 One of the things that was not included in my bio was that I did my undergraduate degree in this department. The design media arts department many years ago and I have to just start this conversation by saying I am so moved that this conversation is even happening in this space in this department. It was not at all happening when I was a student here and I'm really just so thrilled, like really emotional about it, that we, you know, are having political conversations around our work as graphic designers, media artists, artists, cultural producers in the 21st century in a digital world. So one of the things that just immediately struck me about all three presentations is the role of design and just visual semiotics of these things. I mean, for example, Sophia talking about these websites that Dylan Roof would go to and they looked like, you know, they spoke the language, the visual language of a neutral news site or a reputable journalism site, something like this. That's a graphic design issue, right? Media design. And the same, you know, I think like the visuality thread is seen in all of these is how representation just in a very basic kind of formal level is working here. So one of the things that it makes me think about was in my experience as an undergraduate here my mentor was William Henry Lucas who is a very political designer and we would often talk about what the politics were that were embedded in certain choices we were making as designers. For example, a typography choice is a political one. Who made it? Did you have to pay for it? Is it a corporate font? Is it used by corporations so that it looks corporate? You know, are there fonts that you use in journalism sites that bring you a sense of legitimacy as a news site? I mean, and I think that our generation is so well, we're well equipped to be able to make media and make our own images on the web. And I think that, you know, we can be very savvy about how those get deployed. And in the case of maybe the Council for Conservative Citizens, is that what it was called? You know, they probably had a good sense of what kind of graphic design decisions they needed to make in order to seem neutral. So I was wondering if maybe we could start by talking about how I think, you know, this question of structures of oppression and domination that are in place in the real world getting replicated online often happens visually. And through just very basic kind of visual cues, font, like if it's in bold, you know, that signals something different than if it's blinking yellow, you know. So maybe we could talk just sort of about the visual literacy, media literacy that's inherent in digital practices, especially in the 21st century, especially for millennials, the generation, you know, that grew up being very comfortable making media online. Oh, yeah. Great. Thank you, Maru. This is a... I'm happy to jump in on that. I think it's a great prompt. So one of the things that I like to talk about as well in this kind of issue, particularly with the example of Google, is that what we have is kind of an aesthetic of a white page, a blank white slate with a box, an empty box that communicates simplicity. It's simple to put in a query and it's simple to get back an answer. And yet the kinds of questions that often get put into a search engine are highly complicated, nuanced, contested kinds of ideas or concepts that a simple simplicity is actually not the right approach. And so we have a socialization and I certainly see this myself with kind of now in this role teaching is kind of an expectation of a simple and immediate answer. An instantaneous put in get out kind of aesthetic and that translates to how knowledge is produced. And of course we know that is not how knowledge is produced. People go to war over knowledge, right? So I think there's something that we have to be incredibly careful about. I talk in my work about what would it mean, for example, to make knowledge transparent and to see all of the complexities of it and then have to make choices within that complexity rather than an aesthetic of white space and nothingness that communicates something, right? And it's a falsehood. So Dana Boyd, for example, talks about she did studies on teenagers who moved from MySpace to Facebook. And what she found in her study is that students who, high school students who were still on MySpace, were typically marginalized students. They weren't jocks, they weren't cheerleaders, they were kind of like alternative whatever that means and also people of color I guess were alternative, aren't we? And part of the kinds of things that students reported out, especially in an era, like a 21st century era of colorblind ideology where students didn't want to name in an explicit way how they felt about their peers. They would say things like, well, Facebook is cleaner, it has cleaner design, it's not so messy, right? And these were code words that she found that reflected that the incredible hyper-individuality that you can express on MySpace, right, like you got the marching ants or whatever you code in there, were, those were signifiers of difference that in a space like Facebook that was made as like an Ivy League social networking platform where you have a high degree of homogeneity in that kind of university environment that the aesthetic of clean lines of not pointing to difference in individualism was actually valued, right? But it also was loaded with these kind of class and racial markers. So I think these are the things that, you know, go read her work because it's really powerful and what happened as students left MySpace and went to Facebook, we lost a whole generation of especially girls who were learning how to code. They could do basic HTML kind of work by personalizing their MySpace pages. You guys probably weren't even born when everybody was on MySpace, it's fine. This is so, so what did we lose also in these kinds of design choices and moves and the discourse and rhetorics that we used around them? And so I think these are absolutely design questions and issues and they're explicitly political and loaded with these kind of racial class gender dynamics. Yeah, like I just want to offer rejoinder before we all jump in. But I think always about, you know, in arts, which is the world that I ended up moving in more than the design world, there's this word that gets tossed around a lot, which is very funny to me, which is site specific. Like as though there is a thing that's not bad, right? Like this idea of space and artists talk a lot about space as though it's this neutral, empty, a historic location. Like what about place? Like place implies, you know, there's a cost of rent, there were neighbors, there's rules, there's cracks in the walls, there's street noise. There's all of these things that are part of that location. And I think in digital space, which we often talk about, that is, you know, those assumptions are carried over again. Like this idea that the cleanest digital design solution is the best, is an implicit value. You know, there are always these redesigns of social media platforms that are done, you know, according to the company to make things cleaner, which I just think is so funny, like that that's the implicit value that we all now in this world like want. Like, oh, I need to clean up my Facebook feed, I need to clean up my Twitter feed, like this kind of cleanliness. Very strange to me. Well, before MySpace came to the world, everybody was, or not everybody at all, the few people who had a presence online were doing everything entirely from scratch. Learning from other people by looking at what they had done, but everybody was able to have an entirely unique, like the system allowed for an entirely unique presence. MySpace sort of was somewhere in between there and what Facebook is now. Twitter is largely proliferated because it's so easy to do, but we're all within the straight jacket of that character count. And it seems like we're increasingly putting ourselves into these narrow containers through which we can express ourselves. I mean, Facebook is changing a little bit now, but the ability to, the only effect you can apply to something as you like it, you have no other option. I find that just to be very interesting. I don't want to dominate. I'm going to just say really quickly that I think you're right. I mean, what has happened for those of us who remember a pre-digital, a pre-internet and kind of came of age, which would be my generation. On the web, you know, there was certainly, you know, the commercial web environment was kind of late to the game. I mean, it took a while. I remember when like everybody was like, you know, some teenager owned AT&T.com, you know, and like then they're like, oh, my God, we got to get that domain, you know. So like that was happening all over corporate America. Everybody owned something and like was subverting it. And so you're right. I mean, what's now totally normalized is that we function within these corporate containers. And with very little recognition of, for example, our digital labor, that just our ourselves as an audience is the commodity, right? So Dallas Smythe and the audience commodity, you know, we have to understand that we're, these containers in many ways shape our behavior and socialize a particular kind of normalcy. And it's incredibly difficult to intervene upon it. Though there's no interesting activism that comes specifically kind of from those constraints. You know, for example, getting, there's an example of an activist getting kind of Nike to customize his sneakers with the word sweatshop on it, which they, you know, didn't want to do. So kind of using the kind of constraints as a way to kind of speak back to that corporate system in interesting ways. Yeah, I think, you know, I think what's, what's interesting also is how these spaces have, and within these constraints, people are finding ways to critique other forms of media. And it seems like, and some two specific examples that I can, I can really think of recently is that, that hashtag if they gunned me down, where young men of color, especially black men, were showing, you know, side by side using Instagram or other forms of like social media to show side by side how they, they choose to depict themselves versus how media might, you know, mainstream media might depict them if they, if they were gunned down. And I thought that was very powerful and provocative because it was a critique of, of broadcast media. And then you see this in, in a place like China where you'll see, you know, propaganda memes. People will, will take classical Chinese propaganda and then remix that and, and challenge that, you know, kind of this traditional, again, broadcast media that, that, you know, previously most people had to just inherit and could remix in, in maybe in a small scale, you know, locally with, you know, with posters, but the ability to distribute that through these networks becomes very powerful. And it seems, it seems like there's, you know, there is this opportunity to make more public this critical discourse in media and that critical discourse needs to go back onto the media itself that people are using. That, that in using, in finding so much power through Instagram and Twitter to critique broadcast media where we're forgetting that those platforms themselves they're themselves media, there are, they are themselves a form of mediation and that they themselves have their own biases that need to be critically examined. And it'd be interesting, I'm kind of thinking of this kind of snake eating its tail with that kind of critical critique of the, of the very platform in which you're doing your critique, what that might look like and what that, how we could shape a public discourse around that. One of the things I was thinking when you were talking was about the sort of how imperialism has now begun to function within languages on the internet and how we can see, you know, that first, that map where, you know, the language is just redraw, you know, geopolitical lines. I'm wondering, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about, you know, there's a lot of discourse in post-colonial, decolonial thought around how the colonizers, you know, theft of the language, the indigenous language is a function of imperialism. And I'm wondering if, you know, like, you know, all of this literature that I've read about it is pre-internet so far. And I feel like this is the first time I've started to think about how languages are still in that process, but now in a digital way. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about it, the relationship maybe between imperial colonial histories and methods with language. Sure, yes, great question. I think, you know, the history of, like, erasing languages is very much a colonial, you know, artifact. And it's often invisible to the next generation, I think, especially the United States. I grew up, my family is Filipino-Chinese. I grew up speaking only English. It just takes one generation for access to one's native tongue to just vanish and disappear. And certainly, this has a very long history. And it's interesting because the very platforms that are disseminating across the world are largely being designed and developed in one part of the world, which happens to be where I live. And that inherent bias that one region of the world, which, you know, is just one small perspective, then places pressures on other people to have to learn that language. And this, and I think about kind of these language biases as being a full-stack problem in technology design. We talk about the full stack about, you know, all the way down from the very code in which people have, you know, there's so much talk about the open source software movement and the ability to create and shape your software and your media environment. That code is, you know, the human-facing part of that is in English. And it's, you know, there's simple phrases. You know, yes, you can learn those phrases, but if you imagine trying to relearn code in a language that you don't speak and suddenly you're having to learn two languages, the programming language and then the language in which the programming language is expressed. And then it moves up to the typography pressures. And so, you know, the ability to input Arabic on a mobile phone up until recently was severely limited and people, Arabic speakers literally had to use Roman numerics to express their language online, which was incredibly creative. There's these creative workarounds for the language, but as a result, had to use a Latin script and basically erase their script from the internet until input systems improved. And then it goes up from there into content and how, you know, if you want to know what's going on in the world, if you want to have access to, here I used the Wikipedia example, but another example would be Stack Overflow. Again, such an important place for people to learn how to build a software around them. If that's only, that language, that knowledge is only available in English and Portuguese right now, you're the pressure to have to learn those languages and increases substantially. And then all the way to the typography, and we're talking about the political decisions around typography. You know, in English we have, in Latin, sorry, Latin speaking, languages that use Latin letters. You have a great wide variety of typography and fonts so that you can use. And if you have that kind of, that kind of critical knowledge about how these, the kind of implications of all these fonts, you can really make important design decisions. But if you have access to only one or two fonts, suddenly the ability for you to create a space around the very content that you're, and the sites that you're trying to create, again, becomes limited. And you're inheriting someone else's designs around your typography. So these biases and these pressures exist across the board. And the very pressure to join a major network like Facebook or Twitter, then pressures you to have to learn the languages in which they operate. So it's very much these, this kind of colonial pressures in language are very much reproduced. Yeah, it's like code switching, but for cultural things, like you have to, I was just having a conversation with my friend who's published the other day and he was saying, you know, because of globalization and imperialism, he can talk to me about the Simpsons or something, but I won't have any idea about the Polish TV shows that he grew up watching. And I think that this kind of, you know, way of cultural pernicious pervasiveness from English considered to be the universal language now. I mean, this is really getting replicated, exponentially, in the digital space. Exactly, and even within English-speaking cultures, there's also just the general valuation of whose English is more important. And certainly, when we're talking about English-speaking internet, most people are thinking, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and maybe Australia, but many other countries are, people do speak English, and even then their voices and their perspectives are often devalued and underserved. So in addition to building voice, I think we need a culture of also building better tools for listening and of those kind of pipelines for valuation of these new voices online, because you can shout all you want and have new voice, but if there's not enough listening, it's that those connections aren't made. Yeah, when I add to, I think there's this economic dimension around, especially in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, where truly, I mean, it's a closed community of mostly men and well-documented kind of racism and sexism and exclusion that happens, particularly in venture capital funding, so that the paradigm, again, around design happens in the context of the commodity, right? So what can be commodified and sold package make profit? That's a driving paradigm, design paradigm, I would argue, in Silicon Valley that really affects everyone else. If you don't have millions of dollars, you actually can't implement a lot of these kinds of projects that we might offer up would be critiques or subversions or some other kind of alternative. So the opting out and going to other things, like what other things, how can those things be created when they're happening in the context of really hypercapitalism in Silicon Valley? And of course, the biases, again, that we don't see is that the incredible profit margins that happen around platforms and technologies, designs coming out of the Valley, are in direct relationship to kind of our economic policies of globalization, so that the manufacturing jobs are off-shored to the places where children can make those technologies or people can live in dorms and we've read the Foxconn stories where, for example, in the Congo, people who are doing the mining for Colton are living in the most extreme sexual violence, rape, assault conditions in the world according to the United Nations, and so those things get outsourced. So what gets outsourced in the design of our projects is really important as a kind of humanitarian issue. One thing that we don't talk about it, I'm starting to take up in my own work, is the sustainability of these technologies as well. We have a serious design crisis around information communication technologies and their contribution to global warming. We just saw the latest reports coming out now, post kind of the Paris bombing, and just prior to that global, that climate change issues are directly implicated in the destabilization of many nations where we are starting to see tremendous consequence as a result of that destabilization, and we're implicated, again, in these while we're fetishizing Google and Facebook, and so I think that we need a radical design change and I might ask, if I were teaching an HCI class or a design class with you, I would say, how are you gonna design this so that not one life is lost? What if that were the design imperative rather than what's your IPO gonna be? So it's the paradigms within which we're designing that are really important to you. Sophia, I have two follow-ups with that. One is the statement that you made that people seem to trust search engines, and so my question is, why do you think people trust search engines? But that leads to the next question, which is this idea of proprietary and corporate data versus open systems, public systems, and why do you think that all of our data is within these proprietary algorithms and ways of storing rather than in things that are more open and more public? So these are great questions. I mean, part of the reason we trust search engines is because if we need to find out like what time Starbucks close, it gives us the answer, right? And so that's crucial information that some people need, do you know? I mean, if you need to know what time does my class start and I gotta go online and get the schedule because it's the first week class, you can in the room, okay, or the map, there are kinds of banal types of information that search engines are excellent at indexing and then providing for us, and that reinforces our trust in them. Now when we start to put complex ideas into these environments, other things happen, and that's where we lose our sense of making sense of what's appropriate to put in and what's not. And of course, any of us up here who teach, you know, you see oftentimes like under, this is a tip for anybody here who's an undergrad, you know, your professors see it when your papers come in and you're citing things that make no sense to a faculty member as like a legitimate site, citation, right, like there are certain things that you must have Googled that because there's nothing scholarly about that and that's a no, you can't go on that, but you don't know, right, because you can trust it for all these other types of information searches. So that's part of the challenge. I think in our field, you know, we might say that, you know, librarians and information professionals, we've really been focused on scholarly information and scholarly knowledge, kind of a different type of curated and vetted information and we have not put a lot of our attention as a field, as a practice on the kind of broader indexing of the web and curating the web. I'm certainly trying to implore people who do that type of work to consider that that might be an alternative way for us to think about. I mean, what if we had a search engine, I often say, that was curated by all of the research universities in the world, right? Not just in the United States, but in the world. There are so many forms of knowledge, for example, that we don't even have access to, again, because of the language, right, brilliant thinking that's happening from other parts of the world that's really highly inaccessible and these are the kinds of challenges that I think we're facing in the kind of library and information science, information studies fields. Is this access to knowledge has always been a key driver for millennia, for people who keep the record and knowledge. But in the commercial spaces, which is where the majority of people live on the web, that has not been in the bullseye and I think that's part of the barrier that we have to work through. Maybe some of you will come do graduate work in information studies and can help us think through these because they are design issues, too. Marie, could you want to jump in? I think that it's also that they seem, they're not a thing we're taught to read critically. They seem very neutral and objective and even the way in which the language there is used, right? It's the things that pop up with the highest relevancy, right, to the top of your Google search, for example, and we pick on Google a lot. That's because Google is more than 70% of the market share for searches in the United States so it matters, it is a target for a particular reason. But the design itself is intended, of course, when we come back to that, to look neutral and unless people are taught to read that critically the way in which you're taught to read other information critically, why would you? Also, they happen, you know, Google or search engines, they're a ranking format. So the already always way of thinking about ranking, especially in the context of the West or the United States is what? We're number one, right? If it's first, it's the best. If it's on page 10,000, whatever, we don't even care because the paradigm of ranking is actually the design driver, right? And so that has an incredible impact on why we believe, right, because it must be right. But why porn, up until I wrote that bitch magazine article about six months after I wrote that article, they changed the algorithm and black girls don't get pornified as badly anymore. I can't say it's the article, but I can't say it's not. So all I'm saying is that the, you know, who has the most kind of political capital and economic capital is a porn industry on the web. Are you kidding? I mean, it's like we wouldn't have credit card processing and video and audio if the porn industry hadn't put a ton of money behind that so that they could sell their products. So again, we don't really think about these other economic and kind of design drivers that are providing the context for how we receive. Yes, it's got me thinking in terms of like, you know, design and design provocations is, you know, there's this fetishization around, you know, intuitive design and simple design and how those can be extremely dangerous. You know, that intuitions are founded on assumptions and if you are designing to make things as simple and as clickable as possible without having forcing people to have to think through what clicking means, what searching means and that so ethos of not making the user think is a great way to hide the implicit biases and explicit biases that these systems contain. So it would be interesting, I think, to think about, rethink a kind of design, a friction of design that would show like what is happening behind this simple little box? What is this algorithm doing? What is it, how is it floating up things that are relevant and how is your search history and your location impacting these results? And you can imagine a Google that makes it difficult for you instead of I'm feeling lucky it's have, you know, I have to work for it or something and what could that look like? I don't know but it's interesting to think about a kind of contra-intuitive design that can raise these questions in interesting ways. I'll ask Anna a quick question related to what you were discussing. What if we assume that text is no longer the standard? I mean, text was necessary at one time because of how slow bits would travel but now we can work with different kinds of media. So yesterday we were talking a little bit about languages that aren't character based or don't really have a written form and how working with audio directly can enable different kinds of conversations. So I was wondering like what is the state of the art of that or where do you imagine that going to allow other voices to come into play? Yeah, I think the most interesting to me is the WeChat example which I showed and you saw it on that picture of Leo Messy. I didn't get to talk about it to us brushing through it but that interaction of him holding this phone like this is him pressing a button and kind of speaking into WeChat which is a Chinese social network that started out a little like WhatsApp but it's a lot more robust now and he's speaking into the mic and then releases the button and that sends an audio message to the recipient and it's not a transcribed audio message, it is just the audio message and WeChat was sort of a pioneer in that interaction. We now have that with iMessage and WhatsApp and part of the reason that this became very popular is again the difficulty of inputting Chinese into a mobile phone and Chinese being a non-alphabetic language, there are many forms of input and it's interesting that the keyboard kind of stepped away, this simple idea of even using the keyboard to input your language moved into just pressing a button to actually speak it and that I think is one great example of how audio can change an interaction both for input and then also for listening and then you see this with eReader apps, Instapaper or Kindle and we were talking about this yesterday that this is not just an issue of language, it's also about accessibility and also literacy, that's the ability to just press a button and listen to what's there to listen to the text or simply bypass text altogether and listen to a podcast. The kind of rise of podcasts is just an interesting example again of moving away from text as the primary mode of interaction with the web and moving into audio and potentially video and I think this is going to be an urgent need as again this next billion of people who are coming from languages that have no written form the ability to interact and with not with some information to share that and share that information with communities I think that again these biases, forcing oral language communities to have to write down their language the majority of languages in the world have no written form, majority of languages in the world are oral and so again rethinking the very interactions I think and focusing on audio, representation video again as technologies allow for this I think can be quite powerful and also just necessary I think just an important way of preserving culture and not continuing this cultural imperialism that tech implicitly continues. I just have to, as the queer performance artist from my position, I have to talk about the body. So I want to talk, Marika, about how especially this question of embodiment on the internet and how I think you called it like the internet's intervention into the provenance of bodies and how that functions I think kind of can also relate to this idea of moving away from text because if we think about differently abled folks who might interact with information from a different place from like reading text I think that I don't know I'm in a very ambivalent position about how the body can exist in a virtual space and I just rewatched Johnny Mnemonic I don't see nobody knows what this maybe is. Okay, so this was this cyberpunk vision in the 90s of like what virtual reality would be it's Keanu Reeves and like one of the most, the best Keanu Keanu Reeves role and the idea is that he can carry data in his brain he can carry 40 gigabytes and so he's like on the black market as like a data carrier across international political lines and he has to like upload it into his brain and something went wrong and he now has 80 gigabytes and so it's you know but the implication of the body in these earlier cyberpunk films and novels of course was that the body would somehow kind of disintegrate into technology in a very horrific dystopian way like he keeps saying I need to get online because he needs to like empty his head. Sorry for this detour but it seems pertinent. So I was wondering I mean I'm very interested in how the body gets sort of represented and archived and replicated and erased and all of these things and I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about that in its relationship to the internet to digital virtual space. Sure I think yeah I mean I think that's an interesting and important question right and there's much written about kind of especially I think in the early 2000s about the kind of potential for the internet as a space where you wouldn't kind of be tied to your body as a kind of freeing potential to kind of live in a world where you could evade kind of race and class and gender and all of the things that kind of constrain our physical bodies as well as issues of kind of ability and other kind of constraints of the physical body. What's actually happened of course is hasn't happened. People's avatars tend to represent things about their own experience. We know that kind of all kinds of things that happened to physical bodies in the kind of physical world that happened in the digital world as well right. It perhaps frees up kind of certain kinds of harassment to happen even in kind of a greater extent right. There's the kind of potential of anonymity and apparently when given anonymity we get even kind of more racist and sexist and classes that we feel perhaps free to be when we actually have to look at someone. So I think that some of that kind of potential for the body to disappear just we still kind of interact with the digital world in the same constrained by the same kind of paradigms in which we live. It's hard to think outside of the constraints of race, class and gender, even if you're in a world where maybe you can make your avatar look like whatever you want it to look like right. We still are constrained by thinking in ways that are formed in a kind of another world. And I think that it's part of that kind of temptation to draw a line between the physical world and the digital world right as two separate worlds when in fact I don't see them as separate worlds right. They continue their racism, classism, like sexism in the real world, there's racism, classism, sexism in the digital world. And that some of that potential for the kind of body to disappear hasn't happened. And that of course constraints of physical bodies when we're talking about issues especially of accessibility still apply in a digital world right depending on kind of your physical limitations or kind of potentials how you can engage on the internet is also shaped in that way. So I think a lot of that kind of utopic potential for the body to disappear just is not realistic and is perhaps not even a thing we want. I'm also really fascinated by the way in which kind of new identities are formed by the digital and the way in which those identities are highly gendered. If we think about kind of the categories of people that kind of didn't exist like the programmer and things that then the kind of proliferation of those images right. Those are highly gendered images of kind of who is creating kind of the digital world and it's not just that right. It's kind of all of those images are highly gendered and so I don't think we've escaped the body in any way. I wanna add to that. I think we could also ask about to what degree does artificial intelligence promote an erasure of our humanity or we could call it the body or a human experience. So those of us who study algorithms kind of critically we talk about the ways in which human beings now who engage with algorithms in everyday life are more likely to trust the algorithm than to trust previous forms of knowledge right. Tarleton Gillespie writes about the how algorithms have become so fundamental to the human experience that they've started to replace common sense, credentialed experts or the scientific method and even the word of God right. So this is what he says and I think these kinds of ways of seeing a disappearance of the body we could argue by our increasing reliance upon and artificial intelligence is something that's really important and worth examining and thinking about into the future. So you know what would it mean that and you hear people already in such common everyday ways talk about I heard a provost once of a big university say something what was reported that he said what do we need the library for when we have Google right. So it's like you have an interesting notion of human knowledge right and its complexities and that even the process I mean you know if you've had to go to the library to actually do research which I know like I'm not even gonna ask for a show of hands because I already know that the number is low and so what does it mean that again we trust an algorithm to give us a decision or give us knowledge or to have already curated or done the hard thinking for us and you know there are people who are writing in controversial ways about this like Nicholas Carr right who's talking about the neurological effects of how our brains are changed by this kind of instant gratification, instant always uncritical our loss of our ability to think. And so I think this is like you know could be a very important aspect of rethinking what it means to think about embodiment and that we trust our technologies to embody a level of our humanity that's better than our own humanity right and I think that's incredibly complicated. And I think you know there is this opportunity instead of erasing the body to make the body even more visible and more nuanced and you know the just reading an article about how Tumblr has helped create the kind of Tumblr culture of the tags and of talking about gender and gender identity has helped foster a significantly more nuanced you know kind of language around what gender and gender identity look like. So moving beyond kind of male female binaries into gender clear identities, LGBTI identities things like that and then similarly we could talk about this with race and class this kind of you know decision to flatten you know race into these big categories instead look at the nuances of what people's racial and ethnic identities look like. There's actually it seems like there's an opportunity to make the body more visible and more visible in its specificity and that rather than erasing the body it's about bringing out that our humanity. And of course there are risks to this especially if you are highlighting a marginalized identity that can create a non-safe space for these communities but at the same time the visibility of one's body making that visible, making that visible to other people becomes an important way for especially marginalized communities to find identities that may not be represented in mainstream media and I think particularly that the trans and LGBTI communities have you know there's a lot of great studies on how this being visible to each other is itself a powerful act and so I think through making our bodies more visible seems like a critical act of justice.