digital

Giorgio Fontana (1981) is an Italian writer, freelance contributor and editor of Web Target (http://www.web-target.com/en/). His personal website is www.giorgiofontana.com. On Twitter: https://twitter.com/giorgiofontana.

In some very stimulating articles – mainly this one – Nathan Jurgenson has convincingly argued against what he calls digital dualism: that is, to think that “the digital world is virtual and the physical world real”:

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I’ve been thinking on and off since mid-summer about a hole I’ve identified in our collective theorizing of augmented reality. To illustrate it, imagine the following conversation:

Digital Dualist: ‘Online’ and ‘offline’ are two distinct, separate worlds!
Me: That’s not true. ‘Online’ and ‘offline’ are part of the same augmented reality.
Digital Dualist: Are you saying that ‘online’ and ‘offline’ are the same thing?
Me: No, of course not. Atoms and bits have different properties, but both are still part of the same world.
Digital Dualist: So ‘online’ and ‘offline’ are different, but not different worlds?
Me: Correct.
Digital Dualist: But if they’re not different worlds, then what kind of different thing are they?
Me:

I don’t know about you, but this is where I get stuck.

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While tech-writers often act as if the Web is something out there away from society, we all know (and they do too) that technology is always embedded in social structures, power, domination and inequalities. And the words we choose to talk about tech, while seemingly innocuous, betray some pretty heavy political predispositions.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story looking at a “new digital divide” where “poorer” folks aren’t using the web in a “meaningful” way but instead are “wasting time” on social media. I was reminded of how Facebook users looked down on MySpace users a few years ago or the current racist rhetoric surrounding iPhone versus Android mobile phone users. Technology is often an excuse to reify the fallacy that those less privledged are an other, different, less capable and less human.

Whenever someone declares what Internet-use is “meaningful” versus a “waste” we must be critical: who is making the claim? who benefits from these too-commonly constructed hierarchies? And here, as usual, we are dealing with a hierarchical framework created by privileged folks for everyone else to placed within. more...

What do people want? As it turns out, it depends on how the question is asked. At SXSW this year, NetBase.com presented a social media analysis of expressed desire. Specifically, they analyzed 365 days of 27 million status updates that begin with the words “I want.” Recently, they followed up with a Harris survey in which they asked 2,000 participants (1,000 men and 1,000 women) “What is the one thing you want right now? Be as specific as possible.” Unsurprisingly, the results varied dramatically. First, check out the infographic, then keep reading for my analysis. more...

TtW12 twitter backchannel
The TtW12 Twitter back channel. Photo by Rob Wanenchak

Theorizing the Web 2012 was great. Everyone involved did a bang-up job. I certainly learned more in a single day than I usually do at weekend-long establishment conferences. I have said a lot about conferences (here, here, and here) as have fellow cyborgologists (Sarah, Nathan, and PJ). All of these posts have a common thread: academia is changing, but conferences seem out of date in some way. They are needlessly insular, they rely on hefty attendance fees that are increasingly cost-prohibitive,  and they rarely take advantage of social media in any meaningful way. The relative obduracy of conference styles come into high relief once they are compared to the massive changes to institutional knowledge production. Universities have adopted many of the managerial practices of private companies. They are also acting more like profit-seeking enterprises: putting massive resources into patenting offices and business incubators, hiring less tenure-track teaching staff, and employing armies of professionalized managers that run everything from information technology services to athletic facilities. Conferences, on the other hand, have seen few innovations beyond what I call Tote Bag Praxis.  more...

I hereby dare to say that TtW2012 met and surpassed the precedent set by TtW2011 (though both were fantastic). One of the unique features of the TtW conferences are their integration of academic, professional, and artistic expressions of the human/technology relationship. One such example was the lunchtime screening of Kelsey Brannan’s film: Over&Out. In particular, I was struck by the connection between Brannan’s piece and the academic presentations in the Logging off and Disconnection panel. Here, I try to tease out this connection.

I begin with a short synopsis of Over&Out taken from the film’s website: more...

Or: Intellectual Accessibility by Availability and Design

As a sociology graduate student, I sometimes feel like Simmel’s “stranger,” close enough to academia to observe, but distant enough to retain an outside perspective. Like many graduate students staring down a possible academic career-path, I’m a bit terrified at the elephant in the room: is what academics do really important? are they relevant? does it matter?

Who reads a sociology journal? As my former theory teacher Chet Meeks once posed to my first social theory course,  how many people look to sociology journals to learn anything about anything? While the occasional sociologist is quoted in the New York Times or appears on CNN, the influence these experts have is vanishingly small. I do not know as much about other disciplines, but the point for most of the social sciences and humanities is that, in my opinion, expert knowledge is largely going to waste.

And to echo folks like Steven Sideman or danah boyd, we have an obligation to change this; academics have a responsibility to make their work relevant for the society they exist within.

The good news is that the tools to counter this deficiency in academic relevance are here for the taking. Now we need the culture of academia to catch up. Simply, to become more relevant academics need to make their ideas more accessible.

There are two different, yet equally important, ways in which academics need to make their ideas accessible:

(1) accessible by availability: ideas should not be locked behind paywalls

(2) accessible by design: ideas should be expressed in ways that are interesting, readable and engaging

To become publicly relevant, academics must make their ideas available to and articulated for the public. more...

Facebook Inc. and researchers from the University of Milan recently released a study showing that Facebook users are linked by only 4.7 degrees of separation.  This is a significant decrease from the 6 degrees of separation found in Milgrim’s 1967 study, from which the common conception of our degree of networked connection (and the Kevin Bacon game) stems.

Here, I examine what these findings mean in terms of social relationships in the contemporary era.

These findings point to three main things: In the most basic sense, these findings show that Facebook is a highly pervasive and global platform through which interaction takes place. Relatedly, those who interact on Facebook connect to large and diverse networks. Finally, as we increasingly interact on a shared platform, with a wide and diverse group of others, these findings indicate that we are increasingly connected through weak ties. It is this last point that I will expand upon more...

I came across this post a couple weeks back about the “11 Sounds That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard” and it got me thinking about hipsters, nostalgic revivalism, and technological regression as a source of authenticity.

DC hipster shows off his ride at the 2011 Brightest Young Things Tweed Ride in Washington, DC.

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all photos in this post by nathan jurgenson

The role of new, social media in the Occupy protests near Wall Street, around the country and even around the globe is something I’ve written about before. I spent some time at Occupy Wall Street last week and talked to many folks there about technology. The story that emerged is much more complicated than expected. OWS has a more complicated, perhaps even “ironic” relationship with technology than I previous thought and that is often portrayed in the news and in everyday discussions.

It is easy to think of the Occupy protests as a bunch of young people who all blindly utilize Facebook, Twitter, SMS, digital photography and so on. And this is partially true. However, (1) not everyone at Occupy Wall Street is young; and (2), the role of technology is certainly not centered on the new, the high-tech or social media. At OWS, there is a focus on retro and analogue technologies; moving past a cultural fixation on the high-tech, OWS has opened a space for the low-tech.

What I want to think about there is the general Occupy Wall Street culture that has mixed-feelings about new technologies, even electricity itself. I will give examples of the embracing of retro-technology at OWS and consider three overlapping explanations for why this might be the case. I will also make use of some photographs I took while there. more...