Power, Discourse, and Representation online

I was most interested by Langlois’ discussion of power in technocultural dimensions of discourse. Taking the stance that technology and ‘the message being transmitted’ via that technology are not distinctly separable, or rather, that “both technology and language have material effects in that they manipulate and establish relations between social actors,”(62) she extends Foucault’s theory of discourse as the space where “’power and knowledge are joined together’”(63) to the Internet and technoculture. Discourse both reflects and creates its social subjects and relations of power (63).

In this respect, “the reason why computer communication is important for media studies is that the computer is not simply a transmission device, but also a device for representation”  (47). Thus we should consider the ways in which “technical elements participate in the construction of representations.” Issues of representation extend even to the practical levels of language and access; power and culture structures dictate the representation of subjects of discourse before one joins the democratic ranks of facebook profiles. Wikipedia is a good example of this, as its size and content vary enormously depending on the language. In 2006 the New York Times published an interesting article on the Wiki presence of African languages, citing Swahili as the first to cross the 1,000 article mark (English had well over 1,000,000 at the time).

A contributor to Swahili Wikipedia was the only African or African-American to attend that year’s Wiki conference, and on noting that everyone at the conference was white, he said, “We have allies, people who are willing to help us, but we need to be in charge of our own identity. When it comes to producing information, we don’t want to be dependent.” All the same, a young grad student began paying people in Mali to write Wikipedia articles in Bambara, which had only around 100 articles, as part of a general attempt to represent and preserve culture in the form of a substantial Wiki encyclopedia. Another interesting example in Wikipedia is the surprisingly small size of the Arabic encyclopedia, Arabic being the 6th most spoken language in the World. Wikipedia decided to have its annual conference in Egypt this summer, to call attention to this problem and think of ways to increase the Arabic encyclopedia, acknowledging and studying more practical issues of information distribution and representation in techno-discourse.

I also feel grateful to Langlois for her enlightening engagement with Deleuze and Guattari; she gave me a much better grasp on their works. I find their argument that meaning is immanent rather than pre-existing a particularly useful way to look at the fast-paced process of web-based discourse, although I also had trouble understanding glossematics and would like to look at it more closely in class.