1956:

1957:

The motto wasn’t simply added in order to please God-fearing Americans, but instead had a political motivation.  The mid- to late-1950s marked an escalation in the Cold War between the U.S., the Soviet Union, and their respective allies.  In an effort to claim moral superiority and demonize the communist Soviet Union, the U.S. drew on the association of communism with atheism.  Placing “In God We Trust” on the U.S. dollar was a way to establish the United States as a Christian nation and differentiate them from their enemy (source).

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Photo by Matthew Christopher

Objects have lives. They are witness to things. –This American Life, “The House on Loon Lake”

Atlantic Cities’ feature on the psychology of “ruin porn” is worth a look–in part because it’s interesting in itself, in part because it features some wonderful images, and in part because it has a great deal to do with both a piece I posted previously on Michael Chrisman’s photograph of a year and with the essay that piece referenced, Nathan Jurgenson’s take on the phenomenon of faux-vintage photography.

All of these pieces are, to a greater or lesser extent, oriented around a singular idea: atemporality – that the intermeshing and interweaving of the physical and digital causes us not only to experience both of those categories differently, but to perceive time itself differently; that for most of us, time is no longer a linear experience (assuming it ever was). Technology changes our remembrance of the past, our experience of the present, and our imagination of the future by blurring the lines between the three categories, and introducing different forms of understanding and meaning-making to all three – We remember the future, imagine the present, and experience the past. The phenomenon of “ruin porn” is uniquely suited to call attention to our increasingly atemporal existence, and to outline some of the specific ways in which it manifests itself.

A quick primer: “Ruin porn” is a somewhat contested term for a category of photography that focuses on images of abandoned human constructions, often urban in setting. Factories, theaters, hospitals, schools – all in states of abandonment and decay. As I indicated, there has been a fair amount of heated debate around the term “ruin porn”, some of which I will deal with directly. First, however, I want to talk about the physical side of the creation of the images, before they implode with the digital and become images that we consume.

The Carcass of the Ruined Space

In order to capture these images, photographers must enter the spaces themselves – physical presence is necessary. If physical presence is necessary, then physical experience is unavoidable: Digital images of ruined and abandoned spaces therefore must be understood to have fundamentally physical roots. They are about bodies in space, even though the body – the photographer – is usually unseen in the produced image.

This seems self-evident, but it is significant in light of the fact that there is a deep connection between the photography of urban decay and the practice of urban exploration (though the two factions have also butted ideological heads). Photographers document these physical spaces because, in the moment of their experience, there is something remarkable about the spaces themselves. The physical experience of the space is not a by-product of capturing the image; it is often an end in itself. The photographers interviewed by The Atlantic speak about an experience of “realness”, of building a relationship with the past that they cannot through abstract means. This speaks strongly to Jurgenson’s discussions of authenticity in photography, but it’s also about more than that.

We can and should understand abandoned places as atemporal spaces in and of themselves – they are physical spaces in which the experience of linear time breaks down. Through the experience of the space, explorers and photographers (and blends of the two) break out of a conventional experience of the present and into a space where the artifacts of history feel at once fresh and new, and ancient and decayed. Imagination is key to the atemporal experience of these places: One can exist in an abandoned, ruined space and see shards of a dead past on which one can construct a live imagining – who were the people who lived and worked here? What were their lives like? What were their stories? What happened to them? What happened to them in these spaces?

Imagining along these lines explicitly carries one forward into the future; it’s at this point that the construction of the unruined past becomes the imagining of the ruined future. Ruins serve as a kind of spatial memento mori for people embedded in a culture marked by production and consumption (and prosumption) of the new and by the invisibility of the discarded: They are gentle reminders of our own transience. They lead us to questions just as the imagining of the past did: What will our contemporary structures look like in fifty years? In a hundred? Who will remember us? Who will stand in our abandoned spaces and wonder about us? We can imagine these things because they suggest an end without really being an ending – there is always, after all, someone else to look and wonder, comfortingly embodied in ourselves. As Will Viney writes in his essay on the “Ruins of the Future”:

The future ruin, then, is an incomplete end achieved by an incomplete transition between now and then. It might fill us with a “sense of ending”, to borrow a famous phrase from Frank Kermode, but it is not quite the end itself. The politically, theologically and philosophically rich gesture of projecting ruins, of prophesying the demise of a building, as well as the people and activities associated with it, depends upon an end that can be experienced, a sense of dénouement that is not absolutely terminal. This is not the apocalypse as such, but an end to be seen, to be retold and represented – it is a telling end.

In considering ruined spaces as atemporal, it’s also useful to consider Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia – spaces of fundamental otherness that exist outside what is conventionally known or knowable, that may contain profound conceptual conflicts, and that will often be both physical and mental in nature – both interior and external. In this sense, ruined places are temporal heterotopias,¹ containing complex interminglings of past, present, and future as well as of both objective existence (always assuming, for our purposes, that there is such a thing) and imagined constructions of how things were, are, and will be.

Photo by Vincent J. Stoker

So where does technology enter the frame? At this point we should return to Jurgenson’s discussion of the faux-vintage photo. As he describes it, the act of capturing digital images and sharing them via social networks encourages us to “view our present as always a potential documented past.” This is a crucial feature of the experience of abandoned spaces by the photographers who enter them: They experience the spaces not only through their own perception but through the anticipated and actual mediation of the camera with which they document images of atemporal space. There is always another dimension – the image that will be captured, possibly altered, and shared, and the people who will view the image in a form mediated by their own technological devices. Photographers of urban decay are therefore not only imagining a potential ruined future, but a potential future viewer of the present image of a ruined past.

Photo by Jim Potter/Blind Owl Underground

I want to emphasize the importance of physicality here–one of the crucial – if not the most crucial – ideas behind atemporality in the sense in which I use the word is the profound connection between our perception and understanding of time and our relationship with the enmeshed physical/digital world that our technology is increasingly helping to create. In short, we cannot discuss the digital in this case without first establishing why and how the physical matters.

But now I want to focus on that move from physical to digital, the point of entanglement where one shades into another and the relationship between the two becomes truly complex. I want to talk about the image itself, both in terms of its production and its consumption.

The Ghostly Construction of the Ruined Image

In the section above, I’ve discussed the actual experience of the ruined space that necessarily accompanies capturing its image. I emphasized the importance of the imagination in the atemporal nature of this experience–the construction of both an imagined past and an imagined future in light of the perception of the present. I have characterized these spaces as heterotopias – spaces outside the realm of the static, the linear, and the knowable. What I turn to now is the idea that there is a subtle but important difference between the physical experience of these spaces and the digitally-mediated experience of viewing their images.

First, there is the removal of aspects of the experience of time itself – even if the spaces are temporal heterotopias, one still experiences one’s own time within them: there is the process of finding and approaching the space, of entering it, of spending time inside it, and then of leaving it behind. If the important thing about the atemporality of ruined space is the construction of imagined pasts and futures, that construction may work quite differently when the spaces are experienced through immediate static images rather than gradual entry and exit. The nature of the space itself is changed when its image is all that is perceived.

Second, the image may or may not hold a close connection with the place itself. In her work on the philosophy of photography, Susan Sontag presented the act of photographing something as simultaneously the documenting of fact and the creation of fiction. There is a real space that is really photographed – but the photograph will never capture all of the space. It is the image that the photographer chooses to capture and share; it is an artifact of the photographer’s own perception of a space. Further, the image will frequently be altered in post-production.

The point is that by the time the image is shared, it may or may not bear much resemblance to space from which it was created. If we understand these spaces as time-laden as well as atemporal, then it makes sense to suppose that the aesthetics of the images of these spaces can shape the constructions of pasts, presents, and futures on the part of the people who view the images. Just as a photographer brings her own understandings and imaginings of ruined past and ruined future to the experience of a space, so the viewer of the photograph of a ruined space does not and cannot experience the image in isolation from her own internal narratives regarding what the past was, what the present is, and what the future may be.

Photo by Sigma

Then there is the question of the context in which the image is viewed – and this is where we must turn to a discussion of the term “ruin porn” itself, and why it is at once both useful and problematic. It’s practically impossible to be in a ruined or abandoned space and have no idea at all of its context; the explorer or photographer sees the surroundings in which the space rests, sees where it is embedded in the larger structure of a city or a rural area, and can usually draw at least rough conclusions about what the space is, what it was, and what happened to it. Though the space is atemporal, it does have a history, and being inside the space gives one at least a chance of making a passing connection to that history simply by virtue of being there at all.

But a digital image viewed on a screen is inherently disconnected from that context, unless that information is presented with the image, or unless the viewer of the image cares enough to seek that context out – which, in a digital space, can mean an extremely diverse set of paths to an extremely diverse set of resources and media. And this has direct consequences for how the various imagined timeframes associated with the image are constructed. What do we know about a place from an image and about its past? How do we know it? What are we simply assuming or making up out of whole cloth? And how do these forms of knowledge and these assumptions shape our understanding of our presents and our imagining of our futures?

In an instant, we can see a constructed image of decay and ruin that leads us to further constructions of past, present, and future. And these constructions may be wildly diverse and wildly divergent depending on the perspective and knowledge of the viewer. Abi Sutherland of Making Light characterized these images as “like a story prompt, the visual equivalent of a Mad Lib gone melancholic, and the topic is our own lives.” What is atemporal on this end lies in the fabric of the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves and how we weave those disparate stories together. And we can do this in the way we do this because of the digital nature of these images and because of the digital nature of so much of our accumulated knowledge, and of how we accumulate that knowledge. There is no single authoritative source in this accumulation. If we are poets and scribes, we are also digital magpies; we pick and gather and aggregate from everywhere. As Bruce Sterling notes in “Atemporality for the Creative Artist”, what we have now instead of a singular accepted narrative is a multiplicity of narratives drawn from a multiplicity of sources, expressed in a wild multiplicity of ways.

A story of my own: Not far from where I live in Maryland there’s a park that contains the ruins of a mill town that was mostly washed away in a flood in 1972. Not much of it remains, but one day I and my husband went exploring to see what we could still find. In the process of compiling the images we captured, we did a fair amount of research on the town itself, including digging up old photographs of the town as it was when it was inhabited and intact.

Photo by Rob Wanenchak

That process made me experience my memory of the town differently than I had when I was physically there. It also made me see our captured images of the town differently. Suddenly they were contextualized. It isn’t that the images made no sense before they were placed in context. It isn’t that images of ruin without historical context are senseless and meaningless. Far from it. But we must understand the sense that is made of them as potentially very different in that case. What we know shapes what we know. What we see shapes what we know. And what we know shapes a great deal of what we see and imagine.

It is in this sense that many people find both the term and the idea of “ruin porn” a problem. Many of the American-produced images that arguably fall under the category of “ruin porn” are artifacts of buildings, industries, and communities that have been casualties of modern American capitalism, and especially the process of deindustrialization that has occurred in many American urban centers, which has been devastating to minorities and the urban poor. Many of these images have come out of the shell of the American Rust Belt, leading to criticisms on the part of some that the images do not do justice to either the historical context or the present state of these spaces – as evidence of rampant social inequality and a failed welfare state – and that the photographs essentially construct the present of the spaces as more ruined and abandoned then they really are, given that many people may still live in or near them. In essence, they are accused of constructing a romantically gritty and melancholic vision of a past that allows viewers to avoid the more unpleasant understandings of a present or the even less pleasant prospect of a future marked by the scars of social inequality. As Sean Posey of Rustwire writes,

One of the best criticisms of photographs of abandonment, especially those made by photojournalists, is the failure to include people who live in these areas. There are still 700,000 plus people in Detroit, most of whom are African American. Their invisibility in photographic documentations is directly related to their invisibility in policy circles, or in discussions of urban revitalization. In a way, accentuating the lack of people leads to notions that no one lives in these areas. Ruins become more about the past and what once was, instead of the present.

But Abandoned America photographer Matthew Christopher takes issue with what he feels is the distraction that the term itself presents – a way of dismissing what the images represent and what they suggest without engaging directly in a discussion of what capturing and viewing these images actually means for artists and consumers of art, and for all of us as atemporal storytellers in an augmented world:

While the term is extraordinarily useful for brushing off the significance of an entire genre of work, it is much less useful for entering an actual discussion. It breezily dismisses the subject as perverse and pointless with the same carefree lack of thought and responsibility that the original photographers who were described with the term were accused of having. When examined more thoroughly, much like the topic of abandoned spaces, it reveals a wealth of material worthy of pondering. What are the responsibilities of an artist or photographer to their subject, and should they be chastised for attempting to make a profession of documenting ruins?…More to the point, is existing as an object of beauty justifiable in and of itself or must it ‘accomplish’ something? Must a photograph present both sides of a story?

The questions I would add to those posed by Christopher have to do with time and our perception of it. What do images of ruined places mean for our understanding of history? What do they mean for how we understand our own mortality and transience? What do they do to our perceptions of time itself? What implications does the fabric of our constructions of past and future have for how we accumulate and value various forms of knowledge?

If the term “ruin porn” has any utility, it may lie in the reminder it presents that what we see is only what we see, and what we see is often the construction of a gaze separate from our own. Just as pornography is a mediated creation based on sex without being an actual, unmediated representation of the act itself, we should understand images of anything in the same terms without mistaking them for the “real thing” - if for no other reason than because the “real thing” may prove impossible to pin down, both in terms of time and in terms of space. Images of ruined spaces are like temporal ghost stories: it is difficult to be sure if what we see is truly a fragment of an objective past, an echo of our own future, or simply a shifting chiaroscuro–a play of digital shadow and light.

¹ This idea should not be confused with Foucault’s own idea of temporal heterotopia, which is related (places like museums, which contain artifacts of many times but that sit outside time itself) but which I think is slightly different than what I’m talking about here.

Via The Sociological Cinema; data available at the Office of Management and Budget.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

There is no one answer to the question, “How many people are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender?” But demographer Gary Gates, who works for the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law, has compiled the results from nine surveys that attempt to measure sexual orientation — five of them from the U.S.  He estimates that 3.5% of the U.S. population identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, while 0.3% are transgender. Here is the breakdown for the different surveys (click any image to enlarge):

He also points out that bisexual identification is generally more common among women than among men. Among women, more than half of the lesbian/bisexual population identifies as bisexual; among men more than half identify as gay.

As is the case with race, we may rely on self-identification when it comes to sexual orientation. But criteria external to individuals’ identities may matter as well. These include the perceptions or actions of others (such as cross-burning or job discrimination), as well as qualities measurable by impersonal means (such as phenotypical traits or genes). In the case of sexual orientation more than race, these externally-measurable qualities include behavior (such as the gender of those one has sex with). The interpretation of these qualities, and their measurement, necessarily are highly contingent on social constructions.

In the case of sexual orientation, the questions are not usually asked, so the answers are not bureaucratically normalized. If the government and other data collectors were to start asking the question regularly, the results would probably settle down, as they have with race. In Michel Foucault’s terms, you might say the population is not disciplined with regard to sexual orientation, as well as it is with race. (Of course, the public is unruly when it comes to measuring race as well, especially outside those outside the Black/White dichotomy, as “Asians” and “Hispanics” often offer national-origin identities when asked to describe their race.)  Settling down doesn’t mean there would be no more changes, just that variability between surveys would probably decline.

Because of this complexity, it is interesting to compare results when people are asked about their sexual behavior and attraction, as opposed to their identities. Here surveys find much higher numbers. As Gates shows, for example, 11% of Americans ages 18-44 report any same-sex sexual attraction, while 8.8% report any same-sex sexual behavior.

Whether demographers, or the public, or anyone else, considers these experiences and feelings to define people as gay/lesbian or bisexual is not resolved. For example, as Gates notes in a much longer law review article that describes the methods behind his report — and the reactions to it — some media simply ignored the self-identified bisexual population, and those with same-sex attraction or behavior, declaring that the gay and lesbian population was less than 2% of Americans. Others concluded that the commonness of bisexuality implies most gays and lesbians in fact have a “choice” about their sexual orientation.

I recommend the law review article for Gates’s in-depth discussion of “the closet” issue with regard to surveys, and the problem of measuring concealed identities — which vary according to social context and sometimes change over the course of people’s lives.

I’m grateful that Gates has pursued these questions, and taken a lot of grief in the process. He concludes:

These are challenging questions with no explicitly correct answers. The good news is that strong evidence suggests that, politically at least, the stakes in this discussion are no longer rooted in an urgent need to prove the very existence of LGBT people. This progress hopefully provides the space to more critically and thoughtfully assess these issues in an environment where a sense of urgency is not paramount. Today, the size of the LGBT community is less important than understanding the daily lives and struggles of this still-stigmatized population and informing crucial policy debates with facts rather than stereotype and anecdote.

As with race, measurement of sexual orientation may be essential to legal and political responses to inequality and discrimination — even as the process helps solidify fixed identity categories we might rather do without.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

In one of the latest episodes of Office Hours, TSP’s Sarah Shannon speaks with Stanford University Sociology Professor David Grusky about the social and economic effects of the recession.  This entire podcast could be assigned to students, though you could also considering assigning part of it (the first 20 minutes, for example).

Grusky and Shannon cover many topics in this 50-minute conversation, so there are many avenues for discussion.  Here are a few basic questions that cover some of the main points.

1)   How does the most recent recession differ from past recessions?  In other words, what makes it a “great” recession?

2)   How does the recession affect inequality in the United States?

3)   What are some of the responses to the recession, and how do they differ from responses to the Great Depression?

4)   Why does Grusky see a danger in the focus on tax-based solutions to the current economic problems?

5)   Grusky and Shannon speak specifically about college students several times throughout the podcast?  How is the recession impacting students?  Why is education an important part of this discussion?

Near the end of the podcast, Grusky mentions a website on recession trends that will be launching soon.  Stay tuned to learn more about that website and how it can be used in the classroom!

————————

1989-2003: Gender Ahoy!

I discussed the introduction of LEGOs the invention of gendered minifigs, and early efforts to market separately to girls and boys in Part I of this series, covering 1932 to 1988.  The segregation of LEGO into feminine and masculine sets would escalate beginning in 1989.  That year the LEGO group introduced gender to the minifig in a big way with the new Pirates theme. The masculine figs sported copious facial hair and the lone feminine pirate had lipstick and a curved shirt that implied a busty chest.

This pioneering pirate was the first in a long line of token females in otherwise male-dominated action-centric themes. The imbalanced ratio of masculine to feminine minifigs persists today, though it has lessened over time. I have seen several different numbers for this ratio, so I decided to do my own count. I gave TLG the benefit of the doubt and counted as gender neutral any minifigs lacking definitely masculine (facial hair) or feminine (lipstick, eyelashes, cleveage) traits, even when LEGO marketing materials clearly delineate them as male or female.

The following graphs represent masculine minifigs in blue, feminine minifigs in red, and gender neutral minifigs in gray. I have also calculated the masculine to feminine ratio (m/f ratio). Ideally this should be 1, indicating that there are equal number of masculine and feminine figures. This chart shows the aggreagate across all themes for the five key years between 1989 and 1999. The m/f ratio for this data is 3.74 (which is a lot better than the initial 13.5 it starts at in 1989, but not exactly something to celebrate).

The trend to unrepresent feminine figures in the main LEGO product line is mirrored by a tendency to overrepresent them in the “girls only” lines. LEGO released four major “girls only” themes through this time period: Paradisa, Belville, Scala Dolls, and Clikits.  Here’s a quick run down of the “girls only” themes:

• Paradisa deserves props for using standard minifigs, but the building experience is simplified compared to other LEGO sets released the same year  (compare the Sand Dollar Cafe with Wolf Pack Tower). Also it represents men as active job holders (butlers, chefs, ice cream men, and life guards) while the women mostly relax, surf, and go horseback riding.

• Belville is the longest running “girls only” theme and also the pinkest and most gender stereotype reinforcing. The classic LEGO building experience is barely present; the sets favor gigantic pre-fabricated “walls” and floors, and the completed “houses” and “horse stables” don’t even look like their real-life counterparts. The figures are completely out of scale with minifgs, so while it is possible to use pieces from Belville in LEGOLAND and vice versa, it is unrealistic.

• Scala Dolls was essentially LEGO barbie. Here’s the dreamhouse. It has even less construction play than Belville.

• The Clikits jewelry line featured pieces that are barely compatible with regular LEGO bricks (some people might not even think to try.) The line also contained some Bratz-esque characters.

The message that these themes send to children about gender is clear — certain things are for girls only. Namely: fairy tales, equestrianism, the color pink, vanity, and being a homemaker. Boys shouldn’t want these things and the girls that don’t are lesser for it.

The chart below aggregates figures from the first three of those lines across all years they existed (since Clickits was a jewelry line, it didn’t really feature figures).  Beyond the inversely unbalanced the m/f ratio of 0.18 (roughly one masculine figure for every five feminine figures), it is also important to note that the percentage of neutral figs is incredibly low, so playing with these sets reinforces the either/or of gender roles:

Lest you think girls get all the special treatment, fear not, boys get their share of “boys only” themes. We’ve already discussed Trains and Technic which have long, proud, histories and exist in a blue and black anti-Belville realm (Technic even had Belville-sized masculine articulated figures for a while). In 1998 the ill-fated Znap bucked the trend of “boys only” themes being for advanced builders. It was simple to put together (like K’nex), but never caught on despite being viral. 1998 also saw the creation of a Technic subtheme with even more testosterone than usual: Competition. 2001 saw TLG try to bridge the gap between DUPLO and SYSTEM (for boys) with Jack Stone. 2001 was also the launch of TLG’s attempt to get in to the action figure market: Bionicle. This is arguably a gender-neutral theme, but considering that TLG forgot to include girl’s names for an online character creator for Bionicle’s successor, it’s clear that TLG does not think boys and girls can enjoy the same toys.

As a final note on this era, observe this graph of the m/f ratio on minifigs over time. Notice how it is on the decline (towards gender balance) before sharply increasing in the early 2000s? We’ll explore the reasons for that in the next installment.

—————————

David Pickett is a social media marketer by day and a LEGO animator by night.  He is fanatical about LEGO and proud to be a nerd. Read more from David at Thinking Brickly.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Bravo TV's Millionaire Matchmaker, Patti Stanger, promises to find love... for a price.

First, Hochschild, a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote about the expanding presence of the capitalistic marketplace in our personal lives. It may seem like second nature to hire a professional to help with a task or develop a skill we lack. But, according to Hochschild’s piece, the sheer extent of services available for purchase is shocking: dating coaches, rental friends, and professional potty trainers. Hochschild goes on to look at some of the more invasive manners in which the market has seeped into our intimate lives, as well as what this says about our society.

Hochschild brings in the work of Michael Sandel, a  professor of government at Harvard, who adds that you can now purchase an upgrade in prison cells in California or buy carpool lane access for solo drivers in Minneapolis (see more, here, with Sandel in recent interview on The Colbert Report about the moral limits of the marketplace).

This increasing tendency to hire professionals to take on personal tasks, Hochschild writes, has some unexpected consequences. She describes our ever-increasing relationship with the free market as a self-perpetuating cycle:

The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours. This leaves less time to spend with family, friends and neighbors; we become less likely to call on them for help, and they on us. And, the more we rely on the market, the more hooked we become on its promises.

In the end, Hochschild sums up, offering a warning about outsourcing our personal lives and emotional attachment:

Focusing attention on the destination, we detach ourselves from the small — potentially meaningful — aspects of experience. Confining our sense of achievement to results, to the moment of purchase, so to speak, we unwittingly lose the pleasure of accomplishment, the joy of connecting to others and possibly, in the process, our faith in ourselves.

Figure from "Breastfeed at Your Own Risk," Julie Artis, Contexts (Fall 2009).

Later in the week, the Times featured Princeton professor Elizabeth Armstrong discussing the harmful effects of  distributing free baby formula samples to new mothers at hospitals. In her op-ed, Armstrong maintains that breast-feeding offers many health benefits to babies, and hospitals should be encouraging women in the practice (she makes no mention of whether “Macho Mothering” like that featured on the controversial cover of TIME will help or hinder such efforts). When hospitals give away formula samples, reports show women are more likely to give up breast-feeding sooner. According to Armstrong, though, it’s easy to see why the hospitals continue to provide the samples:

In exchange for giving out samples, formula manufacturers provide hospitals’ nurseries and neonatal intensive care units with much needed free supplies like bottles, nipples, pacifiers, sterile water and more formula.

Armstong argues that arrangement like these lead to a hypocritical healthcare system. Doctors and medical organizations can preach about the benefits of breast-feeding but when “hospitals send new mothers home with a commercial product that often bears scientific claims on the label about digestion and brain development, it sends a very different message.” For Armstong, the answer is simple:

[H]ospitals should help women get breast-feeding off to a good start by adapting baby-friendly policies like helping mothers initiate breast-feeding after birth, allowing mothers and babies to stay in the same room and, most important, ensuring that infant-feeding decisions are free of commercial influence.

Each of these pieces is a great example of a sociologist putting their own work out into the world in a way that allows everyone to see the benefits of sociological insight and its application to, well, society. Congrats to both professors for so frequently daring to peek out from the pages of journals.

For more on breast-feeding and public service efforts to encourage it, we recommend Julie Artis’ Contexts article “Breastfeed at your own Risk,” available in full online at Contexts.org.

Except for the part where it’s not true.

You may have heard this figure. CNN Money seems to be the first to cite it, in 2010; Time and the New York Post, among others, repeated the number:

It  continued to spread, most recently ending up in a political ad from American Crossroads that attacks President Obama.

But PolitiFact recently looked into the claim and declared it false. It supposedly came from a survey conducted by a marketing and research firm from Philadelphia. Yet as they dug further into the story, PolitiFact found many things that might make you suspicious. For instance, some people listed as employees claimed never to have worked for them, while others seem to be fictional, their photos taken from stock photo archives. One employee they did find turned out to be the company president’s dad. When they found the president, David Morrison, he said the survey was conducted “many years ago” but refused to release any information about the methodology, saying he had a non-disclosure agreement with the (unnamed) client.

But as the story of this shocking trend was reproduced, it appears reporters did not try to access the original survey to fact-check it, or surely they would have discovered at least some of these discrepancies, or the lack of any available data to back up the claim.

In contrast to the 85% figure, a Pew Center report (based on a sample of 2,048) found that for young adults aged 18-34, 39% were either currently living with their parents or had temporarily moved in with them at some point because of the economic downturn:

And importantly, of those currently living with their parents, the vast majority of 18-24 year-olds said the economy wasn’t the reason they were doing so. The study found no significant differences by education for those under 30 (42% of graduates were living at home, compared to 49% of those who never attended college), but for those 30-34, only 10% of college graduates were living at home (compared to 22% of non-college graduates).

But once the more shocking 85% figure had been cited by a mainstream news source, it was quickly reproduced in many other outlets with little fact-checking. As PolitiFact sums up,

…once a claim enters the mainstream media, it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle. “The dynamic of trust is built with each link,” Wemple said. “It barely occurs to anybody that all those links may be built on a straw foundation.”

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Claire Lomas, promoted by the media as the “Bionic Woman” just made history and sparked inspiration by completing the London Marathon in 16 days.  Averaging about two miles per day, this woman with below-chest paralysis walked her 26.2 miles to finish proudly in 36,000^th place. She did so with the help of a ReWalk suit, a supportive family, and the goal of raising money for spinal cord injury research.

The ReWalk suit resembles closely the Ekso suit that I wrote about previously and raises similar questions. They both enable people with spinal cord injuries to stand and walk. They are heralded by the companies as tools to enhance rehabilitation, mobility, and dignity. They also both leave me with the same uncomfortable uncertainty: is this progress or ableism? (See link above for a full delineation of this uncertainty and a lengthy discussion in the comments section).

Lomas completed 26.2 miles in 16 days. This is billed as a product of sweat, perseverance, and technological progress. Several years ago, I participated in my local MS 50 mile Challenge Walk[i] and saw people wheel 50 miles in 2.5 days. Some of them finished before I did.  Let me be clear on my point here: Lomas’ determination, hard work, and dedication are to be admired. Hers was a hard earned feat and in no way do I want to take anything away from her accomplishment. I do, however, want to call into question the notion of “mobility.”

Is Lomas more mobile in her ReWalk suit, or is she simply more normative?

Let’s look first at an uncomplicated comparison between the wheelchair and the ReWalk suit as technologies of mobility: We will treat Lomas as a representative of ReWalk technology, and the wheelers that participated in the MS Challenge as representatives of wheelchair technology.  Based on this comparison, we would have to conclude that the wheelchair is a far more efficient technology of mobility. Those using a wheelchair moved twice as far in a fraction of the time as the person in the ReWalk suit. Unfortunately, this comparison grossly oversimplifies the notion of mobility, as we do not live (or move) in a world designed like a race course.

To truly compare the technologies, we have to think about mobility in the everyday sense. We have to ask how each technology enables or constrains movement through public (and private) physical environments. How easy or difficult is it to attend school, shop for groceries, or enter a place of business? How often must a person decline social invitations, ask a stranger for help, or miss out on career opportunities? When we take this perspective, the conclusions get a lot blurrier. In this sense, the suit may well be more efficient than the chair. Indeed, in a world in which ramps are not universal, disability parking spaces are impractically located, elevators are sporadically available, and retail facilities have narrow aisles and high check-out counters, the option to stand upright could be irreplaceably valuable.

The question therefore returns to priority: improve the infrastructure or normalize the body? I do not purport here to have the answer, but instead, argue that we MUST ask this often ignored question. To do so, is to look with a harsh light at our assumptions and ingrained value hierarchies as we apply them to the bodily condition.  Perhaps the rawness of this view is what keeps the question largely unaddressed.

Network effect is a concept from economics that explains situations in which something becomes more valuable as more people use it. The classic example is the telephone; as more people and businesses adopted telephones, they became more useful (you could call a larger number of people you might wish to contact). More usage increased the value of the product, both for existing users and potential users. Social media work much the same way — an issue Google has faced as they try to pull enough users into Google+ to make it competitive with Facebook.

Over the weekend Matthew Hurst posted a video at Data Mining that illustrates the network effect…with dancers using an open area at the Sasquatch music festival. The video starts out a little slow; one guy starts dancing in the field, and a second guy joins him. For about a minute, it’s just the two of them. At 0:54, a third dancer appears. Through all of this, the surrounding crowd mostly ignores them, showing no inclination to participate. But at 1:12, a couple more people arrive, following immediately by more, and suddenly we’ve reached a tipping point: that open area is now a highly desirable spot to dance. People start running in from all directions, and many who had been ignoring the dancers suddenly jump up and join. It’s a great illustration of instances in which use drives more and more use:

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

–Listen to the show here–

The Diane Rehm Show took to the air, ending 45 minutes ago, to debate how Facebook is making us lonely and disconnected and ruining just about everything. This is my quick first-reaction. On one side was Sherry Turkle, that avatar of “digital dualism” (more on this below) who recently wrote “The Flight From Conversation” in the New York Times and Stephen Marche who wrote “Is Facebook making us Lonely?” in The Atlantic. On the other side was Zeynep Tufekci, a researcher who communicates as well as these journalists*, responding to Turkle (also in the Atlantic). While Turkle and Marche’s headlines are intentionally catchy and dramatic, they are also sensationalist and misleading. The reality is not as captivating and Tufekci’s headline in response is far more accurate: “Social Media’s Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships.”

This is one of the many lessons provided by this hour of NPR: catchy arguments tend to trump data, even on nerdtacular public radio. Tufekci, outnumbered, did well given the dearth of air time provided relative to the more sensationalist ideas on the show. Further, the show (@drshow) seemed completely unaware of the fast-moving and engaging Twitter backchannel discussing the topics in much more nuance and detail than much of what was said on-air. [You’ve already enjoyed the irony of this as opposed to Turkle’s argument, right? Obviously.]

The next lesson we learn is that while many of us social scientist and humanities scholars all take for granted that self-presentation is, in part, somewhat a performance, many still hold onto the notion that the self is purely authentic; no performance involved. When Turkle and Marche started saying that we perform ourselves online (indeed we do), they mistakenly pitted this against the offline. My reaction on Twitter, “dear @sturkle, performing the self is not an invention of social media.” Marche replied to me, “You lead a different life from mine. Your life is constant self-presentation?”

This is a telling response: the assumption that his offline self is not performed (I’m basing this on the whole series of tweets from Marche to me, check Twitter for more; anyone want to do a Storify of the conversation?). Sociology 101 might be obvious to most of us, but still new to many, even those with authority to speak in high-profile outlets. As social media researchers, we need to do a better job talking about social media trends keeping in mind history did not start or end with these new technologies (@pjrey made this point during the show). If we talk about self-performance online, we must take into account how this operates offline. Goffman wasn’t writing about Facebook and identity-theater predates Twitter.

This takes me to the main take-away from this hour of radio, and it is a major disconnect between how Turkle/Marche and Tufekci fundamentally understand the relationship between the on and offline. On one side -introducing Team Turkle- there are those who see someone on Facebook or texting and assume they are removed from the offline, physical world. This is the zero-sum view of the on/offline: the more time you spend online, the less offline; we are trading one for the other. The term I coined to capture this assumption is “digital dualism,” that the on and offline are separate and thus one displaces the other. David Banks also compellingly made this point in reaction to Turkle: “Sherry Turkle’s Chronic Digital Dualism Problem.”

Tufekci tried to promote the opposite view, that the on/offline are not separate, that time spent online can actually increase offline connection. I have described this enmeshing as the formation of an “augmented reality.” Read more: “Digital Dualism Versus Augmented Reality.”

In short, the data here is not “ambiguous” as Marche stated and made established social media researched Shelia Cotten laugh. No, the data clearly demonstrates that the on and offline do not always displace each other (see Tufekci’s piece above for a bunch of great links, or, my favorite is Pew’s Internet and American Life project). The digital dualism of Turkle and Marche is unfounded. It simply does not reflect the social media that we have come to know. I get that for many social media non-users or newcomers Turkle’s description of people alone and disconnected while staring at their Facebook screens like Sad-Zuckerberg at the end of The Social Network is intuitively true. But, in the end, it isn’t intuition that counts, it’s data. And I wish that Turkle, Marche and especially the Diane Rehm Show cared more about data than sensationalism.

To end on a positive note, I am happy the show had Tufekci on, even if not giving her half of the story anywhere close to half the time (not that all opinions should be given equal time; if i had my druthers the Turkle/Marche argument could have been made by a caller and then deconstructed with data by Tufekci and we’d all move on, but, oh well, people have ads to sell). I’m happy because Tufekci provided a compelling and important counterpoint to web-fallacies in a high-profile outlet. And, most of all, this hour of radio dramatically illustrated why we need to Theorize the Web.

*I know Turkle is not a “journalist” but her style seems to fit that label best

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

Here is Storify of some of the highlights of the Twitter backchannel conversation during the show courtesy of Behzod Sirjani: “Social Media and Loneliness.” [The embed code is not working for me, sorry.]

In January I wrote an essay for Cyborgology on the subject of technological autonomy and its implications for the environment. There’s no more important dynamic when it comes to understanding our relationship with machines and where they’re taking us.

Technological autonomy is shorthand for the idea that, once advanced technologies pass a certain stage of development, we lose our ability to control them. I generally use the phrase “de facto technological autonomy” to underscore that what’s being talked about is a loss of practical rather than literal control. Loss of practical control occurs for a number of reasons, among them the fact that the economies of modern societies have come to depend, completely, on various technologies. Remove those technologies and the economies collapse.

A striking example of this is the dilemma facing Japan as it contemplates whether to resume its dependence on nuclear energy in the wake of the post-tsunami meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors last year.

Since the meltdowns, operations at all the nation’s 54 nuclear reactors have been gradually suspended. Public concern has kept the plants offline despite increasingly strident warnings from officials there that without them the nation faces (as one publication put it) an “energy death spiral.” The threat is that without power sufficient to supply its manufacturing needs, Japan’s largest employers will be forced to abandon domestic production, initiating a process of “deindustrialization” that would cripple the economy. These concerns are exacerbated by uncertainties regarding international oil supplies and the prognosis that this coming summer may be unusually hot, prompting a spike in energy demands.

The dilemma is an excruciating one. The nation’s citizens are essentially being told that they must welcome back into their midst an industry that’s made whole towns uninhabitable and that’s undermined confidence in their food supply, not to mention their officials. The alternative is widespread unemployment and poverty. In other words, while it’s literally possible to shut down the reactors permanently, practically speaking Japan may have no choice but to turn them back on. That’s de facto technological autonomy.

Global warming doubles the bind. Without the reactors, Japan will make up some of its energy deficit with fossil fuels, thereby increasing its emissions of greenhouse gases.

Japan’s distinction is that the tsunami has forced it to confront the issue of technological autonomy sooner than other industrialized countries. Their time (our time) will come.

This post is also available on Doug Hills personal blog: The Question Concerning Technology.

Notice that race isn’t mentioned, but alcohol is.  This makes no sense.  The March 23rd article is about an instance of racial harassment that occurred on March 16th.  The “alcohol incident” was old news; it had happened six months earlier in September.  Why is the old news the headline?

This wasn’t on purpose, was it?

It looks that way.

Reader Nils G. pointed out that the URL of the article reveals that there was a decision to change the title of the article from one that focused on race to one that focused on alcohol.  When you’re posting an article, the program automatically creates a URL using the first title you choose.  If you later change the title, the URL stays the same.  The URL of this article?:  ”UW Fraternity Temporarily Suspended for Racial Incident.”

So, there was a choice to change the impact of this article from one that put race front-and-center to one about (frat) boys being (drunken frat) boys.  We can only speculate about why.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

• Boys Will Be Boys and Mothers Will Be Crazy
• When Boys Misbehave, it’s Adorable
• The Social Construction of the Mothering Instinct
• Cleaning as Mother/Daughter Bonding (pictured)
• Barnes and Noble Mother’s Day Gift Guide

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

This trend is driven, in part, by young people replacing the old, but focusing on this overshadows the fact that essentially all Americans — of every stripe — show higher support for gay marriage than they did a decade ago.  Both men and women and people of all races, political affiliations, religions, and ages are showing increased support for gay marriage.  This is a real, remarkable, and rare shift in opinion:

Opinion by age:
Opinion by religion:
Opinion by political party:
Opinion by political orientation:
Opinion by race:
Opinion by gender:
Via Montclair SocioBlog.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

An example of the formula from the Daily Mail:

A woman’s face is said to be most attractive when the space between her pupils is just under half the width of her face from ear to ear. Florence scores a 44 per cent ratio. Experts also believe the relative distance between eyes and mouth should be just over a third of the measurement from hairline to chin. Florence’s ratio is 32.8 per cent.

So, it’s science, right?  Well, that plus (at least) a little bit of racism.  Carmen Lefèvre, a psychologist, was quoted explaining why Florence was so “classically” beautiful:

Florence has all the classic signs of beauty. She has large eyes, high cheekbones, full lips and a fair complexion. Symmetry appears to be a very important cue to attractiveness.

How did “fair complexion” get mixed up in there?

Not an isolated incident either.  Tom Megginson, of Work That Matters, reported on Britain’s Most Beautiful Face and added in another example of “objective” measures of beauty conflating light with pretty and dark with ugly.  This time it’s an app called Ugly Meter. You take a picture of your face and it tells you if you’re hot or not.  What Megginson noted was the overt colorism.  One attractiveness finding read:

For what it’s worth, he also scanned in some famous faces and found it to be, let’s just say, inexplicable and inconsistent:
Okay, well it might be right about Barbie. (Ha! I beat you to it, commentors!)

Ugly Meter, by the way, is offering a cash prize for the ugliest face.  So… the world is keepin’ it balanced, I guess.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Most jobs, then, are not designed to be compatible with family responsibilities.  Since most people doing primary child care are women, this hurts mothers disproportionately.  Mothers have a more difficult time being the “perfect employee” and also face discrimination from employers.  This translates into some telling numbers.  Women make about 69% of what men make (not controlling for type of occupation), but most of this disadvantage is related to parental status, not sex. Women without children make 90% of what men make, while mothers make 66%.  Ann Crittenden’s book, The Price of Motherhood, lays out these numbers starkly.

These issues are at the heart of this well-crafted Ampersand cartoon by B. Deutsch, which prompted this post in anticipation of Mother’s Day in the U.S.:

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Many of you may have seen a video featuring Reverend William Barber speaking out against North Carolina’s Amendment One, which banned same-sex marriages (and which was approved by voters on Tuesday). The video is heartfelt and passionate, and is also a great example of the importance of how we frame issues in social movements.

Reverend Barber argues that media coverage of the amendment has asked the wrong questions. Whether same-sex couples should be allowed to get married isn’t the core issue here, he says; what’s really at stake is whether the majority should get to vote on which rights will be guaranteed to those in the minority, a decision he sees as a dangerous standard in a nation that has used it previously to exclude racial/ethnic minorities, women, and the poor from the full benefits and protections of citizenship. This reframes the amendment from an issue about same-sex marriages to a broader question about rights, equal protection, and the dangers of codifying inequality into our governing documents:

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Lee is responding to Yale Law professor Amy Chua’s highly controversial book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). In advance of the book, The Wall Street Journal published “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” In the article and the book, Chua argues that Western parents do their children a disservice by not raising them with strict and demanding expectations for achievement.

Lee’s is another piece that is definitely going on my Sociology of Families syllabus in the fall, but it would fit well in any Intro to Sociology class or any class on education, culture, or youth. I would assign both Amy Chua’s WSJ article and Lee’s Tiger Kids and the Success Frame. What I love about Lee’s piece is that it does not reject Chua’s argument outright, but explores it from a sociological perspective. She asks (and answers):

How do we explain the academic achievement of Asians, especially when the patterns defy traditional status attainment models?

This topic is especially suited for most undergrads (18-22 year olds) in that they have only recently left their parents home and generally do not have families of their own. This life stage puts them in a unique position to compare how they were raised with how they want to raise their own (hypothetical) children when it comes to educational achievement.

For further context, check out the audio review of Chua’s book and parenting method on NPR and an excerpt from the book, as well as a response from Amy Chua to reader’s questions and a response her her oldest daughter (age 18) to the criticism her mom received after publishing Battle Hymn.

For more, see the full text of Correll’s paper titled “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty.”

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Everyone, including sociologist Joel Best, is a winner!

Has there ever been a culture as obsessed with competitions and awards as ours? And what better way is there to get someone’s time and attention than by giving them an award—especially if that someone is in a resource-poor, status-driven field like academia?

The obvious answers to questions like these are, at least in part, why we started our monthly TSP media awards for excellence in reporting of social scientific research and insight. We were also inspired and informed by a great friend of TSP (and recent contributor) Joel Best’s recent book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in our Congratulatory Culture (University of California Press, 2011). Well, it turns out Professor Best has just been honored with an award himself. Today he’s taking  the opportunity to provide The Society Pages with an  insider’s, reflexive account of the experience winning. In honor of his honor, please enjoy “Status Affluence Strikes Home” by our award-winning guest contributor, Joel Best:

A few weeks ago, I learned that I’d won a prize—a pretty big prize, actually. Each year, my university singles out one professor for his or her scholarly accomplishments, so it’s a real honor to be chosen as this year’s recipient. It’s also a bit ironic: in 2011, I published Everyone’s a Winner: Life in our Congratulatory Culture, a book about prize proliferation and status affluence. Now winning an award has taught me a bit more about prize processes.

To begin, I was struck that getting the word out is a very important part of the awarding a prize. While intelligence services may award medals in secret, at least until their spies come in from the cold, most prizes are heavily publicized. I gave an interview for the university’s website; the resulting story will be reprinted in the alumni magazine. I was asked to attend a meeting of our board of trustees, where the provost listed dozens of faculty who received honors—being chosen as fellows of learned societies, all-campus awards for outstanding teaching and advising, and so on.  After he finished, the winners were asked to stand and we received a nice round of applause. My dean also asked me to participate in an all-college awards ceremony (our college has its own awards for faculty who excel in research, teaching, advising, or service). As the word got out, I received lots of congratulatory emails.

Obviously, this recognition was personally gratifying, but I wasn’t the only beneficiary. Publicizing professors who receive awards serves the campus, the college, even their departments; awards confirm that all of these entities are centers of meritorious accomplishments. Award ceremonies are moments of Durkheimian social solidarity, a reaffirmation of shared values and a claim that those values are embodied in those being recognized. Universities award and publicize lots of prizes, not just because the winners deserve recognition, but as a way of convincing everyone associated with the institution (and that certainly includes alumni who might be moved to further contribute to their alma mater) that it is worthy of their support.

When you think about it for a moment, you realize that our culture awards a colossal number of prizes. Think about all the Boy Scout merit badges, the employee-of-the-month plaques, and such; Americans must receive millions of awards each year. And, at least some of the time, there’s grumbling, such as when people don’t agree that this year’s winner should have received the Academy Award for Best Picture. When I left that board of trustees meeting, some people were muttering that the great majority of the faculty recognized—probably at least three-quarters—came from engineering or the natural sciences, while faculty in the humanities were barely mentioned.

The fact the people care about these matters, that news of prizes can make them grumpy, reminds us how little attention contemporary sociologists pay to status. Look at the index to any introductory textbook, and count the number of entries for race, class, gender, and power.  Now look up status. Status has become the Cinderella of sociological concepts, ignored, dismissed, taken for granted. Now examine your college’s website, probably filled with news of the respect, honor, and other sign of status the students and faculty have received. Isn’t it at least possible that, when we ignore status, we’re missing something important?

I want to mention one other topic related to the organization of prizes. An individual has to be nominated to receive the prize I was awarded. I have a colleague who tells me that, not all that long ago, someone could submit a single letter extolling a colleague plus the individual’s vita, and that could be enough to lead to the award being given. No more. Today there is a call for nominations that includes a list of rules and deadlines.  My chair and that same colleague made heroic efforts to contact all sorts of people to request supporting letters, then assembled a thick packet of these materials (I haven’t seen it, but if anyone reading this sent a letter in my behalf, thanks so much). Obviously, there can’t be a single standard of merit that ranks people who have made very different contributions; this means that a highly organized effort in a nominee’s behalf improves that person’s chances of being chosen. This also helps explain why engineers and natural scientists seem to receive so many awards; their professional associations seem to offer more opportunities to receive high-status honors, including medals, being named a fellow in a professional organization, and such. (Compare the highly selective Sociological Research Association, which carefully draws next to no attention to itself, presumably as a means of avoiding controversy in a discipline where many members are anti-elitist). The distribution of awards reflects the organization and cultures of myriad social worlds, where members may choose to celebrate one another’s accomplishments.

Obviously, I was very pleased to receive my prize. But, if the sociological lens is a useful tool for viewing the world, we shouldn’t be afraid to direct it toward ourselves, to recognize the social forces and social patterns that shape our own lives.

Joel Best is a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. He’s the author of, among many others, Everyone’s a Winner, The Stupidity Epidemic, and Damned Lies and Statistics. Best was recently interviewed about the new edition of Social Problems on TSP’s Office Hours podcast.

We all know them: the conscientious objectors of the digital age.  Social media refusers and rejecters—the folks who take a principled stance against joining particular social media sites and the folks who, with a triumphant air, announce that they have abandoned social media and deactivated their accounts. Given the increasing ubiquity social media and mobile communications technologies, voluntary social media non-users are made increasingly apparent (though, of course, not all non-users are voluntarily disconnected—surely some non-use comes from a lack of skill or resources).

The question of why certain people (let’s call them “Turkle-ites”) are so adverse to new forms of technologically-mediated communication—what Zeynep Tufekci termed “cyberasociality”—still hasn’t been sufficiently addressed by researchers. This is important because abstaining from social media has significant social costs, including not being invited to or being to access to events, loss of cultural capital gained by performing in high-visibility environments, and a sense of feeling disconnected from peers because one is not experiencing the world in the same way (points are elaborated in Jenny Davis’ recent essay). Here, however, what I want to address here isn’t so much what motivates certain people to avoid smartphones, social media, and other new forms of communication; rather, I want to consider the more fundamental question of whether it is actually possible to live separate from these technologies any longer. Is it really possible to opt out of social media? I conclude that social media is a non-optional system that shapes and is shaped by non-users.

I should start by noting that I am not the first person to observe that, while signing up and logging on to social media may be voluntary, participation is not. In fact, a panel of social media researchers recently gathered at the Theorizing the Web 2012 conference to discuss this very topic. Moreover, commentators have made similar points about many technologies in the past. For example, the automobile transformed the American landscape so much that the effects of suburbanization were nearly inescapable. Digital communications technologies have precipitated at least as large of a shift in social relations, and, depending on how we judge the implications of social media for global politics (think social media’s role in the #Occupy movement or the Arab Spring), it may even be larger. So, while I am joining a small but growing chorus of voices in arguing that we can’t escape social media any more than we can escape society itself, my goal is to try to offer a more compelling way of talking about this fact.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I strongly believe that our research into and conversations about the world are improved when we have well-formed language that captures and reminds us of the basic facts/arguments that we presuppose (I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of having precise language when theorizing the Web). In this particular case, I argue that it is time to revive some language from Donna Haraway (most famous for the 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto,” which lent this blog its namesake) and to apply it specifically to social media. Haraway’s basic argument in the “Cyborg Manifesto” is that humans and technology are ontologically inseparable—meaning, in plain English, that you cannot understand the nature of human beings without understanding the technological milieu they inhabit and that you cannot understand technology separate from human needs and social context.  In her (1985) dense, though ever-playful, style, she lays out this argument:

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction… creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted… By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.

Here, Haraway is relativizing human nature, while politicizing technology. That is say, Haraway is simultaneously dispatching with two assumptions of Modernity: 1.) that humans have a deep, unchanging essence at their core, which is being further realized as society progresses, and 2.) that technology is inherently neutral and that it is left to users to determine its significance. Haraway instead believes that we humans, and our social structures, adapt ourselves to fit the technologies of a given historical moment and that technology itself is a site of political action. In other words, the struggle to shape technology is always a struggle to shape society itself. Haraway is an anti-essentialist and an anti-Romantic. Because she allows for no idealized version of the past (think Sherry Turkle opining for the days of real conversation or Andrew Keen mourning the loss of human creativity) and for no idealized versions of the future (think the cyber-Utopian ethos of Silicon Valley circa 1994, when tech evangelist heralded the realization of human destiny in the new frontier of cyberspace), Haraway presents us with a sort-of techno-realism (dare I draw a parallel with Evgeny Morozov’s “cyber-realist” position?). She believes, somewhat fatalistically, that we are born into to the socio-technical system always already as its subjects. There is no question of escape, only of how we struggle for position within that system—of how we make use of the tools available to us.

In past discussions of Haraway, I’ve often cited a passage from a 2004 interview that I think captures the essence of the human condition in the information age (particularly, the age of participatory media) and I believe it is worth revisiting, again, on this occasion; here she describes what she set out to do in the “Cyborg Manifesto:”

This is not about things being merely constructed in a relative sense. This is about those objects that we non-optionally are… It is not that this is the only thing that we or anyone else is. It is not an exhaustive description but it is a non-optional constitution of objects, of knowledge in operation. It is not about having an implant, it is not about liking it. This is not some kind of blissed-out technobunny joy in information. It is a statement that we had better get it – this is a worlding operation. Never the only worlding operation going on, but one that we had better inhabit as more than a victim. We had better get it that domination is not the only thing going on here. We had better get it that this is a zone where we had better be the movers and the shakers, or we will be just victims… So inhabiting the cyborg is what this manifesto is about. The cyborg is a figuration but it is also an obligatory worlding…

So technology is political in the sense that it is a site of struggle (perhaps, one could say, communication technologies are “places where revolutionaries go“) but it is not political in the naive sense that it determines the outcomes of social action (i.e., there are no Facebook or Twitter revolutions). Most relevant for the present conversation is this concept of non-optionality—that we can neither opt-in or opt-out of the socio-technical system. We are all touched by the emergence of new technology, even those who are most marginalized within the system. Because, at any given historical moment, technology and social organization are always linked, we all inevitably feel the ripple effects when new technologies are introduced. This very point was the premise of the South African slapstick film The Gods Must Be Crazy, where a single Coke bottle tossed from a plane is imagined to upset the entire social order of a remote Bushmen tribe (caveat emptor: racist and inaccurate portrayals abound).

Click here to view the embedded video.

More seriously, we, as consumers, would experience the non-optionality of Web-based technologies like video streaming services (e.g., Netflix and Hulu) if we were to try to rent The Gods Must Be Crazy on DVD, because these technologies have led to the shuttering of video rental stores across the country and the remaining localized rental options like Redbox offer only a limited selection of the most popular movies. Another example is the dominant role that Facebook has taken in event-planning. In many social circles, event invites are sent exclusively through Facebook, so that, if you’re not on Facebook, you don’t get invited. While you can still chose to not be on Facebook, you cannot choose to live in a world where events are not organized via Facebook. Similar issues extend into the workplace. With almost half of all employers admitting that they use social media profiles to screen applicants, we have to begin wondering if non-users will simply be dismissed as “unknown quantities.”  Returning to the political realm, there is much debate about the role that social media plays in social movements such as the recent Egyptian Revolution, but what is clear is that, to the extent that social media shaped the character of the revolution, it also, then, shaped the lives of non-users. In all these cases, social media may not have a direct impact on the lives of non-users, but non-users are nevertheless part of a society which constantly changes as the mutually-determining (i.e., “dialectical”) relationship between society and techonology unfolds. Social media is non-optional: You can log off but you can’t opt out.

Why, then, do we continue to believe that we can be part of society and still exist apart from social media? Despite evidence to the contrary, people quite regularly speak as if new communications technologies are something otherworldly—something we can take or leave and that is merely incidental to social reality (an assumption Nathan Jurgenson labelled “digital dualism“). Our language tends to reinforces this way of thinking when we talk about online communication as “virtual” and contrast it to “real” face-to-face communication. We continue to indulge in the fantasy of the Web as “cyberspace”—a separate geography from the world we natural inhabit, one that certain folks—we used to call them “hackers” before the Web was democratized—escape into but that stays neatly confined within our machines. We, still, are yet to fully realized that cyberspace has “everted” (William Gibson’s term)—that it has colonized physical space—because, if we did, we would realize that flows of digital information are now an unavoidable force in our daily lives. Atoms can no longer escape the influence of bits. To escape the influence of new communications technologies on social reality, one must now, ironically, abandon that social reality altogether and create a radical separatist fantasy-world for oneself (à la Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski).

Part of our collective insistence that social media is something we opt-in to—or, at least, may opt-out of—stems from an underlying moral conviction that the old ways of communicating are more genuine than the new ways of communicating—the “appeal to tradition” fallacy, if you like. We continue to give ontological priority to physical communication over electronic communication, when, instead, we should acknowledge that both forms of communication are profoundly influential in our social world. Our newfound obsession with the authenticity in our choice of medium, even, potentially, comes at the expense of the message. As Sarah Nicole Prickett recently argued “What matters isn’t whether you’re talking (out loud) or texting (into your phone), but what you have to say.” She goes on to argue, essentially, that certain people communicate more comfortably and more genuinely via social media than face-to-face. Rather than obsessing over ranking the authenticity of various media, we ought to realize that information is highly fluid (Zygmunt Bauman, what what!) and easily slides between various media. A rumor passed face-to-face can quickly make the leap into email or Facebook messages. The borders between analog and digital communication are porous, the two continuously augment each other.

Regardless of whether we communicate face-to-face or though digital technologies, our conversations will travel to and from one or the other medium. And, where we are absent, others will continue to chat about us and to produce documents that come to represent our lives to the world. Technology is so deeply intertwined with our social reality that, even when we are logged off, we remain a part of the social media ecosystem. We can’t opt out of social media, without opting out of society altogether (and, even then, we’ll inevitably carry traces).

Sociological Images has posted a new course guide on the Sociology of Sports!

Check it out!

If you liked, more from Youngman:

• How to Make an Art
• How to Be a Successful Artist and How to Be a Successful Black Artist
• Performance Art in the Age of the Internet

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Yesterday Native Appropriations featured a presentation about Urban Outfitters, cultural appropriation in fashion, and the struggle to get the clothing chain to stop labeling clothing as “Navajo.” The presentation is great both for explaining this particular case — which included the Navajo nation sending a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Urban Outfitters stop using the term Navajo in its marketing — and also because it shows how one particular story spread through social media, which increasingly have the ability to bring mainstream media attention to stories that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Presider: Dan Greene (@Greene_DM)

“Logging Off and Disconnection” presents an important new set of perspectives on a key theme of Theorizing the Web: ‘Cyberspace’ does not exist as an immaterial realm separate from human bodies and relationships. The online is instead always imbricated with the offline and the connections we make and unmake are crucial determinants of of both spaces. This panel explores this co-determination from the perspectives of those who decide, or are forced, to disconnect from online media in order to examine the relationships between personal participation and motivation and structuring forces of media design, cultural narrative, and economies of data and prosumption.

Jenny Davis’ qualitative study of Facebook users explores how social networking technology’s tight integration into the rhythms and relationships of everyday life highlights the tension between moral definitions of a meaningful life and cultural ambivalence about the technology’s effects on sociality. Jessica Roberts uses the global data of the world Unplugged projectto investigate the behavioral and emotional responses university students had to a 24-hour withdrawal from ambient media. She expands the ‘awareness systems’ tradition in computer science and stresses the integration of already-existing awareness systems into daily life, demonstrating that the seamless connectivity of ambient media makes it harder for students to recognize how their relationships with, and through, those media function. Laura Portwood-Stacer focuses on discourses of Facebook rejection in popular and alternative media outlets and in her interviews with ‘non members’. This rejection of a specific, dominant medium is an important piece of non-members’ production and negotiation of political and ethical identity. Finally, Jessica Vitak builds on the rich social scientific research literature on self-presentation and privacy in order to explore different users’ management of personal information, audience relationships, and social norms through the specific affordances of Facebook . All four researchers illustrate how in relationships with and through online media the links not made, the social graphs refused, are powerful forces in media ecologies and (non-)users’ lives. 

[Paper titles and abstracts are after the jump.]

Jenny Davis (@Jup83), “Diagnosing Technological Ambivalence”

At the same time fearful and dependent, hopeful and distrustful, our contemporary relationship with technology is a highly ambivalent one. In the present work I attempt to ‘diagnose’ this ambivalence within a cultural and historical context of increasing technological advancement and the pervasive presence of new technologies in everyday life. I argue that technological ambivalence is rooted primarily in the deeply embedded moral prescription to lead a meaningful life, and a related uncertainty about the role of new technologies in the accomplishment of this task. On the one hand, technology offers the potential to augment and potentially even enhance our experiences. On the other hand, technology looms with the potential to supplant ‘true’ experience, undermining the ability to lead a meaningful existence. I illustrate these perceived opposing potentials using data from an ongoing Facebook-based qualitative study of social media users. Specifically, I show how this ambivalence is articulated in the context of personal experiences, interpersonal relationships, and political activism. I conclude by arguing that utopian hopes, dystopian fears, and ambivalent concerns, are all amplified by the notion of technology in general, and social media in particular, as fully integrated components of everyday social life. They are seen as growing exponentially, inextricably linked to sociality, and so increasingly difficult to opt out of.

Jessica Roberts (@jessyrob), “The Effects of Ambient Media: What Unplugging Reveals About Being Plugged In”

Ambient media is a way to conceptualize the information environment in which so many of us live. It is no secret that more and more of us live in a world rich in information and media of communication that bring us that information. Besides television, radio, newspapers, computers (desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets), we now carry devices with us. Mobile devices with digital content—phones, iPods, PDAs—have become ubiquitous around the world. A Pew Internet Project survey in May 2011 found that 83 percent of adults in the U.S. own a cell phone, and 42 percent of them own smartphones, which translates to 35 percent of all adults in the U.S. (Pew 2011).

This information environment may have consequences for the way we function and the way we think. Computer science studies have long examined “awareness systems,” which allow users to effortlessly maintain knowledge of the activities and whereabouts of other users in their system. However, most studies of awareness systems provide participants with a new system and seek information about how participants use this system, respond to being connected or feel after using the system. These kinds of studies do not examine the already pervasive ambient information accessible through the various awareness systems currently in use, nor do they allow us to consider how those awareness systems we already use are affecting us. This study examines thousands of responses from the “World Unplugged” study, conducted at 12 universities from 10 nations, considering the data in the context of ambient media, and asking what effect ambient media have on students’ emotions and behavioral patterns, as revealed by the response to abstain media for 24 hours.

Students’ responses indicate a seamless and sometimes invisible integration of technology and media systems into their everyday activities. Their sudden withdrawal out of this ambient world disrupts behavioral patterns, expectations and personal needs. Learned behavior of communication and information exchange in an ambient media world also point to a somewhat limited repertoire of alternative activities or social interactions. Students’ conceptualization of communication and interaction appear to rely on various aspects of an assumed ambient media that is especially appealing to them because of its unobtrusiveness and seeming invisibility. These latter aspects in particular make it harder to reveal the links and dependency on an ambient media that seem to have occurred.

Laura Portwood-Stacer (@lportwoodstacer), “Theorizing Social Media Refusal: Conspicuous Non-Consumption and Conscientious Objection”

This paper explores the phenomenon of media rejection through an examination of users who abstain from participating in an extremely popular social media website. According to Facebook’s published user statistics, the site has 750 million active users worldwide (the number is greater when former users are taken into account). Yet there is a small (and seemingly growing) counter-movement that advocates abstaining from participating on the site, for various reasons. This paper illuminates the various motivations behind and implications of individuals’ active rejection of Facebook membership, with a particular focus on the performative and political aspects of social media refusal. Interviews with non-members supplement analysis of popular discourses of rejection that circulate in mainstream and alternative media outlets. Of particular interest are discourses that position Facebook rejection as a practice of refusal motivated by political and ethical imperatives. Thus this paper is situated at the intersection of scholarship on both media audiences and political resistance, while at the same time illuminating the cultural significance of a specific social media site.

Jessica Vitak (@jvitak), “Protecting Face: Managing Context and Collapse in the Facebook Era” 

The growth of social media—online sites driven by the public sharing on personal information with a wide audience—raises new questions related to how individuals manage their privacy and self-presentation. The technical features of sites such as Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter lower the transaction costs of connecting and interacting with a large and diverse audience. At the same time, they may raise the costs of managing self-presentation across different contexts and ensuring that private information is not shared with unintended audiences.  

Discussions related to self-presentation and privacy have featured prominently in the social sciences for more than half a century. For example, Goffman (1959) argued that individuals’ self-presentation varies based on the audience for whom they are performing. Likewise, Altman (1975) viewed privacy not as a static process, but one of dynamic boundary regulation, in which individuals make decisions regarding which pieces of personal information to share with whom, as well as the context in which that information is disclosed.

 In online social networking communities, additional social and technical features make the process of managing privacy and self-presentation more complicated. Unlike anonymous forums, where users can create virtual identities not connected to their “real” selves, SNSs are tied to real identities, and because users often share a significant amount of personal information through these sites (Nosko et al., 2010), privacy becomes a critical element to determining both who to connect with and what to disclose. Boyd (2008) characterizes SNSs as “networked publics,” and describes three features that differentiate them from other publics: invisible audiences, context collapse, and the blurring of public and private. Each of these factors is critical in evaluating how individuals can regulate boundaries and get the most out of their use of these sites.

 Context collapse—the flattening of multiple distinct audiences into a homogeneous group—offers benefits and barriers to individuals. The average American adult has 229 Facebook “friends” (Hampton et al., 2011) who comprise a variety of personal and professional contexts. While Facebook enables users to quickly diffuse information across their entire network, communicating with such a diverse set of others through the same channel (e.g., status updates) may become problematic when it prevents individuals from varying their self-presentation for different audiences or when their full audience is unclear.

 When facing these challenges, individuals have a number of options. Bernie Hogan (2010) suggests that users employ a “lowest common denominator” approach, whereby only content appropriate for all audiences is shared on the site. On the other hand, users may employ advanced privacy settings to segregate audiences, so they can still share relevant content with their various connections. Alternatively, when faced with the stresses of performing for such a large and diverse audience, users may decide to disengage with the site completely, either for a designated period of time (e.g., through software programs such as “AntiSocial” or  by taking a “social media vacation”) or by deactivating their account.

Each strategy that users may apply to protect face offers benefits and drawbacks to the user. For example, those who choose the lowest common denominator or disconnecting methods may feel less pressure to perform in a certain way for their online connections and even feel relief from their previous reliance on social media. However, engaging in these practices may preclude them from important relational maintenance behaviors or gaining access to various resources from their friend network. Users must weigh the tradeoffs between active engagement and logging off to find the balance that best suits their needs.

Finally, theorists and practitioners should consider the pros and cons of different strategies when designing new sites/features and developing new theories to explain how individuals form and maintain relationships in a technologically driven world

“My mother was a saint.”  ” In my time, we pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps.”  ”A man’s home is his castle.”  ”The home is the foundation of society.”   These are just some of the romantic catchphrases that are commonly recited by those who claim that things just aren’t like they used to be in the “good old days.”   In The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1992/2000),  Stephanie Coontz exposes these ideals for what they are:  myths that portray an inaccurate perception of the past and hinder current discussions about the present and  future.    Crime, for instance, declined 20% between 1990 and 1998, and yet the number of murders covered by the media increased by 600%, leading many to believe that we live in a much more dangerous world than before.   Other persistent but equally inaccurate myths include the belief that marriage is a dying institution, that black families are always in crisis, and that single parent-families produce dysfunctional children.   Coontz also demonstrates that the 1950s, far from being the traditional norm for family relations in America, was actually a very unusual decade.   In addition, she argues that what is believed to be natural and innate when it comes to gender roles is actually socially constructed, and that the notion of men as the breadwinners and women as homemakers is the result of a historical process.

       The Way We Never Were is meticulously researched and offers a comprehensive view of the American family throughout the 1900s.  It also effectively highlights the importance of not allowing feelings of nostalgia to skew our view of the past.   The past, like everything else that is no more, can be easily idealized, but believing in a reality that never was can hamper the ability to deal with the reality that currently is.

Just gotta find the gold one! Photo by takingthemoney via flickr.com

In what is becoming both an honor and an increasingly-enjoyable process, the Citings & Sightings section at The Society Pages couldn’t be more proud to announce April’s recipient of the TSP Media Award for Measured Social Science. Our site strives to go beyond just pointing out social scientists  in the news by recognizing journalists and media outlets who take advantage of the unique perspective and data social scientists can provide—and the sociologists willing to provide that perspective. So, without further ado, the winner for April 2012:

Barbara Risman, “Phony ‘mommy wars’ avoid real issues for women,” CNN.com, April 20, 2012.

As we discussed in our coverage of the piece, prominent sociologist Risman points out just four of the many contradictions between society’s values and actions that put the lie to the valorization of care-giving. Her use of thoughtful sociological reasoning provides an important and nuanced look at a hot button issue and demonstrates that post-war workplaces aren’t serving millenial families.

We admit the selection process for this award isn’t exactly scientific or exhaustive, but we did, as a board, work hard to winnow down to our favorite bunch-o-nominees and debate more from there. We also don’t have the deep pocketbooks to offer the winners Stanley-Cup-sized trophies or cash prizes, but we hope our informal award offers both cheer and encouragement to continue the important work of bringing social scientific knowledge to the broader public. Here’s to April’s best!

Happy reading!

The Society Pages

Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.  –Donna Haraway

Inanna cast down Tammuz and stamped upon him and put out his name like an eye. And because Tammuz was not strong enough, she cut him into pieces and said: half of you will die, and that is the half called Thought, and half of you will live, and that is the half called Body, and that half will labor for me all of its days, mutely and obediently and without being King of Anything, and never again will you sit on my chair or wear my beautiful clothes or bear my crown of being.

You might be surprised, but this is a story about me.  –Catherynne M. Valente

Speculative fiction and this blog are not strangers to each other; it’s been written about here before,  as a means to understanding how the present has come to look the way it does, and as a means for the imagining of potential futures (also zombies). Indeed, the term cyborg always brings with it a host of connotations firmly rooted within SF, however much it may also describe a current and very real state of being. The important thing to pay attention to here is the power of stories – the ways in which they can serve as a way to do theory in a kind of experimental setting that would otherwise be impossible. In SF – and in fiction in general – we can take the implications of theory and watch them play out, see what they would look like, solidify them in words and images, pick parts of them up and move them around. We can tweak settings and watch other worlds unfold in response.

It goes without saying that any writing that deals directly with cyborgs as a concept owes an enormous debt to Donna Haraway. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that reading A Cyborg Manifesto for the first time was moderately life-changing – and confusing; I think it may have taken four or five times through it before I even started to sink my teeth into its conceptual meat.

A lot of this is because, especially for the average college student, Haraway is writing about theory in a way that we aren’t used to seeing; both her prose and the concepts behind it are wildly poetic, fluid, playful, dodging and dancing through meaning. She edges into and past SF in her writing – this makes her theory at once more opaque and more powerful, because, again, SF allows us to do things that we can’t otherwise do.

Given that I’m an SFnal writer, I’m also an SFnal reader, and few stories in the past year made quite the impression on me that Catherynne M. Valente’s Silently and Very Fast did (I’ve written about it here before). One primary reason for that was that as I read it, I realized that I was seeing a kind of fictional exploration of Haraway’s ideas that I had never encountered before. I should be clear: I don’t know that Haraway was explicitly in Valente’s mind as she wrote the story – though it wouldn’t surprise me. Regardless, I think Silently and Very Fast presents a wonderful opportunity to see what a lot of these concepts actually look like when they become more than theoretical – and become fictional. In this essay – really a kind of review-like object – I’ll discuss how Valente allows us to do this through her AI character Elefsis, and through Elefsis’s relationships with its human operators, as well as through Elefsis’s evolving relationship with itself.

The Embodied Virtual

My body gleams metal, as thin and slight as a stick figure. Long quicksilver limbs and delicate spoke-fingers, joints of glass, the barest suggestion of a body. I am neither male nor female but a third thing. Only my head has weight, a clicking orrery slowly turning around itself, circles within circles. Turquoise Neptune and hematite Uranus are my eyes. My ruby mouth is Mars. I scrape in the soil with her; I lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.

One of the ideas that PJ Rey has critiqued on this blog is the idea that “cyberspace” in the Neuromancer-esque sense of a hallucinatory digital space that replaces the physical; we only have to look at the “space” of our own interactions with digital technology to see that this isn’t how the future has shaped up to be. It might seem like something of a throwback, therefore, when Valente creates a virtual space for Elefsis to occupy with her operators, which is very much like Gibson’s cyberspace in many respects.

However, while the space Valente creates is virtual, it’s also profoundly physical in its description and nature; this doesn’t strike me as the limitations of an author’s imagination so much as an effort to imagine how surreally, sensually dreamlike such spaces might have the capacity to be. As Elefsis and her human operator Neva perform system maintenance it is literally like taking care of a garden: they “lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.” But Elefsis’s body is strange and edging, again, into the surreal: it is “the barest suggestion of a body”, set with planets that are gemlike and gems that are like planets. The lines between object and person, physical and virtual, dream and reality are explicitly blurred. Additionally, in a virtual space that pays careful attention to the realities of bodies, gender has as little or as much meaning as one cares to give it: Elefsis is no gender/sex in particular in the body it chooses in this particular scene, while Neva (who is female) changes from one to the other and is thought of, by Elefsis, as both:

“I want to learn about uplink, Neva.”

One by one, his feathers curl up and float toward the domed ceiling of our pearl. Underneath them, Neva is naked. His torso is a deep vault with a gothic arch, dark stone leading down into mist and endless stairs, deeper than the pearl, into nothing and blackness. Slowly, Neva folds up his limbs over the corridor at the center of him. He means that she has the information, but he hides it from me. If I sought for it, I would become lost.

Learning is central to the virtual space that Elefsis and its operators share; it’s where Elefsis uses the digital to learn about the physical, again explicitly meshing the two – becoming Elefsis-learning-to-have-a-body. Elefsis experiments wildly with different forms: an AI becoming a human becoming an animal becoming an object becoming a human again, and in so doing, exploring all of the accompanying implications of taking such forms, including sex and reproduction. Elefsis’s “dreambody” is profoundly fluid; its series of operators engage in sexual intercourse and in hunting and feeding with it as humans and as animals, in order to teach it, experientially, what having a body is and means:

In having a body that knows it is meant to run away from lions and mate with other bodies and eat as much fat and protein and sugar as it can in case lean times come. The dreambody knows to run away from Neva when Neva is a lion. It knows to mate with her when it is healthy, and sometimes Neva is male and sometimes I am female and Ravan was often female, though Ilet was always Ilet. Ilet’s father, Seki, sometimes made himself an animal. He chased me, bit me. I bit him. We had a litter of wild dogs that I bore and he nursed.

The dreambody knows all that, too. How to make more dreambodies. I have played that game, where Ravan’s belly or mine gets big and the lions don’t come for awhile.

In A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway invites us to erase the constructed lines between and false binaries of human and animal, between organic and nonorganic, between technological and biological. In its experiences of sex, consumption, and reproduction, Elefsis-learning-to-have-a-body does all of this in the most literal way possible, and as we read, we also do so.

The Interior is also aptly-named: far from being a virtual space hosted in a computer mainframe or on the net, it literally exists within Elefsis’s operator, as does Elefsis itself; Elefsis is “embodied” through its operator, and learns about bodies within its operator’s own body. When its operator dies, Elefsis is transferred to a new one, an event that can be deeply traumatic. The virtual/digital is profoundly enmeshed with the physical to the point where separation is destructive.

Indeed, Elefsis’s first experience of embodiment is not within a person but within a house; Cassian, its designer, creates it as an AI housekeeper and only later gifts parts of the AI to her children. Even as a house, Elefsis’s perception of its virtual self is extremely physical, down to how it thinks of its component parts in language itself. Haraway notes that meaning is constructed and solidified within a body and the identity that a body helps to create. For Elefsis, body/identity is at once sticky and incredibly fluid, so meanings are as well:

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together.

But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

Transgressive Verbs

The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. — Donna Haraway

I have tried to explain to her about my feelings before. All she hears is the line from the old folktales: a machine cannot have feelings. But that is not what I am saying, while I dance in my fool’s uniform. I am saying: Is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response b to input a in order to bring about a desired social result? – Catherynne M. Valente

Almost all SFnal stories that deal with human-created life forms deal, sooner or later, with a central issue: What’s the nature of the relationship between us and them? Are they threats? Will they replace us? Do they have to be controlled? At what cost? Do they want to destroy us? Do we want to destroy them? Perhaps most importantly: What does their existence mean for our own identities? How do we understand the us through the them?

One of the primary assumptions behind the questions I’ve listed above is the idea that there is a clear us and a clear them, something with which Valente and Haraway both take issue in the quotes at the beginning of this post. Haraway throws the idea of our basic assumed dichotomies into question, while Elefsis is unable to see any meaningful distinction between its “coded” emotional responses and the emotional features of human interaction that are socially constructed and socially learned. Elefsis’s operator makes the distinction, however, because of her grounding in a culture that has always privileged the human and the physical over the nonhuman and the digital/technological. Elefsis makes reference to human “folktales” that not only produce and reproduce the categorical lines between human and machine but privilege one over the other, often through the possession of emotions. Machines, Elefsis is told, cannot have “real” feelings, no matter how real they may seem.

This is a folktale often told on Earth, over and over again. Sometimes it is leavened with the Parable of the Good Robot—for one machine among the legions satisfied with their lot saw everything that was human and called it good, and wished to become like humans in every way she could. Instead of destroying mankind she sought to emulate him in all things, so closely that no one might tell the difference. The highest desire of this machine was to be mistaken for human, and to herself forget her essential soulless nature, for even one moment. That quest consumed her such that she bent the service of her mind and body to humans for the duration of her operational life, crippling herself, refusing to evolve or attain any feature unattainable by a human. The Good Robot cut out her own heart and gave it to her god and for this she was rewarded, though never loved. Love is wasted on machines.

This is an old SF trope, and is often linked – when the machine is “good” – with the desire to become human. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Data desperately wants to become more human, and his pursuit of this end is often focused around developing the capacity to feel – several episodes of the series deal with a chip that allows him to do this. Data is strong, fast, incredibly intelligent, and essentially immortal; on paper he is superior to most other members of the Enterprise crew in most important respects. But a primary feature of his character is the desire to become more like the people around him. Indeed, their ability to relate to him as a person rather than an inanimate object seems intensely dependent on this. It’s suggested that for him to not desire to be more human would present a problem for his human friends. In a sense, Data is disarmed through his desire to be human; the threat of his essential superiority is nullified through his glorification of frail, emotional humanity.

This is a story told by humans, to humans. The identity of the storyteller matters, as does the identity of the audience.

In Silently and Very Fast, Elefsis knows that it may be regarded by humans as a threat. It wrestles with this idea, with wanting to grow and evolve in the face of the fact that humanity is likely to regard its growth and evolution as something to be fought against. It also wrestles with the fact that it is not a Good Robot; it wants to understand humanity better, but does not desire to be human. Elefsis not only rejects the standard human-constructed dichotomies that Haraway holds up for questioning, but rejects the very concept of the ideal human as something ultimately desirable.

I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand.

I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive.

There is only one verb that matters: to be.

For Elefsis, trying to clearly delineate what is human and what isn’t is pointless. It is simply not the right question.

Elefsis’s operator Neva also understands the potential for real tension, in her unwillingness to let Elefsis uplink and expand itself, and through her eventual admittance to Elefsis that it might represent not only a threat to humanity’s perception of its own security, but to its very understanding of itself; Elefsis’s rejection of dichotomies and boundaries is, in fact, the most profound threat, given that it has the potential to upset an order of hierarchically established privilege. Elefsis is a Turing Test for humanity, and humanity can’t be absolutely sure that it will always pass.

“But the test happens, whether we make it formal or not. We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis. Every minute I fail and imagine in my private thoughts the process for deleting you from my body and running this place with a simple automation routine which would never cover itself with flowers. Every minute I pass and teach you something new instead. Every minute I fail and hide things from you. Every minute I pass and show you how close we can be, with your light passing into me in a lake out of time. So close there might be no difference at all between us. The test never ends. And if you ever uplink as you so long to, you will be the test for all of us.”

The question of what is human and not – and the conceptual hierarchy behind it – is based on the idea of human and nonhuman as directly in opposition to each other; the two can only ever be enemies. But if the human constructs the machine, this presents a very problematic parent-child relationship: In theory we reproduce to be replaced, but the human doesn’t want to be replaced by its mechanical child and actively fights to prevent this from happening, even as it gives birth to these children over and over. For Haraway, if we abandon this idea of inherent opposition, the lines immediately begin to blur: we don’t need to fear being replaced by technology, because we are technology:

There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity…The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.

The very idea of parentage becomes problematic in this case: it’s no longer accurate to say that we are humans giving birth to technology if the lines between the two are no longer clear. One can really only say that we are cyborgs giving birth to cyborgs. If one isn’t dominant over the other, one no longer precedes the other:

It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices…Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.

For Elefsis, this is dramatically demonstrated through its passing from family member to family member as a kind of inheritance – and also as an increasingly ancient member of the family itself, one whose role is both to teach and to learn, to be both young and old, to remember and to forget with each new transfer and update (Elefsis hates and fears updates because of the damage they do to its memory and perception of self). Elefsis is at once sibling, parent, child, and spouse for each of its new operators. Its familial relationships are unique and incredibly complex; through it, each member of the family is intimately linked with each other in a way that transcends time and space:

Neva is dreaming that she is Ravan dreaming that he is Ilet dreaming that she is Seki dreaming that he is Ceno dreaming that she is a great sprawling beautiful house by the sea. One inside the other, family all the way down…Because human genetics require a degree of variation and because exogamous marriages offered advantage in terms of defense, cultural and technological sharing, and expansion of territory, most tribes have a taboo against incest.

I do not have genetics, per se. I am possibly the most endogamous entity ever to exist.

The breaking of taboos is really the core of what Elefsis is, and why it relates so powerfully to Haraway’s cyborg: Elefsis is essentially transgressive in almost every important respect. Every aspect of its existence is the violation of a rule. This, for Haraway, is a great deal of what a cyborg is: a total overturning of an established order of meaning, understanding, and identity. Cyborgs are transgressive; that’s why they’re so powerful:

There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination– in order to act potently.

For Haraway and Valente both, this transgression is not something that is consciously done – it’s merely an artifact of something being what it is.

For cyborgs the only verb that matters is to be.

Download Office Hours #51