5.1: Sam.
Figure 5.6: Medford, New York.
Figure 5.7: Bobbatron, Hawaii.
Figure 5.8: Parkland, Florida.
Figure 5.9: Dylan, Kuala Lumpur.
Figure 5.11: White Sands, New Mexico.
Figure 5.12: The Mouse, Portland, Oregon.
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1 For a wonderful account of human computation, see David Alan Grier’s (2005) When Computers Were Human. This practice overlapped considerably with the era of the digital computer. At its peak, the Mathematical Tables Project, funded by the WPA, employed more than 400 human computers at its site in New York City from the late 1930s through 1948.
2 https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/the-unregulated-work-of-mechanical-turk—My workers were paid $1 USD for their images, and since Amazon provides fairly detailed stats, I can tell this works out to about $8.75/hour—not great but above the minimum wage for the United States. For more on how I tried to balance fairness and a limited artist’s budget for this project, see http://www.jeffreythompson.org/blog/2014/11/14/turker-computer-process-notes
3 See the blog post above for further work that shows a shift in Mechanical Turk worker demographics during the run of the project from non-Western to mostly American, due in large part of Amazon changing their policies. This change is evident in the project too, shifting towards Western homes and higher-end computers.
tijana hirsch
“My kids say ‘shit’ occasionally but pronounced ‘sheet’ so at least I know it is not coming from me as the only English speaking parent in our house. Unfortunately I can’t blame gan1 for the ‘for fucks sake’ usage from our little ones—whoops.”
Dania is a transnational settler,2 a working, now multilingual, professional woman, and a mother to four daughters. She and her Swedish-English-Israeli husband relocated to Israel in 2007, when Dania was in advanced stages of her first pregnancy. I met her at a ‘mommy and me’ gathering for English speakers initially organized by one of the fellow moms whom I met through a Yahoo Groups posting. Since, Dania and I have met many times, with our growing families and alone, and have over the years had many conversations, online and off, on the topic of migration: the translocation, the settlement, and the language(s). In this piece, I focus on how Dania embraced her networked life “in media” (Deuze, 2011)—in particular in Facebook—after arriving to Israel. I briefly pan, scan, and zoom in ←55 | 56→on (Stephens, 1998) her trajectories as an immigrant and a mother, and how those shaped her life in the internet.
Dania already had a Facebook account when she moved to Israel, and considered herself an active internet user. Facebook reached 100 million users in 2008, when Dania’s first child was born, and 500 million active users in 2010, when her twins and the Israeli Facebook Baby-Community she helped to co-create were born. As the babies and Facebook grew, so did the number of communities that Dania as an immigrant mother needed, created or joined. Some of the mothers, who had initially been involved in the Baby community with Dania, created a Kid community, then the City Specific Kid community, then many more after that. For Dania, Facebook became a tool for co-creating a digitally mediated and networked communal life. Each community served as a (co)created, (re)used, shared place that different users frequented depending on their stable and/or fleeting interests, needs, desires and hopes. Dania’s description of that period of her life paints a picture of fluid movement between various Facebook communities while by those very moves creating those communities and their boundaries. She used the space(s) as needed—for respite and information—as part of her being both an immigrant and a mother. “My Israeli aunt came over and was shocked that our six year old after three months in school could not read fluently … given that Hebrew is her third language I decided to ignore.”
Like so many others, she used her Facebook communities as an informational tool to ask for and get recommendations for services, places, and businesses within the new, initially strange place that Israel was for her. Similarly, Dania and her peers entered their Facebook communities as places to overcome isolation and loneliness that often comes with early stages of both motherhood and relocation. There they could share their challenges with pregnancies, birth, nursing, and childcare; seek advice or just vent. As Dania made her way to the stores or businesses recommended to her in the Facebook communities, her understanding
