DIGITAL DANGERS: IDENTITY RISKS
Having explored the creative, inventive, and imaginative ways in which women were taking and shaping and writing themselves into digital spaces, and thus rescripting narratives about women and technology and the ways in which women’s contributions are diminished, I’d like to turn more fully toward how these creators are navigating intellectual property in digital spaces.
In terms of more general feminist-focused research in digital space, Kris Blair and Christine Tulley (2007) argued that “it is the nature of electronic, networked spaces themselves that may well mesh with feminist goals of identity, agency, and community” (p. 305).
More directly relevant to this webtext, in a lengthy piece that runs feminist theory in tandem with intellectual property issues, Debora Halbert (2006) described that “feminist theory can make visible the underlying masculine assumptions existing in our construction of intellectual property as well as highlight a political economy of intellectual property that has historically benefited men more than women" (p. 433).
In another piece published that same year, Malla Pollack (2006) stated that the public domain is inherently a pro-feminist space. Her arguments are fairly essentialist, but the case she makes, that protecting and nurturing the public domain should be part of a feminist agenda, is crucial for feminist scholars.
Making intellectual property, issues of public domain, and Creative Commons spaces part of a twenty-first century feminist agenda is particularly crucial when we consider some of the risks women face in digital spaces and within copyright-protected information monopolies.
Digital Risks
An example related to the risks related to both representation and ownership is that of Alison Chang, whose youth counselor took a photo of her at a car-washing fund raiser in her hometown in Texas and posted the photo on his Flickr page. He published the photo under a Creative Commons 2.0 license without specifying usage, thus allowing for commercial use of the photo without obtaining permission from the copyright owner.
In less than two months, Virgin Mobile Australia had downloaded the photo, added text including “free text virgin to virgin,” and used the image in an ad campaign. Most of the ads, which appeared mainly as street signage, do mention Flickr in small text copy, but several individuals—lawyers and bloggers who have responded to the lawsuit—note that Virgin failed to credit the photographer by name.
Upon learning of the ad, Chang wrote on the Flickr page where one of the photos of the ad was posted, "hey that's me! no joke. i think i'm being insulted...can you tell me where this was taken." Underneath Chang's comment, there is a note from the original photographer: "where was this? do you think virgin mobile will give me stuff?" (Cleeland, 2007, n.p.). (You can read the comment thread on Flickr here.) Chang’s family sued Virgin Australia, an affiliate of the larger, international telecommunications company, and Creative Commons, an alternate copyright licensing organization affiliated with Flickr. The family withdrew the Creative Commons lawsuit and the Virgin Mobile case was dismissed due to lack of jurisdiction.
One of the issues here is who owns whose images. Typically, the photographer owns the right. Thus in this situation, the Chang case would not have gone to court as an intellectual property dispute. It will be interesting to see how this example chills or otherwise affects what girls and women post online and how their representations are used when they themselves aren’t the producers or publishers.
As for a window into the larger context, a January 2007 PEW study reported that 55% of online teens use social networks and 55% have created online profiles; older girls predominate within social networking sites (Lenhart & Madden, 2007). A February 2010 Pew report called attention to the fact that twice as many girls aged 14–17 use Twitter as do boys in the same age group (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). While the study does not report on specific uses (such as sharing images via Twitpic), this is a statistic with potential implications about public spaces for sharing information. Although we should celebrate the writing and identity work that girls and women are doing on social networking and micro-blogging sites, girls and women are more at risk on the sites, especially in a Girls Gone Wild cultural climate.
In 2009, advisors at Michigan State University’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences posted a huge collage outside their offices—about 6 feet high and 12 feet long. It included blown-up pictures of MSU students the advisors had harvested from Facebook, and the caption that ran above the photo collage was “do you want employers to see this?” A striking aspect of the collage was the dominance of pictures of young women in the collage, and not just the numbers, but the activities in which the young women were engaged.
In early 2009, one of the largest galleries on Facebook was “30 Reasons Girls Should Call it a Night,” with more than 175,000 members, almost 12,000 wall posts as of this past Monday, and more than 4,400 pictures. 30 Reasons, a completely public group, is populated by young women passed out, skirts above their heads, or shown with young men pulling their skirts up or aside, or holding each other's breasts or patting each other's buttocks. In late 2009, the group became so popular that an individual migrated it off of Facebook and onto its own domain (the now-defunct www.30reasonsgirlsshouldcallitanight.com), using WordPress as the publishing platform. “© 2008 30 Reasons Girls Should Call it A Night. All Rights Reserved” appears at the bottom of each page. To upload, a user (with or without login) must select a checkbox indicating “I certify that i have the relevant permission of use or ownership of the images or videos that i am uploading. And that i take full responsibility for them.”
Sites like Facebook, and, moreso, 30reasons, are interesting and problematic because when users post materials to social networking sites, they lose some control of that content—technically and legally. It can be downloaded, otherwise stored, and tagged by other users. And, obviously, just because someone clicks the checkbox indicating that they have permission to upload a photo doesn’t mean they actually do—or that there are any repercussions for behaving as if they do. Likewise, the content uploaded can be databased and archived indefinitely by the sites themselves.
Admittedly, these are only two examples, and I don’t want to over-extrapolate them. However, I do believe that they are compelling, and certainly not isolated, examples that lend support to Halbert’s (2006) and Pollack’s (2006) call for intellectual property issues to be addressed by feminist scholars.
index | introduction | history | stanley | digital(creation) |
digital(dangers) | ip resistance | conclusions | bibliography
dànielle nicole devoss | devossda@msu.edu