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 Digitized Lives

In chapters examining a broad range of issues—including sexuality,

politics, education, race, gender relations, the environment and
social protest movements—Digitized Lives argues that making sense
of digitized culture means looking past the glossy surface of techno
gear to ask deeper questions about how we can utilize technology
to create a more socially, politically and economically just world.
This second edition includes important updates on mobile and social
media, examining how new platforms and devices have altered how
we interact with digital technologies in an allegedly ‘post-truth’ era.
A companion website (www.culturalpolitics.net/digital_cultures)
includes links to online articles and useful websites, as well as a
bibliography of offline resources, and more.

T. V. Reed is Buchanan Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American

Studies and English at Washington State University. He is the author
of The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement
to the Present.
Digitized Lives
Culture, Power and Social
Change in the Internet Era
Second Edition

T. V. Reed
Second edition published 2019
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2019 Thomas Vernon Reed
The right of Thomas Vernon Reed to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2014
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reed, T. V. (Thomas Vernon), author.
Title: Digitized lives : culture, power, and social change in the
internet era / T.V. Reed.
Description: Second Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. |
Revised edition of the author’s Digitized lives, 2014. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032050 | ISBN 9781138309531 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138309548 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315143415 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Internet—Social aspects. | Information
technology—Social aspects. | Social change.
Classification: LCC HM851 .R4336 2019 | DDC 302.23/1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032050
ISBN: 978-1-138-30953-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-30954-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14341-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Stone Serif
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Preface: Why Buy this Book? xi
Outline of Chapters xv
Companion Website xvi
Acknowledgments xix

1 How Do We Make Sense of Digitizing Cultures? Some

Ways of Thinking Through the Culture–Technology
Matrix 1
Does Technology Make Us More than We Make
Technology? Technological Determinism vs.
Technocultural Analysis 9
Components of Digital Culture Analysis 13
Terminal Confusion? 17
What’s in a Name? New Media/Cyber/Digital Culture/
Etc. Studies 22

2 How Is the Digital World Made? The Designer/Worker/

User Production Cycle 29
The Internet’s Weird History 29
From Dream to Reality to Dream: Producing
Digital Stuff 36
Maker Culture Production: The Open Source
Do-It-Yourself Digital World 41
Clean Rooms or “Dark Satanic Mills”? Toxic Production
E-Waste and Environmental Justice 45

v
vi Contents

3 What’s New about Digitized Identities? Mobile

Bodies, Online Disguise, Cyberbullying and Virtual
Communities 53
Is There a Virtual World/Real
World Divide? 55
Is Life Online a Mobile Masquerade? 61
Anonymity, Disinhibition and Cyberbullying 68
Are Virtual Communities for Real? 71
How Much Online Life Is Good for Us? 72

4 Has Digital Culture Killed Privacy? Social Media,

Governments and Digitized Surveillance 77
What Rights Are Being Lost if Privacy Is Lost? 80
Social Media as Surveillance Mechanism 81
Government Surveillance 89
What Can We Do to Protect Our
Data and Privacy? 96

5 Is Everybody Equal Online? Digitizing Gender, Ethnicity,

Dis/Ability and Sexual Orientation 101
The Default Subject Position? 102
Is the Internet a Guy? Engendering Cyberspaces 106
Is the Internet Colorblind?
E-Racializations 117
Who Is Dis/Abled by Cyberspaces? Enabling and
Disabling Technologies 124
How Queer Are Cyberspaces? Alternative Sexualities in
Cyberspaces 130
Cultural Imperialism, Hegemony
and/or Digital Diversity? 132

6 Sexploration and/or Sexploitation? Digitizing

Desire 139
Real Virtual Sex Education 139
Digital Diddling: Varieties of Cybersex 141
The “Mainstreaming” of Porn 143
Digitized Sex Trafficking 149
 Contents vii

7 Tools for Democracy or Authoritarianism? Digitized

Politics and the Post-Truth Era 153
Electronic Electoral Politics: The
Trump Campaign, Brexit and the Weaponization
of Digital Data 153
Fake News, Real Impact: Digitizing
a Post-Truth Era 158
Can Social Media Overthrow Governments? 167
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Hacktivism and
Digital Organizing 169
Cyberterrorism 182
Digitizing the Arts of Protest 183
How to Avoid Fake News and Intentionally
Inflammatory Politics 187

8 Are Digital Games Making Us Violent, or Will They Save

the World? Virtual Play, Real Impact 191
What’s in a Game? Playing Theories 192
What Do Games Teach? 194
Do Video Games Make Players Violent? 195
Digitized “Militainment”? 198
Gender Games, Race Games 202
Can Video Games Save the World? 212

9 Are Students Getting Dumber as Their Phones Get

Smarter? E-Learning, Edutainment and the Future of
Knowledge Sharing 215
“Is Our Children Learning” Digitally? 216
What Is Technology Doing in
the Classroom? 218
Is Knowledge a Commodity or a Human Right?
Higher Education vs. Information Feudalism 225
End of the World (as We Knew It): Digital
Humanities and Digitized Arts 229
The Future of Knowledge Sharing: Education for
Whom and for What? 234
viii Contents

10 Who in the World Is Online? Digital Inclusions and

Exclusions 237
The World Wide Web Isn’t 237
Who Needs the Internet? 239
From Digital Divides to Technologies
for Social Inclusion 243
Should Everyone and Everything Be Online? 249
Why Digitizing Matters to All of Us 252

11 Conclusion: Will Robots and AIs Take Over the World?

Hope, Hype and Possible Digitized Futures 255
Robots, Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligence and
the Singularity 258

Bibliography 265
Glossary 289
Index 307
 Illustrations

FIGURES
2.1 High tech, handmade (Courtesy of shutterstock.com) 48
2.2 A pile of circuit boards for recycling (Courtesy of
shutterstock.com) 50
3.1 A bit of the material Internet (Courtesy of
shutterstock.com) 58
7.1 Chinese police officer wearing facial recognition glasses
(Courtesy of People’s Images (China)) 158
7.2 Pride day protest for Bradley/Chelsea Manning (Courtesy:
Koby Dagan/Shutterstock.com) 179
7.3 Police kettle in London protest, 2011 (Courtesy: 1000
Words/Shutterstock.com) 181
8.1 Evolution of Lara Croft, 1996–2013 (Courtesy of Creative
Commons) 207
9.1 Best practices of teaching with technology (© Aditi Rao,
Teachbytes) 221
10.1 Technology for social inclusion (© Mark Warschauer,
reprinted with permission) 245
11.1 Captain Picard as Borg (Courtesy of Getty Images) 259

TABLE
4.1 “The Social Network Constitution.” © from Lori Andrews I
Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks
and the Death of Privacy (Free Press, 2013). 80

ix
 Preface
Why Buy This Book?

Have you been tweeted, blogged, YouTubed, Snapchatted, Insta-

grammed, Kindled, interacted, texted, sexted, crowdsourced and
socially networked to the edge of your sanity? Are you tired of being
told that digital technology will solve all the world’s problems, or
that it is bringing an end to civilization? Do you want to make com-
mon sense of all this digital stuff without the hype, the paranoia or
the jargon? Then maybe this book is for you.
There are many books that promise to tell all about the Internet
and new communication technologies. Most fall into one of three
categories. The most common type is the “how to” book that pro-
vides step-by-step ways to use the technology. While these tend to
go out of date quickly, they can be useful, even when they call their
readers “dummies.” The second type is written in a form close to a
rant by people either so enamored of or so afraid of new technologies
that they profoundly exaggerate their positive or negative impact.
The third type of book is written by experts who generally tell way
more than most of us want to know about a small aspect of these
new media technologies in a language that seems to have come from
another planet (the planet Geek, to be precise, a planet I love and
visit frequently, but do not live on). Only this third category is rele-
vant to my aims in this book. Many of these works by experts are very
important, and this book would not exist without them. But they are
not for everybody. They are aimed at a fairly exclusive community of
scholars and advanced communication students, not the rest of us.
This book is different. What I hope to do is provide a frame-
work for readers to think about questions such as: Why use these
technologies at all? If we do use them, how much use is good for us?
And within those broad questions, more pointed ones, such as what
are “new media” doing to our brains, to our sex lives, to our parent–
child interactions, to our politics, to our education system, to our
identities as individuals and as community members? In other words,
how do these new technologies fit into the bigger picture of society
and culture in the twenty-first century? This book is less interested in
xi
xii Prefa c e

programs, apps and devices that come and go in the blip of a com-
puter screen than in asking, in as clear and jargon free a way as I can,
some enduring questions about what we can and should make of
these technologies, about how we can take control of them rather
than have them control us.
We all sense that the Internet and the ever-changing array of new
digital hardware and software are changing the world, and changing
us. But most of us aren’t so sure what those changes are, and whether
they are for the better or for the worse. Indeed, anyone who tells you
they do know for sure what those changes mean is probably about as
reliable as that email from the complete stranger who wants you to
help him transfer his million dollars into your bank account. From the
dawn of the Internet era, there has been a duel between the techno-
phobes and the technophiles, the haters and the lovers of tech. Right
at the dawn of the Net era in the early 1990s this exaggerated pro–con
debate took off with books such as Neil Postman’s relentlessly pessi-
mistic Technopoly (1993), answered by Nicholas Negroponte’s relent-
lessly optimistic Being Digital (1995). Avoiding these two speculative
extremes that have been repeated often in the subsequent two decades
of Internet life, this book seeks to examine some of what is actually
going on in digitized spaces, noting both the dangers and the pleasures
involved. Part of that work is recognizing that the digitizing world is
only part of the world, surrounded by political, economic and social
forces that shape what happens online more than the technology itself.
For many of the more than 3 billion of us now taking part in the
digitized life (about one-half of the world’s population), asking these
questions is like a fish trying to think about water. We take that water
for granted. It’s just where we live. But just as the quality of water is
vital to a fish’s health, so too is it vital for us to think about the qual-
ity of digital culture, to try to sort out the healthy from the polluted
or the toxic waterways, to try to make things a little less murky, a
little more transparent.
Reportedly the great modernist writer Gertrude Stein, when asked
by her lover on her deathbed the presumably metaphysical question,
“Gertrude, what is the answer?” replied, “What is the question?” I’m
on Stein’s side of this exchange. I think most often good questions
are more important than answers. I’d like readers of this book to enter
a conversation about how to think more carefully and deeply about
these new forces that we have unleashed upon the world. I have tried
to identify some key questions to help you come to your own conclu-
sions about how you are going to involve yourself in (or sometimes
wisely run away from) what these new digital cultures offer. The great
 Prefa c e xiii

science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon had a motto that more of us

might take to heart: “Ask the next question.” What does that mean?
Good question. Well, one thing I think it means is always ask the
question that leads beyond what you think you already know. That’s
what I hope my questions will lead you to do—ask the next ques-
tion neither you nor I have thought of yet. As for those of you who
have been assigned to read this book in a class, if you don’t like your
teacher’s questions, or mine, ask your own. This is not a textbook
where you are told just the facts, ma’am, or the scholarly Truth. This
book is a set of provocations.
One question asked often about new communications media is
whether or not they are creating a new “generation gap” between
adults and youth, between members of the “digital” or “d-generation”
and the analog one. If you are a reader under 30, you may well
have grown up with digital devices utterly woven into your lives. You
are what some call digital natives, as opposed to digital immi-
grants who come to new media as adults. Not all digital natives
are young; aspects of digital culture now go back several decades.
And not all digital immigrants are older, since not all youth grow up
with digital devices. But generally speaking, the digital native/digital
immigrant distinction has an age dimension that is rapidly fading.
More important is the distinction itself. Think of it as analogous to
being a native speaker of a language. If you grew up immersed in
digital culture you probably developed something like a fluency with
it, a sense of it as natural. You have a different relation to digital tech
to that of folks who came to digital culture after having spent a good
many years in the pre-Internet era.
Many digital immigrants have gotten very good at using new
digital media, but just like someone who becomes fluent in a second
language, they seldom have quite the same command as those who
speak the language as natives. They don’t feel quite as “at home” in
digital spaces. So those of you under 30 reading this book may under-
stand some things about digital life that your over-30 parents and
teachers will never quite get. On the other hand, digital immigrants
have some knowledge that digital natives do not, namely knowl-
edge of the olden days Before the Web (BW) that may allow them
to see some things about digital culture that are not as apparent to
immersed natives. In any event, one hope for this book is that it will
spark cross-generational dialogues about the pros and cons of various
digitized experiences.
One key question we will return to again and again as we look
at various new media and the cultures surrounding them is what
xiv Prefa c e

is truly new here and what is not? And to understand what is truly
new, as opposed to merely newish-looking or newly hyped, you
need to know what went before (or at least more about the undigi-
tized world). Hence the value of those who grew up BW. I have
drawn many of my examples for the book from North America,
both because it has been for some time the center of digital culture
production, and because it is the terrain that I know best. But much
of what I say here has broad application around the globe, and
I have tried wherever possible to examine specific impacts in places
outside of the countries I know most fully. Without unduly burden-
ing the reader with footnotes, I have tried to cite the most relevant
research sources on the topics I raise, but because many of these
sources are locked behind pay walls I often do so through summa-
ries in accessible newspaper and magazine articles. But I urge read-
ers seeking more detail and nuance to seek out the original material
if they have the means to access them through libraries or other
resources.
This second edition of Digitized Lives is thoroughly revised, bring-
ing new insights to older questions, updating a number of issues, and
raising some vital new ones that have arisen or become more promi-
nent since the first edition came out in 2014. This includes a whole
new chapter on privacy issues, a major revision of the politics chapter
in lieu of recent digital disruptions of electoral and social movement
arenas, as well as revisions in all the other chapters to reflect signifi-
cant events in a rapidly changing technical landscape. Revising and
updating, however, does not mean surpassing all that came before.
One of the downsides of our rapidly changing digitized lives is an
increase in the prevalence of presentism. Presentism is the false belief
that newer is always better, that all previous things, ideas and infor-
mation are made obsolete by newer versions. This may be true of
some new tech devices, or at least the tech companies who benefit
financially from getting us to buy every new digital product would
like us to think so. But it is seldom true of ideas. So if you see a source
cited here that is more than a few hours old (or heaven forfend, a
number of years old!), or a reference to an app that is no longer trend-
ing, do not assume the information provided is not useful. I have
updated statistics wherever relevant, but perspectives provided on a
previous phenomenon (apps or platforms no longer getting much or
any use) may prove highly useful in analyzing Snapchat or whatever
app is hot by the time my publisher gets this book into your hands
or this e-book onto your phone. Rather than scoffing at old stuff,
where appropriate use your own brain to further update this book by
 Prefa c e xv

applying questions and concepts found here to newer developments

in digital culture.

OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS
Chapter 1 looks at general questions about how technology shapes
culture, questions about the extent to which technologies develop
a life of their own beyond human control. It also introduces some
crucial terms useful in thinking about the culture–technology rela-
tionship, and describes some of the ways readers might follow digital
culture scholars in tracing the social impact of new media.
Chapter 2 deals with the often-overlooked forces that make digi-
tal culture possible, the production process that creates the devices
and the networks that carry digitized cultural materials around the
world. It also deals with another largely hidden part of digital cul-
ture, the environmental devastation resulting from the production,
use and disposal of digital communication devices.
Chapter 3 takes up one of the most discussed aspects of digital
culture, the impact of that culture on individual and collective iden-
tity, including the alleged real world/virtual world divide, issues of
digital crossdressing (impersonating someone you are not), the rise of
cyberbullying and the experience of being overwhelmed by the sheer
amount of information thrown at us by digital media.
Chapter 4 takes up the changing nature of privacy in our highly
networked surveillance society. It looks at the phenomenon of dat-
aveillance, the increasing amounts of personal data gathered on us by
social media corporations and by governments. This chapter includes
some advice on how to minimize privacy invasion.
Chapter 5 continues the discussion of identity by looking specifi-
cally at how questions of gender, ethnicity, sexual identity and physi-
cal dis/ability have been reshaped by digital cultures. Is the digital
world creating greater social equality or replicating or even extending
existing inequalities?
Chapter 6 takes up the multifaceted question of sexuality as
impacted by new media spaces, looking at online sex education, at
various cybersex practices (from sexting to sex-bots), at controversies
surrounding online pornography, and at the role of digital media in
the epidemic of sex trafficking.
Chapter 7 looks at a variety of ways in which political cultures,
from mainstream parties to dissident social movement protesters to
revolutionaries to terrorists, have had their actions reshaped by digi-
tal technologies. The recent rise of digitally assisted authoritarianism
xvi Prefa c e

around the world has changed the tone of this chapter considerably
since the previous edition, with new issues arising around fake news
delivered mostly by new media and the alleged rise of a post-truth
politics. Suggestions on ways to combat fake news are offered as well.
Chapter 8 is devoted to digital games and the various controver-
sies that have surrounded them, from allegations that they promote
mindless violence to those who argue that games can be used cre-
atively to solve many of the world’s problems. The chapter also looks
at the ways that digital gaming has contributed to the phenomenon
known as militainment, the increasing fusion and confusion of
militarism and popular culture.
Chapter 9 takes up another controversial area where digital
technology is having a huge impact, the arena of education, from
pre-school through graduate school and out into the wider world
of lifelong learning. It also takes up the issue of lifelong education
and the role of digital media, including the digital humanities and
digital arts, in representing the world’s rich array of past and present
cultures.
Chapter 10 explores the vital question of who does and does
not currently have access to digital cultures (about half the world),
and what the reasons for this might be, including why some people
intentionally and thoughtfully opt out of the digital world. It also
looks at various digital divides involving not just access to digital life,
but the varying quality of access as it shapes social and economic
possibilities.
Chapter 11 concludes with a glimpse at some likely trends and
more speculative possible future developments in increasingly digi-
tized lives. What hopeful developments are likely, and what possible
negative developments will societies need to avoid? At one extreme,
some posit a possible robot apocalypse (takeover by intelligent
machines with little or no use for human beings); at the other
extreme, a world without serious disease or violent conflict. As with
the rest of the book, this chapter tries to avoid both excessive hope
and excessive hype, while examining some best and worst case sce-
narios and drawing on some speculative fiction books and films as
aids to imagining various feasible futures.

COMPANION WEBSITE
This book has an accompanying website—culturalpolitics.net/­digital_
cultures—that includes a bibliography with books, articles and rel-
evant websites for further exploration of key digital culture issues,
 Prefa c e xvii

and a timeline on the evolution of digital cultures. The website is a

resource and a reminder that this book can only introduce topics that
deserve much deeper understanding. The website also has a response
section where you can send me comments or questions about the
book or about digital culture issues more broadly. I appreciate getting
feedback (most of the time).

COMPANION WEBSITE
This book also contains a glossary of terms. Terms that appear in the
glossary are highlighted throughout the text in boldface.
 Acknowledgments

This book grew out of many years of teaching courses about digital
culture at Washington State University and York University. Students
in those classes contributed important insights to this book, and
I thank them for educating me.
I also want to thank several individuals who played a valuable
role as readers of the first edition, in particular Hart Sturgeon-Reed,
Noël Sturgeon, Katie King and Jason Farman. And I thank Hart and
Noël for additional comments for this second edition.
Lastly, I want to thank the amiable folks at Routledge who
brought this new edition to press: Erica Wetter, Emma Sherriff and
Sarah Adams, as well as Jane Fieldsend (from Florence Production
Ltd) and all the other hardworking people who help keep the book
world alive in this not quite completely digitized world.

xix
 1
How Do We Make
Sense of Digitizing
Cultures?
Some Ways of Thinking Through
the Culture–Technology Matrix

Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inac-
curate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.
(Leo Cherne, Discover America conference,
Brussels, June 27, 1968)

The Internet includes an unimaginably vast sea of data that is profoundly changing
the range and nature of human communication. Not only has it greatly decreased
the cost of communication and enabled heretofore-impossible distances to be
crossed instantaneously, but it is also increasingly subsuming all other media into
itself. Mail, phoning, film, television, music, photography, radio—all have been
translated into digital form and made available in far more accessible ways to the
roughly 3.5 billion people (now redefined as “users”) around the world. No book
can hope to fathom the immensity of the Net and other “new” information com-
munication technologies (or ICTs, as they are known among professionals). But we
can examine some of the key patterns of human social interaction made possible,
fostered or transformed by these “new media.” Note that this is the second time
I have put “new” in scare quotes. Why? Because one of the recurring questions in

1
2 Making S ense of Digitizing Cultures

the fields upon which this book draws is: What aspects and impacts
of digital media are truly new? Are our interpersonal relationships
growing more open or becoming more superficial? Are we becom-
ing more politically informed or more politically divided? Are we
building a more equitable economy or leaving many people behind
as robots take over work? Are we being entertained more richly or
being drawn more and more into empty distraction? Overarching all
these questions is a bigger one: Is the real world being overtaken by
a digital one?
There is no doubt that the digitizing world is full of new things,
but not all of the hyped newness is of equal significance. Not every
new app or platform or device is as revolutionary as its promoters
would have us believe. So, part of the task is to distinguish wider
patterns of significance, important newness from superficial nov-
elty. To get at those questions, this book draws from a wider array
of academic fields that examine the social impacts of information
and communication technologies: Anthropology, sociology, psychol-
ogy, political science, communication, rhetoric, ethnic and women’s
studies, cultural studies and half a dozen other disciplines. The inter-
disciplinary field that most directly addresses the set of issues raised
in this book looks at digital cultures—the social relationships that
occur through immersion in the realm of the Internet, video games,
smartphones and other high-tech platforms and devices. Studies of
digital culture ask how communication technologies reflect the wider
social world, how they create new cultural relations and how those
new online experiences in turn reshape the offline world.
Culture is one of the most complicated words in the English lan-
guage, but for our purposes we can simplify it to mean the values,
beliefs and behaviors that are typical and defining of a group. In this
sense, we are all involved in many cultures. We can think of cultures
as like the Russian dolls that have smaller and smaller dolls inside.
At the broadest level we can talk about global culture, at the next
level national cultures, then perhaps ethnic cultures and so on down
the line to the cultures of small groups (clubs, workplaces, etc.) in
which we take part. In terms of digital cultures, we can think in terms
of Twitter culture, or Facebook culture, digital classroom cultures,
smartphone cultures, digital activist cultures, gamer cultures and so
on, each of which could be divided into smaller groups (e.g., Grand
Theft Auto 5 player or iPhone user cultures).
The analogy breaks down, however, in that Russian dolls are far
more clearly demarcated than are cultures. Cultures are fluid, not
neatly bounded entities. Recent anthropology theory argues that
 Making S ense of Digitizing Cultures 3

“cultures” should be seen as real fictions, as always artificial construc-

tions of observers. The question of what typifies or is essential to a
given cultural group is always subject to debate within that group.
The boundaries or key characteristics of any imagined cultural group
are always blurry, and often in process and changing. Cultural mean-
ings are in fact never settled; they are always subject to contestation,
both among outside observers and internal participants. This simply
means that anything claimed about a given cultural group can be
challenged, and that is a good thing. It keeps cultures from becoming
static and keeps those who analyze cultures from becoming compla-
cent or arrogantly sure of their interpretations.
At the broadest level, digital communication technologies have
played a very significant role in our current international configura-
tion of economics, politics and culture, the period of the last several
decades that is generally referred to as neoliberal or “free market” glo-
balization. Globalization is not a new phenomenon in history. There
have been many forms and periods of significant global interaction
for hundreds of years. Precisely what is new about our current era is
up for debate, but among the new features of this particular phase
of globalization is the spread of digital communication networks.
Most scholars agree that our current brand of globalization would be
impossible without the rapid movement of money, data, knowledge
and non-material commodities across national borders via the Inter-
net and other digital technologies.
To address some of the human-to-human issues surrounding our
digitizing world, we need to get beneath the glossy surface of ever-
cooler new tech devices to ask questions about what these devices
are doing to us, and what we can do with them to make our lives and
the lives of others better or worse. My aim is to avoid both the pro-
tech hype driven by profit-hungry electronics corporations, and the
equally dubious tech haters driven more by fear of the new than by
clear thinking about some of the downsides of high-tech cultures.
Instead this book tries to provide some useful ways to think through
the many and varied social impacts of digital cultures, and hopefully
provides some tools to help readers play a stronger role in shaping
new technologies in ways that improve the world.
Few of the questions this book addresses have simple answers.
One reason there are no easy answers about what new technologies
are doing to us is that the subject is incredibly vast, and changing
at a phenomenal rate. Though no one really knows how to count
them with complete accuracy, halfway through the second decade of
the twenty-first century there were close to 5 billion individual Web
4 Making S ense of Digitizing Cultures

pages indexed by Google (and millions more unindexed). Moreover,

between the time I wrote that sentence and the time you are reading
it, millions more were created. If Facebook were a country, it would
be the most populous one on Earth. YouTube broadcasts more in a
day than all major TV networks have broadcast in their entire history.
In the history of the world, counting every language, there have been
about a hundred billion printed books; the amount of information
contained in that number of volumes is uploaded onto the Web every
month. How could anyone claim to know what is going on across all
those sites and in all the other arenas that make up digital cultures?
Trying to understand digital cultures is a little like trying to interpret
the lyrics to a song that adds new verses every day. Sometimes the
new verses seem to continue the song’s main themes, but at other
times the new verses go off in totally unexpected directions because
the song has more than 3 billion co-authors.
As a result of the rapidly changing nature of new communica-
tion networks, the question of what new technologies are doing to
us covers a territory that is riddled with contradictory evidence. Are
they helping create a more just world, bringing down dictators and
opening up societies, or are they giving hate-mongers a new, safely
anonymous space to recruit? Are they giving women, ethnic and sex-
ual minorities new platforms to be heard, or new ways to be vilified
and marginalized? Are they offering new spaces for smaller cultural
and linguistic groups to have a voice, or allowing dominant cultures
(and the English language) to overwhelm everyone else? Are we creat-
ing a new “(digital) generation gap,” or finding new ways for parents
and children to communicate across differences and distances? Is the
Web truly worldwide in terms of who can use it, or are we creating
a world of digital haves and have-nots? Is the Web a space of free
and open public discourse, or one controlled by governments and
huge corporations? Is the Web creating new transnational, person-
to-person understandings, or amplifying existing cultural misunder-
standings? Is the Web a space where physically disabled people can
enjoy the freedom of virtual mobility, or a space biased toward the
able-bodied, leaving the disabled to struggle for full access? Is online
sexual content destroying relationships and degrading morals, or
offering liberating knowledge and new forms of intimacy? Are video
games turning users into mindless virtual killers, or teaching valu-
able life skills? Is the Internet making us more knowledgeable, or just
drowning us in a sea of trivia? Is the digital world one where we are
more “connected,” or one that stunts the face-to-face interactions
that alone can carry true human connection? Are we becoming more
 Making S ense of Digitizing Cultures 5

liberated as individuals with many more social options, or being

turned by government surveillance, politically biased “fake news”
and corporate data mining into programmed human robots?
Clearly, a case can be made for each extreme side of each of these
questions. But that doesn’t mean that the truth is somewhere in the
middle. It means that the “truth” of digital cultures is a set of ongoing
processes, and will depend on the thinking and acting users do now,
including decisions we make as citizens and as consumers about the
further development and use of new technologies in the near future.
It will depend on the personal decisions we make, on the collective
political work we do to shape social policy about technology and on
the lives we choose to pursue as participants in a rapidly digitizing
age that is upon us, whether we like it or not.
So, digital cultures are very much in progress, and no one really
knows what the more than 7.5 billion of us stranded on the third
rock from the sun we call Earth will eventually make of this still rel-
atively new set of technologies. We are dealing with two ongoing
processes, the: The human development of digitizing technologies
and the human use of those technologies. They are not the same
thing because humans do unexpected things with the tools we cre-
ate. And that is what a technology is, a tool. The roots of the word
technology are in the Greek name for practical things that extend
our human capacities. Some of our more famous technologies, the
wheel, the printing press, have changed the world and human identi-
ties in unimaginably diverse ways. So too will our digital tools, with
an emphasis on the unimaginable part. The tools will only be as good
as the imaginations of the people who put them to use.
While we are still learning to make sense of the new media explo-
sion, there is little doubt that it represents a major transformation in
human culture, what one scholar has called a “fourth revolution in
the means of production of knowledge” (Harnad 1991), following
the three prior revolutions of language, writing and print. As with
each of these previous “revolutions,” much consternation has been
generated by the arrival of the digital age. The Greeks worried that
the invention of writing would fundamentally undermine the key
human capacity of memory. The arrival of the printing press was
viewed by some as a dangerous degradation of human communica-
tion. And so too have many lamented that digital media will bring
the “end of world as we know it.” The end of the world has been pre-
dicted since the beginning of homo sapiens, and this latest prediction
is no doubt as wrong as all the others. But some things in the world
certainly are changing. And the “as we know it” part of the phrase is
6 Making S ense of Digitizing Cultures

undeniable. New media will not bring an end to the world, but they
are deeply changing the way “we know it.” New media (like the print-
ing press) in the past have not brought an end to the world, but they
do bring an end to certain ways of knowing, while adding new ways
of knowing and new identities. And that is surely what is happening
now; we are experiencing a (digital) revolution in how we come to
know the world and ourselves.
Having raised the issue of knowledge, let me say a word about my
approach to knowing about digital cultures. Objectivity is one of the
great inventions of the modern world. It is a worthy ideal of the natu-
ral sciences and much scholarship in the social and human sciences.
But, like all ideals, it is never fully attained. The idea of information
and analysis presented without personal, cultural or political bias is a
wonderful thing to strive for, because no one benefits from distorted
information. Some think the way to achieve objectivity is to pretend
to be a person without biases. Instead, I agree with scholars who
argue that such a position just hides biases that all of us have. So my
approach will not be to pretend to be neutral on all issues raised in this
book (I will not, for example, give white supremacists equal credence
with folks fighting racism online). Rather, I’ll make my own positions
(read biases, if you wish) explicit when I have a strong point of view
and trust that readers will factor my position into their responses.
Having said that this is a book with more questions than answers,
I will also share my ambivalences and uncertainties along the way.
I believe all knowledge is situated knowledge, that it is pro-
duced and interpreted by humans always embedded in cultures,
always able to see some things better, some things less well, from
their particular place in the world (Haraway 2003 [1984]). This is not
relativism—the claim that all cultural viewpoints are of equal value
and validity. Situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) begins in the rec-
ognition that each of us has insights and blind spots based upon
our background and our current location in various economic and
cultural hierarchies. This position acknowledges the unequal power
available to different individuals, and seeks to bring awareness of
that inequality into the cultural conversation. It includes a search
for a deeper level of analysis that more closely approaches objectivity by
acknowledging our inability to fully transcend cultural perspectives.
But an inability to completely leave aside our cultural viewpoints does
not mean all viewpoints are equal. When we are called to jury duty,
we are asked by the court if we can put aside biases that may prejudge
the case. And if we do not do so, other jurors may challenge us. At the
same time, the best judges and lawyers will seek to bring a variety of
 Making S ense of Digitizing Cultures 7

situated knowledges into the jury room in order to most fairly weigh
evidence. Though things outside of a courtroom are far messier, a
healthy democratic society functions in much the same way, through
careful weighing of the facts, wise use of our differing respective
knowledge bases, careful introspection into our limiting biases and a
check upon us by our questioning fellow citizens. Facts matter, and
not all attempts to account for the facts are equally valid. And the fact
of unequal power and differing degrees of self-interest must be fac-
tored into the search for political truth and cultural understanding.
That is what I have tried to do in this book, though I am sure I have
done so imperfectly, as is inevitable among humans (and for that
matter, among Artificially Intelligent entities, so far—see Chapter 5).
Before moving too deeply into this revolutionary world of digi-
tized cultures, it is important to note who is not part of those cul-
tures, i.e., most of the people on earth. Of the roughly 7.5 billion
people on this planet, about half, 50 percent of us, have no access to
the digital world at all. And millions of others have severely limited
access compared with the taken-for-granted fast broadband access
enjoyed by those of us with economic or social privilege. These digi-
tal divides in turn rest upon growing economic and social inequal-
ity in almost every country around the globe, and vast disparities of
wealth between countries. In broad statistical terms, there are clearly
great digital divides between the Global North and the Global South,
as represented by these percentages across continents: 95 percent of
North Americans have access, 85 percent of Europeans, 64 percent
of Middle Easterners, 6 percent of Latin Americans, 49 percent of
Asians and only 36 percent of Africans (Internet World Stats, www.
internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). Access varies by country within
continents of course, and by class, since even the poorest countries
have economic elites. In the many countries with a dominant ethnic
group and other minority ethnicities, minority ethnic groups almost
invariably have poorer access, usually due to having lower incomes
and fewer cultural benefits compared with the dominant ethnicity.
Why does this matter so much? Consider these statistics:

• 80 percent of people live in countries where the income gap is

widening.

• The richest 20 percent of the population controls 75 percent

of world wealth.

• 25,000 children die each day from poverty.

• Seven in a hundred people have a college education.

8 Making S ense of Digitizing Cultures

• A billion people in the world are illiterate.

• One in five people on earth has no clean drinking water.

• One in five owns a digital device.

(Statistic Brain n.d.; UNESCO Institute
for Statistics n.d.)

While statistics at the global level are subject to considerable varia-

tion depending on methods of measurement, a general pattern of
profound poverty alongside great concentrations of wealth is unde-
niable. And, with some local exceptions, it is clear that economic
and social inequalities in the world are currently being replicated,
and often exacerbated, by parallel inequalities in access to the Inter-
net’s resources; this in turn means that the economic, political, social
and cultural benefits provided by digital access are distributed in
extremely unequal ways.
Scholars also recognize that digital divides are about more than
access to devices and software. There are also divides centering on lan-
guage and culture (which languages and traditions are prominently
and fairly represented on the Web, and which are not), techno-lit-
eracy (who does and who doesn’t receive culturally relevant educa-
tion in using digital devices and resources), and censorship/openness
(who does and who does not have their access significantly limited
by governmental or corporate forces). All these various digital divides
are crucial to keep in mind if we are to approach a realistic appraisal
of what is going on in the online (and offline) worlds. (For more on
digital divides, see Chapter 9.)
With these issues of huge scale and widely varying contexts
in mind, let me be clear that I will not pretend to deal with all
aspects of new communications technologies. My focus will be
on cultural and social questions, on asking what can be done
to make digital communication technologies serve the cause of
richer representation for groups currently on the cultural margins,
and how digital communication technology can be used to fur-
ther economic and social justice for all. Thus, the three keywords
in my subtitle—­culture, power and social change. An emphasis on
digital culture means focusing less on the gadgets, more on the
human interactive dimensions of digital phenomena (though, as
we will see, there is no way to fully separate the technical and
the cultural). Focusing on power means centering questions about
who currently benefits from digital cultures and who doesn’t. It
means asking to what extent and in what ways the digitization of
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Der to any tarnation Yankee, kee, kee,
To any tarnation Yankee.

Sir Farragut came with a mighty fleet;

With a mighty fleet came he;
And Lord Lovell instanter began to retreat,
Before the first boat he could see, see, see,
Before the first boat he could see.

His “fifty thousand gal-li-ant men”

Dwindled down to thousands six,
Who heard a distant cannon, and then,
Commenced a-cutting their sticks, sticks, sticks—
Commenced a-cutting their sticks.

“Oh, tarry, Lord Lovell!” Sir Farragut cried;

“Oh, tarry, Lord Lovell!” cried he;
“I rather think not,” Lord Lovell replied,
“For I’m in a great hurree, ree, ree,
For I’m in a great hurree!

“I like the drinks at St. Charles’ Hotel,

But I never could bear strong Porter,
Especially when it is served in a shell,
Or mixed in an iron mortar!”

“I reckon you’re right,” Sir Farragut said,

“I reckon you’re right,” said he;
“For if my PORTER should fly to your head,
A terrible crash there’d be, be, be,
A terrible crash there’d be!”

Oh, a wonder it was to see them run!

A wonderful thing to see—
And the Yankees sailed up without shooting a gun,
And captured their great citee, tee, tee,
And captured their great citee.

Lord Lovell kept running all day and all night,

Lord Lovell a-running kept he,
For he swore that he couldn’t abide the sight
Of the gun of a live Yankee, kee, kee,
Of the gun of a live Yankee.
 When Lord Lovell’s life was brought to a close
By a sharp-shooting Yankee gunner,
From his head there sprouted a red, red—nose,
From his feet a scarlet runner!

OTHER PARODIES.
“Come into the garden, Maud!”

Come out in the garden, Jane,

For the black bear, night, has run,
Come out in the garden, Jane,
It’s time the party was done;
And the chickens commence to cackle again,
And the cocks crow, one by one.

For a breeze begins to blow,

And the planet of Jupiter, he,
Grows shaky and pale, as the dawn, you know,
Comes striding over the sea;
Grows pale, as the dawn keeps coming, you know,
Grows paler and paler to be.

All night have the tulips shaked,

At the noise of the fiddle and drum,
All night has the trumpet-vine quivered and quaked,
As the sounds of the dancing have come;
Till the chickens and cocks in the hen-roost waked,
And they stopped the fiddle and drum.

I said to the tulip, “It’s I,” says I,

Whom she likes best of them all;
“When will they let her alone?” says I,
“She’s tired I know of the ball.
Now part of the folks have said good-bye,
And part are now in the hall;
They’ll all be off directly,” says I,
“And then I’m over the wall.”

I said to the pink, “Nigh over, I think,

 The dancing and glancing and fun:
O young Lloyd Lever, your hopes will sink
When you find the charmer is won!
We’re one, we’re one,” I remarked to the pink,
“In spirit already one.”

And the red of the pink went into my face,

As I thought of your sweet “I will;”
And long I stood in that slippery place,
For I heard our waterfall spill,
Spill over the rocks and run on in the race,
The mill-race down by the mill,
From the tree where I feebly stated my case,
To the fence where you answered “I will.”

The drowsy buttercup went to bed

Nor left a lock of her hair;
The great sunflower he nodded his head
And the poppy snored in his chair;
But the pink wasn’t sleepy at all, she said,
Wishing my pleasure to share,
No tulip or pink of them cared for bed,
They knew I expected you there.

Queen pink of the feminine pinks in there,

Come out in the garden to me,
In the velvet basque, silk-lined you wear,
Queen pink and tulip you be:
Bob out little face, running over with hair,
And let the hollyhocks see.

Is that the marigold’s laugh I hear,

Or the sound of her foot as ’t fell?
She is coming, my duck, my dear;
She is coming, my bird, my belle.
The blood-pink cries; “She is near, she is near,”
And the pale pink sobs: “Do tell!”
The snap-dragon says: “D’you see her? D’you see her?”
And the tulip, “Yes, there by the well!”

She is coming, my joy, my pet,

Let her trip it, soft as she chose,
My pulses would livelier get
Were I dying there under the rose;
 My blood flow rapider yet
Were I buried down under the rose,
Would start and trickle out ruby and wet
And bubble wherever she goes.

CLEON HATH A MILLION ACRES.

Brown has pockets running over,
Ne’er a dime have I;
Brown he has a wife and children,
Bachelor am I;
Brown he has a dozen servants,
One of ’em am I;
Yet the poorest of us couple
’s Brown; I’ll tell you why.

Brown, ’tis true, possesseth dollars,

All creation I;
And the income that it gives me
Lieth in my eye.

Brown he is a sleepy fellow,

Wide-awake am I;
He in broad-cloth, I in tow-cloth,
Handsomest am I.

Brown has had no education;

Mine you couldn’t buy;
He don’t know we call him “noodle,”
I assert it, I;
Brown, I tell you you’re a noodle,
Noodle you will die;
Who speaks first to change conditions?
—I declare—it’s I!

“WHEN I THINK OF MY BELOVED.”

 (Algonquin Song, in “Hiawatha.”)

When I think of him I love so,

Oh lor! think of him I love so,
When I am a-thinking of him—
Ouch! my sweetheart, my Bee-no-nee!

Oh lor! when we left each other

He presented me a thimble—
As a pledge, a silver thimble,
Ouch! my sweetheart, my Bee-no-nee!

“I’ll go ’long with you,” he whispered,

Oh lor! to the place you come from;
“Let me go along,” he whispered,—
Ouch! my sweetheart, my Bee-no-nee!

“It’s awful fur, full fur,” I answered,

“Fur away it is,” I answered,
“Oh lor! yes, the place I come from—”
Ouch! my sweetheart, my Bee-no-nee!

As I looked ’round for to see him,

Where I left him for to see him,
He was looking for to see me—
Ouch! my sweetheart, my Bee-no-nee!

On the log he was a-sitting,

On the hollow log a-sitting,
That was chopped down by somebody—
Ouch! my sweetheart, my Bee-no-nee!

When I think of him I love so,

Oh lor! think of him I love so,
When I am a-thinking of him—
Ouch! my sweetheart, my Bee-no-nee!
(From “Milkanwatha.”)

“NEVER STOOPS THE SOARING VULTURE.”

(Also from “Milkanwatha.”)
 Never jumps a sheep that’s frightened,
Over any fence whatever,
Over wall, or fence, or timber,
But a second follows after,
And a third, upon the second,
And a fourth, and fifth, and so on,
First a sheep, and then a dozen,
Till they all, in quick succession,
One by one have got clean over.

So misfortunes almost always,

Follow after one another,
Seem to watch each other always;
When they see the tail uplifted,
In the air the tail uplifted,
As the sorrow leapeth over;
Lo! they follow, thicker, faster,
Till the air of earth seems darkened
With the tails of sad misfortunes,
Till our heart within us, weary,
Cry out: “Are there more a-coming?”

THE FALLS OF LODORE.

“Rising and leaping, sinking and creeping,
Striking and raging, as if a war waging,
All around and around, with endless rebound,
Confounding, astounding,
Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound!

“Recoiling, turmoiling, and toiling and boiling,

And dashing, and flashing, and splashing and crashing,
All at once, and all o’er, with a mighty uproar;
And THIS way the water comes down at Lodore!”

A disappointed, “disillusioned,” tourist expresses below his view

of the subject, which slightly differs from Southey’s.
Do you want to be told how it is that the water
Comes down at Lodore?
Why then I’m the man
Of all others, that can,
Or, rather, the man of all others, that ought to
Be able to tell you, without any more
Fuss;
Thus!

Behind a small cavern,

Suppose a dark cavern,
Or ravine, more correctly,
From whose summit directly
As from a stone pitcher,
Out of the which, a
Volume of fluid
Enough for a Druid
To wade to his knees in,
Pours out unceasin’-
Gly down, and not up;
Which would be a sup-
Position so very
To nature contrary,
That it couldn’t be thought a
Supposable case,
For a cascade of water
On any man’s place;
Much more, at Lodore,
Where the water has always come down, heretofore.
Down deep precipices,
And awful abysses,
Ten feet, or fifteen,
The water is seen
To drip, skip, trip, slip, dip

A gill in a minute, in great agitation;

Then goes it again,
With a very perpen-
Dicular smash, dash, splash, crash;
A pint, at the least calculation!
Making no bones
Of wetting the stones,
Which can’t get out,
 But wriggle about,
A whole quart of the cascade has got ’em;
And the way they go
Down, isn’t slow;
Rumble, and jumble, and tumble;
Hip, hop, drop, whop, stop!
A gallon has got to the bottom!

And the moral of that is, said the Duchess, that tourists shouldn’t
see NIAGARA before they visit Lodore.

“TELL ME, YE WINGED WINDS.”

Tell me, my secret soul,
Oh, tell me, Hope and Faith,
Is there no resting-place
From women, girls, and death?
Is there no happy spot
Where bachelors are blessed,
Where females never go,
And men escape that pest?
Faith, Hope, and Love, best boon to mortals given,
Waved their bright wings, and whispered, “Yes, in Heaven!”

SEEING IS BELIEVING: SEEING IS DECEIVING.

Here is a row of capital letters, and of figures, of ordinary size
and shapes:
SSSSXXXXZZZZZ33338888
They are such as are made up of two parts, of similar form. Look
carefully at these, and you will perceive that the upper halves of the
characters are a very little smaller than the lower halves—so little
that, at a mere glance, we should declare them to be of equal size.
Now, turn the page upside down, and, without any careful looking,
you will see that this difference in size is very much exaggerated—
that the real top half of the letter is very much smaller than the other
half. It will be seen by this that there is a tendency in the eye to
enlarge the upper part of any object upon which it looks. Thus two
circles of unequal size might be drawn and so placed that they would
appear exactly alike.

FANTASTIC NAMES.
An Ohio lady told me that she knew three young ladies belonging
to one family, named severally:
Regina, Florida Geneva, and Missouri Iowa. And that an ill-
starred child, born about the time of the first Atlantic cable furor, was
threatened with the name of Atalanta Telegrapha Cabelletta!
The cable collapsed, and the child escaped; but a young lady of
Columbus, born January 1, 1863, was less fortunate. She was
named by her parents in honor of the event of that day,
Emancipation Proclamation, and is known by the pet name “Proklio.”
I knew a boy named Chief Justice Marshall; a young man,
(greatness was thrust upon him,) named Commodore Perry V——r,
and have been told of a little girl named by her novel-loving mother,
Lady Helen Mar.
Mrs. C., of Western New York, was, in her girlhood, acquainted
with a boy who by no means “rejoiced in the name” of John Jerome
Jeremiah Ansegus P. S. Brown McB——e.
A colored woman in Dunkirk named her infant son in honor of two
lawyers there: Thomas P. Grosvenor William O. Stevens D——s;
and, at an Industrial school in Detroit, there was some years ago a
colored boy named Nicholas Evans Esquire Providence United
States of America Jefferson Davis B——s.
 In Cazenovia there once lived a young lady named Encyclopedia
Britannica D——y.
There, too, Messrs. Hyde and Coop lived side by side for several
years. Then Mr. Hyde moved out of town, and spoiled that little
game.
It was noted as a coincidence when a Mr. Conkrite, of Tecumseh,
Mich., sold his dwelling-house and lot to Mrs. Cronkite.
A farmer in Allegany county, N. Y., named his children Wilhelmina
Rosalinda, Sobriski Lowanda, Eugertha Emily, Hiram Orlaska,
Monterey Maria and Delwin Dacosti. The following are also vouched
for as genuine American names: Direxa Polyxany Dodge, Hostalina
Hypermnestra Meacham, Keren Habuch Moore and Missouri
Arkansas Ward.
There lived in Greenfield, N. Y., a certain Captain Parasol; and, at
Niagara Falls, for a time, a Methodist minister named Alabaster.
I have lately heard of a Mrs. Achilles, a Mr. and Mrs. December, a
John January, and a Mr. Greengrass; and of an Indiana girl, at
school in Cincinnati, named Laura Eusebia Debutts Miranda M’Kinn
Parron Isabella Isadora Virginia Lucretia A——p.
In 1874 one of the young ladies at a certain convent school in
West Virginia, was Miss Claudia Deburnabue Bellinger Mary Joseph
N——p.
The following are names of stations on the “E. and N. A.
Railway,” New Brunswick: Quispamsis, Nanwigewank, Ossekeag,
Passekeag, Apohaqui, Plumweseep, Penobsquis, Anagance,
Petitcodiac, Shediac, Point du Chene; and we should particularly like
to hear a conductor sing them.

LADIES’ NAMES.
Their Sound.

There is a strange deformity,

 Combined with countless graces,
As often in the ladies’ names
As in the ladies’ faces.
Some names are fit for every age,
Some only fit for youth;
Some passing sweet and musical,
Some horribly uncouth;
Some fit for dames of loftiest grades,
Some only fit for scullery maids.

Ann is too plain and common,

And Nancy sounds but ill;
Yet Anna is endurable,
And Annie better still.
There is a grace in Charlotte,
In Eleanor a state,
An elegance in Isabelle,
A haughtiness in Kate:
And Sara is sedate and neat,
And Ellen innocent and sweet.

Matilda has a sickly sound,

Fit for a nurse’s trade;
Sophia is effeminate,
And Esther sage and staid;
Elizabeth’s a matchless name,
Fit for a queen to wear—
In castle, cottage, hut or hall,
A name beyond compare:
And Bess and Bessie follow well,
But Betsy is detestable.

Maria is too forward,

And Gertrude is too gruff,
Yet, coupled with a pretty face,
Is pretty name enough:
And Adelaide is fanciful,
And Laura is too fine,

But Emily is beautiful,

And Mary is divine;
Maud only suits a high-born dame,
And Fanny is a baby name.
Eliza is not very choice,
Jane is too blunt and bold,
And Martha somewhat sorrowful,
And Lucy proud and cold.
Amelia is too light and gay,
Fit only for a flirt,
And Caroline is vain and shy,
And Flora smart and pert;
Louisa is too soft and sleek—
But Alice, gentle, chaste and meek.

And Harriet is confiding,

And Clara grave and mild,
And Emma is affectionate,
And Janet arch and wild;
And Patience is expressive,
And Grace is old and rare,
And Hannah, kind and dutiful,
And Margaret, frank and fair;
And Faith, and Hope, and Charity
Are heavenly names for sisters three.

LADIES’ NAMES.
THEIR SIGNIFICANCE.

Frances is frank and free;

Bertha is purely bright;
Clara is illustrious;
Cecilia, dim of sight.
Katharine is pure;
Barbara, from afar;
Mabel is lovable;
Lucy is a morning star.

Wisdom is Sophia’s name;

Happiness, Letitia’s;
Adelaide a princess is;
Beatrice, delicious.[2]
Susan is a lily;
 Julia has soft hair;
Sara is a lady;
Rosalind, as roses fair.

Constance, firm and resolute;

Grace is favor meet;
Emily has energy;
Melicent is honey-sweet.
Elizabeth and Isabel
To GOD are consecrate;
Edith is happiness;
Maud has courage great.

Mary or Maria,
Star of the sea;
Margaret, a pearl;
Agnes, chastity.
Agatha is truly kind;
Eleanor is light;
Esther is good fortune;
Elvira’s soul is white.

Antoinette, Anne, Anna,

Grace and favor rare;
Geraldine and Bridget,
Strong beyond compare.
Noble is Eugenia;
Flora, queen of flowers;
Virginia is purity;
Let her grace be ours!

GEOGRAPHICAL PROPRIETY.
The Brewers should to Malta go,
The dullards all to Scilly,
The Quakers to the Friendly Isles,
The Furriers to Chili.
Spinsters should to the Needles go;
Wine-bibbers to Burgundy;
 Gourmands may lunch at Sandwich Isles,
Wits sail to Bay of Fundy.

Cooks, from Spithead, should go to Greece;

And, while the Miser waits
His passage to the Guinea Coast,
Spendthrifts are in the Straits.
The Babies (bless their little hearts!)
That break our nightly rest,
Might be sent off to Babylon,
To Lapland, or to Brest.

Musicians hasten to the Sound;

Itinerants to Rome;
And let the race of hypocrites
At Canton find their home.
Lovers should fly to Cape Good Hope,
Or castles build in Spain;
Debtors should go to Oh-I-Owe;
Our Sailors to the Maine.

Bold Bachelors to the United States;

Maids to the Isle of Man;
The Gardener should to Botany go;
And Shoeblacks to Japan.
This all arranged, and misplaced men
Would then no longer vex us;
While any not provided for
Could go, at once, to Texas!

THE CAPTURE.
When, in the tenth century, the Tartars, led by their ruthless chief,
invaded Hungary, and drove its king from the disastrous battle-field,
despair seized upon all the inhabitants of the land. Many had fallen
in conflict, many more were butchered by the pitiless foe, some
sought escape, others apathetically awaited their fate. Among the
last was a nobleman who lived retired on his property, distant from
every public road. He possessed fine herds, rich corn fields, and a
well stocked house, built but recently for the reception of his wife,
who now for two years had been its mistress.
Disheartening accounts of the general misfortune had reached
his secluded shelter, and its peaceful lord was horror-stricken. He
trembled at every sound, at every step; he found his meals less
savory; his sleep was troubled; he often sighed, and seemed quite
lost and wretched. Thus anxiously anticipating the troubles which
menaced him, he sat, one day, at his well closed window, when
suddenly a Tartar, mounted on a fiery steed, galloped into the court.
The Hungarian sprang from his seat, ran to meet his guest, and said:
“Tartar, thou art my lord; I am thy servant; all thou seest is thine.
Take what thou fanciest; I do not oppose thy power. Command; thy
servant obeys.”
The Tartar immediately leaped from his horse, entered the house,
and cast a careless glance on all the precious adornments it
contained. His eyes rested upon the brilliant beauty of the lady of the
house, who appeared, tastefully attired, to greet him there, no less
graciously than her consort.
The Tartar seized her, with scarcely a moment’s hesitation, and,
unheedful of her shrieks, swung himself upon the saddle, and
spurred away, carrying off his lovely booty.
All this was but an instant’s work. The nobleman was
thunderstruck, yet he recovered, and hastened to the gate. He could
hardly distinguish, in the distance, the figures of the lady and her
relentless captor. At length a deep sigh burst from his overcharged
heart, and he exclaimed in the bitterness of his bereavement:
“Alas! poor Tartar!”

Matrimony has been defined An insane desire on the part of a

young man to pay a young woman’s board. But it might be said, with
equal justice, to be An insane desire on the part of a young woman,
to secure—a master.
 THE FIRST MARRIAGE.—And Adam said: “This is now bone of my
bone, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman because she
was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and
mother and cleave unto his wife. They shall be one flesh.”
No cards.

In a country church-yard is found this epitaph: “Here lie the

bodies of James Robinson and Ruth his wife;” and, underneath, this
text: “Their warfare is accomplished.”

A lady having died unmarried at the age of sixty-five, the

following epitaph was engraved upon her tombstone:
“She was fearfully and wonderfully maid.”

“This animal,” said a menagerie-man, “is exceedingly timid and

retired in its habits. It is seldom seen by the human eye—sometimes
never!”

If it was Talleyrand who described language as a gift bestowed

upon man in order to enable him to conceal his thoughts, he scarcely
made that use of it, when, in reply to some friend who asked his
opinion of a certain lady, he said: “She has but one fault—she is
insufferable!”

“What do you want?” demanded an irate house-holder, called to

the window at eleven o’clock, by the ringing of the door-bell:
“Want to stay here all night.”
“Stay there, then!” Window closed emphatically.
 “I want to go to the Revere,” said a stranger in Boston to a citizen
on the street.
“Well, you may go, if you’ll come back pretty soon,” was the
satisfactory reply.

“I wish to take you apart for a few moments,” one gentleman said
to another in a mixed company.
“Very well,” said the person addressed, rising and preparing to
follow the first speaker; “but I shall insist on being put together
again!”

Two gentlemen meeting at the door of a street-car in Toledo, and

entering together, both faultlessly dressed for the evening, one of
them, glancing at his companion’s attire, asked briskly: “Well! who is
to be bored to-night?” “I don’t know,” said the other, as briskly,
“Where are you going?”

This is the way it sounded to the congregation:

“Wawkaw swaw daw aw waw,

Thaw saw thaw Law ahwaw,
Wawkaw taw thaw rahvawvaw braw
Aw thaw rahjawsaw aw!”

this is what the choir undertook to sing:

“Welcome sweet day of rest,

That saw the Lord arise!
Welcome to this reviving breast,
And these rejoicing eyes!”
 Mary Wortley Montague was epigrammatic when she divided
mankind into “three classes—men, women, and the Hervey family”;
an English writer of the present century, when he summed up Harriet
Martineau’s creed, in a travesty on the Mohammedan confession of
faith, “There is no God, and Harriet is his prophet;” an English critic,
who described Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens as a “Biography of
John Forster, with Reminiscences of Dickens”; an American, who
said of one of his own noted countrymen (and it is equally true of
many others), “He is a self-made man, and he worships his Creator;”
finally, President Grant, when he exclaimed: “Sumner does not
believe the Bible! I am not surprised; he didn’t write it!”

Charles Francis Adams, in his eloquent eulogy on W. H. Seward,

lapses into a mixed metaphor which is, perhaps, all things
considered, one of the most remarkable on record. “One single
hour,” he says, “of the will displayed by General Jackson, at the time
when Mr. Calhoun—the most powerful leader secession ever had—
was abetting active measures, would have stifled the fire in its
cradle.”
This is scarcely excelled even by Sir Roche Boyle’s celebrated
trope: “I smell a rat. I see him floating in the air. But, mark me, I shall
nip him in the bud!”

M. B. was planning plank walks from the front doors of his

Ellicottville cottage to the gate, wishing to combine greatest
convenience with least possible encroachment upon the verdure of
the modest lawn. “Friends in council,” assisting at his deliberations,
took diverse views of the case. One would have the walks meet
obliquely in the form of a Y. Another insisted that whatever angles
there were, should be right angles, etc. Finally, M. B. remarked:
“Well! we don’t seem to agree. No two of us agree. I think I’ll plank
the yard all over, and, where I want the grass to grow BORE HOLES!”
 Readers who admire the elliptical and suggestive style, and who,
therefore, adore Mrs. R. H. D. and Mrs. A. D. T. W., ought to be
pleased with the instructions given by a Philadelphian million-heiress
to her agent, in this wise, (audivi):
“Where the men are at work, they will throw stones and earth and
timbers against that tree, and there is no use in it. By a little care
they could avoid it, but they won’t be careful. So I’d like you, as soon
as possible, to put a protection around it—because it isn’t
necessary.”
... “No, you needn’t drive her out of the grounds. Cows are not
allowed to run in the street, and the owner is liable for trespass if
they do. Shut her up in the yard, and if the owner don’t come for her
to-morrow—Pound her—because there is a law against it.”

“Aha!” said a Hibernian gentleman, surprised at his neighbor’s

unusual promptness; “Aha! So you’re first, at last! you were always
behind before!”
Another Emerald Islander, speaking at his breakfast table of the
difference between travel by steam and the old mode, thus illustrated
the point: “Afore the rail-road was built, if ye left Elmira at noon, and
drove purty fast, ye might likely get to Corning to tea. But to-day, if ye
were to start from Elmira at noon on an Express train for Corning,
why, ye’re there Now!”

Caledonian shrewdness and the Caledonian dialect, alike speak

for themselves, in a “bonny Scot’s” definition of metaphysics: “When
the mon wha is listenin’, dinna ken what the ither is talkin’ aboot, and
the mon wha is talkin’ dinna ken it himsel’, that is metapheesicks.”

“Be what you would seem to be,” said the Duchess, in Lewis
Carroll’s delightfully droll story of “Alice’s Adventures,”—“or, if you
like it put more simply: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise
than what it might appear to others, that what you were or might
have been, was not otherwise than what you had been would have
appeared to them to be otherwise.”
That is slightly metapheesickal, perhaps; and the same objection
might be urged against Dr. Hunter’s favorite motto: “It is pretty
impossible, and, therefore, extremely difficult for us to convey unto
others those ideas whereof we are not possessed of ourselves.”
It was Dr. Hunter, who, some years before the war, returned from
Florida, where he had spent the winter in a vain quest of health, and
exhibited to one of his friends a thermometer he had procured there,
marked from 120° only down to zero.
“It was manufactured at the South, I suppose?” she said.
“Oh, no!” was his reply: “It was made in Boston. It’s a Northern
thermometer, with Southern principles.”

Colonel Bingham, of brave and witty memory, had resigned his

commission in the Union army, and come home to die. During his
lingering illness, the family received a visit from a distant relative, a
Carolina lady, with strong secession proclivities, but with sufficient
tact not to express them freely before her Northern friends. However,
she could not altogether conceal them, but would often express her
sympathy for “the soldiers, on both sides”—wish she could distribute
the fruit of the peach-orchard among them, “on both sides,” &c.
One day when the Colonel was suffering, with his usual fortitude,
one of his severest paroxysms of pain, the lady looked in at the door
of his room, and, after watching him a few moments with an
expression of the keenest commiseration, she turned away. Just as
soon as he could breathe again, he gasped out:
“Cousin—Sallie—looked—as if—she was—sorry for me—on both
sides!”

A young lady who had married and come north to live, visited,
after the lapse of a year or two, her southern home. It was in the
palmy days of the peculiar institution, and she was as warmly