Note: This essay apprears in World Wide Web: Myth, Metaphor, Magic (Eds. Thomas Swiss and Andrew Herman. Routledge:2000.) It was developed at a conference with the same name held at Drake University in Iowa in the winter of 1999.
Theresa M. Senft
How do you explain a radio to someone who has no concept of electricity? . . . In a world crawling with the spirits of the dead, the answer was "magic." (Bourne, 1995: 7)
Whenever I design a chip, the first thing I want to do is look at it under a microscope--not because I think I can learn something new by looking at it but because I am always fascinated by how a pattern can create a reality. (Hillis, 1998: 16)
Introduction
When asked why I study online community-making, my reply often winds up sounding like some combination of the two quotations, above. The first is an American reporter's impression of natives living in Oceania--arguably one of the least techno-savvy locations on the planet (Bourne, 1995: 7). The second is from Danny Hillis, arguably the most gifted computer programmer living today (Hillis, 1998: 16). What strikes me most about these statements is their odd resemblance to one another. Hillis argues that the flip side of believing in magic because one doesn't understand science is believing in magic because one does. After all, isn't a "pattern creating a reality" a fairly accurate description of what was called, in an older time, "magic"?2
In this chapter, I'll be comparing patterns that create realities in two very different locales on the World Wide Web. The first is a now-defunct commercial site called Baud Behavior, where I worked for ten months. Baud Behavior was supposed to function as an engineered community of sorts for neophytes on Prodigy Internet.3 The other example is a ring of commercial and non-profit sites devoted to supporting Louise Woodward, an English nanny accused of murdering a child in her charge.4 Certainly, the two sites have their obvious differences, but here, I want to articulate their similarities, noting in particular the ways in which they both constructed sexualized and racialized discourses in order to facilitate the creation of community online. Though my interest in Baud Behavior is explicitly personal, and my fascination with the Woodward sites is predominately political, I have reason to believe that these two impulses will overlap during the course of my narration.
Cargo is Coming!
For my theoretical lens, I'm going use a metaphor that causes contention among postcolonial theorists--the "cargo cult". Simply understood, "cargo cults" are Oceanic island religious performances that began in 1860 and continue to this day. Island natives, seeing the economic disparity existing between themselves and white colonists, stage a series of performances in which they imitate the rituals of colonial military and commercial enterprises, in the hope that these rituals will one day summon cargo ships and planes of their own. In some instances, it is believed that the arrival of cargo will coincide with the reappearance of a prophet, like the mysterious "John Prum" discussed by Bourne (1995) in the first epigram that opens this chapter. If the last century is any indication, witnessing a cargo cult in action offers up enough material to fill several books on mimicry, technology, desire and performance.5 Take, for instance, this account from a celebration of John Prum Day detailed on Vanuatu in 1995:
A double file of barefoot troops enter from beyond the village gate. They carry four-foot lengths of bamboo at the "shoulder arms" position, the tops cut to a bayonet point and colored red to evoke fire. Across their bare chests "U.S.A." is lettered in red paint. . . . The scene is traversed here and there by bush dogs and the odd chicken . . . (Bourne, 1995: 3)
The reasons the cargo cults continue to fascinate lie in their strange refractory politics--cargo cults reflect different desires and fears, depending on one's position within the performance. For instance, in Melanesia today, national elites use the term pejoratively in order to marginalize "savage" opposition to their rule. Similarly, enthographers have been busy alternately redeeming and/or disavowing cargo cults altogether, dismissing their earlier ideas on the subject as too reductive. For most Western reporters, however, cargo cults are still often detailed as pure entertainment, full of authentic native characters:
Tom Meles and Isaak Wan . . . are the leaders of the John Prum Movement, and they despise each other. Stooped and tubercular, Isaak, fifty-five, sports a flashy chestful of medals. On closer inspection, I find that this resolves itself into an odd pastiche of symbols: an Air Force star, an "Airborne" patch, a medal that reads "Mississippi," a "People Power" patch with rainbow motif--all set off by a homemade sash trimmed in maroon nylon. Meles, eighty-two or thereabouts, is likewise adorned. He's crowned with a red Marine cap that fits his smallish head like a bucket; among his insignia are a pair of Northwest Airlines wings and a plastic medallion inset with a hologram of Shiva. (Bourne, 1995: 7)
Though varied in its rituals, the logic of any cargo cult might be summarized as "If we build it, they will come." Of course, that line is from the American film Field of Dreams, in which a man builds a baseball diamond in the middle of a corn field in an attempt to summon the ghost of his father. Unfortunately for the Oceanic islanders, most cargo cults have thus far failed to secure goods from the gods. Today, the term mainly exists in popular slang as a retroactive naming of sorts--when something is built, and nothing comes of it, it is labeled a "cargo cult". In the past, the term has been applied to practices as varied as the "vaporware" phenomenon in the American software industry (Raymond, 1996) and the failed lending policies of the International Monetary Fund (Rathnam, 1997).
Because it serves double duty, describing both a colonial performance of mimicry and bogus business practices, the cargo cult metaphor has recently resurfaced, particularly in discussions of global telecommunications. In Development and the Information Age (Howkins, et. al., 1997), a book compiled by two United Nations-sponsored economists charged with forecasting possible futures of global telecommunications technologies, there is an entire section devoted to a chilling Cargo Cult Scenario, in which "the dreams of the 20th century, which had solidified into almost a religion, may fade away" (1997: 210). The dream to which they refer is that access to computing technology will alleviate worldwide problems of poverty, education and production. But when nations build supercomputing centers as a point of national pride rather than as part of an economic development plan, the cargo cult scenario has been reached. In this vision, the computer becomes the postcolonial version of the painted stick passing as a gun, mimicking yet not achieving progress (1997: 221).
Of course, within even the most economically developed areas, there exist what Olu Oguibe (1996) calls "digital third worlds"--telecommunications-deprived bands, from Harlem to Ghana. There, too, community members and corporate and government angels extol the ways in which wiring up the world will alleviate class, race and gender differences. David Porush (1992: 3) calls this vision of cyber-utopia a:
primordial, and probably compulsory, form of cultural mysticism no different from cargo cults that erect towers of trash to summon the airplane gods, an expression of the enduring human compulsion to create a transcendental architecture, as if the right restructuring or reconfiguration of space, time, matter, and information will bring heaven down to earth.
Notably, American business practices that appear to succeed aren't labeled cargo cults, even when their practices more or less resemble primitive ritual behaviors. For instance, I recently received a postcard in the mail from the group Silicon Alley Organization, inviting me to a business breakfast they are titling, "Pennies From Heaven: How Two Internet Companies Raised Millions in Today's Hot Marketplace": "When TheGlobe.com went public, its skyrocketing IPO signaled the resurgence of the Internet stock phenomenon. How have these start-ups been able to raise so much money? . . . These newsmaking Internet wizards share their secrets."
If we build it, they will come. Regardless of the players, whether domestic or homegrown, all cargo cults articulate the magic of mimesis, the desire to create something by way of imitation. In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig (1993) defines mimesis as "the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other" (1993: xiii). He links it to "sympathetic magic," a process by which a copy of something draws on the power of the original to the point where it assumes the character of the original. Put another way, cargo cults are mimetic gestures in which "we" engage in particular types of technologies in the hopes that "they" will arrive. Perhaps more significant, however, is our hope that when that magical meeting occurs, we’ll find our own subjectivity somehow re-animated: we'll cure world poverty; we'll escape the confines of our bodies; we'll recreate the wonder of old-time baseball in our own cornfield. This is what Taussig means when he calls mimesis the magical "nature that culture uses to create second nature" (1993: xiii).
Because they are performances in which mimesis, commodity, and desire for technological control are foregrounded, I believe cargo cults might offer some insightful ways of thinking about magic of community-building on the Web. I'd like to acknowledge in advance the potential danger of this project. As Homi K. Bhabha (1985) rightly points out, making universal metaphor out of location-specific particulars can be an act of discursive colonization par excellence. Painting one's chest with the letters U.S.A. means something different if one is American than if one is not; suspect international lending practices have different repercussions for indigenous peoples than multinational corporations; marketing vaporware is not equivalent to hoping that telecommunications will ease poverty. And, of course, the boast "we're all invisible," online or off it, means something very different to those of us for whom visibility is precisely at issue.
For these reasons, Lamont Lindstrom (in Carrier, 1995: 36-7) argues that depending on one's position as observer/recorder, cargo cults actually can be theorized in at least four ways: as internal-orientalism (a performance among natives, read between themselves); as sympathetic-orientalism (a Western construction of Melanesian desire that permit a similarity between self and other); as pseudo-occidentalism (making a presumption about what the orient may be saying about the occident); and as assimilative-Cargoism (erasing boundaries so that stories of the oriental/Cargo other explicitly transform into stories of one's self). The remainder of this essay employs cargo cults to describe two very different attempts at community-making on the Web. I suspect that my theorizing will most closely resemble Lindstrom's final definition of assimilative-Cargoism (turning stories of others into stories of myself). Ultimately, though, I hope to move beyond Lindstrom's categories of valuation and repudiation, and instead re-cast cargo cults as dialectical images with which to think about community online. In particular, I'm hoping that my particular stories of Web communities create a "transformative Cargoism"--that is; a narrative which speaks not just "of the West," but rather, back to it.
Baud Girl is Coming!
In February of 1997, after lengthy deliberations, Prodigy Services Corporation hired me to work as a Community Leader for their newest World Wide Web-based venture, Prodigy Internet. We agreed I would write a weekly column for their new Web site, host a weekly IRC chat, and run a Usenet news group for Prodigy members. The community I pitched to them was called "Baud Behavior," designed to help new Prodigy users socialize online and figure out the Internet. I created an online persona for myself called "Baud Girl" and got to work.
It’s no accident that the same month I was hired by Prodigy, the book Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997) finally hit the stands. Published by the Harvard Business School and glowing with recommendations from industry gurus like Esther Dyson, Net Gain gave official sanction to a fervent hope among many CEO’s that community would the next "killer application" on the Web. Build the communities, Net Gain argued, and the advertising dollars will follow. As Quentin Jones (1997) has observed, like most of the business press of that year, Net Gain ignored the issue of whether group computer-mediated-communication discussions constituted "communities," focusing instead on creating a generic category which they opposed to "content" as a way to encourage people to invest in cyberspace locales for profit.
Ironically enough, the authors of Net Gain--investment counselors and self-admitted "newbies" to the Net themselves--noted in their Preface that they got the idea to write their book by visiting the WELL, the famous San Francisco bulletin board system. Though they claimed to "salute the grassroots, anti-commercial momentum of the WELL," they nonetheless advocated building Web-based communities for profit based primarily on their experiences on what is a non-graphic, text based BBS system. Perhaps following Net Gain’s lead, it was important to my employers at Prodigy Internet that I was familiar with the politics of bulletin board communities, and I was. Since 1994, I had been working as a host at Echo --the New York City BBS, often compared to the WELL. With my old-school pedigree in place, I appeared to be a natural leader for Prodigy Internet.
When originally presented with the idea of a Web community as a money-making enterprise, I was confused. How, I wondered, had Armstrong and Hagel--Net Gain's authors-- made the jump from the WELL (a notorious money-loser) to financial success via Web communities? From the image-based mechanics of the Web itself, they argued, which had finally become sophisticated enough to permit the process of "branding" (1997: 127-129). Branding, a term borrowed from television advertising, is a heavily studied yet barely understood phenomenon in which certain consumer goods become historical subjects by way of their "brand heritage"; that is, their associations to particular users and markets.
Thus, when Macintosh computers are successfully branded as "computers for the rest of us," what is really being marketed is the history of Macintosh as a counter-culture icon, which in turn spurs the consumer's belief that Macintosh machines have had subjective agency through the years, and have been in fact choosing to work for "the rest of us". Branding, in turn, enacts a sympathetic magic in which consumers loyal to a product are so entranced by its heritage that they supplant it with their own, self-identifying as "Macintosh people".6
Put in mimetic terms, branding is the magical nature by which consumption culture creates the "second nature" of the product-identified consumer. Certainly, branding is example of what Marx called "commodity fetishism," that "social delusion" coming from the attribution of spiritual qualities to goods (1906: 73). How else to describe the mystical transformation by which I identify with "my computer," marketed to me by Microsoft by that very naming? Marx, both a critic and a product of his time, called commodity fetishism the moment of the "savage-like" stare of the West, as we confront ourselves with objects endowed with more social power than our own labor.
How richly appropriate and ironic, then, that the first Web site credited by Net Gain with a strong brand recognition carries a legacy of "savagery" in its name: Amazon.com.7 According to Net Gain, by allowing people to write uncensored book reviews at their site, Amazon gives the impression that their users are more important than anything, even selling books. Of course, Net Gain's authors stress, this wound up a win-win scenario: as more people wrote reviews (for free) for Amazon, the site appeared busier, which in turn drew more viewers (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997: 30-32). As Amazon's name recognition rose, so did its attractiveness as a venue for advertising, and (perhaps most significantly) its perceived worth on the stock market as a company worthy of investment.
Inspired by the success of sites like Amazon, and the promise of books like Net Gain, I believe Prodigy was counting on Web communities to be not just a big phenomenon, but a global one. Advocating a "Web community without national boundaries," Prodigy began negotiations with Mexico, Africa and China in 1997 to institute itself as the "international Internet service provider of choice" (Yamamoto, 1997). Ironically, while it reached around the world for customers, it chose to ignore the large number of pre-Web communities it had fostered earlier on its older service, now dubbed "Prodigy Classic." After attempting some relocation tactics to get Classic subscribers to move to Prodigy Internet (free accounts for the first month, etc.) Prodigy stopped servicing much of its Classic division altogether.
Like Melanesian cargo cult practitioners who burned their few possessions so as to encourage their ancestors to rain wealth upon them, executives probably saw sacrificing the Prodigy Classic members as a no-brainer. Sometimes you need to bulldoze a living field to get ready for a parking lot. Tempting though it is, however, I think interpreting Prodigy's actions as "cargo cult logic" misses the mark here. The sacrifices large American corporations make to grow richer--whether or not they are foolhardy sacrifices--are obviously not analogous to those made by the indigenous poor in Melanesia. The former emanates from a position of power, while the latter are located in cultural marginalization. Indeed, within the colonial politics of Prodigy, the sacrificial logic of the marginalized actually belonged to Classic members. To the irritation of the corporation, many Classic members refused to leave their older homesteading locale for the Web-based one. Instead, they decided to stay where they believed that their original home in cyberspace might somehow survive what they must have known was to be its inevitable downsized demise.
Foregoing Classic members wasn't the only way Prodigy ignored the local for the lure of the global. Indeed, for all their talk of the connectivity of the Web, it felt to me that Prodigy forgot the Net already exists as a "global village" unto itself. There was, for example, the company's mind-numbing insistence that all interactive functions (chat, for instance) be held behind a firewall which disallowed entrance by any non-Prodigy members. Because I couldn't bring in outside chatters, anyone arriving at my chat found a room with no more than two people. But no matter. The only people who came were seeking technical advice, usually about how to get through the firewalls. Most of my time in chat was spent telling people that they couldn't send real-time messages to their non-Prodigy friends on the Internet using Prodigy software, but that America Online had a instant message software downloadable by anyone on the Net which would work just fine anywhere in cyberspace.
Then there was the strange issue of my online persona. Non-commercial Net culture abounds with stories of users who are known more by their pseudonymic "handle" than by their given name. On the Web, this has led to the creation of "cyberlebrities" like the Motley Fools (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997: 18-19), speaking subjects who make branding possibilities by recreating themselves as celebrity spokes-objects.8 In his genealogy of the term, P. David Marshall emphasizes that the magic of "celebrity" lies in its ability to commingle the twin specters of modernity: democracy and consumerism (1997: 4). On the Web, "cyberlebrities" perform a similar function, helping to foreground the medium's self-proclaimed status as a locus of cutting edge shopping and participatory experiences.
Clearly, Prodigy hoped that the cyberlebrity of Baud Girl would work in ways analogous to the star system in Hollywood. Indeed, negotiating the terms of Baud Girl's image constituted the most contact I had with Prodigy management. In the eleventh hour before my hire, there was a discussion about whether I had copyrighted the name "Baud Girl"--it was possible that the "community thing" might not work out, I was told, but perhaps I could appear as an advertising persona in mass mailings, advocating certain Prodigy services? At the time, I responded that I wasn't quite comfortable with that arrangement, but today I would reconsider.
Baud Girl was, of course, my pun on "bad girl." For my first Welcome column, I wrote:
Baud Behavior takes its title seriously. Baud refers to the speed at which data travels; likewise, we'll take for granted that the Net is a series of rapidly changing social spaces requiring skill and finesse to navigate. . . . More than anything, we'll discuss slipping in and out of online situations with grace, wonder, and a sense of humor. Rather than concentrating on being a good student of the Internet, we'll be the ones smoking in the bathrooms of cyberspace, asking you to skip school and join us.
Like fantasies of bare-breasted women who lured men to the Pacific islands, geek pin up girls have long been a staple of commercial online services. The absence of any figure like Baud Girl on Prodigy's designated "women's group" (called Avenue W) made it clear who my target market was to be--the men of Prodigy. However, unlike those racially "other" women of Melanesia, I was to follow in the mold of Tomb Raider’s Laura Croft and America Online's "Surfer Girl," and self-present as racially unmarked, which is to say, white. In a sort of ultimate virtuality, I wound up being a pin-up girl without a photograph--my predecessor had put her picture up on her site and it wound up being "too distracting", so I was told to leave mine off.
My predecessor at Prodigy's magazine Living Digital called herself "CyberChick". CyberChick's columns consisted mainly of sexual innuendo, descriptions of her Stair Master, and admonishments to "be nice" online. Knowing only that Prodigy wanted someone more "real" than CyberChick, I attempted to split my column-writing between relatively serious Net reporting (encryption, stalking, how-to materials) and provocative forays into online dating, "techno-fetishism" and the like. Throughout my tenure, I received a number of ambiguous directives from my employer, including a request that I be "sexy but not always about sex," and (my personal favorite) "not too Freudian." Notably, these directives mirrored industry anxieties over government policing of the Web itself. For instance, to be "always about sex" might be in violation of the (then pending) Communications Decency Act.
I remained at Prodigy until November of 1997. Then, ten months into my tenure as "Baud Girl," I received a call letting me know that my services would no longer be needed. Like many Web operations, Prodigy was having difficulty providing a fiscal rationale for community-building. I was told they were planning to trade their Web community’s model for the newest promise of branding magic: the "portal," in which every Web site is made to mimic a search engine. Recently, Prodigy informed its members that it was merging with Excite, to "give members even more surfing options." A friend made the point that this is analogous to being invited to a party, only to be locked in a room with a phone book and told to have a good time.
Net Gain told companies like Prodigy that if they built communities on the Web, the money would follow, but it wasn't that simple or fast (to their credit, the authors point out this the process would take five to ten years--eons in today's new media climate). More to the point, the "they" Prodigy needed to "come" --advertisers and investors, trading on the "buzz" of Baud Behavior--never materialized. Certainly, in their insistence on the global over the local, in their belief that users ought to be trapped in--rather than explore--the greater Internet, and in their slavish devotion to "killer apps" of the moment, Prodigy provides many reasons for how a Web community can fail. But I believe part of the fault was my own. The fact is that while I was marginally successful as a cyberlebrity (my columns garnered large amounts of reader mail), my Web "community" never really gelled as a community at all.
In his exhaustive review of existing literature on the subject, Quentin Jones (1997) developed a four-point requirement system for he calls "virtual settlements".9 The most important conditions, Jones argues, are "a minimum level of interactivity marked by conversation" and "contact among two or more people." Though it’s possible to say that the presence of Baud Girl caused some level of interactivity online, I was consistently unable to get people to gather and speak with one another, rather than just with me.
Steven Jones (1998) has quipped that we can no more "build" communities than we can "make" friends, but for all I know about bad virtual communities, I still can't explain what Taussig (1993) would describe as the "sensuous materiality" of "real" ones. Looking at his design for a microchip under a microscope, Danny Hillis (1998) writes of his fascination for the way a "pattern can create a reality." What kinds of patterns become the realities in "bona fide" Web communities like the WELL, gaming/fantasy settlements such as Ultima, or even consumption-based communities such as auction sites like Ebay? What kinds of magic occurs in those places to allow users to believe their transactions and participation are facts, and not fictions--in short, what makes them real?
Searching for the links between realness, magic, and mimesis, Taussig poses the question: "How much of a copy does a copy have to be to have an effect on what it is a copy of? How 'real' does the copy have to be?"(1993: 51). Examining the healing properties of Cuna medicine dolls (which barely look like the individuals they are designed to heal), Taussig concludes that "the magically effective copy is not, so to speak, much of a copy" (1993: 51). In fact, effective mimesis actually contains two intertwined facets: "imitation" (likeness) and the far more elusive "contact" (emanating from desire) (1993: 53). From this point of view, we see that hyping engineered Web communities nobody wants is as short-sighted as dismissing painted sticks because they aren't "really" guns. Both observations ignore the crucial magical power of contact, and the fact that, as Yrjo Hirn writes, "Strong desire always creates for itself" (in Taussig, 1993: 52).
Justice is Coming!
In fall of 1997, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Hiller Zobel made history when he published his entire verdict for the notorious Louise Woodward "Nanny trial" over the World Wide Web. This was the first criminal court ruling to be so released. At exactly 10:00 AM on November 10, 1997, as the ruling, "manslaughter, with a commuted sentence" was given by the judge, Web surfers furiously typed, and re-typed the "official verdict URLs" provided by the media. Most saw only the message: "This site is currently busy. Please try back later." So much for instantaneous Internet coverage.
I went another route. Knowing it was mirrored in more than four other locations, I headed to The Official Louise Woodward Campaign For Justice Web site.10 But I wasn't there simply to take in the latest news. In truth, I found myself drawn online nearly every day to watch the Web's fascination with its newest Baud Girl, Louise Woodward. As perverse as this sounds, I think I was jealous. A search for "Louise Woodward" on the engine Hot Bot yielded more than 2,000 separate entries. The very year I struggled to maintain three people in a chat room on Prodigy, a bona fide Web community had been forming online to support the "Nanny Killer."
It's ironic that while Prodigy was unable to follow Net Gain's exhortation to build Web communities based on brand loyalty, the amateur Woodward sites managed this quite nicely. "Louise's personal pages" certainly had links to the major information sites like CNN and Britain's Sky News, but also provided goodies available nowhere else, such as a video diary of Louise's days as well as a Quicktime movie of Louise's parents thanking people for their support. There was even a Real Audio file of song written by a fan moved by Louise's plight, and links to RENT, "Louise's favorite play." Why? What was it about Woodward that caused Web communities to spring up like mushrooms?11
To some degree, the proliferation of Woodward Web sites mimed the explosion of competing facts within Louise's trial itself. Woodward, a 19-year-old British au pair, was accused of murdering an 8-month-old American baby in her care, Matthew Eappen. The prosecution charged that as a result of a furious shaking by Woodward, Matthew suffered a head wound from which he subsequently died. From the onset of the trail, however, it was clear the medical community disagreed over whether Woodward had caused Matthew's death via "shaken baby syndrome," or whether the child died as a result of earlier brain injuries sustained early in his life. With all the conflicting evidence, and in the absence of a "smoking gun," the truth of the case (for the jury, at least) turned on Woodward's character and the credibility or her testimony during the trial.
The mechanics by which the Woodward trial was conducted were as ambiguous as the "facts" themselves. For a complex set of legal reasons, Woodward's lawyers designed their options so that a jury could only rule one of two ways: guilty of murder in the first degree, or not guilty. The judge specifically forbade a verdict of manslaughter (murder without premeditation) as an option. Thus, for the jury, the case was cast in black and white terms: either Woodward shook baby Matthew knowing it could kill him, or she was "not guilty"--at least as determined by the rules of the court.
Throughout the trial, many decried the horrific legal limits placed upon the jury, and anxiously awaited the ruling of Judge Zobel, who had the authority to overturn any decision as he saw fit. However, when the judge ultimately did change the jury's verdict of first degree murder to one of manslaughter, some people were outraged by the move, protesting that one individual with authority shouldn't be able to cancel the "will of the people" on a jury.
Because of the sensational nature of the trial and the questions it raised about power and democratic process in the U.S., the case quickly became the stuff of nightly television, catapulting Woodward herself into that particular type of celebrity that Monaco (1978) terms a "quasar". According to Monaco, a quasar is celebrity who is involuntarily thrust into the spotlight and, as a result, exists mainly in and through media construction. Examining the public fascination with the many personas of Patti Hearst in the 1970's, Marshall notes that with regard to quasars, "It is not what they are or what they do, but what we think they are that fascinates us" (1997: 14). Thus, the quasar is a speaking subject who through little choice of her own finds herself rendered as a consumable object.
Figure 10. "The dynamics of formulating and delivering ethical judgement upon the case was crucial to construction of the "reality" of both Woodward as consumable cyberlebrity as well as the community that consumed her image." Screenshot of The Louise Woodward Campaign for Justice. http://www.the-net.co.uk/louise/petition.htm
The notion of Louise as iconic quasar helps to explain why nearly every Woodward Web site during the trial's heyday began the same way: with a close-up shot of her pre-Raphaellite face. Marshall points out that poster images of Che Guevera had iconic power "more vocal than the actions of the revolutionary [himself]" (1997: 14). Likewise, the presence of her head-shot at the beginning of each Web sites underscored the fact that Woodward the speaking subject had morphed into Louise the discursive object, an icon engendering debates "more vocal" than those articulated by Louise herself.
One of the most intriguing of the debates about Woodward had to do with the unreadability of affect in the modern world. To many, Woodward resembled a stereotypical old-world Madonna: round-faced, doe eyed, soft-spoken. Yet did she look placid, people wondered, because she was innocent, or because she was in reality a cold-blooded killer? In the English press, this confusion was cast as ethnocentrism: as long as Americans confused "restraint" with "contempt," they argued, they would be unable to know the "real" (viz., English) Louise.12 But Woodward was not just a criminal defendant-- she was a celebrity defendant. Here, Richard Dyer's observation (1986) that celebrity creates a discourse of "realness" is especially apropos. For as Marshall observes:
We are aware that stars are appearances, yet the whole media construction of stars encourages us to think in terms of 'really'. What is Marilyn Monroe "really" like? Is Paul Newman "really" the same as he appears in films? These are the types of questions that the magazines and media as the stars create for us. Essentially, these questions point to the social function and position of the star in contemporary society. (1997: 17)
As if anticipating her fans desire to stop the stream of media coverage long enough to search for the "real" Louise, freeze-frame images from the Woodward trial were just a click away: Louise awaiting sentencing, Louise panicking during her verdict, Louise walking with her attorneys. While the actual jury was time-bound in their decision making, on the Web, viewers were given all the time in cyberspace to render judgement. Once past the images, many Woodward sites offered multiple routes to interactivity and the formation of discourses on the trial. On some pages, visitors were polled to register their opinion as to whether the courts were doing right by Louise.13 In still other locales, bulletin boards and chat rooms displayed a wide varied of opinions about the nature of the sentencing. I was surprised to find that over 30% of the visitors who posted comments one "Support Louise" board I visited were in fact protesting the fact that Louise received such a light sentencing.14
The dynamics of formulating and delivering ethical judgement upon the case was crucial to construction of the "reality" of both Woodward as consumable cyberlebrity as well as the community that consumed her image. The centrality of such judgement to the constitution of virtual Web communities has been explored by Sloop and Herman (1997). They argue that sometimes loose "courts of judgement" coalesce within virtual communities over the Web. Here's how they describe the way fans gathered in cyberspace to follow a copyright violation case being brought against the musical group Negativland: "It is not that any of this occurred as a result of a "leader" gathering together opposition troops for battle. Instead, people were drawn together because of their access to the net, and once gathered, set up their own means of justice" (1998:298).
Once gathered as a group on the Internet, fans began a sort of underground network to tape and distribute (for free) a Negativland single deemed illegal by the courts because of copyright violations. By setting up this "alternative means of justice," Negativland fans assumed an identity that Sloop and Herman have called "out-law"; that is, an identity that is technically legal, yet discursively subversive. This "out-law" identity is re-articulated on the Negativland home page, which features kitschy graphics from a 1950s diner (a visual staple of "alternative" music groups of the 1990s) and self- parodying slogans like "Copyright infringement is your best entertainment value!".15
Read as a magical phenomenon, the Negativland community used mimesis to brand themselves as "Negativland people". By their skillful use of kitsch and irony, they were able to cast mainstream corporate and legal systems as bogus, and thereby secure their own identity as "real" music fans. It is possible that they did so in part out of their concern for "justice". But its probable that they also deeply desired for contact--not necessarily with Negativland itself, but with the ironic-hip image of Negativland they were able to create and consume by way of their communion with one another. Here, Yrjo Hirn's statement that "Strong desire always creates for itself" rings decidedly true.
Overall, both the Negativland site and the Woodward sites (considered as a whole) easily met Quentin Jones's requirements for a legitimate virtual settlement. Both relied on fan identification with their respective icons, and both were as interactive sites where people gathered to discuss justice. After this, the similarities end. Every Woodward Web site I visited was conducted with the utmost sincerity. Certainly, there were no slogans anywhere to the effect of "Murder trials are your best entertainment value!" Not a single Woodward page I viewed was self-consciously artistic. As if to underscore the seriousness of their concerns, all the Woodward sites I viewed took one of two graphical forms: simply laid out, amateurish home pages, or replications of corporate sites like CNN and Court TV.
As Sloop and Herman (1997) argue, "out-law" justice almost necessarily requires one to self-identify as marginalized. For Negativland fans, this was easily arranged: Negativland and its legal troubles are largely known outside of particular sections of the music industry and alternative press. For Woodward fans, the exact opposite was true. Thus, while Negativland fans created a "court of public opinion," contesting and recreating notions of sovereignty within cyberspace, Woodward's sites were engaged in a different process entirely. Not quite a court, but rather a "cult of public opinion," Woodward sites mimed the rituals of television culture, hoping to build a new psychic locale in which to situate Louise.
Take, for instance, the fact that many Woodward Web sites linked to Court TV Online as a main repository of legal documentation for the case.16 Much the way USA Today has become the most-quoted paper in Congress by way of its easy-to-understand graphs, Court TV Online has become a hot Web site for the average person looking to grasp the mechanics of the American legal system. Of course, with its extremely narrow focus on celebrity trials, the show is hardly indicative of jurisprudence in America. But Court TV's producers understand that more Americans can recite the cast of the television legal drama "Ally McBeal" than can name all the judges currently sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States.
A trip to the special "Woodward section" of Court TV Online offered a series of predictable enough choices: records of court proceedings, transcripts of star witness testimony and profiles of attorneys of the trial. Eerily, Court TV Online featured a downloadable Quicktime movie of O.J. Simpson on the Woodward page.17 Because it had been mentioned repeatedly in the news, O.J. Simpson's iconic association with the Woodward trial was not a shock to me. Both shared the same celebrity attorney, Barry Scheck. Commercially, linking O.J. Simpson to the Woodward section made good sense for Court TV Online: their opening screen offered viewers a choice of "Famous Trials," ranking the "Nanny Murder" as #1, and the "O.J Simpson Case" as #2.18
Here, to serve its own commercial interests, Court TV Online enacts a series of mimetic celebrity equivalencies in order to make random associations ("Oh, Scheck, yeah, he was connected to O.J., right?") the "real" facts of the Woodward case. In odd turn, however, many amateur Woodward sites contained links not to O.J. Simpson, but the materials covering the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Here, a desire to counter mainstream media's collective unconscious was striking, if confusing. Like Woodward, Diana was English, and young. Naturally, Woodward's supporters would like her associated with a love of children, as Diana was. But that's where the similarities seem to end. Recently, the public fascination with life and death of Diana has been likened to a cargo cult of its own, played out on television news-magazines like Entertainment Tonight (Anderson, 1997). By posing one cult icon (Woodward) against another (Diana), what kind of magic, I wondered, were Woodward fans trying to invoke?
Puzzling over the competing icons of Woodward, Diana and O.J. Simpson, struggling with my own failure to incarnate myself successfully as a cyberlebrity worth remembering, I found myself struck by what Walter Benjamin (1978) has called "profane illumination." Benjamin, a Marxist inspired by magic, argued that there are times when modern technology (intentionally or not) backfires on us, replacing its presentation of "life as it is," with a more explicit version of "life as it is being shown to us." Because it is not properly science, or magic, but rather a revelation in which the magic of science is made clear, Benjamin argues that profane illumination is a moment both feared and craved within mass media. It is when our icons animate and stare back at us, demonstrating the ways in which they make and remake our subjectivity in the modern world.
A sort of inversion of the "savage" power of Marx's commodity fetish, profane illumination creates a shock of recognition within the consumer in which we see how (colonial progress myths to the contrary) we "enlightened" folks haven't left the gods at all. Rather, we've replaced "god" with "good"--both in the sense of consumer items and that marketable commodity of the information age, "reality." In our media-saturated time, trials are held, television coverage is broadcast, and Web sites are created. We do these things, we tell ourselves, in order to know what "really" happened the night Matthew Eappen died; what O.J. Simpson "really" did; what kind of person Diana "really" was. We gather in communities, virtual or otherwise, where we can be "real". But realities are, as Danny Hillis would have it, patterns. And if the hyperlinking capacities of the Web demonstrates anything, it is that patterns always exceed the sum of their parts.
In its patterning, connections between Louise Woodward and Princess Diana became at least as comprehensible as the televised trial's malevolent haunting by the Quicktime ghost of O.J. Simpson. In a flash, I understood that viewed as pure icon, Diana and O.J. Simpson have a lot in common, although you'd never know it from mass media's construction of the two. Both had been heroes --she, a philanthropist; he a football player. Both had been stars --she at royal functions; he as a spokesperson. And ultimately, both wound up quasars--she, led to an untimely death dodging paparazzi; he, an accused murderer of a white woman. Diana was revered by mainstream press, and characterized as a martyr to the public's obsession with royalty. And Simpson, though vilified by that same press, had nonetheless been adopted by a certain segment of the world's population as a martyr to unresolved race and class tensions within America. In a sense, they were opposite sides of the same coin: the idolized hyper-visible white female and the vilified, predatory black male. Where the celebrity Diana was a mimetic creature par excellence, O.J. Simpson had become an icon to alterity--the "otherness" that allows the condition of "the same" to exist.
Staring at the refractions of these two icons, I saw new patterns emerging, creating (in my mind, at least) a new sense of the facts that transcended the celebrity lure of the "real" Louise. To boost ratings, Court TV Online worked to present Woodward as a "white O.J. Simpson," playing on unconscious racist fears of black men to interject additional drama into Woodward's case. Woodward fans retaliated by interjecting the image of Diana, not to claim an identical relationship between Woodward and the Princess (for no icon can top Diana's status as the palest ghost of white female privilege today) but because racism demands that it be better to be a "less white" Diana than a seemingly white (which is to say passing) O.J. Simpson. While the former redeems Woodward and affirms the colonial power base securing her employment, the latter introduces the notion of alterity and violence back into the discussion. Court TV built one sort of pattern to meet their needs; Woodward fans countered with a different pattern, one which inverted, yet strangely repeated the racist logic of the television. Here is the magic of mimesis at work, collapsing complex patterns like class relations, migrancy and hybridity into an equivalency of consumable levels of whiteness.
I was reminded that throughout the trial, the quest to determine who a "real" care-giver truly was seemed to come down to a battle of white women: the "working mother" (Mrs. Eappen) and the woman "working as mother" (Louise). I remember thinking baby Matthew was awfully dark-skinned, only to find out later that Mr. Eappen (who is not white) was seldom on camera. It was then that I realized who wasn't visible in the very visible story of inscrutably white "Nanny Killer": the historical and current postcolonial bodies that currently comprise most of the domestic care force in the United States.
In her work on Asian identity on the Net, Lisa Nakamura has observed that the cry, "we're all invisible online," actually works mimetically, making sure that some of us wind up (discursively, at least) far more visible than others in cyberspace (1998: 15). Unfortunately, Nakamura points out, racism and sexism are necessary components of the fantasy of invisibility, because in truth, invisibility is equivalent to whiteness, and maleness. Just as the word "stereotype" began as a mechanical copying machine and morphed into a way to misread human bodies, today the mimetic mechanics of cyberspace produce "cybertypes"--communities defined as alternately "real" and "not" within the political frame of virtuality. Thus the "invisible citizen of cyberspace" still demands that a Newsweek photo of O.J. Simpson be retouched, to look just a bit darker. Thus the Baud Girl still requires the "fact" of her gender to sell her cybertype on the Web market to that self-same invisible citizen.
But Nakamura suggests that cybertypes may actually be more mutable than stereotypes, if only because their mechanics are more apparent to us, at least in our earliest stages of Web use. For instance, one of the cases branded on a Woodward site as being "important to Louise" was that of a Texas girl named Lacresha Murray, dubbed by the British press as the "Black Louise".19 Of course, the passage of power is crucial here: Woodward fans didn't call Louise "the White Lachresha," and for good reason. As a black woman, Murray's case is virtually unknown in mainstream media. Racism works to insure that Lacresha is no more the "Black Louise" than Louise is the "White O.J. Simpson". But branding, when it works, can be magical, creating its own histories, and making new realities. Does identifying with Lacresha Murray via Louise Woodward make any less sense than identifying with a Macintosh computer via a "think different" campaign? This desire to identify--and dis-identify--is precisely how community is created, offline or on it.
If we build it, they will come. One reason cargo cults persist--in Melanesia at least--is because sometimes, cargo actually does arrive out of the sky. During the American occupation of South Pacific islands during World War II, cargo arrived by air for U.S. Marines, many of whom were Black men. Significantly, the arrival of Black Marines to Oceania began for many natives an education in the postcolonial distribution of wealth. Kyle Roderick describes how "Life magazines brought by the GIs contained photographic proof that in America Black people lived surrounded by refrigerators and cars in the kind of consumer paradise which the islanders had been striving so far unsuccessfully to obtain" (1997).
Dismissing the arrival of cargo as "not really" from the gods, but from General MacArthur, misses the point here. For this is a story about the magic of contact, specifically transnational contact brought about by the arrival of mass media. In this story, images in consumerist magazines like Life call into question the long-espoused notion (begun by white colonials) that blacks were less deserving of material goods by reason of their race. What's more, as Roderick puts it: "[Black Americans] could operate the radio transmitters which beckoned the falling cargo from the ancestors, and seemed to the oppressed islanders to be dealing with the white man confidently and on equal terms" (1997). The fact that Black Americans could easily manipulate communications technology challenged earlier colonial notions of who could have powerful magic, and who could not. Nonetheless, the enabling similarities Melanesians saw between themselves and Americans came at a cost. As Andrew Lattas puts it:
They remember the law of America as the law of everything being free. They remember the black Afro-American soldiers who wore the same clothes as whites and ate European food. These old men tell of how they were treated as equals by American soldiers. The discipline and subordination to whites which were part of the war have been forgotten. What the old men selectively remember is the utopian dimension of their relations with Americans. (1996: 290)
In Melanesian constructions of reality, Lattas explains, ethnographers often find themselves dealing with the "paradoxical situation of people needing to remember that they need to forget." And at the risk being essentialist, I would argue that this "need to forget" alterity in order to establish similarity is a universal property of mimesis. Nevertheless, though all media has the power to de-racialize, and re-racialize bodies, on the Web, that power can be traced, observed, and mapped. We can see the patterns that are creating realities. We can see the magic, not because we don't understand the science, but because we do understand it.
Though the kinds of Web communities fostered by the desires of those in a "cult of public opinion" might not be ones I'd like to participate in offline, online they have their uses. For instance, in real life, Americans are not only expected to deny their (racialized) fantasies, fears and projections about the maternal--they are also expected to deny the racist trope of projection that buttresses this denial. But by connecting images of Woodward, O.J. Simpson, Lady Diana and Lacresha Murray, a seemingly "safer" avenue is opened up in which to both have and to defer these fantasies, projections and desires. In fact, the alterities summoned through the dialectical images of the Web might even provide some of us with a way to combat the current desire for online invisibility and sameness. For just as the fantasies of indigenous Melanesians are not analogous to those of American corporations, the complex of admittedly racist and sexist desires of Woodward Web community members are not analogous to the invisible cyberspace residents and their textual geishas. All fantasies are not created, or played out, equally.
Perhaps I am overly optimistic, but I see every reason to hope that future of the Web may provide an antidote to the current industry smugness about the way things "really" are, and really will be, online. For instance, Prodigy Internet has announced yet another internal corporate restructuring (Reuters, 1998). Though most industry analysts have dismissed the move as a lame attempt to jump on the IPO bandwagon, Jupiter Communications senior analyst Abhi Chaki disagrees. Chaki believes that Prodigy actually has the opportunity to meet a previously untapped consumer base--Latinos--primarily due to the fact that it is now 65% owned by the Mexican phone company Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex). As a subsidiary of Telmex, Prodigy may well find its own future dictated by the very global economy it wanted to dominate. Like cargo cults, sometimes things are built by people on the Web, commercial interests arrive, and changes do happen within the social fabric of the performance. Of course, with so many different players planning and dreaming, there is no telling whose story will actually come true, and which pattern will magically become a new reality.
Notes
1. Jennifer Fink, Cathy Young, Chris Belanger, Jim Patrick, Michelle Tepper, Paul Wallich, and Michele D. Knaub read early drafts of this paper and provided much-appreciated feedback. Thom Swiss, Andrew Herman, some anonymous readers at Routledge and participants at the Myth Metaphor and Magic Conference at Drake University posed crucial questions and encouraged me to resist easy answers throughout this project.
2. As will become evident, this essay has been greatly influenced throughout by the theoretical work and creative writing style of Michael Taussig. Even for the turn of phrase, "what was called, in an older time, 'magic'", he deserves credit.
3. Baud Behavior has since been closed by Prodigy. However, I have mirrored the contents of the original site at http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/baudbehavior/index.htm.
4. The Official Louise Woodward home page, which has since closed, was located at http://www.louisewoodward.com.
5. See Burridge (1960), Lawrence (1989), Lindstrom (1993), Trompf (1990), and Bourne (1995) for ethnographic accounts of Melanesian cargo cults.
6. For further discussions of branding, see Stobart (1994), Aaker and Biel (1993), Freeman (1998), Advertising Research Foundation (1994), Ogilvy (1985, 1988) and Mayer (1991).
7. Amazon's site is located at http://www.amazon.com.
8. The Motley Fool Web site is located at http://www. fool.com.
9. Jones's criteria for virtual settlements are as follows: first, a minimum level of interactivity marked by conversation--which would exclude one-way mailing lists; Second, there should be was a minimum of two communicators--which would eliminate simple databases; third, a settlement should contain one symbolically delineated virtual-space--this would eliminate speaking of all of Usenet, or "The Web" as a settlement, but would allow for speaking of multiple sites as a settlement, provided the arrangement met the first two conditions; finally, Jones argued a settlement ought to be able to display evidence of a sustained, long-term membership. Jones criteria were developed from the conceptualizations of virtual communities of Weinreich (1997), Stone (1995), Shenk (1997), Rheingold (1994), Jones (1995), Erickson (1997) and Hafner (1997)
10. The Official Louise Woodward Campaign for Justice site is at http://www.louisewoodward.com.
11. The Woodward sites I examined included the following: Louise Woodward Campaign for Justice at http://www.louisewoodward.org; Force 9 Louise Woodward Campaign at http://homepages.force9.net/louise/htm; Friends of Woodward-Boston at http://www.louisewoodwardboston.com; Louise Woodward: The Nanny Trial at http://www.densu.com/nanny; Cyberstorm: Louise Woodward at http://www.cyberstorm.demon.co.uk/louise; Free Louise Woodward at http://orphansoftware.com/Louise; Louise Woodward at http://www.geocities.com/Pipeline/5504/louisepix.html; and VirginNet's Louise Site at http://www.virgin.net/archive/louise98/background/campaign_sites.htm. Now that her trial has passed, most of the Woodward sites are shutting down, and while collecting images for this essay, I've found that URLs that worked only two weeks ago are broken, closed down, abandoned. As the days progress and the trial grows dimmer in public memory, a random Web search turns up more photos of the happy, glamorous Louise--hair bobbed, smile bright. Some fans still keep pages going, to let us know that yes, Louise is now home with her Mum, and yes, she still likes her Elmo doll she got for Christmas. By and large, however, people have moved on. Perhaps this is only fitting. Celebrity community, like celebrity itself, is generally a short-lived phenomenon, Lady Diana notwithstanding.
12. Particularly at issue throughout the trial was Woodward's use of the phrase, "I popped Matthew on the bed." While American police read the expression as a indication of her disregard for the baby, the British press countered that the term was actually British slang, synonymous with the American "placed".
13. Some sample polls are at http://www.louisewoodwardboston.com/polls.htm and http://www.densu.com/nanny.
14. Sample bulletin boards are at http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/gshhome/louise.htm, http://www.louise.force9.co.uk/louise_home.htm and http://www.louise.force9.co.uk/ricklox.htm.
15. Negativland's Web site is at http://www.negativland.com. The images discussed are on the main page and at http://www.negativland.com/riaa/index.html.
16. Court TV Online's site is located at http://www.courttv.com. Their Woodward section is located at http://www.courttv.com/trials/woodward.
17. The location of the O.J. Simpson Quicktime movie is http://www.courttv.com/trials/woodward/week2.html#oct17.
18. Court TV Online makes periodic changes to its "Famous Trial" lineup. Where once Louise Woodward and O.J. Simpson were ranked trial #1 and #2 respectively, now, Woodward has fallen to #2, sandwiched between the Unabomber (#1) and Marv Albert (#3). See http://www.courttv.com/famous/
19. Lacresha Murray's Web site is at http://www.peopleoftheheart.org/home.htm. The other case branded as "important to Louise" was Scottish national Kevin Richey--presently on death row in Ohio.