User:TheJWC/sandbox

Introduction
My companion cyborg is Wikipedia. This website has become the de facto encyclopedia of the Internet and is widely seen as the most easily accessible information source that exists outside of academia. I chose Wikipedia because of my almost constant use of it and because of its unique community-based collaborative effort in creating widely trusted knowledge. The binaries that I will be exploring are representation vs simulation and public/private vs cyborg citizenship.

Throughout my journey with Wikipedia over the course of this semester, I have realized that the community and the network that the website facilitates is much deeper than I had originally realized. To use Wikipedia and not understand the context behind its creation is to misuse Wikipedia. It serves as an example as to how to move towards more democratized forms of knowledge-production and -translation. Since its release to the public in the early 2000’s, Wikipedia has stayed a valuable resource for non-academic learning and it is necessary that it be examined extensively. So even though our society discourages curiosity and learning outside of traditional academic settings, resources like Wikipedia must be supported, while at the same time, being actively critiqued. Throughout this zine, I will examine different aspects of the identity of Wikipedia, hopefully revealing and educating others on the implications of its use within the stories of this interconnected world.

Origin Story
The origin story which I found for my companion cyborg is the Wikipedia page, “History of Wikipedia.” For all its talk about its egalitarian, decentralized and democratized origins, the Wikipedia page of the history of Wikipedia never even mentions the extremely gendered characteristics of its story. The origin story begins in describing the ancient inspiration of this network of sites in the mythic collections of knowledge, like the Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, eras known for their domination by men. This supremacy of gender is clearly reflected within the founders and early supporters of Wikipedia, a cohort of early self-styled male ‘internet revolutionaries’ of the 90’s. While I will admit to not having read the pages and pages of information from this historical article, I can be assured of the absence of any discussion of gender by this self-report through the ever-useful Command-F search tool, which reveals no mention of the words, ‘gender,’ ‘men,’ ‘women,’ ‘male,’ or ‘female.’ The exemption of any examination of its own history demonstrates a lack of self-criticism that should be remembered in reading all other Wikipedia articles.

I think that this absence by Wikipedia to discuss its very masculine origin stood out to me because of the many readings I have done this semester in my many STS courses about feminist theories on science and the translation of information. Additionally, I found it surprising because of the role that Wikipedia plays within my interaction with classes as I consistently use it as a resource for introducing and reviewing topics that I had always seen as reliably understandable and relatively unbiased.

Category Makeover
Having first been launched in 2001 and built entirely off the work of a network of writers, it must be noted that there is a massive culture explaining the relationships that exist between Wikipedia and the people that interact with it. One article that illustrates the depth of the terms that are used is this article about “WikiFauna.” However, for simplicity’s sake, I will simply address the terms of ‘reader’ and ‘editor’, which I think would be how a majority of people would describe the two main relationships that occur with Wikipedia. Both terms are used in a very literal sense, but at the same time explain a very shallow perspective as to what these two roles accomplish. I think these terms should be much more explicit in how they describe each one’s role and how it relates to the massive community that underlies the expansion of wikipedia. The two major categories of wikipedia-interactors should be ‘casual viewer’ and ‘community member’. While that is not meant to create a difference in citizenship on this fantastic public resource, I think it is necessary to create the distinction in order to show the different level of understanding and interpretation of the platform between the two main groups.

Icon of the Chthulucene
Wikipedia, in many ways, felt hard to construct a specific icon for that fit within the Chthulucene. Much of the reality and popular perspective on the website could be applied to relate to this new ‘cene that Haraway tries to create. Therefore, I have chosen to present just one example of the multispecies stories that Haraway describes as an icon of the Chthulucene, the wikipedia page of Corbin Bleu. This icon involves the ongoing legacy of Disney star, Corbin Blue, who is most famous for a supporting role in the late 2000’s High School Musical series. While an actor of this magnitude would have typically faded into obscurity, surviving only in the vague childhood memories of Generation Z amongst the start of the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis, the story of Corbin Bleu has become determined to live on with the help of my companion species, Wikipedia. Surprisingly, the wikipedia page of this DCOM actor is one of the most translated pages for famous figures on the entire site, beating out the likes of Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein and Shakespeare. With Haraway endeavouring to create a world perspective in which “human beings are not the only important actors,” Wikipedia serves as the perfect example of a non-human being integral to the story of a human. (Staying with the trouble p.55) This mass-translation trend is not the hand of just Wikipedia alone, but also represents the communal recomposition of the story of Corbin Bleu by people on a global scale. This aspect of construction is driven by the silent users who access this knowledge and the vocal editors. Additionally, the multilingual Wikipedia record of this actor is not stagnant in time, but as the Cthulucene embodies the idea that “the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen,” this icon continues to grow with 20 languages being added since 2016. (Staying with the trouble p.55) Many of these translations are suspected to largely be the work of one committed editor in Saudi Arabia. This newly-revealed Chthulu-ic perspective of Corbin Bleu reveals a justification for Haraway’s ideas. If focusing only on the humans of his story, this facet is lost and devalued in the perspectives of the Anthropocene and others. With the Chthulucene, this icon, the wikipedia page of Corbin Bleu, is the unfurling Gaia.

Reflection
When it came to my understanding of Haraway in reaction to my companion species, I think it helped me to not understand everything that she wrote extremely literally. I do not believe that anyone could deny that Haraway’s writings are not incredibly confusing to read at points. Wikipedia served as a constant example of some of the ideas that Haraway was speaking about in a contemporary context. Whereas the ideas of becoming a cyborg or having cross-species interactions may seem like unrealistic demands to make, reframing Wikipedia as an object that allows you to extend your own source of knowledge or considering the impact of Wikipedia to be just as significant in stories as humans is easier to accept. This new perspective in analyzing Haraway’s work was helpful as I think I have a tendency when reading the works from Haraway and other similar social theorists is to understand their ideas in the ways in which they can be applicable, rather than just taking them at face value.

In the reverse direction, Haraway’s influence on my companion cyborg of Wikipedia throughout the semester was much more substantial in my opinion. Previously, I had thought of Wikipedia as a much more desolate and stagnant technology. It has gained an impressive stature in my mind for the complexity that is involved in it. While it started as the dream of early internet self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalists, it has defied the bonds which had previously been ascribed to it by its founders, casual users and me. Not only do I now view it as a very physical extension of my own knowledge and thought process, but I also see it as a real-life application of standpoint theory in some ways. Obviously in this version of standpoint theory, the individuals contributing to it still have their biases because of the overwhelming cisgendered-male-whiteness of the community. However, Wikipedia does to some extent offer some sense of neutrality with the involvement of so many editors. So while I do not think my prolific use of Wikipedia will change much, I definitely think I will be more careful when reading it in remembering the prejudices of its authors.