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The Informational is Spatial: Understanding the Geoeconomics of Cybersecurity in Youth Environments

On Tuesday, 02/28/2012 @ 4PM, I’ll be presenting “The Informational is Spatial” at the Association of American Geographers’ paper session on “Geographies of Surveillance and Security 3: Data, Discourses, and Affects” (session organized by David Murakami Wood and Steve Graham).

Location: The Hilton New York, Second Floor, Sutton Parlor South.

Abstract: As cyberspace expands within young people’s everyday environments, so too does a geoeconomic conception of cybersecurity. My ongoing participatory action research project, MyDigitalFootprint.org, involved a team of youth co-researchers in investigating the production, circulation, and consumption of their personal data in order to collectively address larger questions of privacy, property, and security under informational capitalism. Of specific interest were how the material forms and social practices of proprietary digital environments such as Facebook and Twitter link up with the emerging U.S. war doctrine of cyberdominance. I discuss U.S. cyberdominance as a geoeconomic manifestation of security that aims to reframe a global cyberspace as a component of U.S. territory. Informational flows, from the global to the intimate, are thus cast as matters of national security that must be managed through a plethora of digital enclosure and surveillance mechanisms that are intimately experienced by U.S. youth through their routine participation in proprietary digital environments. Further, despite the “newness” of digital enclosure and surveillance I argue that these mechanisms are rooted in historical processes of environmental control and presuppose a geoeconomic logic of privatization and segregation already operating in our urban environments through strategies such as zoning, gating, and CCTV. I will conclude with a discussion of how the MyDigitalFootprint.org project’s development of its own open-source social network site served as a methodology for understanding the various forms of geoeconomic cybersecurity that become objectified, internalized, reworked, and/or resisted through young people’s everyday engagements with and within proprietary digital environments.

NPR: Youth Shaping Future Of Online TV, Movies, Music

From the article: “A recent Columbia University survey found, in fact, that 70 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they had bought, copied or downloaded unauthorized music, TV shows or movies, compared with 46 percent of all adults who’d done the same.”

NPR: Youth Shaping Future Of Online TV, Movies, Music

From the article: “A recent Columbia University survey found, in fact, that 70 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they had bought, copied or downloaded unauthorized music, TV shows or movies, compared with 46 percent of all adults who’d done the same.”

Growing Up Policed Vimeo Channel

The official Growing Up Policed Vimeo Channel is now live! This channel includes video of presentations, panels, and discussions from the Growing Up Policed: Surveilling Racialized Sexualities Mini-Conference that took place at both the University of Oregon and the CUNY Graduate Center on 12/01/2011.

Incited by the case of the felony conviction of a young woman of color for sexting with her girlfriend in Oregon and participatory research on criminalization among 1,100 young people in New York City, the mini-conference focused on the nexus of youth, technology, law enforcement, and constructions of racialized sexuality. Using a broad definition of “policing” that extends across jails, schools, subways, and cyberspace, the conference examined the tools that parents, professionals, and others use to watch over, intervene with, and attempt to “correct” youth [more info: opencuny.org/growinguppoliced].

Conference Opening by Michelle Fine:

Presentations, Panels, and Discussions:

Betabeat: As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Sink Your Credit

From the article: “A new wave of startups is working on algorithms gathering data for banks from the web of associations on the internet known as “the social graph,” in which people are “nodes” connected to each other by “edges.” Banks are already using social media to befriend their customers, and increasingly, their customers’ friends. The specifics are still shaking out, but the gist is that eventually, social media will account for at least the tippy-top of the mountain of data banks keep on their customers.”

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