fake” and the AI concept of “deep learning.” In a nutshell, deepfake videos are realistically edited using machine learning techniques, usually taking images of a subject’s face and seamlessly editing them onto bodies in video clips. Deepfake pornography features people’s faces — typically women’s — edited onto bodies in adult films and videos. As this technique gains popularity on the Internet, deepfakes have caused mounting concerns over the future of privacy, harassment, and bodily autonomy. While this exploitative technological development has serious implications for the future of celebrity, politics, and the distribution of information as we know it, this article will focus on the way that deepfake technology turned into a weapon of sexual abuse against women.

Deepfake technology was introduced to popular culture on the social media site Reddit, which is well-known for its reputation as a platform for no-holds-barred opinion posting and problematic memes. In 2017, a user with the handle “Deepfakes” began posting what were originally referred to as “face-swapping pornographic videos.” This user eventually launched a smart phone application called “FakeApp,” which made this technique more accessible to everyday people. FakeApp and similar applications soon became

Faking It: The New Reality of Deepfake Porn WRITTEN BY ASHLEY LECROY ART BY JENNY DODGE

a popular tool for making video memes online. The dark origins of this application are, however, largely forgotten as FakeApp and similar programs gain territory in the Internet meme-scape that many of us know — sometimes love — and makes us cringe in secondhand shame. Deepfake videos are used as a means of internet comedy. They gain more popularity and notoriety through the many, many Nicolas Cage films that are “memed” through this app.

Furthermore, a BuzzFeed-produced video with Jordan Peele’s voice dubbed over a video of former president Barack Obama went viral in 2018, ironically posing as Obama “warning” against the dangers of fake news media.

More worrying than the now-existing overpopulation of Nicolas Cage videos on the Internet, however, is the rise of deepfake techniques in the already vast and rapidly growing world of internet pornography. According to the Huffington Post, about 30 percent of the data transferred through the Web is from porn. The faces of celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, and Emma Watson have been photoshopped onto the bodies of actresses in adult videos without their consent, thus creating realistic-looking but fabricated sex tapes — now forever circulating on the Internet. For women who already face heightened scrutiny living in the public eye, these videos breed a whole other form of violation. While women celebrities are ordinarily subject to mass-scale objectification and sexualization, deepfake videos serve to bring this experience to a highly realistic extreme, stripping these women of their bodily autonomy in a way that evokes the uncanny.

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Celebrities, however, are in no way the sole victims of this kind of attack. Everyday women are targeted, while few means of protection are being offered. In December 2018, the Washington Post interviewed an anonymous woman who had images of her face stolen and doctored into an adult video. She said that the images used were obtained without her consent, primarily from her Facebook account. She feared the repercussions in her personal and professional life if the video was exposed to her spouse, friends, family, or coworkers. As quoted in the interview, she said: “I feel violated — this icky kind of violation … It’s this weird feeling, like you want to tear everything off the Internet. But you know you can’t.”

This sentiment is, unfortunately, one that is known all too well by many women and girls living in the digital age.

From leaked nude photos to nonconsensual distribution of sex tapes, women are often the targets of what is colloquially known as “revenge porn” and legally referred to as nonconsensual pornography. This term is often used to describe the public release of explicit videos and photographs of former romantic partners as a type of vengeance after a bad breakup. Revenge porn disproportionately affects women and other vulnerable, often feminized, bodies, and the advent of deepfake techniques only makes this threat more pressing.

According to Vice News, the now-defunct subreddit r/deepfakes was absolutely rife with anonymous requests for pornographic videos of ex-girlfriends. Even though the subreddit has been shut down, these videos and conversations still exist in darker corners of the Internet. There are several public websites that exist for the purpose of capitalizing off of pornographic deepfakes

of specific people, but this doesn’t account for deepfake exchanges happening on the dark web. It’s an industry that only has room to grow in the unregulated spheres of the World Wide Web. Despite all the fear and unease surrounding deepfakes, there are small glimmers of hope. Social media companies have been making efforts to stop the proliferation of deepfakes in recent months. Pornhub vowed to ban the posting of AI-generated porn. Tumblr and Twitter are also among social media platforms that have banned pornographic deepfake content. Despite these measures, the world of deepfake technology will only continue to get more complex.

Given the plethora of sexist, racist, homophobic, and otherwise hateful rhetoric that is allowed to run unchecked on these social media platforms, it is doubtful that tech companies will actually do everything in their power to stop these falsified videos from taking over. As deepfake techniques become more seamless, these fake videos will prove challenging to differentiate from real videos, thereby setting a precedent for the shape false information takes as it spreads across the Internet. Going forward, consumers of digital media need the tools required to think critically about the content they are viewing, and digital media companies must be more critical of the content they allow on their platforms.