I am not an expert on Bolivian politics. I am, however, human, which is more than can be said about the Twitter accounts commenting on the Bolivian coup:
Humor is central to internet culture. Through imagery, text, snark and stickers, funny content holds strong cultural currency. In a competitive attention economy, LOLs are a hot commodity. But just because internet culture values a laugh it doesn’t preclude serious forms of digitally mediated communication nor consideration of consequential subject matter. In contrast, the silly and serious can—and do—imbricate in a single utterance.
The merging of serious and silly becomes abundantly evident in recent big data analyses of political communication on social media. Studies show that parody accounts, memes, gifs and other funny content garner disproportionate attention during political news events. John Hartley refers to this phenomenon as ‘silly citizenship’ while Tim Highfield evokes an ‘irreverent internet’. This silliness and irreverence in digitally mediated politics means that contemporary political discourse employs humor as a participatory norm. What remains unclear, however, is what people are doing with their political humor. Is humor a vehicle for meaningful political communication, or are politics just raw material for funny content? My co-authors and I (Tony Love (@tonyplove) and Gemma Killen (@gemkillen)) addressed this question in a paper published last week in New Media & Society. more...
Exxxotica, a large adult-themed expo that started in 2006, was held in Chicago last weekend. While the event is broad and claims to be a “love and sex” catch-all event (including seminars and presentations related to BDSM, swing lifestyle, sexual health, toys, etc.), it is largely focused on the adult industry. Indeed, since its inception Exxxotica has hosted large name porn stars like Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy, and it promises to connect fans with their favorite stars.
In its 11th year, changes in the expo have reflected changes in the industry itself. Most notably, there has been a huge shift away from mainstream studio porn production to that of independent content creation. J. Handy, the director of Exxxotica, recalled that the first year that MyFreeCams was present was in 2012 with a 10×30’ booth and 8-10 cam girls.in contrast, the same site exhibited with a 50×60’ booth and over 200 cam models in Chicago last weekend. In addition to MyFreeCams, other cam sites such as Chaturbate, Cam4, and LiveJasmine were present. more...
Maybe you’ve noticed Twitter’s new analytics feature. Maybe you haven’t. I kind of wished I hadn’t. It gives you a break down of how many “impressions” and “engagements” your tweets have garnered; impressions refers to views, and engagements include how many people clicked the tweet to see details, how many liked or retweeted, how many checked out your profile, etc. Each individual tweet gets its own breakdown, and you can go to analytics.twitter.com to see a general survey of your activity, from overall “impressions” to profile visits, mentions, and followers.
The case of sociologist Zandria Robinson, formerly of the University of Memphis and now teaching at Rhodes College, has a lot to say about the affordances of Twitter. But more than this, it says a lot about the intersection of communication technologies and relations of power.
Following the Charleston shooting, Robinson tapped out several 140 character snippets rooted in critical race theory. Critical race theory recognizes racism as interwoven into the very fabric of social life, locates racism within culture and institutions, and insists upon naming the oppressor (white people). more...
Netiquette. I seriously hate that word. BUT an issue of internet-based-etiquette (blogger etiquette, specifically) recently came to my attention, and I’m interested in others’ practices and thoughts.
As a blogger, I often analyze content from Facebook and Twitter. In doing so, I usually post images of actual tweets, comments, and status updates. These are forms of data, and are useful in delineating the public tenor with regard to a particular issue, the arguments on opposing sides of a debate, and the ‘voice’ with which people articulate their relevant thoughts and sentiments.
As a common practice, I black out all identifying information when reposting this content. Last week, I posted some tweets with the names and images redacted. A reader commented on my post to ask why I did so, given that the tweets were public. We had a quick discussion, but, as I mentioned in that discussion, this issue deserves independent treatment. more...
Twitter recently made analytics available for free to all users. One of the free metrics is the gender distribution of your followers. This metric is flawed in a lot of ways (most obviously because it’s binary: there are only men and women). Most puzzling, however, is how Twitter determines a an account-holder’s gender. Users don’t have to self-identify–in fact, there’s not even an option to do this.
As both this post about the gender metric and this post from Twitter about its gender-targeted marketing show, Twitter treats gender as an emergent pattern of behavior. As the latter explains, users are thought to send “signals”–such as “user profile names or the accounts she or he follows”–that “have proven effective in inferring gender.”
Classically, one’s body (physiology, phenotype) was the ‘signal’ from which one inferred gendered (or raced) behavior: vagina = nurturing, scrotum = likes video games. In this model, gender is a fixed characteristic inherent in sexed bodies. The kind of body you had determined the patterns of behavior you exhibited.
Twitter’s approach to gender is an example of a broader shift in our understanding of gender (and social identities more generally): genders are not fixed characteristics, but emergent properties. This understanding of gender is different than the traditional one, but it’s not clear that it’s any better. For example, we only recognize something as a pattern if it resonates with other patterns we’ve been habituated to recognize as such (what Reich describes here as “rational” moments). Twitter isn’t crunching numbers to figure out what different kinds of gender patterns people follow; rather, they’re listening for users who fall in phase with already-set “masculine” and “feminine” vibes. (As they say, “where we can’t predict gender reliably, we don’t.”) To count and be treated as a full person/user, you have to exhibit legibly gendered patterns of behavior. Otherwise, you’re effectively non-existent, just irrational noise.
To close with an aside: Has anyone written about the relationship between these gender-predicting algorithms and the parlour game on which Turing based his test? The game was about determining whether or not one’s interlocutor was a woman.
In preparing to write this post, I found myself going back over Whitney Erin Boesel’s post a couple of months back on death and digital/social media mediation, and I found myself running into a lot of the same issues she discusses. She suffered from massive uncertainty regarding how to talk about what she had experienced, or whether to talk about it at all. I’m going through the same. I’m not sure I should even be writing this, or what it will mean when I have. At the same time, I’m not sure how not to write about it, and that in itself is part of what I want to talk about.
Note: this is not going to be particularly organized, or particularly intellectual. It’s in part personal Livejournal-esque navel-gazing, part working through some disparate observations regarding how we deal with traumatic life events on social media, part general flailing around. Please bear with me. Or, you know, don’t.
Last week Twitter introduced an alert system that they described as “ a new feature that brings us one step closer to helping users get important and accurate information during emergencies, natural disasters or when other communications services aren’t accessible.” The alerts show up on users phones as special push notifications and SMS notifications and are marked with an orange bell in your feed. At first blush it seems like a great idea but, given that I’m writing this during yet another government “shutdown”, are governments and NGOs really the only organizations that should get access to this useful service? What can activists do to push back? more...
Here are some of the things I’ve talked about on my Twitter in the last week or so.
my mental health issues
nail polish
Batman
how generally unpleasant graduate school is
the pan-fandom roleplaying game I’m part of
my fiction writing
Chelsea Manning and rights for trans* people
my syllabus for my Social Problems course this fall
Detroit
the failing Philadelphia public school system
knitting
In other words, in many respects this is your average personal Twitter account. I use it in a pretty average way, if there even is an “average” way to use Twitter, which I think is up for debate. What isn’t average about it is that it’s my only Twitter account. more...
About Cyborgology
We live in a cyborg society. Technology has infiltrated the most fundamental aspects of our lives: social organization, the body, even our self-concepts. This blog chronicles our new, augmented reality.
Exxxotica, a large adult-themed expo that started in 2006, was held in Chicago last weekend. While the event is broad and claims to be a “love and sex” catch-all event (including seminars and presentations related to BDSM, swing lifestyle, sexual health, toys, etc.), it is largely focused on the adult industry. Indeed, since its inception Exxxotica has hosted large name porn stars like Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy, and it promises to connect fans with their favorite stars.
Maybe you’ve noticed Twitter’s new analytics feature. Maybe you haven’t. I kind of wished I hadn’t. It gives you a break down of how many “impressions” and “engagements” your tweets have garnered; impressions refers to views, and engagements include how many people clicked the tweet to see details, how many liked or retweeted, how many checked out your profile, etc. Each individual tweet gets its own breakdown, and you can go to analytics.twitter.com to see a general survey of your activity, from overall “impressions” to profile visits, mentions, and followers.
