As most of Cyborgology readers know, the blog puts on a conference called Theorizing the Web (now in it’s fourth year). We have some exciting new ideas for 2014. By popular demand, #TtW14 will now–for the first time–feature two full days of programming. We’ve also moved out of an academic-institutional space and into a gorgeous warehouse in Brooklyn, NYC. All of this means that, in addition to the competitively-selected papers and invited speakers, we can experiment with more ways to push the norms of academic conferences. The goal of Theorizing the Web has always been to create the event we’d want to attend.

If you are interested in presenting at Theorizing the Web, here’s the call for papers.

Anyone can attend, you just have to sign up. Traditional conferences get expensive and often leave people who don’t have some sort of institutional backing out in the cold. We want to include as many as possible, so TtW works on a pay-what-you-can model (minimum $1). This means that those with limited funds can still attend, relying on the generosity of those who can afford a little more. Register and pay what you can here.

All the information you’ll need should be on the conference website, and, if not, feel free to comment below or write to theorizingtheweb@gmail.com.

If you think others would be interested in this event, please share. The Twitter hashtag is: #TtW14

Thanks for all the support these first three years, and we’re excited for the fourth Theorizing the Web!

As many of you already know, the third annual Theorizing the Web is fast approaching this March 1st and 2nd. We’ve moved the conference to New York City with help from CUNY’s Just Publics 365 initiative and we’ve also added a Friday event in addition to the main conference on Saturday. [Also, a reminder: the deadline to submit a 500 word abstract is January 6th!]  On Friday, March 1st,  the conference launches with a full slate of invited presentations at the CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery followed by an offsite social gathering.

The event will begin with an late afternoon plenary by Alice Marwick (@alicetiara), titled: “Wall Posts Can’t Protect You: Networked Privacy & Social Surveillance in Facebook.” You can get a hint of what Alice will be discussing by reading her recent paper in Surveillance and Society titled “The Public Domain: Surveillance in Everyday Life.” Here’s the abstract [updated 1.15.13]:

In the autumn of 2012, a popular Facebook meme involved a cut-and-paste “privacy notice” that served as a folk legal strategy, aimed at protecting people’s Facebook posts from being used by, well, Facebook. While this was quickly debunked, its popularity points to a larger issue, namely the futility of individual control over information dissemination, and thus the reliance on others to protect individual privacy on social network sites like Facebook, which I conceptualize as networked privacy. Online privacy is often framed either as a binary of public vs. private information, or of information that flows from a known and anticipated context to an unknown and unanticipated context. Neither frame takes into account the affordances of social technologies, which enable people to widely share information about someone without their consent, that preclude individual control over privacy. For many, control over social context and individual agency is required to feel that something is private. However, the power differentials inherent in human relationships mean that both control and agency are constantly violated, not only by changing technologies, but by differing levels of social status. These power differentials are also illuminated by the widespread practice of social surveillance, or the close examination of content created by others and views of one’s own content through other people’s eyes. Individuals strategically reveal, disclose and conceal personal information to create connections with others and tend social boundaries. Using examples from ethnographic studies of American social media use, I discuss how Facebook’s promotion of networked privacy and social surveillance contributes to the reinforcement of tightly striated social hierarchies.

Following a brief intermission for refreshments, will be our featured panel conversation, titled “Theorizing the Web Presents: Free Speech For Whom?” The panel brings together exciting speakers who each have a unique perspective on how digital technologies are making us reconsider the relationship between power and free speech. Here’s a description of the ideas the panel will be discussing among themselves and with the audience:

A free society requires free speech. But the story has always been more complicated than that. Power and social inequality always shape how speech is practiced. Technological change—most recently, the Web—has the capacity to disrupt and transform those speech practices, raising many questions: Who can speak? To whom? How? Where? Why? What such questions about free speech make clear is that the Web is not a new (virtual) frontier; instead, it is part of and consequential to this reality. From this perspective, Theorizing the Web asks, “Free Speech For Whom?” This panel discussion brings together thinkers of free speech and the Web, cutting at this broad issue in many ways. From bullying, trolling, and harassment to Anonymous and WikiLeaks; from drones, spying, and surveillance to protest and repression; from big data, hacking, and doxxing to mob vigilantism and anarchism, the necessities and limits of free speech, visibility, and transparency are a complex topic.

The panel will be moderated by Jessie Daniels (@JessieNYC) and will include:

danah boyd  (@zephoria)
Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen)
Kate Crawford (@katecrawford)
Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc)

More speakers may be announced soon. Seating for Friday’s events will be limited, so be sure to arrive early.

Registration is required and open to all. As always, it’s pay what you want.

We hope you are looking forward to #TtW13 as much as we are!

We begin with the assumption that social media expands the opportunity to capture/document/record ourselves and others and therefore has developed in us a sort-of “documentary vision” whereby we increasingly experience the world as a potential social media document. How might my current experience look as a photograph, tweet, or status update? Here, we would like to expand by thinking about what objective reality produces this type of subjective experience. Indeed, we are increasingly breathing an atmosphere of ambient documentation that is more and more likely to capture our thoughts and behaviors.

As this blog often points out, we are increasingly living our lives at the intersection of atoms and bits. Identities, friendships, conversations and a whole range of experience form an augmented reality where each is simultaneously shaped by physical presence and digital information. Information traveling on the backs of bits moves quickly and easily; anchor it to atoms and it is relatively slow and costly. In an augmented reality, information flows back and forth across physicality and digitality, deftly evading spatial and temporal obstacles that otherwise accompany physical presence.

When Egyptians dramatically occupied the physical space of Tahrir Square this past January (as they do, again, at this very moment), the events unfolded live before the eyes of the world, despite considerable geographic barriers. The authors write this post in one browser tab and, in another, watch live streaming footage of protests in Tahrir Square thousands of miles away. Less dramatically, but still important, we get a first-hand perspective of several #Occupy encampments being dismantled, despite police efforts to diminish visibility by performing the raids under the cloak of night. With an eye on the Twitter streams of protesters exchanging information and strategizing movements, it has become clear that physical events transmit digitally, and vice versa. Our augmented reality is an atmosphere increasingly capable of documenting and transmitting information fluidly across atoms and bits.

When information transmission becomes less costly both in terms of resources and effort, documentation becomes more ubiquitous. An obvious example is the invention of the digital camera. Photographers not so long ago had to be judicious in an attempt to save film for the 24 or 36 best shot. In the digital paradigm, the photographer has virtually unlimited resources to capture nearly everything and only retroactively selects the best images. Digital photography gives new meaning to the cliché “shoot first, ask questions later;” our capacity to document well exceeds our capacity to process those documents in real time.

Once captured, we tend to share and disseminate much of our documentation of ourselves and others. Indeed, this is what social media is: (1) the documenting of ourselves, our lives and others, and (2) sharing, interacting and collaborating with those documents in a social way.

The ease of digital documentation and our desire to gain social benefits from sharing these documents creates an environment where documentation is nearly ubiquitous. The default assumption—even when in a semi-private location such as a house party—is that cameras are rolling. Most every action is potentially just one smartphone click away from becoming a (quasi-)public document, and those around us often have a vested interest in creating such documents, be they photos, tweets, check-ins, or status updates.

We are increasingly in the spotlight even if we are unaware that we are performing. When online, many of our searches, shares, and clicks are registered in innumerable databases; sometimes visibly and sometimes invisibly. The abundance of documentation mechanisms means that simply existing implies that we are leaving a trail of recorded information behind us. Ambient documentation is what we call the condition of documentation that occurs as result of one’s mere presence in an environment.

As such, we are constantly confronted with the means of documentation (e.g., cameras, phones, keyboards, etc.) as well as the documents themselves, leading us to assume that we are always being recorded. As Nathan has stated before, the consequence is that our present is increasingly lived as a potential document; the present is now always a future past. A condition that can be described as “documentary vision.”

Spotify, the music streaming service that syncs with one’s Facebook account, offers an excellent example of the pathway by which ambient documentation leads to documentary vision. Spotify users sign up using their Facebook profile, and then watch as what their music choices are published to Facebook in a stream that also includes what their friends are listening to, watching, and reading, plus the great thing about it is that those who haven’t used Spotify yet can get a spotify promotion their first month. Friends can then comment on a user’s choices, serving as a constant reminder of pervasive documentation.

We, of course, make choices with this in mind. What music makes me look good? What selections, when documented for all to see, will make the best impression? This could mean, for example, Top40 is out and Pitchfork darlings are in—or vice versa—depending, of course, on the social circle one is performing for. Newspapers such as the Washington Post and The Guardian are now similarly tracked by Facebook. Will I click on a certain newspaper article if I know my choice will be documented and disseminated? Or, will my reading habits change? Similar questions can be asked in light of Foursquare or Facebook Places: Will I choose the same bar whether or not I intend to “check in?”

The point is that we weigh decisions differently in environments that are capable of documenting much of what we do. With new technologies, from smart phones to social media, the atmosphere of documentation is far more pervasive than ever before.

As it always has, documentation takes on new cultural forms and norms. None of this neglects the important point that much of what we do and think remains anonymous, hidden, and undocumented. But we are living in a state of heightened publicity; one where the fact of our existence guarantees public documentation, and public documentation guarantees our existence.

(Or: How we’ve come to be micro-celebrities online)

Facebook’s recent introduction of “frictionless sharing” is the newest development in a growing trend: data is being increasingly produced passively as individuals conduct their day-to-day activities. This is a trend that has grown both on and offline. We will focus on the former here; especially “frictionless” sharing that involves syncing Facebook with other sites or apps. Once synced, much of what a user listens to, reads or otherwise accesses are automatically and immediately published on Facebook without any further action or approval.  Users may not even need to “opt into” frictionless sharing because many services are changing their default setting to automatically push content to Facebook. In short, we can say that users play a passive role in this process.

Contrast this to more active sharing: when we “like” or “+1” something (by clicking the eponymous buttons that have spread throughout the Web) it requires the user to make a conscious and affirmative action to share something with others in their network. Nathan Jurgenson (one of this post’s co-authors) previously described these two models as types of “documentary vision:” We actively document ourselves and our world around us as if we have a camera in our hand (“liking”, status updates, photos, etc.), or we can passively allow ourselves to be documented, curating our behaviors along the way (e.g., reading a magazine article so that you can present yourself as the type of person who “likes” that sort of magazine) much like a celebrity facing a crowd of paparazzi photographers.

Let’s make another layer of complexity to this documentary model: In many cases, we not even aware that we are being documented. For decades, A-list celebrities have had to live with the reality that every time they go out into the  world, someone may be documenting their every move from afar.  Today, the experience is becoming universal. The Internet is full of digital paparazzi; that is, invisible data collection mechanisms that track and surveil users. Google has long collected data about users behavior-patterns to improve its page-rank algorithm. Without such data, the algorithm would be largely ineffective in predicting what sites best respond to the users’ inquiry. The paparazzi-like invisibility of the documentation is significant because users have less opportunity play as active of a role is shaping the documentation produced about them. We could come up with many examples of this passive, invisible digital-paparazzi: from Amazon tracking user habits to make recommendations to the iPad tracking your every behavior and location to send statistics to the company and app developers. What is clear is that much of the data we produce comes from something like a paparazzi hiding in the bushes, rather than from the posed self-portrait.

Of course, the subject of invisible digital-paparazzi documentation is not always completely inactive in the documentation process. Many of us know, to some degree or another, that we are being tracked. Celebrities know that paparazzi might be present at any time and place and learn to behave as if they are always being watched. We might think of the residents of the Real World or Big Brother houses: they are engaged in a perpetual performance for an invisible, omnipresent audience, giving new meaning to Shakespeare’s declaration that “all the world’s a stage” (or, at least, a red carpet or confessional room). These tabloid-darlings who stroll through public venues with the express purpose of being seen and documented are no longer a separate caste. All of our lives are increasingly resembling theirs.

Some have argued that social media has turned the average person into a “micro-celebrity,” to use Alice Marwick and danah boyd’s term. Let’s differentiate between celebrities who (1) embrace documentation; the Paris-Hilton-like famous-for-being-famous celebrity who exist to be documentable; and (2) those J.D. Salinger or Howard Hughes types that attempt to avoid the spotlight, (which, of course, makes documentation of them all the more valuable). The former is active while the latter are much more passive in their own documentation. We-micro-celebrities on Facebook have generally been active as own documenters. We choose what photos we post and de-tag ourselves from the non-flattering ones others post of us. The interesting change brought about by this new so-called frictionless sharing is that act of documenting has gone from being active to much more passive. And, at the same time, frictionless sharing has made this passive documentation more visible.

And, as such, we are increasingly aware that we are being documented, and thus increasingly calibrate our behaviors as such.

The issue at stake here is whether social media users are content to accept this newly-assigned role: the Paris-Hilton-like-micro-celebrity who is highly active, visible, but not allowed behind the camera? Are we willing to be the production while handing the role of producer to some paparazzi behind the digital bush?

Perhaps not entirely, as the reaction to Spotify has demonstrated. Spotify, a music-streaming service, can sync to Facebook and passively publish what you listen to on the live-ticker-like space at the top-right of the Facebook screen. When Spotify made it mandatory that all users sign-in via Facebook, users rebelled and more privacy options have been included. Nevertheless, the logic of frictionless sharing remains intact and is likely to expand into other sectors of the Web.

Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) | PJ Rey (@pjrey)

The Cyborgology blog turns one today! [our first post]

We are thrilled with the blog’s success and the community that has grown around it. It has been exciting to see the increase in page views, high quality comments, and discussions on sites like Twitter and Facebook. The Faux-Vintage photo essay took on a life of its own and a recent post on Chomsky was rewritten for Salon.com (here). The blog has advanced a theoretical position we call “augmented reality,” positioned art as theoretically significant, focused on social justice issues and has played host to much audio and video from a range of events. The highlight was watching this community come to life at the Theorizing the Web conference that grew out of the blog.

We began Cyborgology to fill a void we observed in popular and academic discourse: conversations about technology often lacked theory, and theoretical debate often neglects technology.

Since we created the blog 365 days ago, there have been 289 posts on the intersection of technology and society.

And we did not do it alone.

Three regular contributors, David Banks, Jenny Davis, and Dave Strohecker have joined our team and made many wonderful contributions. We have received guest posts from many authors, including George Ritzer, Jessie Daniels, E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman, Marc Smith, Francesca Tanmizi, Dan Greene, Bonnie Stewart, William Yagatich, and Sarah Wanenchak,  as well as innumerable thoughtful comments from a range of readers including Patricia Hill Collins, Amber Case, Jeff Jarvis, Bruce Sterling, and Siva Vaidhyanathan. Posts have been spun off as content for venues including Salon.com, the Boston Globe, and NPR.

The posts receiving the most page views  October 2010 – 2011 were:

1. The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Parts I, II and III)

2. Surveillance & Entertainment: A Panopticon in the Clouds

3. George Orwell and the “Like” Button

4. The Rise of the Internet (Anti)-Intellectual?

5. Recap: Social Media and Egypt’s Revolution

6. Facebook Narcissism?

7. Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality

8. An Introduction to Body Modification: The New Cyborg Body

9. WikiLeaks and our Liquid Modernity

10. Audio from danah boyd’s TtW2011 Keynote

The most commented on posts from October 2010 – 2011 were:

1. The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Parts I, II and III)

2. The Rise of the Internet (Anti)-Intellectual?

3. Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality

4. Life Becomes Picturesque: Facebook and the Claude Glass

5. The Problem with Americans Elect 2012

6. Chat: Noam Chomsky Getting Social Media All Wrong

7. Rethinking Privacy and Publicity on Social Media: Part I

8. Jeff Jarvis and Multiple Identities: A Critique

9. Augmented Revolution

10. Recap: Social Media and Egypt’s Revolution

The most viewed posts by author from October 2010 – 2011 were:

David Banks: Surveillance & Entertainment: A Panopticon in the Clouds

Jenny Davis: Digital-Physical Embodiment & the Kiss Transmission Device

Nathan Jurgenson: The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Parts I, II and III)

PJ Rey: Recap: Social Media and Egypt’s Revolution

Dave Strohecker: An Introduction to Body Modification: The New Cyborg Body

The posts receiving the most comments by author from October 2010 – 2011 were:

David Banks: The Problem with Americans Elect 2012

Jenny Davis: Active and Passive Cyborgs

Nathan Jurgenson: The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Parts I, II and III)

PJ Rey: Recap: Social Media and Egypt’s Revolution

Dave Strohecker: New Technology and the Zombification of Higher Ed.

We would like to thank Jon Smajda for maintaining thesocietypages.org and helping us with all our technical needs. And, we are especially indebted to our designer, Ned Drummond, for donating her creative skills to creating the look and feel of Cyborgology.

Most importantly, we would like to thank everyone who reads this blog!

We have plenty in store for the next 12 months…

Cyborgology Editors Nathan and PJ have teamed up with Dr. Chris Donoghue to organize a session (or sessions, or perhaps a mini-conference, depending on the number of quality submissions) on social media at the Eastern Sociological Society Meetings, February 23-26, 2012 in New York City.

If you follow Cyborgology, Theorizing the Web, or know anyone who wants to present on social media at a Sociology conference, please see our Call for Abstracts. All we need is a title and a 200-250 word abstract (anything over 250 words will not be accepted). Papers will be competitively chosen.

Submit your abstracts here.

The annual meetings of the American Sociological Association were held this past week in Las Vegas. More than 5,000 sociologists converged from departments around the world to meet face-to-face in a massive conference hotel. Planning such an event is a massive undertaking with a vast array of logistical issues; yet, one facet of the meeting, Wi-Fi access (or, rather, its inadequacy), sparked a major debate.

First, we should mention that as conference organizers who have run up against the limits of a venue’s Wi-Fi infrastructure, we understand the difficulties in getting people reliably connected. During last Spring’s Theorizing the Web conference, the Wi-Fi crashed under such heavy pressure. However, we were working with a classroom building on a campus, not a massive conference hotel that already has Wi-Fi access built in. It is now the norm for major conference venues to have Wi-Fi available at a price. While the relatively small Theorizing the Web conference might not have a budget for universal Wi-Fi access, ASA could easily spread the cost over the massive number of those paying for registration (or even make a separate Wi-Fi registration fee).

Having Wi-Fi at the ASA meetings is important. Let’s take just Twitter for an example. As we previously noted, 559 people produced nearly 3,500 tweets with the #ASA2011 hashtag (archived here). This content is being broadcast out to all of their many followers, too (for example, Zeynep Tufekci has over 4,000 followers around the globe). We have discussed before that Twitter creates a “backchannel” to the physical conference, facilitating an “augmented conference” experience. Using Twitter allows one to

• “Attend” many sessions at once
• Become engaged with session instead of just passively consuming it
• Make new connections
• Find sessions to attend
• Find good eats/drinks outside of the conference
• Attend the meetings when you have to arrive late/leave early
• Spread news updates about the event
• Contact event organizers
• Raise questions and critiques of the speaker in real-time
• Fact-check speaker’s statements
• Communicate with publishers at the event
• Promote your own session
• Enjoy in-jokes about the conference
• Post photos of speakers and interesting slides

Surely there is more (also, see Jessie Daniels and Nathan’s Twitter ASA Bingo Card for more), but the general trend is that attendees can augment passively consuming the conference in physical space with actively producing digital content when given the means (“means” being adequate Wi-Fi coverage, of course).

Twitter users can make points that spread throughout attendees and are often discussed in the session’s Q&A period. The digital conversation quickly bleeds into and becomes again enmeshed with what is happening in physical space. Further, all of this content becomes a tangible and durable archive of the meetings, adding value to the conference itself. As Sociologist Daniel Morrison states, the Twitter “backchannel allows for alternative forms of participation, builds community during sessions.”

We measured the connection speed near the publishers’ exhibition room, and it clocked in at .39 megabytes per second for both upload and download. On the same day we measured the free and open Wi-Fi connection at the Cosmopolitan and it clocked in at 4.25 mb/s download and 5.28 mb/s on upload, or, roughly, 10x faster than that at ASA.  The Wi-Fi connection on PJ’s plane ride home 10,000 feet was .54mb/s, or, roughly twice that of the connection at ASA.  Given the needs of conference attendees, 10mb/s should be the gold standard, and anything below 3 mb/s should be considered inadequate.

It is time for the ASA to include “robust wireless Internet connectivity” to its “factors which weigh heavily in the Council decision” about which conference hotel to choose.

Also, see Marc Smith’s Event Graph of all ASA communication:

“	@JessieNYC: @barrywellman @nathanjurgenson Let’s hope @ASANews recognizes the value of social media publicity in 2012 #ASA2011
	pjrey August 22, 2011

During his plenary address a Theorizing the Web 2011, entitled “Why the Web Needs Post-Modern Theory,” George Ritzer was deeply critical of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s (2011), The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), a book which has received a great deal of media attention in recent months, for it’s lack of theoretical foundations.  The editors of the Cyborgology obtained the following excerpt from Ritzer’s paper:

The nature of, and problems with, a modernist approach are clear in Siva Vaidhyanathan’s (2011), The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). We were drawn to this book because the title is similar to, if not an outright rip off of, two similarly modernist books written by one of the authors of this paper- The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer, 1993/2011) and the Globalization of Nothing (Ritzer, 2003/2007). Thus we know from whence we speak in seeing Googlization as a modernist work and as such in understanding its liabilities (and strengths). In addition, while Ritzer’s works (mentioned above) use modern theories and ideas (e.g. rationalization) to deal with such clearly modern phenomena as the fast food restaurant and, more generally, the world of consumption, Vaidhyanathan employs modern ideas (not full-fledged theories) to deal with the arguably postmodern world of the Internet, Web 2.0 and especially Google.

Googlization can be seen as a modernist work in various ways. For example, Vaidhyanathan draws, although very superficially, on the ideas of a number of modern thinkers such as Veblen, Dewey and Habermas, but the work is virtually devoid of any discussion of postmodern thinkers and ideas. There is one exception, a brief mention of the work of Richard Rorty, but instead of drawing out its postmodern implications it is discussed in the context of the modernist concern for truth. This is related to the fact that Vaidhyanathan implicitly sees Google, as well as the Internet in which it exists, as modern phenomena and therefore as amenable to a modernist analysis. For example, the book offers a “centered” (as opposed a postmodern decentered) analysis with Google seen as exemplifying all of the positive (e.g. “liberty, creativity, and democracy”) and negative trends (e.g. “blind faith in technology and market fundamentalism”) associated with the Internet today (Vaidhyanathan, 2011: xiii). More importantly, Vaidhyanathan employs the most modernist of modernist approaches by employing throughout the book a grand narrative of the “googlization of everything”. By googlization, Vaidhyanathan (2011: 2) means that “Google has permeated our culture” and by everything he means, well, that everything, especially “us” (including the googlized subject and memory), “the world”, and “knowledge”. To this list, he adds toward the end of the book the googlization of higher education, students, scholarship, and research. Had the book gone on further, we would have been treated to endless examples of googlization.

In his conclusion, Vaidhyanathan (2011: 205) offers as a replacement for googlization his own grand narrative of the “Human Knowledge Project” which has a “single realizable goal in mind: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible”. In fact, in articulating this highly modernist goal, Vaidhyanathan is self-consciously using Google’s own mission statement to create a grand narrative that, he hopes, competes with Google’s while leading to a system that deals with many of the problems created by googlization.

We should also add that while some theorists and theoretical ideas are mentioned, The Googlization of Everything is a largely atheoretical work. Although it is published by the University of California Press, it is clearly a trade book aimed at a larger, non-academic audience. The result is that it is highly superficial and devoid of the insights that might have emerged from a more serious intellectual engagement with modern theory, to say nothing of postmodern theory.

Of note, Vaidhyanathan recently visited the University of Maryland campus to give a talk that, like his book, was largely descriptive and lacking in theory. University of Maryland graduate student and past Cyborgology contributor Daniel Greene posed a critical question that Vaidhyanathan admittedly had no response for. “You are asking me to think?”, Vaidhyanathan (half?) joked. After the talk, Cyborgology editor Nathan Jurgenson invited Vaidhyanathan to engage Ritzer’s criticism via Twitter. Here is Vaidhyanathan’s response:

We have Ritzer’s criticism and, as yet, no real response from Vaidhyanathan (though, we will edit this post if there is one). Video of Ritzer’s full presentation streams below, with his criticism of Vaidhyanathan beginning around the 4:25 mark:

As many of you already know, the Cyborgology editors decided to throw a conference called Theorizing the Web. The conference will be in College Park, MD (just outside of Washington, D.C.) on April 9th. Today we are excited to announce the program for the conference and attach a flier that we hope you all can distribute to those who you think might be interested.

As you will see, the response was terrific. We built 14 panels out of the 56 papers we accepted (from the over 100 submissions). There will be three invited panels (on feminist activism, race, and methods). There will be two symposia (one on the role of social media in the Arab uprisings and another on social media and street art). There will be two plenaries (one by Saskia Sassen and another by George Ritzer). And we are excited to have danah boyd deliver our keynote.

If that was not enough, we have plenty of art-related surprises in store for those who attend. We have invited artists of all types to display and perform art specifically tailored to the themes of the conference. This will be one busy carnivalesque day for those who love technology and/or theory!

The program is found here: http://www.cyborgology.org/theorizingtheweb/program.html

Last, a flier for the conference [.pdf here]. Please distribute widely!

TtW2011 Flyer

On Jan. 8, 2011, Jared Lee Loughner allegedly shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 others resulting in 6 fatalities.  This event has drawn attention to a number of new and important roles social media has come to play in our society, including how information is gathered, changed political rhetoric, and how these sites handle the profiles of those involved in high-profile tragedies.

Profiling the Suspect
Media coverage (i.e., cable, network, radio, and newspapers) of the event represented a broader trend in contemporary journalism: almost immediately, news outlets began to piece together a profile of this previously unknown figure using almost exclusively Loughner’s social media profiles (i.e., Facebook, Myspace, Youtube and, most recently, online gaming discussion boards).  Even though his MySpace and Facebook profiles were taken down by the site, screenshots of the sites are available, including one showing a photo of gun on a US History textbook as a profile picture.

The digital documentation of our lives via social media offers an easily-accessible, autobiographical source for journalists and anyone else who is interested. Yet, there is a risk in basing our impressions solely off of this information.  Loughner’s image of himself is certainly not objective and may very well be inaccurate.  News outlets, however, face pressure to “get the scoop” on the story, so they tended to report on Loughner based heavily on this information, as opposed to interviewing a range of people in his life to construct a more holistic perspective.

The Post-Shooting Political Debate
In the wake of the tragedy, a debate emerged over the intensity and tone of contemporary political rhetoric.  The political right in general, and Sarah Palin in particular, were criticized for their use violent language which many on the left believe has the power to incite real violence.  Palin’s use of cross-hairs over opponents districts became the central image of this debate as well as a tweet in which she encouraged supporters: “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!” And it is noteworthy that Sarah Palin posted her video-response to this criticism on Facebook.

Arguably, the medium of online communications has contributed to the intensification political rhetorical over the past decade.  The Internet has made communication easier and more efficient, allowing politicians to communicate with their constituents more and more publicly.  This proliferation of communication has further enabled the mainstream media’s tendency to report on politicians themselves, what politicians are saying, and how they are saying it (as opposed to focusing on politician’s platforms).  Thus, the media spends more time covering rhetoric and less time covering issues.  Moreover, politicians are expected to adhere to the norm that social media communications are intimate communications between friends/supporters.  As such, politicians are pressured to speak more colloquially, using the language of their voting base.  In doing so, however, they leave behind a very public trail of communications that are likely to alienate those outside their base who lead very different lives and hold very different values. For instance, using gun-related terms is commonplace to many of Palin’s constituents, while this same language makes many others quite fearful.

Disappearing the Suspect
It was also important to observe how social media sites (and their users) handled the online profiles of the victims and the alleged perpetrator.  Since the Virginia Tech massacre, it has become standard to make the profiles of victims de facto memorials. Meanwhile, the Facebook and Myspace profiles of the alleged perpetrator were disabled. We can speculate as to why both companies made this decision (as opposed to Google keeping his YouTube account accessible): the pages may have been significant to the investigation, the companies might have feared that Loughner’s “friends” visible on the pages might have been endangered by the coverage, or they might have sought to protect Loughner’s own right to a fair trial before being subjected to public ridicule (e.g., through comments on his page).  Whatever the motivation, the consequences of disappearing Loughlner from the social media landscape are of great significance.  For the generation that has come of age in the era of social media, losing one’s presence on such websites is tantamount to losing one’s (social) existence.  Suspension of one’s accounts is punishment in the form of social isolation; like a sort-of digital solitary confinement.

Hear the Cyborgology Editors discuss the social media connection to this tragedy on the Maryland Morning radio show on WYPR (Baltimore’s NPR affiliate).