There’s a tricky balancing act to play when thinking about the relative influence of technological artifacts and the humans who create and use these artifacts. It’s all too easy to blame technologies or alternatively, discount their shaping effects.

Both Marshall McLuhan and Actor Network Theorists (ANT) insist on the efficaciousness of technological objects. These objects do things, and as researchers, we should take those things seriously. In response to the popular adage that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” ANT scholar Bruno Latour famously retorts:

It is neither people nor guns that kill. Responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants

From this perspective, failing to take seriously the active role of technological artifacts, assuming instead that everything hinges on human practice, is to risk entrapment by those artifacts that push us in ways we cannot understand or recognize. Speaking of media technologies, McLuhan warns:

Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users.   

This, they get right. Technology is not merely a tool of human agency, but pushes, guides, and sometimes traps users in significant ways. And yet both McLuhan and ANT have been justly criticized as deterministic. Technologies may shape those who use them, but humans created these artifacts, and humans can—and do— work around them.  

In working through the balance of technological influence and human agency, the concept of “affordances” has come to the fore. Affordances are the specifications of a technology which guide—but do not determine—human users.  It is rare to read a social study of technology without reference to the affordances of the artifact(s) of interest. Although some argue the term is so widely used it no longer contains analytic value, I strongly believe its place remains essential. The power of “affordance” as an analytic tool is its recognition of technology as efficacious, without falling prey to the determinism of McLuhan and ANT.

We can, however, improve the nuance with which we employ the concept. Primarily, a delineation of affordances currently answers the question of “what?” That is, it tells us what component parts the artifact contains and what this implies for the user. For instance, the required gender designation of Facebook pushes users to identify their bodies into a single social category. The dropdown menu limits those options vis-à-vis a write in, but expands the options through multiple gender designations beyond male and female. These are some of the affordances of the Facebook platform, and they influence how users engage the platform in gendered ways. This is an important point, but I argue that we can better employ affordances through theorizing the “how?” in addition to the what. How for example, does Facebook push users to identify with a gender category? Do they make the user do so, or simply make it difficult for the user not to? In other words, the how tells us the degree of force with which the whats are implemented.

This issue of how came to me while talking with my students about technological affordances. An astute student asked about the difference between a wood privacy fence and a perimeter rope. They both afford the same thing, he correctly noticed, but in different ways. We collectively decided that while the fence tells you to stay off the property, the rope politely (though often effectively) asks.

I propose a rudimentary typology for the question of how, in which a technological affordance can request, demand, allow, or encourage.  The first two refer to bids placed upon the user by the artifact. The latter two are the artifact’s response to (desired) user action. I welcome tweaks, suggestions, and of course applications.

Requests and demands move human users upon specific paths, with differing levels of insistence.

A technological artifact requests when it pushes a user in some direction, but without much force. This is an affordance a user can easily navigate around. For instance, Facebook requests that users include a profile image, but one can sign up and engage the service without doing so. Similarly, David Banks’ coffee maker requests that he live in a spacious home, but still agrees to make coffee in his modest residence.

A technological artifact demands when its use is conditioned on a particular set of circumstances. Facebook demands, for instance, that users select a gender category before signing up, and Keurig demands its users make coffee with Keurig brand K-cups. Although demand runs the risk of technological determinism, it is important to note that even demands can be rebuffed, though the obstacle may be significant. For instance, one might jailbreak an iPhone, subverting its demand that distribution rests solely with Apple. Or, with likely much greater difficulty, one might craft their own K-cup, subverting Keurig’s demand on brand loyalty. I think we could say/fight more about demands, but I’m kind of looking forward to hashing it out on Twitter and in the comments.

Thinking about the difference between request and demand, we can imagine signing up for some service through an online form. The form has several blank categories for the applicant to fill in. Those spots with red stars are required. Those without red stars are not required. The form therefore asks the applicant to fill in all of the information, but demands that they fill in particular parts.

The second two categories refer to an artifact’s response to those things a user may wish to do.

A technological artifact allows when its architecture permits some act, but does so with relative indifference or even disapproval. The Facebook status update allows users to post links, text, and images. One can post short quips or longer narratives. These narratives can potentially follow a variety of affective lines, such as joy, excitement, depression, or disappointment.  Keurig allows users to make a variety of coffee flavors and strengths, offering a host of these through the machine-compatible brand. The user can also potentially run water through the same K-cup twice, reducing the value of each individual pod, though the technological artifact does not invite the user to do so.

A technological artifact encourages when its architecture makes a particular line of action easy and appealing, especially vis-à-vis alternative lines of action. It fosters, breeds, nourishes something, while stifling, suppressing, discouraging something else. Facebook, for example, encourages users to produce content, providing a host of templates and a centrally located status update box complete with a prompt: “What’s on your mind?” It further encourages interaction by providing “notifications” of relevant activity at the top of the page in an eye-catching red font and sending these notifications to user’s mobile devices. Twitter, in turn, encourages short blips and link sharing, while Tumblr encourages longer form engagement. Both, like Facebook, encourage engaged interaction.

In examining the how, the what remains critically important. It is the what that the artifact requests, demands, allows, or encourages. Affordances enable and constrain. That is, they are always a product of, and subject to, human agency. However, facilitations and constraints operate at different levels. This typology is useful in understanding the degree to which each affordance is open to negotiation. It recognizes not only the mutual influence of human and machine, but the variable nature of this relationship.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

Jasmine Rand, lawyer for Trayvon Martin’s family, came and spoke at my university last week. I held my breath as she walked out on stage. She began with the emotional announcement that we were on the eve of what would have been Trayvon’s 20^th birthday. Along with a crowd full of students, professors, staff, and members of the community, I settled on the edge of my seat and listened eagerly for what this woman, in this moment of racial upheaval, had to say.  As I tweeted just before the talk: this was a big deal.

The talk had no official hashtag, and the #JMU hashtag was entirely populated by tweets about the basketball game going on at the same time. With no backchannel and no one to tweet with, I put my iPad away. Fine, I thought, Turkle-esq undistracted presence it is.

About an hour later, I was somewhere between bewilderment and seething anger. The talk was not just disappointing, but downright offensive. This person, this supposed defender of justice and crusader for equality, had used the death of a young black man and the subsequent non-conviction of his killer as a platform for self-aggrandizement (and I imagine financial gain). With a captive audience of young minds—college students in a prime position to take action—she, a white woman, spent 45 minutes talking about her personal journey through law school, and about 15 minutes talking about race relations. In those 15 minutes, she politely preached colorblindness. Not only did she fail to address systems of racial oppression, but advocated “love” as the penultimate solution.

I believe in love as much as the next person and I agree that love should be part of both academic and political discourse. But what about Stand your Ground? What about Stop and Frisk? What about broken windows policing? It’s not lack of love that makes black men disproportionately vulnerable to police violence. It’s wasn’t lack of love that failed to indict the officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Love would not have saved 12 year old Tamir Rice.

The talk ended and the organizers prepared the room for questions. Remembering my dormant iPad, I pulled it out. That was SO bad, I thought, someone must have commented. No dice. The #JMU Twitter feed was still mostly basketball, speckled with excited announcements of Rand’s upcoming talk. Including mine. Ugh.

If the talk was bad, the question answer session was even more troublesome. Young women stood up, profusely thanked Rand, and asked for advice on getting into/through law school. Faculty cordially asked her to expand on her love thesis. People clapped after each of her responses, which consisted almost entirely of “follow your heart” and “be true to yourself,”along with a personal story about how she does just that. One brave student tried to challenge her, but the question wasn’t perfectly articulated. She took the opportunity to twist what he said and then refused to answer. The crowd clapped for that, too.

I was screaming inside my head. Will nobody stand up and force the issue of systemic racism? Will nobody ask her to account for the conditions under which Trayvon Martin’s killer was deemed innocent by a jury of his peers? Will no one push this woman, acting as a voice for a social justice movement, to get outside of herself and address the devastating failures of the justice system? What is wrong with everybody!?, I wondered. Do they have no courage, or do they simply not get it?

Amidst this internal rant, I realized that I am them. I was not asking these important questions. I was the one with no courage. About this time, one of the colleagues I was sitting with signaled that she was ready to leave. In a daze, I got up and walked with my small group out into the lobby and then into the cold night air. We were all silent for a moment. And then, to my great relief, we all exploded into conversation about our dissatisfaction with the talk. And yet, none of us spoke up in front of the crowd.  The content of the talk, including questions and answers, was wholly uncritical. Our dissatisfaction, and undoubtedly, the dissatisfaction of many in the room, was never brought to the record.

This bothered me a lot. It still does. It is especially bothersome because she is a voice of authority, and many students in the audience were therefore primed to receive whatever message the talk produced. Critical questions by other figures of authority—such as faculty like me—could have changed that message. We didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.

I went home and ruminated. In an effort at damage control and an attempt to put something on record, I tweeted this:

The tweet was entirely ignored. No favorites. No retweets. No replies. It just hung there with nothing to latch onto and no one to address[i]. There was simply no platform in which to embed the message. There was no conversation for this tweet to disrupt.

It is here that we see the power of a hashtag.  A hashtag does not just organize discussion, it also creates a space for discussion and sets the expectation that discussion will take place. I put my iPad away at the beginning of the talk because there was nowhere for me to place my thoughts; nowhere for me to go to read the thoughts of others. I didn’t livetweet because it made little sense to do so.

The consequences of this were substantial. The communicative effect of a hashtag is not additive, but productive. It doesn’t just tack onto existing discourse, but changes the discourse itself. The message of Rand’s talk included her words and those of the audience in the room. It could have also included the content of a Twitter feed. The content of this feed would not only affect the meaning of the talk as a whole, but primed those listening to hear Rand’s words from a different, more critical, perspective.  Perhaps this would have encouraged others to express their own critiques through social media. Perhaps it would have incited defensive responses by Rand’s supporters. Perhaps more of us would have been willing to break through decorum and press Rand to defend her position. It could have been a fight. Instead, it was a willowy hour of personal stories and sanitized contentions.

In circumstances of differential power and authority, the hashtag is an important means by which the masses can become part of discourse. In all of its simplicity and seeming banality, the hashtag holds liberatory functions. It provides a space for comment and a platform for dissent. It augments discourse not just through the use of multiple media, but through the inclusion multiple voices.  The absence of a hashtag—intentional or not—therefore becomes a mechanism of silence. Without a clear platform, we can speak, but to whom and to what end?

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

[i] I included the speaker through an @connect, but her page has strict privacy settings and my message was not displayed. Her privacy settings are in place for good reason. I Imagine Trayvon Martin’s lawyer would otherwise be bombarded by ridicule and threats by white supremacists.

We’ve all been there. Sweaty palms, racing heart, left eye that winks at involuntary intervals. You’re emotionally fraught and having a physiological response. It could be an upcoming exam, a big presentation, or that one friend who can’t stop telling you about their fantastic job/spouse/kids/new shoes while wondering out loud how you manage living in such messy quarters.

Our bodies are key sources of information and guidance. Bodied reactions, coupled with culturally situated reflexive analyses, help us make sense of day-to-day events and make behavioral decisions. Feel like you’re going to vomit every time that colleague stops by your office? Maybe they’re toxic. Maybe you’re in love. The bodily response prompts you to do something, and how you interpret that response tells you what that something is.

This relationship between bodily responses, their interpretation, and potential behavioral outcomes, is the principle behind self-quantification, or the tracking of bodily trends for the purpose of self-reflection and aspirational change. Self-quantification relies on a host of technological devices, each of which measures, reports, and aggregates body-data, helping the quantifier tell hirself a story, about hirself. Although self-quantification often pertains to physical health, many use tracking technologies to record variations in affect and mood.

A new iOS app extends this logic, and helps quantifiers tell themselves stories about themselves, in affective relation to specific others. The pplkpr (people keeper) uses a smartwatch to measure a user’s heart rate, employing subtle changes to identify emotional states. When triggered by a change, the app prompts the user to record who they were with and how that person was making them feel. The app then aggregates this information, revealing who is calming, toxic, or arousing. Based on this information, it initiates messages and invitations to those who make the user feel “good,” and blocks those who make the user feel “bad.” From the app’s website:

 pplkpr implements a complex metric called “heart rate variability” that uses subtle changes in heart rhythm to determine your emotional state. This data is correlated with the people you interact with to determine who should be auto-scheduled into your life and who should be removed.

In short, the app treats bodily flows as raw data, which it translates into an ostensibly meaningful report. The app uses these data to quantify the affective experiences of users’ relationships, and pushes users into “healthy” pairings. But it does more than this. It does not just push users to reflect on relationships and make tangible moves on the user’s behalf (though it certainly does both of these things), it also becomes part of the relationship dynamic; it produces those relationships that it helps the user analyze. And this productive force relies upon a particular set of values and assumptions, built into the device in the form of diagnostic criteria. Anxiety is to be avoided; calmness and arousal sought out.

That is, pplkpr is a definitively prosumptive technology, and one with a deeply valued agenda. The user both produces and consumes hir data, and with this, produces and consumes relationship meanings. The pplkpr forces the user to confront hir bodied reactions—but only those bodied reactions deemed relevant by the app developers—interpret them, and act towards them in some way. That way may be to acquiesce to the data, or resist its message, but the data seeps into relationships with an inevitable shaping effect.

If we are already data-selves, with pplkpr, we create a data-us; our relationships tied to calculable metrics, and these metrics granted legitimacy and authority—A heart flutter or it isn’t love.

The implications of metric-based relationship evaluation are widespread and certainly extend outside the bounds of my speculation. Perhaps it will improve widespread mental health and abusive relationships will become a thing of the past. Perhaps we’ll all become wooden dopes, incapable of feeling outside of our numbers. Probably nothing as extreme as either of these scenarios will come to pass. I do know that it all exposes an interesting tension, one in which truth is found in data, produced with, but not directly through, the body.

Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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*An excellent student brought pplkpr to my attention. Thank goodness for regular access to college students.

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a radical shift in the structure of education at the national level. With a tone of idealism, he set forth the intention to provide all students in good standing two free years of community college. In response to this highly anticipated announcement, half of the room stood in applause, while the other half sat firmly in their seats. Unsurprisingly, standers and sitters divided along party lines, with democrats welcoming the proposal and republicans opposed.

In theory (and in general) I’m with the standers on this issue. In practice, the issue is complicated and I have some deep concerns— concerns that stem from troubling trends within higher education. If I had to locate myself among the split-level congressional crowd, I would be out of my seat, but remain in an awkward and uncomfortable squat.

My discomfort stems from what I see as a larger trend in higher education: a move towards credentializing at the expense of educating. It is this credentializing shift that is also at the heart of my conflicted feelings about “online” colleges and universities. And I have little doubt, universal access to college will require digital mediation.

Let me be clear about a few things. I am not against digitally mediated educational opportunities. More than that, I fully support a highly educated public, and I am more than willing to pay through tax dollars, increased teaching loads, and fewer personal resources, in order to make education accessible to everyone who seeks it. I believe with all of my heart and mind that two free years of college education is a noble cause, and would love to see us implement this in a meaningful way.

And yet, I remain unwilling to stand and applaud. Through my first hand experience within higher education, however modest (I’m in my second year of a tenure-track job, having finished my PhD in 2013), I’ve noticed a distinct trend—a focus on the product rather than the process. Jobs require credentials, colleges and universities are supposed to provide these credentials. In an environment where resources are relatively scarce, finite, and zero sum, institutions of higher education are incentivized to crank out degrees, more so than cultivate sophisticated and thoughtful citizens.

The implications of this incentive structure have played out across the higher education landscape. Grade inflation acts as a simple but powerful metric of this trend. On a personal level, I recently spoke with a graduating senior at my university who was writing her first full-length paper. It wasn’t even for a regular course. It was for me, through an independent study. In this vein, my qualifying exams as a PhD student were significantly less rigorous than those of my committee members. I answered questions only from my areas of specialty, while foregoing a general theory/methods exam[1]. But it is in the (often for-profit )online education market that credentializing is taken to its logical extreme.

Credentializing is the open secret of the online education market. It is the justification for hiring low-paid adjuncts and mechanizing the job of teaching, requiring instructors to use pre-selected textbooks and pre-made lectures. It is behind the problem of online universities’ struggle to place their students into sustainable full-time jobs. It is what drives the threat of lost accreditation, a lurking potential for a large host of online schools which hang onto education—as opposed to credentializing— by mere threads.

My fear is that the implementation of subsidized community college will follow the trend of credentializing more generally, and in practice, most closely follow the online education model. The threads that save institutions of education from falling fully into institutions of credential distribution can be all too easily cut.

This is not to say that digitally mediated teaching and learning is inherently deficient. On the contrary, the sorry state of online education is neither natural nor inevitable. Digitally mediated learning harbors strong potentials for access, enrichment, and personal and cultural advancement. And indeed, digital tools can—must—be integral in expanding access to education.

But I remain squatting. Not just uncertain, but primed to jump—into debate, into protest, into planning meetings, and, always, into classrooms of all types.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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[1] Qualifying exams are essay-based tests that PhD students take at the end of course work, before starting their dissertations. The requirements vary greatly across universities, between departments, and even between individual faculty members within a department. My experiences, however, and those in and around my cohort, are generally less strenuous than those of the generations before.

For those of us in the Academy, mid-January is bittersweet. As Winter Break turns into Spring Semester, we  shrug off the Gross that comes along with 12 hour Netflix marathons, rush to meet conference/journal deadlines, and prepare for a new set of students. For me, this means finally starting my Cultural Studies of New Media course–what I not so humbly announced as the Best. Class. Ever!!

Some regular readers may remember that upon this announcement, I asked for content suggestions. Those suggestions were wonderful and I spent many hours sorting through the comments on that post, as well as threads that proliferated on Twitter. Seriously, you guys are the best. Below I’ve copied a link to the final version of the syllabus.

Feel free to use/share/borrow/critique any and all of it. There is TONS of stuff that I would have loved to include, but had to make decisions based on variety and level. The good news is that there’s a lot on deck for me to suggest to students as they work on end of semester projects, and a reserve of readings ready to be put in next time I teach the course. Ya know, to keep things spicy for me.  Thanks for all of the help. Here we go (project descriptions are at the bottom):  Cultural Studies of New Media Syllabus

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The end of a year is an introspective time. We reflect on the past 365 days and lay plans for the year to come. This is a time of remembering, analyzing, hoping, and figuring. Helping us through this introspective process is Facebook’s Year in Review.  This app compiles the “highlights” of each user’s year through images, events, and status updates. It then displays this compilation for the user, and gives the option to share the review with Friends.  The default caption reads: “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being part of it[i].”

Quickly, the app garnered negative attention when web designer Eric Meyer blogged about his heart wrenching experience of facing pictures of his 6 year old daughter who passed away not long ago. There was no trigger warning. There was no opt-in. There was simply an up-beat video picturing his daughter’s face when he logged into his Facebook account. He aptly attributes this experience to “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty.”

Although the cruelty was indeed inadvertent, it was none-the-less inevitable. It reflects a larger issue with the Facebook platform: its insistent structure of compulsory happiness. This insistence is reflected in a “Like” button, without any other 1-click emotive options; it is reflected in goofy emoticons through which sadness and illness are expressed with cartoon-like faces in cheerful colors; it is reflected in relationship status changes that announce themselves to one’s network. And as users, we largely comply. We share the happy moments, the funny quips, the accomplishments and #humblebrags, while hiding, ignoring, or unFriending those with the audacity to mope; to clog our newsfeeds with negativity. But we do not comply ubiquitously nor condone/censure unanimously. Sometimes we perform sadness, and sometimes we support each other in this.

Facebook’s Year in Review’s does not mean to be cruel. In most cases, it is not. Facebook is quite intentional, however, in its perpetuation of the happiness presumption. Meyer writes in his blog:

And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault.  This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house

Facebook’s Year in Review tries to play back for us the happy performance it structurally worked to elicit. Its algorithms pick from available content, assuming the content will be of a particular, cheerful, affective tenor. But the world is not always happy. People are not always happy. And this platform, this corporate entity, has become a central medium through which people engage social life and social relationships. A Year in Review, decorated with confetti, imaged with dancing figures, populated by our own words and pictures, forces this happiness—realized or not—into our line of view.

There is no structure for grief on Facebook, no structure for struggle. Although users find ways around the structure of compulsory happiness, this structure—like all structures—pushes back.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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[i] Check out Sarah Wanenchak’s excellent post on the story telling aspects of Year in Review

Does anyone else feel like the terms ‘cyber-attack’ and ‘cyber-terrorism’ should always be accompanied by cold-war style red flashing lights?  Maybe I’m just watching too much mainstream news. In any case, I argue below that the ‘cyber’ prefix is not only dated and dualist, but imprecise. I suggest ‘data’ as an alternative. This relies on the assumption that we don’t have data, we are data; an attack on our data is therefore, an attack on us.

Cyber-war, terrorism, attack, etc. has been a central topic of conversation among news outlets since North Korean hackers breached Sony’s network and then threatened a physical attack in response to The Interview, a comedy about assassinating Kim Jong-Un[i]. Sony controversially responded by canceling the film’s release. Of significance, U.S. intelligence showed that the physical threat was largely unsubstantiated. And yet, Sony pulled the film. The ‘cyber’ breach, it seems, was dangerous enough. This breach not only exposed information, but was a means by which an enemy gained access to data; a means by which an enemy infiltrated. This was powerful by the very fact that we don’t have data, but are data.

The data breach was not just symbolic, but held material consequences. It spoke, loudly declaring ‘we have access to you.’

And indeed, they do have access to us.  The hack was not only a breach of data, but a violation of the people who populate the Sony network, and a reminder to us—all of us data-selves—of our own vulnerability.

We don’t have data, we are data.

And because of this, we are vulnerable. We leave pieces of our data—pieces of our selves—scattered about. We trade, sell, and give data away.  Data is the currency for participation in digitally mediated networks; data is required for involvement in the labor force; data is given, used, shared, and aggregated by those who care for and heal our bodies. We live in a mediated world, and cannot move through it without dropping our data as we go.

We don’t have data, we are data.

This is why threats of ‘cyber-terrorism’ and ‘cyber-war,’ are better named ‘data-terrorism’ and ‘data-war.’ The cyber prefix, relying on a dated spatial metaphor, carries with it assumptions of separation between the digital and the real. On the contrary, attacks on the digital are very real. Not just symbolically, and not even just in their consequences, data attacks are real as violations of persons, communities, and potentially nations.

These are not attacks in ‘cyberspace,’ but attacks on networks. And networks are populated by people; networks are populated by us. These forms of aggression therefore threaten not only infrastructure, but populations. A data-breach is an act of unexpected, undesired, violative exposure.  A data-attack is not just an aggression, it is a violent aggression, and a clear means of access for those with nefarious intentions. It is a deeply personal tool of war. And it is a tool of war that works, a tool that makes sense, because we are our data.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

[i] North Korea now declines involvement and proposes a joint investigation into the breach. The U.S. authorities maintain that North Korea is the responsible party, and are continuing as though this is the case.

Facebook announced this week that it will add a new search feature to the platform. This search feature will, for the first time, allow users to type in keywords and bring up specific network content. Previously, keyword searches lead to pages and advertisements.  Now, it will bring up images and text from users’ News Feeds. Although search results currently include only content shared with users by their Friends, I imagine including public posts in the results will be a forthcoming next step.

Facebook, as a documentation-heavy platform, has always affected both how we remember, and how we perform. It is the keeper of our photo albums, events attended, locations visited, and connections established, maintained, and broken. It recasts our history into linear stories, solidifying that which we share into the truest version of ourselves. And of course, the new search feature amplifies this, stripping users of the privacy-by-obscurity that tempered (though certainly did not eliminate) the effects of recorded and documented lives.

The search feature also does something interesting and new. It aggregates. For the first time, users can take the temperature of their networks on any variety of topics. Music, movies, news events and recipes can be called up, unburied from the content rubble and grouped in a systematic way.

Perhaps because I’ve been able to think of little else lately, I immediately considered what this new feature means for how we will remember the events of Ferguson, Staten Island, and the parade of police violence against young men of color. And relatedly, I considered how we will remember ourselves and each other in regard to these events.

Facebook has always remembered, but now, Facebook actively remembers.

The logical response to police killings of unarmed citizens of color is evidently contestable in this historical moment, but times change, and so do logics.

Those who threw vitriolic accusations at Michael Brown and Eric Garner, posted passionately in defense of the police officers in question, lamented a fallacious emphasis on race, can be called back, individually and en masse, and confronted with their own message. Those who engaged in protest following the shootings, and expressed disgust when the grand juries did not indict, those who insisted that we pay attention to race, power, and how these intersect dangerously in the justice system, will have their messages called back as well.

We have always had to live with our past selves, and the side of history that these selves located us. But memory also used to be more fluid, less confined. With increasingly rigid and document-based forms of remembering, an open question, for me, is if this platform-afforded active remembering will make us more careful and thoughtful in how we perform, or stand stronger in our convictions? Will those who defended the police officers think twice before posting that “Michael Brown is a Thug” meme, or will the knowledge of that posts’ permanence prevent a later evolution of thought?

We come to know the self by seeing what we do, and this knowledge guides our actions. Facebook’s active remembering reminds us, with physical evidence, what we have done.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

The mobile phone camera has become an embedded tool of protest. It has given rise to the citizen journalist and is a key mechanism by which surveillance is countered with sousveillance. In a New Media & Society article earlier this year, Kari Andén-Papadopoulos names this phenomena citizen-camera witnessing. This is a ritual through which bodies in space authenticate their presence while proliferating images and truths that contest with the stories told by The State.  The citizen camera-witness is not merely witnessing, but bearing witness, insisting upon articulating, through image, atrocities that seem unspeakable. Indeed, as W.J.T. Mitchell compellingly claims: Today’s wars and political conflicts are to an unparalleled extent being fought on behalf of, against and by means of radically different images of possible futures.

The failure to indict Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown and the protests that continue to follow, set the stage for drastically different futures. The way we tell this story will guide which future is most plausible, most logical, and most likely.  

The key image makers include State representatives, mainstream media, Darren Wilson supporters, and those protesting against the Grand Jury decision. These voices vie for space in the construction of the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson story. The story told by those in the first two categories is largely one of violence and mayhem at the hands of an unruly crowd. The story told by Wilson supporters is similar, but with a clear reverse-racism twinge.  The story of those in the last category is one of systemic oppression, a story in which black bodies—especially black male bodies—are in persistent danger of physical harm, inflicted by those charged with public protection.

I stand with this last category, and am committed to promulgating their version of the story. But in watching this story and in spreading it, I’m struck by the method of its telling. In particular, the citizen-camera witnesses not only point their camera phones at the crowds, at the police, and at the built environment, but also point the camera at themselves. They don’t merely imply their presence through video footage, but explicitly locate themselves—their own bodies—at the heart of the story.

I want to make the case for citizen-camera witnesses to be thoughtful in their use of this videographic tactic. In particular, I call for these witnesses to consider their own bodies, and what it means to have particular kinds of bodies within the imagescape. I argue that the role of protestors with white bodies, those antiracists who stand in solidarity, should be one of quiet support. White voices and faces already overpopulate public discourse. Absolutely turn your camera outward on injustice. Always do this. But think carefully before turning the camera on yourself.

The war for possible futures, fought in images, has far reaching consequences; for some, those consequences are literally life and death.  The stakes are highest for those with bodies of color. These are the bodies in danger. These are the bodies that should be at the center of the story.

Image: Source

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

Earlier this month, Science had a big victory. The Rosetta Project landed their spacecraft, Philae, on a comet.  This was a billion Euro and entire careers in the making. This was a huge step in space exploration. The accomplishment is unprecedented and data gleaned from this project are entirely unique. Good job, Science.

Meanwhile down on earth, a #ShirtStorm broke loose. Rosetta Scientist Dr. Matt Taylor gave a television interview about the project. His choice of attire—a naked-lady shirt—was ill conceived. Moreover, he described the project as the “sexiest mission,” feminizing and then validating the probe as “sexy” but not “easy.”

Thank goodness women don’t have a science problem!! Oh, wait…

Quickly, Atlantic writer Rose Eveleth posted this tweet:

And Astrophysicist Katie Mack said this:

Bloggers, columnists, and social media micro-pundits shook their heads and called Matt Taylor on the misogynistic implications of his public presentation. Dr. Taylor, in turn, granted a heartfelt apology.

Well, Dr. Taylor, I accept. That thing you did was sexist. You realize that now. You engaged in humility and public repair work. Let’s hug it out and get back to hoping that Philae shifts its position into the path of enough sunlight to regain power.

I am a strong proponent of conversation over accusation, and try to avoid extrapolating the actions of one person to the actions of an entire group. Science didn’t wear a naked-lady shirt, Matt Taylor did, and he apologized. All of the other Rosetta scientists were appropriately (if not stylishly) dressed. But Dudes (and yes, I mean Dudes in the “Bro” sense of the word), you’re making it difficult this time. The vitriolic response AGAINST TAYLOR’S DETRACTORS on both social and mainstream media shines an unflattering fluorescent light upon the cultural depths of misogyny.

Tim Stanley at the Telegraph dubbed November 14^th , the day of Taylor’s apology, The Day Political Correctness Went Mad. Glenn Reynolds at USA Today discredited Taylor’s critics as “crazy.” And James Meikle of the Guardian, while not explicitly taking sides, recounts the incident under a title that places “offensive” in quotes. And then there was Twitter:

Some quick themes (each represented above): sexism is bidirectional, and men are at least as gender-oppressed as women; there are real problems for women from which #shirtStorm distracts (as though the banality of everyday culture is somehow separate from, rather than constitutive of, the material conditions of violence and inequality); feminists are stupid/whiney/infantile.

My question, as always, is what are you defending? This reaction is so clearly compensatory, stemming from a fear of a changing world, and the implications about how particular kinds of people hold disproportionate power and resources. We feminists would like to get back to the science, if only our opinions didn’t lead to literal threats on our lives.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

*Cyborgology maintains a policy of editorial comment moderation. We are purposeful in keeping the conversation productive and intellectually relevant. We don’t approve trolling, personal attacks, or off-topic rants. In the case of this post, however, I am approving all comments. Here, they act as data that illustrate the theoretical argument I pose above*