Two weeks ago, I wrote a Brief Summary of Actor Network Theory. I ended it by saying,

My next post will focus on ANT and AR’s different historical accounts of Western society’s relationship to technology. While Latour claims “We Have Never Been Modern” we at Cyborgology claim “we have always been augmented.” I will summarize both of these arguments to the best of my ability and make the case for AR over ANT.

The historical underpinnings of ANT are cataloged in Laotur’s We Have Never Been Modern and are codified in Reassembling the Social. I will be quoting gratuitously from both.

In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour comments on a debate between the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes and natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Latour describes the debate this way:

After Hobbes has reduced and reunified the Body Politic, along comes the Royal Society to divide everything up again: some gentlemen proclaim the right to have an independent opinion, in a closed space, the laboratory, over which the State has no control. And when these troublemakers find themselves in agreement, it is not on the basis of a mathematical demonstration that everyone would be compelled to accept, but on the basis of experiments observed by the deceptive senses, experiments that remain inexplicable and inconclusive.

Hobbes (and Latour) do not like this separation of terms. Nature and society must be regarded as one thing. For Hobbes, taking nature out of society meant there was no clear authority on the workings of nature. One could only persuade others to agree on the same interpretation of sensory input. For Latour, the problem lies with drawing a hard line between what is social and what is natural. The hallmark of “Modernity”, according to Latour, is the rhetorical separation of nature (things) from society (citizens). Nature and society have never been separate, we just talk about them that way. What we need to start talking about are sociotechnical “hybrids” that bridge the human and nonhuman.

At this point, you may expect Latour to cite Haraway or at least position his own views on hybridity in relation to this prominent author. We have Never Been Modern, was published just two years after the Cyborg Manifesto.But, he engages Haraway in only the most shallow of terms. As Harding notes,

Donna Haraway gets perhaps three or four mentions in the two books to be discussed here. Valuable as her work is, such a tiny citation record is not sufficient to count as engagement with feminist science studies. His work is uninformed by Haraway’s arguments or those of any other feminist science theorist. He specifically discounts the value of what he refers to as “identity politics,”including many of the new social movements which have produced feminist and postcolonial science studies.

Instead, Latour (Reassembling the Social, p. 110) wants us to consider “nature” and “society” as “two collectors that were invented together largely for polemical reasons, in the 17th century.” This invitation to do away with nature and society, has to do with rhetorically and ontologically granting scientists the ability to see “things in themselves.” In other words, Latour believes that, when Enlightenment thinkers set up the “collectors” of nature and society, what they were really doing was limiting us to talking about our perceptions of nonhuman actors; their properties as objects, not their potentiality as subjects.

It is worth noting that there are precious few ANT analyses of information technology. This might be part of a larger problem that I have mentioned before: that Science and Technology studies is better equipped to talk about wooden planes than the Internet. But I also suspect that it is because when we really try to explain what is happening when a teenager deletes all of their Facebook posts every night ANT does not let us get anywhere new.

It is worth noting that Reassembling the Social does not even list “Internet” in the index. Beyond a few tentative steps into assessing ANT’s effectiveness as an Information Systems approach, there is almost no ANT literature that tries to describe what is happening on the Internet. In my summary two weeks ago, I demonstrated how ANT could describe wifi troubles at OWS. That description might have been semantically interesting, but it did not provide any kind of new or useful insight. Collins and Yearley said something similar when criticizing ANT’s ability to provide deep insight: When you strip away ANT’s provocative vocabulary, you are really left with nothing more than an “old-fashioned scientific story…The language changes, but the story remains the same.” I would suspect that an ANT analysis would result in nothing more interesting than the kind of uncritical analysis that Evgeny Morozov rightfully criticized in The New Republic back in October.

It may seem as though Augmented Reality (AR) is doing nothing more than extending ANT into the realm of the digital and the networked, but that is simply not the case. AR does something much different.

First, as the title of the blog suggests—we are deeply rooted in the project that Haraway started and that Latour largely ignores. This is evidenced most clearly in PJ’s piece on Trust and Complexity, the work we presented on the Cyborgology panel at #TtW2011, and Nathan’s piece on Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality. It is clear that we are saying that technology is social, but not that the categories ought to be thrown out altogether. We are, instead, fascinated by the co-construction of society and technology and the new and complicated relationships they engender.

Second, as our subject matter shows, we are deeply committed to understanding this co-constructed world in terms of social justice, equality, and the emancipatory potentials of various socio-technical assemblages. This is seen in our continuing coverage of augmented revolution (both in the past as well as the present),  Jenny Davis’ work on the gendering of Siri, and Dave Paul Strohecker’s posts on prosthetics and depictions of disability in the media. My work in gender and online cooking shows, mobile information systems in the developing world, augmented warfare, and the changing landscape of surveillance and sousveillance have also been motivated by topics that ANT shows little interest in.

Finally, in a reflexive turn, I want to acknowledge how we situate ourselves in relation to our interlocutors (i.e., versus Latour’s relationship to his subjects). The authors of Cyborgology have always tried to situate ourselves within our work. It is very personal work, in that we study cases  we love, and we suspect that we love them because they are important in some way. We are developing a social theory of technology, using the very technology we aim to describe. Latour is totally absent from his own work, and it is by design. In his book Aramis: or, The Love of Technology Latour goes so far as to fictionalize and novelize his analysis so that he becomes but a character in a larger story. ANT says everything is connected in a seamless web, but when it comes to the author himself, he is always out of reach. Within that same book, he writes:

“You see, my friend, how precise and sophisticated our informants are,” Norbert commented as he reorganized his notecards. “They talk about Oedipus and about proximate causes . . . They know everything. They’re doing our sociology for us, and doing it better than we can; it’s not worth the trouble to do more. You see? Our job is a cinch. We just follow the players. They all agree, in the end, about the death of Aramis. They blame each other, of course, but they speak with one voice: the proximate cause of death is of no interest-it’s just a final blow, a last straw, a ripe fruit, a mere consequence.”

The larger project of Cyborgology has been to do the exact opposite. To say that information and communication technologies, broadly defined, have been under-theorized. The informants have much to tell us, but they do not provide the level of sophisticated analysis we need to fully understand what is going on here. We are bringing to bear, over a hundred years of social and political theory in hopes of better understanding how our information systems affect our social lives. In so doing, we believe that we can make both far better.

Follow David on twitter: @da_banks

Iran claims to have captured one of the CIA’s stealth drones which, they say, intruded on their airspace. Usually, I would talk about nations’ continuing development of their capacity for “augmented warfare” and maybe throw in some commentary on how this relates to theories on surveillance and the state. But, to be totally honest, I am incapable of doing that right now. Not because I have deadlines for papers coming up, or because I actually promised that my next post was going to be about Actor Network Theory. Its because… Well…

THE THING LOOKS LIKE A FRACKING GODS DAMN CYLON RAIDER!

Thanks to my colleague, Kirk for pointing out this horrifying fact.

Follow me on twitter! (While humanity still exists.) da_banks

There are many theories that seek to clarify the relationship between our offline existence and whatever it is we are doing online. I say “whatever” not to be flippant, but because there is a great deal of debate about the ontological, conceptual,and hermeneutic ramifications of online activity. How much of ourselves is represented in our Skyrim characters? Is retweeting an #ows rally location a political act? How is access to the Internet related to free speech? These are questions that some of the greatest minds of our day are contemplating. I know some equally smart people that would throw up their hands in frustration at even considering these topics as worthy of research and critical analysis. Regardless of whether or not you think it is worth pondering these questions, people all over the world are engaging in something when they post a Facebook status or check in to a coffee shop on Foursquare. In his Defending and Clarifying the Term Augmented Reality, Nathan described how our relationship to these sorts of digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) fits in with our historial relationship to technology: “technology has always augmented reality, be it in pre-electronic times (e.g., architecture or language as technologies) or how those offline are still impacted by the online (e.g., third-world victims of our e-waste or the fact that your Facebook presence influences your behavior even when logged off).” I have argued elsewhere that, even if ICTs mark a fundamental shift in our relationship to technology, it is only another wave in a constantly evolving relationship to our own understanding of technological progress. I am going through this (hyperlinked) summary of many of this blog’s larger arguments because 1) we have been growing in readership, and 2) we are embarking on a new, ongoing, project to situate Augmented Reality (AR) amongst other theories of society’s relationship to technology. Today I want to introduce Actor Network Theory (ANT).

ANT is an ongoing project that seeks to radically transform how social scientists talk about society’s relationship to technology and other nonhuman actors. There are three major authors that write under the banner of Actor Network Theory: Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law. Law describes ANT as,

…a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations. Its studies explore and characterise the webs and the practices that carry them.(Law 2009).

Essentially, ANT describes human and nonhuman “actants” (the preferred term of ANT writers, since “actor” is mostly used to talk about the roles of humans) with the same language, and grants them equal amounts of agency within “webs” or  “actor-networks.” Anthrax spores, Portuguese navigators, car batteries, Thomas Edison, the Renault Car Company, and scallops are all given equal treatment as nodal points within an actor-network. ANT is an extremely effective tool for describing the processes by which inventions and technological systems come into being, or fail to materialize. If a new technology is mature through the various stages of innovation, its inventors must secure the cooperation of potential users, as well as the various components of the device. A few weeks ago, I wrote about my personal experiences in getting wifi to work in #occupyalbany. If I wanted to use ANT to describe the same thing I might write the following:

After several hours, the IT working group resolves that 4G hotspots will not cooperate with their encampment. The 4G signal refuses to visit the park with the same regularity as the activists. Without the 4G signal, those in the park are unable to reach their fellow activists, computers, protest signs, and supplies located throughout the Hudson Valley region. The IT working group decides instead, to project a wireless signal from a nearby apartment into the park. They devise an assemblage of signal repeaters and routers that will provide a more reliable stream of data that will show up on time to general assemblies, and in sufficient numbers. The working group believes that the attendance of broadband Internet will allow the geographically and temporally dispersed occupiers to be enrolled within the larger actor-network of Occupy Albany. This increased attendance by activists, broadband connections, and networking hardware, according to the facilitation working group, will lend more authority to the decisions that come out of the GA and keep the occupation going through the winter.

You will note that I use the same language to describe both human and nonhuman entities. I describe the GA as attended by not just people, but 4G signals and wifi hardware. The relationships between all of these things, the actor-network, is what’s under investigation. The actants are simply constituent nodes that facilitate a larger functioning. If the occupation does not last through winter, an ANT theorist could blame the inability of the IT working group to enroll sufficient broadband connections that facilitate at-home GA attendance.

Actor Network Theory has received its fair share of criticism. Sandra Harding has criticized ANT for dismissing such basic social factors as race, class, gender, and postcolonialism. By ignoring these basic categories of social science, ANT is incapable of challenging the power of racism, oligarchy, patriarchy, or eurocentrism, respectively. David Bloor (1999) and Sal Restivo (2010) object on similar grounds, noting that ANT’s vocabulary and analytical tools cannot challenge power structures, it can only describe them. They also openly question whether or not ANT should even be called a social theory at all.

This post can only give the very basic outline of what Actor Network Theory says and does. If, after reading this post, you want to know more about ANT, I would recommend Reassembling the Social by Bruno Latour.  If you don’t want to read a whole book, check out John Law’s chapter “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics” (this is the piece I quoted earlier) in the New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Other prominent titles that explicitly employ ANT or are closely associated with that school of thought are: The Pasteurization of France, We Have Never Been Modern, and any of the chapters written by John Law, Michel Callon, or Bruno Latour in The Social Construction of Technological Systems and Shaping Technology/Building Society.

This very basic introduction to Actor Network Theory serves as the launch point for a much longer discussion of Augmented Reality’s relationship to Actor Network Theory. I hope this post gives you the ability to do your own comparison of ANT and AR before we tackle the subject ourselves. My next post will focus on ANT and AR’s different historical accounts of Western society’s relationship to technology. While Latour claims “We Have Never Been Modern” we at Cyborgology claim “we have always been augmented.” I will summarize both of these arguments to the best of my ability and make the case for AR over ANT.

Since you are probably going to spend today arguing about Occupy Wall Street with your conservative family members and helping your parents with computer questions we figured you would appreciate some slightly ligher fare: internet cooking shows. But because we are social scientists, we can’t be satisfied with uncritical review. Therefore, I want to discuss how these cooking shows interact with, perform, reify, and probelmitize constructions of gender and nationality. The three shows I want to cover (I’m gonna have to pass on this and this. There’s a great article at dailydot.com that lists most internet cooking shows.) are Epic Meal Time, Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time, and My Drunk Kitchen. Full disclosure: I have a profound weakness for all of these shows, with increasing affinity in the order I just presented them. In case you’re unfamiliar with these shows, I’ll briefly introduce them and then get into the theory. [Images after the break might be considered NSFW.]

Epic Meal Time

Epic Meal Time (EMT) could easily be written off as an apolitical, sexist, hyper-masculine, food porn extravaganza that is totally unapologetic in its ravenous desire to prepare pork products doused in brown sugar and Jack Daniels in new and creative ways. Such dismissal would be easily defensible and generally correct. They keep a calorie counter in the bottom right corner of the screen, and their latest creation –The Turbaconepicentipede– clocks in at a truly epic 802,420 calories. Their videos get millions of hits and their twitter channel rivals Justin Bieber’s.

Ordinary Regular Swedish Meal Time

A parody of Epic Meal Time, Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time (ROSMT) features several young Swedish men yelling at each other while they cook relatively boring dishes. ROSMT is meant to show that even the most ordinary dish, Swedish meatballs, for example, is epic in and of itself. They throw the ingredients around, yell in a virtually incomprehensible mix of English and Swedish called “Swenglish”, and commit minor acts of physical assault on one-another. There are also semi-regular appearances by a mischievous fox called Mr. Fox. Niclas, the host, is very fond of mayonaise as a “pre-dinner snack.”

My Drunk Kitchen

My Drunk Kitchen (MDK) is less about cooking, and more about being a cooking show. Despite its meteoric rise in popularity, each show is still filmed on a web cam pointed toward an oven. The host and creator, Hanna “Harto” Hart, plays with this defined frame by constantly making reference to things happening off camera, making subtle reference to backwards letters (web cams record a “mirror” image), and popping in and out of frame to make witty quips or drunkly slur a (charming) self-deprecating remark. She gets progressively more drunk as the show goes on and her final food product is only barely edible (If she makes anything at all).

Gender and Culture in Internet Cooking Shows

EMT, ROSMT, and MDK are all do-it-yourself affairs that rely heavily on their creators/stars to make the shows entertaining and unique. These shows are personal and are built upon the personalities of their creators. Each show seems more like a person than a media entity. EMT is your embarrassing sexist-even-though-he-knows-better college frat friend; ROSMT is not willing to make the sexist jokes, but wants you to be equally impressed by his antics and instead makes self-deprecating jokes about his ethnicity; and MDK is your best friend that puts up with the antics of your first two friends and will gladly party with them anyway.

ROSMT trades on images of vikings, black metal, and harsh climates, to enact a very particular kind of masculinity. The show is funny, because these things are taken to their extremes while also acknowledge the bland and uninteresting foods commonly eaten by Swedes. The “epic” nature of Swedish culture makes up for the less-than-epic food.

EMT has quickly become offensive in its transparent objectification of women. Bitch Magazine’s Jessica Critcher writes,

Though the show regularly features guest eaters, female ones are present only when the day’s dish is appropriately sexualized: In one episode, a giant dessert crepe is eaten, hands-free, by two young women who are filmed from angles best described as “blowjob-esque.”

Harto is an openly gay woman that frequently shows support for LGBT rights and puts up with some strongly heteronormative redditers, but still makes a point to appear on shows that regularly talk about and treat women like objects. This might be more an effect of internet video being a “boys club” than anything else. Breaking the glass ceiling may require amicable relationships with EMT and  other shows that aren’t even food related. This doesn’t mean she silently plays along though. After she stated that one of her “pet peeves” was men claiming they can drink anyone under the table, the men at Revision3 decided to challenge her to beer pong.

Like I said earlier, these shows are inseparable from the personalities of their hosts and creators, so it is hard to figure out how these people actually feel about each other. Harley Morenstein of EMT says he loves and has been in constant contact with the ROSMT guys and Harto called the EMT guys “nice young gentlemen.” Beyond that, however, I can only guess at the intentional and personal relationships between Harto, Harley, and Niclas. But as a social scientist, I can look at the media artifacts and what they convey.

Gender representations become problematic in EMT’s lastest episode in which Harto joins Harley and the gang in devouring the “Turbaconepicentipede”. At first, she is presented as an equal to the EMT crew, devouring the feast as a peer:

But only a few seconds later, Harto is filmed eating a long piece of meat with another woman, until their lips touch:

We can interpret this multiple ways. First, we can position Harto in the masculine role, and the image is similar to the (nonhuman) heterosexual romance depicted in “Lady and the Tramp”. In another interpretation, we can see this as two women eating a phallic food product under the male gaze. This has been used in EMT in such episodes as “Sausage Fest”:

Still there is a third interpretation, and one that I like better than the former two. Harto is fully participating in EMT in a role that simultaneously masculine and feminine. She is participating in the male fantasy of two desirable/desiring women engaged in an act of (assumed) mutual arousal. At the same time, as a subject, she is a homosexual woman engaging in an intimate act with someone of the same sex. In a thoroughly Heideggerian sense, the technology of the video -and the people it captures as subject and object- are in a state of emergence. If you view the episode knowing that Harto is a lesbian, then we might see her in the masculine mode, if we do not know her sexual orientation, we might see her in the same light as those women in “the sausage party.” This is the power of the video:  both as a technology and as a cultural object, it produces its own meaning independent of its constituent parts. We should also note this is happening within the rich cultural milieu of western holidays, food culture, bodies, intoxication, heteronormativity, and sexuality. Women are expected to remain sexualized, yet humble, are expected to prepare food and engage in festive eating, while also maintaining certain body types. It is a complicated set of factors that leave me with more questions than answers. Perhaps, just as Harto rarely completes her dish, I can leave this discussion incomplete, half-baked, and just appreciate the process.

Many thanks to Britney S.G., Dan Lyles, and K. Mcauley for their help in various parts of this post.

You can follow David on twitter: @da_banks

Commentary about the Internet and the various communication services it provides, regularly fall into utopian or distopian visions of radically new worlds. The utopias tell of a future in which we are all continually connected in a seamless egalitarian web of techno-democracy. The distopian warnings describe overstimulated zombies shuffling from computer screen to smartphone, hermetically sealed in the echo chamber of their choosing. These predictions are equally unlikely to occur any time in the near future, and for one simple reason- Its really hard (and expensive) to get a stable internet connection in a park.

For the last month or so, I have been involved in my local Occupation here in Albany, NY. I have divided most of my time between, sanitation, IT, and facilitation. When I have half an hour to spare, I might rake some leaves, when there is an active demonstration I’m helping out with our social media, and during the GA I might help do a “temperature check”. These are all somewhat mundane and unromantic activities that are nevertheless necessary for a sustained occupation. As I said to a fellow occupier holding a broom, “No one said the revolution would be sexy.”

And so- while my twitter feed swells with reports of hundreds of righteous arrests all across the country, I want to write about signal repeaters, and 4G wifi hotspots. Our camp has been plagued by a severe bandwidth drought. In the first few days of the occupation, I bought a little prepaid G4 mobile broadband stick and strapped a webcam to my head. I was able to stream the first few GAs until the expensive bandwidth ran out and my overdue papers (and blog posts!) piled up. I had to step back from that position and since then, our occupation has reevaluated our capabilities and our priorities. If an occupation relies on one person to achieve a certain goal or accomplish a certain task, then that is not something the occupation is capable of doing. It is not sustainable, and it is certainly not in keeping with the ideals of leaderless movements and horizontal organization.

This is an example of isometric social and technical systems: the assemblage of people that monitor and maintain technical systems are organized in a similar fashion. One person with all of the internet is not democratic. Our new solution, is to “throw” a signal into the park from a nearby wired connection. This is not ideal (access to the hardline will be limited) but it is our best option right now. The wifi signal will be sent wirelessly into the camp, and base stations will repeat the signal within the park. This is an excellent example of technical innovation following -while simultaneously reinforcing- social norms. Our options for providing internet access to fellow occupiers is constrained by the available market of hardware and software. Two months ago, before the occupations, there was little need for sustained internet access to horizontally organized communities living in open air encampments. There are a few excellent options but they are not widely available. Occupations must adapt to the existing material realities of our technosocial world if they want to appropriate existing tools for their own ends.

These material realities beget a sort of material agency. Whether it is high energy physics, mapping the human genome, building a nuclear power plant, or trying to get a broadband connection into an urban park, we are met with resistance by nature or existing technosocial realities. (e.g. The Higgs-Boson doesn’t show up in the spectrometer readings, the line-of-sight internet connection is blocked by a stand of trees.) As we move forward, we must accommodate nature (alter the sensors in the LHC, move the antenna,) and learn from our mistakes and failed experiments. This performative, real-time process of discovery and innovation is what Andrew Pickering calls The Mangle of Practice. Inanimate objects do not have the same ability to act in the world as humans do, they do not have intentions or motivations, but the laws of physics and the operational parameters of routers require us to act in particular ways.

From what I have described, material agency seems to affirm the worst fears of distopian authors and gives credence to the excited musings of techno-rapture utopians. But if we focus on the mangle, the point at which we are actively building our future, I think we are forced to consider a much more complicated reality. The affordances of routers and the laws of physics do provide constraints. But just like the rules of chess, the restrictions on what each piece is allowed to do is also what makes the game playable. When the IT Working Group sits in a tent and figures out what it takes to get a wifi signal in a park, they are not just overcoming material agency, they are engaging in prefigurative politics. Overcoming the material restraints of existing technosocial systems -engaging in the mangle of practice- is valuable in and of itself. The visions of utopias and distopias are static entities that assume an end to history, and end to the mangle of practice. Our relationships with technologies are constantly evolving and it is in that evolution that we should be searching for meaning, not some sort of imagined end point.

Follow David Banks on Twitter: @da_banks

David also writes about his experiences at Occupy Albany for the Times Union’s Occupy Albany blog.

The first post I wrote for Cyborgology concluded that many of the dominant socio-technical systems in our world look and behave in a similar fashion. The entertainment industry, advanced military surveillance, search algorithms, and academic reference tools are swapping hardware and best practice in such a way that the carrying out of a military invasion, or the Super Bowl begins to look disturbingly similar. Around the time that I wrote that post, USAToday ran a disturbingly cheerful story about police departments’ desire to acquire similar technology. Miami’s police department acquired the  Honeywell’s T-Hawk Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) a few moths later. The only regulations that prevented the MPD (or any police force) from acquiring such technology were FAA regulations about where and how it could be flown. Such acquisitions have gone largely unquestioned by the media as well. In fact, local coverage of the purchase was supportive. A local CBS affiliate led with the headline, “Dade Cops Waiting To Get Crime Fighting Drone Airborne.” This all seems very bleak, but just as powerful actors have increased their abilities to engage in surveillance, the individual has more tools than ever to watch the watchers.

At Zuccotti park, there is a literal panopticon sitting at the northwest corner. The mobile surveillance tower stands about a story tall on thin white struts. The tower has several panes of blacked-out glass, which makes it impossible to tell who or what is sitting in it and when.

We have come to expect being watched, and through that expectation we alter our actions accordingly. These systems allow the powerful to watch (and through doing, alter) both our public actions and our private thoughts. But there is another system that stands to push back on our surveillance culture. By taking up a video camera or some other sensing device, participants engaged in political actions can redefine the social pressures that are being enforced in that moment. As Kate Shilton noted in Surveillance and Society:

“…participatory sensing has the potential to do more than simply help individuals comply with consensual social norms. Its focus on participation in defining data collection and understanding the meaning of sorting and analysis could enable individuals to identify that they are in fact the subject of such social pressures.”

Recall back in September, some of the first videos to go viral from Occupy Wall Street was the indiscriminate macing of protestors by Officer Anthony Bologna. Once that video became popular, NYPD spokesman Paul J. Browne implied that the video had been selectively edited. Since more than one camera was rolling at the time, protesters were able to show many other perspectives and angles of the same incident. In the same way scientists replicate experiments to validate their conclusions, multiple camera operators are able to refute allegations of tampering and editorializing. These multiple perspectives are one of the key strengths of sousveillance. Whereas surveillance is the watching of the many by the few from above, sousveillance is the watching of the few by the many from below.

The ubiquity of individually owned recording devices (usually cell phones, but also cheap video recorders and digital cameras) coupled with the multitude of accessible mass distribution platforms is a powerful tool against police brutality and other kinds of abuses. While it is not nearly as powerful or robust as the socio-technical systems I described in “Panopticon in the Clouds” the “Panopticon in the Crowds” is gaining strength.

The Clouds have a superior advantage for a three reasons. 1) The crowds rely on the clouds. The participatory sensing that makes sousveillance possible relies on the same infrastructure used for surveillance. Most of our social networking happens on private services owned by big companies. Those bits travel through hardware owned by more big companies. If any large entity wanted to put a stop to occupation footage, they could (although it would not be easy.) 2) Reacting to images seen through surveillance is easier than those captured by sousveillance. The relationships between the watcher and authority are clearer and the action is more directed. A guard sees the glimmer of a knife in the hand of a prisoner, and  a straightforward, predetermined, course of action takes place. When a crowd sees police brutality, cameras come out, actions are recorded and broadcast, but the response is undetermined and a reaction is not guaranteed. Activists can call for firings or criminal allegations, but they do not have the institutional authority of prison guards. 3) Surveillance has more access to capital. While surveillance systems are backed by powerful institutions like the NYPD and JP Morgan Chase, sousveillance systems must rely on sheer numbers of participants (and their ability to acquire technology and skills) to be effective. Surveillance systems are tailored to specific needs, and are implemented by well-funded institutions. Sousveillance is achieved through the appropriation of existing technology that is not meant for that express purpose.

Using the term “empowering surveillance” instead of what I am calling “sousveillance” Shilton concludes,

Participatory sensing will coexist with broad data surveillance by corporations and governments, and may also be used towards pernicious ends. But, with its emphasis on participation and targeted collection, participatory sensing may simultaneously give people their own way to use tools and platforms of surveillance. Participatory sensing, when developed with a focus on local control, participation, transparency, and social justice, emphasizes learning, messiness, and experimentation rather than rigid categories and conformity. This is why empowering surveillance is not just possible, but desirable.

Perhaps we will look back on this historical moment and characterize it as a time of “watching wars” where large actors created more and more sophisticated monitoring systems as individuals wielded their own cameras in an attempt to document their own side of the story. The perfecting of surveillance systems during the rise of sousveillance guarantees that no matter what the outcome, it will be -if nothing else- well documented.

Follow David Banks on Twitter: @da_banks

Unlike my fellow Cyborgologists, who are based in sociology departments, I am working towards a Ph.D in an interdisciplinary field called Science and Technology Studies (STS). The field emerged in the late 60s amongst (and directly influenced by) the environmental movement, the anti-nuke movement, and second wave feminism. Today STS is an established field with departments all around the world. The interdisciplinary nature of the field makes it difficult to have one single umbrella conference, but the closest we get is the annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, or simply “4S.” The conference has panels on a wide variety of topics including, “(Re)Inventing the Internet: New Forms of Agency“, “Evidence on Trial: Experts, Judges and Public Reason“, and “Reproductive and Contraceptive Technologies: Shifting Subjectivities and Contemporary Lives“. There are also two sister conferences that happen simultaneously at nearby hotels: The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and the History of Science Society (HSS). While the conference was enjoyable, and the talks were fascinating, I was left wondering if STS is up to the task of changing how we talk about technology, science, and innovation.

There is a lot to talk about, but I want to focus on a meta-level critique that I saw throughout the conference. Now, more than ever, it seems as though the insights of STS scholars are crucial to the major events of the day. Unfortunately, our work has not reached popular press, nor has it had a major influence on socio-technical policy. As I have argued elsewhere, STS has done a poor job of making its canon relevant to the times. This is part of a larger problem that Nathan identified, that of the Internet Anti-Intellectual. While business leaders have been busy churning out popular press books by the dozens, scholars of technology and science are caught up talking amongst themselves in expensive journals and dense books. The question remains: How do scholars gain control of the conversation on technology’s role in society?  I posed this question to E. Gabriella Coleman after her presentation in “STS 2.0: Taking the Canon Digital”. Her response was rather straightforward, scholars need to get into op-ed columns. We need to start writing for popular audiences in a big way. We also need to start experimenting with new forms of publication. She then reiterated a strong statement from her presentation: “We need to end the monopoly of the cultural pundit.” I think we at Cyborgology are ahead of the curve on this mission. Our overall project has been one of mainstreaming academic work by providing relatively short, readable, and (dare I say it) entertaining posts about science, technology, and society. Most bloggers would not say this, but speaking personally- I want more competition! I want more popular texts in the field of society and technology.

I’d like to end here with an XKCD comic that Dr. Coleman put in her presentation, to demonstrate social science’s relationship to science and technology in the popular imagination:

Randall Monroe’s depiction of sociology as somehow “impure” speaks to the popular concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. The natural sciences are objective windows on how the world works, and the social sciences sit atop these truths on a bed of subjective opinions and observations. Sociology cannot penetrate these core layers of meaning, or provide insights on how mathematics (for example) is the product of a social activity called knowledge production. In short, STS (and my own work on Cyborgology) have been trying to make one, very basic, statement:

EDIT: November 07, 2011 19:04 EST- I made that STS reply cartoon back in April, and my advisor, Ron Eglash had replied to me in kind. With his permission I am including it below:

Cyborgology editor Nathan Jurgenson will be in Zuccotti park Saturday, and contributing author David Banks will be participating in a new occupation in Albany, NY. Nathan will be providing his insights on social media and the OWS movement. David will be watching closely and commenting on the birth of a local occupation.

Follow Nathan and David for coverage of OWS’s spreading influence both on and offline.

To Follow Nathan:

Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

Personal website: www.nathanjurgenson.com

To Follow David:

Twitter: @da_banks

Tumblr: http://davidabanks.tumblr.com/

Personal website: http://www.davidabanks.org/

A discussion of Burning Man may, at first, seem out of place on a technology blog; however, as sociologist Fred Turner has previously observed, the ideology of Burner culture is profoundly co-implicated with the prevailing ideology of Web.  It is more than mere coincidence that this particular festival has exploded in proximity to Silicon Valley.  It is also more than coincidence that Google and other tech company virtually shut down during this event.  The week-long temporary city in a desert attracts people from around the world. The community is founded upon the (seemingly paradoxical) principals of “radical self-reliance” and “communal effort.” For a week, Burners collectively construct a festive atmosphere that separates themselves from the institutions and customs of their everyday lives. There is a vibrant gift economy with a focus on the decommodification of goods and services (though, of course, like the Internet, much money changes hands behind the scenes: for infrastructure, transport, illicit ticket sales, drugs, etc.). Everyone is encouraged to participate in all aspects of the community (to “prosume” their surroundings), and in doing so, to reach a better understanding of self. This is all embodied in the Ten Principles of Burning Man.

Ten Principles

Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.

Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

What many people do not know, is that while Burning Man is not happening, there are many “regional burns” across the country. These smaller burns are usually in the Spring and Fall months and last for a weekend.  Examples of this are Playa del Fuego in Delaware, Transformus in North Carolina, Apogaea in Colorado, and Burning Flipside in Texas.  These events usually host around 2,000 people compared to the roughly 50,000 people in attendance at Burning Man.

Burners tend to refer to their lives outside of burns as their “default lives.” Used in the same way we describe the out-of-the-box setting on a consumer electronic, default implies something that was handed to you without your input. It is imposed. The default is what is not best for any individual, but is sufficient for the majority. The default is opposed to the virtual. The virtual in this case, refers to something yet to be actualized: this could be the blueprint for a building or a Utopian vision for social organization.  It is in this sense that many theorists (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari) have, historically, used the term “virtual.”  (It is important to note that this use of the term virtual is not identical to the (digital dualist) connotation of the term that has been popularized with the emergence of the Internet, which implies artificial, separate, and unreal).  So, while, default life is constituted by whatever conditions currently prevail in society, Burns (like many other festivals [see Mikael Bakhtin’s classic Rabelais and his World]) seek to be a time outside of time. A place where the virtual is actualized, if only temporarily.  Burns are made from whole cloth, positing themselves as a vision of radically different possibilities. One Burner captured this sentiment in a recent conversation with one of the authors, stating, “we are all possibilitarians.”

Unlike commercial music festivals, the activities that comprise a Burn are not top-down—with a few produces providing content for the many consumers.   Instead (as sociologist Katherine Chen notes in a soon-to-be-printed article), Burns are both co-created and co-consumed.  Rather than the few occupying the attention of the many, the many are on display for one another.  This, of course, sounds an awful lot like the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.  Burners give themselves new names, organize themselves into theme camps, and associate with their fellow burners casually, but in meaningful ways. There are frequent exchanges of hugs, gifts, performance, and conversation. These are momentary, but often very meaningful. The idea being that associations are freely enacted, but do not necessitate obligations by either party. In this way, the individual is allowed to be (and in many respects must be) radically self-reliant while at the same time, have a reasonable expectation of communal efforts in setting up a tent, getting some coffee in the morning, or making a human pyramid. Importantly, this is the same pattern of reciprocal, non-obligatory interaction is the foundation of online social media.

Though it is interesting to juxtapose Burner culture to social media (and to note the relative affluence of participants of each and the linkages between the organizers of both), it would be an overstatement to argue that there is a one-to-one correlation between the logic of Burning Man and the logic of social media. Social media use is clearly much broader than the participation in and identification with Burner culture.  Moreover, there is a whole discussion to be had about how many sites, like Facebook, are monetized.  However, the issue, here, is simply whether the surface ideology of Burning Man is mirrored on social media. To the extent that it is, are we all Burners?

Last week I went down to Zuccotti Park out of an overwhelming desire to be a part of something intensely important. One of my professors  compared the occupation of Wall Street to People’s Park in Berkley, California. He also sees strong connections to the ongoing hacktivist activities in Spain. OccupyWallst.org draws their tactics explicitly form the Arab Spring. I have waited so long to write something about my own experiences because, frankly, it almost feels too personal. So, if you’ll indulge me, this post is going to be a little different from the ones I’ve written in the past.

While the major news outlets try desperately to shoehorn OWS into existing frames, smaller outlets have provided excellent commentary and insight. Jenny Davis was the first on this blog to write about the movement’s use of social media. Since her insightful post, social media has proven to be an effective tool in revealing police brutality and even possible entrapment by the NYPD. The various Twitter backchannels have been instrumental in organizing and publicizing the organization – as well as the results- of major protests. Nathan has also done an excellent job of discussing the relationship of online and offline action. And yesterday’s post by Sarah Wanenchak describes exactly my feelings on the confluence of various forms of technology. There truly is no easy way to describe the feeling you get when you hear the people’s mic for the first time. It is a little difficult to master, but a truly powerful tool.

Having participated in everything from sweeping Zuccotti Park, to handing out the “Occupied Wall Street Journal,” to helping start a local occupation there is a pervasive sense of togetherness. Friend requests on Facebook explode, you learn the depths of blogging software, you loose your voice from screaming, but you talk through it because you are having a meaningful conversation with a total stranger on 125th Street.  Over a decade ago, when Robert Putnam was writing Bowling Alone he bemoaned the generational loss of social capital. At the time, he saw little promise in the message boards and chat rooms of the dial-up internet. Nothing could replace face-to-face communication. And he was almost right. Putnam says,

Above all, then, as now, older strands of social connection were being abraded-even destroyed-by technological and economic and social change. Serious observers understood that the path from the past could not be retraced, but few saw clearly the path to a better future.

Voluntary associations in the mid 20th century provided deep social relationships, but they were bounded into silos of different races, classes, and genders. As those classifications have been challenged, abandoned, or radically transformed, our social environment evolves faster than we can change ourselves. We feel a vague sense of disconnectedness as we search for new and meaningful voluntary associations. New associations are coming from unexpected places, and offer multiple entries into new kinds of voluntary associations. Our twitter feeds and Facebook networks allow us to reach across geographic boundaries and relate to one another through political affinities, niche hobbies, or even vaguely defined -but powerful- movements. Our associations begin to take on a rhizomatic shape. They spread horizontally and offer multiple entry points but maintain their cohesiveness as an identified whole. Through our augmented voluntary associations we are beginning to see a rhizomatic re-construction of voluntary associations.

A lot of ink has been spilled over whether our digital connections pull us together into a global community or push us apart into our own highly specialized tribes. I do not find either to be very convincing- as they mostly fall into the trap of digital dualism. I would rather point to the wide-spread solidarity created by and through the Occupy Wall Street movement and show that as long as the bits keep flowing, we will have the ability to create new kinds of voluntary associations. These new augmented voluntary associations are rhizomatic, that is, they run horizontal instead of vertical, provide multiple points of entry, can mobilize large groups into collective action, or pit them against one-another in partisan confrontation. Whatever the outcome of the Occupation movements, it is important that we recognize the power of these new associational patterns and use them in the most inclusive and productive way possible.