Traces 5: Universities in Translation: The Mental Labour of Globalization

Imagined Networks: Digital Media, Race, and the University

Imagined Networks T R A C E S : 5 341 imaGined neTworKs: diGiTal media, race, and The universiTy wendy hui KyonG chun As my title suggests, I’ll be arguing in this paper for the existence and importance of “imagined networks,” but I want to start by outlining the difficulties in discussing links between “digital media, race, and the university in translation.” The first is the fact that the term “race” does not translate easily: there is no universal form of or diagnosis for racism. The pursuit or celebration of “hybridity” within the United States, for example, has a very different resonance than in Brazil, a country whose racial self-categorizations are changing in response to the introduction of affirmative action programs. In addition, when race is translated easily, especially in the U.S., it is conflated with globalization — the “we are the world” syndrome that GeorgeYudice diagnosed so many years ago.1 As well as making the US the world, this syndrome also makes certain visible minorities forever alien: for instance, in 2002, when Sarah Hughes won a gold medal and Michele Kwan the silver, the Seattle Times headline read: “American Outshines Kwan.”2 Although very different, the term “digital media” also poses definitional difficulties. Given that most media is now produced or stored using computers, what is not digital media? Furthermore, how applicable is the term media? Is there a difference between technology and media? media and text? media and office applications? Computers blur the boundaries between work and leisure, art and design, and their impact increasingly bleeds outside the screen. One of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun 342 T R A C E S : 5 the most important effects of computing is what Philip Agre has called its mode of “capture.”3 That is, the use of mobile computing devices to track and optimize human activities. Today, our daily tasks, such as shopping, have become so imbricated with the mechanisms of computerized tracking that, Agre argues, “the notion of human interactions with a ‘computer’ — understood as a discrete, physically localized entity — begins to lose its force.”4 Capture, crucially, is not only linked to commercial transactions, but also to the increasing marketization of human relations, and I teach my students capture by analyzing how their learning and my teaching have changed with the introduction of powerpoint and other digital teaching aids: the ways I use “changes of state,” such as a new slide, to wake them up and signal a new topic. This attempt to program their attention, however, is arguably counter-productive, since it causes me to produce more and more slides in a frenzied attempt to keep them focused and alert, and because it emphasizes the content of the slide (which, more often than not, is a quotation from the reading or a key word), rather than the flow of the argument. Regardless, the slides break down lecture into discrete units that can be more readily identified, verified, counted, measured, compared, and evaluated in terms of economic efficiency. Most problematic about “Race, Digital Media, and the University,” though, is its association with the so-called digital divide. To many, “Race, Digital Media, and the University” implies racial disparities in access to digital media and to the university; it also suggests that these two are related. Within the United States, there are clear and indisputable inequalities in access to education. There is also a disparity in Internet penetration, although this is diminishing with time and age. According to the NTIA, in 2000, 56.8% of Asian American and Pacific Islander households had Internet access; 46.1% of white ones; 23.5% of Black households, and 23.6% of Hispanic ones.5 According to the Pew Internet surveys in 2005, 89% of Hispanic teenagers are online, 87% of white teenagers, and 77% of black teenagers.6 In 2006, 42% of white families have broadband at home; 41% of English speaking Hispanic families and 31% of black families.7 By questioning the framing provided by “Race, Digital Media, and the University,” I am not disputing these numbers; rather, I am disputing the ways in which this frame assumes in advance the value of digital media: it posits digital media something automatically desirable, good, and even enlightening; it does the same for the university. This link between the university and the Internet Imagined Networks T R A C E S : 5 343 was made more darkly in a...