jurgenson

In social media, alienation appears as its opposite

A LinkedIn Body is made of the ways in which you’ve made money

it’s no surprise to see an app tracking your ability to disconnect

It’s no accident that both Manning and Snowden are former soldiers who served in Iraq

Should the government know less than Google?

7. Realize, w/ horror, that your boyfriend, unbeknownst to you, has had unprecedented access to all of your emails

“Oh, don’t be such a digital dualist, Raymond,” Isobel quipped

In his egregious professional misstep, he inadvertently handed Fat Activists a microphone and a spotlight

Every wave of positivism eventually comes undone, when its central contradiction emerges

the digital beatdown he’d help deliver over Steubenville came back to haunt him

replacing cops and soldiers with PRISM and predator drones: Massively Open Online Police State (MOOPS)more...

Over the past few months, a lot of theoretical work has been done to further develop the concept of “digital dualism.” Following a provocation from Nicholas Carr, a number of thoughtful people have chimed in to help both further explicate and defend the theory. Their responses have been enlightening and are worth reading in full. They have also clarified a few things for me about the topic that I’d like to share here. Specifically, I’d like to do a bit of reframing regarding the nature of digital dualism, drawing upon this post by Nathan Jurgenson, then use this framework to situate digital dualism within a broader field of political disagreement and struggle.

In his reply to Carr, Jurgenson helpfully parses apart two distinct-but-related issues. (Technically he draws three distinctions, but I will only focus upon two here). First, Jurgenson identifies what he calls “ontological digital dualism theory,” a research project that he characterizes as focused upon that which exists. Such theory would seem to include all efforts that seek to explain (or call into question) the referents of commonly used terms such as “digital” or “virtual,” “physical” or “real.” In contrast to this ontological theory, he then identifies what might be called normative digital dualism theory—a branch of analysis concerned with the comparative value that is attributed to the categories established by one’s ontological position. Such theory would thus analyze the use of value-laden modifiers such as “real” or “authentic” in describing the “digital” or the “physical.”

I posit that digital dualism, in fact, draws from both the ontological and the normative analyses. Specifically the digital dualist: more...

no sense arguing with the digital humanities. They don’t really exist. This is the age of the managerial humanities

The animated GIF is a Brechtian medium

Microphones + Crooning + Nazis + Radio + Bing Crosby + $50,000 = Silicon Valley

MOOC’s only make sense if you don’t think about it too much

Jane Austen’s internet success isn’t so surprising

a handful of people wearing Google Glass, now standing next to me at their own urinals

during this period, it was more common for digital animation to be emulated using hand-drawn techniques

Cars didn’t end up awarding us freedom, nor did they serve to better connect us to our friends and communitiesmore...

paying in Bitcoin could be more convenient than converting to local currency while traveling abroad

Paul Miller was never more aware of the internet than when he made himself live without it

Airbnb indulges the fantasy that we might temporarily inhabit another life

the MOOC threatens the liminal space currently held by colleges and universities within the life course

after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information

Apparently no one has ever sent Nicholas Carr or Sherry Turkle a tastefully brief Snapchat

no one remembers what YOLO meantmore...

attorneys have taken to Yelp to complain about prison procedures that delay or prevent them from seeing clients

The nostalgia that attracts a fan to “Garden State” is of a particular Internet variety

Next, simply disassemble the computer, shove the fragments back into those clams, harvest the clams, and puree them into a thick slurry in your home blender

there’s a lot of “reality” in the virtual, and a lot of “virtual” in our reality

this is a new way of expression that does not have a direct correlate offline

The mockdate is a type of status update that uses humor to publicly condemn all forms of “improper” bodies

Teens are the ideal tweeters because they are never happy and always interesting

the cell phone’s ability to signify status has given three beeps and vanished like a dropped call

they buy up thousands of dollars in pizza currency & then trade it for Bitcoin currency

Of all the millions of dollars of purloined bitcoin that’s floating around out there, not one Satoshi of it has been spent

Just because he used the acronym LOL in a text message and on Twitter doesn’t make him evil; it makes him a young person who sends text messages and uses Twitter. He is evil because he allegedly helped bomb the Boston Marathonmore...

Cable news is dead, but something keeps animating the corpse

Human genes do not augment the body, they are the body

memes circulate us rather than vice versa

many of the declarations whizzing around Boston look like sympathy but smell like attention-seeking

social networking sites are not a separate realm of political activity

We need a multitude of what I call “Denial of Positivism (DoP)” attacks from various directions

the Google car was treated with deference no matter how recklessly we drove

iPad painting: just of the many similarities between George W. Bush and Churchillmore...

On the whole, academia is quite anti-popular writing

Mainstream sociology & history have a bias towards thinking that nothing is new, ever, & thus ignored the internet

Use the emoticons & gift-wrap your message for data-miners or stick to plain English & limit yr audience to humans

I was hoping one of my cat vines was popular, not this tragedy

Think very carefully about whether tragedies belong on Vine, and about whether you should put them there

Goatse was the perfect totem for a burgeoning web culture that prized free speech and unpredictability

Jenna Marbles already embodies the future of celebrity

Digital dualism can blind us to the real and serious problems of online vigilantism

Facebook invites us to forget we even had a self before Timeline was there to organize it

the emoticon scheme makes us shoppers for new, bonus feelings à la carte

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...

the collective value of all bitcoins has passed a billion dollars

Pa was a simple man, a techno-anarchist by trade, and long after the Bitcoin bust, he stayed on with the mining. “Don’t know nothin’ else, Ma said

Irene Serra chose the name -isq for her band deliberately to make it hard to find online

the public quickly accepts all the miracles that science provides (1948)

From paywalls to jargon to a tacit moratorium on social media, academics build careers through public disengagement

watching videos on the Internet & maybe writing a few very short essays that the professor never sees isn’t college

it is often difficult to distinguish between organized trolling and media linkbaitmore...

There’s a strong, specifically technocratic conflation between efficiency and good in Silicon Valley

Drones date online, but drones don’t think about it the way that humans do

The Work of Art in the Age of the Internet

We have a billion folks using our services now, and we want to get to 3 or 5 billion one day

Throughout Zuckerberg’s talk, people and Facebook friends were used interchangeably

there is general, assumed agreement on what social media is even as there is significant doubt as to whether society exists

There’s a stereotypical Pinterest user and I can’t escape the feeling that it is what I have become

The Like button tears aside this veil to reveal the cloying, pathetic, Willy Lomanesque need of marketers to have their brands be well-liked

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...

Twitter seems to be making aspects of academic practice more visible

as long as people want to be seen reading, things to read will be printed

photos are disposable records of moments, to be taken in bulk and largely forgotten and unshared

“It made it more real to folks,” he said. “There’s nothing like a hundred YouTube videos to do that”

This makes the drone the greatest champion of neoliberal practices

The False Distinction Between “Online” And “The Real

The great sin of Facebook is that it made “like” far too important and too obvious

he is siphoning off my very lifeblood in the service of charging his Apple-issued heart replacement

Cyborg writing is the first instant of picking up the tools

Shaw thought the videos looked “pre-viral” and saw an opportunity to exploit them

“Boston Punk Zombie,” reads the crudely-scrawled avatar of a green-mohawked punk with the address bostonbeatgang@gmail.com

Sandberg assumes that the feminist question is simply, how can I be a more successful worker?

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...