On the anniversary of the Occupy movement, an anonymous saboteur released a secret video from a private Mitt Romney Fundraiser back in May, potentially replacing “99%” with “47%” as the new progressive rallying cry.

I know I ended my post last week with a promise for continuation, but that will have to wait (next week, I promise). Today, I want to talk about privacy, sousveillance, but mostly, context collapse in light of Monday’s events.

In case anyone missed it, here is what happened: An attendant at a small, private, high-dollar Mitt Romney fundraiser secretly taped Romney’s speech and released the tape to the mainstream media. On this tape, Romney makes several politically damning statements, most notably, referring to 47% of American citizens as “victims” who will always depend on the government and about whom it is not his job to worry. Here is a quick snippet of the transcript (see full video below):

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what…There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them. Who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing.

He makes several other statements as well, but the content of his gaffe is not the purpose of this post. Instead, I want to talk about what the existence of this tape and the spread of its contents means in terms of social logic. Specifically, I want to talk about how the affordances of social media come to pervade physical space, as the structures of online and offline sociality bleed together.

First, I want to note that we can easily talk about this tape in terms of both privacy and relatedly, sousveillance—or the ground up documentation of high power authorities facilitated through small, cheap, recording devices, user-friendly means of dispersion for user-generated content (UGC), and an increasing connection between UGC and mainstream media. Indeed, a private event became public, and was able to do so through an inconspicuous audience member who recorded the content and spread it through the major (left leaning) news outlets Huffington Post and Mother Jones, which then set the story prominently within national news discourses.

We can also talk about this, however, in terms of context collapse, and to do so, is to talk about a changing logic of sociality.

Context collapse, introduced by danah boyd (@Zephoria) as one key dynamic of networked publics, refers to the literal collapsing of network walls between previously separated familial and social connections as facilitated by the architectures and social structures of social media in general, and social network sites in particular. For example, Facebook networks are likely to consist of schoolmates, work colleagues, grandparents, (ex)lovers, childhood friends, bosses, mothers, fathers, siblings, college buddies, party acquaintances, and everything in between. This presents unique challenges as networked individuals must manage disparate expectations within a shared space.

This  form of sociality—one with collapsed network walls—goes against the deeply embedded identity processes that social psychologist George Herbert Mead discussed back in the 1930s. Mead explains that each group with whom we interact represents a separate Generalized Other, or normative and moral framework within which we form and enact a self. According to Mead, the self is multiple, and each Generalized Other represents a different self, with different (sometimes disparate) expectations for how and who the actor is to be in the world. For instance, our school friends know a very different version of us than do our parents, teachers, bosses, etc. Context collapse troubles the separation of these interactional expectations.

Romney made his remarks in relation to a particular Generalized Other (very wealthy, very right leaning, campaign donors). To treat the tape as though it reveals Romney’s “true” self—a self that he cloaks in relative moderation in public speeches—is a mistake. Rather, it reveals one of Romney’s selves, a self that he expected to contain within the physical and social confines of this particular, small, network of others. Unfortunately for the Romney campaign, a new technologically facilitated logic disrupted this expectation.

The recent Romney tape (and a similar incident with Obama back in 2008) demonstrates that context collapse has moved beyond the digital, and become part of physical space interaction, but that Romney—and many others— are/were not quite prepared for this interactional shift. Closed doors and thick walls no longer necessarily signify separation, but still offer the guise of such. This is not just cultural lag, but culture in motion. The saboteur was successful by exploiting the now empty—though still prevalent—assumptions of pre-digital logic. Ironically, the affordances of networked publics—persistence, scalability, replicability, and searchability, exacerbated the consequences the Romney team naivety.

In tactical response, the Romney campaign announced that it will now allow news cameras into private donor events in which reporters were previously not allowed to film. That is, the campaign, recognizing their outdated logic of contextual separation, decided to make explicit the new reality of networked publics.

Last week Sarah Wanenchak (@dynamicsymmetry)  and Whitney Erin Boesel (@phenatypical) separately broached the tensions between technologies, bodies, ownership, and power. Here, I want to articulate this tension more explicitly, and argue that at a broad level, this is a tension between empowerment and dependence. Empowerment—as producers become consumers, reducing institutional authority over identity meanings and cultural representations; dependence— as these identity and cultural prosumers necessarily rely upon increasingly complex technical systems of implementation.  

Let us look specifically at the body, as this is the most sharply felt site of contestation. New technologies empower us to take control of our bodies and of ourselves. We can track bodily movement and internal states; we can search the web for alternative opinions and peer-produced information; we can come together with a community of others to prosume embodied experience into individually held and culturally available identity categories. This increased empowerment is indeed technologically facilitated, and indeed liberating. And yet, with each move towards increased empowerment, we embed ourselves more deeply in the biomedical institution, broadening its umbrella of control. We may have the power to define our embodied experiences, but we do so with an institutional language, and within a medicalized logic. We insist on recognition, a label, an infrastructure, and treatment protocols—none of which those without medical authority have the skills to accomplish. All of which makes these non-authoritied subjects dependent upon those who do.

As such, even as medical professionals lose authority over knowledge, they maintain—through a relationship of dependence—authority over subjects’ bodies.  This tension is well illustrated through a discussion of contested illness and the internet. Contested illnesses are themselves a product of a biomedical era. In a time of biomedical logics, we expect illnesses to have visible and measurable effects. When embodied experiences—specifically those that cause suffering— are not connected with an observable physiological abnormality, the experience is largely negated. Examples include Fibromyalgia, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Restless Leg Syndrome, and a topic I actively research—Transability.

The internet enables those with contested illnesses to come together, establish shared experience, act collectively, exchange advice, coach one another in advocacy, empower themselves through self-identification, educate medical professionals, and lobby for institutional recognition. This institutional recognition is crucial. It is a means by which those with a contested illness receive insurance coverage, the way funding gets channeled into pain management, and the way doctors receive training for, and education about, treatment of  the currently unrecognized embodied experience of sufferers.

Because I know the example well, we will take the example of body integrity identity disorder (BIID)—otherwise known as transability. Persons with BIID (PWBs) experience a deep schism between a physically-able body and a self-view of very specific impaired embodiment (e.g. amputation 2 inches above the knee, L3 paraplegia). This embodied experience is currently unrecognized by medical professionals, though it may be included in the upcoming DSM-V. This lack of recognition means that PWBs often find themselves educating therapists, who sometimes reject the transabled client and almost ubiquitously lack the training to treat them properly. It means that transabled persons can be fired from their jobs without protections from the Americans with Disabilities Act. It means that those seeking ability reassignment surgery have no safe,legal, options, let alone insurance coverage. The fight for recognition is therefore a very real fight for resources.

This fight for resources and recognition, however, also locates subjects necessarily in a dependent relationship with medical authorities. Suffering subjects fight to define their bodies in a way that facilitates the surrendering of these bodies to the medical institution. Here, they will be treated with sophisticated technologies operated by those with highly specialized expertise—all of which is far beyond the typical subject’s understanding.

In short, those with contested illnesses take control over definitions of the body while actively relinquishing control over treatment of the body. Next week, I will discuss why, social-psychologically, many suffering subjects view this trade as “worth it.”

Jenny Davis is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jup83

Pic credits:

http://www.imaging.beckman.illinois.edu/areas/biomedical.html

http://www.thequeercommons.org/

We all know the trope: In The Future—near or distant—food will come in the form of a pill. The pill will offer optimal proportions of all necessary nutrients. It will be calorically dense, vitamin infused, moderately fatted, protein filled, fiber enhanced, time released, and highly precise. The consumer will be satiated. The body will be healthy. This is a pill of perfect consumptive efficiency. This is the predicted diet of the cyborg.

Indeed, as cyborgs, our practices of (literal) consumption are characterized by scientific engineering. Our food and food practices are more a product of laboratory and factory work than the sweat of tilling farmers. And yet, we have not come up with a successful food-replacement pill. Instead, we’ve generally (though not ubiquitously) developed a market and a mindset that  moves away from efficiency, developing and utilizing technological advancements to maximally consume with minimal caloric absorption. I offer here a few examples:

1) Defatted peanut butter.  Peanut butter is a naturally efficient food. Very small quantities provide high caloric, fat, and protein content. Defatted versions of this food are made from peanuts with the fat literally processed out of them, such that one would need to (get to?) consume 2X as much to achieve the caloric value of regular peanut butter, and 8X as much to equal regular peanut butter’s fat content.

2) Artificial Sweeteners: These sugar-substitutes allow us to prepare and consume food and drink with dramatically reduced—sometimes down to zero—calories. Diet soda is the quintessential use of these sweeteners. Consumers can literally drink limitless amounts of these beverages without ever absorbing a nutrient.

3) Volumetrics: This is a weight-loss buzz word for diet programs that teach people how to maximize consumption while minimizing caloric intake. It is represented by Weight-Watchers” Zero Point” foods, Hungry Girl’s “Ginormous  Foods” and Jenny Craig’s “Free Foods.”

 4) Diet pills: Perhaps this is the sharpest response to the food-replacement pill. The most popular of these pills—such as Alli— do not suppress appetite, but speed metabolism and/or block fat, re-engineering the body in a way that literally wastes consumed nutrients.

So what’s going on here? We have the technology to engineer food (and our bodies) to a great extent. We have the capacity to affect consumptive efficiency—and we actively engage this capacity. The direction of our technologically enabled efficiency alterations, however, is curious. Rather than maximizing efficiency, we minimize it. We actively make ourselves less efficient consumers. Why is this?

The answer, I argue, is because cyborgs are indeed part machine, but also inextricably human, and humans are pleasure seeking. Food consumption is pleasurable. As such, we deploy technologies in a way that maximizes this pleasure while avoiding (or at least attempting to avoid) the perceived detrimental effects. In this light, it seems crazy to consider the replacement of food with nutrient dense pills. Such a technology divorces food from pleasure. We human-cyborgs, instead, divorce calories from food.

I have elsewhere referenced technology as materialized action. We construct and utilize technology based on human need, and are forever changed for it. Humans, technology, and culture mutually constitute one another, but unlike the equally influential picture painted by Actor Network Theorists, the materialized action approach holds humans accountable for their agency—for the needs, desires, and values in which technological production and use are entrenched.

We are a culture that values thinness, but a people who desire indulgence. As such, consumers create a market incentive for the production of inefficient foodstuffs and corporations invest in the creation, distribution, and normalization of inefficient food products—along with the image of slender embodiment which these food practices signify. In short, we deploy cyborg technological capabilities towards very human ends.

Jenny Davis is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University and a regular author on Cyborgology. She wrote this piece while consuming a large high-protein-low-calorie bagel, with a double portion of defatted peanut butter, and a gigantic cup of Stevia sweetened half-caf coffee. Follow this inefficient eater on Twitter @Jup83

Photo Creds in order:

http://www.bellplantation.com/

http://www.jennycraig.com/how-it-works/volumetrics/

Alva Noë at NPR wrote an excellent opinion piece over the weekend on Lance Armstrong’s decision to stop fighting the United States Anti-Doping Agency—which accuses the seven-time Tour de France winner of ingesting performance enhancing drugs.

Noë argues not that Armstrong ‘didn’t do it’—on the contrary, most expert commentators agree that he probably did dope, along with all other high level cyclers—but that ‘doping’ is a logical component of competitive sports in a cyborg era. Noë concludes with a key point and a provocative question:

He didn’t win races on his own. No, Like each of us in our social embeddings, he created an organization,  drawing on other people, and the creative and effective use of technology, the mastery of biochemistry, to go places and do things that most of us never will, that no one ever had, before him. That we now attack him, and tear him down, and try to minimize his achievements…what does this tell us about ourselves?

I want to take on this question, and in doing so, further flesh out the points that Noë brings to the fore.

I argue that our attack on Armstrong speaks to our collective discomfort with a cyborg nature, and that this discomfort is twofold. First, we are uncomfortable with categorical blurring, and second, cyborg bodies problematize deeply held myths and moral tenets of self-reliance.

Claude Lėvi-Strauss famously pointed to the categorical ways in which we order our social worlds, and the embedded nature of this categorical ordering through language. Indeed, social actors vehemently work to maintain these categorical structures, and staunchly resist their blurring both interpersonally and institutionally (despite the best efforts of queer theorists). The cyborg, as a construct, is inherently a-categorical. It blurs human, animal, and machine; it complicates gender, embodiment, and sexuality; it eschews separations of internal and external; and it applies to our own bodies, our own Selves. In short, the cyborg is a threat to categorical ordering, and this threat is amplified by its application to our very being. We are uncomfortable by our own blurriness, and we take it out on those who display the cyborgness of humanity in explicit ways. In this vein, we reject those who use steroids, ridicule those who use Viagra, and shame those who obtain cosmetic surgery at places like the local and pretty hidden vaginal tightening medical clinic around the corner.

But this explanation is insufficient. Indeed, there are cases in which we encourage technological embodiment. For example, I’ve written about/problematized elsewhere the way we celebrate technologies that allow people with paralyzed bodies to stand and walk upright. Similarly, we operate on Deaf children and babies, equipping them with cochlear implants. We spend billions of dollars (personally and institutionally) on pharmaceuticals that help normalize bodily processes. In short, we are okay with cyborgs, as long as the cyborg technology makes someone more human, not more than human. This brings me to the second-fold of our twofold discomfort with a cyborg nature—namely, that it implodes all notions of self-reliance to which we so desperately cling.

Lance Armstrong is the subject of the moment, but let us look also to Oscar Pistorius—the South African Olympic athlete with double below-the-knee amputation. This decorated paralympian had to overcome legal and social battles to fight his way into the 2012 able-bodied Olympic games, with detractors complaining about his ‘advantageous’ use of biomechanical shins and feet. Pistorius’ embodiment challenges us by throwing the technological bodily element in our collective face, and explicitly linking it to success among ‘Normals.’ This speaks to our narrow definition of humanity. Those who stand and walk are more human than those who sit and wheel; those who can communicate by voice and sound are more human than those who communicate by sight and sign; those who focus intently are more human than those who quickly and creatively flit from one social stimuli to the next. Cyborg technologies are fine for them, those less-than-human Others who need help achieving functionality, who need help achieving humanity. We are uncomfortable, however, when we must acknowledge the normalcy of an enmeshed relationship with technology, and even more so, when we must acknowledge our reliance on this enmeshment. As such, when technology enables or even suggests success at a level beyond the accomplishments of an organic body, our defenses go up and our discomfort shows through.

The Horatio Alger Myth, so often discussed in introductory level sociology courses, applies well to our relationship with technology. We want to believe we exist on a level playing field. We want to believe that the world is fair. We want to believe that those with talents and drive will rise to the top, and that those who lack these things will fall to their deserved social locations of mediocrity or utter failure. To maintain this myth is to ignore external factors associated with success and failure. Technology—and our enmeshed relationship with it—is an explicit artifact of externality. We can ignore this artifact, but only to a point. We can ignore it until it goes too far. We can ignore it until, at some point, our own cyborg nature intrudes our conscious space. We can ignore the aerodynamic clothes, the meticulously calculated bodily movements, the waxing technologies that free swimmers from body-hair drag. We cannot, however, ignore steel legs, just as we cannot ignore chemical changes to the physical body that make it stronger, faster, and longer enduring.

Our attack on Lance Armstrong is an attack on our own blurriness. It is a simultaneous defense of categorical boundaries, normative definitions of humanness, and individualist, internal, attributions of efficacy and personal outcomes.

Jenny Davis is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. She is a regularly contributing author on the Cyborgology blog. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jup83

Pic Creds:

http://personalrecordinpr.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/the-marketing-of-the-livestrong-braclet/

http://www.oscarpistorius.com/

The Communication and Information Technologies section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA) was founded in 1988. Since its inception, the membership has evolved, as have the mission, perspectives, and the empirical world of study.

As a section member, one who just participated in five days of conferencing at the American Sociological Association’s  annual meeting (ASA2012), I am reminded of the need to look critically and reflexively at our social worlds—especially those aspects to which we hold strong attachments. In this vein, I am simultaneously energized about the role of new technologies in social life, and uncertain about the role of a special section dedicated to their study. In short, I am led to the question: Do we need the CITASA section?

CITASA’s Digital Dualism Problem

Reality is augmented—characterized by the entwinement of human and technologies rather than their categorical separation.  Digital and physical, online and offline are false dichotomies that the bloggers here at Cyborgology actively work to blur.

My participation at ASA2012, as a presenter, presider, and audience member in numerous sessions from various sections was in many ways heartening with regard to the scholarly implementation of augmented logic. Indeed, I sat on a social problems panel dedicated to new media methods; I saw social psychologists report on experiments that utilize digital technologies as tools to better understand small group processes; I saw medical sociologists examine emergent and contested illnesses by looking to doctors, patients, online support groups, and web-based information seeking; I saw embodiment scholars explicitly evoke the cyborg as they theorized about the enmeshed relationships between the physical body, gender,  race, sex/sexuality, the medical institution, and the self. In sum, new technologies—including information technologies—are increasingly understood as part and parcel of our social worlds, and in turn, part and parcel of sociological study.

What does it do, then, to separate out a section to study technology and its effects independently from the substantive concerns of the other sections? My worry is that this institutional cordoning off of IT as a topic of study reinforces digital dualism. Symbolically, this distinct categorization indicates that IT is somehow something apart from other sociological concerns, something to be studied by specialists, rather than something to interweave into the innumerable phenomena of sociological interest. Materially, this distinct categorization separates IT experts, and their work, from the scholars and scholarship that make up the rest of sociology. These distinctions and separations are not something that I want for the discipline, and I imagine that that few (if any) CITASA members favor the symbolic or material separation that I describe above.

 The Case for CITASA

To make a case for CITASA, I begin with the reminder that augmented reality refers to a relationship between humans and technology in which they are enmeshed, but also distinct. Technology—and IT in particular—may be part and parcel of everyday life, but it is not necessarily the root of all social processes. On the contrary, IT is sometimes of periphery importance and of worthy of only periphery concern. IT intertwines with deviance, gender, sexuality, social movements, social psychology, political economy etc., but it is not synonymous with these things.

CITASA is useful for those of us who want to focus on the role of technology within these substantive areas. It is useful for those of us who want to spend the time and space to understand how technology operates in the micro and macro processes of social life. And it is important for us to have a shared space and community of scholars with which to delve deeply into these issues, critique each other’s work, push each other further, and build something complex, robust, and constantly evolving. CITASA provides such a space. CITASA provides such a community.

Moreover, it is important for us to bring this complex, robust, and constantly evolving knowledge to other substantive areas. Few (if any) scholars study only technology in society. Most (if not all) of us specialize in several other substantive areas of research. In a world in which technology is increasingly pervasive and quickly changing, these other substantive areas will benefit from a technology and society expert who can fold technology into the collective knowledge. CITASA can breed such scholars.

A Fruitful Future for CITASA

To continue usefully and successfully into the future, the CITASA section must navigate the delicate space between specialization and isolation. We must avoid digital dualism (symbolic and material) while garnering a deep understanding of technologies’ sociological import.

I argue that such a fruitful future—on that I am invested in bring about—must contain the following three ingredients:

1)  Inter-Scholarly movement. CITASA members must not only continue to work, write, and present in other substantive areas and outside disciplines, but to share with their colleagues the knowledge and expertise that we gain through the collective and critical focus on human-technology relations. Similarly, CITASA members must bring their substantive expertise to bear on issues of IT.  With our collective specializations, we can construct real knowledge about technology in social life. We must therefore act as a two-way bridge between technology experts and the larger scholarly community.

 2) Translation of complex content. This applies to all areas of scholarly sociology. We study social life, and the knowledge we produce is relevant to everyone who lives in the social world. Too often, however, we talk only to ourselves. It behooves us all to share our work in accessible spaces (e.g. blogs, news programs, open-access journals) and to do so using accessible language. We must act as a bridge between the scholarly community and general interested publics.

3) Theoretical orientation. Descriptive studies are useful, but they are not enough. Any statistician can tell us how many people use Facebook and in what ways. Sociologists are critical. Sociologists theorize. It is theory that connects us to other substantive areas and to the general public. It is theory that enables us to build the bridges that I describe in ingredients 1 & 2. This is particularly important because, as I’ve written about previously, we study empirical phenomena that changes with extreme rapidity, but work within a system that publishes slowly. Without theory, our findings are likely obsolete by the time they appear in print. In this vein, we might eventually think of renaming the section to more explicitly include a theoretical emphasis. Perhaps the easiest would be CITTASA (Computer Information Technology Theory). Other suggestions are welcome (and probably better).

A section is what its members make it. The above is therefore not only an argument, but a call to action. 

Jenny Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. She is a regular author on Cyborgology and member of the CITASA section. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jup83

Ann Swidler argues that we operate using complex cultural repertoires. These are the propensities, scripts, frameworks, and logics—the tools with which to navigate everyday life. Our repertoires are vast, and often contradictory—and yet we deftly pull what we need, when we need it, easily ignoring contradictions. She illustrates these practices through narratives of romantic love, in which participants, within the same interview, draw seamlessly on logics of independence (e.g. we are separate people and we need our separate space), intertwinement (e.g. we have grown together over the years, our marriage is a true union of two souls), fate (e.g. we were meant to be) and rationality (e.g. marriage is a product of hard work and sacrifice).

With Swidler’s cultural tool kit as a framework, we can begin to make sense of  the logical gymnastics that enabled a Virginia Sheriff to fire his subordinates for hitting a Facebook “Like” button in support of an opposing candidate and then argue successfully in court that this firing was not a violation of free speech.

Here’s the story: In 2009, Sheriff  B.J. Roberts fired six employees for hitting the “Like” button on Facebook in favor of a rival candidate (Jim Adams) in an upcoming election.  One of the employees fired, Deputy Daniel Ray Carter Jr., is contesting the firing in court. Carter argues that “Liking” should be protected under his first amendment rights. The initial ruling from a U.S. District Court in Virginia ruled in favor of Roberts, opining that free-speech is only protected when someone says something. “Liking,” the court ruled, is not a sufficient form of expression. Carter continues to pursue the case through higher level courts.

This ruling of the District Court requires numerous logical contradictions. Let us briefly review the two most egregious:

1) Language is a shared symbol system. “Like” is a symbol that conveys shared meaning. Yet, the court ruled that “Like” is not, in fact, a form of expression.

2) Sheriff Roberts fired his employees BECAUSE “Like” expressed a political view that he found inappropriate. Yet, Sheriff Roberts’ defense rests on notion that “Liking” something is not a political statement (Really Roberts? Then why did you fire them!?).

What we see here, is that although numerous cultural tools are in play (a la Swidler), this argument rests on an overarching framework of digital dualism. The (oddly calculated) sum total of empirical circumstances surrounding this case concludes that digitally mediated symbol systems do not constitute real mechanisms of communication.

But the story goes deeper. We are currently in what Swidler refers to as “unsettled times” with regards to digital technologies. This is a time/space in which social reality is still in negotiation. The cultural tool kit is still being stocked, we must rely upon often outdated tools, and new acquisitions are up for debate.  How these debates play out are of crucial significance. Indeed, if this case is not overturned, and a Facebook “Like” is legally considered something other than communication, digital dualism will more firmly embed itself into our institutional and cultural logic. In turn, if the case is overturned, it will be a boon for the cultural logic of augmented reality.

Of course, the cultural contests of unsettled times do not happen in a vacuum—or better said, a meritocracy. Rather, they are subject to the power relations that pervade social, political, and economic life. The logic that aligns with interests of the powerful is, in most cases, the logic that wins out. In relation to the present case, a digital dualist logic aligned with the interests of the more powerful party (i.e. an elected official), and in turn, the legal system not only took this logic seriously, but upheld it in the face of a less powerful challenger. This is not to say that the less powerful have no chance, but that the relative power of promulgators matters, and those with greater power have more freedom in selecting their cultural tools, and more efficacy in spreading them.

More concretely, Carter’s case will be much stronger with the support of powerful groups who back his cultural logic—and in turn, back his legal argument. And indeed, he now has such support, as his appeal was filed by the ACLU, and includes the following statement by multi-billion dollar Facebook Inc.:  “like” for a political candidate is the 21st-century equivalent of a front-yard campaign sign.  

In these unsettled times, battles such as this have implications beyond the parties involved. They shape institutional meanings and cultural logics. They lay the foundation for an eventual settled future. And indeed, these battles, their outcomes, and their implications reflect and buttress existing social hierarchies.

Photos creds (in order):

Holster

Talk of Love

Jenny Davis is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. She is a regular author on the Cyborgology blog. Follow Jenny on Twitter: @Jup83

Chick-fil-A has delicious waffle fries. So delicious. But before getting in to the content of this post, I should locate myself by stating that I have not purchased anything from this company in over a year, and I will never consume those warm checkered squares of potato-y goodness again.  The reason for this (in case anyone has been living under a rock/in a dissertation shaped bubble) is that the company explicitly opposes same-sex marriage. I am explicitly anti-bigotry, and so I do not purchase food from Chick-fil-A

Okay, now I can theorize.

The case of Chick-fil-A, and its debaters on both sides, is useful for delving deeper into issues of reality curation—an idea I wrote about previously. As a brief overview, reality curation is the flip-side of self-presentation. In the former, we curate information going out, and in the latter, we curate information coming in. In particular, we curate incoming information in confirmatory ways, seeking out that which appeals to our political, religious, and affective sensibilities.

Using the Twitter buzz surrounding Chick-fil-A, I work here to make three additional and interrelated points about reality curation. First, I argue that reality curation is not a digital phenomena, but amplified by pervasive digitality. Second, I argue that reality curation is required in a digitally connected era. Finally, I argue that reality curation takes place at multiple levels, as users interact differentially with the affordances of a technology.

Reality curation is not new, nor is it unique to digitally mediated communication.  Indeed, we curate reality through the newspapers we choose to read, the television stations we choose to watch, the people we choose to befriend and the topics we choose to broach with chosen friends. Pervasive digitality, however, amplifies curation—making it more explicit and visible. With the affordances of digital technology, one not only chooses the slant of their information, but actively and explicitly navigates to do so. For instance, one can implicitly curate their reality of the Chick-fil-A controversy by turning the channel to Fox News versus MSNBC. More explicit, however, is the navigation on Twitter to the   #LiberalFastFood versus #ConservativeFastFood (the former in support of Chick-fil-A and conservative policies, the latter in opposition to Chick-fil-A and support of liberal policies).

This leads to my second point: that explicit reality curation is required in a digitally mediated world. A hallmark of the contemporary era is the abundance of information—including an array of voices. This amalgamation of views, facts, stories, and perspectives necessitates the active practice of sifting and selecting. To participate on Twitter, for example, one must choose to Follow some instead of others—engaging in what I call selective connection—and  they must both seek out and ignore particular topics—engaging in what I call selective visibility. Indeed, the viewer is responsible for sifting through the chatter about Chick-fil-A in a way that makes it comprehensible, and this clarifying process necessarily involves active reality curation.

This reality curation, however, can and does take place at many levels, and varies with the ways in which users engage the technology. That is, although digital mediation requires reality curation, users vary in the extent to which they curate. In the case of Twitter, information can be narrowed down to different levels. One might curate reality by typing Chick-fil-A into the Twitter search function, choosing to “let in” lay discourses surrounding the controversy. Curating further, one may search by opinion-specific hashtags (such as #LiberalFastFood/ #ConservativeFastFood discussed above). Similarly, one may go to a specific Tweep—an individual or institution— who tends to tweet in a particular vein, and follow the discourse from this one Tweep’s perspective. Most interestingly, however, is that users have the potential to engage in all of these practices simultaneously, or engage in curation at a consistently broad or narrow level.

Reality curation has always been a part of human social life. We constantly make conscious and unconscious decisions about what to hear, see, feel, know, and experience. The potentialities of digital mediation, however, amplify this practice. They make it explicit and required. How we know affects what we know, and we are highly agentic in this process.  

Below is the full text of a two-part series that I wrote and posted last month

In what follows, I delineate a language with which we can think about the body as technology, and in particular, politicized technology. We can do so, I argue, with Ernst Schraube’s conceptualization of technology as materialized action. I begin by laying out this theoretical framework. I then apply this conceptualization to the body, with a focus on body size.

The conceptualization of technology as materialized action comes from a 2009 essay written by Ernst Schraube.  Here, Schraube synthesizes and builds on both Critical Psychology and Actor-Network-Theory.

Schraube begins with critical psychologist Klaus Holzkamp’s conceptualization of objectification—the notion that material artifacts are more than a means to an end, but are imbued with human subjectivity. The initiation of production stems and is shaped by a particular human need, and the produced artifact, as a tool used to satiate that need, carries in it human agency and subjectivity.

Roads, for example, hold in them the human need to work, socialize, and participate in commerce in light of a sprawling landscape and increasingly differentiated division of labor. This human agency is literally built in to the asphalt, road signs, and bridges that enable car and bus travel.

Schraube critiques objectification, however, for ignoring the independent effects of material artifacts upon humans. He succinctly sates:

It is not only the subjects that do something with the things; the things also do something with the subjects

To buttress this weakness of the objectification perspective, Schraube calls upon Actor Network Theory to argue that indeed, material objects act back upon their human creators and users—instructing them, in the famous words of ANT theorist Bruno Latour,  to ‘do this, do that, behave this way, don’t go that way, you may do so, be allowed to go there.’

Going back to the example of roads, the asphalt, signs, and bridges instruct us on how to get from point A to point B, but also tell us that we may build and live in suburbs, that we may forgo co-habitation with extended family, that we may shop, work, and seek entertainment in geographically dispersed locations, but that we must own a working car or a bus pass, that we must travel to shop, work, and socialize etc.

Importantly, just as ANT shores up the weaknesses of objectification, the notion of objectification reciprocally supplements the weaknesses of ANT—namely the failure to recognize the human root to all technology and the responsibility of humans for the creation and use of technologies.

 To capture both the subjectivity and independent efficacy of technological artifacts, Schraube refers to artifacts as materialized action.

 It is not only the subjects that do something with the things; the things also do something with the subjects. The “means-to-an-end” perspective fails the independence, materiality, and efficacy of things. Absolutizing this perspective holds the danger of voluntarism and an understanding of seemingly disposing freely over created artifacts, treating them just as we want. To make it clear that, on the one hand—in line with the objectification concept—human subjectivity and agency are materialized in the object, while, on the other hand, the materiality of the object can release an independent power and efficacy, I propose to conceptualize the created objects as materialized action 

Schraube further argues that materialized action is often precarious, surprising and necessarily ambivalent. He says:

…Things are more than just societal meanings, more than just socially conceived and produced items. They always materialize, in addition, an unknown action, something coincidental, unplanned, and their decisive power and efficacy can frequently be located just in what had not originally been imagined or intended 

With this precariousness in mind, I want to focus here on the body as technology, and specifically I want to focus on the body as a potentially politicized technology. I do so using the case of body size.

The body is simultaneously infused with human meaning and independent efficacy. The body is an object created out of human choices about (literal) consumption, adornment, and sculpture. At the same time, the body tells the person to ‘eat this, wear that, desire hir, move like this.’ The body then, as materialized action, is necessarily precarious. We cannot know what effect the relationship between the person and hir body will produce. Does a thin body reflect and effect fitness, or does it reflect and affect poor body image and restrictive self-control? Does a fat body reflect and affect indulgence, or does it reflect and affect acceptance and pleasure?

To embrace this ambivalence, I argue, is the means by which the body—as a technology—can be transformed into a politicized tool. Such a transformation is exemplified in the Fat Positive movements.  Fat Positive movements exist in juxtaposition to narrow (pun intended) beauty standards that not only exclude the majority of U.S. women, but bring about anxiety, guilt, and sometimes dangerous behaviors of voluntary starvation, purging, and/or excessive exercise. Importantly, these sensibilities (a privileging of thinness and its behavioral and psychological consequences) are largely produced through the (often institutionally facilitated) accomplishment of thinness, and the public display of thin bodies. Fat Activists, in contrast, imbue (often their own) bodies with different meaning.

In a culture in which thin is deemed not only beautiful, but also moral, a fat woman in a bikini is a radical act. Embracing this radicalism, Fat Activists proudly display, maintain, and/or publicly support large bodies. In doing so, they use these bodies as objects to affect an explicit kind of change—that of both ideology and behavior—which they hope will alter the subjectivity imbued in future bodies.

In short, with materialized action as a framework, we have a language with which to talk about the body as a tool, one full of human agency with the potential for imagined, and unimaginable, effects. As a politicized technology, the body can be used to challenge not only fatness (as described here), but heteronormativity, binary gender categories,ableism, and white racial privilege. We should be warned, however, that the ambivalence of artifacts, with their potential for unimagined effects, means that the body—like all technologies—can be used for both revolutionary change (e.g. Fat Activism) AND stagnant, sometimes repressive, reification (e.g. Thinspiration). Indeed, the latter is far more common than the former, as it is only through recognition of the body as an object of materialized action, coupled with a propensity for change, that such stagnation can be fought.

Jenny Davis is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. She is a regular contributor for Cybogology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jup83

“Otherness” has long been a concern of social scientists. It refers to those who are marked, set-apart, excluded, or included with qualification. Those who fail to fit into normative conceptions of belongingness are treated, unsurprisingly, as though they do not belong. They are a polluting force, an intruder, an outsider. In this post, we discuss the dual nature of Otherness and the Othered subject, as they must navigate a social space in which they are either excluded or fetishized, but never fully integrated. We exemplify this dual nature with a discussion of new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer—a tech industry power player marked with femininity, amplified by pregnancy. We begin with a theoretical discussion of Otherness.

 The Dirty Other

As suggested by Sigmund Freud and Marry Douglas, “Dirt is matter out of place”; it threatens the integrity of boundaries—moral, aesthetic, symbolic, experiential and otherwise.  The removal or neutralization of dirt is not an easy matter for its methods of contamination are many.  The most effective method of contamination occurs within and through fantasy.  Case in point, the non-normative Other acquires her pollution powers from the fantastic projections of “Normals.”  But in analyzing the non-normative Other, we find that not all dirt is abject.  Rather than demonstrating the power of horror, dirt may acquire the quality of seduction, indulgence and exotic profundity.  Of course, Kristeva notes that the abject—while maintaining its horrifying quality—is the sight of fascination.  Although such a stipulation is relevant to the present discussion, we may note that said fascination need not coincide with horror.  For example, the “out of place” position of non-normative others facilitates the fantastic lure of systemic escape, reparation or atonement.  After all, that which is not dirt: the normative, the systemic, the homogenized, carries the weight of morality and social judgment.

Those who are dirty, at least in fantasy, serve as a reprieve from judgment.  They are the sight of the Normals’ non-normative desires.  Normals project fantasies of understanding, care and esoteric wisdom upon the dirty.  We need not, then, limit the fetishization of dirt to the repressed wish for incestuous or other sexually aberrant relations.  Normals may look to the dirty to recapture maternal care in an otherwise uncaring environment.  Perhaps because the Normal believes that she hides or represses an affinity for the unheimlich (the unfamiliar) she sees (fantasizes) the heimlich (familiar) in dirt.

However, like their fascination with the abject, Normals best enjoy dirt at a distance.  Fantastic projections cannot sustain close inspection.  The dirty, counter-systemic Other, when viewed up close, appears all the more normal.  Her ability to save, to provide care, wanes with the waning of her Otherness.

 Marissa Mayer as the Fetishized Other

Women have long been Others within the business world, and in no industry is this more apparent than the technology industry. The exclusion of women from this field was made painfully evident when, in preparation for its IPO,  Facebook released a picture of its all male board of directors (they have since added one woman: Sheryl Sandberg). Indeed, Twitter, Zynga, Pandora, and Foursquare still maintain all male boards.

As we point out above, however, inclusion is by no means an escape from Otherness. The included Other is exotic, marked, qualified, and fetishized. Marissa Mayer, with her 88% approval rating, demonstrates the treatment of an included—yet still dirty—Other.

Mayer’s Otherness is first seen in the marked language with which analysts talk about her. She is not merely the new Yahoo CEO, but the new female yahoo CEO (see examples here, here, here, here and here—you get the point). Like the gay soldier, male nurse, or black politician, the female president and CEO of Yahoo is first and foremost, a categorized subject.

And indeed, analysts focus on this categorization as a frame with which to celebrate her sexual and maternal roles within and outside of the corporate realm.  While nurturing an ailing corporation back to health, her presence constitutes an air of family and sexuality. This is exemplified in the following content from around The Web:

           We hope this changes things for Yahoo and turns the losses into gains! Maybe all Yahoo needed was a women’s [sic] touch   (Google Watch Blog)

Yahoo Now Has the Hottest CEO Ever (Thread title on Reddit.com)

I wish the company, and Mayer, nothing but luck. They’re going to need it. Having a baby can be nothing short of an earthquake—the best, most joyful kind of personal destruction, but a total upending nonetheless. I hope her delivery is free of complications and her baby is healthy. I hope if Mayer chooses to breastfeed, that all goes smoothly, that her son latches and her supply is plentiful. I hope he’s not colicky. I hope he sleeps well. I hope she doesn’t have post-partum depression or even the simple baby blues that can trigger tears at an inappropriate moment’s notice. I also hope that other firms don’t pick, say, Oct. 12^th to launch their most competitive assault on Yahoo. I hope her executive team hangs together and works well. Maybe activist investor Dan Loeb, who has put pressure on the company lately, sends a nice baby gift (Wall Street Journal Blog).

 Perhaps Mayer’s role as the Fetishized Other is unsurprising. She is not only a woman, but The Woman: an Other whose only deviation comes in the form of her newly granted position of power. She maintains this position without threat to other boundaries. She is white, thin, heterosexual, well-educated, married, and embodies a quintessential womanly state (i.e. pregnancy).

The public portrayal of Mayer spans the spectrum of the pleasure derived from “dirt.” She nurtures and fulfills, maternally and seductively. She challenges Others like her—evoking debates about women, work, and motherhood—but does not threaten the structural system which Others her.

James Chouinard is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. He studies social theory with a focus on embodiment.

Jenny Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University and a regular contributor to the Cyborgology blog. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jup83

In each of the past two Theorizing the Web conferences, I have been present to see an audience member—concerned about the fleeting popularity of online platforms and rapid technological development— question the pervasive use of Facebook as a study site. This is an important question, and one to which panelists (including myself) have not adequately responded.  Absent the pressure of probing eyes and a ticking clock, I work here to craft the kind of response that the question deserves.

In both cases, the exchanges went something like this:

Audience member: This is a question for all of the presenters.  I noticed that all of your data come from Facebook.  What about other sites? Is it wise that we put so much stock in a single platform? What happens when Facebook is no longer relevant [insert reference to MySpace and/or Friendster].

Audience: Murmurs of agreement

 Panelists: [Nervous smiles and glances until the awkward silence gets to be too much and one brave panelist begins talking] Right, we need data from other spaces as well. Of course. But, Facebook is the most popular and prevalent right now, so it makes sense to study it and it makes sense that a lot of people are studying it. As the medium shifts, research will shift as well. [Other panelists chime in with similar responses and stare expectantly at the presider until s/he moves along to another question].

Next year, if asked, my response will be as follows: “I am not concerned about using Facebook as a study site, because I study it theoretically. My work is both informed by, and informs, social theory. If I do it right, my findings will be theoretically relevant both because of, and beyond, the site of study. This type of work should be easily transferable and adaptable as new technologies and platforms emerge.”

I made a similar argument in a piece I recently published using data from MySpace. Yes, MySpace. Yes, in 2012. Specifically, I say:

Although MySpace is no longer the predominant PIH [personal interactive homepage]…a study of this platform offers important theoretical and empirical insights. Indeed, the internet is littered with once thriving but now abandoned spaces, dead links, and forgotten communities…. A study such as this offers insights into the basic impact PIHs have on processes of the self, and leaves room to adapt future analyses to the more recent developments in PIH platforms and social media use in general…  with the fast-changing nature of digital technologies, the goal of the CMC [computer mediated communication] researcher is to effectively depict and theorize the technologies of the time, in a way that frees the research(er) from too firm a connection to any specific technological artifact (emphasis added).

In short, studying Facebook—or any fleeting technological object—is not problematic as long as we theorize said object. This is evidenced in the continued scholarly use of Marx and Durkheim, who presented theoretical insights based on steam engines and totems respectively. More contemporarily and perhaps more clearly relevant, danah boyd’s work on Friendster still heavily informs social media research today.

This is not to say that the empirical realities of a particular artifact at a particular time are unimportant.  Theoretically, it is these empirical realities that often facilitate—or at times, insist—on adjustments to existing theories of social life.  For example, the vast application of Erving Goffman within internet studies problemtizes the assumption that interaction rituals take place only through face-to-face contact (Sarah Wanenchak and I have both made similar arguments in relation to Collins’ IRC theory). Similarly, media studies scholars now must account not only for one-to-many production and distribution, but also for user generated prosumption.  Studies of sites such YouTube have led to a differentiation between “gatekeepers” and “gate watchers.”  Moreover, places like the Pew Internet and American Life Project do a phenomenal job of providing snapshot depictions of who is doing what, where, when, how, and how much.  They study the media that people use right now, and these descriptions matter. They conduct research knowing that their findings will be out of date almost immediately. This does not make their work irrelevant; it simply makes it relevant in different ways than the work of a theorist.

To study technological artifacts is to study a moving target. Properly theorizing these artifacts—and their relation to human users and creators—enables scholarly growth, while preventing inextricable attachment to an inevitably changing empirical moment.