Michele White is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. She teaches Internet and new media studies, television and film theory, art history and contemporary visual culture, science fiction and technology literature, gender and queer theory, and critical race and postcolonial studies.
Her book, which is entitled The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship, was published by MIT Press in 2006. It considers how spectatorial positions are produced and structured by Internet settings. Internet sites and computer interfaces address the spectator, depict the kinds of bodies that are expected to engage, model the views and experiences that can be accessed, and promise spectatorial control for some individuals. In The Body and the Screen, White poses hybrid critical models and suggests how theories of art viewing, authorship, feminist and psychoanalytic film, gender and queer studies, hypertext, photographic reproductions, television, and postcolonial and critical race studies offer ways to understand Internet sites and spectatorship. The critical models indicated in this book are intended to support ongoing new media research and production strategies. More information about The Body and the Screen and a sample chapter are available at the MIT web site.
Her recent articles include: "Where Do You Want to Sit Today? Computer Programmers' Static Bodies and Disability" Information, Communication and Society 9, 3 (2006); "Television and Internet Differences by Design: Rendering Liveness, Presence, and Lived Space," Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 12, 3 (August 2006); "My Queer eBay: 'Gay Interest' Photographs and the Visual Culture of Buying," in Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire, ed. Ken Hillis, Michael Petit, and Nathan Scott Epley. New York: Routledge Press, 2006; "Too Close to See: Men, Women, and Webcams," New Media & Society 5, 1 (2003); "The Aesthetic of Failure: Net Art Gone Wrong," Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 7, 1 (2002); "Representations or People," Ethics and Information Technology 4, 3 (2002); "Where Is the Louvre," Space and Culture - The Journal 4/5 (2000); and "Visual Pleasure in Textual Places: Gazing in Multi-User Object-Oriented Worlds,"Information, Communication, and Society 2 (1999).
White's current research includes two book projects: Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay and Elements of the Internet: Rethinking the Network and Information Technology Workers. Buy It Now indicates how buyers, sellers, categories, collecting processes, and material objects are articulated through eBay's carefully structured narratives and representations. Chapters address eBay's histories, the interface and production of viewing positions, construction of community, sellers' narratives about digital representations and relinquishing desirable things, the rendering of alternative eBay viewing positions, the reproduction of stereotypes, artists' interventions into the site, and how critical considerations of eBay can be used to interrogate other Internet conventions. The book points to what makes eBay important, proposes a series of critical readings of the site, and suggests how an analysis of eBay's structure can be used to explain other Internet sites and interfaces.
Elements of the Internet considers some of the standard ways academics, artists, popular writers, and other individuals represent Internet engagements. It considers how the Internet is rendered through visual and textual representations of entering, going, aliveness and liveness, and space. The tendency to describe these concepts as inherent, necessary, and original is critiqued by comparing them to counter-narratives about the Internet and the similar conventions employed in such cultural forms as architecture and television. The use of spatial terms in conceptualizing the Internet is also resisted with a strategic vocabulary, which includes such concepts as reading, typing, sitting, and representations. These alternative terms emphasize the rendered aspects of Internet and computer engagements and indicate how technologies and depictions influence individuals' embodied experiences. In proposing different models for understanding the Internet, the book also indicates the alternative functionality and strategic resources that the Internet can offer.
