#& they offered a variety of challenges for al to face & in turn helped develop His character

[arttheclown]

can i also say i appreciate that sean lewis (king spawn’s writer) doesn’t kill off villains very often, which is a real problem that mcfarlane had in the earlier issues LOL

#spawnposting #there are some villains who really deserve the axe like billy kincaid & i think both lewis & mcfarlane recognize that #because that character is never around for long periods of time #but in order to really develop a character & get your readers invested in them you have to like. keep them around #not to mention actually developing them as adversaries to your heroes #that's why vi & wynn worked so well in the og series. because we actually got to know them #& they offered a variety of challenges for al to face & in turn helped develop His character #same goes for malebolgia #there's a reason why i mostly just talk about those three im afraid </3 #in terms of spawn villains #the other antagonists just aren't around long enough typically to get me invested in them #and if they were around a lot their personalities weren't clearly defined enough which sucks because some of them have potential to cool #like the freak / the curse / overkill / etc #at least cygor was redeemed & turned into al's ally

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Podcast Episode: Why Does My Internet Suck?

Episode 002 of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet

Gigi Sohn joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss broadband access in the United States – or the lack thereof. Gigi explains the choices American policymakers and tech companies made that have caused millions to lack access to reliable broadband, and what steps we need to take to fix the problem now. 

In this episode you’ll learn:

How the FCC defines who has broadband Internet and why that definition makes no sense in 2020;

How many other countries adopted policies that either incentivized competition among Internet providers or invested in government infrastructure for Internet services, while the United States did neither, leading to much of the country having only one or two Internet service providers, high costs, and poor quality Internet service;

Why companies like AT&T and Verizon aren’t investing in fiber;

How the FCC uses a law about telephone regulation to assert authority over regulating broadband access, and how the 1996 Telecommunication Act granted the FCC permission to forbear – or not apply – certain parts of that law;

How 19 states in the U.S. have bans or limitations on municipal broadband, and why repealing those bans is key to increasing broadband access

How Internet access is connected to issues of equity, upward mobility, and job accessibility, as well as related issues of racial justice, citizen journalism and police accountability;

Specific suggestions and reforms, including emergency subsidies and a major investment in infrastructure, that could help turn this situation around.

Gigi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy and a Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate.  She is one of the nation’s leading public advocates for open, affordable and democratic communications networks. From 2013-2016, Gigi was Counselor to the former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler. She advised the Chairman on a wide range of Internet, telecommunications and media issues, representing him and the FCC in a variety of public forums around the country as well as serving as the primary liaison between the Chairman’s office and outside stakeholders. From 2001-2013, Gigi served as the Co-Founder and CEO of Public Knowledge, a leading telecommunications, media and technology policy advocacy organization. She was previously a Project Specialist in the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts and Culture unit and Executive Director of the Media Access Project, a public interest law firm. You can find Gigi on her own podcast, Tech on the Rocks, or you can find her on Twitter at @GigiBSohn.

Below, you’ll find legal resources – including links to important cases, books, and briefs discussed in the podcast – as well a full transcript of the audio.

Please subscribe to How to Fix the Internet on Stitcher, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your podcast player of choice. You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive. If you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]

Resources

Current State of Broadband

The American Federal Definition of Broadband is Both Useless and Harmful (EFF)

America is Still in Desperate Need for a Fiber Broadband for Everyone Plan: Year in Review 2019 (EFF) 

Report: Most Americans Have No Real Choices in Internet Providers (Institute for Local Self Reliance)

Social Distancing, the Digital Divide, and Fixing This Going Forward (EFF)

Fiber

The Case for Fiber to the Home, Today: Why Fiber is a Superior Medium for 21st Century Broadband (EFF)

ISP Anti-Competitive Practices & Broadband Policy

1996 Telecommunications Act

Broadband Monopolies Are Acting Like Old Phone Monopolies. Good Thing Solutions to That Problem Already Exist 

Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic at Colorado Law White Paper re. Modern US Broadband Market

Local Communities Can Inject Desperately Needed Competition in the ISP Market (EFF):

19 States Restrict Local Broadband Solutions (Institute for Local Self-Reliance)

The FCC Can't Save Community Broadband -- But We Can (EFF)

Why is South Korea a Global Broadband Leader? (EFF)

Net Neutrality

2005 National Cable & Telecommunications Assn v. Brand X Internet Services Decision (Wikipedia)  

Cable Wins Internet-Access Ruling (New York Times)

New Neutrality Takes a Wild Ride: 2014 in Review (EFF)

DC Circuit Court’s Decision in Verizon v FCC 

An Attack on Net Neutrality Is an Attack on Free Speech (EFF)

D.C. Circuit Offers Bad News, Good New on Net Neutrality: FCC Repeal Upheld, But States Can Fill the Gap (EFF)

Mozilla v FCC EFF Amicus Brief (EFF)

California's Net Neutrality Law: What Happened, What's Next (EFF) 

CA’s Net Neutrality Law Letters of Supporters (EFF)

Broad Coalition Urges Court Not to Block California's Net Neutrality Law (EFF)

California Net Neutrality Cases - American Cable Association, et al v. Xavier Becerra and United States of America v. State of California (EFF)

Other

Gigi Sohn's website

Transcript of Episode 002: Why Does My Internet Suck?

Danny O'Brien: Welcome to How to Fix the Internet with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a podcast that explores some of the biggest problems we face online right now, problems whose source and solution is often buried in the obscure twists of technological development, societal change, and the subtle details of Internet law.

Cindy Cohn: Hi, everyone. I'm Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and, for purposes of this podcast, I'm also a lawyer.

Danny O'Brien: And I'm Danny O'Brien, and I work at the EFF, too, although they have yet to notice I'm not actually a lawyer. Welcome to How to Fix the Internet, a podcast that explores some of the more pressing problems facing the Internet today, and solves them, right then and there.

Cindy Cohn: Well, or at least we're hoping to point the way to a better future with the help of some experts who can guide us and, sometimes, challenge our thinking.

Danny O'Brien: This episode, we're tackling a problem that has been a blatant issue for years here in the United States, and yet no one seems able to fix. Namely, why does my broadband connectivity suck? Cindy, I live in San Francisco, supposedly the beating heart of the digital revolution, but I'm stuck with a slow and expensive connection. My video calls look like I'm filming them with a potato. What went wrong?

Cindy Cohn: Well, maybe take the potato away, Danny. But, you know, it's a recurrent complaint that the home of the Internet, the United States, has some of the worst bandwidth, the highest costs in the developing world. And that's a problem that our guest today has been tackling for much of her career.

Cindy Cohn: Gigi Sohn is one of the nation's leading advocates for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks. She is currently a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy. Previously, she was counselor to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and she co-founded and led the nonprofit Public Knowledge for 12 years. And I'm proud to say that she's currently a member of EFF's board of directors.

Danny O'Brien: Welcome, Gigi. When we talk about broadband policy, what we're really talking about is fast Internet, home and business Internet that's speedy enough to do what we need to do these days online. Yet, I was looking and the FCC, the regulator in charge of such things in the U.S., Defines broadband as 25 megabits per second down and 3 megabits up. That seems a little low to me.

Gigi Sohn: Yes, it is very slow. But before I start on my rant and rave, I just want to say how delighted I am to be with you guys today. Very socially distant, 3000 miles away, but also how proud I am to serve on EFF's board, so thank you, Cindy, for asking me to do that, and I love being part of this organization.

Gigi Sohn: So, yes, 25 megabits per second down, three up. That is the definition that was set in 2014, when I worked at the FCC. And now we are in 2020 and we are in the middle of a pandemic, and it is quite clear that, if you, like me, have three people working from home, on Zoom calls, at least two of us on Zoom calls at the same time and another doing her homework, that 25 megabits per second down and, particularly, three up, which nobody ever focuses on the upload speed, is just wholly inadequate.

Gigi Sohn: So, let me tell you a story. Up until about six weeks ago, I had 75 megabits per second symmetrical at the low, low price of $80 a month. I called my broadband ISP, Verizon, and I said, "There's three of us in the house and we're all working at the same time. I need 200 megabits per second symmetrical for an extra $30 a month." And the tech told me the truth and said, "Yeah, 75 symmetrical, that's not enough for three of you."

Gigi Sohn: So, that'll tell you a bit about how outdated the FCC's definition of broadband is, when a company representative is telling you that 75 megabits per second symmetrical isn't enough for just three people.

Danny O'Brien: And I mean, what's crazy to me, and we're going to be talking in this show primarily about the United States experience, but I use what bandwidth I have to talk to people in the rest of the world, and it seems most countries, or a lot of countries, I should say, have far better connectivity at a far lower price. So, it seems crazy that the United States, which is certainly one of the origins of the Internet, has struggled to provide that Internet to its own citizens.

Gigi Sohn: Well, I think there's a very simple explanation for that. In the other countries, the countries have either made, like South Korea, a major investment in broadband. They consider it infrastructure. They consider it, if not a public utility, like a public utility. Or, in places like England, the policy permits great competition. And we have neither of that.

Gigi Sohn: The investment that this government has made in our infrastructure, in our broadband infrastructure, has been nominal. Now, there's some proposals out there I'm happy to talk about to up that number considerably. But perhaps even more importantly, the policy that we had, which promoted competition in the narrow band world, in the dial up world in the late 90s and the early 00s, the average American had access to an average of 13 different ISPs. Today, you're lucky if you've got two.

Gigi Sohn: It does amaze me how little competition there is in San Francisco. So, there's a recent study out from a group called the Institute for Local Self Reliance, and it showed that nearly 50 million Americans have a choice of only one broadband provider, and that's using the FCC's really lousy data, which grossly overstates who has access to broadband. And that Comcast and Charter, the two largest cable companies, have a monopoly over 47 million Americans and another 33 million on top of that have only digital subscriber line, or DSL, which is not even 25/3 most of the time, as their competitive choice.

Gigi Sohn: So, because we got rid of policies that promoted competition, we now have a series of regional monopolies, and they can charge what they want. And they could serve who they want.

Cindy Cohn: So, how did we get here, Gigi? How did we end up with this lack of choice in the United States?

Gigi Sohn: I think it's two reasons. Again, we let the private sector take over what is essentially public infrastructure. The government said, this was Democrats and Republicans, this is not partisan, "We should let the free market, so to speak, flourish. We should let the market flourish."

Gigi Sohn: And for a while there, again in the late 90s and early 00s, it did. But then the FCC deregulated broadband and eliminated the requirement that dominant telecom providers in a community had to open up their networks to competitors. And that was the beginning of the end. So, that's when we had a choice of 13 dial up ISPs per American. But as soon as the FCC said, "No, no, no, broadband Internet access is something different than dial up. It's different than phone service. We're going to deregulate it and we're not going to subject it to that requirement that the dominant provider open up their networks," that's when the entire competitive ISP industry shrunk to nothing.

Danny O'Brien: So, I remember a time when, during the transition between dial up, it was dial up, which was slow, but we had competition, so you had all these mom and pop ISPs, and you could pick which one you wanted to use just by calling a different number. And then there was DSL, and DSL was provided by the phone companies. Correct me if I'm getting this wrong [crosstalk 00:08:18]

Gigi Sohn: Correct.

Danny O'Brien: But down the copper wire. And that was sort of competing with cable, which had already laid its wires and could provide something a little faster.

Gigi Sohn: Not exactly. So, DSL came first, and the Federal Communications Commission, which regulated DSL, considered it just like telephone service. It did come over the same copper wire, and they regulated it like telephone service, and again, required the AT&Ts and the Verizons of the world to open up their networks to competitors. This was a result of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which is a much derided, but I believe, actually, it was quite an excellent piece of legislation that really has almost no force and effect anymore.

Gigi Sohn: Then cable modem service came along afterwards, and the cable industry went to the FCC and asked it to declare how it should be regulated. Should it be regulated like DSL, or should it be regulated like something else? Or unregulated, or deregulated? The FCC decided, this was in 2002, that cable modem service should be deregulated, not subject to the same requirements as DSL.

Gigi Sohn: That case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which said, "Well, we don't think the FCC's reading of the Communications Act of 1934, which is its organic statute, the statute that it is required to follow, is the best. But because it's the expert agency, they get deference." So, the FCC won, and then the FCC said, "Well, if we're not going to regulate cable modem service like a telephone service, we're certainly not going to regulate DSL that way, and we're certainly not going to regulate mobile broadband, or mobile wireless that way."

Gigi Sohn: So, that's when, in 2002, well, 2005 really, after this Brand X decision came out of the Supreme Court, that's when everything came tumbling down, and this so-called free market in broadband was allowed to reign. And what you got, again, under both Democrats and Republicans, was intense consolidation, regional monopolies. And guess what happens with concentration and monopoly? High prices. We have some of the highest broadband prices in the world. We average about $79 a month for broadband, and again, that's the crummy broadband.

Danny O'Brien: Yeah, I do remember that it was specifically around about this time, around 2005, when connectivity began to really suck here in the West Coast. I remember, really, before that, there were competitors in copper wire DSL, COVAD and Sonic were two of the challengers here on the West Coast. But after that decision by the FCC, they really seemed to struggle to compete with AT&T, the local phone incumbent whose wires they were using.

Danny O'Brien: Still, all of those series of decisions you described did leave cable and the phone companies sort of dueling with each other. Why wasn't there enough to bring competition to the next stage of broadband?

Gigi Sohn: They're not because the phone companies have been punished when they've invested in fiber. Right? So, Verizon Fios, when it came to market, everybody was really excited and Wall Street just pummeled its stock price. So, for all intents and purposes, Verizon Fios is not expanding. It's in really very limited areas. I don't know if you can get out there in San Francisco, but in a lot of places, you cannot.

Gigi Sohn: Similarly, AT&T, I think, not wanting to follow Verizon's lead, hasn't invested in that either, and those two companies are far more interested in building out their mobile wireless capacity than they are in building their wire line fiber capacity. So, that's why you don't see Verizon Fios and AT&T's Uverse, that's the name of their fiber offering, which again, is very limited. And by the way, AT&T still offers DSL in a lot of places, particularly in inner cities.

Gigi Sohn: That's why you don't see a lot of competition between the two of them. And really, that was the thinking behind the Telecommunications Act of 1996, was that you were going to have this kind of fervent competition between the cable companies and the telephone companies, and you would have fervent competition between cable companies themselves.

Gigi Sohn: But what these companies did, good for their bottom line, was basically split up the country into different regions and become monopolies. But it said AT&T and Verizon, I think if they could sell off their fiber, they'd do it in a heartbeat and just focus on mobile.

Cindy Cohn: So, Gigi, how do we break up this situation where we're stuck with a duopoly? And how does this conversation fit in with the ongoing, very public fights around network neutrality?

Gigi Sohn: Yeah, so the first thing that the FCC needs to do, if we have a new FCC, is restore its authority to promote competition in the broadband market. And look, I'm glad about how many people know about net neutrality. My 15-year-old daughter and all her classmates know about net neutrality. My 86-year-old mother knows about net neutrality, and my relatives know about it.

Gigi Sohn: But net neutrality, in my mind, is less about ISPs blocking and throttling and discriminating against traffic. Obviously that's something we really, really want to prevent. But it's more about is there somebody, is there a government agency that is overseeing an industry that is highly concentrated, that controls an incredibly essential resource, and that, without anybody to oversee them, is free to charge whatever they want and free to do whatever they want.

Cindy Cohn: One thing that really shifted things for me was the 2014 DC Circuit decision that rejected the prior legal basis that the FCC was relying on to do network neutrality. As part of that, the DC Circuit told the agency that it couldn't even pass rules to target abuses by the ISPs. So, as a result of that decision, the FCC couldn't stop ISPs from blocking, it couldn't stop them from discriminating among applications, favoring its own or making a pay-to-play scheme, and it couldn't stop special access fees. This meant that we really weren't going to get a market correction here, and we had to do something. And ultimately, what we did was the Open Internet Order.

Gigi Sohn: Yeah. Look, here's the problem. The part of the Communications Act, what is known colloquially as Title II, or Chapter II, in plain English, right now, is all the FCC has to assert its regulatory authority over broadband. Now, should Congress pass a new chapter, a new title, that really is just super focused on broadband? Yeah, I think that would be a great idea. But we don't have that right now.

Gigi Sohn: And that's why, when I was at the FCC in 2015, we reversed that 2002 decision that I talked about some time ago, and said, "No, no. We're going to regulate broadband like a telephone service," although not entirely like a telephone service. And this is where it gets a little complicated. Because obviously, a law that was written in 1934, every jot and tittle shouldn't necessarily apply to broadband.

Gigi Sohn: But the good news is, in that same 1996 Telecommunications Act, the FCC was given permission to forebear or not apply parts of Title II that it didn't believe to be in the public interest. So, what we did was said, "Look, the only game in town for us to protect consumers and promote competition," and this is really important, and I'll talk about that in a minute, "Is Title II." But I think we didn't apply 75% or 80% of the Title II provisions because they didn't make sense to apply to broadband.

Cindy Cohn: I know. I remember when that fight was going on and our activism team was like, "Title II plus Forbearance." Doesn't really lend itself to a slogan or something we could put on T-shirts or anything. But it really was a way that I think, and you were inside the FCC at this time, a way to really ensure that we were able to think about regulating broadband in a way that was consistent with how broadband is, that we weren't straitjacketed into things. I mean, the whole thing would be better if Congress actually just did its job and thought about how to regulate broadband.

Danny O'Brien: I feel like a lot of the theme of our conversations about fixing the Internet is that the most obvious solution is somehow blocked in some way, because, given that it's so obvious, why don't we do it? And looking at the fights that have gone on about broadband, regulation and encouraging competition, the obvious thing to do is not to have a law written in 1996 based on a law written in 1934, but to write a new one.

Danny O'Brien: And it just so happens, in the United States, that Congress is so dysfunctional right now that we can't do that. So, what are the other, sneakier, skunkworksy kind of routes can we take to fix this?

Gigi Sohn: Well, look, the fact of the matter is if we're going to close the digital divide in this country, it's not just about fast broadband, Danny. It's about over 140 million Americans that don't have broadband, either because they don't have any infrastructure or because they can't afford it. It's important to note that the affordability problem is far larger, like 2.5X larger, than the infrastructure problem.

Gigi Sohn: So, at a time like today, like now, during this pandemic, where the only way you can work and your kids can learn, and you can communicate with others in a safe way is through the Internet, we've got to deal with the problem at hand, and that's the affordability problem. And that is not going to get solved by the private market.

Gigi Sohn: What's interesting is, right now, you're seeing both the wire line and the wireless companies going to Congress and saying, "Can you provide a $50 a month credit for broadband for low income Americans?" And they're finally admitting two things. Number one, is that government must have a role, and they hate that, right? Because it's all about the "free market" for them. And number two is they cannot close the digital divide themselves. They've been boasting about how they're providing broadband free during the pandemic and they're not cutting people off, that they're not charging them late fees.

Gigi Sohn: But the latest numbers I've seen is that, in the first two quarters of 2020, only 2.4 million people took up broadband that didn't have it before. And that doesn't necessarily mean they're low income. That still leaves... I testified in front of Congress that 141 million Americans don't have broadband either because of affordability, infrastructure. Microsoft estimates 162 million, almost 50% of Americans. Okay?

Gigi Sohn: So, we're talking about a huge gap, and if all they've signed up at the beginning of the pandemic is 2.4 million, industry is not moving the needle. So, that takes us to who's going to fill that gap. It's got to be government and it would certainly help if the 19 states that have prohibited their communities from building their own broadband networks, those laws were repealed.

Danny O'Brien: Wait, wait. Back up a bit because I want to get this down. Because when I said there must be someone else if the federal government is doing this, I was coughing under my breath and pointing out like the states could do it or maybe we've had rumblings in San Francisco for many years that maybe that San Francisco might build out its own broadband. But you're saying that the states actually prohibit cities from creating their own competition.

Gigi Sohn: Yeah, so 19 states either totally ban local communities from building their own broadband networks or limit them in some way, put hurdles over them. So, for example, in Colorado, if you're a local community and you want to build a broadband network in that community, you have to have a ballot initiative. Now, as it turns out, something like 70 Colorado communities have had that, but think about if you're a low income community. It's expensive to have a ballot initiative, and who are you fighting? You're fighting the resources of a Comcast or a Charter or an AT&T and a Verizon, who are trying to block you.

Gigi Sohn: So, there are either enormous hurdles or they're flat out bans. Now, when I was at the FCC, we tried to preempt those state laws and we were struck down. Our decision was struck down by the 6th Circuit. So, it's either going to take Congress to pass a law, and in fact, there is one law that actually was passed by the House of Representatives, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, that would preempt those state laws, or states themselves.

Gigi Sohn: I've urged communities. I say to them, "Get every mayor that you know, get every chamber of commerce, get every university, and go to your state legislators and say, "You are killing us and you are killing the state economy. You need to repeal this law."

Cindy Cohn: Yeah, it's a disaster. Now, we do have some good news. One of the things that happened with the last DC Circuit ruling around network neutrality is that the circuit freed up the states to be able to do some of this work.

Gigi Sohn: The Communications Act of 1934 does explicitly note that it is both the duty of the states and the federal government to provide connectivity for all. Obviously, they weren't thinking about broadband. They were thinking about telephony, but again, this is the telephone of the 21st century. There's always been a dual role.

Gigi Sohn: Now, what happened, again, this was around the late 90s and early 00s, was that the cable and telephone companies went to state legislators and they said, "You know, the feds got this Internet regulation thing. You don't need to do it. You can deregulate yourself." And that's what they did, and indeed, Governor Brown signed a largely deregulatory bill in California. So, the states got out of the business of protecting consumers, protecting competition in their own states. And when you have a state as large as California, the notion that the state government would have nothing to do with this vital resource is kind of a crazy idea.

Danny O'Brien: I think one of the things that we got, I got to spend some time a few years ago doing that thing where you have a focus group and you get to hear people actually talking about your issues. We were behind one of those two-way glasses. And the funny thing was, of course, that our topic of interest is surveillance.

Danny O'Brien: So, there are all these people talking about surveillance, and then occasionally looking over at the two-way mirror and wondering who exactly was listening to this. But the thing that came out of it, for me, was people were freaked out about surveillance. People were particularly mad, though, at the cable companies and the phone companies, out of all the people that were.

Danny O'Brien: What was interesting to me is that this was sort of before the Facebooks and the Googles began to attract the venom that they have now. People really don't like their cable companies. And this turns out, politically, too. I think particularly after the pandemic. Every single person who has a child need broadband right now because otherwise they can't comply with the education requirements of this day.

Danny O'Brien: So, I think there's a real political moment here, and I think, tell me if I'm wrong, but I've seen politicians actually pick this up as an easy issue that isn't being addressed by, really, either side of the political divide effectively. And I think that it can work at every level. It can work at the city level, it can work at the state level, and the federal level. What should we be telling those politicians who, maybe, realize that this is a vote winner?

Gigi Sohn: So, again, let's start at the state level. If you have a law that severely limits or prohibits local communities from deciding whether or not to build their own broadband networks, repeal it. Repeal it today, repeal it tomorrow. That is, to me, the number one target, in my mind, that is limiting competition, is limiting the closing of the digital divide. It is terribly anti-competitive and anti-consumer. So, that's number one.

Gigi Sohn: At the local level, I would say consider building your own broadband network. There are so many cities and towns where, if you live just outside the city limits, you have to buy satellite. You have to buy three different services. You get DSL, satellite, it costs like $300-400 a month. Those are places that the private sector don't want to serve because there's not an economic return that's big enough for them. That's where community will serve.

Gigi Sohn: And at the federal level, look, the Feds have to do a couple things. Number one, they have to immediately, first on an emergency basis, and then permanently, pass what I call a monthly broadband benefit of at least $50 a month. Because these local community broadband builds are not going to happen overnight. So, you've got to make a dent in the affordability gap. And the way you do that is either you could call it a voucher or a credit. I don't care. Now we've got industry on board.

Gigi Sohn: The only thing that's holding this up right now is that Republicans don't want to pass a COVID-19 relief bill that's anything but a skinny bill that deals with some of the employment problems. I think this is definitely a COVID-19 problem, but the Republican Party doesn't agree. So, they need to do that, number one. First on a temporary basis, second on a permanent basis.

Gigi Sohn: They need to preempt the states to the extent that the states don't do it themselves, the federal government has to preempt those prohibitive state laws on municipal broadband. And third, they need to make a big bet on infrastructure, at least between $80-100 billion for infrastructure in those places where there is no broadband. And just to say, everybody likes to focus on rural America, rural America, rural America. There are lots of places in urban and suburban America that don't have infrastructure either.

Gigi Sohn: But what's important is the government has to do a better job of making sure that they get a return on that investment. We have spent tens of billions of dollars over the last decade on building infrastructure. And what's happened? It's happened in California. You get a company like Frontier that goes to the government trough, and doesn't build what it promised. And now it's going into bankruptcy.

Gigi Sohn: So, what's critical is for both federal and state governments working together as opposed to being adversaries, which they have been for the last three years, to make sure that, if my taxpayer dollars go into Frontier's pocket or CenturyLink's pockets, or anybody else's pockets, that we get the networks that we were promised.

Cindy Cohn: Gigi, let's go to the question that we kind of started with. What does the world look like if we get this right? How does our world get better if we get this right?

Gigi Sohn: If we get this right, every American who wants to be connected will be connected, and that's pretty much every American. One other thing that drives me absolutely nuts is people who say, "Well, there's lots of causes for the digital divide. Relevance is one of them." People don't think it's relevant.

Gigi Sohn: Well, all you need to do is go see the lines to use the computers at the library to know that is false, and that relevance means a lot of different things to different people. It's another way of saying, "I can't afford it." It's another way of saying, "I don't have the digital literacy to be able to use a computer." So, every American is connected at robust speeds of minimum, in my opinion, of 100 symmetrical, and that the government money is going to build future-proof infrastructure, not stuff that we're going to have to upgrade again in another 10 years, and that means fiber.

Gigi Sohn: Everything that allows for full participation in our society and our economy is now dependent on a robust broadband Internet access connection. So, that's what the world looks like, and I think we can get there, but we are so far from it right now, and it's shocking. The first national broadband plan was written in 2010, by my friend, Blair Levin, who was, at the time, coordinated this process at the FCC. And we have not even come close to fulfilling 90% of what he proposed in that report, and that is really sad.

Cindy Cohn: There's so much that we're going to get if we fix this. It's kids, it's work, it's flexibility for everyone to be able to set their lives up in a way that matches them better. In this time of the pandemic, we're seeing how important it is to some people to be able to support their families. Robust broadband everywhere gives people so many more choices.

Cindy Cohn: And I think there's an equity point under this, as well. Right now, it's pretty expensive to live in some of the places where people have to live to make a living. If we end up with robust broadband everywhere, we're going to free up people to do good work and do it from wherever they happen to be. I just don't know how many good works and excellent memes and good organizing and groundbreaking ideas we're missing because the only people who really get to participate are people who can live in places where there's really strong broadband. There's just so much we can gain from this.

Gigi Sohn: Think about the moment we're in right now, where people are protesting in the streets every day for racial and social justice. The digital divide disproportionately impacts people of color, regardless of income. And that's because of systemic racism. That's because of unjust credit practices, unjust and discriminatory housing practices. You name it.

Gigi Sohn: And years ago, in the 60s, Lyndon Johnson dictated something called the Kerner Commission. He basically had a guy named Otto Kerner, I don't remember what Kerner did, but he basically looked at the causes for social unrest and racial inequality in this country. One of the causes was the lack of access to what was the only medium at the time, broadcasting. The way that broadcasters covered the protests, the Civil Rights protests, and how they covered communities of color. And needless to say, it was not a positive.

Gigi Sohn: So, access to the means of communication is a way of pulling one's self up and being equal in society, having an equal voice in society. So, it's much more than, can somebody in a garage invent something. It's, can all Americans have equal rights and equal access to the main means of communication in this country and, frankly, in this world.

Cindy Cohn: I think that's such an important point, Gigi. We have to understand the role of technology in lifting people up and giving them access to information, and uniting people from different backgrounds. Lots of people have talked about that for years, but what we spend less time talking about, and what I think is equally important, is how technology is being used every day to document abuses of people in power, including police abuses against people of color.

Cindy Cohn: And once those abuses are documented, how easily they can be widely and immediately shared, accessed and discussed. This ability to see what is actually going on in the streets in nearly real time has helped to shift the conversation about equity in our country. We have so far to go, but we're not going to get there without people across the country, and honestly across the globe, being able to participate by sharing what they see and accessing what other people see on their phones and computers, reading the articles, commenting on social media, organizing and reaching out to their representatives.

Cindy Cohn: Internet access is just vital to all of these things. It is the infrastructure of democracy in our time, and also of social change. We have to understand that vital role and begin to think about broadband in that perspective.

Danny O'Brien: I remember in the 90s, arguing with someone about broadband, and what was fast and what wasn't. I said, "Well, what about the upload speed? We've got to have a fast upload speed." And I remember this, he worked for British telecom, he sort of said, "What are they going to upload? Video? And are they going to create? We have the BBC."

Danny O'Brien: Of course, that's what starts revolutions, is the ability to upload what you see around you and show that to the rest of the world, and you need fast Internet to do that.

Gigi Sohn: Yeah, absolutely.

Cindy Cohn: Well, thank you so much, Gigi. This has been a lot of fun, and I think we can build that better world, and I'm so glad you're a part of helping make it happen.

Danny O'Brien: That was super interesting and I think one of the positive elements that I got out of it was this vision of people getting the chance to build or contribute to their own Internet connectivity. Though it seems to me that part of the reason why people get frustrated is because they don't feel they have any power, and the idea that you might have a municipality or a community or a local business providing you Internet connectivity is very inspiring because it'll mean that you literally have a connection to the people providing you the connection.

Danny O'Brien: And also good for technologists, too, because I sometimes get frustrated, but it's not like I can go to Comcast headquarters. Whereas, if it was just down the road or my local city, I might be able to make a difference.

Cindy Cohn: Yeah, I think that's right. The theme of a lot of this is how do we bring back user control, and what was exciting to me is Gigi's really talking about giving users control of the very means in which they get to the Internet, which is the very first step. And I think the other thing that was really important from this is that we had a reasonable market in the late 1990s. We had a lot of choices for ISPs, and maybe a lot of people who came online later than that may not realize that.

Cindy Cohn: This was something that we had kind of gotten done pretty well, and then we broke it. This is something that got broken. It got broken, in part, because of FCC deciding that it didn't want to regulate anymore. That decision being confirmed by a Supreme Court case called Brand X in 2005. Then we had a regulator that wanted to regulate again, which is when Gigi worked there. And now, we have, under Ajit Pai, an FCC that doesn't want to regulate again.

Cindy Cohn: But the good news in all of that is that we do know what a good answer looks like. It's not an all or nothing in terms of regulation, as if, once you're regulating, you're all the way to a public utility. That the Open Internet Order that we had in the last years of the Obama administration had a balance, basically, requiring some regulation in order to spur competition, but also something called forbearance, with the regulators saying, "We want to regulate in this way, but we don't need to do everything that we do for broadband in the same way we did for telephone."

Danny O'Brien: Right. I feel like there's just no way you can not regulate the telecom industry because it's already tied up in so much red tape. And not just in the U.S., To be honest. This was a very American-specific conversation that we had here, but I end up working with a lot of people all around the world and I know that I said that lots of countries have better connectivity than the U.S. On average, but a lot of countries have much worse connectivity as well.

Danny O'Brien: And when I sit and talk to them, folks working there, they have exactly that same frustration. It always seems to be the same combination. It's always how do we break through a lack of competition, or the fact that the telcos have come to this agreement with governments that isn't working.

Cindy Cohn: Yeah, it's interesting because sometimes this gets framed as regulation or not regulation, and first, as I mentioned, you can have smart regulation that really helps, but also, a lot of what Gigi was talking about was actually the law getting in the way, regulation. And she was talking about the things that we need to do to fix it. The first thing on her list was we need to get the 19 states that have said that people can't have municipal broadband or can't build their own competitors to the giants. We need to get those laws repealed. That's regulation as well, but it's regulation that's disempowering users, rather than empowering them.

Danny O'Brien: What did you think about the idea of giving everybody $50 to get decent Internet?

Cindy Cohn: Well, I think it's worth thinking of in the short term. And she said that. This was a short term subsidy. She basically said we're not going to be able to build out the infrastructure we need, especially for, and I thought it was important that she pointed out that we need infrastructure built, not just in rural places, which is where we think of immediately, but lots of urban places. We need to build that infrastructure.

Cindy Cohn: So, I think the thought that we needed to give people a subsidy so that they could get broadband now, because people need broadband now, especially during this pandemic time, that would be a bridge towards a time in which we had competition actually helping us have more options and the prices go low.

Cindy Cohn: I'm open to that. I think we're in a time in which we need to think a little more broadly about how the government can support people. And certainly, the concerns that she raised about some of the ISPs, Frontier, for instance, taking a whole lot of government money, saying that they were going to build out infrastructure, and then not building it out and going bankrupt. That's just a horrible situation. And at least if you give money to the end users to buy connectivity for themselves, you avoid that kind of problem, which frankly is a lot more money lost.

Danny O'Brien: Right. So, the idea is that, at least if you're giving the money to the users, they're going to expect and hopefully get something from those companies, rather than just giving the money directly to the companies. And yeah, I agree with you. It seems like the biggest fix here, it's the thing that stood out for me, was we need to get those 19 states that actually prohibit community and municipal broadband involvement. We need to get those laws off the book.

Cindy Cohn: Yeah, and I guess the good news/bad news about that is it seems very clear that everybody hates their broadband providers. They hated them before the pandemic, and the pandemic has just made it worse. So, as an activist organization, that's our opportunity. There's a lot of public support for making sure everybody's kid can get an education while staying safe. And that sense, I think, from a lot of people, that they've been ripped off by their broadband providers for a very long time. We need to harness that energy towards a movement to basically fix this, to give us the broadband that we deserve.

Danny O'Brien: Well, on that slightly mixed note of taking people's hatred of broadband providers and turning it into political action, we should wrap up. Thanks very much, Cindy, and thanks to our guest, Gigi Sohn.

Danny O'Brien: Thanks again for joining us. If you'd like to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, here are three things you can do today. One, you can hit subscribe in your podcast player of choice, and if you have time, please leave a review. It helps more people find us.

Danny O'Brien: Two, please share on social media and with your friends and family. Three, please visit eff.org/podcasts, where you will find more episodes, learn about these issues, and donate to become a member and lots more. Members are the only reason we can do this work, plus you can get cool stuff like an EFF hat or an EFF hoodie, or even a camera cover for your laptop. Thanks once again for joining us, and if you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]. We do read every email.

Danny O'Brien: This podcast was produced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with help from Stuga Studios. Music by Nat Keefe of BeatMower.

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Ana Sofia Elias & Rosalind Gill, Beauty surveillance: The digital self-monitoring cultures of neoliberalism, 21 Eur J Cult Stud 59 (2017)

Abstract

This article argues that ‘beauty apps’ are transforming the arena of appearance politics and foregrounds a theoretical architecture for critically understanding them. Informed by a feminist-Foucaultian framework, it argues that beauty apps offer a technology of gender which brings together digital self-monitoring and postfeminist modalities of subjecthood to produce an hitherto unprecedented regulatory gaze upon women, which is marked by the intensification, extensification and psychologization of surveillance. The article is divided into four sections. First, it introduces the literature on digital self-tracking. Second, it sets out our understanding of neoliberalism and postfeminism. Third, it looks at beauty and surveillance, before offering, in the final section, a typology of appearance apps. This is followed by a discussion of the modes of address/authority deployed in these apps – especially what we call ‘surveillant sisterhood’ – and the kinds of entrepreneurial subjectivity they constitute. The article seeks to make a contribution to feminist surveillance studies and argues that much more detailed research is needed to critically examine beauty apps.

Introduction

Golden Beauty Meter is an app (mobile application) that will ‘determine if you are pretty or ugly’. Instaglam and Modiface allow you to ‘swipe your way to beautification’ by enhancing self-portraits to give you, for example, longer legs, higher cheekbones or whiter teeth in seconds. Beauty Mirror ‘lets you play plastic surgeon on your face’. These are examples of a rapidly proliferating category of computer, tablet and smartphone applications that we call ‘aesthetic self-tracking and modifying devices’ or – put simply – ‘beauty apps’. We use this term to encompass a wide range of different applications designed to analyse, rate, evaluate, monitor or enhance appearance. There are already thousands of these apps available – often free of charge or available for sale at very low prices (e.g. under a dollar) – but as yet there has been no scholarly research investigating them.

In this article, we seek to inaugurate some discussion of these apps, raising critical questions about them from a feminist perspective. We will argue that they form part of a wider trend towards self-tracking and self-monitoring (Lupton, 2014b; Nafus and Sherman, 2014; Rettberg, 2014), which has been understood as giving rise to a ‘quantified self’ (QS). For Deborah Lupton (2014a), the QS is best conceptualized as a ‘self-tracking’ or ‘reflexive monitoring’ self who uses the affordances of digital technology to collect, monitor, record and share a range of – quantified and non-quantifiable – information about herself or himself while engaging in ‘the process of making sense of this information as part of the ethical project of selfhood’. Her conceptualization valuably foregrounds the links between the QS and neoliberalism: ‘the very act of self-tracking, or positioning oneself as a self-tracker, is already a performance of a certain type of subject: the entrepreneurial, self-optimising subject’ (Lupton, 2014a). As Lupton shows in her analysis of sex apps and pregnancy apps (Lupton, 2015; Lupton and Thomas, 2015), women are major targets of these tracking technologies and they urgently require feminist attention.

Pushing forward Lupton’s argument, we contend that beauty apps need to be understood in gendered (and racialized and classed) terms, as related to the dominant neoliberal and postfeminist sensibility circulating in contemporary society which addresses women as entrepreneurial subjects par excellence (Gill and Scharff, 2011). In particular, we suggest that beauty apps mark out a particularly powerful example of the intensified surveillance of women’s bodies, whereby the ever more fine-grained, metricized and forensic scrutiny of the female body is increasingly mediated by the mobile phone. As we will argue, beauty apps not only recalibrate but also reconfigure the gendered rationality of postfeminist self-capitalization, predicated as it is on relentless beauty surveillance, labour and optimal transformation through consumption.

In addition to looking critically at the rise of aesthetic self-tracking and modifying apps, then, we seek to begin a dialogue between the small but growing body of critical work on self-tracking technologies and a different corpus of work concerned with the ‘psychic life’ of postfeminism and neoliberalism (Elias et al., 2017; Gill, 2017; Scharff, 2015). We will suggest that there are a number of productive parallels in these bodies of work, both of which are deeply informed by Foucaultian ideas. Both share a critical emphasis upon ideas of personal responsibility and moral accountability of the subject for his or her body or biography; both emphasize the simultaneously pleasurable/playful and disciplinary aspects of self-monitoring; both are built around understandings of entrepreneurial modes of selfhood centred on labour, measurement, comparison and (self-)transformation, and both are imbricated in relations of ever more intensive and extensive surveillance of the self and others. How, then, can we ‘think together’ these bodies of work in order to develop a critical understanding of rapidly proliferating appearance apps?

The article is divided into four sections. First, we introduce the literature on digital self-tracking and the QS. Second, we set out our understanding of neoliberalism and postfeminism as cultural forces that not only shape broader social and economic relations but also remake subjectivity. We then turn to look at beauty and surveillance, before focusing, in the final section, on appearance apps.

Digital self-monitoring and the QS

Mobile smart technologies are changing the way we relate to others and how we experience our embodied selves (Goggin and Hjorth, 2014). Most new phones now include as standard a variety of applications that allow users to self-monitor a range of aspects of their lives (e.g. steps, weight, calories and sleep). In health domains, more and more sophisticated apps are being developed, allowing users to check and record data, such as heart rate, blood pressure and blood sugar levels. More broadly, the range and number of apps are proliferating, facilitating the measurement and monitoring of everything from mood, to pain, to stress levels to work productivity to sex life to computer use to meditation habits to pregnancy and parenting.

Human beings’ desire to reflexively monitor aspects of our lives is not new. Keeping diaries and filling in charts to record menstrual cycles or money spent are just a few examples. In the realm of postfeminist media culture, famously, each entry of Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding, 1996) started with a ‘confession’ about how many cigarettes she had smoked, alcohol units consumed and her body weight – along with self-evaluations, such as ‘Feb 16: 8 st 12 (weight loss through use of stairs), alcohol units 0 (excellent) cigarettes: 5 (excellent), calories 2452 (not vg), times gone downstairs to check for Valentine-type envelope: 18 (bad psychologically but vg exercise-wise)’. This example vividly conveys a picture of a self-surveilling postfeminist subject, struggling to ‘discipline’ an ‘unruly’ body (Gill, 2007a).

However, what is striking is how self-monitoring is intensifying, as the capabilities offered by smart mobile technologies meet a neoliberal culture increasingly concerned with tracking an ever greater variety of personal characteristics and experiences. If Bridget were 30 today, she would probably be wearing a FitBit wristband or have a Jawbone UP insert in her bra – her sleep stats would be automatically bluetoothed to her phone every morning and she would receive messages throughout the day from her phone, reporting on her activity levels and calories burned and asking her to input her mood using a simple menu of emoticons. Perhaps she would have replaced ‘to do’ lists with an app like GettingThingsDone. No doubt she would have fully embraced the proliferating ‘psycho-technology mobile apps’ to help her deal with stress and learn deep relaxation and meditation techniques (‘must become goddess radiating inner calm’ as she would say.) She would also certainly be employing the aesthetic self-monitoring devices that are the topic of this article – to assess her chance of cellulite developing, measure her facial symmetry, call up emergency beautician treatments or simply to enhance her selfies.

These self-tracking technologies are developing rapidly. Not limited to mobile phones they include an ever-increasing range of ‘wearable’ biometric devices, such as bracelets, watches, running shoe inserts and sensors, that clip onto underwear and enable 24-hour monitoring. A range of ‘smart’ objects from cars to mattresses and clothes containing ‘wearable technology’ also have capacities for self-monitoring (e.g. drivers’ drowsiness and sleep patterns). Mainstream fast-selling devices include as standard geographic positioning systems (GPS), altimeters, accelerometers and various other kinds of increasingly sensitive mobility monitor (e.g. to help detect motion during sleep). The number and range of devices and apps are growing at an extraordinarily rapid rate.

Most responses to these technologies have been enthusiastic – indeed, distinctly boosterish. Health practitioners have championed the possibility to monitor key aspects of patients’ health ‘at a distance’. Many patients have welcomed digital engagement and the opportunities it offers to challenge hierarchical relations with doctors. Cultural intermediaries in the fashion, beauty and lifestyle worlds celebrate the ‘biometric revolution’ (Vogue, April 2015) as aiding women’s health and beauty projects in new and significant ways as we will discuss later.

The technologies themselves are viewed as a major source of revenue for digital developers and entrepreneurs (Lupton, 2014b). The most visible face of this is seen in the QS ‘community-industry’ (O’Neill, 2015), set up by two Wired editors in California. Wolf and Kelly host a website, promote the development of new tools, run annual conferences and publish a blog documenting numerous self-tracking activities and novel ways of representing these through maps, artworks, sound files and other creative exhibits. Their motto ‘self knowledge through numbers’ captures the view of these devices and their applications as essentially benign developments. Indeed, where concerns have been raised, worries about privacy have dominated. However, as Dubrofsky and Shoshana (2015) argue, privacy remains a ‘limited lens’ through which to think about these technologies. Likewise, a focus upon ‘abuses’ (identity theft, fraud and data breaches) ‘works to deflect attention away from concerns about emergent uses’ (Andrejevic, 2015: xiii), implying that ‘normal’ practice is unproblematic and requires no attention.

Increasingly, however, a more critical form of engagement has been developing, centred around questions about coercion (Lupton, 2014b) surveillance (Andrejevic, 2015; Lupton, 2014b) and data use (Beer, 2016), with particular concerns about employers, insurance companies and the state having access to (and in some cases selling on) ‘personal’ data. Deborah Lupton (2014b) has proposed a useful typology of modes of self-tracking – three of which relate to the degree of freedom or coercion involved. According to this typology, ‘private self-tracking’ ‘is undertaken for purely personal reasons’ with the data kept private; ‘pushed self-tracking’ involves some sort of external ‘nudge’ towards self-tracking – often from medical practitioners or employers or insurance companies; and ‘imposed’ self-tracking involves coercion – seen not only most clearly in school settings, the penal system and drug addiction programmes but also in a growing number of workers’ lives (e.g. warehouse staff, call centre workers and academics).

When the critical angle turns to surveillance, the bulk of research focuses on the surveillance practices of the state, the military, the immigration apparatus and – more recently – corporate surveillance by companies like Google or Facebook (Andrejevic, 2015). An interest in biometric surveillance is predominantly centred on coerced or compelled forms of surveillance – such as airport scanners, ultrasound testing and network genomics – showing how a whole person becomes fragmented into a composite of data sets. But these practices also remake the body, ‘classifying some bodies as normative and legal, and some as illegal and out of bounds’ (Nakamura, 2015). As Lisa Nakamura expands, ‘There is no form of surveillance that is innocent’, and biometric forms of monitoring serve two functions: ‘to regulate, define and control populations, and to create new gendered, racialised, abled and disabled bodies through digital means’.

Compared with surveillance apparatuses that underpin the ‘war on terror’, immigration control or the prison system, the apps that are the subject of this article are distinct in being located in consumer culture and largely ‘voluntary’ rather than compelled – although as we argue in the next section such a clear-cut distinction is problematic. We believe that they require critical interrogation for their contribution to a ‘surveillant imaginary’ that is expanding ‘vertiginously’ (Andrejevic, 2015). As we argue, they incite women to ever greater punitive self-surveillance, enrolling them into intense metricized self-scrutiny that is no less toxic for being ‘freely’ chosen. Indeed, in making sense of the proliferation of these apps with their exhortations to critical and forensic surveillance of women’s bodies, their seemingly paradoxical construction as useful, pleasurable and ‘fun’ urgently requires explanation.

Neoliberalism, postfeminism and subjectivity

If the ‘appearance apps’ that are the focus of this article are part of a more general move to self-tracking, self-monitoring and the QS, then these apps also have to be understood as a product of the dominant neoliberal and postfeminist sensibility circulating in contemporary societies. Neoliberalism has been broadly understood as a political and economic rationality characterized by privatization, a ‘rolling back’ and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision, alongside an emphasis ‘that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets and free trade’ (Harvey, 2005: 2). Equally important as this macro-political and economic ‘ethic’ is the way in which it is, in Aihwa Ong’s (2006: 3) words, ‘reconfiguring relationships between governing and governed, power and knowledge, sovereignty and territoriality’. In societies in which a neoliberal rationality is dominant, the enterprise form is extended to ‘all forms of conduct’ (Burchell, 1993: 275) and ‘normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life’ (Brown, 2005: 42). Individuals are constituted as self-managing, autonomous and ‘responsibilised’.

In this context, governing is recast as a technical rather than political activity – one in which both ‘big data’ and micro-measurement increasingly play a key part (Ajana, 2013) – including, as we argue, in self-monitoring apps. Davies (2014: 16) argues that neoliberalism seeks to ‘replace critique with technique, judgment with measurement’ in such a way as to efface power and to displace it onto seemingly neutral systems or algorithms that can govern at a distance.

Extending critical writing on neoliberalism, feminist scholars have compellingly demonstrated its gendered politics – often characterized as postfeminism. Used as a critical term, postfeminism reflects upon how in popular culture feminism is not only taken into account yet also repudiated. Angela McRobbie (2009) suggests that this ‘double entanglement’ facilitates both a doing and an undoing of feminism. She argues that young women are offered particular kinds of freedom, empowerment and choice ‘in exchange for’ or ‘as a kind of substitute for’ feminist politics and transformation. Yet postfeminism ‘is not simply a response to feminism but also a sensibility that is at least partly constituted through the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideas’ (Gill and Scharff, 2011: 7). Both postfeminism and neoliberalism are structured by a grammar of individualism that has almost entirely replaced notions of the social or political, or any idea of individuals as subject to pressures, constraints or even influence from the outside. In postfeminist culture, women are interpellated as active, autonomous and self-reinventing subjects, whose lives are the outcome of individual choice and agency.

Analysts of postfeminism have had much to say about the body, highlighting the way in which it has come to prominence as a defining feature of identity for women and the site of intense circulating power relations. These questions are foregrounded in critical analysis of postfeminist culture, which draws on a long tradition of feminist scholarship concerned with the body and appearance, highlighting the force of bodily discipline for women (Bartky, 1990; Bordo, 1993). It is striking to note that in this postfeminist moment this has intensified rather than diminished, albeit wrapped in discourses that highlight pleasure, choice, agency, confidence and pleasing oneself, obscuring the extent to which aesthetic labour on the body is normatively demanded (Elias et al., 2016). The body and intimate relationships remain sites of profound asymmetry, suffused by power relations (O’Neill, 2015). Indeed, McRobbie (2009) has argued in a Deleuzian vein that patriarchy is ‘deterritorialised’, spread out and diffuse but is ‘reterritorialising’ in the ‘fashion-beauty complex’, an institutionally unbounded assemblage producing as pecific kind of female subject who is perpetually dissatisfied and unhappy with her body and appearance and thus compelled to embark on new regimes of ‘self-perfectibility’ (pp. 62–63). This individualist striving for perfection is best understood as entrepreneurial self-work and, more specifically, self-capitalization concentrated on the visual register (Conor, 2004) and effected through consumer regimes of beauty – and increasingly psychic – labour.

A key line of enquiry, then, has explored the psychic life of neoliberal postfeminism through a close interest in the ‘makeover paradigm’ – and its extended disciplinary power in the turn to confidence (Gill and Orgad, 2015). The makeover paradigm is a key part of the contemporary postfeminist sensibility (Gill, 2007b) – not only demanding work on, careful styling of and reinvention of the body (Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008) but also remodelling psychic life and requiring a makeover of subjectivity itself – whether this is to produce the ‘sexual entrepreneur’ who is ‘compulsorily sexy and always ‘up for it’ (Harvey and Gill, 2011: 56) or the ‘confident woman’ of Lean In or women’s magazines who must exude wellbeing, ‘positive mental attitude’ and self-esteem, however fragile or insecure she may actually be feeling (Garcia-Favaro, 2016; Gill and Orgad, 2015).

Appearance and surveillance

An interest in self-tracking and in the contemporary neoliberal/postfeminist moment come together in the emergent field of feminist surveillance studies (Dubrofsky and Magnet, 2015). To this phenomenon, our article contributes an argument that highlights the injurious force of beauty surveillance and its proliferating techniques, gazes and metrics. Our analysis brings to feminist surveillance studies a feminist-Foucaultian understanding of discipline and regulation also concerned with affective technologies; longstanding interests in visual culture, the gaze and the politics of looking; and an interest in the psychosocial and the remaking of subjectivity.

Within media and cultural studies, critical scholars of postfeminism have been at the forefront of highlighting the intensification of surveillance of women’s appearance. Rosalind Gill (2007b) has argued that ‘surveillance of women’s bodies (but not men’s) constitutes perhaps the largest type of media content across all genres and media forms’ (p. 149) – a trend that has been increasing in the 10 years since Gill was writing (Winch, 2013).

It is impossible to understand the heightened surveillance of women’s appearance in contemporary culture without reference to celebrity culture with its circulating news articles, magazines, gossip sites and social media. In tandem with new photographic technologies, it has helped to inaugurate a moment of 360° surveillance. Being ‘in the public eye’ now also has an amplified meaning as camera phones can be used to record and upload video within seconds. The dissemination and uptake of paparazzi practices such as ‘the upskirt’ shot have generated discussion, as has the use of other covert filming techniques – frequently designed for the objectification of women (e.g. the scandal over the filming then distribution of images of women eating while on train journeys). As Amielle Shoshana Magnet has argued, the pleasures of this kind of gaze also need to be theorized; it represents perhaps a scopophilic surveillance.

More familiar and everyday forms of intensified surveilling of women’s bodies are to be found in gossip and celebrity magazines and websites, the content of which is dominated by forensic dissection of the cellulite, fat, blocked pores, undepilated hairs, wrinkles, blotches and hairstyle/sartorial/cosmetic surgery (mis)adventures of women in the public eye. Red circles highlight close ups of each and every bodily part in a context in which no aesthetic misdemeanor is too trivial to be microscopically ‘picked over and picked apart by paparazzi photographers and writers’ (Gill, 2007b: 149).

What is striking, however, is the extent to which the surveillant gaze is becoming more and more intense – operating at ever finer grained levels and with a proliferating range of lenses that do not necessarily regard the outer membrane of the body – the skin – as their boundary. This intensified and increasingly forensic surveillance is seen repeatedly in contemporary advertising and beauty culture – with the recurrent emphasis upon microscopes, telescopic gunsights, peep holes, alarm clocks, calipers and set squares. Most common of all are the motifs of the tape measure (often around the upper thigh) and the magnifying glass, used to scrutinize pores or to highlight blemish-free skin, but – most importantly at a meta-level – underscoring the idea of the female face and body as under constant (magnified) surveillance.

One case in point is Benefit’s POREfection campaign (2015) which constructs facial beautification through an analogy with the highly skilled military labour of espionage – a traditionally male-dominated sphere reinvented to include the magnifying-glass wielding ‘spygal’ (at a beauty counter near you). Likewise, Estee Lauder’s (2015) campaign for ‘little black primer’ invites us to ‘spy’ women’s made-up eyes through a peephole. Perfumier Douglas also deploys the magnifying glass trope, repeatedly encouraging the audience for their brand messages to forensically analyse what is wrong with a face (our own or others’) and how it can be improved (e.g. is it too ‘wide’, ‘thin’, ‘round’ and ‘square’ and is the nose too ‘broad’ or ‘long’?). These are just a few examples attesting to the way in which an ever-refined (and punitive) visual literacy of the female face is being normalized.

In fact, we want to argue that a quantified/biometric rationality increasingly runs through contemporary beauty culture. We understand this as a metricization of the postfeminist gaze, which subjects the female body to increasingly ‘scientific’ and quantified forms of surveillance and judgement, which – as we have argued elsewhere (Elias, 2016; Elias and Gill) – now extends to trichological, glandular, dermatological, vascular and genetic aesthetics. The apps that we consider in the next section push the postfeminist surveillance of beauty culture even further in this direction.

Digital aesthetic self-monitoring: ‘perfection at your fingertips’!

Computer, tablet and smartphone applications centred on appearance are being developed and marketed at an extraordinary rate. A search on Google in December 2015 using the search term ‘beauty apps’ generated a staggering 171 million results. At the top of the list of results were well-established companies or brands, such as Stylist magazine, Cosmopolitan and Harpers Bazaar, which are actively promoting beauty apps as fun, portable, everyday means of enhancing women’s beauty. As we will show, beauty apps are a firmly established part of the beauty-industrial complex, with horizontal ties to cosmetics companies, women’s magazines, celebrity culture, the aesthetic surgery industry, fashion industry, social media entrepreneurship and the burgeoning aesthetic service sector.

Below we offer a provisional typology focusing upon those apps with an explicit emphasis on the aesthetic dimensions of the body. As perhaps the first (certainly one of the first) studies to examine these beauty apps, our approach is a broad and exploratory one, centred on capturing a sense of the field rather than offering detailed discussions of specific apps. Our method for selecting the apps that we discuss was based on top search returns, numbers of downloads and the appearance of the apps on lists such as ‘top beauty apps’ in magazines and digital sites targeted at women. We identify five broad types of appearance apps – pedagogic apps that ‘teach’ beauty techniques, apps that facilitate virtual makeovers or the ‘trying on’ of a ‘new smile’ or reshaped nose ahead of potential cosmetic surgery, self-surveillance apps that ‘scan’ the body for flaws and damage and aesthetic benchmarking apps that ‘rate’ attractiveness in a multiplicity of different ways. After setting out the different types of apps, we discuss the kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity incited by these apps and the specific kind of postfeminist intimate relationality they configure – one organized around what we call surveillant sisterhood. We start by talking about perhaps the most commonplace and ubiquitous beauty apps: self(ie)-modification apps that filter or enhance photographs.

A provisional typology of beauty apps

Selfie-modification: ‘Give your photos a true beauty makeover in just a few minutes!’

Selfie-modification apps are among the most common apps, popularized by Instagram, and thus are worth discussing in some detail. According to Amy Slater’s (2016) research with young people (18-25) in seven countries, 74 percent of young women said they used filters when taking self-portraits and 43 percent agreed with the statement that ‘I would never publish a photo that I don’t look my best in’. Selfie-modification apps are characterized by inbuilt visual filters aimed at aestheticizing digital self-portraits so that they more closely resemble images of ideal or normative femininity. For instance, Beauty Makeover Photo Effects promises to ‘help you edit your photos like a true professional while giving yourself a full beauty makeover treatment!’ Since Instagram has popularized the visual filter function, selfie-customization is now everywhere (Rettberg, 2014) with tens of thousands of apps claiming that the world of digital postproduction is at your fingertips with facilities to work with contrast, brightness, shadows, textures, contouring, collage, among many other filters. These can be combined to produce customizable – yet highly standardized or formulaic – visual effects. For instance, several apps let you ‘swipe to erase blemishes, whiten teeth, brighten dark circles and even reshape your facial structure’ (Face Tune) or ‘to look 5, 10 or 15 lbs. skinnier’ (SkinneePix). In so doing, they facilitate the creation of ‘ever-greater stylized identities’ (Wendt, 2014: 7) and are illustrative of an algorithmic-filtered culture (Rettberg, 2014) which is inherently contradictory. Emerging critical accounts (especially focused on Instagram) have emphasized that while selfie-filtering might be understood as a tool for identity making and expression of individuality, it is inarguably a disciplinary practice which calls upon critics to ‘to think about how these filters work. What is filtered out? What flavours or styles are added?’ (Rettberg, 2014: 21) and what are ‘the consequences of seeing ourselves as data bodies’ (Rettberg, 2014: 61). In response to this call, we identify four ways in which selfie-modification apps can be seen as implicated in the disciplinary project of neoliberal postfeminism, working to sustain social injustice, as Nakamura had it.

To start with, they help create new racialized bodies through digital means in, at least, two ways. First, users are offered skin ‘brightening’, ‘lightening’ or ‘whitening’ as standard – encoding particular ideas about skin colour and desirability. In contrast with photography’s ‘skin tone bias filter’ – which has long suited light skin tones but distorted photographic representations of people with darker skin tones (Rettberg, 2014: 27–30) – apps like PicBeauty or MoreBeauté offer self-chosen ‘whitening’ filters. Likewise, nose reshaping and eye reshaping are hugely popular features of selfie-modifying apps (e.g. Plastic Surgery Simulator) underscoring another aspect of the racialized sub-text that informs them, in a transnationally circulating market of ‘global beauty’ (Dosekun, 2015).

A second – but also deeply problematic – set of ideas that have become encoded in such apps include those from evolutionary psychology – centred on the desirability of particular waist-to-hip ratios or on facial symmetry. The links between these ideas and the reassertion of sexual difference and heteronormative femininity deserve critical attention.

A third problematic element is the nostalgic quality of filtered selfies seen in images emulating analogue photography styles such as Polaroid, black-and-white and Kodachrome. While these nostalgic aesthetics have started to attract scholarly attention (Wendt, 2014), we want to argue that an analytics of postfeminism might productively expand existing theoretical accounts by attending to the gendered politics of the retro or vintage filter – a line of enquiry which has been underexplored. Furthermore, given that filtered images arguably have a sedative effect (e.g. self-numbness) and might help producing the illusion of an ahistorical subject (Wendt, 2014), could we think of selfie-modification apps as yet another site for the neoliberal disarticulation of politics?

Fourth, following Rettberg’s (2014) insights we want to argue that selfie-modification apps are technological filters intimately shaped by the ‘cultural filters’ of postfeminism, by highlighting how they participate in the intensification of aesthetic surveillance and labour. Not only are women required to engage in intensive regimes of selfie-taking labour (see Wendt, 2014) and visual filtering labour but also they are now addressed by beauty advertising as digitally augmented consumer subjects who (should normatively) challenge boundaries between their ‘data bodies’ (Rettberg, 2014) or digital reflexive body projects and fleshy ones. Let us take the example of Revlon’s PhotoReady makeup which ‘promises its wearers they will look like photographs that have been digitally enhanced’, asserting that the ‘elisions and virtual surgeries that Photoshop provides for two-dimensional images can be applied to three-dimensional faces’(Jones, 2012: 204). Selfie-modification apps, as we argue, increase the extent to which the female body and face are rendered visible as a site for crisis and commodification. As digital aesthetic self-monitoring is emerging as one key economic and cultural currency of contemporary femininity, Revlon and many other cosmetic brands are capitalizing from women’s sophisticated visual literacy. One outcome of this cultural promiscuity has been the intensification and extension of traditional makeup sets – which now include more products and more routines (e.g. Mac’s eight-step routine for colouring the lips alone, see also Benefit and Estee Lauder’s campaigns discussed earlier).

Importantly, selfie-modification apps also work to disavow the very same bodily discipline they incite (e.g. ‘SkinneePix gives you inspiration if you’re working out and trying to keep fit or lose a little weight. It’s not complicated. No one needs to know. It’s our little secret’). Secrecy around all the effort we are now demanded to put into taking and enhancing our self-portraits (and the motivations behind it) is not only a feature of apps’ intimate form of address discussed later, but should also be accounted by attending to a ‘selfie hatred’ culture which mocks women (e.g. as narcissistic and exhibitionist) and works to put them back in their place at a time when they have found new platforms to speak out and be heard (Rettberg, 2014: 17–19). Thus, even though selfie-modification apps are repeatedly celebrated for its pleasurable and playful components, a focus on ‘self(ie) disgust’ reminds us that they may well intensify the cultural pathologization of femininity (see McRobbie, 2009) and, therefore, women’s engagement with them is likely to produce complex and contradictory affective responses (e.g. relief, pleasure vs. feelings of shame and failure) which require urgent attention. Below we turn more briefly to four other beauty apps.

Pedagogies of perfection/learning to labour: ‘your personal beauty advisor’

A huge variety of beauty apps offer instructions in techniques to enhance appearance. These include contouring, brow shaping, hair styling (e.g. according to daily/local weather conditions), makeup, manicure, dress and (colour) accessorizing. They deliver this tutelage in the style of a ‘personal beauty advisor’, an expert professional and a best friend. For example, Benefit Brow Genie works by uploading a photograph, which the app will use to ‘custom map your eyebrows to reveal the best brow shape for your face’. Their brow-mapping technique also delivers a photograph that contrasts your real eyebrows with your ideal arches. L’Oréal The Colour Genius helps women to decide whether to ‘match, blend or clash’ the colour schemes of their outfits and makeup. Importantly, it promises to act as a ‘personal stylist in your pocket’ giving customizable instruction on the chromatic aspect of visual presentation: ‘you’ll get instant, personalized nail polish and makeup suggestions to suit your mood and complete your look!’ The Colour Genius’ trend towards individualized customization is representative of a pervasive feature of pedagogic apps which work with your height, body shape or getting ready for a particular occasion – and increasingly also with your personality and your mood.

Virtual makeovers/try-on apps: ‘Do you wonder sometimes how you would look with whiter teeth and a brighter smile?’

If selfie-modification apps facilitate ‘improvement’ of images to be posted to social media, the third category of apps offers users the possibility of going one step further: trying out different looks ranging from new clothes, hair styles or colours, make up, teeth colour – through to nose reconstruction, eyelid reshaping, breast augmentation and vulval surgery – as a prelude to actually modifying the body. Some of these are depicted as ‘augmented reality’ beauty apps because they have ‘real-time’ cameras which allow you to ‘virtually try on any product’ and ‘see how it looks on you, as if you’re looking in a mirror!’ (ShadeScout and L’Oreal Makeup Genius). Similar apps allow you to ‘try on’ any hair colour (Modiface – Hair Color Studio) or to decide whether various cosmetic dental procedures really are for you (iWhite instant). The interactivity of the apps is much promoted, as is the fact that they work with individualized pictures or mirror functions. iWhite instant offers ‘automatic smile zoom functionality [that] gives an even closer look at your results’, allowing you to analyse how different shades of whiteness ‘affect your smile aesthetics’.

A plethora of apps also offer try-outs of surgical procedures for the face and body. Plastic Surgery Simulator Lite, available on Google play for Android, has been installed on more than 5 million devices. It asks people ‘How would you look with a different nose, chin, breasts or buttocks, or with less weight?’ It encourages people to ‘simulate realistic plastic surgeries, improve your appearance on social networks, or have fun warping people’. In turn, Facetouchup invites: ‘visualize the new you™’ and promises:

we bring you the same digital imaging technology that surgeons use to visualize plastic surgery results – all in a super easy to use site. For nose jobs, chin augmentation, liposuction, breast reshaping and more. FaceTouchUp is the virtual plastic surgery tool you’ve been waiting for.

Horizontal links with the plastic surgery industry are well established – indeed, surgeons ply their services on this kind of site or app and are addressed through specialist areas which promise that the app will ‘attract new patients, elevate your practice and increase patient acceptance, satisfaction and word of mouth’.

Surveilling the self: ‘apps that could save your life!’

All the genres of apps discussed so far involve a heightened degree of self-surveillance and incite intensified self-scrutiny of the face and body, compared with ‘traditional’ beauty advertising. But this has a particular force in those apps which are centred on using the photographic or scanning facilities of the phone to measure and highlight present or even future problems. Blurring into the health field, there is a fourth multiplying genre of apps that seek to identify and ‘diagnose’ problems before they even become visible to the naked eye. Perhaps, you have cellulite that is not yet obvious when you look in the mirror; maybe you have freckles or moles that are changing shape and may signal the development of something more sinister (e.g. UMSkinCheck); or think your veins look ok now, but perhaps there are already signs of broken capillaries (e.g. Soffer Vein). Sunburn, dental problems and smoking damage can all be identified using beauty apps (e.g. SunSafe, Coppertone MyUV alert, Dental X-Ray, Dental Decide and Smoking Time Machine) that can then bring into play a whole array of anticipatory labours to prevent or mitigate damage (e.g. ‘to-the-minute countdown’ of how much sunbathing time we have left before ‘racking up skin damage’ and set alerts for sunscreen applications).

Aesthetic benchmarking: ‘do you ever wonder if you’re ugly and your friends just don’t tell you?’

Another category of apps is focused on evaluation, rating and ranking – specifically aesthetic benchmarking (how pretty am I?). They invite users to benchmark different aspects of their appearance – one of them being their facial attractiveness. Apps solely focused on facial self-assessment abound (e.g. Ugly Meter, Facial Beauty Analysis and Face Meter are just a few examples) and are hugely popular.

Many of these apps challenge users to submit their face to a metric scan which delivers numerical scores on individual facial attractiveness. They ‘scan a user’s face and measure the proportions and placement of their features. The person’s attractiveness – and the ‘magic’ behind the ratings – is based on a mathematical equation called the ‘golden ratio’ that defines perfect proportions (not just in faces but also in design, architecture, math and more)’.1 As this article reports, each rating is delivered through affectively loaded comments which underpin a complimentary or derogatory tone (e.g. ‘You’re so sexy you make Athena jealous’. Or ‘You could win a professional ugly contest’).

Again facial assessment apps increase the extent to which the female face is culturally intelligible as a site of value or its lack, the – sometimes hostile – judgement being authorized by the supposedly scientific metric system – the ‘machine vision’ (Rettberg, 2014). These apps direct the user to not only several emerging consumer markets, some of which include the cosmetics brands examined earlier (i.e. new makeup ranges); brow & lash bar studios (e.g. Superdrug’s and Wiñk’s), but also the rapidly growing market of non-invasive cosmetic procedures (see Jones, 2012). All these markets can then satisfy the ever-expanding consumer desires these beauty apps help to create. Your eyebags rank your face as ugly? Go for a ‘lunch-hour’ hyaluronic acid procedure in the nearest shopping mall!; That one facial hair scores you a 6 in the Ugly Meter? Go for a laser hair removal in the nearest high street boutique!; Your reemerging facial spots undermined your latest high score in the Beauty Meter? Go for a chemical peel instead of getting yourself a new pair of shoes!; Your face ranks lower than your more attractive friend? Then why not trying a microdermabrasion? Compared to traditional surgical methods, this range of ‘walk-in-walk-out’ or ‘lunch-hour’ surgical interventions is less expensive and is becoming widely available to women as it ‘moved into the high streets and the malls (where it is administered in a range of spas, beauty salons and medical sites) and where it now shares physical and symbolic space with mainstream consumer fashion’ (Jones, 2012: 199).

In addition to the five broad types of apps considered here, we can add another fast growing genre concerned with shopping for products and services. These promise ‘on-demand beauty’ in the form of products, stylists, therapists and beauticians who can arrive at your door or your office within an hour (e.g. Glamsquad and Beautified). Furthermore, another genre is focused upon constructing look books or cataloguing your wardrobe or style decisions in multiple ways – for example, to avoid embarrassing faux pas such as wearing the same outfit twice to a venue (god forbid!) or to associate particular styles with particular states of mind (e.g. this dress made me feel confident and these pants were sexy). New genres of apps are developing all the time – with up and coming ones increasingly using the location functionality of smartphones to inform about particular weather conditions or to tie goods and services to place-based features (e.g. through push notifications about particular ranges on sale in a store near you). This is an area of new media development that is developing at a phenomenal rate. We have simply made a start to understanding it by mapping some of the different types of apps that constitute the field of beauty apps.

Subjectivity, surveillance and authority

Before concluding, we want to look at the modes of address deployed in these apps and the kinds of entrepreneurial subjectivity they constitute. The apps present themselves as a source of considerable authority, an authority that is largely accepted in reviews of these products which depict them as ‘cool ass’, ‘freaking awesome’ and dream makers. Much has been written about the distinctive and intimate ‘voice’ of women’s media – particularly the way that magazines construct themselves as ‘friends’ to their readers – and this address is central to the intimate credibility that the apps construct. However, they also draw on the authority of scientific knowledge (e.g. the golden ratio and evolutionary psychology), on social media feedback genres and on beauty vloggers and fashion bloggers’ expertise, as well as on the credibility of major beauty brands – sometimes actually purporting to put their power in ‘your’ hands (e.g. with an eyebrow-reshaping app that will obviate the need to see a professional). The intimate address constructed by the apps is a composite of all these genres and deserves some more attention for the way it produces a very specific ‘girlfriend gaze’ (Winch, 2013). One feature of this is what we might call ‘warmly couched hostility’ in which criticisms of potential users for procrastination, sloppiness or bad habits are articulated carefully in an address that is explicitly ‘non-judgmental’. For example,

If a big day is approaching and you haven’t booked a hairstylist or makeup artist yet (we aren’t judging), you’ll want to check out this on-demand hair and makeup service (review for Vensette2)

Another mode of authority is drawn from an ‘ideology of dataism’ (van Dijck, 2014 cited in Rettberg, 2014). The key aspect of this address is the claim that the apps will generate (quantitative) objective truths about oneself (that your friends and family might not). ‘Test yourself!’ Facemeter exhorts ‘Just take a picture and let the app scan it! Do you ever wonder if you’re ugly and your friends just don’t tell you?’ Another app explains, ‘when your friends won’t tell you the truth, the Ugly Meter will’. The subjective evaluative gaze of friends along with the ‘anonymous’ and always-potentially-brutal social media gaze (see Banet-Weiser, 2014) which offer ratings by people rather than algorithms undermines their reliability. By contrast, the supposedly neutral metric systems of assessment and surveillance offered by beauty apps are positioned as a welcoming asset, continuously actualized within what we call – borrowing from Foucault (1990) and Hook (2007) – a digital ‘pastoral relationship’ which is allegedly a kinder power and a more authoritative one.

These apps turn the acquisition of ‘feedback’ about one’s appearance into entrepreneurial labour that will help subjects maximize their visual capital; it also promises to optimize such labour by enabling users to get feedback from friends/family/Facebook likes and comments instantly/having it at your fingertips, pockets or handbags. In so doing, beauty apps inscribe feminine subjectivity into the realm of ‘economies of visibility’ (Banet-Weiser, 2014) and intensify and extend gynaeoptical surveillance (Winch, 2013) by framing the apps as new best friends. Alison Winch (2013) argues that ‘girlfriend culture’ is ‘demarcated from other women’s cultures because of its yoking of an intimate friendliness with a mutual body regulation that is configured as entrepreneurial and empowering’ (p. 2). These apps extend and reinforce the ‘intimate networks of comparison, feedback and motivation [that] are necessary in controlling body image’ (Winch, 2013: 2), offering both an extension of the reach of the beauty–industrial complex and a new modality of digital girlfriendship.

Situated in a media context where temporality – and more specifically ‘time famine’ – has become one of the most crucial dimensions of postfeminist femininity (Nathanson, 2013), beauty apps address women as busy, time-starved, savvy consumers wanting something that is quick, easy and fun to unleash or actualize their beauty potential. Increasingly anxious about an apparent crisis of femininity, contemporary media is responding with pleasurable and pedagogic depictions of time scarcity and its management which, we argue, are not only limited to the sphere of domestic labour (Nathanson, 2013) but also extend to the realm of beauty work. In addition to their guarantee of honest no-holds-barred surveillant sisterhood, beauty apps promise an array of forms to ‘help’ women – already juggling the tension between domestic and paid labour – in optimizing beauty through a focus on speeded up temporality – one also suited for a moment of fast capitalism. For example, Cloth promises that ‘Everything is instant – and doesn’t feel like work’, Benefit Brow Genie opines, ‘Tada! In seconds your perfect eyebrows will magically appear’ and Vensette promises a ‘pro’ ‘will arrive at your doorstep, hotel room or office in under an hour’.

All kinds of surveillance sensibilities – be it scanning your brows, measuring your facial symmetry, keeping track of your wardrobe or modifying your pictures – can apparently be achieved ‘instantly’ through these apps, which are presented, then, as time-saving and labour saving – ‘an easier way to look hot all the time’ according to Cosmopolitan’s review of the best beauty apps of the year.

The apps are also presented as money-saving and promoting affordability to a group of female consumers assumed to be – if not recessionistas (Nathanson, 2014) – then at least concerned about getting a bargain. Some apps are dedicated to bargain hunting ‘for the best beauty service deals in your area ranging from highlights to Botox’ (Lifebooker).

Other beauty apps also address women as ethical consumers who are empowered by the apps to monitor the implications of their consumer practices on a wide range of ethical and political matters spanning climate change, animal testing, genetically modified organisms, sweated labour, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights, organic products and more. This trend is a response to the recent visibility of issues, such as exploitation in the aesthetic service sector (Ouellette, 2017) or the real costs of cheap fashion (Hoskins, 2014). It might also be thought of as a distinct articulation of ‘cool capitalism’ (McGuigan, 2012) in the fashion–beauty complex. Ethical barcode is an app that will scan products for you as you shop and give you an instant report on the company and its practices. Likewise, Goodguide helps find greener products by scanning the bar code of skin creams and make up for products that are not environmentally friendly. This app can also help to mitigate the risks of buying a beauty product that is not good for your health

All kinds of possible dangers can be assuaged by use of these apps: health risks and risks posed by cosmetic surgery, and even weather (i.e. access to real-time forecasts helps women minimize the chances of having potentially successful looks undermined by unforeseen weather conditions).

The ever more minutely dissected problems, failings and risks produced a profoundly troubling and at times surreal experience for us in researching these apps – introducing us to whole new categories of beauty problems (e.g. ‘tech neck’ – which can, ironically, be produced by overuse of mobile phone apps) and whole arenas of moral wrongness that the apps seek to put right: lack of skill, lack of time, procrastination, overspending, poor knowledge of products or procedures and even – paradoxically – ‘overbeautification’. This overbeautification is a consequence of lacking the skills and routines of what Simidele Dosekun (2017) has called ‘aesthetic vigilance’ and ‘aesthetic rest’ (taking makeup off at night, letting your skin ‘breathe’ and not over-dyeing your hair or always having hair extensions).

Conclusion

In this article, we have set out a theoretical architecture for understanding the rise of beauty apps. As we have noted, they can be understood as part of the contemporary moment of self-tracking and self-monitoring – discussion of which is growing significantly, even as we write (e.g. Lupton, 2016; Neff and Nafus, 2016) – but must also be understood as technologies of gender (de Lauretis, 1987) in a distinctly neoliberal and postfeminist moment. We have argued that in the regime of ‘the perfect’ (McRobbie, 2015), women’s bodies have come under hitherto unprecedented degrees of scrutiny – in ways that represent an intensification (ever finer, more detailed and more forensic), extensification (spreading out, more diffuse and leaving no areas unsurveilled) and psychologization (focus not simply on techniques and applications but on making over subjectivity) of surveillance.

In concluding, we seek to pull together the threads of our argument in order to highlight what is new in the rise of beauty apps and why they differ from, say, beauty advertising or women’s magazines which, it might be argued, offer broadly similar ‘messages’, if analysed merely at the representational level. Without offering a simplistic ‘medium is the message’ evaluation, we would want to point to the significance of the visuality of these apps, and the interactivity/personalization they afford, as well as their location in perhaps the most intimate technology of the 21st century – the mobile phone. Their force and significance, we contend, go far beyond the (rather typical and familiar) constructions of ‘beauty’ or ‘female desirability’ they encode and promote – the youthfulness, slimness and racialization would offer few surprises to critical observers. Extending Rettberg’s (2014) important argument that technological filters are entangled with cultural ones, we argue that beauty apps do much more than simply reinforcing established cultural ideas about female attractiveness.

First, we would point to the role that these apps are playing in the (bio-) metricization of surveillance. They have become a technology of neoliberalism par excellence in purporting to offer neutral, scientifically based evaluations and ‘assistance’ in beauty projects through apps that do not simply judge but ‘measure’ and rate against the ‘golden ratio’ benchmark or some other logical syntax/algorithm like the BeautiPHIcation™ method. These beauty apps invite women to know themselves through an ever more minute pedagogy of defect (Bordo, 1997) for example, your brows do not start, arch and end in the right place-and to implement upon themselves the disciplinary lessons on the aesthetic labour of femininity, underwritten by a metricized gaze.

Second, we seek to point to the significance of these apps’ use of, indeed dependence upon, the camera functions of contemporary smartphones – and increasingly their capabilities as ‘scanners’ of veins, sunburns, moles, blocked pores and so on as women are exhorted to scan their bodies as they would a QR code – a new turn in ‘objectification’, to be sure. Mark Hayward (2013) has argued that ‘neoliberal modes of visualisation’ are characterized by the ‘distribution and extension of elements of self and body by technological means and the appropriation of forms of direct, personal address in order to maintain and exploit affective engagement on the part of individuals towards institutions’ (p. 194). We contend that the techno-social regime of ‘neoliberal optics��� (Hayward, 2013) has reconfigured the reach of bio-power. With the metricization of the postfeminist gaze, the individualizing knowledge necessary for the successful enactment of ‘techniques of appearing’ (Conor, 2004) has never before been so profound, no longer being skin deep as we have demonstrated.

Moreover, the apps incite a subjectivity that goes far beyond current notions of self-care and beauty practices but are located in a regime of forensic self-scrutiny and self-monitoring that constitutes the ‘nano surveillance’ of visual appearance (one’s own and that of other women) as a normative practice. Through self-assessment practices, women are taught that their faces are unlikely to look attractive enough, thereby they are invited to turn to cosmetic physicians – and their products and services, as we have discussed. This recalls the important work of Anne Balsamo in exploring the co-emergence and co-constitution of photographic and aesthetic surgical technologies. Here again, we see clear links between photographic and scanning affordances of smartphone beauty apps and the promotion of particular surgical interventions.

Finally, we want to highlight the way in which these apps diffuse and disseminate a multiplicity of ideas, techniques, images, practices, products, and surgical interventions relating to the maximization of visual capital while ‘domesticating’ them and rendering them familiar and everyday. ‘Domestication’ is the common notion for capturing a sense of something transformed from the unfamiliar into the known and the safe. But here, perhaps, ‘intimatization’ would be a better (if clumsy) word – as this process neither relates to the home nor to the domestic, but to a technology – the smartphone – which is light, portable and can be taken everywhere, and with which people have profoundly intimate relations. What these apps do – and quite explicitly and self-consciously – is to take beauty procedures out of the salon, the department store, the hairdresser or the clinic, and present them in interactive, customized form on an item most people in affluent societies carry everywhere. While we do not know how these apps are taken up and used – research is urgently needed – it is clear that being invited to see how your face would look like after rhinoplasty or eyelid surgery while you are standing at the bus stop or waiting in line at the ATM radically changes the meanings of such interventions, rendering cosmetic surgery as more familiar, banal and culturally intelligible as ‘normal’ – something that can be accounted as the ‘anestheticising’ and ‘(de)familisaring’ effect of seeing ourselves through technological–cultural filters (Rettberg, 2014: 25–26).

In multiple ways, then, beauty apps are transforming the arena of appearance politics, offering a technology that brings together the contemporary focus on digital self-monitoring and self-tracking with a society structured by neoliberal and postfeminist ethics to produce an intensified surveillant and regulatory gaze upon women that now fits neatly in our pockets and is with us everywhere.

Notes

Available at: http://www.everydayhealth.com/skin-and-beauty-pictures/new-apps-claim-to-rate-attractiveness.aspx

Available at: http://www.realsimple.com/beauty-fashion/best-beauty-apps

References

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Conor L (2004) The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Dubrofsky RE and Shoshana AM (2015) Feminist surveillance studies: Critical interventions. In: Dubrofsky RE and Shoshana AM (eds) Feminist Surveillance Studies. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press. pp.15-32.

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Neff G and Nafus D (2016) Self Tracking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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#beauty #media #technology #digital self-tracking #foucault #gender #labor #neoliberalism #postfeminism #new media #subjectivity #surveillance

[gravitascivics]

HOW TO DEFINE AND EVALUATE THEORIES

[Note:  At the end of the last posting the reader was advised that this posting would continue this blog’s report on the development of a civics unit of study.  Due to certain requests, this will happen next posting.  As for this posting, the following is an overview of what a political construct is; what is the function of a political construct; and how to evaluate a construct.]

Theories, models, and often constructs are explanations of some set of phenomena.  One such example in the field of political science is cybernetics which is an off-shoot of systems theory.  It deals with communication and control.  It does not pretend to explain all political phenomena, but through its lens it does shed light on most aspects of political behavior.  In turn, this explanation can be the source of political research, analysis, and even attempts at predicting a relevant future.

         In terms of research, a theory, through its explanatory quality, suggests or directly provides hypothetical relationships between or among factors. Usually, in terms of supporting an explanation, the aim is at establishing cause and effect relationships; factor A causes factor B to happen.  While this is fine within the context of a model – its hypothetical nature does not oversell its view of reality as necessarily being reality – a study that gathers relevant information usually attempts to establish a correlation or, more technically, to disprove (falsify) a relationship.[1]  

Of course, protocol provisions in such studies are developed to strive to account for all nuances; i.e., exceptions or the identification of other factors that lead to both A and B are hopefully detected. Of course, such study or research is prone to problems, as all human endeavors are.  One problem is the function theories, as they were described, play is that political scientists with such a view favor the positivist approach. Political scientists who use positivist protocols adopt, to the extent possible, the methods used by natural scientists such biologists and physicists.  

A term used to describe this approach is reductionist studies.  They reduce the effort to focusing on those factors the scientist is testing.  A historical note:  political science was not always so “scientific.”  Before the behaviorist revolution in the mid-twentieth century, political science was more historical.  And this fact is relevant to what is being emphasized with this blog’s call for the utilization of federation theory.

For example, not all political questions can be reduced.  Why?  A way to view this shortcoming is offered by the political scientist, Daniel J. Elazar.  He claims that political science is not only interested in answering the questions:  how and why does political phenomena operate as they do, but, also, how should governance and politics be conducted?  Often, these “should” questions, while, at times, assisted by asking reductionist questions, cannot be fully answered by them.[2]

So, scholars that utilize the non-reductionist, federalist model to guide their research, such political scientists as Elazar, Donald Lutz, Martin Diamond, and Stephen L. Schechter, tend to be more historical in their approaches as they ask federalist questions of the past. But as is the case, the federalist model is one of many models and, given the purposes of a consumer of such models might have, such as the case of a civics teacher, what questions should he/she ask of a political science model?

Eugene J. Meehan[3] offers such a criteria:

·        Comprehension:  Does the explanation explain as many phenomena as possible which are related to the area of concern?

·        Power: Does the explanation control the explanatory effort by being valid and complete in its component parts and in the relations between those parts?

·        Precision:  Does the explanation specifically and precisely treat its concepts, making them clear in their use?

·        Consistency or Reliability:  Does the explanation explain its components and their relations the same way time after time?

·        Isomorphism:  Does the explanation contain a one to one correspondence with that portion of reality it is trying to explain?

·        Compatibility:  Does the explanation align with other responsible explanations of the same phenomena?

·        Predictability:  Does the explanation predict conditions associated with the phenomena in question?

·        Control:  Does the construct imply ways of controlling the phenomena in question?

These criteria are geared to assist social scientists in terms of them evaluating the various explanations their discipline hold or propose given the areas of concern the discipline studies.  But given the above concern of Elazar, might there be one more criterion?  Here is what it could be:

·        Normative determination:  Does the construct indicate what normative/moral political behavior is and how the subject of the model’s use – the polity and its participants – measure up to that standard?

Different consumers, given their reasons for utilizing these criteria will have different needs.  Not all the criteria above will have the same salience for all consumers. As a list, this seems to be fairly complete, but users of the list might find some criterion to be unimportant or the entire list might be seen as lacking some concern.  The judgement here is that each of the above concerns should be of some relevance to a teacher.

But civics teachers don’t conduct political science research.  Instead, they can rely on these models to assist them in making sense of what they teach. They do want to be responsible in the substantive information he/she is imparting or otherwise implementing in their lesson plans.  So, the above criteria can be helpful.  As a matter of fact, his/her concerns do not end with this list.  One can add two more criteria:

·        Abstraction Level:  Does the construct’s abstraction level allow students to comprehend it?

·        Motivation:  Does the construct’s content sufficiently motivate students to study it?

Each of these standards might deserve a separate section to further explain it and to go into the implications each might have on the social sciences or, more importantly here, civics education.  As it is being used here, the idea is for a teacher to have a handle on how to critically judge what a federation approach has to offer since it is offering a construct.  That is, this blog explains what federation theory is and how it is useful in meeting the challenges civics education is facing in today’s classrooms.

So, a teacher or curriculum developer becomes aware of a political theory or model – an explanation or construct – what then? This now turns to be a curriculum and instruction concern.  In the curriculum literature, there are a variety of curriculum developmental models. One that has received a bit criticism – as being too constrained – is suitable for establishing the connection between the demands of offering meaningful content material and the demands of teaching it.  That is the developmental model offered by Ralph Tyler.[4]

The Tyler model identifies three sources of curriculum:  the relevant attributes of the society/community in which the curriculum is to be utilized, the distinguishing, relevant attributes of the students to be served, and the subject matter’s elements that are to be taught.  Of most relevancy here is the last of these three – the subject matter.  It is in this way that Meehan/Elazar/ (and this writer humbly adds) Gutierrez’s criteria can be helpful.

But Tyler’s model goes on; it assumes that if one is reflecting on these three sources of curriculum, a teacher or curriculum developer will be likely to arrive at an overwhelming number of instructional objectives.  Therefore, to be more focused and direct, this number of objectives needs to be whittled down.  To do this, Tyler inserted two “screens” by which to evaluate each objective:  social philosophy (in terms of scope) and psychology (in terms of sequence).  Of course, for the purposes here, social philosophy is more important.

By social philosophy, Tyler refers to a school’s sense of its mission.  Each school – and this is generally required by accreditation bodies – has a school philosophy.  The school is to abide by the philosophy’s espoused values in the various operations or activities it either performs or sanctions.  So, if a school (usually a decision made by state or district authorities) is committed to abide by the C3 Framework,[5] this or, at least, the framework’s substantive prescriptions, would be a set of elements within a school’s philosophy.

What about schools that have not made such a formal commitment?  Chances are such schools can still implement the prescriptions of the framework since what districts, states, and even schools have in place are so vague.  All that needs to be done is interpret the wordage of district or state standards – or school philosophies – to include federalist ideas and ideals.  This is not being dishonest.  The authorities have purposefully been this vague in order not to squelch school initiatives.

         Hopefully, this overview of the functions of a political model, criteria by which to judge the usefulness of political models, and the role political models play in civics curriculum, the reader can apply these ideas in considering and, perhaps, implementing the tenets of federation theory.

[1] Or as Karl Popper states it:  falsify a hypothesis.  See “Falsifiability,” WhatIs.com, n. d., accessed July 14, 2018, https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/falsifiability .

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL:  The University of Alabama Press, 1987)..

[3] Eugene J. Meehan, Explanations in Social Science: A System Paradigm (Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1969).

[4] Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1969/1949).

 [5] National Council for the Social Studies, “Preparing Students for College, Career, and Civic Life,” (Washington, D. C.:  NCSS, 2013), accessed April 16, 2018, https://www.socialstudies.org/c3. This framework is offered as part of the Common Core project by the US Department of Education.

#theory #civics education #federation theory

[bestnewsmag-blog]

New Post has been published on Bestnewsmag

New Post has been published on https://bestnewsmag.com/jerusalem-post-israel-news-politics-and-diplomacy-trumps-tolerance-tour-first-trip-to-riyadh-jerusalem-and-rome/

Jerusalem Post Israel News Politics And Diplomacy TRUMP’S TOLERANCE TOUR: FIRST TRIP TO RIYADH, JERUSALEM AND ROME

ASHINGTON – In an attraction for spiritual tolerance and solidarity towards the scourge of News radicalization, US President Donald Trump has selected to journey to Riyadh, Jerusalem and Rome on his first presidential journey overseas, senior administration officers confirmed on Thursday Post.

The trip, starting on May additionally 19, will mark the start of an initiative by way of the Trump management to forge a coalition against nonsecular extremism. “Those aren’t going to be the conventional country visits such as you’ve visible – These are genuinely operating visits,” one legit stated. Be the first to recognize – Be a part of our Fb page.

Netanyahu: I stay up for talks with Trump to advance peace Analysis: In Washington, Abbas gets a boost – for now Trump will convene Arab global leaders from throughout the place along Saudi royal circle of relatives participants in Riyadh.

While in Rome, he’s going to meet for the first time with Pope Francis.

And in Jerusalem, Trump will for the primary time offer details on his vision for a complete Israeli-Palestinian peace. The president will “lay out some phrases for what we see as a peaceful future in that region,” one professional stated. The White Residence has not yet set the exact date for Trump’s visit to Jerusalem.

“There’s a number of alignment among President Trump and leaders of the Arab world – they see the equal problems,” the respectable said.

“We’re looking to unify humans across the same objectives.”

The Trump management has made regional cooperation in the Middle East a focus of its overseas coverage, and senior officers say the president hopes to “formalize” aspects of these collaborations at some point of his visit. However, they diagnosed Trump will face challenges in rebooting the Israeli- Palestinian peace procedure – despite help from the Arab world – just someday after the president said that peace might not be as difficult to reap as human beings have the lengthy notion.

“You have to strive something – You have to take shots. This is what we assume is a very clever first step inside the area, in unifying the coalition,” one respectable said.

“Whether or not we are able to or can’t, it’s our job to strive.”

White Residence press secretary Sean Spicer said the president’s go to become at the invitation of Top Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin.

Trump also agreed to a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Whilst in the vicinity, Spicer introduced.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, Secretary of state Rex Tillerson and leader negotiator Jason Greenblatt are operating to position forward thoughts on the peace system from the Yankee facet. However Trump “has his personal ideas, as properly,” the authentic brought.

Iran’s interest within the location maintains to inspire cooperation between Sunni Arab nations, Israel and the united states – an alignment in an effort to function centrally within the president’s ride.

“Right now you’ve were given a variety of troubles in that neighborhood,” a 2nd legitimate said. “However they see the strengthening of Iran as possibly their largest risk.”

Several West Wing aides with overseas policy experience said they sensed a distinctive tone from Arab international locations now inclined to participate in a bigger coalition towards religious extremism, and with Israel, than they’d earlier than.

“It does take US involvement,” an authentic said. “However the stage of a hobby by using the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians – it does sense distinctive. Candidly, they feel a feel of jogging out of time,” the respectable introduced.

Trump’s 3-country visit will precede his trip to a NATO summit in Brussels and the G7 summit in Sicily.

48 Hours in Riyadh

  The capital of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh is certainly one of the most important cities inside the USA. It covers a metropolitan place of 1825 rectangular kilometers, most of which is dedicated to tall skyscrapers, overseas embassies, and urbanized buildings. Riyadh has a huge population of over five million human beings, engaged in extraordinary occupations. It is a critical business and management middle, being the capital of Riyadh Province and home to many global offices. A land of contemporary buildings and historical structures, Riyadh has a balanced way of life. A number of the oldest architectural masterpieces reflect fantastic Arabic paintings, commissioned by means of kings and rulers. Al Masmak fortress and King Abdulaziz’s Murabba’ palace are classic examples of vernacular Arabian architecture. These antique systems stand in evaluation to current, modern skyscrapers like the State center and Al Faisaliyah middle. However, both are a part of the metropolis’s tourist sights.

The contemporary lifestyle has transformed the town into a major purchasing middle with several department shops. Panorama Mall, Sahara Mall, and Salam Mall are nearly constantly crowded via city dwellers, shopping from more than a few excessive cease brands. The records of Riyadh, but, is still retained in its museums and galleries, that shape the metropolis’s attractions. King Abdul Aziz ancient Centre is the Countrywide Museum of Saudi Arabia, holding A number of the richest artifacts blended with centuries of artistic information.

Islam is the essential faith accompanied in Riyadh. Many mosques are constructed amongst the urban offices to restore faith within the ancient religion. people right here communicate in a locally developed speech sample known as the Najdi dialect. English is quite popularly used for informal functions. The culture of Riyadh is decided no longer most effective via its religion and people but also with the aid of their real cuisine. The Nejdi dish cab say is the most traditional meal of the city, garnished with cashews, raisins, and different dry culmination. It frequently includes rice, meat, and cooked veggies. Mandi is some other famous dish, originating from Yemen.

The climate of Riyadh is regularly hot and burning with temperatures growing to even 50-degree celsius between Might also and September. November to March is comparatively much less hot with little rainfall. Mild cotton clothes are comfy to travel in and assist to beat the warmth. December and January are the nice months to go to.

Riyadh Flights are frequent and connect the city to global locations like Big apple, Washington DC, London, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. They may be cheaper and are the maximum green method of transport to and from the metropolis.

News and Society Article Category

America is rapidly approaching a glaring red light where a turn could easily be fraught with peril. We faced this same peril in the humble beginnings of the Republic; we battled and won against the most powerful military might on the planet. The likelihood of a win was against all odds and surely gained through God’s favor. We faced an enemy who used a club of fear to cower us back to what they perceived to be our rightful place. Our dastardly deed of attempting to be a free people would be forgiven if we lay down our arms and allowed them to control our country; if not, we were to be branded traitors and punished with death. It seemed impossible to win, yet the Americans chose to fight. They understood the value of being a free people.

Politics naturally involves debate, disagreement, and differences of opinion. It’s the backbone of our democracy. Each of us has a right to express our opinion on topics as far ranging as immigration reform to the best point guard in the NBA.

by

Having just labored through another Easter with all its hype and reflections on a myth introduced by Constantine and perpetuated by the Catholic Church leaves me drained. The spiritual presence within me is again shaken by the lies and misconceptions that lead people like sheep. Visions of the tourist venues in Jerusalem with masses pouring through so-called holy sites is rather appalling.

by

On January 20, 2017, newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific-Partnership. A couple of days later, Trump signed another executive order but this time against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Both of these agreements played major factors in both the United States domestic and international trade markets.

When someone wants to find out about what is taking place around them, there is the chance that they will look towards the mainstream media. This is because this source will be seen as being trustworthy and reliable.

People put up fake news to sway others with their opinions and hopefully to destroy the ‘norm’. During the USA elections, it was rife. Social Media sites like Facebook along with videos, and the media, in general, all promoted it.

we are at the time of the last days when the Spirit of the Universe, the Great Creator, promised that the world

   as we know it will come to an end. To bring it to this point the 2 beasts of Revelation have played a vital role. The population of the earth is in turmoil as wars, famine, poverty, and climate changes each play a vital role in the brutality visible today and getting worse by the minute.

Doesn’t free public transport services within a busy city center sound interesting? Some cities have a well-developed zero-fare public transport strategy. This has its pros and cons which are looked at below.

The increase in school tardiness is most disturbing. Schools considered a significant problem that affects school performance.

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Koe No Katachi - Best Anime Movie on the world!

Ishida Shouya is a 6th grader who's usually after enjoyment and bold material. Because of his daredevil character, it's no shock he can also be a bully. Oneday a new-girl called Nishimiya Shoko exchanges to his course. Sadly, Shoko is deaf by delivery and therefore employs her laptop to speak. Not able to comprehend her, Ishida attempts deeper techniques and begins bullying her creating her to move to a different college, making unfavorable effect on his existence aswell. Couple of years later, Ishida, alone and unhappy, chooses to meet up Shoko again and apologize for several material he did in those days.

I came across Koe no Katachi fourteen days before while going right through arbitrary tips, I don’t understand how but I arrived on its MAL site inadvertently. I'd nothing more straightforward to achieve this I considered providing it a try. Granted how great it had been I believe I ought to randomly press each time I take advantage of the web to find out new material.

Koe no Katachi is a brief manga with only 64 sections that address a which in fact has some meaning and ethical. Intimidation is a difficulty in nearly every college. It is available in several types so it's challenging to tell apart it from normal cracks. Koe no Katachi describes equally, and much more significantly, it describes what it results in. Nothing within the manga is sugar coated however the truth is offered because they are in a really lovely method. The tale starts with Ishida being a idiot in 6th-grade and advances with him despising his previous home when he enters high school. Because of conditions produced following the bully event in 6th-grade, Ishida has dropped all his buddies and lifestyles a lonely existence. The way in which he looses his buddies is anything just about everyone confronts at-one point-of existence, be it straight or indirectly. Ishida’s method of intimidation Shoko is extremely vicious and it is enough to surprise any regular individual and make him furious. The unhappiness is doubled due to the grin Shoko retains up while getting bullied. However the developed Ishida is a individual. He cares for others and certainly desires to commit herself to Shoko. He actually learned sign-language for several years simply to talk to her. The entire tale handles numerous figures as well as their present associations, that will be significantly affected by their past.

The figures in Koe no Katachi are extremely practical. We've Ishida, who moves from an a&%pit to a guy. Shoko, a sweet deaf woman with a quite complicated character. Shoko’s sibling Yuzuru who's really defensive about her, Ueno, a former classmate of Ishida who's really short-tempered and hates just about everyone. Sahara, whose existence was damaged and he or she never found college following the intimidation event, “Kawai”, who reports within the same course as Ishida and was likewise his classmate in 6th-grade, Shoko and Yuzuru’s mom who retains her poker-face up constantly and….I might continue all day long!

Lets adhere to main people below. Ishida-I disliked him in the beginning but from the end-of the sequence he turned among my favorites. What he did was incorrect but his commitment to create Shoko’s existence great was anything to become valued. Though at some degree, his apologizing to Shoko was for their own individual fulfillment, he quickly found this and eliminated such selfish emotions. The youth Ishida was really irritating and went too much while bullying Shoko. Due to him, two lifestyles got ruined, among Shoko’s along with other being their own. Shoko- I dislike her and that I enjoy her, I really like her for who she's and dislike her for considering himself as a trouble as well as for what she did later within the tale. Shoko has a complicated character, she retains up a grin constantly to create up on her insufficient conversation abilities while inside, she's getting consumed by her very own ideas. She views her existence useless and doesn’t desire to be a load on anybody. But, she's the main reason everybody got along side Ishida and despite being bullied by him in 6th-grade, she forgives him and apologizes instead. I like her and yes I did so shame her in the beginning due to her impairment getting used against her, that shame vanished between simply to strike back again later and vanish again. Her grin is stunning and it is enough to soften actually the coolest of minds that rest several levels underneath the heavy fridge (ERB research: Blackbeard vs Al capone) Despite having such powerful primary toss, my personal favorite personality was Shoko and Yuzuru’s mom. She appears really rigid and illegal in the beginning nevertheless when her backstory is informed, you can understand why she ended up like this. She appears like a individual who doesn’t treatment much about others but we and Ishida reach begin to see the aspect her very own kids are not aware. She's strong-woman who lifted to kids on her very own while experiencing a very difficult time.

Personality improvement in Koe no Katachi is extremely quick because of less quantity of sections but nonetheless it's accomplished beautifully. It handles associations which are described at different amounts. It handles what this means to become a friend. It's something stunning. All of the figures which were attached to the intimidation event continue to be haunted from the shame of sensation, actually Shoko, the primary target is one of these. Despite the fact that the character improvement is quickly, it's false for each personality. Although Ishida totally works out to become a fresh individual, figures like Ueno remain exactly the same. A mixture of such figures gives rise to issues that are necessary for the history development. With a simple personality proven from a wide variety of views, it's difficult to dislike anyone of these. I liked how this manga pictured the results of intimidation about the lifestyles of everybody associated with it. Ultimately, everybody was a target, actually Ishida. Koe no Katachi is heartwarming knowledge that'll bring-you towards the holes. The ease shown through artwork and tale helps it be a experience. Oh, from artwork I recall that it's stunning and a pleasure for that eyes. No large-breasted women or awesome men with strange attire design, simply regular people leading a regular lifestyle.

Ultimately, Koe no Katachi is among the greatest manga I actually study. Every once in a while, it's great to consider a split from conventional material and study something which appears actual, anything stunning. Koe no Katachi mightn't be ideal, but I don’t believe I deserve to indicate its defects. Therefore, for that very first time, I'm composing a critique which has just the good, due to the fact Koe no Katachi is good. Used to do not discover any desire to consider defects within the piece or artwork, since I had been active experiencing in the base of my heart.

You MUST watch it: http://fullofanime.com/

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