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I’m currently doing field work in Kumasi, Ghana and will be back next week with some really great original content. Until then, I am sharing a piece of media that I have been looking forward to, but currently have absolutely no time to watch. Amy Goodman moderates a discussion between Lacanian Philosopher and pop-culture critic  Slavoj Zizek and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. This is the first interview Assange has given since being put under house arrest without charges filed against him by Sweden or the UK. Zizek considers operations like Wikileaks are the “harbingers for the end of global capitalism as we know it.” Again, I haven’t watched this yet, but I go into it with the following questions in mind: Can we make this kind of conclusion? Or is this a matter of digital dualism mixing with the cautious optimism of the far left? Are we fetishizing information technology to such a degree that we conflate its revolutionary capacity to disrupt technological systems, with its ability to tear apart similar social systems? Technological and social systems can and do follow isomorphic and parallel organizational structures but that does not mean that a technology’s ability to disrupt one, is on par with its ability to disrupt the other.

Augmented Reality Cinema [thanks @farman].

While we generally focus on contemporary cyborgs and new technologies, the case below illustrates the longstanding entanglement of human bodies and technology. And yes, this is a medieval prosthetic hand.

According to David Forbes over at Coilhouse, this little guy belonged to famed mercenary and medieval knight Gotz Von Berlichingen of the early 1500s.

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Mediating Mediums, an architectural augmented reality video. Via Wired’s Beyond the Beyond.

Source: xavax

Citizen-generated film footage – from the Zapruder film, to the Rodney King beating, to 9/11 – has long served an important role in shaping media narratives around major news events.  Yet, with the recent advent of smartphones, virtually everyone will soon have the ability to film public events at virtually anytime.  What many people do not realize is that the legality filming  other people varies widely from state-to-state.  Massachusetts and Illinois, for example, both have strict laws about filming without consent, even in public.

Nevertheless, the technologies are increasingly being used by everyday citizens to record interactions with those in positions of authority.  This trend is often described as sousveillance (meaning observation from below).  For some people, this instinct to record of seemingly significant events has become almost second nature.  Consider the recent video from Casey Neistat, who immediately pulled out a camera when stopped by an officer while biking. more...

 

Contents of the suitcase include a cell phone, some antennae, and modems.

In a sort of 21st century version of Radio Free Europe, the US State Department has sponsored a project that develops suitcase-sized kits that set up cell-phone based mesh networks. These private networks are to be deployed in countries that have totalitarian governments (with anti-American sentiment).

Full story at the New York Times.

Cyborgology editors Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey were recently interviewed by Maryland Morning’s Sheilah Kast about how social media is being used in 2012 presidential campaigns and which candidates are likely to benefit most

Click here to listen to the whole interview.

Here, in this prelude panel discussion to the Internet as Playground and Factory conference, Tiziana Terranova presents a brief and excellent summery of how contemporary Marxist theory—particularly, Italian Marxist theories of socially-produced value—is useful in understanding the social and economic conditions of the Web.  It’s a bit dense, but, in brief, she argues that much of the value produced in modern capitalist societies now comes from outside the workplace.  Markets have learned to capture value from our everyday social activities.  The ideology of neo-liberalism has moved society even further away from the traditional wage-for-labor relationships that used to characterize the workplace by convincing people to view their individual labor-power as a (sometimes risky) investment that may or may not result in satisfying returns.

Terranova was an early advocate of viewing cyberspace and the material world as co-determining (what we describe, on this blog, as “augmented reality”).  Consider her (2000) statement:

I am concerned with how the “outernet” – the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that criss-crosses and exceeds the Internet – surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole.

The intrinsic materialism of Marxism proves quite productive in this case insofar as it draws Internet theorists toward viewing the material implications of digital politics. more...

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A company called Quiring Monuments has recently begun marketing augmented tombstones that are designed to assist smartphone-carrying visitors in accessing digital information about the deceased.  On these tombstones, qr codes are given the kind of prominence once exclusively reserved for a person’s name, dates, and epitaph.  The qr codes link users to individualized sites that contain information about the person being memorialized.  This means that part of the memorializing process now includes constructing an enduring Web presence for the deceased.

This raises a few questions.  How important to the memorializing process is being in the physical presence of a the body?  Will crystallized bits of memory in cyberspace deepen, or even eclipse, the memorial experience found in physical graveyards?  Facebook has already adopted a policy for memorializing accounts (also discussed in the official blog).  Are graveyards becoming redundant?

For more, see Bellamy Pailthorp’s NPR story, “Technology Brings Digital Memories To Grave Sites.”