I transferred to UMass from Washington State University two years ago, at the start of my sophomore year. Back then, we still had the textbook annex and I was very comfortable and familiar with that system. As an English major, many of my professors insisted that we take our business to Amherst Books and support them instead, so instead of buying all of my books at the annex I would buy what books were available at Amherst Books and buy the rest at the Annex. At the end of my first semester, I sold my books back to the annex for a reasonable amount of money and thought nothing of it.

The next semester, however, Amazon arrived and replaced the textbook annex. The annex had still been there at the start of the semester, however, at the end Amazon was the one in charge of buying back textbooks. As an English major, a large portion of the books I read for class are novels and small paperbacks, and Amazon typically does not buy these books back, even though they are part of the course curriculum. This was only the start of my dislike of Amazon as the replacement for the textbook annex.

Amazon takes neoliberalism to a whole different level; by becoming the sole on campus textbook provider, it subtly requires students to pay for amazon prime, which is an additional $50 a year to receive the free one day shipping to the amazon pickup center. Without prime, customers can still get their packages delivered to the center but it will not be one day free shipping. As Nat said in the interview, Amazon is using their monopoly on the textbook industry to create new Amazon customers. Not only does Amazon reach its hands into the pockets of students through their reliance on the company for textbooks, by forcing them to buy prime it incentivizes students to shop through Amazon instead of other local stores for other products. Why walk all the way into town to buy books and other school supplies when you can get it all delivered to the center of campus by using your newly purchased Prime membership?

Overall, the transition to Amazon has been a pretty negative experience for me. However, taking this course and getting to explore exactly how Amazon affects the community has been a great learning experience. I know a lot of prominent public figures, such as Obama, support Amazon as a company, seeing it as a success. That is true; as a company in a neoliberal, capitalist society, Amazon is a wildly successful company that has become the number one retailer in the country, replacing Wal-mart. In some ways Amazon has the potential to be much worse than Wal-mart, as they are not limited to dominating the physical market. Amazon is taking a stab at the digital market as well, offering music and video/movie streaming services that are available with a prime membership.

I probably started watching streams on twitch a few years ago when I transitioned from playing Runescape to World of Warcraft and Hearthstone. Although at first I only followed a few streamers who I found through YouTube, Twitch eventually grew on me as a platform and I now find myself tuning into Twitch streams when I multitask; instead of listening to music while I do homework or cook dinner I’ll have a stream playing in the background and occasionally look at the gameplay or interact with chat. I’ve met a lot of online friends in the gaming community through Twitch and I really value it as a platform for allowing members of the community to interact with one another. However, as I spend more time interacting with Twitch, I have slowly started to realize how toxic the community can be. On a small scale, when the streamer is small and pulling in less than 50 viewers, the chat tends to be very nice and, if there is trolling, it is usually light-hearted and is kept in check by the streamer and his mods who can easily keep up with the slow-paced chat. However, in the chatrooms of major streamers, racism and misogyny are everywhere, with many users spamming (usually) mild racist or sexist jokes in chat. I remember watching a vod of Reynad testing out text-to-speech on his channel for the first time, where viewers can donate a minimum of three dollars to have their message read aloud for the whole stream to hear; without the proper filters set up, the level of racism in the messages was obscene.

I didn’t really know too much about gamergate when it was new and relevant, only that it pertained to women in gaming and the prejudices they faced while trying to be part of the gaming community. I have noticed, over my years of gaming and Twitch consumption, that there is a void of women in the gaming community, and most of the only women who are successful on Twitch are very attractive. It’s really unfortunate that it seems like a requirement set for women in the gaming and esports communities is that they must be attractive and appeal to the predominantly male audience. I have made several friends on Twitch over the years who are women and occasionally they will experience more terrifying forms of harassment than online trolling; a couple of them have experienced cyber-stalking, with people going as far as finding their home addresses and personal phone numbers, calling them and breathing heavily into the mouthpiece. Thankfully, they both told me that they resolved their issues safely, but it is terrible that they had to experience something like that simply because they are female gamers.

Not only do women experience hardship when interacting with the Twitch/gaming community, but people of color who are not Asian do as well. Looking at the ESports teams that I know, I do not know of a single one who is neither white nor Asian. I keep fairly up to date with competitive hearthstone, and I don’t think there was a single non-white, non-Asian professional hearthstone player present at the Blizzcon world championships last year. Furthermore, when I look at the over 100 channels that I follow on twitch, I can only find one person who is a non-white, non-asian streamer and he is a Latino man. Much like how the gaming community excludes women, it appears that it has a tendency to exclude minorities who are not Asian.

Platforms have played a significant role in my life since my childhood, especially since I first began to go on the internet as a child using a dial-up connection. I remember the first gaming “computational” platform I ever used: the original Game Boy. It was my dad’s old Game Boy and the only game we had for it was the original Pokemon Blue, and, being the 5 year old child I was, I did not know how to save the game so every time I played I would try to beat the whole game in one go. Silly childhood me. I soon moved online with my gaming and sometime, probably about third through fifth grade, found myself playing a game on the computer called Runescape. This transition from one platform to another was motivated primarily by my friends who also were playing Runescape. Playing games on the computer was not the exclusive  console of my elementary school days; I also quite fondly remember being quite excited to sleep over at friends houses because we would stay up all night playing Super Smash Bros on their N64 or Halo on their Xbox. Having a console when I was a young child other than a Game Boy Color was not a luxury I had as my mother was fairly against gaming in general and wanted me to focus more on my studies.

However, for Christmas one year, my brother and I received a Game Cube right when it came out. I remember this gaming platform quite fondly; it was a great experience playing Mario Kart: Double Dash and Super Smash Bros Melee with my brother and my friends. Since the Game Cube, however, I have transitioned mostly back into computer gaming and almost exclusively play on the PC. I’m not really sure what marked this transition and dedication to the PC platform. It most likely has something to do with the fact that my parents were willing to spend more money on a decent PC than throw a few hundred dollars at a brand new Gaming Console such as a Play Station or an Xbox.

In terms of other computational platforms, for social media I use almost exclusively Facebook, which I do not use very much at all. I never had a MySpace and before Facebook I primarily communicated with my friends through Gmail chat. I never really liked twitter very much and sharing pictures is not really my thing, so the Instagram platform does not really appeal to me. I do, however, enjoy watching streams on twitch and videos on YouTube.