Prosumption is something of a buzzword here at Cyborgology. It refers to the blurring of production and consumption, such that consumers are entwined in the production process. Identity prosumption is a spin-off of this concept, and refers to the ways prosumptive activities act back upon the prosuming self. Identity prosumption is a neat and simple analytic tool, particularly useful in explaining the relationship between social media users and the content they create and share.

If you’ll stick with me through some geekery, I would like to think through some of the nuances of this humble bit of theory.  

Identity Prosumption

Identity prosumption rests on a key principle of social psychology: people come to know the self by observing what they do, and observing others’ reactions to them.  When a person prosumes content, this content becomes a mirror that reflects back identity meanings. This is particularly useful when making sense of content creation, consumption, and sharing on social media. Users create and share content in a social arena, receive feedback on it (even if that feedback is silence), and utilize the content, now tied to its’ elicited response, to both perform and learn about, the self.

For example, posting a Facebook image of my dogs is not only an outward performance of my affinity for these (incredibly adorable and wuvable) animals, but also a performance for myself. The image becomes a data point with which I come to know myself as a dog lover. This is further reinforced by comments and Likes, through which my network interacts with me as the kind of person who loves (her) dogs.

Certainly, identity prosumption predates social media. Foucault, for example, has written extensively on self-writing as a form of self-formation, relying on the examples of Greco-Roman Hupomnema and Christian confessions. Other examples include personal correspondence, diaries, and autobiographies. Extending beyond the written form, identity prosumption is well suited to theorize the identity meanings in scrapbooking, photo albums, quilting, and various forms of art.

A digitally connected landscape, however, makes sharing in general, and prosumption in particular, a compulsory and public activity. Identity prosumption is not just a component of the social media experience, it is a central component. And with an increasing prevalence of social media as part of everyday sociality, identity prosumption becomes an integral component in processes of the self. To better understand identity prosumption, I want to try to break it down into integrated but distinct parts.

Prosuming Identity through Process and Artifact

To prosume is an act. That is, the prosumer is doing something. The result of this doing is an object. That is, the prosumer is making something. Both the act itself, and the consequent object, work back toward the prosumer in identity-constructive ways. I refer to these parts of identity prosumption as process and artifact.

Process is the doing. The bodily act of punching out a Tweet, or Tumblr post, or Snap, or Status Update, or Ello comment. It is the focus, anxiety, excitement, banality, or fear of creating the content and going live. The actor sees hirself engage these media, sees hirself articulate a message, sees hirself share—perhaps selectively— with hir network. What s/he sees hirself do informs who s/he defines hirself as.

The artifact is the result of this doing. It is the image, the story, the joke, the meme. It stares back at the actor from the glowing screen, evidence of who s/he is and what that means. Though individually relevant, artifacts prosumed through social media take on an aggregate character. In the case of social network sites, artifacts combine into what Hogan refers to as an Exhibition Space, or a curated collection of objects of the self. Even with ephemeral media (e.g., Snapchat), past prosumed artifacts linger in the networked memory, given nuance by their fleeting stay.

Though distinct, process and artifact are entwined. The process anticipates the artifact. The artifact refers back to the process. Both point to the identity meanings of the prosumer.For instance, if I share a funny story about my students, the content of that story (i.e., the artifact) is a means by which I perform—for myself and others—the role identity of academic, and the person identity of witty, or perhaps, cynical. This artifact points to the moments in which I constructed the narrative, decided to share, and agentically crafted this piece of performative content (i.e., the process).

We become subjects through the objects we prosume.  These objects hold identity meanings in their very act of creation, and in the fruit that these acts of creation bear. In an age of digital connectivity, prosumptive activities become a key mechanism of identity performance and identity creation. I’m looking forward to continued exploration into the nooks and crannies of this line of theory.

Follow Jenny on Twitter: @Jenny_L_Davis

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Net neutrality is back in the news. It’s been a minute, so in case you forgot, some broadband providers want to speed up high traffic services (e.g. Netflix), creating a tiered model of delivery speed. In turn, proponents of net neutrality have lobbied the FCC to classify broadband companies as “common carriers,” requiring that all Internet traffic receive equal treatment (i.e., equal speed of delivery).

In light of overwhelming public support for net neutrality, conflicting with strong lobbies from broadband companies, the FCC is still working towards a solution. Some of this work was leaked last week, revealing a sort of hybrid plan, in which broadband companies could sometimes establish “fast lanes” for service providers, but only when they deem it is “just and reasonable” (whatever “just and reasonable” means).

Whitney Erin Boesel does a fantastic job laying out the policy and delineating a strong argument in support of Open Internet. I want to take a bit of a simpler approach, and address one issue which underlies the debate in its entirety: the relationship between speech and money.

What role does money play in free speech?

Proponents of net neutrality criticize Internet deregulation for its coupling of money and speech. Those with more money get a greater proportion of the attention economy. Those with less money get a lesser proportion of the attention economy. That is, one can purchase louder, broader, and more penetrating speech, at the expense of those with fewer resources.

Opponents of net neutrality, however, appeal to the free market and the moral goal of “winning” within this market. Taking a greater proportion of the attention economy is a result of successful business practices, and therefore not only fair, but morally superior under capitalist logic. That is, share in the market economy earns the right to greater share in the attention economy.

As evidenced by the vast public support for a neutral Internet (see link above), citizens overwhelmingly opine with the former. That is, the American public understands speech and money as diametrically opposed. They believe that policies should prevent share in the market economy from determining share in the attention economy. Voice should not depend on Wallet Size.

And yet, those who oppose regulations have precedent on their side, though from an unexpected source: campaign finance. In 2010 the Supreme Court struck down regulations which limited corporate campaign contributions, and further deregulated campaign finance in 2014. In both cases, they argued that limiting campaign contributions equated to limiting free speech. Here is Chief Justice John Roberts on the 2014 case:

Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects. If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades—despite the profound offense such spectacles cause—it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.

If money is speech, then the poor have the softest voices. A deregulated Internet extends this logic, and cultural logic is what is at stake. The maintenance of net neutrality would exist in tension with the SCOTUS election campaign decision, maintaining a battleground on which the speech-money relationship remains fraught. Net non-neutrality, in whatever form, would combine with the SCOTUS decision, tipping the cultural scales in a sharply capitalistic direction; A direction in which the economic system drives the political system, and rights are things to be earned, bought, and sold.

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Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

After my annual in-class Race and Halloween conversation, one of my students sent me  this BuzzFeed link. Check it out, and then see below for commentary.

Three things, BuzzFeed.

First, doing a racist thing does not necessarily mean the offender is a jerk. Often, it means they are culturally embedded and naively expressing the logics of a racist society. Bonilla-Silva famously claims that we live in a society of racism without racists, or a society that outwardly values multiculturalism and colorblindness while implicitly maintaining whiteness as the default and supreme category. The values of colorblindness and multiculturalism are tools in the perpetuation of white supremacy, as they discount racial difference as an organizing principle while ignoring deeply embedded structural and cultural racial inequalities.

To identify a person engaging in a racist act as a jerk is to define this person against the values of multiculturalism and colorblindness—the very tools that silence the voices of racial oppression. These “racist actors” are construed as bad apples, not one of us, exceptions to an otherwise racially equitable society.

This individual focus is therefore not only incorrect, it is deleterious to the project of race consciousness, a project that understands and works to rectify racism as it pervades the large and small structures of daily life.

Moreover, it is unproductive. Calling someone a racist (or a jerk) invites defensiveness, rather than thoughtful conversation.  Saying “that thing you did was racist” is entirely different, and more useful, than saying “you are racist.” There are clear means by which the offender can learn and develop from the former, while the latter binds the offender to a defense of their entire personhood.

Second, reverse racism is not a thing. Racism refers to prejudice beliefs and discriminatory behaviors leveraged against racially oppressed groups. Concretely, you can’t be racist against whites.

People of color costuming as white characters is qualitatively different than white people costuming as people of color. The vast majority of BuzzFeed’s images depict people of color in white costumes, as though whiteface were a possibility and these Halloween enthusiasts are successfully avoiding it.

The inclusion (indeed, predominance of) people of color in these  images reveals the very colorblind assumptions I just detailed in point one, above.

Third, ohmigosh Lil Wayne and Scary Spice.  I don’t know how BuzzFeeders classify racism, but apparently white people who imitate people of color with deeply racialized and stereotypical tropes are immune from censure.

Michonne is a white woman in dreads, Lil Wayne has a grill, sagging pants, and flashes gang signs(?), while scary spice wears leopard  print, cat ears, and takes an animalized pose.

For the record, one does not need to physically paint the skin to dress in blackface.

Once again, BuzzFeed’s choice of images reflects colorblind assumptions coupled with an acceptance of racial stereotypes  and their perpetuation. With that said, even the most offensive costumes do not make the costumers terrible people. Rather, as highlighted in this BuzzFeed feature, these costumers are products of systemic racism, and  their forms of play on Halloween—i.e., that racist thing they did—both reflects and reinforces an underlying racial logic.

Jenny is an editor for Cyborgology and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

As a social scientist and theorist of technology, I follow some general rules in my thoughts and writings. One such rule is that I make no claims about the nature of people or the nature of things. Below, I do both. I then put these rule-breaking claims to use in beginning to make sense of the Washington school shooting, in which a reportedly “popular” and “normal” 15 year old boy shot 5 classmates before killing himself.

I begin with two claims about human nature:

First, humans need and develop with, culture—both material and symbolic. Second, humans’ internal emotional and psychological states are always in flux.

To the first point, Clifford Geertz makes the compelling case that humans are different from other animals not in our ability to create culture, but in our need for culture. Our instincts are comparatively quite poor, and so we must rely upon language, rituals, and objects (i.e., symbolic and material culture) to develop and survive.

To the second point, internal states, both emotional and psychological, are fluid rather than constant. These states change with both physiological and circumstantial shifts. For instance, hormone levels, brain chemistry, and blood sugar can drastically affect how one thinks and feels, as can external factors such as romantic love (both successful and not), money troubles, or even the weather. These shifts in internal mental and emotional states take place certainly over the life course, but also, even, from moment to moment. For a concrete if mundane example, think about yourself before and after your first cup of coffee. Or if you aren’t a coffee drinker, think of your mental state when lunch comes 30 minutes later than you had anticipated. It matters. A lot.

These two components of human nature—our need for culture and constantly fluctuating internal states— intersect at the location of individual action. Plausible lines of personal action are a joint product of culture—both material and symbolic—and an ephemeral feeling. Culture gives humans an array of social options and a corpus of tools (i.e., technologies). Action, or what someone does in a particular situation, depends on what is culturally available and what makes sense given a particular psychological and emotional state. For example, if I felt lonely, it would make sense to pick up the phone and call my mom, or even jump in the car for the two hour drive to my parents’ house. However, if letters were the predominate form of communication and horses the predominate form of transportation, or if parent-child bonds were not culturally normative, those lines of action would no longer make sense. Instead, it would perhaps make sense to visit a neighbor or ride into town. Alternatively, if I felt irritable (rather than lonely) my menu of cultural options would be entirely different.

Therefore, to understand human action requires an examination of these intersecting factors of internal state, cultural logic, and culturally available tools. If the action is problematic, we might think about which of these factors can best be changed to prevent such actions in the future.

Certainly, internal states can be altered with drugs and therapy, and symbolic culture can and has changed over time, but material culture—or technological objects—act as the physical tools with which actions are carried out. Remove the tools and the action becomes implausible, if not impossible.

This equation, of course, is far from simple. Technological objects are created within the logics of symbolic culture, and hold multiple meanings and indeed, multiple uses. And yet, some objects class together in cohesive ways. When it is a troubling glue that holds such objects together, naming the class of objects is an important task. As such, I suggest technologies of violence as a shared heading for those pieces of material culture with the sole purpose of inflicting physical harm. Bombs, grenades, and of course, guns, fall into this category.  These technologies and their usage may vary in the target of harm (e.g., human, animal, criminal, opposing army) and in the intention of the harm-inflictor (e.g., self-protection, protection of others, aggression, revenge). In the end, though, violence is the outcome of using these technological objects.

So let’s talk about guns, and about the role of this technology of violence in a deeply tragic event. Or stated differently, let’s look at how guns played into the equation of individual action as the piece of material culture which intersected with a 15 year old boy’s fluctuating mental state.

Jaylen Fryberg is not the “typical” school shooter. He wasn’t a loner. He didn’t wear a trench coat. He never wrote a manifesto. Rather, he played football, had lots of friends, and was elected to the Homecoming court just a week before. This atypicality (or perhaps, this ultra-typicality) have left media pundits digging to find his mental illness or tortured life circumstances. Watching the news over the weekend, I heard “experts” and newscasters question if the boy was bullied, if he endured racism, if there had been abuse at home. A lot of attention was given to some mopey (but not inherently alarming) Twitter posts about a recent breakup. People were reaching, it seems, to figure out the ways this boy, this killer, was broken.

But perhaps the answer is not that he was a broken person, but rather, that he was experiencing a break—a temporary moment of deeply troubling mental and emotional fluctuation. In this moment, he could have taken almost infinite lines of action. However, his access to a gun—to a technology of violence—shaped the action that he did, ultimately, take.

The idea that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, fails to grasp the intersection of human action and technological objects, just as the idea that guns are safe as long as they are kept away from the mentally ill fails to grasp the always present potential for a mentally healthy person to drop into mental illness. Internal states will, by nature, change, but the cultural object of violence will remain. This is a dangerous combination.

Certainly, as a society, it is important to address problems in symbolic culture such as bullying, abuse, racism, and an increasing normativity of lethal violence, just as it is important to address problems of mental health at the personal level. Understanding, however, that symbolic culture and internal states are always in flux, perhaps we should first address those technological objects with violence as their ultimate outcome. A first step in this endeavor is naming these technologies, creating a clear construction of what they do, and why they are used. We cannot know which lines of action will be personally plausible, but we can know that technologies of violence construct a logic and reality in which self and other harm are distinct possibilities.

Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

Facebook and Apple are offering  women employees the opportunity to “lean in,” which is great…right?

Humans both make and use technologies. Because of this, technologies themselves are imbued with politics, and the way people employ technologies have political implications. Untangling what those politics are, is sometimes a tricky process, as technological potentialities in both design and use are multiple and sometimes contradictory. Such is the case with egg-freezing technologies and the offer from Apple and Facebook to cover this procedure for women employees.

Since their announcement—a clear response to criticisms over Silicon Valley’s disproportionately dude populated work force—commentators have tried to discern the political implications. While the move certainly offers an opportunity for women who want to delay childbirth, it also presents a pressure to do so.

As Samantha Allan says in the Daily Beast:

While some female employees will undoubtedly benefit from this unexpected perk, the inclusion of egg-freezing coverage in an already male-dominated industry could make tech an even more hostile place for women who don’t want to make the choice between career and family…On top of dealing with notorious levels of sexual harassment… women in tech might be put under even more pressure to delay childbirth in favor of career advancement if company leadership has provided the means to do so. Given the tech industry’s problem with the retention of female employees, too, it’s hard not to perceive the inclusion of egg freezing coverage as an attempt to squeeze more value out of women before they abandon the industry altogether.

At its root, the policy brings us to fumble with the question: Is egg-freezing, as a covered procedure, feminist or anti-feminist? To grossly oversimplify feminism(s), the answer rests on the role of choice. Feminist technologies, in both design and use, open up choices to women. Anti-feminist technologies, in both design and use, place constraints on women.

The concrete question then becomes:  Is it enabling to offer women employees the choice to freeze their eggs, or does it imply to women that they must put off motherhood if they wish to participate in this labor force? The answer, of course, is yes and yes. It is both feminist and anti-feminist; it offers choice but also shapes that choice.

All reproductive technologies carry politics of gender and power, and in the U.S., these gender-power politics are embedded in the logics of capitalism. It is therefore only within an unequal gendered system of capitalist logic that we can evaluate the political agenda of particular technologies and their implementation.

So let’s put egg-freezing into an economic and cultural context. Historically, social scientists show that within the workplace, women endure a penalty for motherhood, while men enjoy a bonus from fatherhood. That is, the role of Parent holds different consequences for men and women. Women, assumed to take on primary child care responsibilities, become professionally discredited. And indeed, the gendered division of child care labor does lead women to leave their careers.  In contrast, men who become fathers presumably take on an heir of responsibility without the burden of divided time or attention, leading to positive workplace evaluations and material gains.

As a 31 year old woman, I see the anxieties of this reality in action on a regular basis. Many of my similarly aged friends are putting off kids in order to stay professionally competitive. In fact, many of these friends find their husbands and male partners pushing for kids, a push against which they have to negotiate. Of those who have had children, many (though not all) decided to quit their jobs and are staying home, at least temporarily. To be clear, all of these life choices are valid, but should be understood as part of a larger pattern, one reflective of a cultural and economic climate. It is this climate, and these choices, that play into the role of egg-freezing as a technology itself, and as an employer-covered procedure.

To cover egg-freezing, is indeed to offer choice. It also, however, imposes pressure. It is both feminist and anti-feminist. And it will remain such, until cultural and structural changes facilitate true gender equality.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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The contemporary information economy is made up of prosumers—those who simultaneously produce and consume. This is exciting, as we lay-folk become micro-journalists, creating content and spreading what others create. However, such a system poses serious questions about the ethics of sharing practices.

In what follows, I offer a skeleton guideline for the ethics of sharing. It is purposely broad so as to remain flexible. I offer three key guiding principles: Who always matters; Intention always matters; and The law is a really good suggestion.

1) Who always matters

The identity and network size of the content producer matters, as does the identity and network size of the sharer.

Content produced by public figures are generally fair game. Content produced by mere mortals (i.e., the rest of us) should be handled more carefully. This has traditionally been the conventional ethics of journalism in newspapers, magazines, and the evening newscast. Such ethical conventions are put in place to protect the privacy of private citizens, given the power of journalists to tell someone else’s story. In the age of digitization, we are all the tellers of other’s stories. To do so responsibly and respectfully, it is important to think about who’s story we share, and what the consequences will be for that person.

Of course, not all sharing is equally  consequential. Some people have a broader public reach—more Klout, if you will—than others. Content shared by those with name recognition and  large followings hold greater weight and spread further than content shared by those with less name recognition and smaller followings. Rather than a polemic divide, we can think of this as a sharing power continuum. For instance, Jon Stewart has far stronger sharing power than a local politician, who maintains stronger sharing power than a citizen in the town that politician governs. As a great philosopher of our time once said, “With great power, comes great responsibility”-Spiderman. Those with lots of sharing power have greater reason to err on the side of privacy maintenance.

2) Intention always matters

Before sharing, ask yourself if it is clear whether the person intended to share it beyond the original platform or not. This relates back to point 1: who matters.  If the content producer is you, someone you know, or someone with whom you have communicated, you can relatively easily discern intention. Whenever possible, share in line with the content producer’s wishes. When personal knowledge of producers’ intentions are unavailable, type of content can be a good clue.

Some kinds of content are clearly intended for sharing, while others are clearly not. For example, naked pictures sent via SMS are clearly private, while a magazine article is clearly public. Often, however, intention is murky. For instance, publicly available tweets and Facebook posts pose an ethical-sharing dilemma. Technically, they are already out there, and the technological affordances are such that the content is easily reproduced. Indeed these content producers did not use the technologically afforded settings in a way that ensured privacy.  At the same time, research on digital inequality tells us that it is often vulnerable populations who are less skilled in navigating digital technologies, and therefore more likely to unknowingly make their content available.

To be safe, if intention is unclear, for any reason, assume naivety and proceed with caution.

3) The Law is a Really Good Suggestion

Laws are put in place to protect and ensure order, but following the law is not synonymous with doing the Right Thing. As a practice, be aware of the law before making a decision. If it is illegal to share something, think about why it is illegal, consider the consequences of breaking that law, and, as mentioned in point 1, when you think about the consequences, always qualify them with for whom?

For example, many academic journal articles are copyrighted to publishing companies, and kept behind paywalls. Technically, it is illegal for me to post my own articles on a public website, but I do so anyway, with reckless abandon. I believe academic research is a public good and I have no interest in protecting the financial wellbeing of those who seek profits from treating this public good as a scarce resource.  However, all images I post to Cyborgology are either licensed for sharing through Creative Commons, or I have received personal permission from the photographer or artist, as failing to do so would violate the terms of ownership over personal creative property.

Importantly, consider that breaking the law might land you in jail. This does not mean one shouldn’t share, but when treating the law as mere suggestion, jail and hefty fines are matters of consideration.

Follow Jenny on Twitter (where you are welcome to share all of her tweets) @Jenny_L_Davis

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Let me start by saying, accessibility is a human rights issue, not an afterthought. Frankly, it’s an insult to people with disabilities that access is even a subject of debate. And yet…

The Technology, Equality, and Accessibility in College and Higher Education Act (i.e., the TEACH Act) is currently under debate in congress. The legislation requires that technologies used in college classrooms be accessible to all students, including students with disabilities. It is entirely possible that you have not heard of the TEACH Act, but for those who it most affects—students with bodies that deviate from the norm—the stakes are quite high. The bill has some strong support, but also strong opposition, from surprising sources.  

Digitally mediated technologies play a significant role in the pedagogies of many college professors, and success in a class often depends upon the successful navigation of these technologies. Though most would agree that giving some students learning resources while withholding those resources from others is egregiously unfair, students with disabilities often find themselves on the losing end of just this scenario. Rather than a malicious or calculating decision on the part of educators, these inequities are instead a product of ambient ableism, in which general logic accounts for needs of ‘typical’ bodies, while those with bodies deemed ‘non-typical’ are expected to adapt and make due.

This norm-privileging logic guides those who argue against the TEACH act. The opposition is led by the American Council on Education (ACE), which, along with 20 other educational groups, wrote a letter to Tom Harkin, the senator who chairs the Education Committee, detailing their concerns. They argue that TEACH will prevent technological development and implementation, harming all students. As stated in the letter:

 This provision creates an impossible-to-meet standard for institutions and will result in a significant chilling effect in the usage of new technology

 Yes, perhaps requiring educators to employ only accessible technologies in the classroom will ‘chill’ the use of new technologies. However, this ‘chilling’ points not to a problem with TEACH, but rather, an ingrained problem of prejudice, manifesting in nothing less than institutional bigotry.

ACE’s argument rests on ableist practices, in which technologies—both ‘built’ and digital— are created for ‘typical’ users, and then when financially plausible and temporally convenient, adapted for people with different needs. This is a logic that dismisses, or entirely ignores, the principles of universal design, slugging off the needs of those on the margins with a flippant ‘ya, we’ll get to you when we have time, but let’s take care of the Normals first.’ It is a model of build-then-adapt, rather than build with the wide variety of human needs in mind.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires ‘reasonable accommodation’ for those utilizing public and commercial services. In 2010, this was expanded to include accessible design. The legal debate, then, rests on what is reasonable. I implore those who oppose TEACH to consider the implications of defining equal access to educational materials as even potentially unreasonable.

Jenny Davis is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University and a weekly contributor for Cyborgology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

Netiquette. I seriously hate that word. BUT an issue of internet-based-etiquette (blogger etiquette, specifically) recently came to my attention, and I’m interested in others’ practices and thoughts.

As a blogger, I often analyze content from Facebook and Twitter. In doing so, I usually post images of actual tweets, comments, and status updates. These are forms of data, and are useful in delineating the public tenor with regard to a particular issue, the arguments on opposing sides of a debate, and the ‘voice’ with which people articulate their relevant thoughts and sentiments.

As a common practice, I black out all identifying information when reposting this content. Last week, I posted some tweets with the names and images redacted. A reader commented on my post to ask why I did so, given that the tweets were public. We had a quick discussion, but, as I mentioned in that discussion, this issue deserves independent treatment.

My rationale for blacking out names/handles/pictures, even when accounts and content are public, is that it is, in my opinion, the respectful thing to do. Privacy is confusing on the Internet, and I doubt those people intended for their content to reappear on my blog post. That is, just because something is public doesn’t mean others should publicize it. As a general rule, I rely on the ethic of “Don’t be a jerk.” To restate it positively, I believe in collective care and stewardship, in which we all act with each other’s best interest in mind.

To be sure, one might argue that I am doing a disservice by using content without giving name credit. This is a valid point. In some cases, people are not only aware that their content is public, but this publicity is intentional.  That I use their ideas without proper citation is reasonable cause for people to get pretty cheezed off. Taken to its logical extreme, I could be accused of intellectual property violation. Taken at the level of my own personal ethics, idea use without citation is kind of a jerk move.

The trouble is that unless a person explicitly states otherwise—either publicly or through personal communication—that they wish for their name to appear or not appear, I have no way of knowing their intention. If I were a journalist for a well-funded publication, with all of the concomitant resources (i.e., time, money, and assistants), I could seek out individual content producers and ask their preference. This is a relatively laborious process, though, and of course people may or may not respond to direct inquires. As a safe short cut, I err on the side of privacy protection. The stakes are simply not even. To fail to give name credit is at worst a neutral outcome for the content creator. To attribute an idea to someone who did not realize their voice would spread so far, could potentially have dire consequences.

This is my deeply imperfect rationale. I’m interested in what others do, and their reasoning behind it.

Follow Jenny on Twitter (where she won’t reveal your true identity, unless you ask her to): @Jenny_L_Davis

Can a gift be a data breach? Lots of Apple product users think so, as evidenced by the strong reaction against the company for their unsolicited syncing of U2’s latest album songs of innocence to 500 million iCloud accounts. Although part of the negative reaction stems from differences of musical taste, what Apple shared with customers seems less important than the fact that they put content on user accounts at all.

With a proverbial expectant smile, Apple gifted the album’s 11 songs to unsuspecting users. A promotional move, this was timed with the launch of the iPhone6 and Apple iWatch. And much like teenagers who find that their parents spent the day reorganizing their bedrooms, some customers found the move invasive rather than generous.

Sarah Wanenchack has done some great work on this blog with regards to device ownership—or more precisely, our increasing lack of ownership over the devices that we buy. That Apple can, without user permission, add content to our devices, highlights this lack of ownership. Music is personal. Devices are personal. And they should be. We bought them with our own money. And yet, these devices remain accessible to the company from which they came; they remain alterable; they remain—despite a monetary transaction that generally implies buyer ownership—nonetheless shared. And this, for some people, is offensive.  

It is also a breach of privacy. Users produce data, but they also consume data. I’m sure for most people, and certainly for the decision makers at Apple, giving people music seems far less insidious than selling people’s information. But Just as opt-out models of user-data sharing, mining, and sales expose customers’ productive labor and personal information to unexpected parties in unexpected ways, opt-out models of data-gifting infiltrate customers’ private consumptive spaces.

Admittedly, the exposure in this case is mainly just inconvenient. At worst, those who aren’t fans of U2’s music made an appalled face as they found their playlist infiltrated by an unappealing sound.

But if we push this, and think about what Apple did with this gift, the act itself becomes worrisome, if not surprising. If they can put this content into one’s collection, they can put other content in too. Putting content in means entering, uninvited, into a presumably private realm. The space, in short, was never yours.

I leave you now with 2 gifts of my own:

1.) Link to remove U2 album (if you are so inclined): https://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/offerOptOut

2.) Some of my favorite public Twitter responses

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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The sociologist Kai T. Erikson says that boundaries are made and reinforced on the public scaffold. In the Ray and Janay rice case, Twitter is that public scaffold.

To briefly recap, Ray Rice is a (now former) NFL football player for the Baltimore Ravens. He was originally suspended for two games after part of a video surfaced of his abusive behavior towards his then fiancé, Janay. His suspension from the NFL was made indefinite following TMZ’s release of the entire video[i] in which he punches Janay, and then drags her unconscious body out of a hotel elevator. Though Ray was punished by the NFL, Janay maintained their relationship, marrying him and then releasing a statement in Ray’s defense.

While the public outrage over Ray Rice makes him an object of boundary reinforcement—“violence against women is wrong”—Janay Rice is the object of a boundary war. 

Though apologists have a presence—this was especially true in the beginning—Ray Rice has largely been the object of public derision.

As have those who failed to take his offense seriously enough

The reaction to Janay,  however, has been far more contentious, as some arduously defend and support her, while others cast her as weak, stupid, and morally culpable.

That is, Janay has become the site of a moral boundary war upon which the moral tenor of Women Who Stay is at stake. The trouble with this boundary war, as fought through Twitter, is that each side, the moral crusaders and moral defenders, cast Janay—as an agentic and empowered subject—aside. That is, they turn Janay into  an object through which they exemplify a moral claim. In both cases, it—the moral claim—becomes synonymous with and then subsumes she—the moral subject. Either it/she is complicit in abusive dynamics or it/she is helpless and therefore not culpable. If moral wars are fought on the scaffold, Janay’s is  the body displayed prominently in the public square.

But then there’s #whyistayed and #whyileft. These offshoots of the Rice discourse do something qualitatively different than the debates categorized under the encompassing #Janayrice hashtag. Refusing to wage war on and through the object of Janay, women on #whyistayed and #whyileft project their own voices; share their own stories.

The women tweeting on #whyistayed and #whyileft shift the site of battle onto themselves, as active subjects. They put themselves on the public scaffold along with Janay, and shout down to the crowds below.

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[i] I don’t link to the video because I don’t think it’s my place to publicize or watch the traumatic experience of a woman, thereby amplifying her trauma through its public scrutiny.

*Special Thanks to @TonyPLove who learned in 1 day how to mine twitter and conduct sentiment analyses, skills we are using to collaborate on a more formal treatment of the moral boundary debate.

Jenny Davis is an assistant professor of Sociology at James Madison University and a weekly contributor for Cyborgology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis