Irwin Altman defines privacy as “the selective control of access to the self” (1977:67).  To maintain privacy is not, necessarily, to avoid disclosure, but to exhibit autonomy and choice over that which is, and it not, exposed. A privacy violation is that which unduly inhibits this control.

What counts as a privacy violation is far from straight forward, and always situation specific.   Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework  delineates the relationship between situational expectations and relative control over access to the self. Specifically, Nissenbuam argues that each context contains its own set of privacy norms, or expectations about how much of the self will be accessible. From this perspective, a privacy violation is that which violates privacy norms. Or in other words, privacy is violated when the self is more accessible than one has agreed to. Ostensibly, one could then avoid those contexts in which the self is highly accessible, and cry “violation!” when the self is unduly accessed.  

This assumes, however, a freedom of choice that fails to account for the empirical circumstances of the contemporary, highly connected, era.

What if the context is unavoidable, yet the privacy norms are disconcerting? Such is the potential case for mobile phone usage. I say potential because I do not assume that everyone finds the privacy norms surrounding mobile phones unsettling. Those who do, however, may feel a bit stuck. Your phone tracks you. It records what you do, where you go, with whom you communicate. Your data are scraped, sold, and distributed among corporate entities and government agencies. This is the new normal. And yet, the mobile phone—and increasingly the smartphone—are integral parts of everyday life. A recent Pew report shows that about half of all cell phone users would find it “very hard or impossible” to give their devices up. These devices are woven into the logic of contemporary society, and to be without one is at best burdensome, and for some, virtually impossible.

Within this context, then, one can assume a high degree of access to the self, whether desirable or not. This is the key privacy dilemma of the contemporary era, and this creates a need. Specifically, it creates a need to subvert  contextual privacy norms, allowing users to access the technologies, while limiting access to the self. The goods and services that pop up in response to this need create a silent battle between privacy as a right, and privacy as a commodity.

Simply, those goods and services that seek to render profit construct privacy as a commodity. Those goods and services that are freely available, construct privacy as a right. To illustrate this point, let us compare two responses to the privacy dilemma: The Blackphone and ChatSecure.

Blackphone is a piece of hardware that advertises privacy for its consumers. Specifically, it is an Android based smartphone for which geo-tracking and data availability are opt-in—rather than opt-out. The default setting is such that users’ data remain private, literally locked in a Swiss vault, rather than dispersed among advertisers and the NSA. This phone sells for $629. Apparently, that’s what privacy, as a commodity, costs. Indeed, the tagline on the Blackphone site tellingly reads:

If privacy is a commodity, it is necessarily not a right. A commodity is available to some, those who can afford it; those who elect to put their resources towards it. A right, on the other hand, is a given. It is secured; it need not (or should not) be earned, bought, or benevolently granted.

ChatSecure, and applications like it, are material manifestations of privacy-as-right as opposed to privacy-as-commodity. ChatSecure is a free encryption application that allows users to communicate with increased privacy across platforms and operating systems. The application is open source and was constructed by a consortium of hackers, developers, and activists. Moreover, it is advertisement free. As the website claims: “we want your love, not your money.”

Earnst Schraube contends that technologies are materialized action. They do something, but are also, always, imbued with human value. The meaning and place of privacy is both at stake, and reflected in, data protection mechanisms. The question, is are we willing to consume privacy? And if we do so, do we forego privacy-as-right in favor of privacy-as-commodity?  And perhaps most importantly, do we, as consumers, have a real choice?

Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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The Internet is officially abuzz about Facebook Inc.’s newly expanded gender categories.  Here’s the story in brief: Facebook now allows users to select from over 50 gender identifications, such as genderqueer, cisgender, agender etc. (here is a glossary of the options). The move has drawn the expected responses from all of the usual suspects. The deep conservatives are annoyed, the liberals are elated, and the critical progressives appreciate the gesture, realize its significance, but remain dissatisfied with any form of identification confined to a box. I’m of the critical progressive camp, and happy to defer you readers to all of the smart things written by other people.

Meanwhile, I want to focus on another piece of the gender-identity expansion, a piece of great significance which has nonetheless snuck by in light of the jubilation, fighting, and intellectualism surrounding our new opportunity to bend the gender binary.  Namely, I want to talk about privacy, and Facebook’s shifting discourse about identity and power.

A key defining characteristic of Facebook is the profile’s connection to a “real world” referent. Terms of Service are such that users are supposed to display their real names and maintain only a single profile. The architecture is such that other users are easy to find and connect with. The normative structure is such that requests for connection are generally abided. All of this sets the stage for quickly growing intertwining networks. Such intertwinement results in context collapse, or the blurring of network walls, as Facebook users engage with others from the multitude—sometimes contradictory—roles which make up the self.

Recognizing context collapse, and addressing the issue,  Zuckerberg (in)famously said to David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, that:

The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity  

That is, Zuckerberg (and by extension, Facebook Inc.) ignored throngs of social psychological research about self and identity. But more than that, remained ignorant to the reality that some identities are more troublesome than others, and that those who hold troublesome identities may need to maintain network separations for reasons having little to do with integrity. Or, as Anil Dash aptly summarizes:

If you are twenty-six years old, you’ve been a golden child, you’ve been wealthy all your life, you’ve been privileged all your life, you’ve been successful your whole life, of course you don’t think anybody would ever have anything to hide

Along comes the new 50+ gender option. My favorite feature of this option is its privacy settings. Unlike a life event, changes in gender are not displayed via the News Feed. Moreover, and more importantly, users can select which members of their network are privy to their newly customized identification.

Implicitly, then, through an architectural alteration to the Facebook platform, Zuckerberg acknowledges that some identities are in fact marginalizing. That separation can be an issue of safety, rather than integrity. That collapsed contexts, though not without benefit, hold differential consequences for different kinds of people. It’s an acknowledgment that power matters, and that those without it have less freedom in both interaction and identification.

The expansion of gender categories is a step, if imperfect, in the right direction. It pushes and rearranges, but never radically breaks. The privacy sensitivity surrounding the new gender options, though, is a pretty big deal.       

Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_l_Davis

As a professional sociologist, I maintain membership in several listservs and social networking site groups centered around my areas of study. Every now and then, someone will post a request for a particular academic article to which they do not have access at their home university. Quickly, another member of the group provides the article, and we all go about our business.

Not having access to one article, for a connected professional, is no big deal. But imagine if that same professional never had access to academic articles unless they were willing to pay—exorbitantly—to get beyond publishers’ paywalls. Were that the case, it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for that professional to conduct research.

Much of the debate surrounding open access contends that social research should be a “public good,” and therefore openly available. I wholeheartedly agree (in fact, that link above goes to my own post about scholarship as a public good). But today, I want to think about who is *really* harmed, or at least, harmed the most, by paywalls. The clearest victims of paywalls, I argue, are the growing number of professionally trained scholars occupying non-full-time positions within the academy, or positions outside of the academy altogether.

Yes. In an ideal world, all scholarship would be available to all interested parties. But let’s get real for second, the general  public doesn’t need (or probably want) to wade through long, dry, jargon-ridden academic journal articles, adorned with gratuitous citations and unnecessarily semi-coloned titles.  They are interested in the ideas, which are probably best conveyed in journalistic publications (i.e., newspapers and magazines), blogs, and crossover books. But what about someone who wants to do research? Someone, say, who has a PhD but no University affiliation. An “independent scholar,” if you will.

Research articles have lots of citations. They have an entire section just for a review of the literature, and the scholarly public expects more citations sprinkled throughout the methods and analysis. Quite simply, one cannot do academic research without easy, affordable access to the academic work that’s already out there. And this, I argue, primarily affects the growing number of PhD’s whose jobs reside on the margins, or entirely outside of, formal academia.

Here’s how journal access works. Some journals are open access. Not a lot, though, and not many of the “big names.” Articles from these journals can be accessed on the web, at any time, by anyone with Internet connection. Other journals—most journals—live behind paywalls.  Individual citizens can purchase access to the contents of these journals for a not unsubstantial fee. Typically it’s somewhere around $15-$20 for a single article, or several hundred dollars for a year’s subscription. To effectively conduct research, a person realistically needs access to the archived content from many, many journals, spanning multiple years. The personal cost is prohibitive, to say the least. Authors can opt to purchase open access for their own work, and universities can sponsor their faculties’ work, making it publicly available. This costs thousands of dollars, though, and again, effects only a single piece of work, while an aspiring researcher needs access to All of The Work.  Luckily for university-affiliated faculty and students, institutions’ libraries usually purchase subscriptions to a wide array of journals, and grant access to those who teach and learn at these institutions. Moreover, these institutions are interconnected through Inter Library Loan (ILL) such that missing materials can be easily supplemented by a partnering institution.  Basically, a researcher can only be a researcher if s/he maintains the right kind of institutional affiliation.

Here is what’s happening in the academy: it is getting increasingly more difficult for people with PhDs to obtain full time work within a university. Over half of all college faculty hold adjunct or non-full time positions  and the average salary of these positions is $2,000-$3,000 per class. These positions also include no benefits, no job security, and often, no offices. They currently do include, however, access to library services. So technically, if an adjunct can squeeze in time for research between their multiple classes, multitude of students, and sometimes, second jobs, they could potentially publish themselves into one of those cushy—though diminishing—full time academic positions. This is probably not going to happen—24 hours are simply not enough for someone who makes at best $30,000/year teaching five classes per semester. For now, though, it could.

For now. Non-full time faculty, like all “part-time” contract workers, are a vulnerable bunch. Not only can their jobs be cut without notice, so too can the few benefits afforded them. If universities already ask faculty to teach without basic teaching resources like offices and computers, it is not a stretch to imagine that, when the whim hits, these universities could take away library resources as well.

Moreover, $30,000/year, teaching five classes (and again, I’m being generous with these numbers), with no job security or health benefits, is pretty untenable as a long term career. Without supplemental support-say, a spouse with a full time job—it is incredibly difficult to make a living, and close to impossible to support a family. This creates a circumstance in which it is increasingly difficult for a trained professional to stay affiliated within the academy, and all but necessary that s/he seek employment in other realms.

To leave the academy, though, is to leave behind access to scholarly works. To leave behind access to scholarly works is to forgo the possibility of ever returning to the academy. One cannot conduct scholarship without access to journals; one cannot access journals without institutional affiliation and inclusion as a beneficiary of library services.  In short, the relationship between hiring practices of universities, and economic practices of publishing companies, makes it such that huge numbers of professionally trained scholars are precluded—potentially, actually, technically, and practically—from engaging in scholarly work. Once this exclusion occurs, it builds on itself, further excluding the marginalized, and blocking their way back in, one paywall at a time.

Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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Like many Americans, I spent Sunday evening watching the Super Bowl. This entailed tasty snacks, a comfy couch, and lots of head shaking because, well, the Denver Broncos. It also involved Facebook and Twitter. The day of, day before, and day after were full of commentary, predictions, snarkiness, and declarations of various sorts. Indeed, Sunday’s Super Bowl, like all media events, incorporated multiple media.  One item, within one piece of this media ecology, keenly sparked my interest: The Twitter feed of @YesYoureRacist.

The Super Bowl commercials are as much a part of the spectacle as the game itself. Two ads in particular garnered a lot of attention on social media.  One was Coca-Cola’s multi-lingual rendering of “America the Beautiful.” Another was the second in a series of Cheerios commercials featuring an interracial family.

Naturally, people responded to these advertisements in racist ways. And Logan Smith, who operates the Twitter handle @YesYoureRacist collected and shared all of the transgressions he could find.  For example:

The logic behind @YesYoureRacist is a simple shaming ritual. It takes individual racist locutions, highlights them, and publicly heckles to speaker. To be sure, the things these people say are racist. In fact, the things these people say are downright asshole-ish. But I don’t believe that personal, public shaming is the most effective antiracist strategy. First, though well intentioned, the practice is a little asshole-ish in its own right. Second, and more importantly, the strategy of public shaming may be counterproductive to the larger project of fostering race consciousness.

Racism is a systemic problem, which manifests in the ignorant words and actions of culturally embedded Americans. But also, it manifests in disproportionate incarceration rates, disproportionate wealth distributions, disproportionate educational attainment, and disproportionate access to health care.

Publicly shaming those who espouse overtly racist statements is useful in reminding the collective “us” that race-based judgments are still prevalent, and that whites are still the privileged class. However, it also firmly locates racism in the safe ideological space of individualism, perpetuating the false belief that racism can be eradicated, if only we could educate those un-evolved, uneducated, backward thinking, racist individuals.

In the meanwhile, “we” can use these ignorant racists as an alter against which to define ourselves. Slowly shaking our heads, wearing our most concerned expressions, wondering (always out loud) how such antiquated thinking can still exist in 2014.

Bonilla-Silva famously writes about racism without racists. He shows how racism persists alongside colorblind rhetorics. This racism without racists facilitates personal disidentification with racial realities and affords racist citizens the liberty to divorce themselves from complicity within a racially unjust system. This hinges on individualist conceptions of race relations.

The kind of individualist framing inherent in shaming endeavors, though it certainly highlights the existence of deeply racist people, simultaneously hides the ways that racism is a key structural component of American culture, infiltrating its institutions, organizations, and citizens. This is detrimental to the larger antiracist project.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter: @Jenny_L_Davis 

So I’ve been thinking a lot about curation and its role in contemporary social life. I’ve had such thoughts before, and have since expanded upon them. Here’s where I am…

Curation is the act of picking and choosing, marginalizing and highlighting, adding, deleting, lumping, and splitting. Social life in itself is highly curatorial, as social actors necessarily filter infinite masses of stimuli, selecting and preening in intricate ways while sculpting performances out of the broad slabs that constitute affect, body, and demeanor. In what follows, I argue that new technologies—and social media in particular—amplify curation, facilitating its operation as a key organizing principle of augmented sociality.

Specifically, I briefly outline a three-pronged theory of curation, in which social actors curate their own performances, curate what they see, and are always subject to curatorial practices of others—both human and machine. I refer to curated performance as outgoing curation, curated viewing as incoming curation, and curation at the hands of others as third-party curation.

Outgoing Curation

Performances of self and identity through social media are highly curated. By default, one cannot share every detail of hirself, in all places, at all times. Rather s/he constantly chooses what to reveal, what to conceal, when to do so, and for whom. Such decisions are complicated by the affordances of various social media platforms. Context collapse on Facebook, for instance, means that the social actor has to manage hir performance in ways that appeal to vastly disparate network nodes. Similarly, the affordances of many platforms are such that content can be saved, replicated, and edified in ways that shape not only how the social actor appears, but who the social actor can later become.

Loads of research address the curatorial practices of identity performance through social media. Users can elect to post only flattering pictures, curating their physical images. They can engage in the lowest common denominator approach, sharing only that which will be appropriate for the most sensitive members of the audience. They choose which news stories to share, which annoyances to rant about, when to #humblebrag, when to tag, when to check-in, and when to keep quiet. Users can utilize Fakebooks, aliases, and privacy settings to disperse different performances amongst different audiences. Users can share content through ephemeral media, such as Snapchat, reclaiming one-to-one communicative practices and electing to perform in mediated ways, without leaving artifacts behind. Or, as participants in my own study of social media have said, they can show the “highlight reel,” emphasizing fun, friendship, and success, while largely ignoring the “heavy stuff.” Alternatively, they can utilize social media as a stage on which to elicit sympathy and encouragement, or to perform collective action and political activism.

Incoming Curation

Of course, those who engage social media do more than perform. They also view performances. And the show is highly curated.  I call this selective visibility. The relevance of the audience role for social media users becomes clear in Whitney Erin Boesel’s (@weboesel) reconceptualization of friendship practices, in which she argues that the new labor of friendship falls not to the storyteller, but the reader, who is obligated to sort through bushels of content to glean the important performative acts of one another.

The issue has been well addressed in terms of news and political content consumption. Much of this research shows that people seek out confirmation, creating something of a bubble effect.  At the social level, social media users block, unfriend, skim, and ignore, looking for that which they find relevant, reality confirming, friendship affirming and so forth. In my  own research, I saw that people base these decisions on political affiliation, closeness of ties, and general demeanor (i.e. they delete/block/skim over network connections who are “immature,” politically offensive, politically correct, too happy, too sad, too braggy, too boring etc.).

Third Party Curation

Both outgoing and incoming curatorial practices are quite laborious. Social media users constantly decide what to share, what do to, where to look, and when to close their eyes. A significant portion of curation, however, is out of the actor’s active control. All curation—both outgoing and incoming—is subject to the curatorial practices and policies of others. These others consist of both social actors in a user’s network, and algorithms that sort content on social media platforms.

A social actor can carefully decide what to share and not share, but other network members play a significant part. First, these others can add to one another’s performances through tags, @ connects etc. Second, they can accept or reject connections the target actor initiates, accepting or rejecting the performance of a connection between them. Moreover, outgoing curation (i.e. performance) is always subject to others’ incoming curatorial decisions. That is, the audience need not read what the performer writes. Concretely, although I may share copious dog pictures on Facebook, other Facebook users can opt not to accept my Friend request, to de-Friend me, to block me, or to skim over the content I’ve shared.

Similarly, incoming curatorial efforts are beholden to the outgoing curatorial efforts of those in one’s network. I may seek out the content of a long lost high school friend, but they may  put me on limited profile, engage in “highlight reel” style sharing, or refuse to grant me access altogether.

Finally, both incoming and outgoing curatorial efforts are further subject to machine-based (though human-written) algorithms. Any site with a feed-style format (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) does not show all content that its user’s share. Rather, each site utilizes an algorithm to share what they deem most relevant. That is, each of our curatorial efforts—both incoming and outgoing—run through a second round of curation, one outside of our control.

I am still thinking through these ideas, so suggestions—and especially citations—for any of the sections are welcome.

Keep the conversation going on Twitter (a highly curatorial space): @Jenny_L_Davis

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This is the first post in a new Cyborgology series we call #review. #review Features links to, summaries of, and discussions around academic journal articles and books. This week, I’m reviewing:

Goodings, Lewis and Ian Tucker. 2014. “Social Media and the Co-Production of Bodies Online: Bergson, Serres, and Facebook’s Timeline.” Media Culture & Society 36(1):37-51. [paywalled PDF]

Goodings and Tucker work to understand the difficulties of embodiment in light of pervasive technological mediation, and in particular, Facebook’s Timeline. They do so using data from 8 focus groups, with a total of 25 participants.

The authors refer to technologically mediated embodiment as that embodiment which exists in light of, and conjunction with, pervasive electronic and digital media. Through the work, the authors identify two key problems or difficulties of technologically mediated embodiment. First, technologically mediated embodiment troubles communicative boundaries, as multiple networks, with varying expectations, converge together in shared social spaces. Second, technologically mediated embodiment stifles the fluid nature of personal biography, cementing the past in ways which inhibit future re-interpretations of the self.

Goodings and Tucker address the first issue—blurring of network boundaries—utilizing Serres theory of communication.  Serres contends that all nodes of communication require mediation, or a host. That host, however, necessarily creates “noise,” or that which disrupts communication. For example, telephones create static, voices stutter, and Wifi connections run slowly. Facebook is the platform of interest for Goodings and Tucker (though they imply that their work is applicable in the broader social media context). The noise produced by social media, for technologically mediated bodies, is that of blurred boundaries. Specifically, technologically mediated bodies experience noise when temporally distinct selves and socially distinct networks converge in ways that contradict one another.  The problem of the contemporary citizen is then to manage this noise, while engaging through the host (i.e. Facebook or social media platforms more generally). The authors write:

…[W]hen online bodies are fed back to us through Facebook there can be a sequence of unanticipated connections. To Facebook users…it also presents a moment where the computer mediation is revealed, a process that requires managing the coming together of bodies from different ‘space–times’. This is a distinct problem in social media, as in offline social situations it is typically accepted that our different bodies or selves are unlikely to collide (42)

…[N]oise does not simply refer to a technical term of communication engineering, but refers to an additional element that is produced through the mediated act of communicating. In the case of social media this involves the mediated technological space of connecting online… [C]ommunication in Facebook is focused on conveying certain messages from their sender perspective, for example about a night out. Yet Facebook introduces intermediary actions in terms of the visibility of the communication to those who will receive the message. The technology itself works in such a way as to create certain forms of noise (44).

I love the use of Serres, and in particular, the “noise” metaphor. However, the authors spend several hundred words delineating the existence of “context collapse,” a well-established concept which describes the blurring of network boundaries within social media, without ever citing the term, or engaging with its surrounding literature. Here is a short literature review, and etiology of context collapse as a concept. This exclusion is unfortunate, as the words spent describing context collapse could have been better spent connecting Serres’ metaphor with the existing literature. With that said, those of us interested in context collapse will likely find this article useful moving forward.

The second difficulty of technologically mediated embodiment, as identified by Goodings and Tucker, is that of an overly static and fragmented biography. They focus empirically on Timeline, and frame their discussion using the work of Henri Bergson. Specifically, they conceptualize the body using Bergson’s images. For Bergson, the social world is made up of an assemblage of images, or that which the body perceives. Images reside between things and representations. The body is a special kind of image, unique as the only image known from the inside.  Temporally, the body-as-image is a moving process, co-constructed along with other images, incorporating the whole of a past. The past, for Bergson, swells into the present and future, layering itself, atop itself. Timeline complicates this by fixing the past, selecting out documentable memories and presenting them in linear ways. The past, through Timeline, is no longer cumulative, stifling narrative movement and fluidity. The authors note that such fixing was present in earlier eras through photographs and home movies, but the contemporary era is unique in the visibility, volume, and so centrality, of these time-fixing documents. They state:

Knowing what somebody ‘did’ seems to be interactionally problematic as it mediates a fixed sense of the body, which follows along in a linear fashion and where all moments can be understood in terms of a succession of fixed points in the past. This function fails to grasp the ability for the past to be created anew in our daily attempts at reordering the past… The experience of Timeline relates to Bergson’s concept of ‘bodies as images’ which continually move, as opposed to being defined as stable spatial entities. For Bergson, the world consists of nothing other than images. Here the Facebook Timeline acts as a kind of force that spatialises past social media activity and goes against the virtual aspect of memory for Bergson, in which the past is not contained but endures, taking a temporal not spatial form. (46-47).

The authors are astute in their analysis of the affordances/constraints of Timeline. Social media are platforms through which we not only perform a self, but come to know and develop our selves. Fixing a past, especially a highly curated and selective version, alters selfing processes in significant ways. Pushing this further, and focusing perhaps on the other side of the coin, their analysis lends itself to a discussion of ephemerality. Perhaps social media tends to eschew ephemerality, upending its important role in a fluid selfing process. However, it need not. Users agentically avoid such fixing through things like whitewalling and purging. More recently, new technologies have come to the fore which embrace ephemerality. Snapchat is, of course, the quintessential example. This social media platform facilitates a body that is both technologically mediated and simultaneously ephemeral. It has a solution built in. It is part of the social media ecology through which users share the mundane, the private, the floating pieces.

I applaud the authors for their insistence upon avoiding binaries. Moreover, the work is highly useful and insightful as an analysis of Facebook Timeline in its own right. Further, the piece smartly incorporates the work of Bergson and Serres, locating these theorists, in useful ways, within discourses of new technologies. Moving forward, the context collapse literature can benefit from the integration of this piece (just as this piece could have benefited from the inclusion of context-collapse theorizing). Moreover, the piece offers a starting point for talking about fixidity, ephemerality, and the technologically mediated body.

Jenny is a weekly contributor for Cyborgology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

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When my phone rings, it’s almost always my mom, or her mom, or my partner’s mom. It’s always somebody’s mom.  For everyone else, the notification is a buzz, a ding, a quick vibration. For all of the not-moms in my life, we communication via text message, Facebook, Twitter, email, chat, or Skype. We connect regularly, but rarely through voice calls. When I do pick up the phone, I last about 30 minutes max. Then, my ear feels hot, my shoulders tense, and I refuse to ask “were you talking to me, or to Dad?”” one more time.

This is indicative of a wider trend. The telephone, as a medium of voice-talk, is in massive decline—at least amongst the texting public. A widely cited 2012 CDC study shows that over half of all American homes rely predominately on mobile devices, with almost 40% living in landline-free homes. And we all know, the cellphone is far better at just about everything than voice-to-voice communication.  With smartphones, the talk function seems almost like an afterthought, available in case of emergency.

And this shift away from traditional telephones and their voice-call functions is, I argue, the result of an inherently flawed medium. I don’t prefer alternate forms of communication because I am inept at conversation; I prefer alternate forms because the telephone is inept at facilitating conversation. I’m not even referring here to fuzzy connections and dropped calls. Those are imperfections in the system. I’m talking about a deep social-psychological flaw with the telephone as a mediating device.

Ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts say that the best conversations have a continuous flow, with each speaker picking up just as hir partner leaves off, barely overlapping. This kind of conversation requires intense engagement, and highly accurate cue-reading on the parts of interaction partners. Interruptions and extended silences disrupt the conversational flow, and create a less satisfying interaction.

Off the bat, the telephone puts interactants at a disadvantage by taking away all but vocal cues. The listener cannot see the speaker’s face to tell if s/he is merely taking a breath, or waiting for a response. The speaker remains ignorant to the listener’s nods, not knowing if quiet indicates deep enthrallment, distraction, or outright boredom.

To be clear, I am not advocating a “reduced social cues model”  or celebrating face-to-face as the gold standard. I don’t think technologically mediated interaction necessarily reduces social cues, or that social cue reduction is necessarily a problem. I do think, however, that the telephone reduces social cues in a problematic way.

The problem with the telephone goes beyond inhibiting the perfect conversation. Let’s be honest, a perfect conversational flow is rare. More often, we converse imperfectly, with lulls, interruptions, general choppiness. Most communication media, however, have tools which help us manage those imperfections.

Asynchronous communication, like email messages, texts, and Facebook wall posts, do away with many of the difficult conventions of real-time interaction. One need not reply right away, nor disrupt what s/he is doing. The message waits, ready for reply at the recipient’s earliest convenience.

Synchronous communication media, though requiring real-time responses, have mechanisms which help conversations along.  Skype allows interactants to see each other’s faces, get the background and context, lets an eye roll to stand in for a snarky reply. When conversing in person, the environment becomes a wonderful tool in interaction maintenance. Don’t know what to say? Wonder out about the restaurant you just passed by, pet the dog in the room, coddle the child, discuss the interesting piece of architecture, or, if all else fails, people-watch for a few seconds until someone comes up with something to say. When engaging through relay-chat (IM), interactants relax their expectations for seamless flow. Each interactant is granted a delay with which to articulate hir thoughts. As s/he types them, the chat feature often informs hir partner that the response is still in development. “Jenny is typing…” is a way for me to show my partner that I am still engaged, and a way for hir to know that it is not yet hir turn. In short, it un-awkwards the silence.

The phone, I argue, is a weak link in our communication ecology, one which—in traditional form—will soon become a relic.  Add video, or take away voice, and the device is far more conversationally conducive.

Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

The Quantified Self is defined—in the tagline of the movement’s website—as self -knowledge through numbers.  With the example of the Tikker “Happiness Watch” (also known as the Death Watch) I argue for the primacy of self-knowledge within the movement, and the subservient role of numbers.

Self-quantifiers utilize technologies to tell themselves, about themselves. The information gleaned through self-quantification practices and technologies are meant to facilitate mindfulness, which facilitates control, which facilitates change in a desired direction. For instance, if a FitBit tells its user how many calories s/he consumes and burns, the user is made aware of hir consumptive practices, exercise patterns, how these relate to body size, and what s/he can do to maintain or alter that body size to accomplish greater or lesser mass. The technologically induced numbers, however, are those which serve a human purpose. It’s less about the technology, less about the numbers, and more about how self-quantifiers use them for their own desired ends. That is, technological measurements of the body serve at the pleasure the desired self. This becomes quite clear with the example of the Tikker watch.

The Tikker, as a technology, tells the user very little about hir body. This is a watch which calculates the user’s average life expectancy, and then counts down the minutes until anticipated death. It also tells time, for what that’s worth. The algorithm for life expectancy is drawn from that used by the U.S. government, and is based quite simply on age, sex, and your cohort’s life table. As a woman of 30 years and 2 months, I have about 55.4 years left to live. If I were a man, that drops to 51.8 years.

The technical aspects of the watch are incredibly simplistic. It takes a calculation based on age and gender, and then it counts down. One’s age and gender are the only pieces of personalizing information. It ignores lifestyle, biography, family history, environment, etc.(not to mention excluding anyone with queer gender identification). More concretely,  my estimated 55.4 years ignores that my college apartment offered free tanning facilities (knock of several years), that I run or otherwise work out 6 days per week (add on a few), that my diet is almost entirely vegetables (add a few more), but that I finish every night with an ice cream cone (knock off a couple). It ignores my grandmother who lived to 92, and my grandfather who never hit 80. It forgets the grey hairs I developed while studying for comprehensive exams, and that weird stint of almost daily cheap-beer consumption. In short, the Tikker nods to the body, in a nominal way, while concentrating significant focus on the mind. Indeed, the creators refer to this as a “Happiness Watch,” and tout it as a product which will make the world a better place. And of course, they suggest that the watch will make better people out of those who wear it. The following is taken from the website:

While death is nonnegotiable, life isn’t. The good news is that life is what you make of it – and it can be beautiful!

All we have to do is learn how to cherish the time and the life that we have been given, to honor it, suck the marrow from it, seize the day and follow our hearts. And the best way to do this is to realize that seconds, days and years are passing never to come again. And to make the right choices.

Anger or forgiveness? Tic-toc. Wearing a frown or a smile? Tic-toc. Happy or upset? Tic-toc. 

THAT’S WHY WE’VE CREATED Tikker, the death watch that counts down your life, just so you can make every second count.

Really, the Tikker is not much different than putting an inspirational saying on your bathroom mirror. It reminds you to live a certain way, focuses your energies on this lifestyle mentality, and encourages you to remain reflexive, always mindful of who you are, who you want to be, and how you have to live to get there. The only difference is that the Tikker has moving parts, a timer heading consistently and imperviously closer to zero. But this clock, these moving parts, are largely symbolic. They have little to do with the body of the person who employs it. This technology quantifies the self inaccurately, but these inaccuracies are of little consequence, as the numbers are but tools in the pursuit of a particular kind of mindfulness; a particular urgency of life.

Follow Jenny Davis on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

For those of us eagerly awaiting the Winter Olympics this February, we got an Olympics of a different kind to tide us over. Last weekend, the “Robot Olympics” took place at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in south Florida. Schaft Inc., a Google-owned Japanese company, took first place at The Games, officially called the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). The events in which competitors compete, and the criteria by which they are evaluated, are nicely illustrative of Earnst Schraube’s technology as materialized action approach, and present an opportunity to push the theory further.

Robots in the DRC complete a series of tasks relevant in disaster situations. They have to climb ladders, cross uneven surfaces, cut drywall, un-wrap hoses, turn knobs, and drive cars through an obstacle course. Points are distributed based on how well the robots approximate human movement and dexterity. Points are detracted for human intervention. The top 8 teams get to move on to DRC finals, and receive a million dollars from DARPA for further development.

Schraube’s materialized action approach combines Actor Network Theory with Critical Psychology. From the latter, Schraube uses the idea of objectification which argues that technology is always imbued with human intention. From the former, he takes the idea that technologies always act back upon humans. In short, the materialized action approach says that technologies and humans have a mutually constitutive relationship, but this relationship is lopsided. Although both humans and technologies each act upon the other, humans take the primary position. Humans construct technologies in response to human problems. They build into these technologies cultural values and intentions. Technology is the material form of human action, but one without definitive consequences.

This kind of human primacy is clear in the rules and incentive structure of the DRC.  These robots are built to engage in human tasks, judged on the closeness of their human approximation, and penalized when they fall short—requiring human intervention. Following the materialized action approach, these technologies are constructed to solve human problems, in human ways. But let’s push this a bit. Let’s ask which human problems these technologies solve, and in whose interests are the technological solutions?

Human problems—both personal and collective—are infinite. Technological solutions are not. I argue that we should always ask which problems get solved, who gets to decide, and who benefits? These questions are, of course, deeply interlinked.

Let’s take the case of the DRC. The human problems they address are those disaster relief and/or military combat. This outcome is guided by DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency—as they provide financial support for developers. Who benefits, is the U.S. Military and those willing to work for the betterment of the military. Here is DARPA’s mission statement:

DARPA’s mission is to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security by sponsoring revolutionary, high-payoff research bridging the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military use…

Exploding out this example, it seems that the problems which get addressed, how this is done, and who benefits, is largely an effect of who can pay the developmental tab. Technology costs, and those who can pay will always have a stronger voice in shaping which technologies develop, and how.

Each decision is always a decision not to do something else, just as each bit of money and energy towards one technological development is energy and money not funneled into something else. I am not arguing for or against the value of DARPA or the DRC robots. Rather, I suggest we take these questions of source and benefit as an organizing frame with which to understand technological developments, where they come from, and where they might lead.

Jenny is a weekly contributor for Cyborgology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

So, Elsevier pulled kind of a jerk move. And probably a move that’s not great for PR.

As it turns out, publishing giant Elsevier is taking down copyrighted papers from Academia.edu. Here’s a bit of background. For-profit publishing companies (like Elsevier, Sage, Taylor & Francis etc.) make authors sign a copyright agreement when they publish in the journals run by these companies. This gives distribution rights to the publisher, and takes them away from the author. However, many authors (like myself) sign said agreement, and then immediately post content on Academia.edu, ResearchGate, or other academic-based social networking sites.

Technically, posting our work on these sites is illegal. However, the publishers’ policies, which create false scarcity, exploit intellectual labor, and restrict knowledge sharing, are in a word, preposterous. Here’s why:

First—and this is a moral stance—scholarship should be a public good. These publishers boast that their journals house the most innovative and world-shattering research. This is why the journals are so valuable. And in the same breath, they argue that this information should be restricted from the general public—unless, of course, that public is willing to pay exorbitant fees. If this is our model, then I can’t help but ask, what’s the point? Why bother with the sweat and toil of research if it’s only available to other researchers who will use it to inform their research, which will also be restricted from public view. The academic masturbation analogy is almost too easy.

Second, publishing companies enforce policies as though they still own the means of production, even though they no longer do. Rather, they (for now) own the means of prestige. When academic journals were distributed in print only, the number of pages in a journal, its production, and its distribution, had cost-prohibitive limitations. I do not, for instance, have the infrastructure with which to print my own work and distribute it internationally. The big publishing houses do have this infrastructure, and so, for print-based articles, I am fully dependent on them, as are potential readers. Unsurprisingly, this relationship of dependence results in a model that is most beneficial for the publishers. Here’s what that model looks like:

• Scholar puts in research/writing labor (University pays Author)
• Author submits to journal (Author pays Publishing Company submission fee)
• Scholars review submitted articles for free (nobody pays anybody)
• Editors publish articles and sell them to institutions and individuals (Readers and Universities pay Publisher)

In short, authors and reviewers engage in labor. They are paid indirectly by universities, who also pay publishers. Occasionally, individuals also pay publishers. Perhaps you’ve noticed, the only ones receiving direct payment for research activities are the publishers. Everyone else pays out, especially universities. And who pays universities? That’s right, students and tax payers.

But, ya know, computers and The Internet. Now that research articles have been digitized, the information they contain no longer needs to follow a model of scarcity. Nobody needs to check them out of the library. We can all read all of the articles, at the same time. If you spill coffee on it, you can print another (or more likely, send it to your Kindle).

Moreover, authors can easily distribute their own work without going through these companies. I can distribute this blog, for example, with no personal financial cost, no financial costs for the reader, and quite small institutional costs.  Ideas are no longer bound by profit-seeking gate-keepers. Access is no longer restricted to those with proper institutional affiliations. And this is why PJ Rey (@pjrey) argues that academic journals are the dinosaurs of academic publishing, and why David Banks (@DA_Banks) uninstalled Mendeley.

What these companies do maintain, however, is control over the means of prestige. Although this may be slowly changing, committees that decide on hiring, and on tenure and promotion, make many of these decisions based on the prestige of the journals in which a faculty member publishes. The for-profit closed access journals, with high impact factors and itty-bitty acceptance rates, as a rule, hold greater weight. I could cite statistics, but as a fresh-off-the-job-market-PhD, I will instead just say that I was told on multiple occasions, by members of different hiring committees, that my *peer-reviewed* publications weren’t “mainstream” enough. They wanted specific journals, and I wasn’t published in those[1].

In short, it’s not that individuals don’t have the resources to share their own ideas; it’s not even that not-for-profit open access models can’t provide rigorous peer-review or produce innovative and important research (they do). Rather, the incentive structure still privileges a traditional model. This model disproportionately benefits for-profit publishers.

Now, to be fair, Elsevier and others offer “open access options” for authors, and provide select articles as open access, usually for a finite amount of time. The former, however, relies on author payment (which, from my experiences, is a bargain at around $3,000). The latter offers only a glimpse of what’s offered. It’s more of a sample to draw customers in than a good-faith effort to promote public engagement. I see both of these as release valves, doing nothing to accomplish a public-goods model, but alleviating just enough of the pressure.

So quickly, let’s talk about the ways we, as academics, are complicit in perpetuating false scarcity, and the possibilities for resistance.

Quite simply, academics comply with a false-scarcity model every time they submit to, review for, or cite a paywalled article. They/we also perpetuate that model by evaluating job and/or tenure candidates based on metrics which bolster the “big name” journals.

The most obvious form of resistance includes not submitting to, reviewing for, or citing from, paywalled journals. But as usual, reality is more complicated than this. Selective submitting and reviewing is great for well-established scholars. Corner-office holders of the world, please, by all means, pave the way by placing your work exclusively in open access venues. Throw away your assumptions about impact factors and competitive acceptance rates, and hire someone who simply does good and innovative work. However, selective citation is trickier. At what point does a political stance outweigh the goal of good research? Perhaps the most relevant conversations, or germinal pieces, are located behind paywalls.

More personally relevant, what about us noobs? Our names don’t yet pull weight, and moreover, we haven’t yet entered into a lot of the academic discussions (or if we have, those engaged in the discussions probably don’t realize we’re there, quietly waving with hopeful smiles). Based on the above essay, a reader might surmise that I only publish in open-access venues.  Well, I don’t. I do when I can, but place my work first and foremost, based on journal relevance (and of course, acceptance by editors and reviewers). Sometimes that means signing a binding legal document which places my work behind a paywall. Ugh.

I do, however, ignore that legal document. I post my work on Academia.edu., share it on Twitter, and give it to anyone who will read it. No one has yet taken down anything I’ve shared, but if they do, I will repost immediately, in as many places as I can.  I’m far more willing to suffer legal repercussions than intellectual ones, and I’m not going to sacrifice participation in an academic conversation because a bunch of a-holes refuse to evolve with the changing technological affordances of the time.

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Read all of my articles un-paywalled on my Academia.edu page

Check out a great thread on the Association of Internet Researchers listserv (AIR-L) with regards to the Elsevier-Academia.edu incident: http://listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l-aoir.org/2013-December/subject.html*

*Read everything with Open Access and Elsevier. People wrote/responded under various headings, therefore breaking the thread.

Follow Jenny on Twitter, where she regularly grants access to legally inaccessible stuff: @Jenny_L_Davis

Pics via (in order):

http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2006/08/upside_down_loo.html

http://www.bestcollegesonline.org/paywalls/