Next month I’ll be in Kumasi, Ghana doing field research and I thought I’d share what I hope to accomplish over there, since my work is informed by much of what I write about on this blog. (I will be blogging over here.) We hope to set up an information system by which Ghanaians can find condom sellers nearby. The primary interface will be text messaging using a fantastic open-source project called FrontLineSMS. By texting a certain number, the user will be asked to send their district and a list of nearby landmarks. The database will send back a list of condom sellers within a reasonable walking distance. We also hope to have several other front-end access points that are already becoming popular places to socialize. Our aim is to increase access to condoms in order to reduce the infection rate of HIV/AIDS. As of 2009, according to UNICEF, 230,000 people (about 2% of the population) live with HIV in Ghana. I should also note that cell phones are not a luxury item in Ghana. Adoption has exploded over the past several years, and it is estimated that about 67% of Ghanians own a cell phone.

Why confront such a devastating disease with the same technology you would use to organize a trip to the movies? The answer is simple: we want people to think of this service at the moment they are planning their night. Not too long ago, I attended a talk by Dr. Lynn Miller of the Annenburg School of Communication and Department of Psychology at the University of Southern California. Her talk was on the creation of interactive sexual education videos that were meant to engage the user at the moment of decision. Reducing the barriers to choosing safe sex at the moment one is contemplating or pursuing sex, will reduce occurrences of unprotected sex. The project we are implementing here, is similar. Whereas Dr. Miller’s work was on education, we are providing a convenient service that helps people make the right decision at the right time.

It is not enough to have condoms available, if no one knows where they are. Initial research and communications with informants have shown that locating condoms can be difficult. Additionally, less than one in five Ghanians (PDF) have an “accepting attitude” of people living with HIV/AIDS, indicating that discussing sexually transmitted diseases is taboo. By augmenting the city, using communication technologies that are wildly popular, Ghanaians will be able to find a seller of condoms efficiently, reliably, and (if they feel so inclined) discreetly. This is something that we, as theorists, should take note of: The augmenting of the physical realm changes how we interact with the world in very subtle ways. The digital and virtual components of our augmented reality may not illuminate an entirely new world, but it can help us tackle problems that are bigger than “where do I find the best coffee?”

EDIT [12:22EST] : The picture captions did not attribute authorship, as intended.

In my Theorizing the Web presentation last April, I gave a presentation entitled Practical Cyborg Theory: Discovering a Metric for the Emancipatory Potential of Technology. I wanted to develop a cyborg theory that helps us understand the emancipatory potential of a given technology or technological system. My formal hypothesis was an addendum to Haraway’s definition of a cyborg in the Cyborg Manifesto:

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, who’s existence and emancipatory potential is constructed as a function of the temporal and social environment within which it operates.

The temporal and social environs are dependent on the individual’s (or a collective of individuals) ability or knowledge of the technology and its relationship to various fields of power. To give a concrete example: a computer is only as useful as one’s own knowledge of computers and the internet. (Think of teaching an older relative how to use a computer.) It is one’s knowledge of how to use the machine (and those socio-technical systems that control how and what the end-user is allowed to control) that determines the degree to which that technology can create opportunities for emancipatory action. You see this play out in China, as the government tries to block Facebook and Twitter, and individuals work to access proxy servers and set up alternative systems.

Now consider the state of educational systems, in light of the previous statement. Set aside America’s deplorable rankings in K-12 education, and consider our world-class secondary education and research institutions. Today, colleges and Universities act more like an expensive service, than an element of civil society. The best and most complete study of this trend is Slaughter and Rhoades’ book Academic Capitalism and The New Economy. We see artifacts of this shift in government, industry, finance, and academia itself. A good example of all four is federal funding of undergraduate education. The government has shifted from funding the universities themselves, to offering subsidized loans to students. This reifies and reinforces the student as independent consumer of his or her education. Since these loans need to be paid back, students look at their college choice as an exercise in return on investment, and less about enriching their lives or following a passion.

I do not wish to romanticize a past in which only the well-off white patriarchy were allowed to attend higher education, and I do not think this argument goes there. Consider what one could do with a high school diploma (debt free) thirty years ago, compared to the job offers of a freshly minted B.A. in the twenty-first century and you will find that in terms of finding a job and doing productive work- education has not necessarily been democratized as much as we would like to think. Online, for-profit educational services complicate the matter further, since they have obtained record-breaking profits while being accused of putting their students in severe amounts of debt. Some interesting statistics provided by the online education database.

Which brings us back to the emancipatory cyborg. If our access to knowledge becomes totally enfolded within a market economy, what does this say for the ability of individuals to use technology to their own ends? The educated cyborg is inherently a more powerful, agentic cyborg. If we as intellectuals are concerned about the social justice of a technologically-augmented society, then we must be doubly concerned with the production of knowledge about (and through) these technologies. This means fighting the trend towards academic capitalism, while also opening up new avenues to education. The revolutionaries in Egypt were not using social media technologies as they were intended, they had to appropriate them. To put it in the parlance of the tech industry: revolutionaries are almost always prosumers.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

In a sort of 21st century version of Radio Free Europe, the US State Department has sponsored a project that develops suitcase-sized kits that set up cell-phone based mesh networks. These private networks are to be deployed in countries that have totalitarian governments (with anti-American sentiment).

Full story at the New York Times.

President Obama declared June to be LGBT Pride Month and so, I though it would be appropriate for us here at Cyborgology, to take a moment and recognize how LGBT peoples were foundational to the construction of cyborg studies and other inter/trans/multidisciplinary fields. I should note upfront that this incredibly brief summary, from a macro perspective, does some violence to the critical nuance of all the fields mentioned. I hope this post encourages further research, not angry comments about my (acknowledged) hurried treatment of the subject matter. Consider this more of a conversation-starter, than a stand-alone digest. I would also like to thank my good friend Naomi Ardjomandkermani for inspiring me to do this post. She does fantastic work with intersex communities on the web at http://intersexresources.moonfruit.com.

The work of Donna Haraway, the obligatory point of passage for talking about cyborgs and hybridity, explicitly deals with deconstructing and displacing concepts of gender and sex (and the intersection of the two). In chapter seven of Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (PDF) Haraway wrestles with the anglophone as well as the germanic semantics of the word “gender” within a marxist context. She notes that the very separation of “sex” from “gender” in English (compared to the single word geschlecht in German) “are part of the political history of the words.” This semantic artifact demands that feminists critically consider the validity and portability of pan-cultural or universalistic theories of gender. Her cyborg metaphor, and the post-modern project as a whole, is concerned with ripping apart these modern binaries and reconstituting gender as one uses to build their political relationships based on common “otherness” rather than externally imposed identities, i.e. affinity politics. This post-modern turn that came with third-wave feminism provided the necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) political and theoretical frameworks for expanding the feminist project into the fields of queer theory, LGBT(Q)(I) studies, and gender studies.

LGBT contributions to cyborgology are not limited to theory and analysis. It is important to note the LGBT people that have contributed enormouslyto related fields. Alan Turing, the father of computer science, was a gay man.  Turing is credited with the theoretical underpinnings of modern computer science. Turing was subjected to chemical castration under UK’s indecency laws in 1952. He died two years later, in what was reported as a suicide-by-poisoning. Other notable LGBT computer scientists include Marshall “Kirk” McKusick (extensive contributions to BSD Linux), Eric Allman (developed sendmail and delivermail, the ARPANET ancestors of present-day email), Tim Cook (COO and acting CEO of Apple Computer) and Audrey Tang (linked page in Mandarin) (PERL 6 implementor). Its also worth watching the moving “It Gets Better” videos from Pixar, Google, Facebook and Apple employees.

Science fiction and comic books also have gay characters and authors. The wikipedia page for LGBT Themes in Speculative Fiction has an incredibly thorough list on the topic, but I encourage anyone who knows more on the topic to add to it. (What better time?)

Thanks to reddit user dharmatech for the list of LGBT computer scientists.

Lately I have been trying to list all of the spaces, places, moments in time, story telling techniques, life courses, and jobs that are not popularly considered “the real world.” Here is the not-so-comprehensive list I came up wtih:

1. The Internet
2. Video Games
3. Books
4. Graphic novels
5. Reality television
6. Movies
7. School
8. College
9. “Theory”
10. Fiction

A note about number 3 (and 4). I say “books” as a whole, to capture two sentiments. The first, is an aversion to the nerdy bookworm that is exemplified in The Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough At Last” (SPOILER). The second is a sort of anti-intellectualism that is best described in the first episode of The Colbert Report:

This feeling over fact mentality can  be extended to 7, 8, and 9 as well. One cannot truly know the world until they have lived it. One has no authority on certain topics because they are not a part of an in-group that claims legitimacy. But there are major contradictions. When one invokes the “real world” they are often describing a sort of pragmatic realism that demands experience over the learned best practices provided by institutional educational settings. There has been a move in academia to include this sort of experience in and outside the classroom in the form of increased access to internships and required community service. (I’m not linking to any sources here, because if you graduated high school in the last 10 years or have a kid who’s going through it now, you know this to be true through experience.)

For a discussion of reality television (5), check out my first blog post on Cyborgology on the increasing isomorphism of entertainment and surveillance technology.

This leaves the remainder of the list. 1, 2, and 6 are becoming increasingly intertwined and rely on one-another to remain relevant and popular technologies. In this case, “the real” is more synonymous with “offline” and are often referred to as “IRL” or “In Real Life”.  These are interactions and relationships that some still privilege over online interactions. Nathan, PJ, and many other people smarter than I (PDF) have devoted text to this line of inquiry and you should read their work.

So, what about 10? Fiction, and particularly science fiction, has always played a critical role in understanding the “real world” through metaphor, satire, and futurist conjecture. Reality follows fiction as we build flip phones, rocket ships, and burbclaves, but our awe at these technologies fade as they become more mundane. So when we talk about the “clippings on the floor” being more interesting than the puzzle pieces we fit together, consider the multi-faceted concept we call “reality” and consider the mode in which you are working. Its a slippery subject that shows you another face, as soon as you think you understood the first. I will leave you all with the classic Louis C.K. observation: “everything is amazing and nobody is happy:”

In 1960 an architect by the name of Kevin Lynch embarked on a fascinating three-city study of how urban dwellers keep mental pictures of their hometowns. He and his team identified five “elements” of the city: 1) paths, 2) edges, 3) nodes, 4) districts, and 5) landmarks. These five components constitute most of the ways individuals think about and navigate their city. As smartphones become more and more ubiquitous, the way we navigate cities has changed. We have GPS devices, interactive maps, social networking applications that tell us where our friends are and where they like to go for pizza. The city exists in physical space, it exists in our minds, and now it exists in the digital “cloud.” How does this new layer of bits effect the way our cities look, act, and feel? To know more about the How to update the maps on your Garmin device , go through this.

I want to briefly discuss the five elements before conjecturing how access to information changes what these elements look like and how we organize the city in our heads. Paths can be everything from informal trodden grass across a campus quad, to an interstate highway. They are mutually recognized vectors of travel that have varying levels of accommodation for such an action. Edges are linear boundaries that individuals view as the end of a certain space or a barrier to further travel along a path. A path for cars (highways) might act as an edge for pedestrians. Nodes are areas that attract or concentrate activity and provide an orientation to the surrounding area. They denote a sense of arrival, and/or provide a transition from one perspective to another. Train stations, highway exits, public squares, and plazas are all examples of nodes. The last two elements, districts and landmarks- are terms we use every day. There are “warehouse districts,” or places we might call “Little Italy.” But in general districts are spaces that residents recognize as somehow different from other places. Landmarks help orient you to your surroundings by thinking of other points of interest in relation to the location of the landmark. A Wal-Mart, the Empire State Building, or an old oak tree are all landmarks.

But what happens when you add an always-on internet connection in your pocket? What does this new digital layer do to our image of the city? The ubiquity of aerial photographs and accurate maps may mean that we do not rely on these five elements quite so much anymore. We have a cheat sheet of sorts, which can tell us when the next train arrives or where a coffee shop can be found.

Building off of what PJ and Nathan have been working on, I would like to posit the idea of an “augmented city.” The tourist or recent transplant may use their phone in the beginning, but we do eventually build our mental images. Our customized Google maps, our Yelp reviews, and Foursquare badges are digital manifestations of our mental image. But because we are sharing this information, these images inform others’ images as well. The implications for such a direct link to our image of the city is bigger than we think. Advertising on these platforms can distort our image, it can make that Starbucks seem closer or bigger in a way that a billboard couldn’t accomplish. Our images are now, more than ever, susceptible to the influences of others. We need to be careful of who we let build that image.

Wired’s Threat Level Blog is carrying a story about the Department of Homeland Security demanding that Mozilla take down an add-on that lets users easily redirect to sites that have been given a take-down notice due to copyright infringement. Maybe censorship is too strong a word, but it certainly appears as such. Mozilla agrees and is requesting a reason for the takedown. The government has yet to respond.

Via WIRED.

This past weekend Cyborgology editors PJ Rey and Nathan Jurgenson treated over two hundred (mostly) young academics to a new kind of conference. In some ways it was like any other conference: some people (me included) did the necessary grousing about waking up early; there were minor technical mangles [mangle of practice]; and there were some awkward glances at name tags as everyone tried to remember the names of their new professional acquaintances. But unlike some of the larger (dare I say, “mainstream”) conferences, there was a palpable sense of ownership over all aspects of the the project. We were doing this for a reason, and it was not to pad our CV’s. It was to play with the medium. We theorized the web, but in so doing, we also reconsidered the purpose of conferences.

Personally, I am tired of visiting a corporate hotel, adding another tote bag to my collection, and rushing from tablecloth-clad conference rooms to bad catered dinners, so I can make it to a plenary talk about the politics of the discipline. That needs to be over, or academia will stagnate in a pool of its own hypocrisy. Its time for the academic conference to take a reflexive turn. We need to practice what we preach.

What would a reflexive conference look like? TtW2011 was about how we use information technology and how IT changes our day-to-day lives. Through some brilliant art work and our own collective action, we were participating in -and experimenting with- the same activities that we were investigating. Does that mean a conference on social movements needs to run out of the room and topple the university’s administration? Not necessarily. (Although, nine times out of ten, it’d probably be a popular choice of action.) But we, as social justice advocates, should be offering day care and the ability to bring spouses for free or at a reduced rate. It means voting with our dollars and removing ourselves from the same companies that host Halliburton’s executive conferences, or might have questionable hiring practices.

While our own institutions may not be bastions of equality, they are institutions that we are belong to, and can be changed. TtW2011 was hosted at the University of Maryland, the rooms were adequate, and while there were some technical issues, they weren’t any better or worse than experiences I have had at hotels or convention centers. We ended a very productive day by listening to a band and enjoying each-other’s company as colleagues and new-found friends. We were encouraged to eat at local restaurants, and there was a map orienting us to some local favorites.

Theorizing the Web was the beginning of a new interdisciplinary interest, but it was also the start of a new way of sharing information. It was about reflecting on what we think is important, and informing the work that we do with those values. The reactions I have seen have all been really positive, and I think that identifies an underlying desire for a new kind of conference. Its time to get out of the hotel conference room, and go to the streets (and twitter).

This is the fourth panel spotlight for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference on April 9th. I’ll have the pleasure of presiding over a panel that focuses on how mobile web platforms are augmenting the world of bricks and flesh. Much more than an ethnography of Foursquare, this panel will explore our changing relationships to space and place, and the new ways public and private spaces are opening up as a result of this new augmented reality.

PJ and Nathan have done an excellent job on this blog of  articulating social media’s role in times of revolution, but this panel seeks to understand social media’s roll in a variety of instances. We will explore the cultural contexts that Social Networking Services (SNS) operate within, and what this does for old and new associations with (and within) place and society. From San Francisco hipsters to Chinese political activists, and from your local Starbucks, to the Second Life, social media is changing how we interact with our cities and our fellow citizens.

If anything unites these four panelists, it is their balanced perspective on the roll of digital media. Its easy to essentialize mobile computing platforms, or mistake computer mediated communication as anti-social. Without essentializing the technology, or romanticizing the past, these authors provide a balanced critique of what is happening in our cities and online. Read the four abstracts after the break  to learn more:

Daniel Susser: “From Telephones to Smellophones: The Role of Place in Electronically Mediated Communication”

Video chat, Second Life, and other “immersive” or quasi-immersive electronically mediated communications technologies suggest to us a future in which communicating subjects are physically distanced from one another, yet arestill present to one another by virtue of some sort of virtual replica.  But what is the nature of such virtual presence?  How is it accomplished?  In this paper, I argue that what designers and technologists are trying to reconstruct in digital form is the sense of place that’s largely been lost in electronically mediated communication.  That the goal of building technologies which involve richer communicative experiences is to reconstruct the situated contexts that provide the ground for producing shared meanings.  I look to the work of philosophers of technology, such as Hubert Dreyfus, and theorists of place, such as Ed Casey, to explain (1) why being situated apart from our interlocutors is both a philosophical and technological problem, and (2) how philosophy can help those who design and build these technologies make them more effective.

Kent Xili Deng: “The Walls to Breach: Between Online and Offline Worlds in China”

The whole world has been taken aback by the Jasmine Revolution in the Middle East, not only because of the swift implosion of seemingly impregnable regimes, but, more importantly, the transformation of political energy from online interactions to offline revolutions.  In the light of these cases, the assertion that the events happened online are nothing but virtual has to be modify, if not completely rewritten.

Considering China’s gigantic population, the number of its Internet users is equally whopping.  The latest biannual report published by China Internet network Information Centre, a governmental Internet monitoring body, puts the figure at 457 million, two times of the population of the US.  Half of the netizens are at the same time SNS users.  The demographics, in theory, should possess immeasurably great transformative power.  So when real-time developments in the Middle East were relayed to them through international and domestic SNS, there were indeed abundant political imaginations about possible storms in China among the SNS users nationwide.  Interestingly, history doesn’t repeat itself there, notwithstanding that China today shares similar social problems with those Arab countries.  Why does the ‘Tunisian Formula’ lose its magic in China?  Can civil actions online be translated into offline events in China?

The questions set above may be a bit ambitious for a conference presentation of 15 minutes.  Besides, the contexts in China are so different from those in the West, which may not necessarily be familiar to the audience.  Therefore, it is perhaps more advisable and practical to explore the answers through the real stories of ordinary Chinese netizens, instead of aiming to construct a grand narrative that covers every aspects of the SNS development in this most populous country with cultural, economic, sexual and social diversities.

The schema of my argument is nonlinear and reflexive.  I argue NOT the Internet and its infrastructures will fundamentally change China’s society and politics, or vice versa.  Instead, by depicting the two ‘walls’ that Chinese netizens have to traverse, namely the Great Firewall of China which separate China and the democratic West, and the Great Firewall of Mind which disconnect the inter-transformation between the social practices on- and offline, with illustrations from the life story of Liu, I intend to argue that nation-state, politics, power, class and sexuality are not peripheral but central to our theorisation of the SNS and the Internet at large.  The online world is neither a parallel universe utterly different from the physical one nor does it divorce from the modern times qualitatively and quantitatively.  Subsequently, internet studies or the theorisation of the web, by no means, should recede to discipline-bounded games that only interest in the web per se, but taking the cyber-ecology of specific regions into the schemas.

This conference paper is part of a broader ethnographic project which investigates the contexts and mechanisms that Chinese SNS users, primary the ones with university education, construct their imagined societies through SNS.  This paper presents the ethnographic data gathered in preliminary research and analyses the uniqueness of cyber-ecology in China today.  More data are to be collected, analyse and interpreted for theorisation in my future research.

Raz Schwartz, “I’m the Mayor here! Place Attachment and the Personalized Physical Place”

“@IAmAru: “I feel like I’m betraying my @foursquare mayorship by going to the other Starbucks.

For @IAmAru, being the mayor of a specific Starbucks carries special meanings. Although all other Starbucks have the same décor, same menu and same background music, he continuously chooses to go to this particular one just to maintain his virtual Mayor title. But @IAmAru emotional tweet is hardly a rare example; it portrays a growing tendency in which location-based services users interact with the physical places they visit. What are the elements, therefore, that virtually connect someone to a certain physical place? Why do people feel an intimate attachment to a specific place after using these applications? And how do location-based services promote users to virtually chronicle their everyday endeavors?

Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical concept called ‘Place Attachment’ that was conceived during the late 1980s, following by an analysis of twenty interviews I conducted with users, I examine how the use of location-based services such as Foursquare, SCVNGR etc. establishes a personalized relation to a physical place. By applying the ‘Place Attachment’ theoretical framework to the study of location-based technology, I offer a new lens through which we can articulate the implications these services have over local connections between people and places.

The term ‘Place Attachment’ represents an interdisciplinary research field originating from different studies in anthropology, architecture, family and consumer studies, folklore, psychology, sociology and urban planning. It is the symbolic relationship created by people who give culturally shared emotional meanings to a particular place that provides the basis for the individual’s and group’s understanding of and relation to their surroundings. Thus, place attachment is more than an emotional and cognitive experience, it also includes cultural beliefs and actions that link people to place.

Studying emerging virtual-local relationships of people and places in light of concepts of ‘Place Attachment’ enables us to better understand users actions, and explore how, in turn, these practices strengthen users connection to a physical place, promote the assimilation and participation of users in their local community, enhance relations with other users and fortify the existence of a virtual-local identity.

Sang-Hyoun Pahk: “Pahk Restaurant 2.0: bringing online sociality to the streets”

“What is the impact of the internet on social relationships? As recently as a decade ago, internet use was primarily instrumental; for most users in most places, email was the dominant online activity. Thus it was reasonable for scholars such as Wellman, Castells and others to conceptualize the internet as primarily an advanced communications medium. Against both the utopian hopes and dystopian fears of various pundits, studies including Hampton and Wellman’s groundbreaking 2003 Neighboring in Netville found that the true effect of the internet was to enhance and facilitate social relationships, rather than fundamentally transform them. Since then the social media of Web 2.0 have come to dominate the online landscape (at least for a significant and growing number of users), and made instrumentalist conceptions of the internet largely obsolete. In addition to communication and commerce, the internet has increasingly become a site for work and play as well. In a series of papers, George Ritzer and others have usefully used the concept of “prosumption” to track some of these changes, identifying important trends in the production of identity among users (e.g. on online profiles) and even the emergence of a new economic logic based on abundance rather than scarcity. This paradigm shift reopens the question of the impact of the internet on social relationships, and suggests strongly that the answers this time should be different. Here, I present a case study of a community formed around cultural, social and even economic sensibilities previously identified only on the Web.

This study, based on interviews, participant observation, and publicly available online sources, focuses on the dramatic growth of street food in the Mission District of San Francisco in 2008-2009. During that time, what had previously been the near-exclusive domain of working-class Hispanics selling tacos and hotdogs exploded into a scene of tech-savvy middle-class hipsters selling an enormous variety of different foods from make-shift carts. Instead of establishing predictable locations and operating hours, the new vendors congregated in impromptu fairs, appeared and moved sporadically throughout the neighborhood, and used Twitter to keep their similarly-connected customers abreast of their activities. The vendors created a new organizational form that can be interpreted as a “hacking” of the restaurant industry. Local blogs and Twitter were instrumental in facilitating the rise in popularity of new street food, and they were also a primary site for debating and articulating the meaning of new street food for its participants. This meaning-making work signaled the emergence of a community of vendors and customers that had deep affinities with the culture and sensibilities of Web 2.0. These affinities included a broad commitment to an “ideology of freedom” (Castells 2001), born partially from the original hacker culture, which can be characterized by respect for technical expertise and disdain for regulatory or bureaucratic barriers. This also included economic sensibilities that resemble the “logic of abundance” (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010), approximated offline by low barriers to entry to the food cart field. Finally, the street food scene also showed evidence of a troubling offline reproduction of the so-called “digital divide,” as evidenced by the demographic and cultural characteristics of its most enthusiastic participants. ”

One of the few things more interesting than Anonymous, are the internal sub-groups that have begun to develop.  Libcom is currently running a story about the Anonymous Anarchist Action hacktivist group.  This group seeks to specialize in capitalist targets and (in true anarchist fashion) constructing a horizontally organized coalition of people with a wide variety of expertise (not just programming or web science).