In open online spaces, opening doors is not enough.
Maha Bali, ‘Reproducing marginality,’ September 2016
We so easily forget our bodies.
Mary Freer, ‘This body goes to work,’ August 2016
Over the last week I’ve been skirting a significant conversation begun by Maha Bali (“I don’t own my domain, I rent it“) and continued by Audrey Watters (“A domain of ones own in a post-ownership society“). Never far away is Andrew Rikard’s Edsurge post “Do I own my domain if you grade it?”
The question for me is how the idea of “own” works as a metaphor. It’s complicated enough as it is: my own, to own, owned, owned. We own our mistakes, we own our work, we own our politics, and none of this is quite like the way we own our homes—which for most of our working lives means some version of renting, in a funhouse world in which access to credit, like debt itself, has become an asset.
Conceptually, home ownership makes an ironic pass at all this, promising dominion over property that is actually quite a temporary thing in geohistorical time. Home ownership offers a misleading sense of permanence in relation to our provisional space in the world. A home that’s owned is always haunted by both its past and future. Far from sheltering us against the churn of things, it’s a daily reminder that we’re not here for long.
And inside our own homes where we might think of ourselves as free to do as we please, we remain legal subjects, subordinated to the local laws or ways of being to which our citizenship is bent. We house our human bodies, our social selves, our presentability. Our houses face the street; and behind the scenes, who knows what.
As legal subjects, we have modest rights to allow our homes to fall into disrepair, although these are limited by heritage considerations, public health and safety and so on. Zoning laws fence us in. Meanwhile there are all the social obligations of habitation to keep up: from the pragmatics of rent, rates, taxes, body corporate fees and utilities, to the labour of being a considerate neighbour, maintaining a yard, planting a tree that will outlive you. All this takes some skill, some literacy. No one really remembers how we learned to pay bills, or manage our garbage, but we do.
The implication that ownership of things is the beginning of practice of civic participation is something we both assume and overlook when we use ownership as a tech metaphor, without thinking ahead to use. It’s as if the ownership of a domain becomes an end in itself. Domain names are fetishised, like novelty license plates. They’re collectable and tradable, despite having no inherent functionality except to indicate an empty lot where something might be built, or a lot where something has been abandoned, that might be recaptured at a price for a new project. But achieving naming rights in the use of a domain doesn’t come with the skills you need to know what to do next, how to build what people will find if they search at those coordinates.
This is where I’ve come to in the conversation about whether personal domain ownership is a useful or socially equitable project for higher education. Maha’s post set off a deep and thoughtful exchange among some of higher education’s most experienced and engaged champions of student and personal blogging. Really, go read through those comments, they’re a model for the conversations we should have when we think about bringing tech innovation as a requirement into the lives of others.
As companion pieces, I read Maha’s further post on how things get paid for in Egypt; Audrey’ post on the impact of student debt on credit score; and two articles by Tressie McMillan Cottom, on the $20 principle and on preferential student recruitment as reparations for slavery (spoiler: it’s not reparations.) Then I fell into this exchange on Twitter about the critical importance of making small barriers to educational participation visible, kicked off by Robin deRosa reminding her students to bring a credit card and working laptop to class.
To lower these barriers while keeping them visible, which is very much Robin’s project, we have to get much better at noticing them. We need to be scrupulous in attending to the assumptions that lie behind our metaphors, our proposals, our sense of being agents for change largely on the side of the good. We are teaching people with different life experience than our own–different educational capital, cultural capital, actual capital. I teach students for whom a missed shift at work may mean a lost job in a sinkhole local economy; a required online textbook with a digital key may prevent joining the class at all; a credit card may already be maxed or cut up; a laptop may be both so cheap and so broken that it’s hard to see through the cracked screen. All of these are actual barriers to participation that actual students have discussed with me in the last four weeks.
And it’s easy to say that we have policies or options for students who can’t do what we expect, and measures to show that they are in a tiny minority; but in reality we rarely check what disadvantage and/or risk comes with our Plan B. We don’t think nearly enough about students for whom the language of digital making is unfamiliar, or the demands of content generation are disempowering and demoralising. We don’t adequately accommodate the students who have poor internet access, exhausted data plans, or have to do everything through a second hand phone.
So when we say that it’s a good thing for students to own their domain, we need to ask what we mean by owning, and what we think home might be as a metaphor–especially given that the metaphor for our times is not home ownership, or even post-ownership; it’s homelessness.
It’s the global political scale of this homelessness, the mobility of whole populations for whom the modern projects of both nation and property have entirely fallen apart, that presses an anxiety of ownership on the rest of us. Having a home is more than a matter of shelter, it’s the presentation of a certain kind of survivorship, assessed in cultural competence, the assertion of literacy, the visible privilege of know-how. And like home ownership, domain ownership is the practice of insiders, survivors, using the skills and languages that flex their cultural power by asking to be taken entirely for granted, not just in terms of what appears on the screen but increasingly in terms of the coding that lies beneath it.
This weekend I walked past a house that I like. It’s in a gentrifying Sydney neighbourhood, defying the trend. It’s been taken over by an unpruned wisteria draped over its rotting balcony; curtains are never pulled back from its verandah doors. Who knows what’s inside? Who lets their property, in Sydney of all places, fall into this unproductive, vegetative state? But now there’s a notice stapled to the fence. Development is planned. The house will be demolished and replaced. There will be a plunge pool. This abandoned property will retake its place in the proper, and properly owned will become an asset to the whole neighbourhood in house price uplift.
Ownership can never be less of a public spectacle than this. It’s whole point is to be knowable by others, to turn exclusivity of access and control towards a model of social order and a vision of security that will miraculously extend to all, including those who are most obviously excluded. Owning and gentrifying are inseparable economic forces. So when we talk about securing a domain of one’s own, we’re also talking about this privatising vision of the proper—and we’re at risk of missing the fragile, important lesson that just as with homes, the security of ownership is always measured against the temporality of the bodies walking past.
Note: This blog is parked with Reclaim Hosting, for whom my admiration is unreserved. None of the questions I’m asking here are a criticism of their model.
8 Responses
Another usage for “owned”: “You got owned!” – competitively; being soundly beaten.
Hi Kate,
In the Twitter convo about #DoOO I was struck by your references to the necessary literacies (technical, social, academic…) one actually requires not simply to *have* a domain but to use it purposefully, extending beyond the bare bones of operational standards. What I appreciate so much about this post is your insistence that we invest in the practice of noticing, and become “scrupulous in attending to the assumptions that lie behind our metaphors…” I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly.
Our assumptions are powerful; deeply rooted in our identities, experiences and belief systems such that they can be remarkably resilient in the face of contrary evidence and argumentation.
One read today which underscores the nature of our assumptions about access to technology and its attending infrastructure is by Alison Stine, “Where The Internet Doesn’t Reach” https://talkpoverty.org/2016/09/06/internet-doesnt-reach/ . She writes: “The assumption of basic technology, even in the digital age, is just that: an assumption.”
These assumptions run so deep and are so common, that we often fail to recognize that they are right there clouding our vision of what actually *is* and mar our attempts to develop “solutions” which may or may not address the right questions.
Noticing is the act of calling ourselves to attention. Your post calls us to attention in an extraordinarily kind and stirring fashion. Thank you for that.
Hi Sherri, thank you so much for this thoughtful comment, and for sharing Alison Stine’s piece. Rural poverty is a reality for education systems in many apparently first world economies, compounded by distance itself. In Australia rural broadband connectivity doesn’t just affect those living in poverty or off-grid, but it’s certainly a multiplier.
This post did start life as an extension of those thoughts about literacy assumptions, especially in relation to coding. I think there’s more to say about this, and about the ways that the privilege of know-how has the capacity to entrench insider-outsider positioning in ways that are hard to get across. Tech literacy is just like reading literacy: if you have it, you tend to think it was relatively easy to acquire. Most of us have blanked how hard, how frustrating, it was to make the letters on the page form into words and sentences. So one of the complications about a culture of tech skill sharing is the impact on those who watch the sharing that’s happening way, way above their skill set. What sense of self or potential does this reinforce, and in whom? How many times do you hear students say “I’m not technical”, or “I’m no good with computers”, and how many times are they women?
In this vein, Alan has a new blogpost up illustrated with metaphors about home building. I understand the metaphor and its imagery, and I also understand how this construction imagery excludes so many: http://cogdogblog.com/2016/09/timber-framing-interior-finish-certificatation-building-from-github-to-wordpress/
So I’m having a think about all this now.
Ouch. That’s some sting of embarrassment at my choice of metaphor. I’d like to write some things w/o sounding defensive. I’m having my own think.
Primarily when I write long blog posts about my programming or technical things, I try (and fail sometimes) to bring it to an understandable level, to aim for the “I’m not technical crowd.”
It was aimed at my colleagues to explain the concept between the structure of information and how it’s seen in the world. It’s also something I am evolving as I work on it, not a final thing.
The house metaphor really was mine- literally looking at the walls of my house, it’s story… and of course will not mean anything, or worse maybe turn off, people lacking homes. Could I have tried to make it adobe brick construction? Thine and straw? Hay bales? Bamboo? (I love this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOSQksSlr9c) I can’t write about those knowingly. But I can couch the metaphors better.
If you use a metaphor of an Australian cultural context, if it’s not familiar, am I excluded? Is it possible for me to understand a metaphor if it is not part of my life? Can I try it on? Is not including everyone equivalent to excluding them? (it probably feels the same to them and not to me).
More think needed. I do appreciate your observation, as I was not thinking that widely when writing.
My sense is that we aren’t aiming never to speak from where we are, or to hold to a standard that we will always speak so simply that no one could be excluded; and sometimes that where-we-are will need investigation and translation for others. That’s as it is.
In the case of your post, which actually I liked very much, the issue was really that the metaphor was such an apt one. Both the house building and the web building is about significant expertise that isn’t as widely shared as people think. The equivalent for me is writing. I have a learned and taught capacity to make sentences, so I write. I’m highly liable to think of writing as something anyone can do, or at least anyone can get better at.
But the truth is that I live in a house I can’t repair beyond a lick of paint; I drive a car I can’t fix myself; I get about the world in a body that requires the inscrutable and rarely explained medical expertise of others to keep it going; and so on. I write, someone else plumbs, someone plays a harp, and we can all make fumbling efforts at learning bits of any of these things, but those fumbling efforts aren’t always rewarding to pursue, and so we fall away.
I suspect we gain most from watching the expertise of others in practice (as it was in your post) if the gap between where we are and there is also able to be spoken about as a natural part of this.
The issue is that there are many good people in tech who want everything to be open, and technically they keep it that way, but we really have to talk about skills if we’re talking about open in practice.
We own nothing. We can only make it undesirable to put us to other uses.
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