Monthly Archives: August 2018

Erin Yerby take the page 99 test for her dissertation

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On page 99:

 “Spiritualism troubles the separation between here and there: as modern, western and mostly ‘white,’ but also because Spiritualists inhabit the problematic prejudices of modernity as uncomfortably “religious,” skirting the secular-religious divide, and adopting the very stance of the scientific observer with regard to their own bodily sensorium. The body becomes an object of observation, and simultaneously, the site of an intimate participation in one’s own affective experience. Mediumship involves, I argue, the practiced bodily technique of refusing to put images to rest, at least as properly historicized and situated pasts. The past returns as a living presence available to sensation, a revenant stutter interrupting American history in its sublimation of the dead, and making visible the ongoing entanglement of colonized bodies and spectral figures within settler-colonial imaginaries.”

Mediumship is an always-present encounter with ephemeral images and affects that  reveals the intimate way pasts are congealed in the body. An encounter, in other words, with something at the limits of what we neatly designate the social or culture, that gets into the body—a spectral remnant within experience that exceeds experience. How to think about such encounters was Mauss’ problem, it seems to me, in calling for a study of the techniques of the body, and in making the far-reaching claim that even the most metaphysical of our practices—mystical states— are “at bottom […] techniques of the body.” And then we might follow Nietzsche’s claim that philosophy has always concerned the body, or rather a misunderstanding of the body. It is as if thought has abstracted itself from its most fundamental encounter—a missed encounter with the body, from which thought arises. The body is thought’s otherness—its condition, as Deleuze and Guattari say: thought has its condition in the non-thought of the body, “its tiredness and waiting.” More precisely, the claim I am making here is that mediumship presents us with time in the body, the past sensed (in the body) as an animate and figural sliver of the present: living images of the dead. This dissertation explores modern Spiritualist mediumship as giving shape to a specifically modern sensorium, wherein the body appears as the primary, or primordeal, media of spiritual presences.

The section in which I discuss this, which includes p.99, explores the problematic relation of “dead” images to history, drawing upon Chakrabarty’s post-colonial critique of historicism as the conversion of the “plural” life-worlds of non-western others to a “bit of the past.” I propose here that the problem of history, or historicism, turns upon its relation to images—and the power of images which theological iconoclasm so deeply confronts. For Protestant reformer Calvin, the only safe, non-idolatrous images—those that cannot be confused with a living body, or entrance a living body into an ecstatic identification with itself—are images sequestered to pastness: that is, effectively de-animated and rendered dead, through their enclosure within an historical context. If historicism also names a way of writing we are comfortable with, and even, following a Marxian post-structuralist vein, is said to make for responsible, ideologically weary scholarship, mustn’t we also ask ourselves if such writing sequesters ideas and images to a dead zone, eliding (and thus missing) the full sense of their force in the now of the present?

Enfolded in a modern dialectic of proximity and distance, the medium’s quasi-scientistic re-making of the body into an instrument of observation is her means of drawing near the overlooked sensations affecting a body that have elided history—the many animate spectral shapes of the past. North American Spiritualist mediumship, I am saying, puts in relief the iconoclastic distinction between dead and living images by placing the body at the center of a sensory engagement with the past: not as a history of dead images, but as an erotics of plural entanglements with the living-dead. In its performed refusal of history, mediumship dialectically adheres to, yet refuses, the deadening of external images which iconoclastic prohibition demands. In making the body the locus or house of living images, mediumship expresses an immanence between presence and past, the body and the image.

Erin Yerby. 2017. Spectral Bodies of Evidence: The Body as Medium in American Spiritualism. Columbia University, Phd dissertation.

 

 

Bibliography:

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mauss, Marcel. 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society, 2:1, 70-88.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. The Genealogy of Morals. New York: Dover.

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway on her new book, Signing and Belonging in Nepal

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http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/bookpage/SABINbookpage.html

Interview by Rebekah Cupitt

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway’s book, Signing and Belonging in Nepal (2016) captures the ongoing and changing nature of both deaf Nepali and Nepali life in general. It especially marks the shifts in how deaf Nepalis perform their identities through sign language and the relation with the larger socio-political changes occurring during the many years she has visited Nepal. She traces the ties between the caste system and notions of ritual pollution associated with the stigma assigned to deaf people, then shows how deaf signers in Nepal used an ethnolinguistic model of deafness to address this stigma, while navigating the resonances of this model with the politics of language during the Nepali Civil War. Her book also examines how the drive for Nepal to become a modern bikas (developed) nation in the eyes of the global economy influenced interactions between hearing and deaf Nepalis. Erika ends by considering how deaf signers’ practices for framing and labeling different forms of signing may be shifting in the post-war period.  I should note that during our exchange, Erika explained that although she used the d/Deaf distinction in the book at the request of the editors at Gallaudet (she had originally used local terms), in more recent works she follows the lead of deaf anthropologists who are moving away from that particular typographical distinction. The terminology used in this interview reflects that.

 Rebekah Cupitt: Could you discuss how the political changes that occurred after the People’s War have further impacted signing and deaf belonging in Nepal. For instance, is there an instance of deaf signing practices from that period which is indicative of the current political situation in Nepal?

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: I noted in the book that, since the end of the war, the structural inequalities embedded in Nepali governance have shifted slowly and unevenly in the forging of a “new Nepal.” However, symbolic changes have occurred more readily, specifically with the grounding of nationalism in caste Hinduism becoming less overt. One obvious example of this type of change, which I discussed in the book, was the 2006 appointment of a new national anthem for the secular republic. The lyrics of Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka, or, “Made of Hundreds of Flowers,” are widely understood to signal a commitment to a form of nationalism that is explicitly multicultural and multiethnic and can be seen as an attempt to performatively call forth a not yet realized political landscape, one characterized by the inclusion that adivasi janati (indigenous) groups had struggled for in the war.

In this post-war context, then, efforts to link standard Nepali Sign Language (NSL) forms with caste-Hinduism have become a less necessary and effective way to align with explicit symbols of Nepali nationalism. In the book, I addressed how pictorial images of NSL signs served as public resources through which signers could access the cannon of lexical items understood to constitute standard Nepali Sign Language, and also as a tool through which signers were encouraged to create boundaries and linkages between a range of linguistic practices, different forms of representation of such practices, and social types. This use of the creative indexicality of images continues in the post-war period, of course, but the particulars of these practices are shifting along with the changing grounding of Nepali nationalism.

For example, I am currently working on an article in which I analyze deaf artist Pratigya Shakya’s illustrations representing a NSL version of the new National Anthem. Shakya’s pictorial representations of signing practices entail representing signing bodies, both performing and embodying (through, for example, their clothing) the social groups which the signs individually and collectively reference. Thus, in order to recapitulate the new anthem’s explicit claim that Nepali nationalism is widely inclusive, the collected figures Shakya painted performing the signs represent a range of types in terms of social (caste, ethnic, and geographic) variation. Here then, the inclusiveness referred by the anthem is materialized in the figures performing the signs, as this group of figures collectively indexes a social persona of “diverse Nepali.”

Rebekah Cupitt: In Chapter 3 and 4, you talk in detail about signing practices and how they are lexically tied to Hindu traditions in some cases, and in the case of homesign (sign systems developed by deaf Nepali who grow up without access to NSL, see Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016:70), traditions and socio-economic origins are framed as less desirable from perspectives grounded in hegemonic Hindu nationalism. I know that your research makes for an important comment and account of deafness in Nepal but do you see your work as commenting on Nepali culture and religion through deaf eyes and the situated performance of sign language thus offering a counter-narrative of Nepali life?

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: While the book focuses on the practices of signers, in order to understand the political economies of their efforts to link linguistic forms to social types, it was necessary to consider scales “beyond directly observable and recordable face-to-face interactions” (Inoue 2016:153; Gal 1989). That is, it wasn’t just that I had to try to understand the ethnographic moments in which I participated within a broader social and historical context, but more specifically that I had to analyze the processes through which deaf social actors themselves understood and enacted such scalar relations (see Carr and Lempert 2016). So in that respect the book indeed seeks to highlight deaf perspectives on broader Nepali social life.

In some cases, these perspectives reproduced the hegemonic hierarchies of the state within deaf social worlds; in order to navigate the difficult period of the war, deaf leaders didn’t just work to associate NSL signing practices with the middle-hills caste-Hinduism in which Nepali nationalism was grounded. Rather, as you note, these processes also involved contrasting this cluster of practices, qualities, and affiliations with an opposed cluster that could serve as their foil (Irvine and Gal 2000). This broader project also involved work to associate homesigns with non-caste Hindu practices and qualities, in so doing replicating broader hegemonic discourses. At the same time, however, this diverse network of deaf signers did not universally share these bundles of associations. Thus, I also tried to highlight the ongoing semiotic work deaf leaders engaged in (such as leading workshops and creating images that highlighted links between signs and social qualities) in order to make these kinds of interpretive habits cohere, to some degree and for some duration.

On the other hand, the way that some signers recruited the concept of porous personhood as a tool to reduce internal hierarchy within deaf social worlds offered a counter-narrative not only of broader Nepali life but also of many enactments of ethno-linguistic models of deafness. Specifically, in some contexts, deaf people who begin to sign later in life, and whose signing shows the effects of such late-learning, may find their status as ethno-linguistically deaf challenged. Nepali signers who drew on understandings of distributed personhood to distribute linguistic competence, thus challenged not only Nepali models that would enjoin “polluted” signers to avoid contact with others, but also the internal hierarchies that can characterize the way that an ethnolinguistic model of deafness may be understood.

Rebekah Cupitt: Porous personhood as a concept is a compelling analytical device through which the social collaboration involved in becoming deaf is powerfully rendered, especially the stigma attached to it but it also forms the distinction between Nepali Sign Language signers and home-signers. Could you discuss how this notion of personhood has shifted given the decreasing focus on Hindu caste systems and the karmic model of deafness and a Nepal-wide more towards ideologies focused on development (bikas) and modernity?

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: In Chapter 5, I focused on The Bakery Café, a fast food chain in Kathmandu that hires and advertises the presence of deaf wait staff, as a way to think through this question. I pointed out that, since food was an especially effective medium for the transmission of pollution, hiring deaf waiters to serve in a restaurant chain was a risky proposition when the venture launched in 1997. However, I suggested that The Bakery Cafe was successful not in spite of the fact that the deaf waiters would “traditionally” have been understood to transmit pollution, but in large part because publicly accepting food from deaf servers created a way for customers to generate and display modern personas that hinged on a contrast with such “traditional” frames.

I should add that it’s possible see the Bakery Café’s hiring of deaf staff as part of a neoliberal commodification of linguistic and social variation, which might suggest that an individualizing frame would be overtaking a notion of porous personhood in that context. However, as Inoue (2016:166) notes, “the neoliberal self is produced through processes of “dividuation” as much as “individuation” (Inoue 2016:166), as persons are fractured into shifting bundles of qualities and skills. And, as Friedner (2015) describes concerning Indian businesses that attempt to extract value from deaf sociality, businesses hiring deaf workers may take advantage of the ways in which deaf signers work to share and distribute skills among themselves, saving the management some of the work of training and creating team dynamics. Similarly, in Nepal, it seems that models of deaf sociality generated in part through the concept of porous personhood have been productively exploited as deaf workers are incorporated into such work contexts. So, to address your question more specifically, my point is that these ideological frames and the embodied enactments of them have not replaced one another linearly, but have rather resonated together in complex ways.

Rebekah Cupitt: Are you able to speculate perhaps on what a focus on disability or the non-linguistic aspects of deaf culture potentially brings and/or removes from a study of deafness in Nepal? Given the strength of the ties between the ethnolinguistic model of deafness and the now less-popular Hindu nationalist movement, how might deaf personhood and belonging in Nepal appear differently should deaf identity be theoretically decoupled from language? 

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: To think through this question I need to be clear that concepts like personhood, identity, or disability are grounded in forms of semiosis (signification or meaning making). Linguistic practices can’t be easily separated from other modes of semiosis (see Nakassis 2016). For example, though much of my book is ostensibly about Nepali Sign Language, as the set of practices that ground an ethnolinguistic framing of deafness, consider how much of my discussion focuses on modes of semiosis that are generally considered non-linguistic, such as drawings, clothing styles, or food. While linguistic practices are explicitly centered in the meta-semiotic debates I analyze in the book, many of those practices center on forging or disrupting perceptions of entanglement between these linguistic practices and other modes of meaning.

Even as I want to keep in mind that language does not function independently of other types of meaning-making, however, working in a context in which many people (such as homesigners) have not had sufficient access to linguistically mediated sociality does make clear that linguistic semiosis is a distinctive and vital form of signification. Because deaf people often suffer from being cut off from sociality when shared linguistic practices are inaccessible, it’s difficult to imagine a politics of deafness in which language plays no role. However, there seems to be a lot of scope for variation in terms of how language is ideologized in deaf framings of personhood and larger scales of belonging. For example, while communicative sociality via accessible modalities will, I think, always be central, it may not always be seen as necessary to ground Nepali understandings of deafness in the perceived use of a particular named language like Nepali Sign Language, nor to posit hard and fast distinctions between named signed languages, spoken languages, written languages, gestural practices, and homesigns (for example, Kusters and Sahasrabudhe 2018).

Rebekah Cupitt: It strikes me, on reading the later chapters in Signing and Belonging in Nepal that deaf Nepalis have unique opportunities to engage with the international deaf community beyond receiving aid, sometimes even travelling to these countries, and therefore deaf Nepalis have access that other Nepalis, especially those from the lower castes and socio-economically poor ethnic jats lack. Towards the end of the book, you discuss what it means to be deaf and how deaf identity has changed in response to the political structure of Nepal, but I wonder if you could reflect on the potential for the deaf Nepalis you know, to themselves become drivers of change and not simply respondents – either on a national, local or global front.

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: I closed the book by saying that, “ultimately, I hope to have shown that deaf Nepalis will not only continue to respond to local and transnational change, they will also continue to actively participate in making such change” (Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016:116). Such changes may occur in part through the relationships that deaf Nepalis forge with signers from other countries – relationships that can entail travel but which are also enacted over media like Facebook and YouTube. For example, Pratigya Shakya, the deaf artist whose work I often discussed in the book, prolifically posts videos in which he provides artful portraits of Nepali and Nepali deaf life, which he addresses to a global “Deaf World.” Other signers, like Dipawali Sharmacharya, work with international organizations to create programs to help deaf Nepalis access language, schooling, and work opportunities, while yet others, like Upendra Khanal, have been publishing linguistic analyses of NSL that can affect local and transnational framing of Nepali signing practices (e.g., Morgan, Green, and Khanal 2016). However, given that broader social constructs (including both “Nepal” and the “Deaf World”) are generated (if not in predictable or controllable ways) by the interactive engagements they mediate, all deaf Nepalis are actively engaged in collaborative and contested ways of producing, shaping, and changing their social worlds.

 

Carr, E. Summerson, and Michael Lempert, eds. 2016. Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. Oakland: University of California Press

Friedner, Michele, 2015. Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Gal, Susan. 1989. “Language and Political Economy.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 345–67.

Hoffmann-Dilloway, 2016. Signing and Belonging in Nepal. Washington D.C.: Gallaudet University Press.

Inoue, Miyako. 2016. “Where Has ‘Japanese Women’s Language’ Gone?: Notes on Language and Political Economy in the Age of Control Societies.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 151–77.

Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal, 2000. Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (Paul Kroskrity, ed.): 35–84. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Kusters, Annelise and Sujit Sahasrabudhe, 2018. Language Ideologies on the Difference Between Gesture and Sign. Language and Communication 60: 44-63.

Morgan, Michael, Mara Green, and Upendra Khanal, 2016. Sign Language: Southern Asia. In The Sage Deaf Studies Encyclopedia (Genie Gertz and Patrick Boudreault, eds.): 815-817. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Nakassis, Constantine, 2016. Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language.  American Anthropologist 118(2): 330-345

Miranda Weinberg takes the page 99 test for her dissertation

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Page 99 of my dissertation, Schooling Languages: Indigeneity, Language Policy, and Language Shift in Nepal, is both representative and anomalous as part of my dissertation. In my dissertation more broadly, I investigated how an indigenous minority established a footing relative to the national majority, and within their own community. Specifically, I looked at the implementation of a language policy in Nepal that gives each community the right to basic education in their so-called mother tongue, in particular the case of the Dhimal language. Individual chapters of my dissertation are focused on different levels of scale involved in regimentation of languages in education, from national decisions to community debates over entextualizing the language in textbooks, from discourse practices in schools to interactions at home that teach children which languages they should learn. In the chapter that opens on Page 99, I followed three schools: the two government schools that had begun to teach Dhimal language by the end of my fieldwork, and a third that was seemingly ideally situated to do so but did not. I found that, while the noun phrase the state implies a coherent actor with unified goals, the state was encountered by people and institutions (such as schools) as a momentary and fragmentary phenomenon. The decisions that determined the distribution of languages in schools were more directly influenced by alignments of political party affiliations and activism by an ethnic organization than any sort of force from laws and policies.

Page 99 of my dissertation exemplifies one of my analytical priorities, which was to listen to children. Children and young people are crucial actors in the realms of schooling, enregisterment, and language shift, all issues that I was concerned with in my dissertation. Yet scholars who share these concerns frequently focus on adults without providing full attention to children’s perspectives. In the case of the vignette presented on Page 99 (see below), children’s perspectives showed that they had no problem listing Dhimal as one of their school subjects alongside others, and that they even enjoyed it. At the same time, it exemplifies challenges of conducting research with children, whose claims can be difficult to interpret.

My page 99:

On a sunny afternoon in December, near the end of my fieldwork, I asked a group of second grade students about their favorite subject:

1 MW: ani timharuko sabbhandā manparne bishaya kun ho? And what is all of your favorite subject?
2 S1: malāi manparne bishaya, malāi cahi manparne bishaya, uh, kun ho My favorite subject, uh, the subject I like, um, which is it
3 S2: malāi thāhā cha I know
4 MW: la bhanna ta? Ok, say it then
5 S3: eh bhanna lāunu na Yeah, make her say it
6 MW: la bhanna Ok, say it
7 S2: Dhimal Dhimal
8 MW: Dhimal ho? It’s Dhimal?
9 Teacher: Dhimal bhāshā, Dhimal bhāshā Dhimal language, Dhimal language
10 MW: Dhimal bhāshā ho? Timro favorite? ani Kamalko? It’s Dhimal language? Your favorite? And Kamal’s?
11 S2: bhan Say
12 Teacher: ke bhannu timile What do you say?
13 S1: malāi favorite bishaya Dhimal bhāshā ho My favorite subject is Dhimal language
14 S4: malāi pani Dhimal bhāshā Mine is Dhimal too

:                 (Group interview, 12/2/15)

 

 

On being asked what their favorite subject was, one by one, all but one of the students in the class reported that their favorite subject was Dhimal. The one exception reported that she favored GK, or General Knowledge. This exchange should certainly not be taken as a transparent reflection of students’ feelings: the teacher of the Dhimal and GK subjects was hovering over the conversation and prompting students to answer, the students knew that I frequently attended their Dhimal class, and the less confident students tended to echo the answers of the first few students to speak up.

 

Miranda Weinberg, 2018. Schooling Languages: Indigeneity, Language Policy, and Language Shift in Nepal. University of Pennsylvania, Phd. Dissertation.

Dr. Miranda Weinberg is a linguistic anthropologist of education and currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Linguistics at Swarthmore College. Her research, conducted in Nepal and the United States, investigates how and when language learning spaces, especially indigenous language revitalization, can support social change. You can reach her via email at mweinbe1@swarthmore.edu.

 

Suk-Young Kim on her new book, K-Pop Live

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Cover of K-pop Live by Suk-Young Kim

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29375

Interview by Chuyun Oh

Chuyun Oh: What were some of the questions you want to explore when you first decided to write a book on K-pop, and what aspects of K-pop drew your attention as a theatre/performance studies scholar?    

Suk-Young Kim: The primary questions I wanted to explore were twofold. How was it possible for a small country like South Korea to reinvent itself from a culturally obscure place to a pop culture powerhouse in just two decades or so? When I came to the US for my graduate studies in the late 90s, most American students did not know anything about South Korean culture. Today, most of my undergraduate students either follow K-pop or know something about it. How was this transformation possible?

I was also concerned about our craving for liveness. K-pop’s natural habitat is YouTube and most K-pop stars and their performances can be found online. But why do fans still crave live concerts and live interaction with their idols? What is the driving force behind this constant search for a face-to-face interaction?

Chuyun Oh: Would you like to give a heads-up to your future readers about what “live” and “liveness” mean to you, and why it matters to understand K-pop today?  

Suk-Young Kim: On a primary level, liveness indicates co-presence in time and space, where performers and spectators are situated in the same venue in real time. But the way I articulate the notion of liveness in this book goes far beyond the level of co-presence. Ultimately, it is about feeling connected to a broader community and sharing affective kinship with that community to the point that it reaffirms one’s feeling of liveliness and a sense of being alive in this increasingly mediated world. K-pop presents an interesting case in point since it both manipulates such affective kinship for monetary gain while also allowing for the genuine grassroots level communities and networks to emerge in a powerful way.

Chuyun Oh: As beautifully demonstrated in your book, K-pop — including its representation, transnational circulation, and consumption — would be impossible today without hyper-sensory, mediatized technology. Still, at the same time, K-pop provides highly embodied and participatory platforms and experiences to both fans and K-pop performers. Ontologically and perhaps, aesthetically too, can you tell us a little more about how your project blurs the dichotomy between the liveliness of the body and the virtual world of the high-speed Internet?

 Suk-Young Kim: This is a terrific question. My chapter on hologram addresses this point most viscerally, but to tease out my main arguments here: K-pop as a cultural scene appears to be extravagant and excessive in its performance style, but if you look deeper into the K-Pop scene, its economy is fueled by the concept of scarcity or lack. The mediated images of K-pop idols saturate media space, and yet so few fans have seen them in close proximity. The lack of opportunities to see stars’ living bodies in real time and space is what creates constant thirst for their immediate presence, and that thirst has to be quenched by a compensating mechanism, which is to saturate our visual playing field with more and more mediated images. This constant gap between fan’s desire and the reality (to paraphrase, the gap between the real body and the mediated images of that body) is what fuels the K-pop craze.

Chuyun Oh: Digital consumerism is often driven by and thus, inseparable from personally and/or socioculturally constructed desire. Why does K-pop matter to its consumers and fans, and what would be the desire lies behind K-pop consumption to this technology-savvy generation? 

Suk-Young Kim: If I were to address this question by focusing on fan communities rather than fan-to-star dynamics, digitally savvy K-Pop fans have found ways to create a community of their own by establishing global networks online. K-pop fan clubs are extremely active online, using their participatory power to not only support their stars, but also establish kinship and share a sense of belonging that offline space does not willingly provide. Participation in online fan clubs can make fans overcome geographic distance and bring someone in Brazil and Iceland into an intimate interaction by sharing their common passion. A sense of belonging, in this case, stems from a sense of validation by others. But I would be remiss not to mention how this fan community, for some fans, is also used as a place to promote themselves and create distinction for themselves by demonstrating their close association with the stars (the so-called “fame by association”). Many K-pop fan clubs have a strict hierarchy that resembles a military organization (the longer you’ve been around and the more material support you’ve provided for their stars, the higher your status will be in fan clubs). K-pop industry navigates through this double edged fandom by promoting both hyperconsummerism and a sense of belonging.

 

Another way to address this question is to see how K-pop itself celebrates technological trendiness. K-pop creates desire for something newer, faster, smarter with their never-ceasing production line, just like smartphone companies are pressured to pump out new models that will be better than the previous version. I think being associated with the K-pop scene directly translates into performing one’s tech-savviness and trendiness.