danah boyd

(Or: How we’ve come to be micro-celebrities online)

Facebook’s recent introduction of “frictionless sharing” is the newest development in a growing trend: data is being increasingly produced passively as individuals conduct their day-to-day activities. This is a trend that has grown both on and offline. We will focus on the former here; especially “frictionless” sharing that involves syncing Facebook with other sites or apps. Once synced, much of what a user listens to, reads or otherwise accesses are automatically and immediately published on Facebook without any further action or approval.  Users may not even need to “opt into” frictionless sharing because many services are changing their default setting to automatically push content to Facebook. In short, we can say that users play a passive role in this process.

Contrast this to more active sharing: when we “like” or “+1” something (by clicking the eponymous buttons that have spread throughout the Web) it requires the user to make a conscious and affirmative action to share something with others in their network. Nathan Jurgenson (one of this post’s co-authors) previously described these two models as types of “documentary vision:” We actively document ourselves and our world around us as if we have a camera in our hand (“liking”, status updates, photos, etc.), or we can passively allow ourselves to be documented, curating our behaviors along the way (e.g., reading a magazine article so that you can present yourself as the type of person who “likes” that sort of magazine) much like a celebrity facing a crowd of paparazzi photographers.

Let’s make another layer of complexity to this documentary model more...

This brief essay attempts to link two conceptualizations of the important relationship of the on and offline. I will connect (1) my argument that we should abandon the digital dualist assumption that the on and offline are separate in favor of the view that they enmesh into an augmented reality and (2) the problematic view that the Internet transcends social structures to produce something “objective” (or “flat” to use Thomas Friedman’s term).

Instead, recognizing that code has always been embedded in social structures allows persistent inequalities enacted in the name of computational objectivity to be identified (e.g., the hidden hierarchies of Wikipedia, the hidden profit-motive behind open-source, the hidden gendered standpoint of computer code, and so on). I will argue that the fallacy of web objectivity is driven fundamentally by digital dualism, providing further evidence that this dualism is at once conceptually false, and, most importantly, morally problematic. Simply, this specific form of digital dualism perpetuates structural inequalities by masking their very existence. more...

Theorizing the Web 2011 was held on April 9th 2011 at the University of Maryland’s Art-Socy building.  It far exceeded our expectations in every way.  We received over 100 abstract submissions of which were able to accept 53%.  We were joined by Internet research experts from around the world, including presenters who traveled from Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Europe.  The conference pushed the capacity limits of the venue with over 230 official registrants and easily 250 people in attendance throughout the day.  Events ran from registration at 8 AM and ended with an afterparty that wound down around 11 PM.  The program was packed with as many as five concurrent panels in early sessions.  The plenary sessions by George Ritzer and Saskia Sassen as well as danah boyd‘s keynote drew audiences of over 150 people.

Sessions covered a wide range of topics pertaining to the social web, including the politics of infrastructure; the role of social media in contemporary social uprisings; the reproduction of race, class, gender, sexuality, and their intersections in a digital milieu; the co-determinacy of the online and offline world (i.e., “augmented reality”) and the dangers of viewing them in isolation; the performance of the self through one’s online Profile and the increasing need to accept the cyborg subject as sociology’s proper unit of analysis; the Internet as more post-Modern than the original objects of analysis under consideration by the post-Modern theorists; the new economies of the Web and the limits of traditional (e.g., Marxian, neo-liberal) modes of thought; the reconfiguration of norms pertaining to privacy/publicity; the democratization of (formerly expert) knowledge via crowdsourcing (e.g., Wikipedia); and the capacity of art to capture/predict our changing relationship with technology. more...

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