Nobody knows you’re a dog…
NOTE: I know this is a bit of a long post, but it’s because I’m not sure what to focus on specifically. There is so much STUFF out there! I figure because I’m working with YA literature a lot, I will incorporate some of what I have learned from fiction into this post. I hope that I don’t confuse too many people.
A lot of what Baym has to say can be seen reflected back from the pages of fiction. Currently, I am reading Cory Doctorow’s For the Win, in which a number of people meet, interact, and fight back the evil corporate world through online games and all sorts of other crazy technological things that I can barely follow. What made me think of this book is Baym’s discussion of the curious dynamics of online relationships and interaction. The cartoon that reads “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” is in both Baym and Doctorow and is relevant both in reality and in the slightly fictional world of the novel:
Although Steiner has said he didn’t know what the cartoon was about when he drew it, New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff said it “perfectly predicted both the Internet’s promise and its problems” (2004: 618). Whether this cartoon represents a dream or a nightmare depends on whether one is the dog or the fool unknowingly talking to the dog.
And this is very much the case in Doctorow. His characters often have to rely on people they have never met in person and are, therefore, under a lot of pressure trying to decide if they can trust the people who might just turn out to be the dogs. Through different writing styles, Baym and Doctorow manage to make similar arguments, and they are important ones. Self-representation is something so tricky on the internet. It’s easy to fall prey to the temptation to falsely represent yourself in chat rooms or with avatars (as Eric’s earlier post shows.) Truth can be easily manipulated through an electronic curtain, and it’s hard to know when someone is being real or not. But beyond this, how do teens interact through and with technology?
The way that teens interact with each other in For the Win is very much dependent on the ability to hack and evade government systems and corporate firewalls. And some teens IRL (in real life) tend to act very similarly, constantly finding ways of evading technologies meant to limit access or distribution of electronic media. As we talked about in class a short while ago, every time corporations or governments try to limit the ways in which electronic goods can be used, a hack will inevitably turn up shortly thereafter (i.e. DRM hacks, and DVD ripping software.) Of course this is very generalized and is only one view of how a section of a very large teen population relates to the internet and technology, but it is a very evident and important aspect of internet and technology use.
Based on my limited knowledge, the Baym reading, and my reading of Doctorow’s works (which are very influential, by the way. He was named one of the Web’s twenty-five influencers by Forbes and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum), I would hesitate to believe in technological determinism, but I also hesitate to believe that all responsibility should be placed on social influence of technology. I would say I believe more in Baym’s explanation of Social Shaping of Technology. There are so many micr0-markets and small sub-groups of larger populations that influence a lot of technologies while the rest of us have to either accept the technological change, or assert our freedom to choose (what little freedom we have, depending on the case) and decide to stick with something that works for us. Society can shape technology, but it’s also sometimes at the mercy of corporations and other groups that implement technologies without our input.