These readings certainly covered a lot. There are two main things I want to talk about here:

1) invisibility 2) “authenticity” (yes, I have to put this in quotes, because who knows what this means really?)

1) I want to push back on this notion of invisibility a little bit. Joe mentions in his blog how Nakamura discusses the “erasing or making opaque the labor that affords ‘innovation and development.’” The thing that’s a little confusing about Nakamura’s argument is that she problematizes both the Navajo’s invisibility as well as how they are made visible. The way the Navajo are portrayed, especially in the Shiprock brochure, is littered with racial stereotypes. Fairchild is appropriating an image here - playing up ideas of Native Americans as dexterous craftspeople, who, after centuries of weaving blankets, are only naturally disposed to making circuit breakers – for the benefit of the corporation. In other words, the Navajo are only made visible when it makes someone else – Fairchild, the military, the U.S. government – look good. A kind of selective invisibility perhaps. But even “true” invisibility – a “labor temporally hidden” or “hidden spatially” (937) – doesn’t feel exactly right. It’s not that we don’t know that the coltan in our phones comes from the Congo (Nathaniel) or that our clothes are made in sweatshops in Indonesia (Todd). It’s that we actively choose not to think about this fact. I’d like it if one of these authors tackled what the conditions are surrounding this sort of unthinkability. Is this way of thinking a hangover from colonialism (as in, I don’t concern myself with what’s going on over there)? Or is there something recent, something about the integrality of technology that makes it different, that makes this turning away possible?

2) Like Nathaniel and Aden, I also thought about Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story when reading Sterne. Nathaniel, I would also distrust a bluray of this film. There’s something about the grainy quality that makes the film feel “authentic.” But what is authenticity here? Especially when “lo-fi” becomes an aesthetic choice rather than inherent to the infrastructure itself (Nathaniel’s Jack White example is a good one). There’s a quote I’m thinking of from Tan Lin’s Heath Course Pak - a book Kelly and I recently read in Barrett’s class - something about “distortion being built into the product” in order to make it feel more “natural.” We know what this feels like; people can look weirdly unnatural on televisions that are too hi-def. But it’s hard to determine what the starting point is for the natural/the authentic/verisimilitude (defined, by the way, as the “merely appearance of truth”). Should I think about visual media best “represents” what I see in my real life? Is the most “true” auditory media the one that’s closest to what I hear during a live music performance? And how can we even track this when the “finitude” of the medium so often surpasses the “finitude” of the human eye/ear?