The Internet is a site of cultural engagement – a place where people can construct their own individual and group identities, as well as a place where groups of people might be represented in stereotypical ways – such as women being represented as sexual objects designed for the visual pleasure of men. Communities can be represented as tourist attractions with a “disneyfied” sense of diversity, or their communities can be represented as politically engaged. Site designers use visual images, descriptions, and interactivity to construct these various representations. When we analyze web sites and build sites of our own, it's important to consider ethical questions: Who will have access to our sites? How can those sites be used? How can we allow for diversity? How can we avoid alienating visitors to our site without compromising our own beliefs? Are we including information and representations on our sites that are sexist or racist or homophobic? Have we built in measures for people with disabilities to be able to navigate our sites?

Some thinkers are skeptical about the promises of technology, believing that the Internet, for example, will become just another corporate-dominated media outlet serving the interests of large conglomerates. According to others, however, the Internet offers the promise of democratizing the exchange of information, allowing more equal access to create and consume messages about culture. Individuals have the opportunity to "hack" into the matrix, creating blogs and web sites and mail distribution lists to transmit messages that counteract stereotypical and oppressive information. The following essay illustrates one writer’s struggle with this sense of agency. In this essay, Derek Powazek describes his own experience hacking into the Matrix. At first, he is excited by the prospects of working for Wired magazine. Then, like Neo, he feels himself devolving into a drone while the corporation “kills off” those things that he loves.  Finally, he is able to achieve his own sense of agency on the web by creating an online community called The Fray for creative writers of cultural critique, a site devoted to creative non-fiction and the establishment of a literary community on the web.

Reading 4: “Stoked: The Short Story of a Year as a Cog in the Digital Revolution Machine” (Derek M. Powazek) Go to http://www.fray.com/work/stoked/

Reading Questions

Analyze the text


Analyze the texture


Analyze the context


 
Visual Texts

Image 1: If you go to Derek Powazek's personal web site at http://powazek.com, you'll see the following banner:



In this banner, Derek Powazek, author of “Stoked,” is constructing a very specific identity for himself. Look at the foreground, background, camera angle, relationship between and prominence of objects, and use of text. Because of the camera angle, the background is mainly sky, but also includes the very tips of houses as well as a lamp post. We can tell that he’s standing in a community – community being a central theme in his work. He is off center rather than being the central focus, and balances the text on the left of the image.

1. What does this banner say about Powazek as a creator, about his beliefs about design? What do the terms and their order – “Author, Designer, Troublemaker, Person” – say about him?

2. Look through his web sites at http://powezak.com and http://designforcommunity.com to get a sense of his view of the Internet. Is his identity consistent across the various sites?

3. When you look at powazek.com, try looking at the source code for imbedded messages by pointing at VIEW and dragging to SOURCE. Do these “hidden messages,” meta-tags, and alt codes reinforce this identity?

Powezek saw the Internet as something new and exciting because it created new opportunities and ways of doing things, new opportunities for creative ventures. He saw it as a tool for expression and community. However, with his experiences at Wired, he felt that Wired’s digital project became corrupted from upper management who make it a business that’s based on making money and lose touch with employees and their community of readers: I watched as the company grew above me, and I stayed where I was. I watched as the ranks of the upper management moved higher and higher. And the futurists and dreamers at the top of the company seemed to flounder more and more.  they started killing the things we underlings were working so hard on without bothering to tell us why. As a result, Powazek implies, the project becomes more rooted in advertisements and the topics become broader. The magazine cares more about making money than personal expression, freedom, creativity, and social activism. It becomes more advertising-based so topics become broader so that the general public won’t be offended by anything. Wired Magazine, Powazek implies, serves advertisements rather than the public. In the corporate atmosphere, Powazek might argue, there are many opportunities for corruption and the lawyers and advertising executives kill off things that the creative engineers love. It becomes more about money and power rather than about public good. Although Powazek identifies digital space as potentially corruptible by corporate interference, he also sees hope for a different kind of space. Individuals can subvert the system by creating own sites for posting creativity and cultural criticism.  The Internet can be used in the non-profit sector to build communities and bring people together and educate and inform.

In response to his feeling of disenchantment as “a cog in the digital revolution,” Powazek created The Fray, an on-line community dedicated to creative non-fiction. At this site, readers can submit essays, often socially conscious and politically charged, under the subject headings of criminal, hope, work, and drugs. These submissions are then reviewed and selectively published. Each essay ends with a question that then prompts other readers to respond on a bulletin board, building a sense of community. On the submission page, the editors offer the following recommendations:

Image 2: Look at the layout design and content for "You in the Fray" at  http://fray.com/is/you/


One of the missions implicit in these recommendations is to allow for diverse perspectives and personal voices to dominate the conversation. This is a site for first-person narratives, a site for individuals to tell their stories. As a collection, we may get a more diverse picture of American culture. Read through some of the essays on the site (fray.com) to see if the promise of diversity paid off. 

The site also includes information about face-to-face gatherings of writings to extend the community into the real world.  Powazek and his colleagues created and linked the site to fray.org -a "real-life extension of The Fray" in which contributors meet in local coffeehouses in San Francisco, Austin, Toronto, Boston, and other cities in order to come out from behind the glass to read their works out loud to live audiences.  Look at the schedule of meetings and photographs of those gatherings by going to http://fray.com/events/. Do these gatherings seem to extend the community into the real world. Would you be interested in attending one of these gatherings? Do you think you'd be accepted there? Do you think that everyyone would be?

The creators of The Fray also created The Fray Shop (http://fray.com/shop/), a commercial site that sells Fray related memorabilia (currently limited to a few different styles of T-shirts and stickers). Originally on the site, they explained that this isn't a venture capitalist money-making scheme, but another way of building community: Welcome to the fray shop. You can buy fray-inspired stuff here (with your credit card, even). No, this isn't some sort of corporate plot. I just thought it'd be cool to bump into someone on the street someday who's wearing a criminal t-shirt, or someone with a hope sticker on their car. Besides, any money raised here will go to support the fray organization. So take a look around. And thanks for supporting the fray. -Derek What is the relationship between this type of commercial site and others that you have seen. How does this compare with a museum gift shop, for example. How do the producers see this as another way of extending community?

How do these different aspects -- the online culture, the face to face meetings, the material artifacts and memorabilia -- how do they interact to create a particular type of community?

Reading the Web 1

Look through The Fray web site at http://www.fray.com and think about the following questions:

Analyzing Text:


Analyzing Texture:


Analyzing Context:


Reading the Web 2:

Conduct a cultural analysis of an electronic text as a site of cultural engagement. Go to several of the following sites on the Internet:


As you look through the sites, think about the relationship between the visual and the verbal. Also think about the ways in which the site attempts to create community, the ways in which it succeeds and the ways in which it fails. Try to identify the different kinds of communities that are represented here and the characteristics of an interactive, socially progressive community.

Now, conduct a cultural analysis of an electronic text as a site of cultural engagement. Look for other sites that serve as electronic communities -even something as simple as your English department's web page. How do they build community? Based on your previous analysis of The Fray, what more might they do to create a stronger sense of community and interactivity? What might they do to construct a site that has consequences for positive social change?  

Digital Communities

Based on your answers to the previous questions, what are the elements of community building on the web? In order to build community, does a web site need a certain degree of interactivity -- a way for producers and consumers to talk to each other? In order to build an ethical and politically conscious community, does there also need to be a way for that dialogue to be framed so that it focuses on critical issues and allows for diverse opinions. What consistency does there need to be on a web site from page to page? Can you find examples of cool web sites that do interesting things in terms of community? What makes them interesting to you? Include their URL’s as links on the board.  

Secondly, what can we learn from this? In what ways can you incorporate some of these ideas into your own web building? How should we incorporate some of these ideas into a web site that links all of our projects together?

Digital Culture

What do Powazek,  Rheingold, Camper, and Gomez-pena have in common? In what ways do they come up with different answers to the same questions?

DIGITAL LITERACY CONCERNS

One thing that you can do is to create your own web site with specific principles of digital literacy in mind. Your web project could combine your classroom projects into an online portfolio for external review. Or it could be a site that you build for a special interest community at your college or in your neighborhood. Think about the multiple audiences for your site and the ways in which it reflects your identity and your community. If it is housed on your university’s server, it is a reflection of yourself as a scholar, of the class as a site of learning about language and research, and of the university as a institution of higher learning. In some ways, it could also be a reflection of college students from your state and American college students. In addition, it is your opportunity to intervene in the public sphere with your own ideas – your own opportunity to make people think.

Consider the following criteria for web building: readability, navigability, hyper-textuality, and ethics.

Readability

• Choose font style and color and spacing to make the document easy to read.
• Eliminate typographical errors and surface flaws that lead to distraction.
• Avoid distracting animation and scrolling/blinking text.
• For multi-page documents, include a print-friendly version (all information on a single page).

Navigability

• Make sure that all pages link back to the home page.
• Make sure all links work properly.
• Consider using a recurring menu for each page.

Hyper-Textuality

• Exploit the potentials of hypertext
• Create linked internal documents and menus.
• Link to provocative external sites
• Include provocative multi-media such as graphics, video, and audio

Ethics

• Be sensitive to audience needs
• Use Alt Text with graphics and sound files for vision and hearing impaired.
• Attend to potentially "offensive" content that is gratuitous.
• Balance needs of general public with notions of artistic and academic freedom and inquiry.
• Avoid stereotypically offensive imagery except in the interest of academic inquiry or thoughtful satire.
• Ensure that your site is user friendly – readable, navigable, and clear.
• Be aware of multiple conflicting expectations of different audiences (peers/family, instructor, administrators, general public).
• Contextualize each page so that your site’s author and purpose are clear.
• Include a "Last Updated" note on each page and appropriate contact links.
• Respect copyright within fair use guidelines.
• Attend to notions of academic rigor.

You can find other suggestions for web building at http://webstyleguide.com/

Web Building Project

What if you became an Internet writer? How might you engage with cultural ideology via electronic text production? What if your ideas and your work became the cultural text with which others would then engage? How would you utilize visual representation? How would you utilize interactivity? How would you create community or social action?

Think of a community that you belong to. It could be a campus organization, a work community, a neighborhood, even your own family. Design a web site that would appeal to the common interests of that community and would function to strengthen community, though both visuals and interactivity, and that would also promote social change of some kind -- community activism, social awareness, understanding across differences, challenging or dispelling myths about your community.

First, plot your web site out on paper. Think about how you would use fonts, colors, space, images, hyperlinks, etc. Think about the messages that you would convey with your web site through the use of these different elements. Next, choose a method of building your web site. If you are advanced, you might use html coding. Or you might use a program such as Netscape Composer or Frontpage to build your site. Or you might create your pages in Microsoft Word and Save As HTML.

Finally, create and launch your site. Solicit feedback from site users concerning ease of navigation, appropriateness of images, and usefulness of the site features.