STRATEGIC VISIBILITIES: DIGITIZING THE LATINA INFORMATION WORKER

Recent examples of virtual assistant technologies designed as Latina information service workers are noteworthy objects of study for their potential to bridge analyses of Latinas’ labor history and information technology. Latinas in the United States have traditionally worked in blue-collar information technology sectors characterized by repetitive labor and low-wages, such as electronics manufacturing and customer service. Latinas information service workers, though fundamental to technoscience, have been largely invisible in histories of computing. Latina virtual assistants mark a shift in this labor history by relying on the strategic visibility of Latina identity in/as the technology interface. Our research explores Latina virtual assistants designed by Airus Media, and installed as airport workers in airports along the southwestern border of the United States. We situate the technocultural narratives present in the design and marketing of these technologies within the broader histories of invisible Latina information labor in the United States. We find continuities between the ways Latinas have historically been positioned as “ideal” information workers, and the use of Latina identity in the design of virtual assistants. We argue that the strategic visibility of Latina virtual assistants is linked to the oppressive structures of invisibility that have traditionally organized Latina information service workers.

ON BROWN BOXES: HIDDEN INTERDEPENDENCE IN UNBOXING VIDEOS

This paper sheds light on the hidden interdependence in unboxing videos by examining brown cardboard boxes and the mechanism of “brown-boxing” through one extravagant unboxing video by makeup influencer Roxette Arisa on YouTube. I use brown boxes to illustrate the entanglement between digital influencer media and supply chain. Brown boxes are integral sites to explore the operating mechanisms and aesthetics of digital capitalism. Similar to how black-boxing signals the practice of hiding information/labor, and masking operation in technology, brown-boxing points to the mechanisms of concealment across capitalist sectors along the supply chain. Although supply chain is rarely discussed, logistical labor and/as infrastructure do unexpectedly show up in influencer media. These linkages sometimes unintentionally seep into audiovisual media. Perhaps the most unexpected scene takes place when Arisa’s filming of the unboxing video is interrupted by a doorbell ring with the delivery of more boxes by a UPS worker. From the off-frame interaction captured and remain visible briefly in this unboxing video, we feel the presence of the delivery worker. Examining brown boxes and the process of brown-boxing is to think through the containerization of supply chain capitalism. Brown boxes and black boxes are typically discussed in separate spaces, with the former attracting scholars of logistics/supply chains whereas the latter appealing to scholars of digital media/communication. My analysis of the materialities of unboxing video adds to the conversation around the overlapping of infrastructures and the labor that sustain the operation of these infrastructures.

Weavers of Film

This article uses AT&T’s 1910s–30s “Weavers of Speech” campaign to read on-screen telegraph and telephone operators as vernacular translators of cinematic syntax and hypervisible avatars for the invisible cutter girls who “knitted the pieces of film together” on studio lots. While operators largely played peripheral roles in classical films, two transitional periods saw them rise to the surface of story en masse, as if temporarily hired to sew over a rupture. A comparative analysis of telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of crosscutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound suggests women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and auteur models that dominate theories of film editing. More broadly, the article suggests that the culturally conspicuous feminization of low-level information labor offers feminist film historians a crucial “mediatrix” for uncovering woman workers hidden in the cut of film.

Brand Identifiers as a Tool of Territorial Development

One of the promising areas of scientific research today is branding of territories. This issue is widely covered in the context of territorial marketing. Brand influence on recipient’s behavior is a significant brand management goal. That is why branding is actively used today in economy, in particular, when creating a territorial image. The development of urban space is predetermined by the need to form strategic guidelines that are adaptive to the existing competitive potential of the territory, dynamically changing environmental conditions, and toughening competition in the investment, information, labor, event, tourist and other markets. In this regard, the issues of territory’s promotion in the domestic and intercountry spaces by means of creating a recognizable urban brand which is associated with the most significant competitive advantages of the territory become more and more crucial. The importance of understanding the category of territory branding in the economic context is determined, in our opinion, by the formation of a territory brand, which helps to significantly strengthen the regional identity aimed at the elimination of various contradictions of religious, national character, as well as solution of problematic issues connected with the coexistence of various social groups within the same region. In order to determine the influence of brand identifiers on the economic development of the region, the authors have conducted a marketing study among the population of the Republic of Crimea, in which 242 respondents from various social and age groups took part. The survey reveals: respondents’ awareness of regional symbols depending on their age; respondents’ emotional perception of the logo of the city of Yalta; associative perception of the logo of the city of Saki; visual perception of the logo of the city of Kerch; knowledge of the logo of the city of Sudak; associative perception of the logo of the city of Feodosia; attitude of the population of the Republic of Crimea to the logos of cities in the region.

Online Credibility and Information Labor

This chapter examines how information infrastructure influences ethos in information labor. The primary text is discourse about ACID3, a web page created by members of the Web Standards Project. ACID3 tests the compliance of infrastructural standards for web browsers. In addition to analyzing ACID3 code, several other related conference presentations, job announcements, and web pages are analyzed to theorize ACID3 as a rhetorical text. This chapter argues that three rhetorical commonplaces (mastery, purity, infallibility) are central for the credibility of ACID3 as a text of legitimacy. This study provides a better understanding of rhetoric and infrastructure. To understand rhetorics of infrastructural standardization is to understand the power structures embedded within the modern world. ACID3 is a significant case because of its criticality for standards that enable publics to publish Web content. This chapter contributes to literature in information infrastructural studies, science and technology studies, and the rhetoric of science.

Commentary: The Place of Labor in the History of Information-Technology Revolutions

As co-editor of this IRSH supplement “Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions”, I have to begin this commentary with a confession. Before I entered the world of abstract knowledge production, commodification, and consumption known as academia, I was myself a worker in a world of much more concrete information processing: I was a computer programmer in the US from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a time we might now consider the nostalgic heyday of desktop-office information technology (IT). In the spirit of full disclosure, before I leap into an analysis of how we might more broadly conceptualize information technology together with information labor in different historical contexts, I have decided to work through my own historical narrative a bit. After all, if historical practice teaches us nothing else, it teaches that each of us makes sense of the world through the lens of personal experience, leaving historians (among others) with the daunting task of interpreting, translating, and finding patterns of meaning in those experiences. Thus I offer this candid admission: “I was a teenage information worker!”