Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Internet Stoning Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Supervisor: Dr. Mark Hobart Centre for Film and Media Studies School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Course Code: Masters Dissertation Programmed Name: Global Media and Post-national Communication Word Count: 9863 Page 1 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Abstract. This essay is an attempt to go beyond the dominant views on the 'liberating nature' of the internet: Denying totality and unity of the concept of the internet, I view web applications as discourses and sees Social Software or Web 2.0 as a discursive formation or épistémè. I analyse the discourse of Balatarin, a popular Persian-language web application modelled after similar American-made applications such as Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us etc., locate the points of silence, and examine various rules of exclusion that govern and regulate the speech on it. Avoiding teleological pessimism, I study the possibility of resistance, and locate the actual points of opposition within the discourse. Proposing such theoretical frameworks as agency, articulation, and gaze, I describe what the hyperlink does to the speaking subject and what is its relationship to the silence that is produced through the governance of the discourse. I find a modified version of the notion of subaltern, which is neither universal, nor absolute, and thus is useful to think silence and resistance on Web discourses. Page 2 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan 'From now on, any submissions that I see about this person I would vote a negative.' -- marmooz, a user in Balatarin 'The only good thing that I can do regarding a person like Derakhshan is that to ignore him from now on. Wherever there was a link to him or a mention of him, I would disregard it. Hossein is nourished by our reactions. We are giving him energy with our negative reactions. I stop that now.' -- mecyber, a user in Balatarin 'Before coming to this website, I didn't know this person properly. Based on the anger and animosity of Balatarin members [towards him], I thought he must be very strange and important. But [when] I read his weblog and his views, I thought these things should not upset people this much. ... If you want to win this game, you should play it differently. ... What you are doing is helping him more. He easily shows how intolerant his opponents are.' -- mhreza262, a user in Balatarin 'Now suppose you made our comments disappear. This way people are more encouraged to go and see what we have written that has disturbed some people so much. So among these 200 comments, they go and read those [dimmed] ones.' -- hatef_83kh, a user in Balatarin 1. If I have learned anything from Jacques Derrida, it is his exploration of the necessities that are at the same time impossible. Aside from his attempts to show the impossibility of notions such as justice (1992), gift (1992) and Page 3 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan democracy (2005), this was perhaps best manifested in an architectural project called 'Chora L Works' (1997), which he collaborated with the architect Peter Eisenman. The concept of building was based on Derrida's investigation of presence/absence and functionality and was part of the larger project of Parc de la villette in Paris which was being build by another architect, Bernard Tschumi. However, the well-thought and radically different 'Chora L' was never built. To Derrida, that was itself part of his intellectual project against logocentrism and the fact that such idea was never made to the material life was a proof that a unified, autonomous, self-present human subject is not the centre of a universe that has a central truth. This impossible necessity, ironically, resembles with this very essay. When I proposed to Dr. Mark Hobart, who is my supervisor for this dissertation, that as a symbolic performance of resistance against the still-colonial function of SOAS, this very university that I'm studying at and writing this dissertation for, I would like to submit my dissertation in Persian language, he strongly discouraged me and warned that the university 'require you to submit your dissertation in English, as that is the language in which you have been taught and are to be assessed.' He delicately added that I was welcome to submit it in Persian, however, 'the Board of Examiners will have no option but automatically to fail you, because you are in breach of regulations.' So much was for my attempt to practice the very thinking that I learned at SOAS, inspired by the teachings of Foucault, Derrida and Said. Sadly, I now know of another impossible necessity: the impossibility of departing from a system of knowledge/power production that has long been, and continues to be, used by similar universities to control the 'Oriental' and African world. It is not a mere co-incident that, in the 1916 opening ceremony (1917) of the School of Oriental Studies (The original name for SOAS, before Africa was added to its mission), the King of Britain expressed his hopes for the school: 'Its work will serve to develop the sympathy which already so happily exists between my subjects and those of my Far Eastern Ally, Japan'; or that John Hewett, the chairman of the School's governing body, Page 4 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan described it as 'adequate to the needs of an Empire which includes nearly four hundred million Orientals'; or that Lord Curzon, a former 'Viceroy of India' and the chairman of the general committee, identified the primary objective of the school as 'where administrators and soldiers, merchants and missionaries, will learn the language, study the history, and absorb the customs of the East.' Page 5 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan 2. The personal experience of my online presence within the past few years has inspired this dissertation and its main questions: What is it to speak or to a have a voice on the Web? Is there such thing as 'subaltern' on the Web and if yes, how is it produced and resisted. I start with a quick flash-back: In 1999, I started writing a daily column in an Iranian reformist newspaper, introducing the internet and its potentials. A few months after the paper was shut down by the Iranian judiciary, I immigrated to Canada. From there, I started a blog in Persian language and shortly after that, in Nov. 2001, published a how-to manual that explained in simple terms how to create a weblog in Persian. This manual helped thousands of exiled or home-based Iranians to start their own weblogs. My efforts1 in helping that group of enthusiastic people and promoting the use of weblogs by journalists, politicians, etc. made some to label me as the Blogfather. But the later changes in my views and thinking, as well as shifts within the Iranian and the world political scene, altered my status. Now I'm dubbed as the 'most hated' blogger in Iran2; my blog is urged to be boycotted3, public calls for punishment have been made4, and my writing is often silenced or censored5 in community websites such as Balatarin. Before expanding the questions, I need to stress a couple of points: a) Internet is too ambiguous a concept to be used in a research question. Its precise technical definition refers to a decentralised network of computers around the world which use a common technical language (or a set of protocols such as TCP/IP ) to communicate. Therefore, I would rather focus on the Web (or World Wide Web, to be precise), which is only one of 1 Apart from helping with technical questions in a yahoo group, called 'farsiblogging', I was keeping a manual list of all Persian blogs that existed before the number got out of hand and I gave up. 2 https://balatarin.com/permlink/2008/8/7/1368426 3 http://balatarin.com/permlink/2007/5/12/1054943 4 http://www.doomdam.com/archives/000260.php 5 https://balatarin.com/permlink/2007/12/29/1201326 Page 6 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan the numerous pieces of software (or applications) that are written based on this decentralised network. The Web is so widely used these days that sometimes it is confused with the internet, but it is important to keep this difference in mind; especially because the Web is the basis of most of my arguments in this paper. If the Web is an internet-based application (or software) , there are many other applications that are built upon the Web itself. These are usually the websites that we load and watch and work with, using our Web browsers. Web browsers (such Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) are the tools that we use to work with Web applications. To help you visualise it, think of internet as a base, then Web as a layer on top of that, and then another layer of Web applications on top of the Web. To expand my questions in this paper, first, I examine a web application as a discourse and look into how the speech is regulated; second, I look into the role of hyperlink and suggest some theoretical openings; and third, I discuss the idea of the subaltern and relate it to hyperlink and its discursive role. Since the Web was invented in late 1990s, there have emerged hundreds of various dominant Web-based applications (or simply applications, from now on) . Some of these dominant applications could each be seen as a discourse, for they all follows the three conditions Foucault (1981) outlines: Production of the object, production of the subject, and fencing the field of enunciation, to put it simply. Meanwhile, it is possible to observe several discursive formations that have emerged as an outcome of the relations between these dominant discourses at specific periods. For instance, search applications (or search engines) have gone through a major shift in the way they have understood the notion of relevance (Sperber & Wilson 2001). For example, Google's discourse of relevance, which has affected the entire Web due to its hegemonic status (e.g. regarding market share in most countries), is now very different from the previously dominant search applications such as Yahoo or AltaVista. Google symbolizes a new discursive formation on the web that understands relevance differently. This discursive formation, which is commercially called Web 2.0 or Social Software, puts more emphasis on Page 7 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan the idea of user participation (Milliard & Ross 2006) and therefore many of the new dominant applications give a crucial role to this participation; such that in some cases, like the whole idea of the application is built upon what users contribute to it. In Google's discourse of relevance, such privileged position of user participation, is reflected through a certain algorithm, commercially known as PageRank, whereby the relevance of a document (e.g. a web page, an audio or video file) is evaluated through such participation, as it is explained on its official website: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyses the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance. 6 This is different from the way AltaVista, an older search application, had described, in 1999, its method of evaluating relevance, which lacked such notion as user participation and was merely dependent on internal dynamics of a document: AltaVista uses a ranking algorithm to determine the order in which matching documents are returned on the results page. Each document gets a grade based on how many of the search terms it contains, where the words are in the document, and how close to each other they are. Repeating a word over and over in a Web page, known as "spamming," has a negative effect on a site's ranking. As soon as it is discovered by software programmed specifically to detect spamming, the offending site is prevented from appearing in the AltaVista index. 7 6 http://www.google.com/technology/ 7 http://web.archive.org/web/19990128233131/www.altavista.com/av/content/ques_h owto.htm Page 8 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan With this shift in the discursive formation, certain Web applications have emerged in the past few years that are solely dependant on user participation (or 'user-generated content' as many of them call it). Ranging from entertainment to news to business, they have various functions and target audiences, but they are all networks of inter-connected users who share with others different objects (e.g. videos, photographs, music, news, etc. ).8 The notion of hyperlink, as an instrument, has made much of this user participation and inter-connectivity possible on the Web. But it has also become the object of such Social Software applications, by itself. In other words, as Engeström puts it, it is a mistake to think that 'social networks are just made up of people. They are not; social Networks consists of people who are connected by a shared object.' (Engeström 2005 p.4, cited by Mejias 2006) Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us are among these applications that allow inter-connected users share collectively-evaluated hyperlinks with others. Even though Google, because of its PageRank algorithm, can also be seen as such an application, I think websites such as Digg can better crystallise how they regulate their discourses and what role hyperlink theoretically plays there. Thus I focus on a similar Persian-language web application, called Balatarin. Balatarin as discourse Meaning 'the highest' in Persian language, Balatarin is a popular Web application in Persian language, created in 2006 by a small group of expatriate Iranians. It was modelled after successful American web applications such as Digg and Reddit, but with minor differences. These applications define their purpose as being a kind of 'filter' for the 'best' or 'the more interesting' things to know on the Web. Digg9 claims that it 'surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.' Reddit10 says it is a 8 YouTube around videos, Facebook around social network, Flickr aruond photos, Wikipedia around knowledge, etc. 9 http://digg.com/about 10 http://www.reddit.com/help/faq Page 9 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan source of new and popular things on the web and wants to 'democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.' Balatarin11 claims to 'introduce to its readers the more interesting hyperlinks [to other web pages] using its users' feedback'. Balatarin consists of: hyperlinks to other web pages that registered users have submitted, a title they have chosen for it, a description, a number of keywords (or tags) that are assigned to it. But this content, or the accumulation of all these submitted links, are presented on the website in two ways, based on two different orders: The first order, called Linkha- ye Daagh (or Hot Links), is automatically shown on the front page and is based on both the popularity of the submissions (the number of votes they have received from other registered users) and the time of submission; the other, called Linkha-ye Taazeh (or Recent or Upcoming Links), is only based on the timestamp of the submissions -- the most recent ones appears on top, etc. Now let's get into theory. Foucault's interest in relations of power is intertwined with his account of discourse, because discourse 'is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized.' (1981, p. 53) To examine what regulates a discourse, Foucault (1981, p. 53-56) looks at the procedures of exclusion within it, both external (prohibitions, definition of mad, and definition of truth) and internal (commentary, author, disciples, and rarefaction of speaking subject). (Mills 2004, p. 57) Prohibitions There are written and unwritten taboos in Balatarin. In its regulations page12, the forbidden websites are categorized in seven groups: 1) websites with copied material from other sources; 2) websites with insults to either famous or non-famous persons; 3) websites with 'sexual content' except if 11 http://balatarin.com/guide 12 http://balatarin.com/guidelines Page 10 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan they have educational or artistic purposes; 4) commercial websites; 5) websites that are illegal in many countries such as paedophilia or terrorism; 6) websites with accusations against non-public persons or revelations about their private lives, unless they are famous such as politicians; 7) fraudulent (phishing) websites. For instance, one of my own websites, Chalghooz13, a political parody magazine criticizing the Iranian opposition, is in Balatarin's blacklist now and when one attempts to post a link to it, before even submitting it, an error message in red appears, warning 'Sending links to this website is not allowed.' This is one of the ways these bans are enforced when a website's address (URL) is in the blacklist. In some other cases, the postings are removed directly and without prior notice by the administrators, or they are omitted once they get a certain number of negative points. Another example of prohibitions, which is absent from the written rules and regulation, is insulting religious sentiments and figures. This caused heated debates after administrators suspended a few registered users.14 Sane and insane speech Voting in Balatarin follows a pattern: According to its manual, a positive vote should be given when the user finds a submission interesting, and a negative vote if the submission has violated any of the rules. Unlike a positive vote, for which no reason should be chosen, a negative vote needs to be explained by selecting one of the potential reasons; in other words, the negative voter must chose which rule the submission has violated. The multiple choices for reporting violation of the rules for any given submission are: a) false untrue or news b) repetitive, c) insulting, d) non- matching title or description, e) copyright violation, d) privacy violation, and e) time-wasting.15 13 Http://chalghooz.com 14 http://balatarin.com/profile/show/shahvali 15 'Time-waster', has been added and removed as one of the choices a few times. Page 11 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Despite the explicit warnings16 to avoid negative votes if users disagree with a submission and to use such votes only when a rule is broken, many users keep giving negative votes using justifications such as 'time-wasting' or 'false news.' The former category has been used in many cases, including many of my own submissions, to justify a negative vote. But Illustration 1: Making a new submission since it is not (and perhaps can not be due to it ambiguity) part of the prohibiting rules, it could be seen as a way of marking 'the mad or insane speech'. Negative votes, however, became visible only only after a debate among administrators and registered users in December 2007. It made the negative votes and their justification public to all registered or non- registered visitors. 17 Another mechanism for marking the insane speech in Balatarin happens in the comments section. Registered users can use a simple form to put as many comments below each submission. Although the comments appear immediately and with no moderation, a voting mechanism, similar to the submissions, is in place for every comment. The result of the negative and positive votes are displayed for each comment and if a comment's voting result goes below a certain negative number, it will be dimmed – it will only be displayed with a click on the comment's tab and with a dimmed text colour to makes it harder to read. In many cases, comments posted by 16 http://balatarin.com/guide 17 http://blog.balatarin.com/?p=30 Page 12 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan users who have different views from the majority of users in Balatarin (most users are outside Iran and thus more likely to be against the current Iranian state) get too many negative votes and become invisible and therefore, practically ignored, without necessarily breaking any of the rules. True and false speech Apart from the first category of justification for negative votes, i.e. 'untrue or false news', and also the value of each submission depending on the positive votes it has received, there are other mechanisms for separating true from untrue statements. One is a system of distribution of 'energy': The number of submissions and comments each user can make per day are limited. Using a certain algorithm based on the users' history of participation (a combination of the date they registered, their submissions and comments and their related vote results, etc.), each registered user has a certain amount of 'energy' that is accordingly calculated and automatically allocated at all times. With every new submission or comment a user makes, or every vote she gives, she loses some energy and if her energy result reaches zero, she can't make new submissions or comments or vote. Illustration 2: Hot Links which is also the front page Page 13 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan The other mechanism is spatial, in that not all parts of all webpages in Balatarin have the same truth value. There are three columns in most pages: the left one is specified to advertising and an automatically- generated list of submissions with highest votes and highest number of comments; the right column is to show submissions made or voted by users; and the middle column is dedicated to administrative options (such as log-on, submissions, etc.) and also a list that is called Hot Topics. These are groups of submissions that are related to specific topics of the past few days that have high significance to those who can create them. While every user can add any submission to any groups, the groups themselves can only be created by users with more than 5000 units of energy. These groupings are also closely watched and edited by administrators. Moreover, on top left side of the page, there is a space where only website's official announcements (reminders, warnings, tips, etc.) are displayed, in addition to the top horizontal menu where users can access the official weblog of Balatarin that is exclusively written by its administrators. This is partly how the truthfulness of the words and sentences in Balatarin are measured and illustrated through a spatial differentiation of the text in any of its webpages. Commentary The fact that within the left column, which is one the most 'truthful' spaces in Balatarin, there is a top-ten list of the most commented submissions shows a mechanism of circulation or reproduction of discourse that Foucault talks about: [A] kind of gradation among discourses: those which are said in the ordinary course of days and exchanges, and which vanish as soon as they have been pronounced; and those which give rise to a certain number of new speech-acts which take them up, transform them or speak them'. (1981, p. 57) I don't imply that users' comments on Balatarin are necessarily what Foucault describes in Order of Discourse (1981) certain statements which 'must say for the first time what had, nonetheless, already been said, and Page 14 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan must tirelessly repeat what had, however, never been said.' (p. 58) But the exclusionary function that Balatarin's way of treating users' comments performs is very similar to what he has laid out. Even though, users' comments are not always related to the submission or its author. Author Every registered user (or author) has a specific page (the profile page) where all her submissions, votes, comments and marked submissions or simply the history of her activities (plus a statistical overview of it) on the website are collected and chronologically listed. This history is accessible to all visitors to the website, even to non-registered users. Users can also write a brief biography or description about themselves which appear in the profile page. Illustration 3: Dimmed comments on Balatarin This is quite close to what Foucault calls author-function : 'Not, of course, in the sense of the speaking individual who pronounced or wrote a text, but in the sense of a principle of grouping of discourses, conceived as the unity and origin of their meanings, as the focus of their coherence.' (1981, p. 58) The existing author-function in Balatarin was best manifested when the administrations realised that many users were voting for the submissions Page 15 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan based on their submitters (or authors), rather than their substances. I experienced this too, when many of my submissions were quickly getting many negative votes and were therefore being omitted. A few months later, the administrators decided to hide the name of the author from the upcoming submissions page for the first three hours. 18 Authors' names are, however, visible everywhere else all the time. Discipline Apart from a title, a web address (URL), a brief description, and a list of related keywords (or tags), each submission must be categorised in: a) one of the seven possible topics (society, economics, entertainment, culture and arts, science and technology, and sports); b) one of the seven languages (Persian, English, Persian/English, French, Arabic, Other languages, and no language required); and c) one of the six types of content (writing, photograph, audio, video, Flash animation, none). Among the three groups, only the first one, i.e. the seven possible topics of submissions, has a major effect on how the submissions are displayed on various pages. 19 Balatarin's Hot Links page automatically shows all the more popular submissions, in spite of their topics. But visitors can also switch to topic-based separate pages with their most popular submissions. A more important limiting effect of such classification is the minimum value (number of votes) required for each submission before it finds its way, from the Upcoming Links page, to the Hot Links page, which is much more visible than the former. At the time of writing this paper, 21 was the minimum value for submissions in society, 17 for economics, 25 for entertainment, 21 for politics, 17 for culture and arts, 19 for science and technology, 18 for sports20; but these values have been, and will continue to be, modified by administrators for unannounced reasons. Hence, a certain system of prioritization emerges that regulates which topics are to be more visible or less. 18 http://blog.balatarin.com/?p=87 19 The other two, type of submission and its language, are only used in the form of small visual clues below each title. 20 https://balatarin.com/guide#guide Page 16 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan If what disciplines do, by Foucault's account, is to limit the boundaries of knowledge about a certain matter, the topic classifications and their different priorities in Balatarin work in the same limiting manner: As a Illustration 4: A submission's specific page with positive (blue) and negative (red) votes result, for instance, it is easier to talk about sports and economy than politics and society. Rarefaction of the speaking subject While all visitors can see all pages, not everyone can make new submissions or vote in Balatarin; one needs to be a registered member of the website in order to vote or submit. Registration was open to everyone for a while, but after a few months this was changed. Ever since, new registration can only happen based on an invitation from some of the current registered members: Those who both have at least 200 units of energy and also have received an invitation from another invited registered user. This was due to the increasing number of fraudulent accounts, mainly those who illegally had more than one user account. When registered users break the rules, they might face temporary or permanent suspension, which means they no longer can submit or vote. Such violations could start from having more than one user account, to Page 17 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan insult other users. But it is not clear violating which rules would cause a permanent or temporary suspension. Apart from the socio-economic conditions that prevent many from accessing the internet, another notable rarefaction, which is imposed on Balatarin, is the fact that it is filtered in Iran21 by the state and only those with certain technical skills can bypass these filters and visit the website. This has automatically led to a degree of dominance by exiled Iranian users in North American and Europe. Such mechanisms for circumscription of the registered users and also the notion of Energy that I discussed before fit into what Foucault sees as procedures 'to preserve or produce discourses, but in order to make them circulate in a closed space [distribute] them only according to strict rules, and without the holders being dispossessed by this distribution', and also a 'system of education is a political way of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourses, along with knowledges and powers which they carry” (1981, p. 64) Discontinuity and Resistance One important feature in Foucault's thinking is that he doesn't see knowledge, power, and resistance as separate objects which can be possessed. At the same time, his account of discourse is far from treating it as a coherent, unified, and continuous system: 'Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowances for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.' (Foucault 1990, p. 100-101) 21 http://blog.balatarin.com/?p=48 Page 18 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Also, it would be a mistake to ignore the productive aspects of discourse and power and that what makes it 'hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse.' (Foucault 1980, p. 119). In Balatarin, if there is exclusion, there is also resistance. Example: After I realised how my submissions were quickly receiving enough negative votes to be omitted, and at the same time, how negative submissions about me proved to be attractive and popular, I discovered what to do. I started framing my own submissions in negative terms, as if someone who didn't like my opinion on something had submitted them to discredit me or expose my 'insane' speech – and it worked for a while. Particularly after the administrative decision to hide the submitters' names from the Upcoming Links page, which was concealing the fact that it was actually me who had submitted that post with such negative framing against myself. 22 Another example is when comments from a few users are dimmed as a result of many negative votes they have received. As a user (hatef_83kh) whose comments were dimmed once wrote: 'Now suppose you made our comments disappear. This way people are more encouraged to go and see what we have written that has disturbed some people so much. So among these 200 comments, they go and read those [dimmed] ones.' 23 This has recently led some users to ask others to stop reacting to, for example, my submissions altogether. For example, a user (hichki) has repeatedly left comments such as this one: 'Pals, this is my duty to tell you... No vote... No insult... No comment... Only [show] disregard. But still you know better.'24 However, another user (mhreza262) responded to an angry comment by another member (america) amidst a heated discussion below one of my 22 http://balatarin.com/permlink/2008/1/21/1215121 23 http://balatarin.com/permlink/2008/9/26/1406151 24 http://balatarin.com/permlink/2008/8/8/1369218#c-1147856 Page 19 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan deliberately negatively-framed submission: Before coming to this website, I didn't know this person properly. Based on the anger and animosity of Balatarin members [towards him], I thought he must be very strange and important. But [when] I read his weblog and his views, I thought these things should not upset people this much. ... If you want to win this game, you should play it differently. ... What you are doing is helping him more. He easily shows how intolerant his opponents are. 25 Finally, it would be a mistake to disregard the productive effects of Balatarin's rules of these exclusions in: their effective blockage of spam, the decentralised way of news gatekeeping, the informative discussions among users, etc. 25 http://balatarin.com/permlink/2008/8/20/1378360#c-1173284 Page 20 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan 3. If Balatarin is an example of the new discursive formation (or épistémè) that allow and privileges user participation, my analysis of its discursive regulation can be extended to many other dominant applications within this discursive formation, including Google. But now I want to explore some additional questions: What is it to speak on the Web? Is writing on the Web enough to be a speaking subject? What role does hyperlink play here? Hyperlink The notion of hyperlink is part of the larger concept of Hypertext. George Landow (2006) quotes Theodor H. Nelson, who coined the term Hypertext in 1960s, as saying: 'By hypertext, I mean non-sequential writing -- text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chinks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.' (quoted in Landow 2006, p. 4) Tim Burner's Lee, the inventor of the Web, says that what he did was to combine pre-existing technologies and concepts: When I was doing the WWW, most of the bits I needed were already done. Vint Cerf and people he worked with had figured out the Internet Protocol, and also the Transmission Control Protocol. Paul Mockapetris and friends had figured out the Domain Name System. ... I didn't invent the hypertext link either. The idea of jumping from one document to another had been thought about lots of people, including Vanevar Bush in 1945, and by Ted Nelson. ... Bush did it before computers really existed. Ted thought of a system but didn't use the internet. Doug Engelbart in the 1960's made a great system just like WWW except that it just ran on one [big] computer, as the internet hadn't been invented yet. Lots of hypertext systems had been made which just worked on one computer, and didn't link Page 21 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan all the way across the world. I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web.'26 His motivation came from a problem he encountered at CERN, the Swiss research institution where he worked. Accessing data located on different computers was frustrating, therefore he tried to 'convert every information system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can read.'27 He also stresses that the web 'is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world.' (Berners-Lee 1999, p. 123) Hyperlinks, the underlined blue words in a web page that take us to another web page once clicked on, are a fundamental part of the Web architecture, according to Burners-Lee. (2006) The dominance of user-participatory applications (and thereby discourses) has important consequences. For example, in Balatarin, speaking is governed through a diverse set of internal and external rules whereby its code, written by programmers and administrators, as well as the way the users work with it, play an important role. This simply means that, in Balatarin, in order for a submission (itself a hyperlink to another webpage) to be visible enough to visitors, first, it should survive the exclusionary mechanism of removal as a result of numerous negative votes; and then finds its way to more 'truthful' spaces, such as the Hot Links page, or the Hot Topic groupings, etc. Otherwise, it would virtually remain unseen. The same goes for Google: If a certain web page, no matter how informative, useful and relevant to the object of query it might be, is not linked to by other web pages, chances are that it does not appear in the first few thousands of search results that Google ranks and displays – if listed at all. 26 http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids 27 http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids Page 22 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Web is now being increasingly dominated by applications such as Google and other Social Software; and being absent from, or poorly ranked in, these discourses means non-existence, -- or not being able to speak. This opens the possibility of theorizing hyperlink and what it does in a discourse such as Google or Balatarin. Articulation Ernesto Laclau's account of articulation posits every social practice as articulatory. He talks about articulation in relation to three other concepts: discourse, elements and moments. 'We will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse. The differential positions, insofar as they appear articulated within a discourse, we will call moments. By contrast, we will call element any difference that is not discursively articulated.' (Laclau & Mouffe 1987, p. 105) By this account, every hyperlink is an articulation, at least, between: a) the source webpage, its creator, and its context; b) the target webpage, its creator, and its context; and c) the linked text. There is always a tension, or a kind of 'violence' (Foucault, 1971) when we highlight a few words of a written text on a webpage and link them -- re- articulate them -- to another web page, in order to bring that target webpage into the discourse of our own writing, on our own webpage. This is both the site of power and the site of resistance, and the trick that I mentioned above, regarding my Balatarin submissions, can only be possible in the light of this endless violence of, in Laclau's words, turning elements to moments. 'We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity.' (Foucault, 1971, p. ) Page 23 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Conversely, when a hyperlink is not given to a webpage or removed, the target webpage is disarticulated, excluded from the discourse. Agency Opposing the totalizing constructs of 'individual' and 'society', Inden sees agency as 'the capacity to act in inter-relationship with other agents'. (2000, p. 24) Hobart, also drawing on Collingwood, posits that 'agency and patency are situational, overlapping, ironic and under-determined. Agents never operate in a vacuum, in a sense they are always more or less complex.' By complex agency he refers to a situation where 'decisions and responsibility for action involve more than one party in deliberation or action.' (Hobart 1990, p. 96) By this particular account of agency, it would be a mistake to talk generally about agency on the Web. Thus, given these conditions, it is not difficult to argue that a registered member of Balatarin is a complex agent when she votes or submits or leaves comments. Mainly, because her agency is already affected, as a patient, by the code, which is in turn an instrument of the programmers. But even those programmers are not unified, autonomous, pre-discursive, pre-historical subjects -- or agents. (Inden 2000) But how about the hyperlinks themselves? Are they only instruments of web authors to act upon the target webpages as patients, or could they be seen as (complex) agents themselves? Hobart's observation in Bali, Indonesia, is helpful here: 'Balinese attribute responsibility for all sorts of events to the actions of invisible beings or even material objects which we, but not they, tend to consider Imaginary Agents.' (Hobart 1990, p. 92) Gell (1998), from another angle, suggests that whatever people believe as a cause should be seen by anthropologists as an agent, even if its is an object rather than a person. He cites Mauss (1954), who holds that gifts are extensions of persons and ascribes a de facto agency to non-persons or objects. Gell then suggests that objects can be seen as secondary agents and applies this to art objects that are his focus of study. With some caution, it would be possible to attribute a complex agency to Page 24 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan some hyperlinks. For instance, when a submission (which is basically a hyperlink plus a brief description) has received enough positive votes to reach the Hot Links page in Balatarin, it has effectively gained a complex agency, mainly because it is a product of a never-ending tension, interaction, and inter-relation between various other agents and instruments. From another angle, Balatarin's submissions can be seen as a representation (in its both meanings:speaking on behalf of, and portraying as) of a group of its members who, after a certain process of inter-relation, have sent it to a the status of truthful (by upgrading it to the Hot Links page) within the discourse of Balatarin. This is how Hobart, citing Goodman, relates the notion of agency to representation in his study of agency in Bali: The train of discussion and meetings, some more public some more private, are the desá, in the forms of the participants and absentees, reworking itself. This many at times be made quite explicit, as when the committee head noted that those present were entrusted by the desá to represent it, 'Represent' has, of course, two senses: 'to speak, or act, on behalf of' and 'to portray as'. The ambiguity in our term points to the importance of agency, because one represents something as such-and-such to someone on a particular occasions. ... There is no such thing as essentially representing: it is always the act of an agent in a particular situation.' (Hobart 1990, p. 103) Weather to view hyperlinks as complex agents or as instruments of other complex agents, is open to dispute. But as Hobart shows (1990) only a complex agent (like members of a meeting) has the capacity to ascribe agency, intelligence or will to a person, or, I would like to add, to an object. Thus, giving a hyperlink to another webpage can be considered as attributing agency to another object (the target webpage) or person (the author of owner of the target webpage). Conversely, refusing to give a hyperlink to a webpage or to remove it, can mean denying agency from the target object or person. The latter argument can also be made using a conceptual framework known as actor-network theory (Callon 1987, Latour 1992), as Meijas Page 25 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan (2006) shows. With this approach, 'actors acquire their agency only as nodes in the network.'(p. 23) This is similar to my argument that it is mainly through (or by) hyperlinks a webpage (or its author) acquires agency. Gaze One other way of thinking about hyperlink and what it does is through the notion of gaze. Schroeder (2002) notes that gaze has been approached from various perspectives such as feminism, psychoanalysis, history, and psychology (Adams 1996; Olin 1996). Pratt (1992) explores 'the colonial gaze' in how the European colonizers treated newly found lands. Urry (1990) engages with 'the tourist gaze'. Mulvey (1989) probes the effect of 'the male gaze' in films in regards to representation of women. Schroeder summarizes what these perspectives have in common: 'To gaze implies more than to look at -- it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze.' (Schroeder 1998, 208) But Foucault goes beyond the psychological aspect by his inquiry into how surveillance, as the main way of control, has replaced punishment in a disciplinary society. Using Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor, he delicately shows how the object of the surveillance, or the gazed, internalize that gaze and produces a self-controlling subject. In this disciplinary society, he writes: 'The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side - to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in Page 26 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan advance.' (Foucault 1977, p. 202-3) Or as Anand (2007) neatly puts it, '[o]bjectification (fixing its essence) of the gazed goes hand in hand with its subjectification—gaze and surveillance are productive of identity of the gazed', (Anand 2007, p. 23) Unlike most accounts of the gaze that mainly focus on how it negates the agency and subjectivity which precedes the gazed, Foucault acknowledges how it posits a different kind of subjectivity and agency. Such productive (or positing) aspect of gaze, I argue, could lead into seeing hyperlink as a gaze of one website (or its author or owner) on another website (or its author or owner). Without this gaze, there will be no power relation, and thus no reproduction of the subject within the gazed, and thus no agency.28 Now, is it fair to say that on today's Google-dominated Web, if no one has linked to you, or if no website is gazing at yours, you simply don't exist? 28 This resonates with what Hobart stressed above: that agency is always 'situational, overlapping, ironic and under-determined.' (Hobart 1990, p. 96) Page 27 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan 4. There is not an agreement on how the term subaltern, first used in the theoretical context by Antonio Gramsci in his analysis of hegemony, should be defined. To make things worse, there is even a dispute on Gramsci's own use of the term. Morton (2003) holds that Gramsci uses it 'interchangeably for “subordinate” or “instrumental” to describe 'non- hegemonic groups or classes.'” While he says that translators of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (1971) have not discovered a systematic difference between the way Gramsci has used 'subordinate' or 'subaltern', Morton acknowledges that some commentators think this is a coded word for the Marxian concept 'proletariat' so that he can smuggle his notes outside the anti-Marxist Italy of 1930s under Mussolini. This has led to an ironic intellectual struggle for hegemony between the two views: '[W]e are in a situation in which many parrot that the word “subaltern” comes from Gramscian terminology, but the Gramscian concept of subalternity itself and Gramsci’s corresponding texts are rarely known nor read. In other words, some kind of “distortion” has been produced. Particularly in Japan, India, and the United States of America one cannot overlook the discourse of Gayatri Spivak – the author of the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak” – on the subject of the subaltern. We may say that some type of hegemonic struggle for the Gramscian concept of the subaltern is now being waged.' (Ohara 2004) However, drawing upon Laclau and Moufe's description of the Gramsci's project to understand the reasons for the failure of the industrial proletariat in north of Italy and the peasantry in the south to unite, Morton concludes that Gramsci's use of 'subaltern' can hardly refer to the 'proletariat'. Rather he intends: 'to precisely denote subordinate groups such as the rural Page 28 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan peasantry in Southern Italy, whose achievements of social and political consciousness was limited and their political unity weak. In so far as the subaltern had not achieved conciousness of their collective economic and social oppression as a class, the subaltern is quite different from the industrial proletariat. ( 2003, p. 96) Morton also points to another tension within the Subaltern Studies project's usage of the term. Citing Gayatri Spivak, he notes that Ranajit Guha, one of the key leaders of the Subaltern Studies project, uses 'people' and 'subaltern' interchangeably in his early work. But this does not mean, Spivak suggests, that Guha confuses the two terms. Rather, he still thinks of subalternity as a 'space of difference', which is close to Spivak's account as a 'position without identity'. (Spivak 2005, p. 476) Spivak's own account of subaltern has faced different interpretations since she published 'Can the Subaltern Speak?'. (1988) That is why she stresses that the European working class, for example, is oppressed, but is not necessarily subaltern, since it is not entirely excluded from the hegemonic discourse. 'In postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern - a space of difference. Now who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern. ... Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus, they don't need the word ‘subaltern’... They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're within the hegemonic discourse wanting a piece of the pie and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.' (de Kock 1992) Spivak's account of subaltern is, in this sense, not very different from Gramsci's: Subalterns are those subordinated subjects who have no access to the hegemonic discourses. But despite the relative agreement on the definition of the subaltern, strong criticism has been made towards Spivak's further articulation about the universality of the subaltern and the Page 29 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan possibility of it speaking for him or herself. Rhode (2003) outlines some of the criticism: Alina Loobma (1990) notes that Spivak 'blurs the relationship between the material and the idealogical and that analysis of representation replaces all discussion of actual events and material reality.' (cited by Rhode 2003, p. 22) Benita Parry (1987) sees the anti-colonial struggle and opposition in various parts of the world as indication of the actual agency that the subaltern has. Vaughan (1995) notes that 'History is seen as a process that allows alliances across a colonial divide, not a dichotomy between the powerful and the powerless.' (Vaughan 1995, p. 225, cited by Rhode) Mohanty (1984) locates the problem in the treatment of 'woman as “signifier” - representing the “discursively consensual homogeneity” of woman as a group.' She notes that, by this very generalization of the oppressed women as a group, the hegemonic discourse is constructed. (Rhode 2003, p. 24-25) And finally Rhode concludes, citing Montag (1998): [T]he Silenced, “voiceless” subaltern subject is a discursive creation of Spivak's to preserve her own subjectivity and agency as representative of this silenced subject, since it has been proven that the former, in fact, do “speak” and can be heard, but Spivak's theory “deems it impossible for them to speak.” (Rhode 2003, p. 26) Mark Hobart (2000), in turn, questions Spivak's presupposition that there exists such a discursive position from where Spivak's knowing subject can speak without any constrain. Pertaining to his study of how the 'Balinese engage with television in their lives', Hobart asks: 'What are we to make of the fact that the commentators [i.e. the ordinary Balinese television watchers] , male and female, of different ages, class and caste backgrounds, did speak and had a great deal to say? What enunciative position are we to adopt such as to conclude that they cannot speak or are not heard? ... grounds, that they could not speak. However, it was precisely the a priori dismissal of anything that they might say, without bothering to listen to it first, that exercised them – an exclusion in which Spivak is as implicated as the wealthy and politically powerful people to whom the commentators were referring.' Page 30 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan (Hobart 2000, p. 88) Although the above criticism raises significant questions about the possibility of the subaltern altogether, I think it is still possible -- and useful -- to imagine a modified version of the concept: that which is specially and temporally situational and particular, and is not rendered entirely without agency. With these two conditions, it is possible to talk about a particular subaltern that is produced in any given discourse (or a Web application) as a result of all procedures of exclusion. Within the context of Balatarin, for instance, the difference between the subaltern and the oppressed is between those submissions that are removed (for the high number of negative votes) and those that have not found their way to the space of the 'truthful' such the Hot Links page. While the former is entirely prevented from accessing the discourse, the latter is still part of the hegemonic discourse, but on the less privileged side of the power relation. However, such position of exclusion is not universal to the subaltern subject, since it is only true in a particular time and space (e.g. Balatarin rules and layout constantly change) within the particular discourse (e.g. Balatarin's discourse) -- there may be many other Web discourses or applications where one does not have the status of the subaltern. This modified account of the Subaltern resonates with concepts such as complex agency, power relations, and articulation. For instance, to Inden, colonialism does entirely deny agency, despite all its oppression: 'From the standpoint of agency, we could say that colonialism consisted quite precisely of the attempt to make previously autonomous agents into instruments ... through which the colonizers could fulfil their desires and into patients, those who has to be variously pacified or punished, saved, reformed, or developed.' (Inden 2000, p. 23) To Foucault, this version of the subaltern, becomes possible since he sees resistance a necessity to any relation of power or knowledge. And to Laclau, the subalterns are those elements that are disarticulated, those that are not articulated within a particular discourse. Page 31 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan 5. This essay was an attempt to go beyond the dominant views on the 'liberating nature' of the internet and provide an account, less totalizing, universal, utopian, virtual, teleological, reductive, ahistorical, and apolitical. My motivation came from a personal and painful experience of a sudden exclusion from some of the hegemonic discourses on the Persian-language Web. Painful, because since the late 90s when I started my online presence, I had never experienced such practices of exclusion and such continuous hostile reactions by the majority of a Web community. Up to that point, I had always been one of those who saw the internet as the most liberating technology that ever existed. But the events of the past few years, showed me the other side of the story – or the other side of the discourse, I should say. In July 2007, I wrote an entry on my weblog, titled 'From the Tyranny of the Majority to the Stoning of the Minority'29 in which I described some of the rules in Balatarin, especially the possibility of negative voting for reasons other than violation of the rules, as the main cause that Balatarin has become worse than Digg, etc. to me; if Digg is ultimately a kind of tyranny of the majority, Balatarin's regulations turn it into something worse: an internet stoning of the monitory. I, then, announced that until these rules were fixed, I would leave Balatarin. This was the first time that I felt my agency was minimised as a result of the combination of the code and users' behaviour within a web application. Nearly every link I was sending was being removed after a few hours and every comment I was writing was being dimmed. But as I discussed earlier, subalternity is neither universal nor absolute. I'm not a subaltern in my weblog, since I set the rules of the exclusion and I have maximum access to its discourse. (Even though my weblog is 29 http://i.hoder.com/archives/2007/07/070710_016212.shtml Page 32 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan filtered by the Iranian state) At worst, I can point to all my removed submissions and dimmed comments, portray it as a manifestation of my ultimate marginality and draw sympathy from my readers – and, in other words, turn that subalternity into an act of resistance and agency. I'm not a subaltern on Google, since my weblogs have a high PageRank, due to the older days when my views were popular on the Web and I was getting a lot of hyperlinks from highly ranked websites in Google -- hence my own high ranking in Google. I'm not a subaltern on many other web sites in Iran or else, where I can easily get published. Even on Balatarin, after they changed the code to hide the name of the submitter for three hours after the submission, things became slightly better and I returned to the website. Now I can frame my submissions the way Balatarin users like and before they realise that I was the submitter, find them on the Hot Links page. The dominant discourses on the Web such as Google, Digg and Balatarin indeed produce their own kind of sublatern with different degrees. But, like agency, subalternity is always situational and complex. Therefore, resistance to such unequal power relations are not only possible, but necessarily inevitable. Michel Foucault must be right when he says 'Where there is power there is resistance' (1990, p.95) Page 33 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Bibliography. (1917) The Opening Ceremony. In Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, 1: 1, 23-31. Anand, D. (2007) Western Colonial Representations of the Other: The Case of Exotica Tibet', New Political Science, 29:1, London: Routledge Berners-Lee, T. (1999) Weaving the Web. London: Orion Business Bruners-Lee, T. (2006) Interview with developerWorks. [online] available from <http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm- int082206txt.html> [02 Sep. 2008] Cornelia rhode, A. (2003) The subaltern 'speaks'. [online] available from <etd.unisa.ac.za/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-04292005- 100806/unrestricted/03dissertation.pdf > Derrida J., Eisenman P., (1997) Chora L Works. Eds T Leeser, J Kipnis. Monacelli Press, New York Derrida, J. (1992) Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority. In D. Cornell (ed.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. London and New York: Routledge Derrida, J. (1992) Given Time: 1. Counterfeit money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (2005) Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Elkins, J. (1996) The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Simon & Schuster Engeström, J. (2005) Why some social services work and others don't – Or: the case for object-centered sociality. [online] available from <http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html> [17 Nov. 2006] Foucault, M. (1972) The archaeology of knowledge. Trans. Sheridan Page 34 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Smith, A.M. New York: Pantheon Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Foucault, M. (1977) Intellectuals and power. Discussion with Gilles Deleuze. In Language, counter-memory, practice. Donald F. Bouchard, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, trans, 205-17. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge - Selected Interviews and Other Wiritings 1972-1977. In Colin Gordeon (ed.). Brighton: Harvester Press. Foucault, M. (1981) The Order of Discourse. In: Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader. R. Young (ed.) London: Routledge Foucault, M. (1990) The history of sexuality: Volume 1: An introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1994) The order of things. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1996) Clarifications on the question of power. Interview by Pasquale Pasquino. In Foucault Live. Sylvere Lotringer, ed., and James Cascaito, trans., 255-263. New York: Semiotext(e). Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hobart, H., (1990) The patience of plants: a note on agency in Bali. Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 24: 90-135. Hobart, M. (2000) Live or Dead? How Dialogic is Theatre in Bali?. In A.Vickers and Ny Darma Putra with M. Ford (eds) To Change Bali: Essays in Honour of I. Gusti Ngurah Bagus, pp. 183–212. Denpasar: Bali Post. Hobart, M. (2000) The end of the world news: Television and a problem of articulation. In Bali International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, pp. 79-102 Laclau, E., Mouffe, C. (1987) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Verso, London. Landow, G. (2006) Hypertext 3.0. Washington, DC: John Hopkins University Press Page 35 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Loomba, A. (1998) Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge Mauss, M. (1954) The Gift. Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. London: Cohen and West. Millard, D., Ross, M. (2006) Web 2.0: Hypertext by Any Other Name?. In Proceedings of the seventeenth conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. Odense, Denmark. Pages: 27 - 30 Mizzaro, S. (1997) Relevance: The Whole History. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 48, 810‐832. Mohanty, C. T. (1984) Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. In Mhanty, C. P et al. (eds.) 1991. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, Ind.: Indian University Press. Morton, S. (2003) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: Routledge. Mulvey, L. (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan Nelson, T. (1981) Literary Machines. Swarthmore, PA: Self-published Ohara, K. (2004) The Subaltern can still speak: A report on the Puebla Conference, International Gramsci Society. [online] avilable from <http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/resources/online_articles/ articles/ohara-2004.shtml> [23 May 2008] Parry, B. (1987) Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourses. In Aschcroft et al. (eds.) 1995. The Postcolonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 36-44 Pratt, M. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledg Said, E. (1979) Orientalism. New York City: Vintage Books Schroeder, J. (2002) Visual Consumption. London, UK: Routledge Sperber, D., Wilson D. (2001) Relevance : communication and cognition, Cambridge, MA : Blackwell Publishers University of London, (2008) Postgraduate Prospects, 2009 Entry SOAS, London: School of Oriental and African Studies Urry, J. (1990) The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Page 36 Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses Hossein Derakhshan Societies. London: Sage Vaughan, M. (1994) Colonial Discourse Tehory and African Hostory, Or Has Postmodernism Passed Us By?. In Social Dynamics, 20.2 (1994), pp. 1-23 Page 37