PERSONALDEBRIS  

… and that future is… ASIAN! - haha - at least if you’re in the Ubicomp 2004 workshop “Ubicomp and the Urban Frontier“. i’ve been sitting in the workshop all day now, and images of “the Asian people” have been repeatedly used (intentionally or not) to illustrate “the Urban Frontier” in various people’s presentations. now, Asians have typically been used as the face of the future (the “other” that is both open possibility and threat) but as interest in non-western notions of subjectivity and experience grows it seems the “gaze” that is levelled really hasn’t shifted. i saw this at ars electronica (where pronouncements about the need to look outside of Europe, and the USA abounded, while over half of the speakers in the main symposium were American, the rest mainly from Europe) and now i see it here. with the rush of researchers going to places like japan, south korea, and other countries in the “far east” i see the danger of simply reinscribing notions of essentialist racial and cultural difference. the nouveau orientalism of technological discourse can be pretty subtle, and often “liberal” well meaning people can find themselves held sway.

this entry was posted 09/07/2004 at 3:47 pm and is filed under NEWS.EVENTS, RESEARCH. you can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. you can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.