In reading Elizabeth Losh’s hashtag, for this week. I was particularly drawn to her chapters on #Person and #Place. A recurrent tension within her piece resides in the politics of naming and the fruits and follies that can be found when that naming operates at scales conducive and discordant to their original intention. Scale is a consistent feature in her work implicitly and explicitly, and because of the # as a categorical structure for making something readable and sortable by a machine, scale can be inescapable. This reflects the promise of the hashtag and the danger, begging us to deal with the effects of visibility, exposure, evidence, and interpellation.
Her writings on person and place seemed to bring these tensions to a head, writing, “In many ways hashtags are a mechanism for the redistribution of the sensible, by making particular kinds of content more perceptible to potential audiences. Text, images, and video tagged with #Euromaidan can gain visibility by jumping to the top of a user’s social media queue. The act of labeling a chunk of data shines a spotlight on it for a heterogeneous audience that may be composed of both activists seeking to reach a critical mass of participants and security forces planning their crackdown on a crowd of unruly dissidents.” (Losh 56).
Losh points us to the hashtag’s ability to spread and distribute content, as well as the inherent fungibility of the hashtag and is ability to be taken up antagonistically and agonistically with varied consequences. This turns our attention to the invisibilized labor that Losh notes that resides behind the hashtag. The labor of maintenance, disidenitifcation, and renaming to maintain a salient politic. Through the organizing work of Blank Noise Losh also shows us the ways that hashtag based movements are never such, but in this case, always tied to interpersonal acts of organizing, performance, and public intervention on the ground. Blank Noise’s use of the hashtag #ActionHeroes is a culminating call for Indian women to reclaim everyday sites of public sexual assault and street harassment, "devoted to “building testimonials, creating vocabulary, and creating a safe space for people to be able to talk about their experiences.” Blank Noise volunteers have been encouraged to adopt new identities as #ActionHeroes. They reclaim public space by doing seemingly purposeless activities like idling, loafing, or congregating for no purpose.” (Losh 30). These examples begin to show the constitutive role that hashtags can play in constructing new types of representative spaces.
Returning to the power of naming that Losh describes she writes of #Person to "stake their claim to the rights of the self by linking ideas about the autonomy of an individual conscious body to its irreplaceability in the social world, which is signaled by the act of naming” (Losh 37). This act of naming is powerful, yet not only a tool for writing against erasure. Naming has also been a dominate tool in the mode of categorization, management, essentializing identity, and discipline. It's from this tension that many of my questions arise. What is lost in the pursuit of macro scale appeals to visibility achieved through the hashtag? While these tactics are often accompanied by calls to physically gather and engage in the material dimension of place, at what point does the hashtag lose its capaciousness to hold a politic? Because hashtags and their wide dispersal carry such a strong power to name, which then proliferate algorithmically, what are the modes for redressing the ways that political hashtags can slip into undermining their initial revolutionary calls? I’m thinking specifically about #metoo inspired movements that have been structured within a logic of white carceral feminism that carry myopic views that ignore the rising homicide rate for black trans women. Given the rate and immediacy of hashtags, what become reasonable means for redress and engaging in the time, attention, and rigor that sometimes feels absent from our contemporary overmedicated space?
No comments:
Post a Comment