Editor’s Note: This post was written in response to PJ Rey‘s “Incidental Productivity: Value and Social Media” and the text is reposted from mrteacup.org.

PJ Rey has a very interesting post up at Cyborgology about issues of production and labor on social networking sites that has some connections with things that I have been thinking about.

The point seems to be a partial critique of the social factory thesis – that social networks exploit the social interactions of their users, turning it into a kind of labor. This critique turns on the idea of “incidental productivity.” Rey claims that some activity on a social network does not fall into the category of labor as defined by Marx; or to put it another way, the Marx-influenced theory of labor is not conceptually broad enough to cover every type of activity that occurs. Rey proposes the concept of incidental productivity, which seems to mean value that is silently produced as a side effect of some other activity that the user is engaged in. The important point is that users are not aware of the value that they are creating, so this is not labor.

So far, I agree with this. There is only one very small point of disagreement, which is where Rey says in the final paragraph, “A quintessentially Marxian question remains: Who should control the means of incidental production?” I claim that this concept of incidental production is ultimately the liberal-capitalist problem of consumer rights and protections.

This is obvious from Rey’s main example: Google tracks what users search for and what results they click on, and this data is used in various ways to improve the service. The data is a side-effect of our consumption of the service. This is productive activity, but not so different from filling out a customer feedback card after staying at a hotel. Of course, you have to opt-in to feedback cards and Google collects data automatically and invisibly. A better example might be a grocery store that secretly tracks the movement of customers around the store to see what sort of displays are most effective; or customer loyalty cards that track the effectiveness of marketing. But in all cases, the fundamental consumer relationship remains the same.

How would we think about our labor relationship to Google? We might talk about the early days of the web when individuals would create personal home pages containing list of useful links. This was eventually turned into a labor when companies like Yahoo hired people to do this same work to create a centralized directory of web links. Google replaced these web directories by returning to the distributed production of links and using an algorithm to interpret that activity as keyword tagging.

Returning to the hotel analogy, AirBnb has a similar relationship to the people who rent out their apartments. AirBnb is essentially a global distributed, decentralized hotel, where individual apartment owners are contracted to do all the work that occurs in a hotel, but just for their apartment. PJ Rey is drawing attention to the problem of customer feedback cards: who can use that data, who is it shared with, are customers informed and educated about privacy issues, and so on. But as I wrote in You Can’t Check Out of the Peer-to-Peer Motel, the social factory perspective is more concerned with questions analogous to “Is AirBnb generating profit by pushing risk on to its labor force?”

Obviously companies on the internet have an unprecedented access to customer data and this is only growing with the rise of social media, so the scale of the problem is well beyond customer feedback cards. But even so it is, for the most part, well within the ideological horizon of liberal democratic capitalism, and far from raising Marxist questions, actually risks further entrenching the belief that our fundamental economic rights derives from our social role as customers rather than workers. It’s no accident that the rise of consumer rights activism since the 1960s corresponds with the decline and defeat of the labor movement and the undermining of labor rights in the same period.

Mike Bulajewski (@MrTeacup) is a Master’s student in Human-Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington.

Information Politics in the Age of Digital Media

Discussant: Deen Freelon, American University

  • “Internet Infrastructure: ‘Access’ Rhetoric, Neoliberalism, and Informational Politics” (Dan Greene, University of Maryland-College Park)
  • “Academic Marginalization in the Age of Social Media” (PJ Rey, University of Maryland-College Park)
  • “Social Media and Revolutionary Movements: Toward Research and Activist Agendas” (Mina Semeni, Randy Lynn, and Jason Smith, George Mason University)

This panel explores some of the opportunities for theoretical development and synthesis emerging at the intersection of public sociology and digital media. True to the conference’s remit, each focuses on a distinct form of publicity of interest to publics outside the academy. Dan Greene questions the prevailing neoliberal rhetoric of access to information technologies, arguing that it facilitates the concentration of power and prevent us from connecting related struggles for individual and collective emancipation. As a corrective, he proposes a frame he calls “informational politics” that overcomes this conceptual weakness by explicitly recognizing the links between digital media and the social contexts within which they are used. PJ Rey invites us to reconsider the roles of newer forms of scholarly communication such as blogs and tweets in evaluations of academic productivity. Journals and conference proceedings, which still enjoy preeminence among tenure criteria in most fields, are far too slow, costly, and obscure to effectively relay the fruits of public sociology to non-academic publics. Finally, Mina Semeni, Randy Lynn, and Jason Smith are interested in how activists use social media in contexts of social protest and revolution. In an attempt to move beyond totalizing and causal theories of the Internet and politics, they propose two mechanisms through which social media might abet protest: by increasing social capital and by strengthening existing institutions.

Dan Greene

Abstract:

Since the early and mid-90s when the Clinton administration touted the benefits of the ‘Information Superhighway’–and further back in MUD communities and speculative fiction—local access to high-speed Internet infrastructure has been promoted as a socioeconomic panacea by the telecommunications industry, educational administrators, and politicians at multiple levels of the US government. Something that could wipe away race- and class-based inequalities with World Wide Web-based upward mobility. Just this year, President Obama’s touted in his State of the Union address a plan to bring high-speed Internet to 98% of Americans, funded by wireless spectrum auction. Within this rhetoric, Internet ‘haves’ are figured to be more active and upwardly mobile citizens plugged into globalized economic opportunities, the latest and most desirable educational training, and meaningful cultural and political conversations. Internet ‘have-nots’ are left behind in all these arenas. Deconstructing this binary shows the cultural and historic discourses animating ‘access’ rhetoric and the complex power relations which ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ binaries obscure. As demonstrated by Lisa Nakamura and others, the historical development of the World Wide Web since the early 90s occurred amidst a perfect storm of early-adopter cyber utopianism and economic and cultural neoliberalism. These more recent developments build on discourses inherent to post-WWII information theories which disavow the material embodiment of information; and an even longer tradition of Liberalism where the ideal subject-citizen is freed from structural and material constraint.

Recognizing these roots is the first step towards deconstructing ‘access’ rhetoric, revealing who most profits from the maintenance of a ‘have and ‘have-not’ binary and why that powerful rhetoric persists. Then we can begin to see some of the more complex, actually-existing power relations obscured by such a binary: the over-representation of Latinos and African-Americans (especially youths) on the mobile Internet, the intersections of skilled Internet use with mental and physical disabilities, and the successes and failures of high-speed Internet rollout plans in different urban and rural communities. This shifting geography requires researchers and activists to recognize the always-linked material conditions and informational potentialities of any Internet infrastructure project; policing the separation of material and informational allows dangerous modes of 21st century upward redistribution to continue. Scholar-activists such as Lisa Duggan call for modern activists to always link cultural and economic causes; I want to conclude by suggesting a frame of ‘informational politics’ which link informational representations and technologies with material conditions and responses in order to advance social justice in multiple spaces. These politics are a research program and an activist manifesto, linking legislation with platform and infrastructure and experience with code and critique. These politics do not consider as separate the fight for Net Neutrality and the fight for improved urban education, for example. This is a model of coinvolved resistance gestured towards by Andrea Smith and others, recognizing that the experience of culture, politics, and economics has been fundamentally changed by the everyday use of specific information technologies—most prominently the Internet and the personal computer.

 

PJ Rey

GMU Public Sociology Presentation – The Academy & Social Media

Abstract:

In most corners of society, it’s a become a trope to say that the Internet has changed everything; but online communication is still far from integrated into the norms and practices of the academy, whose pace of change and adaptation is nothing less than glacial. Anyone familiar with academic careers knows that conventional (read print) journal publications are the be-all end-all criterion in evaluating potential hires—the meaning behind the well-worn cliché: “publish or perish.”

The practice of using journal articles as the sole criterion in evaluating an academic’s productivity is an artifact of an epoch long-passed. I the age of the printing press, journals were, by far, the most efficient and enduring form of communication. They enabled disciplines to have thoughtful conversations spanning decades and continents. They also facilitated the transmission of the knowledge produced through these conversations to younger generations. In fact, it is nearly impossible to imagine the emergence of Modern science without existence of this medium. Thus, in the beginning, journals become symbolically and ritually important because they were functionally necessary. (While journals were medium du jour during Durkheim’s productive years, he surely would have recognized the reason behind their status in the cult of the academic.)

Today, academia finds itself in a state of hysteresis (à la Bourdieu); that is say, our habits have become maladapted to the field or environment in which they are performed. Let us consider recent developments in the nature of academic discourse. Fifty years ago, the democratization of commercial flight made face-to-face communication between professionals in various disciplines a reality. Conferences becomes a more rapid and efficient method of communicating ideas—but, this form communication was not durable. Thus, the conference proceeding emerged as a supplementary medium to compensate for the shortcomings of face-to-face communication. In some younger or more progressive disciplines, proceedings have been elevated to a status akin to that journals. These proceedings are printed, circulated, and come to occupy the shelves of offices and libraries across country, if not the world. And, for many decades, this was the only way to transmit and store the content of conferences.

In the proceeding two decades, however, the practical justifications for the production of print journals or conference proceedings has evaporated in light of the Internet’s emergence. These vestigial organs of the academy should have slowly withered away, becoming fossilized in archives. Yet, print media remain firmly entrenched, retaining all their symbolic significance, while lacking any of their earlier practical import. Our cult-like worship of print media is far from benign; the privileging of the print over the digital, in fact, has the opposite effect than was originally intended. Instead of facilitating the rapid dissemination of ideas, it hinders it. Print is a solid, heavy medium (as Bauman explains); it travels slowly and is expensive to reproduce. Digital information is liquid and light; it travels instantaneously and is free to reproduce.

It would be superficial, however, to simply criticize print article (and to promote digital articles). The article itself an artifact of print media and native to that form. There ought to be a debate within the academy that seriously considers whether the article optimally utilizes the potential of digital platforms. Are there more effective, indigenously digital mode of communication? Is the article a undead corpse, reanimated to inhabit the digital realm? Of course, this is a loaded question—no doubt exaggerated by the fact that the medium currently in use is an indigenously digital blog, not an article.

De facto, academics in every discipline are utilizing blogs, Twitter, video, and other “new media” to communicate their ideas (and, incidentally, to communicate them to much wider—read interdisciplinary and lay—audiences). De jure, however, we still valorize the article, particularly, the print article. Who/what suffers? Young academics, socially-active academics, the quality of conversation within the academy, and anyone layperson or community who stand benefit from the fruits of academic knowledge. Who benefits? Those entrenched in the old system, whose habits are better suited to yesteryear and who still have sufficient power to resist within the academy to resist any change in the standards of evaluation. What can we do? It’s time for the a younger generation and those on the outside to fight our way on to hiring committees. It’s time for us to establish a unified agenda that involves developing more expansive and inclusive criteria for evaluation. It’s time (as Patricia Hill Collins once said) to leverage our power as “outsiders within”—to learn to function, even thrive, within the system as we systematically work to reform it.

 

Mina Semeni & Randy Lynn (with Jason Smith):

Social Media and Revolutionary Movements

Abstract:

Although the conspicuous role of social media in the strategic and tactical operations of recent revolutionary movements has generated sudden and prolific interest from scholars in the diverse fields of communications, media studies, information technology, and social movements, extant research has yet to produce a compelling and coherent account of this burgeoning phenomenon. Limited in part by the rapidity with which these digital tools have been taken up and are appropriated daily for novel uses, researchers in general have nevertheless preferred to direct their efforts toward descriptive or speculative studies, largely neglecting the important question of how social media does or does not aid the causes of revolutionary movements.

This submission seeks to move beyond the qualified promises and perils and posit theoretical mechanisms by which research and activist agendas may be guided. Broadly, scholars approaching the phenomenon from a social movements or communication and information technologies perspective have rarely been as utopian as some critics have claimed, focusing largely upon social media’s empirically identifiable benefits of coordinating political action, communicating important information among participants, raising awareness of events and goals among nonparticipants, and the resourcefulness by which participants have successfully used social media to navigate around attempts by state or corporate interests to suppress movements. Conversely, researchers adopting Marxist, prosumption, media studies, or otherwise critical frameworks have rarely been blind to these actual or potential benefits while raising provocative points regarding the implications of corporate ownership of social media, the ease with which political regimes may use these same tools to disrupt movements, the technologically deterministic assumption that social media inherently produces exploitable social benefits, and the diverse array of other factors required to yield a successful revolutionary movement.

We posit two interrelated mechanisms by which social media may lead to empirically verifiable benefits in the context of revolutionary movements: a social capital mechanism, wherein social media increases social capital among actual or potential participants, which may then be converted into effective political action; and an institutional mechanism, wherein social media is situated in a larger institutional framework that includes other forms of new media as well as traditional media and is used to gain institutional support and compete discursively with oppressive regimes. Although some studies have hinted at or suggested the salience of these mechanisms, they have generally neglected the implications of the more poignant criticisms of critical scholars and stopped short of articulating an empirical research agenda informed by these hypothesized mechanisms.

This submission will begin to develop a more rigorous understanding of social media and revolutionary movements by integrating the findings of the extant literature and employing case studies of recent revolutionary movements to sketch a theoretical framework that may be used both to advance empirical research as well as to provide useful knowledge for participants involved in struggles against oppressive political regimes. Integration with the social movement literature will enable discussion of what benefits the use of social media confer, the extent to which these benefits are unique to social media’s enabling capacities, and how movements might continue to reap these benefits in spite of state or corporate interference. Implications and limitations will be discussed.

The Cyborgology team will be hosting a meet up @ 8pm tonight (Friday) at the Flamingo Garden Bar. Hope you’ll join us.

Most of the Cyborgology team is in Las Vegas for the 106th American Sociological Association meetings. Las Vegas is a city that might be defined by its integration of technology and consumerism. In this spirit, we are running a series of posts in the coming days about Las Vegas, the meeting, consumerism and whatever else we might learn on this trip.

Cyborgology is sponsoring a local meetup event at PJ’s place on Wednesday, June 1st.  We’ll be enjoying a Tron Double Feature.  Use this link to contact PJ for details: http://is.gd/n5WwyE.

“The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”
–William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“This is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.”
–Bruce Sterling, “Slipstream”, SF Eye #5, July 1989

I first read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition almost a year ago, after a long hiatus from his work. I’ve long loved his books, but went through the kind of distance that time and life just sometimes put between a reader and an author. Pattern Recognition was the return, and I went into it cold, knowing nothing about it except for the author–an experience that I always find somewhat refreshingly like exploring a dark, richly appointed room with a small flashlight.

And then something rather interesting happened. The book contains a description of the memories that the protagonist retains of the events of September 11, 2001, and as I read, I experienced a curious kind of vertigo–something that I have since come to understand as the mirror-hallway perception of reading a fictionalized account of a real event in my own memory, remembered as past in a near-future context. In that moment, what I experienced as vertigo was the collapsing of a number of categories–past, present, and future, fiction and non-fiction, myself and other.

Vertigo, a really common illness seen in many of us may be a sort of dizziness that makes balance disorder. Vertigo gives one a sense of swaying while the body is stationary with reference to the world or its surroundings. Vertigo is commonest when an individual goes up some height. it’s going to produce to a false sensation of movement. Vertigo often results in nausea and vomiting.

Vertigo is said to the internal ear balance mechanism that relates to the brain or the nerves connecting the ear and therefore the brain. The disease creates a loss in equilibrium and wooziness. However, vertigo and dizziness aren’t synonymous. While dizziness is one symptom of Vertigo, not all dizziness are often termed as Vertigo. Vertigo is commonest in elderly people, but can affect both sexes at any age.

Vertigo is a treatable disease and handled through medicines, but only if treated from well qualified doctors like vertigo la. As vertigo is more a symbol of other diseases, it are often treated by treating the particular disease that causes this. If Vertigo has been caused by a tympanic cavity infection, then it requires antibiotic treatment. Home remedy is additionally an option for vertigo.

A word about Gibson–After his quintessential cyberpunk Sprawl trilogy and the more subtle near-future of his Bridge trilogy, he has moved into the fuzzy present-day world of Pattern Recognition and the subsequent books Spook Country and Zero History; this is generally recognized to be because the technology-soaked world of the previous books has, in fact, arrived. But I think, even more, it’s because writing about the future can no longer happen in the same way that it could in the earlier days of SF–because we now perceive time differently and more fluidly. As critic John Clute says, “the old SF…is no longer possible in a world lacking coherent “nows” to continue from.”

The divided categories of time have no intrinsic meaning aside from that which we give them through our perceptions of them–through our stories about them. We understand the past, the present, and the future each in reference to each other. How we remember the past changes based on our perception of the present and our imagining of the future. How we imagine the future changes based on our perception of the present and our memory of the past . How we perceive the present is colored by our memory of what’s gone before and our imagination of what might be still to come. All three are then functions of each other, changing in response to each other. All three are constantly imploding into each other, moving as time itself seems to move, shifting as our situated perceptions shift, meanings changing as our processes of meaning-making change. And the divisions between the three are not hard or clear. Indeed, they may essentially be illusory.

One could argue that the blurring of the lines between these categories has been going on for as long as there have been categories and lines to blur. What is new, I argue, is the speed and the intensity of the effect, which are products of pervasiveness. Nathan Jurgenson has presented one aspect of this kind of blurring in his discussion on this blog of the faux-vintage photograph. Social media and the myriad forms of documentation that come with it–as well as the ease of dissemination of these documents–”increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past.” We see the present from a fractured, kaleidoscopic viewpoint: present as future-remembered past. Once we remembered the past, inhabited the present, and imagined the future. Now, increasingly, we inhabit all three simultaneously. In his discussion of the effects of network culture on our perception of time, Bruce Sterling refers to this phenomenon “atemporality”–the loss of a single authoritative source for the narratives with which we identify and define the passage of time, and the desituation of our narratives in what we perceive of as linear time.

The question at which we now arrive is the question with which Gibson himself seems to have been faced: If traditional science fiction tells stories through an imagined future, how does one tell those stories in a vital and sensible way when the boundaries between past, present, and future are constantly eroding?

The answer that Gibson seems to have hit upon–and the answer to which other authors seem to be looking as well–is to do away with the tradition, and with it, the constraints of temporal setting. Gibson’s current work maintains the sensibilities and the flavor of science fiction, but his stories are set in the present, and are about the present–in a present so nebulous that it could pass for recent past or near future, or some parallel universe. His fiction reflects atemporality. It embraces the blurring of the lines.

This is in fact something that Gibson–and many other authors–have known and have worked with for a while: the idea that science fiction doesn’t necessarily have to be about the future. But I think it’s worth emphasizing at this point: we have an opportunity to embrace, as temporal boundaries continue to erode, a way of telling stories in and with and through time in a manner that matches what we’re experiencing every day. SF at its best was only ever a kind of modern mythology, a way of telling stories about ourselves, explaining ourselves, to ourselves–a way of exploring the mundane through the fantastic. But now the fantastic is here, and it is itself mundane. We live it. In essence, as everything becomes more fluid and less certain, we live in a constant state of speculation.

I don’t say that there’s no longer any place for spaceships or aliens or tales of the distant future. We don’t have to stop what we were doing before. But I think we have have expanded the bounds of what we can do, of the kinds of stories that we can tell and the ways in which we understand those stories–and I see that trend continuing in the future. “Slipstream” fiction, which is arguably a fairly old literary phenomenon, continues to make a place for itself as an interstitial blend of the scientific and the fantastic, a repository for what we discover as strange and weird in the everyday–which, as a list, is probably growing. It’s increasingly what I find myself writing, and what I find speaking to me. I’m almost certainly not alone.

But who cares what kinds of stories we tell? Well, I proceed–in almost everything I do–from the basic assumption that stories matter. If we want to understand ourselves, we need to understand our own stories. But more than that, SF is fundamentally a sociological genre in a way that most other narratives are not; it is the genre of the thought experiment, and really more of an ongoing conversation than a genre in the strictest sense. Because of the ways in which it allows writers to play with the parameters of both world physics and social organization, it can serve as a kind of sociological idea-lab, a way for us to do theoretical work that would otherwise be impossible.

And in this, we come to the final boundary, and one whose erosion excites me a great deal: the boundary between the fictional and the real. Many writers on this blog have described “the implosion of atoms and bits”, and I think it shouldn’t escape notice that for people who buy into digital dualism, the digital, in being held separate from the “real”, presents itself as a kind of fiction. But many of us say that this is incorrect, that the digital and the physical are increasingly intermeshed, that reality itself must be understood as “augmented”. What I see, what I experienced in reading the passage in Pattern Recognition that I described at the beginning of this post, was and is another kind of augmented reality, in which my own experience and someone else’s story became as intermeshed as I am with technology.

When we document our lives for and with social media, this is a kind of narrative; we’re telling a story. The ways in which we tell our stories affect the kinds of stories we tell, and this in turn affects how we view ourselves, our own intersection of biography and history–two other stories, one small and one considerably larger. We are entering a period wherein the stories we tell and are told are becoming atemporal. This has dramatic implications for the ways in which we both write fiction and do sociological work–both of which I do.  And I am finding less and less meaningful distinction between the two.

I could talk (much) more about why stories and narratives matter and why we, as social theorists, need to be paying attention to them. But I want to close instead with a quote from author Dennis Danvers, in his own discussion of Pattern Recognition, because I think he wraps things up more neatly than I could at this point:

Science fiction, in effect, has become a narrative strategy, a way of approaching story, in which not only characters must be invented, but the world and its ways as well…A science fiction writer must invent the world where the story takes place, often from the ground up, a process usually called world-building. In other words, in a science fiction novel, the world itself is a distinctive and crucial character in the plot, without whom the story could not take place, whether it’s the world of Dune or Neuromancer or 1984. The world is the story as much as the story is in the world. Part of Gibson’s point…is that we live in a time of such accelerated change and layered realities, that we’re all in that boat, like it or not. A novel set in the “real world” now has to answer the question, “Which one?”

Sunny Moraine is a graduate student and writer who has published short stories in Strange Horizons, Icarus, and M-Brane SF, among many other places. Her work of erotic cyberpunk, “Wetwire”, will be featured in the anthology Agony/Ecstasy, coming in December from Berkley Books. She has co-written one novel for which she is looking for a publisher, and is working on a second. Her life is a trick of light.

Orcs, Trolls, Elves and more. With such fantastical races and landscapes, online gaming is an area where people can seemingly escape reality and all the expectations of society. For newcomers to the world of online gaming, it seems like anything can happen. You can be whomever you want to be, your race, gender, sexuality or physical limitations no longer matter. Games without avatars provide an even deeper layer of anonymity for players; for all you know, you could be playing against a faceless being behind a computer.

However as most people will quickly realize, the online gaming world is very similar to the “real life” world and strong assumptions and stereotypes regarding players still exist. Players can largely avoid racial stereotypes as it’s hard to tell the race of the person behind the screen, however, gender stereotypes are harder to escape.

After a short period of time, those who enjoy online gaming will eventually notice assumptions regarding your sex based on what role you play online. These assumptions are usually based on gender stereotypes and they will override almost everything else someone does to express his or her gender.

Take MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy. In these games there are 3 types of roles that your character can play: Tank, Damage & Healer. The tank’s role is well, to be a tank. He or she will take the most damage and his or her role is to protect other party members by drawing the mobs away from them. Damage just has to do damage, as the name implies and the Healer will have to heal all party members during the fight. Within merely a month of playing, you will be able to pick up the common assumption that the Tank will be male, and the Healer, female, regardless of the sex of their avatar.

It makes sense; the role of the protector is stereotypically male. Meanwhile, the role of a Healer, a supporter who supports the entire party without doing damage, the one person the party must all protect, sounds like the stereotypically female role.

The strange thing is, most people have accepted that not all female avatars are played by women and will greet those declaring themselves to be female in obvious ways with suspicion, due to the stereotype that there are tons of “guild princesses” who try to use the fact that they’re female (or pretend they’re female) to receive perks from men. This belief can easily be found among many gamers, resulting in Rule 30 of the loosely created set of “Rules of the Internet” by /b/:

As well as creation of images such as these:

However, despite the skepticism regarding the presence of women on the internet, the stereotype of the female Healer persists. Sometimes, even when the Healer or Tank makes his or her gender known, people still slip and refer to them as female and male respectively.

Even in a browser-based game that is devoid of avatars to express ones gender, as long as there are roles to play, there will be gender role stereotypes. In Travian, you can be a Hammer or an Anvil. A Hammer is an account with a lot of offensive troops while an Anvil is an account with a lot of defensive. You can guess which role everyone assumes is played by a woman, and which one is played by a man.

Even when a Hammer’s text-only profile is littered with a lot of overly cutesy details (think declaration of love for Disney princesses & Justin Bieber), the assumption is that the account belongs to a guy pretending to be a girl just to rub salt on the wounds of those whose villages he destroyed. Yes, even online, being “beaten by a girl” is a cringe-worthy event.

In games where there are no roles like StarCraft, most people assume you’re male by default, but they have no problem accepting you’re female once they’ve learnt you’re one. However, once there are roles to fulfill, somehow it becomes hard to accept that the aggressive, tough role is played by a woman and the supportive, less aggressive role is played by a man.

Francesca Tanmizi is an ex-Sociology major at Loyola Marymount University who only realized she missed writing Sociology essays after graduation.

ok so i have a few complaints about the use of “augmented reality.” the first is primarily semantic. it seems (to me at least) like the term it implies some kind of (pre-digital?) “non-augmented” reality. this is more or less explicit when we refer to things like “augmented revolution” or “augmented conference.” it seems like the idea of augmented reality was introduced to make a point against a false binary (“digital dualism”) and i agree that this is important, both academically and in real life (see what i did there?). but i think the way we talk about augmented reality is sneaking a version of that binary back in. not the naive real v virtual but maybe something like real v “real+” and i think that is a mistake. and it is a strange mistake to read here, on a blog called “cyborgology” that proclaims (rightly i’m sure) that we have always been cyborgs. our friends from sst especially, i think, are sensitive to how reality has always been “augmented” if we are paying attention. so quoting sst hero latour:

If we wanted to project on a standard geographical map the connections established between a lecture hall and all the places that are acting in it at the same time, we would have to draw bushy arrows in order to include, for instance, the forest out of which the desk is coming, the management office in charge of classroom planning, the workshop that printed the schedule that has helped us find the room, the janitor that tends the place, and so on. And this would not be some idle exercise, since each of these faraway sites has, in some indispensable way, anticipated and preformatted this hall by transporting, through many different sorts of media, the mass of templates that have made it a suitable local—and that are still propping it up.*

and he goes on for literally pages. he starts on p 200 (where the quote is from) and ends somewhere on p 203. then he picks it up again on p 206 with more. by 207 he is talking about the “plug-ins”, “patches” and “applets” that actors in a lecture need to make sense of what is happening. and cyborgs:

As we have witnessed so many times throughout this book, information technologies allow us to trace the associations in a way that was impossible before. Not because they subvert the old concrete ‘humane’ society, turning us into formal cyborgs or ‘post human’ ghosts, but for exactly the opposite reason: they make visible what was before only present virtually. In earlier times, competence was a rather mysterious affair that remained hard to trace; for this reason, you had to order it, so to speak, in bulk. As soon as competence can be counted in bauds and bytes along modems and routers, as soon as it can be peeled back layer after layer, it opens itself to fieldwork.

so what has changed, latour argues, is not reality but rather our ability to trace reality. so i guess in that sense what i want us to start talking about now is an augmented sociology instead of an augmented reality, but that is maybe a topic for another time.

anyway, the other objection i have to augmented reality is in the way it is sometimes invoked here. because it is often employed as a kind of device against “digital dualism,” augmented reality is sometimes used to signal the “implosion” of offline and online worlds. again, i think this is true to an extent, but i think it goes a little too far. and again the particular mistake i think is being made is a strange one for me to find on this particular blog. i think nathan probably more than anyone else i’ve read is most articulate about the different logics that operate online and offline (or maybe it’s just that he articulates what i find to be the most interesting difference). specifically, i am referring here to his stuff about the difference between “the properties of atoms and bits” which appears in multiple places. these different properties produce/are conducive to (depending on how determinist we are feeling) different social logics.

ok so what? it seems to me that appreciating the ways in which online and offline worlds are increasingly enmeshed is quite different from the “online and offline are mutually constitutive” kind of feeling i often pick up when reading about augmented reality here. the former seems to me to be quite good and quite important. but often this first argument seems to be conflated with the second, which seems to almost abolish the difference, or at least make it difficult to talk about the difference. so in kind of the same way, cultural sociologists insist on an analytical distinction between “culture” and “structure” not because the two aren’t inextricably intertwined, but because they are, and to simply say that they are “mutually constitutive” robs us of the ability to identify and articulate the real processes by which one produces the other.

also (or relatedly), people in real life (again!) perceive the difference between offline and online, which is a pretty good indication that we should take that difference seriously as well. sometimes there really isn’t a “divide” at all – like when we want to contact a friend we can visit or email or text or call or whatever seems most appropriate, and email isn’t some bizarre extra limb that we have to remember to use. but other times people do imagine a divide, and in a sophisticated way. the best example i can think of here is from aimee morrison’s “hiding in the crowd” presentation at the conference on mommy bloggers. for them, the difference between online and offline was crucially important, and the way they navigated this “divide” was not at all naive. you couldn’t say that this was some kind of relic of an earlier time that might disappear as people get more comfortable with technology just like we all got used to sending email.

* this is from reassembling the social. highly recommended for basically everyone but especially sociologists. i think it is the “the sociological imagination” of our generation (which is to say, polemical and imperfect but super important).

sang is a sociology student at the university of hawaii at manoa.

Theorizing the Web 2011 is coming occurred on on April 9th.  In anticipation, the Cyborgology blog has been taken over by all things conference-related.  Let’s get keep the conversation going!

This content is reproduced from the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information website.

Last weekends Theorizing the Web 2011 conference (TTW2011) was a great time. I’ve been working along with Ben Shneiderman and Marc Smith on developing techniques and tools (namely NodeXL [1]) to make sense of social media data – particularly relational data from sites like Twitter and Facebook ([2], [3]). I thought I’d take the opportunity to do a bit of quick-and-dirty analysis and visualizations of the Twitter network around the conference. Here are a few snapshots. I’d love to hear reactions and thoughts on ideas for further analyses and reactions of how well these visualizations represented conference attendees’ experiences.

Size by Betweeness


The first visualization shows the 148 users who followed or were followed by @ttw2011 at 6:30am on 4/9/2011 (Saturday morning, the day of the main conference). Nodes are connected by arrowed edges (directed ties) that point from a user toward the other users they follow on Twitter. Node Size is based on betweenness centrality, which highlights people who play important bridge-spanning roles by connecting many people who would not otherwise be as directly connected. This one shows that: 1. @zephoria (dana boyd) was an excellent choice for a keynote because (a) most followers of @ttw2011 (81 of the 148) knew and followed her already prior to the conference suggesting their interest in staying aware of content that she posts, and (b) she has followers from people all over the network (i.e., not just one clump of people in a particular discipline), and (c) she has a lot of total Twitter followers suggesting that she can draw attention to others about the ttw2011 conference (see next image). 2. @nathanjurgenson and @pjrey, the conference organizers, play important bridge-spanning roles within the community. Incidentally, they show up very close to one another in the layout because they have similar friendship networks. 3. Other people with high betweenness often provide unique connections to a handful of people from a particular disciplinary or geographical area. These include: @techsoc, @saskiasassen, @jessienyc, @mkirschenbaum, @umd_mith, @shakmatt, @carlacasilli. While I don’t know all of these people, I do know that @mkirschenbaum and @umd_mith point to digital humanities scholars and @shakmatt (me) points to people affiliated with CASCI.

Of course there are other metrics that can determine one’s “importance” in a network. The next image is identical to the first except that it sizes based on total Twitter followers. The main characters in this view are mostly different, with the exception of @zephoria who has over 43,000 followers. The next most followed are peripheral members: @19sixty3 (43,000+) only connected to @nathanjurgenson and @thomas_lyndt (24,000+) who isn’t connected to any others. Others are a mix of core and peripheral members.

Size by Followers


Another way to look at the conference is to focus on the change in the network that resulted from the conference. I grabbed data from 7:55am on 4/11/2011 (Monday morning, two days after the conference). By this time 172 users were followed by or followed @ttw2011. Those in both networks garnered 1.7 new followers at the conference, with most people not receiving any new followers and some receiving many: @zephoria (17), @jessienyc (13), @techsoc (12), @academicdave (11), @nathanjurgenson (10), and @msanastasia (10). The next visualization only shows all of the new ties created among individuals who were in the pre-conference and post-conference network. The size of the images is based on the In-Degree, which in this case is the total number of new followers a person garnered from among this subset of users.

I looked for subgroups of these members who cluster together into distinct subgroups and was a bit surprised given the interdisciplinary nature of the conference that there weren’t more distinct clusters. Even after removing the conference organizers and zephoria there aren’t clear clusters due to bridge spanners such as @techsoc, @jessienyc, @mkirschenbaum, @academicdave, @saskiasassen

Size by New Follows


Of course, there are some serious limitations with all of these data since they are only based on conference attendees who chose to follow (or were followed by) @ttw2011. Another analysis that is possible is to look at all messages that used the hashtag #ttw2011. But, even so, it’s a decent method for identifying some of the most important people in the network (based on different metrics of importance).

Derek Hansen (@shakmatt) is an assistant professor in the University of Maryland’s iSchool and the director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information.