"proof" that the internets is a scary place to dwell

vancouver is abuzz with the news, and the notion, that a young couple would try and sell their seven-day-old baby on the popular online classifieds page craigslist. this post is neither about the morality of such an act nor an investigation of the act itself. it is about the media framing around the decision to attempt to sell a baby on the interwebs, and how, as always when it comes to media portrayals of the internets, this "proves" that cyberspace is a dangerous, and potentially (culturally) damaging, place to dwell.

as the story goes, on tuesday may 27, 2008, a 60 year-old woman browsing the website came across a ad tagline that read MUST HAVE!!!!!!!!! and upon opening it, discovered the advertised "product" was a "very cute" baby girl. having a number of grandchildren of her own, this woman informed the police in the event it was not a joke or a hoax. police then tracked the couple down in the west end apartment through the cellphone number provided in the ad. the couple was arrested for public mischief and the child has been removed from their care.

interestingly, the immediate local media coverage of this event focused on the woman who reported the posting, who was said to believe in angels and who was being touted as a heroine. much of the emphasis on this woman neglected the fact that craigslist is a self-regulating community meaning that members (users) flag posts for any number of reasons from level of appropriateness to general maintenance and organization of the site. no doubt this woman did the "right thing" in reporting inappropriate behaviour, but her actions reflect what is expected of craiglist users. as an "internet user" (the identifying label under her name explained), this woman was held up as an exemplar of the regulating morality the internet is understood to lack. thus, the wild west imagery associated with the internet persists while self-regulating communities like craiglist have been operating since pre-web days.

my frustration with this story reflects a broader frustration with popular culture notions of the internet as a scary place, and moreover, a place where social rules and mores are somehow non-existent. we do not become different people on the internet, we bring our identities, our problems, our life circumstances online with us. there is no break between ourselves online and off. the fluidity of our experience is captured in our presentations and representations online. this young couple is having a bad time. their baby was unexpected. instead of dumping it on a hospital doorstep, or setting it free on a bed of reeds, they turned to another everyday aspect of their lives, the internet. this does not reflect the depravity of contemporary existence. it reflects the different ways that people have to do what they have been doing forever - even if it reflects a part of humanity that makes us uncomfortable, that is the fact that some children are unexpected, and ultimately not wanted.

this story has a particularly gendered and normalized aspect to it as well, which ultimately accompanies any critical investigation into constructions of technology. it is better therefore, to think of this young couple as "known to police," familiar with drugs, and generally monstrous - and taking that monstrosity to that place of anonymous, dangerous, unregulated danger: the internet - than to think about the structural conditions of their lives. the poverty that would lead them to such an act, the desperation they must feel. the internet is a place to blame that doesn't talk back, that will remain a place of fear until we recognize that we are the internet. the constitutive force behind the technology we produce, enable, and use.

technology is the humanity of today, not the danger of tomorrow.

i heart halloween

i have been thinking a lot lately about the significance of halloween, mainly because it has been taking over my life for the past week and a half. in recent years i have discovered that i LOVE halloween. it is such a silly thing. it's not like i'm goth (or ever was), like death, or enjoy hanging out in cemeteries (even though i did take a ambulating tour of mountainview cemetery lately and it was pretty freakin' cool). i've decided, as much as one can, that the significance for halloween for me is the transformative effect it has on - wait for it - everyone. i know, i know - ohhhhhh - everyone gets to be someone/thing else - isn't that liberatory (reminiscent of Turkle's Life on the Screen which i am currently reading). but seriously, there is something cool about the transformative effects of change, no? while the internet may be a hasty receptacle to pour all of society's hopes and dreams for liberatory change, empowerment, and utopian je ne sais quoi, this tendency does beg some interesting questions about the human desire for transformation, growth, change and something "other." we could chalk it up to consumerism, as we could everything, including my precious halloween, or we could think of it as an exercise in the technological imaginary a la de Lauretis. the combination of anxiety and desire around technology (and other transformation objects, effects, and affects) is a compelling and powerful, if not heady, experience. someone recently told me that they think people like scary movies in order to feel something, to feel alive. to be scared into your own humanity is a interesting proposition. to remind ourselves that we are alive, have the capacity for change, and the desire to seek it out makes every other day (other than halloween, that is) seem lacking. my tenuous halloween-as-a-metaphor-for-technologies-of-the-internet thing might be lacking as well in that both produce fear, anxiety, and a certain amount of pleasure but one happens only once a year and the other pervades our everyday, every minute, every second. maybe the desire for transformation and change does as well but we are "programmed" to ignore it, push it down, hide it in the recesses of our mind until we are allowed, enabled to set our difference out into the night of all hallow's eve - the simultaneous celebration of life and death. do we not seek to say something about ourselves, whether blogging or dressing up as something clever? is it not all about us on some level. the work on the self. the identification with the other to become more, different, better. anyhoo. monster mash just came on. must go do the twist. another imperative on halloween.