jurgenson

Stories In Focus, posted by Sarah Wahnecheck two days ago, is a brief exploration of Bokeh that strikes me as a great start to something bigger. This is just a quick followup, asking Sarah and others to think more about the reality that amateur, documentary and news footage is increasingly coming to look like art films, specifically the effect of having one thing in sharp focus with the rest blurred and out of focus. more...

“facebook asks you to produce yourself in terms that are corporate”

“We love books for what they carry within them, not for what they’re made of”

“Already, [QR code] technology boasts a certain retronostalgic appeal”

“if you discard the digital dualist viewpoint, you don’t have to choose between online and “real” life”

“Internet shopping and drone flying can happen in the same remote space anywhere in the world”

“where fiction generally resists reader alteration, board games take it for granted”

“Bieber’s role in popularizing the song reflects the importance of both social media & old-fashioned celeb promotion”

“The result is a private, digital ranking of American society unlike anything that has come before”

“to touch and feel the Internet, to do with our virtual experience what Surrealists did with their dreams”

“It won’t be enough to touch our screens, some day. Our screens will touch us back”

“A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher”

“Women lie, and they do it to ruin men in positions of power. We shall henceforth call this “The Reddit Defence””

“a rapidly growing group of L.A.-area residents who share a passion for listening to police scanners and then disseminating that local news online, in real time, via Twitter”

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society (note: at a conference this week, so didn’t do as much reading as normal):

“if a “Like” is legally considered something other than communication, digital dualism will more firmly embed itself”

“even Facebook-hating Redditors make assumptions abt people w/o Facebook accounts”

“it’s tempting to think of the rover as a bodacious chick on another planet with a rock vaporizing laser on her head”

“what App.net is really about is that geeks are getting uncomfortable with normal people encroaching on their space”

“the shadowy obverse of [Silicon Valley] is the militarized barracks in China”

“Social networks are just comparison life shopping”

“what isn’t real about the digital world?”

“Every moment we are afraid for our privacy, we are thrilled by our celebrity”

“Mediation presents itself as a friendly tool when in fact it creates distance between us and the ordinary“

Bodies and screens, voices and tweets, hallways and backchannels, experiencing the American Sociological Association meetings this weekend in Denver means stepping into an atmosphere oversaturated with information. The bombardment can sometimes be overwhelming, with more sessions than you can attend and more tweets than you can read. This isn’t going to be a post on why we should use Twitter at conferences, Whitney Erin Boesel already did that more diplomaticly than I could pull off. Anyways, framing it as ‘why do we continue to meet face-to-face?’ would be more interesting for me. Instead, I simply want to argue that there will not be separate online and offline conferences happening, that Twitter isn’t a backchannel and the session room isn’t the front. The reality of the conference is always both digital and physical for everyone whether their noses are buried in a screen, sheets of paper, or staring unblinkingly at the podium. more...

“the Amish are paradigmatically modern in that they have made the need to think about technology a defining feature of their culture”

“humans tweeting about watching a humanmade satellite watch a humanmade rover descend on Mars”

“he also showed a prototype robot armpit that’s humanlike as all-get-out”

“only a white man would believe that the online literary culture suffers from too much niceness”

“emergent, digital and participatory technologies are vital for the endurance rather than demise of libraries”

“When “on vacation” from social media, people bask in their freedom from virtual performance”

“Social media promises a society in which anyone can and probably should investigate anyone”

“We become so focused on the connections, at the relations between human and nonhuman nodes, that we forget that a node can be a hungry child”

“And with only a few wires, these machines, these cameras can be made to dream”

“Artificial Intelligence meets human intelligence, and the human gets to sort things out”

“OMG it’s the end of the world: K-mart shoppers and people of color found Twitter”

“In an era of ectoplasm & ghost photography, the spirituality of machines seemed logical & exciting”

“One-Dimensional man made to look three dimensional in two dimensions”

“I haven’t opened up Instapaper in weeks. I’m scared to look”

“they felt meaningless unless they were being observed“

Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:

“If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, he should have an outfit for that”

“As people become brands, we expect not friendship from them but customer service”

“I’m left wondering why we’re typing so breathlessly, like we’re all skydiving into prom”

“Are 3D printers ontological white holes that produce reality from their printer heads?”

“My mental map was no match for the crisp precision of the iPhone’s…being in that place meant something different”

“TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering”

“The horrendous ramifications for privacy are obvious…yet they have not deterred anyone from using social media”

“drones are the most anthropomorphized of killing machines…so easily endowed with human subjectivity”

“the Amish are paradigmatically modern in that they have made the need to think about technology a defining feature of their culture”

Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:

“cupcakes match—& attempt to assuage—our cultural anxieties of the moment”

“The obsession with the Minority Report computer is a betrayal of everything that is human about computers”

“lets situate our Western New Aesthetic w/in its global context. What kinds of New Aesthetic are we blind to?”

“Each second, I observe friends on Facebook contributing to a shared space of disposable moments”

“I’m wondering, now, if machines are, by default, gender queer?”

“AUDI’s e-sound essentially turns the automobile into a rolling instrument for playing the sound of the engine”

“the modes of constraint operating through [the Web] are material, while liberation is semiotic”

“the flight path of a digital artifact never fully stops unfolding, so the range of possibility is never fully formed”

“typewriters alter the physical connection between writer and text“

Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:

“why is it that speculative art & fiction is the only means of confronting & thinking about surveillance culture?”

“Within the digital arena, however, the [dead] body is mummified in the encasing of social media and the face these platforms maintain for the dead”

“Kickstarter is just another form of entertainment. It’s QVC for the Net set”

“the desire of theory always involves a dimension of universalism”

“beautiful books become consumable objects that describe the taste of the reader who proudly displays them”

“What does it mean to feel empathy for a twitter feed?”

“we are attuned not only to possibilities of documenting, but also to possibilities of being documented”

“consumers are consumed with consumption, take pleasure from pleasure, desire to desire and want to want”

“Comic-Con protesters call cyberpunk doorway to demonic possession“

Discussing the relative strengths and weaknesses of education as it occurs on and offline, in and outside of a classroom, is important. Best pedagogical practices have not yet emerged for courses primarily taught online. What opportunities and pitfalls await both on and offline learning environments? Under ideal circumstances, how might we best integrate face-to-face as well as online tools? In non-ideal teaching situations, how can we make the best of the on/offline arrangement handed to us? All of us teaching, and taking, college courses welcome this discussion. What isn’t helpful is condemning a medium of learning, be it face-to-face or via digital technologies, as less real. Some have begun this conversation by disqualifying interaction mediated by digitality (all interaction is, by the way) as less human, less true and less worthy, obscuring the path forward for the vast majority of future students.

This is exactly the problem with the op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times titled, “The Trouble With Online Education.” more...

This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). It was originally posted on 4.6.12 and was updated to include video on 6.22.12. See the conference website for additional information.

The issue of self documentation is increasingly fertile ground for theorizing the intersection of the digital and the material, illustrating how our identities are increasingly mediated by new technologies and “digital” forms of sociality. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest (as relatively new forms of sociality) produce requisite changes in our self concepts. In the digital era, identity becomes a project of coordinating, collecting, and curating; self presentation becomes a project of self documentation.

Each of these authors acknowledges the paradigmatic changes new technology (especially social networking sites like Facebook) has introduced into our self concepts. For example, Aimée Morrison looks at how norms are created, encouraged, and enforced in the digital realm of Facebook. The Facebook status update field has gone through several permutations, reflecting changing expectations and norms regarding self presentation and self documentation on this popular social networking site. Somewhat differently, Rob Horning addresses issues of power and control in the promulgation of new forms of sociality. More specifically, Horning discusses Facebook’s role in socializing users into the “digital self,” or the self as curated project. Self documentation is integral to the rise of the digital self and the destruction of the inner/private self. In addition, Jordan Frith reflects on how social media incorporates emerging GPS technology into location based social networks (LBSN) like Foursquare. Drawing from qualitative interviews with over 35 Foursquare users, Frith analyzes the impact of this LBSN on both self-presentation and self-documentation practices.

Finally, social media and the ability to self-document also changes our conception of time. As Nathan has argued, “Social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past” (Jurgenson, 2011). In this vein, Sam Ladner addresses the proliferation of digital calendaring (MS Outlook, Google Calendar) and resultant changes such technology engenders to our conceptions and use of time. Digital calendars create new affordances but also new risks in time management.

[Paper titles and abstracts after the jump.]

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