On Tuesday, 02/28/2012 @ 4PM, I’ll be presenting “The Informational is Spatial” at the Association of American Geographers’ paper session on “Geographies of Surveillance and Security 3: Data, Discourses, and Affects” (session organized by David Murakami Wood and Steve Graham).
Location: The Hilton New York, Second Floor, Sutton Parlor South.
Abstract: As cyberspace expands within young people’s everyday environments, so too does a geoeconomic conception of cybersecurity. My ongoing participatory action research project, MyDigitalFootprint.org, involved a team of youth co-researchers in investigating the production, circulation, and consumption of their personal data in order to collectively address larger questions of privacy, property, and security under informational capitalism. Of specific interest were how the material forms and social practices of proprietary digital environments such as Facebook and Twitter link up with the emerging U.S. war doctrine of cyberdominance. I discuss U.S. cyberdominance as a geoeconomic manifestation of security that aims to reframe a global cyberspace as a component of U.S. territory. Informational flows, from the global to the intimate, are thus cast as matters of national security that must be managed through a plethora of digital enclosure and surveillance mechanisms that are intimately experienced by U.S. youth through their routine participation in proprietary digital environments. Further, despite the “newness” of digital enclosure and surveillance I argue that these mechanisms are rooted in historical processes of environmental control and presuppose a geoeconomic logic of privatization and segregation already operating in our urban environments through strategies such as zoning, gating, and CCTV. I will conclude with a discussion of how the MyDigitalFootprint.org project’s development of its own open-source social network site served as a methodology for understanding the various forms of geoeconomic cybersecurity that become objectified, internalized, reworked, and/or resisted through young people’s everyday engagements with and within proprietary digital environments.
The official Growing Up Policed Vimeo Channel is now live! This channel includes video of presentations, panels, and discussions from the Growing Up Policed: Surveilling Racialized Sexualities Mini-Conference that took place at both the University of Oregon and the CUNY Graduate Center on 12/01/2011.
Incited by the case of the felony conviction of a young woman of color for sexting with her girlfriend in Oregon and participatory research on criminalization among 1,100 young people in New York City, the mini-conference focused on the nexus of youth, technology, law enforcement, and constructions of racialized sexuality. Using a broad definition of “policing” that extends across jails, schools, subways, and cyberspace, the conference examined the tools that parents, professionals, and others use to watch over, intervene with, and attempt to “correct” youth [more info: opencuny.org/growinguppoliced].
Conference Opening by Michelle Fine:
Presentations, Panels, and Discussions:
From Sherry Turkle’s “The Second Self,” p21:
… the computer is a metaphysical machine. Children too are provoked. The computer creates new occasions for thinking through the fundamental questions to which childhood must give a response, among them the question “what is life?”
From Sesame Street (h/t jgieseking, Aga Skorupka):
