Imagining Humanity: The Potential and Limits of Humans of New York (2 of 2)
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Becky Pham, Parmita Sengupta & Eduardo Gonzalez
Tensions between envisioning and creating connective action
Eduardo
So what I am hearing is that Stanton’s dominance over the original “Humans of” brand is clearly visible and also significantly challenged by the other spinoff communities. In my own research, I am interested in understanding the social and political efficacies of migrant communities in transnational contexts--in other words, the real and imagined ways immigrants exercise agency over their lives and in their communities in contexts where they may have to navigate legal restrictions caused by their noncitizen statuses.
I’d like to discuss a little more about the space between envisioning action and creating connection: Among the great causes Stanton has supported through his HONY platform, he also interviewed Barack Obama near the end of his presidency. What role do high-profile officials play in transforming (or even dominating) the civic imagination? Do these kinds of features take away from the essence of HONY?
Paromita
High-profile officials definitely gave Stanton the mass popularity that he now enjoys, which I do appreciate as a long-term fan of HONY (I use the term “fan” loosely here, because I am quite critical of his policies and apolitical stance). I don’t know if I would say they take away from the “essence of HONY”, because Stanton has been consistent about maintaining HONY as an apolitical, “good vibes only” space from the very beginning. But they do make his stance as a moderator in the HONY comment sections more problematic, because they give him a higher symbolic authority to shut down conversations that displease him, and bring greater amounts of attention to some of the more problematic stories he decides to feature.
For instance, last September, Stanton published a somewhat-alarming story about a man from the Netherlands who expressed some very incel views on relationships, such as keeping women in a constant state of insecurity by demeaning their appearance. Since Stanton does not comment on the stories -- he just features them -- and he has been very vocal in the past about the need for compassion, and not judging the people whose stories you see on HONY because you do not know their full stories, the combined effect is one of a sympathetic portrayal of a public expression of misogyny from a wildly-influential media voice.
Under-represented communities and popular culture
Becky
Right. So from a case in the Netherlands, let’s look at international microcommunities based on the original HONY. I truly appreciate that you have decided to feature the “Humans of" microcommunities in a non-Western and underrepresented context like Iran, and then convincingly delved into how these communities challenged the mainstream rhetorics of Orientalism and demonization imposed on Iran as “repressive, antiquated and in need of humanizing" (p. 267). This, of course, has seemed to successfully promulgate a more localized and nuanced representation of Iran, but do you think this effect would be stronger if a more uniquely Iranian cultural phenomenon had been featured?
Paromita
This is a particularly interesting topic for me, and something I explore in detail in a journal article that is being published in March in Transformative Works and Cultures. To give you a brief summary, I discovered in the course of researching HONY that Iranian journalists have long been critical of American media representations of Iran which either demonize the culture, or describe it in language that stresses the ‘normalcy’ of Iran by stressing its similarity with American (or universally human) values. As an Iranian-American journalist named Alex Shams put it, “It seems that just about every other week another Western journalist “discovers” Iran and its 'manically welcoming' people, explaining to the world for the fifty-millionth time that contrary to the audience's assumptions, Iran is a pretty nice place to visit”. This is why spinoff pages like “Humans of Tehran” play such important roles as counter-narratives, because they decolonize the very notion of ‘humanity’ by pushing for more nuanced and varied representations of non-American cultures.
For instance, when Shirin Barghi (the creator of “Humans of Tehran”) adopted the “Humans of” model of storytelling by approaching people on the streets of Tehran and asking them to share their stories, her experiences were very different from the way Stanton had described his on HONY. During the government crackdown against the Green Movement of 2009, surveillance equipment had been used to covertly photograph protestors at demonstrations and use them as intimidation tactics, so the people Barghi approached were wary and distrustful of photographers who were inquiring about their private stories. When Barghi was describing why Stanton’s methods were not replicable in the Iranian context, she said, "I love the captions that 'Humans of New York' provides for its photos, but it's not the same in Tehran, people don't want to tell their stories. People are very, very private, as soon as people go outside, they become private people and they set up these barriers."
Barghi uses a more collaborative form of storytelling, such as working with Iranian photographers Omid Iranmehr and Nooshafarin on curating the photographs and translating the captions from Persian to English, and crowdsourcing photographs for consideration from the Iranian community. These methods encourage Iranians to surpass the colonial lens of HONY, and tell their own stories. "Humans of Tehran" also rejects the model of contrived positivity, and addresses a wide variety of complex and sometimes uncomfortable political issues, such as government censorship, the growing suicide rate amongst young women, and the struggles of maintaining transcontinental familial connections in the face of the US travel ban. One example I used in my article is a photograph of a news-stand captioned: "News-stands in Tehran are absolutely awesome—you can find anything in them, lock, stock and barrel." The caption is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that newsstands in Iran often run a flourishing trade in alcohol and marijuana, even in the face of draconian government control and criminal charges.
Transnationality, tensions between global/local forces
Becky
So on this note of the transnational aspect of the HONY universe, I would like to branch out from here to discuss any tensions between the global versus local forces when a transnational cultural phenomenon becomes spreadable media. From my own studies of transnational K-pop fandom in Vietnam, there exists a tension between nationalistic ideologies advocating for the preservation of a unique national identity in the wake of foreign cultural invasion versus cosmopolitan, youth-based reception of foreign cultural flow in forging new youth identities and new forms of civic participation. I have been questioning whether this tension is structurally- or culturally-based, or both? In other words, given how K-pop has taken the world by storm and established wide networks of fans with increasingly accessible communication technologies, it should not be surprising that Vietnamese fans would enthusiastically and/or conveniently tap into these structures and embrace K-pop. So as of now, I would argue that any public reactions to K-pop fandom in Vietnam should take into consideration both structural and cultural configurations underlying this cultural phenomenon. I find your discussion on the problematic white savior complex associated with Stanton illuminating, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Stanton’s personal background and ideology has been conflated with Facebook as the arguably even more Anglocentric structure that HONY is based on in accentuating the notion of ethical neocolonialism that certain critics have identified? As you have pointed out in the chapter, even when Facebook was banned in Iran, followers in Iran still actively accessed Facebook for their “Humans of Tehran" community. Could Stanton's uncritical expression of global fellowship and superficial assessment that “Americans are especially loved in Iran" have been attributed to the soft power of Facebook somewhat?
Paromita
I think that might have been an expression of Stanton’s own apathy towards trying to understand racial tensions, and his obsession with portraying a mode of universal, colorblind “humanity” that precludes any kind of critical discourse on his page. From what I can see on the “Humans of Tehran” page, I don’t think the situation is as simple as Stanton would like to believe.
The position of Facebook within this debate is interesting, not just within the context of “soft power” in Iran, but also in terms of the algorithmic control that Stanton can exert over this community as the moderator of the HONY Facebook page. Following an incident where the conversation in the comment section took on a more critical bent, Stanton posted a public announcement on the HONY Facebook page stating, "Unfortunately, the 'right to free speech' does not apply here. This is not the place to further an ideology at the expense of an individual... Let's try to get back to saying nice things about strangers. In short, let's make HONY different than the rest of the internet”.
In 2015, Stanton delivered a lecture at the University of Dublin where he spoke about being in negotiations with Facebook about altering the Facebook mobile app such that comments would be organized in order of popularity instead of chronologically, pushing the upvoted comments to the top of the post, where they would have the most visibility . This would allow Stanton to maintain the culture of positivity by upvoting the comments that aligned with his own vision. Given how Facebook’s ostensibly color-blind content filtering system has been shown to be racially-biased, HONY is using the social media algorithm and his own vision of ‘humanity’ to create what I call an oppressive “culture of positivity”, which is further silencing dissenting opinions within the fandom.
Conclusion
Eduardo
In line with Stanton’s criticisms for white savior complex and to wrap up our short conversation today, how might we learn from that to envision and create transnational connective action working to support new groups in other countries without it being framed by the local/national a different flavor of U.S. cultural imperialism?
Paromita
I think the larger narrative that emerges from the comparison of “Humans of New York” and the spinoff groups is that the civic imagination of a group, or in this case a fandom, cannot be limited by one person’s individual vision of humanity. To me, one of the most important things that I would have liked to see from Stanton and HONY is for him to acknowledge his position of power and privilege, and not attempt to speak for minority voices. Instead, he should pass on the mic and let minority voices tell their own stories, using his platform and global outreach to make it easier for them to be heard.
Becky
Alright, thank you for taking the time to let us talk to you today, Paromita!
Eduardo
We look forward to reading your future scholarship on participatory online communitie
In the meantime, check out Paromita's next publication in Transformative Works and Cultures:
Sengupta, Paromita. 2020. "Positivity, Critical Fan Discourse, and "'Humans of New York'". In "Fandom and Politics," edited by Ashley Hinck and Amber Davisson, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 32.
