Introduction: Performing the digital body—a ghost story

Senft, Theresa M.

doi:10.1080/07407709608571248

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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Section: Pixels In Distressmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For one thing, as Theresa M Senft has pointed out, the potential for prosthetic or hypothetical identity-making practices offered by the convenient anonymities of cyberspace can often carry with it a kind of problematic rhetoric: the ‘wrong assumption that only an online textual body is performative, whereas a biological body at the end of the terminal is stable’ (1996: 17). Senft makes it clear that the internet ought to be considered ‘a series of cooperative performance gestures from multiple computer and telephone systems’ (1996: 14), which also beckons us to ask, via Butler, ‘[w]hich bodies come to matter – and why?’ (1996: 13). As Senft explains, matter here importantly designates both ‘materiality’ and ‘significance’ (1996: 13) and her reading of the internet as a paradigm productive of bodies that matter, and of bodies as matter, opens out an important consideration to the kinds of spectator bodies engaged in the virtual reproduction of post-traumatic states and their histories.…”

Section: Pixels In Distressmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Senft makes it clear that the internet ought to be considered ‘a series of cooperative performance gestures from multiple computer and telephone systems’ (1996: 14), which also beckons us to ask, via Butler, ‘[w]hich bodies come to matter – and why?’ (1996: 13). As Senft explains, matter here importantly designates both ‘materiality’ and ‘significance’ (1996: 13) and her reading of the internet as a paradigm productive of bodies that matter, and of bodies as matter, opens out an important consideration to the kinds of spectator bodies engaged in the virtual reproduction of post-traumatic states and their histories.…”

Section: Pixels In Distressmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Launching from early discussants of online behaviour such as Julian Dibbell (1993) and Theresa M Senft (1996), and by conducting a self-reflexive practice of what Christine Hine (2000) has argued is the new frontier of virtual ethnography, this article contemplates how virtual practices of witnessing history make claims for the ‘truthful’ nature of their memorial artefacts, testimonials and material traces in an oddly mimetic synchronism with real-life counterpart memorials. Indeed, Kristallnacht in Second Life simulates the presence of a real-life museum that simulates a traumatic history.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Touching virtual trauma: Performative empathics in Second Life

Trezise

2011

Memory Studies

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Trauma has entered the virtual domain of Second Life. Unsanctioned memorials to 9/11 and re-imaginings of a digitized Guantanamo Bay are but some of the more recent installations of traumatic memory to be found in this relatively new online territory. This article seeks to understand how Second Life participates in an affective economy of performative empathy through remediating the traumas of ‘those’ who have suffered ‘elsewhere’. In contemplating one particular online Holocaust museum – the US Holocaust Museum’s Kristallnacht in Second Life, it examines how Second Life participates in the circulation of a range of ‘wound culture’ affects in problematic ways.

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Section: Pixels In Distressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Pixels In Distressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Pixels In Distressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Touching virtual trauma: Performative empathics in Second Life

Trezise

2011

Memory Studies

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“…Text-based, computer-mediated digital culture repackages the Cartesian desire to transcend the 'truth-polluting' body. As such, this apparent disembodiment created in cyberculture poses a genuine dilemma for critical, feminist and progressive educators who have invested decades in ensuring that 'the body' be recognized as essential to knowledge production (Grosz, 1993;Probyn, 1993;Senft, 1996).…”

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confidence: 99%

Hypes, hopes and actualities: new digital Cartesianism and bodies in cyberspace

Boler

2007

New Media & Society

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‘New Digital Cartesianism’ investigates the socio-material power inequities embedded in text-based, computer-mediated communication (CMC). Is the body really transcended in text-based computer-mediated communication? This article summarizes software and hardware advertising ‘hypes’, cyber-enthusiast ‘hopes’, and the ‘actualities’ of CMC which contradict this virtual dream of pure minds communicating. Marketing hypes and cyberhopes mythologize disembodied CMC with promises of anonymity and fluid identities. However, the actualities of how users interpret and derive meaning from text-based communication often involve reductive bodily markers that re-invoke stereotypes of racialized, sexualized and gendered bodies. Ironically, despite claims that CMC achieves Descartes’ dream of ‘pure minds’ and the transcendence of body, users frequently rely on stereotyped images and descriptions of bodies in order to confer authenticity and signification to textual utterances. In digital Cartesianism, the body actually functions as a necessary arbiter of meaning and final signifier of what is accepted as ‘real’ and ‘true’.

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Online Identities and Gender Norms

White¹

2020

The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication

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Individuals are thought to have unique characteristics, to be coherently embodied, and to be agentive in contemporary Western society. Identity is associated with the individual's understanding of the self, a person's self‐presentations, other people's view of the individual, state and cultural conceptions of the individual, and technological readings and renderings of the person. The internet has confirmed and challenged these cultural conceptions of the unique, authentic, and unchanging individual because people produce and engage with versions of the online self. Online identities can be defined as constructed personas, which are maintained by system participants and technologies. Thus, people's online practices can support stable notions of the individual and their behaviors can have more destabilizing implications for these conceptions of the coherent person and body when they do not distinguish between the self and companies, products, technologies, and other individuals. Online identities can be associated with or distinguished from aspects of people's everyday identities, including their gender, race, sexuality, age, and class. While online identities were once associated with opportunities to employ the internet anonymously, social networking and the economic value of people's data have resulted in increased forms of verification and tracking. This entry details varied aspects of online identities, including the ways people are constituted through sign‐up forms, avatars, the design and interface features of online sites, emoticons, and algorithms.

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Introduction: Performing the digital body—a ghost story

Cited by 11 publications

References 2 publications

Touching virtual trauma: Performative empathics in Second Life

Touching virtual trauma: Performative empathics in Second Life

Hypes, hopes and actualities: new digital Cartesianism and bodies in cyberspace

Online Identities and Gender Norms

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