Cyborgology

Malcolm Harris has posted one of the most provocative things I’ve ever read about social media , “Twitterland.” I’d like to point you the story and go through some of the many issues he brings to light. Harris’ story is one of theorizing Twitter and power; it can reinforce existing power imbalances, but, as is the focus here, how it can also be used to upset them.

Digital Dualism
Harris begins by taking on the idea that Twitter is a “tool” or an “instrument”, arguing that, no, Twitter is not a map, but the territory; not the flier but the city itself; hence the title “Twitterland.” However, in nearly the same breath, Harris states he wants to “buck that trend” of “the faulty digital-dualist frame the separates ‘real’ and online life.” As most readers here know, I coined the term digital dualism and provided the definition on this blog and thus have some vested interest in how it is deployed. And Harris’ analysis that follows indeed bucks the dualist trend, even though I would ask for some restating of the more theoretical parts of his argument. I’d like to urge Harris not to claim that Twitter is a new city, but instead focus on how Twitter has become part of the city-fabric of reality itself.

Much of what Harris goes onto describe is not some separate Twitterland City “made of text” but instead a city made of physical space, bodies, as well as information, be it textual, oral, visual, etc. At no point does Harris ever articulate any new strategies existing fully in the text-space of a new Twitterland, but are instead always examples of just how deeply text is embedded within physical space, just as physical space is also increasingly co-dependent on new flavors of information. Bracketing Harris’ unintentional dualist language, let’s look at his four stories of walking and talking in the augmented city.

OK Computer
The first story involves Harris and others starting a rumor that the band Radiohead would be playing Zuccotti Park in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. What follows is illustrative of journalism and information dissemination in the age of Twitter virality. Harris crafted the rumor in a way that seemed plausible, though, not provable; sites like Gawker are “more concerned with page views than reporting verified facts”:

As long as reporting’s framed as a rumour, then it can only be false if the rumour fails to resonate. As long as people repeat it, the rumour becomes a self-fulfilling story.

Here, Harris is making an astute claim about the structure of information virality, especially the delicate balance of “fact” and the kind of information juicy enough to be retweetable; taking into account the particular situation at hand, the right recipe can summon the Twitter network to perform as desired. The technology at play here is not just the smartphone and network, or the Twitter code and servers; the technology is also the social-network itself, including the users.

The rumour offered something a band-confirmed appearance wouldn’t have: an event, something that might or might not happen.

This is a nuanced point: the truth of the band coming announced not as rumor but through traditional, established and trusted networks could only provide inevitability. There is often little viral quality to something that is set in stone. Preordained certainty is information a network primarily consumes, whereas rumor is knowledge many are compelled to enact, to spread, and, importantly, to witness. The uncertainty provides enough excitement to retweet the information as well as show up to the park. Again, getting to the earlier point about digital dualism, Harris provides a striking example of how the different properties of textual expression and physical space are so deeply interpenetrated and co-dependent on each other as to confound our current understanding of how information flows so fluidly between them.

Who’s in a Username?
Harris’ next example surrounds his high-profile legal case having to do with his Twitter account details subpoenaed by the state, and Twitter itself coming to his defense in protecting that information. Harris has used this as an opportunity to play with notions of identity, ownership, privacy and activism to reveal an important strategy in using digital technologies to combat existing power structures. In short, there is little that can be used to equate a person and a user name.

Just because the account has my name and picture on it doesn’t mean it’s mine.

After tweeting out the subpoena document, I dropped the user name @destructuremal and switched my account name to @getsworse. Another user picked up @destructuremal, kept my name but changed the picture to an attractive woman’s torso, and started tweeting what I have to admit was solid mockery of me.

I don’t know how any prosecutor’s office could successfully subpoena a Twitter account that has no permanent accessible characteristics.

The point is that the state isn’t even sure what to subpoena for. What is that consistent piece of information an individual keeps between user names? Does the social media company have to give that to the state? Even then, how do we know who was using the account at any given time?

There is a @destructuremal ostensibly operated by a Malcolm Harris, but from minute to minute it could be anyone.

Names stand not for individuals, but for contingent singularities, subjects that are not who but what they say.

The hacker group Anonymous routinely has different people using the same username as to confound exiting legal procedures. By playing with his Twitter handle in this way, Harris is “feeling out the contours of the avatar.” By highlighting the different workings of identity on and offline, Harris, again, is not showing the value of some Twitterland, but instead how our one material-information-reality is being recast and relearned.

The Deafening Bark of Silence
The next two scenarios Harris describes aren’t first person, but are instead about how Twitter can be used to reorient discourse within existing knowledge-power- hierarchies. Jean Baudrillard famously discussed graffiti as it first emerged in New York City as especially disconcerting, even terrifying, precisely because the scrawls could not be understood by everyday people riding the subway. The graffiti did not always attempt to use established language but instead talked back precisely by not providing textual information. Graffiti’s incomprehensibility wasn’t a counterpoint but a refusal. In a similar tactic, Harris describes the Twitter account @Anti_Racism_dog:

The account would respond mostly to what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva would call ‘colour-blind racism’, that is, racisms that are generally right-libertarian in orientation and justified through appeals to supposedly objective discourses like science and statistics. It’s a notoriously insidious white-supremacist ideology, a virulent strain evolved specifically to resist anti-racist language

Colour-blind racists feed on good-faith debate…they demand to be engaged in …but @Anti_Racism_Dog just bark.

The successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do.

The only way to win is not to play but this is the colour-blind racist’s Achilles Heel: they’re compelled to defend themselves against accusations of racism.

While color-blind-racist attacks are very easy to make and defend, this specific form of trolling attempts to switch the economy of debate, to assert a counter-efficiency into a discourse manufactured to favor the dominant ideology.

The last scenario Harris describes is of a woman receiving unwanted attention on a flight. Instead of having to remain silent, she tweeted details of the man harassing her from the next seat, and her thousands of Twitter followers figured out who he was, exposing his lies and reveling new truths.

‘Did I just ruin Brian Presley’s life via Twitter?’ Stetten asked her followers. When the gossip sites picked up the story, she certainly had.

Harris concludes,

Structural injustices thrive when the micro-interactions that constitute them are hidden from view.

***

Ultimately, this is a story of how the one, augmented, city has been fundamentally changed. The power of new technologies Harris is describing are precisely born of the fact that they are not, as the title of the story suggests, of a “Twitterland.” The power-grabs in play are those of one reality, one of physical space, material inequalities, bodies that hurt, people with histories, pains, pleasures, re-networked together. As such, the sightlines are different: we can conjure the eyes of the many. Spaces darkened to hide the subtle operations of power can be illuminated. We have become reoriented to each other; we are negotiating these new freedoms but also need to be aware of the new boundaries those in power will try to enact.

At no point can we forget that these new technologies, these new reorientations, will also be used by those in power. New enlightened spaces will be used to create new shadows spots of domination and control. Twitter exists to make a profit, remember (something that Harris is himself very aware of in the story). But by kicking the system around, playing with it, we are learning its shape. In a moment where the contours of knowledge and power are being reshaped by these technologies of orientation, there is something of a gold rush to figure out these new flows, how to exploit them for one’s own purpose; some to demand new rules, and others to as quickly as possible recreate the existing order before too many figure out that something, for a brief moment, could have really changed.

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

Creepy Technology

Doug Hill on August 29, 2012

The online magazine Slate recently ran an essay that asked the question, “Why Do We Love To Call New Technologies ‘Creepy’?” The article was written by Evan Selinger, an associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology. My initial reaction to that essay, posted on my blog, was critical, but Selinger suggested in a tweet that I’d missed his point, which he said was “‘creepy’ discourse + normative analysis.” He’s right, I’m sure, that I missed his point – to be honest I don’t know what “normative analysis” is. So, with apologies to Selinger, I’ve reworked the essay to ask, simply: What is it about some technologies that makes us feel creepy?

There’s an obvious correlation between creepiness and novelty. It’s not unusual to be suspicious of strangers, especially when they have the potential to effect some degree of change in our habitual sense of the world. With technologies as with people, a measure of trust has to evolve.

Selinger’s essay mentions that early railroad passengers sometimes developed a variety of symptoms that physicians came to recognize as manifestations of “train sickness.” He suggests these maladies were a reaction to the creepiness of unfamiliarity, a form of “mania” that simply disappeared with time. Without going into detail (or normative analysis), it’s worth noting that the experience of early train travel was considerably rougher and more dangerous than it would become as technologies of comfort and safety evolved.

Still, I don’t doubt that (to borrow Robert Hughes’ phrase) the “shock of the new” had something to do with passengers’ uneasiness. As a given technology weaves its way into our lives the creepiness factor usually fades, as does its “specialness” factor. We become acclimated to its presence, and then dependent on it. The miraculous and frightening become routine. I say the creepiness factor “usually” fades because it doesn’t always. Plenty of people still find flying on airplanes creepy, for example. I’m one of them.

There are two less obvious issues that help explain the creepiness we often feel in response to technology. One is that we’re intuitively aware that, in terms of brute strength, technological power outstrips human power. You don’t have to be a religious fundamentalist to see that technology is about achieving a degree of mastery over nature, other human beings, and ultimately death, what was once believed to be the exclusive purview of God. But we’re also aware that technological power cuts both ways, and thus is not only a source of security, but also fear.

Human vs. Machine (and Machine/Human) in Desk Set

Immediately after reading Selinger’s essay I happened to catch on TV a showing of the old Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie, Desk Set. The plot, for those who don’t know it, revolves around a group of women who staff the research department of a major television network. Much of their working day is spent answering questions from the public – someone wants to know who had the highest career batting average in the history of baseball, someone else asks for the names of the reindeer in “The Night Before Christmas.” The women handle these calls with an impressive combination of dedication, good humor, and smarts.

The conflict in the picture is supplied by the installation in their department of a new, room-sized computer named EMERAC (a variation of the names of the early computers UNIVAC and ENIAC), which the researchers assume has been brought in to replace them. It turns out (spoiler alert here) that the movie isn’t really about the threat of automation – that’s just an excuse for a romantic comedy that revolves around Hepburn’s researcher falling in love with Tracy’s efficiency expert/computer engineer. It’s a formula that requires a happy ending, and indeed, in the end we learn that the researchers aren’t fired, EMERAC is only there to help them.

That the plot goes in this direction perhaps explains why there’s a note in the film’s opening credits thanking IBM for its assistance in the production. In any event, by the end, Hepburn’s character (who’s named, surely not by coincidence, Miss Watson) is cheerfully learning to use the computer and cooing affectionately as it spits out answers to questions. Human and machine learn to live in mutually supportive collaboration; mistrust and fear give way to admiration and gratitude; the researcher accepts the engineer’s proposal of marriage.

This seems a bit disingenuous. In truth, there’s good reason for the researchers of Desk Set to fear the arrival of EMERAC. Countless workers, from the onset of the Industrial Revolution to today, have been replaced by machines. Technology has the power to make us obsolete, and we know it. That’s creepy.

A merger of man and machine goes poorly in David Cronenberg’s *The Fly*

The second fundamental issue that the creepiness question raises is an existential one. It involves the alienation that exists between two separate orders of being: the organic and the mechanical. That’s what the uncanny valley is about, I think. We instinctively recognize that a machine is trying to sneak across that boundary, and it puts us on our guard. A similar discomfort may be at the root of the creepiness some people feel about flying: there’s just something unnatural about it.

Desk Set gets lots of mileage out of this tension. The computer and the female technician who’s brought in to attend it are both portrayed as cold, relentless intruders into a human community. Stanley Kubrick played brilliantly on that tension, too, defining the character of HAL in 2001 with two radically incongruous features: a heartless, staring eye and a voice that oozed creamy sincerity.

I realize not everyone agrees that a firm line exists between human beings and technology. There’s no reason, many believe (including many here at Cyborgology!), that we can’t share ontological space with one another. Certainly the transhumanist point of view is that nothing could be more natural than humans merging with their machines. “[I]t is our special character, as human beings, to be forever driven to create, co-opt, annex, and exploit nonbiological props and scaffoldings,” writes Andy Clark, author of Natural Born Cyborgs. “…Tools-R-Us, and always have been.”

I don’t buy it, or, more accurately, I don’t buy the implication that such adaptations are necessarily desirable. Human/machine intimacy is as likely to produce mutation as it is enhancement, in my opinion. This is a view that draws me to the work of artists like David Cronenberg and Philip K. Dick and philosophers like Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse.

One of the more eloquent expositions of this perspective came from the theologian Paul Tillich. Like other existentialists, Tillich believed that uneasiness is endemic to the human condition. It’s weird being aware that we exist and weird knowing that we’re going to die. Our predicament leaves us with persistent feelings of, as Tillich put it, “uncanniness.”

We’ve come up with lots of ways to avoid those feelings, and technology is high on the list. On one level we find technology reassuring because we think we can control it. Even though we may not understand how it works, we believe it behaves by rational, logical, “calculable” rules. We can surround ourselves with it, cloak ourselves in it, and feel secure. Tillich cites the home as an example. Its “coziness,” he wrote, holds “the uncanniness of infinite space” at bay. What the house or apartment offers individuals, the city offers humans en mass.

Like so many palliatives, however, technology can turn on us. It may not be as safely in control as we’d hoped. The potential for unease grows as our technologies become more powerful, more complex, and more self-determined. On some level we’re aware that the relentless logic they’re following is their own. We know they’re not truly alive, but they seem to be. We wonder whose agenda is being followed. Creepiness ensues.

“As the technical structures develop an independent existence,” Tillich wrote, “a new element of uncanniness emerges in the midst of what is most well known. And this uncanny shadow of technology will grow to the same extent that the whole earth becomes the ‘technical city’ and the ‘technical house.'”

Tillich ends this passage with a pertinent, and creepy, question: “Who can still control it?”

This post is also available on Doug Hill’s personal blog: The Question Concerning Technology.

Apertures Matter (a brief response to ‘Stories In Focus’)

nathanjurgenson on August 27, 2012

bokeh brew — my bad photo with lots of bokeh blur will get lots of facebook likes

Stories In Focus, posted by Sarah Wahnecheck two days ago, is a brief exploration of Bokeh that strikes me as a great start to something bigger. This is just a quick followup, asking Sarah and others to think more about the reality that amateur, documentary and news footage is increasingly coming to look like art films, specifically the effect of having one thing in sharp focus with the rest blurred and out of focus.

In short, older video cameras that were used to film the news, make documentaries, cover war, protests and so on tended to keep much of the frame in focus. However, you probably have noticed another style of photography and videography where something is in sharp focus and the rest is blurry. The blur is often called “bokeh” and is achieved by using a wide “aperture,” which is the size of the opening of the lens that lets light in. To illustrate, hold your hand up about 12 inches from the front of your face. Focus on the details of your hand and notice how the rest of the world is a bit blurry. Shift your eye’s focus to the deep background and your hand goes out of focus. Natural bokeh. More expensive lenses on SLR and DSLR cameras can create this effect especially well. In fact, the tell-tale sign of a new photographer is the overuse of the one-thing-in-focus-everything-else-blurry photo-cliché. The effect cues the viewer (who is usually not a pro-photographer) that the photo was taken by a pro, even when the photo isn’t actually very interesting. For fun, to prove this, I just snapped the photo above of my coffee cup on my desk. It isn’t a good photo, but because it has one thing in focus and the rest is blurry (f/1.8), I’ll post it to Facebook and it will get a bunch “likes.”

This blur carries weight, imparts meaning, conveys status, and tells us that something of fiction was involved in creating the image rather than an attempt at capturing pure fact. Susan Sontag described every image as the product of both the poet and the scribe, of creative subjectivity and objective reality. And when we see a photo or video with lots of this bokeh effect, we know the emphasis is more on the poet. Looking at that coffee cup on my desk and then seeing it on the screen above are very different sights. I’m looking at the cup now, it hasn’t moved, and it’s pretty boring, however, the image suggests something a bit more artistic.

To this point, Sarah states,

Bokeh – and other visual styles – are the means by which we understand what kind of story we’re reading. They are the “once upon a time” that sets up our expectations of what we’re going to see.

What does it mean that more of this effect is showing up in the news? In documentary depictions of war and protest?

My first thought is to the ethical implications of video-journalists documenting the world as it appears versus creating something more artistic. Should the documentary videographer be required to depict the world as it appears to the eye? Should they try to keep as much in focus as possible to convey as much of the “truth” of scene as they can? I explore some of these issues surrounding the ethics of war-photographers using Hipstamatic and Instagram faux-vintage filters here.

What I’d most like to see expanded upon more has to do with the “once upon a time” feeling that videos in the exaggerated-bokeh-blur style suggest. Sarah rightly states that we have been trained to know that bokeh suggests dreamlike fiction, not cold reality. I’d like to ask: What does it mean that we present our protest to look like an art film? what does it mean that we present our news to look like fiction? and what does it mean that we present our war zones as picturesque?

I’d like to suggest that overly-bokeh’d news video exists to cast the confusing present in the soft glow of unreality. Be it the increasingly popular faux-vintage/Instagram/Wes-Anderson nostalgic glow or the “once upon a time” bokeh blur, we are trying to frame our confusing present as like the movies. ‘Today’ is always baffling, right and wrong are always in flux, heads are fuzzed-out in the epistemic-bokeh that comes with our postmodern condition. But with these effects, we can almost ascertain good and evil, winners and losers; by imbuing our news with the faded saturation of faux-vintage filters and warm bokeh glow, we can almost trick ourselves into believing the present as having the sharp focus of the big screen and of simpler times past.

Much more work needs to be done to support this thesis, I know. Hopefully this is something we can discuss more moving forward. In the meantime, see Sarah’s Original Post and the “In Praise of Bokeh” article she was responding to.

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

In Their Words

nathanjurgenson on August 26, 2012

“facebook asks you to produce yourself in terms that are corporate”

“We love books for what they carry within them, not for what they’re made of”

“Already, [QR code] technology boasts a certain retronostalgic appeal”

“if you discard the digital dualist viewpoint, you don’t have to choose between online and “real” life”

“Internet shopping and drone flying can happen in the same remote space anywhere in the world”

“where fiction generally resists reader alteration, board games take it for granted”

“Bieber’s role in popularizing the song reflects the importance of both social media & old-fashioned celeb promotion”

“The result is a private, digital ranking of American society unlike anything that has come before”

“to touch and feel the Internet, to do with our virtual experience what Surrealists did with their dreams”

“It won’t be enough to touch our screens, some day. Our screens will touch us back”

“A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher”

“Women lie, and they do it to ruin men in positions of power. We shall henceforth call this “The Reddit Defence””

“a rapidly growing group of L.A.-area residents who share a passion for listening to police scanners and then disseminating that local news online, in real time, via Twitter”

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

In Their Words

nathanjurgenson on August 19, 2012

some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society (note: at a conference this week, so didn’t do as much reading as normal):

“if a “Like” is legally considered something other than communication, digital dualism will more firmly embed itself”

“even Facebook-hating Redditors make assumptions abt people w/o Facebook accounts”

“it’s tempting to think of the rover as a bodacious chick on another planet with a rock vaporizing laser on her head”

“what App.net is really about is that geeks are getting uncomfortable with normal people encroaching on their space”

“the shadowy obverse of [Silicon Valley] is the militarized barracks in China”

“Social networks are just comparison life shopping”

“what isn’t real about the digital world?”

“Every moment we are afraid for our privacy, we are thrilled by our celebrity”

“Mediation presents itself as a friendly tool when in fact it creates distance between us and the ordinary“

Twitter isn’t a Backchannel (#ASA2012)

nathanjurgenson on August 17, 2012

Bodies and screens, voices and tweets, hallways and backchannels, experiencing the American Sociological Association meetings this weekend in Denver means stepping into an atmosphere oversaturated with information. The bombardment can sometimes be overwhelming, with more sessions than you can attend and more tweets than you can read. This isn’t going to be a post on why we should use Twitter at conferences, Whitney Erin Boesel already did that more diplomaticly than I could pull off. Anyways, framing it as ‘why do we continue to meet face-to-face?’ would be more interesting for me. Instead, I simply want to argue that there will not be separate online and offline conferences happening, that Twitter isn’t a backchannel and the session room isn’t the front. The reality of the conference is always both digital and physical for everyone whether their noses are buried in a screen, sheets of paper, or staring unblinkingly at the podium.

One of my favorite conference activities is watching how people sift through this information-saturated environment. Notice their various comportments: some sitting, watching, listening with paper and pen, others clutching a glowing screen. Some are hand-high asking questions out loud, others are tapping angrily at a keyboard. Some are checking Facebook, others in that place between awake and asleep. This is the conference, individuals and their relative position to creating and consuming (i.e., prosuming) the surrounding atmosphere of information, be it analogue or digital.

There is no “backchannel”, there is no more or less “real” way to exist within this atmosphere of information, yet we continue to hear that the Twitter distraction whisks people away from the “real” conference in favor of something separate and “virtual.” Each time we say “real” or “IRL” (“in real life”) to mean offline, we reify the digital dualist myth of a separate digital layer “out there” in some ‘cyber’ space. And when we call Twitter a “backchannel” to mean a separate conversation, running tangent to the offline conference in some space behind precious face-to-face exchanges, we continue to support this digital dualism. The implicit, and incorrect, assumption is that the on and offline are zero-sum, that being offline means being not online, and vice versa.

Instead, the atmosphere of information is always at once analogue and digital, and we exist within it, always both on and offline. The idea of a backchannel is the fantasy of some Matrix-like informationscape untethered by material realty, similar to the complementary fantasy of some purely offline front-channel, some natural habitat untouched by digital contaminants. You can refuse to carry a phone, ignore all screens, and boast to everyone who will listen how old-school you are with your pencil and leather-bound notebook, but you still have not opted out of Twitter or the mislabeled “backchannel.” Akin to what I argued in The IRL Fetish essay, those who proudly fetishize their analogue resistance to digital distraction are still experiencing an augmented conference and are still deeply influenced by what happens online. In fact, they are often less-prepared to understand the nature of that influence.

That said, it remains important to differentiate between information, as it travels fluidly on and offline, that is coming at us from bodies or tweets, paper or pixels. Just as the person neglecting information in its digital form is less-prepared, equally problematic is the logic that being always more deeply digitally connected is a good thing. Neglecting what is happening face-to-face in favor of the backlit action on your screen can be a mistake. Conversational nuances, room dynamics, and of course, undistracted attention to the speaker are all important conference skills. The question should never have been ‘is Twitter good or bad?’ but how to best arrange your digital and analogue inputs and outputs in real-time. Always tuning out the room or Twitter are both failed conference strategies.

If we can acknowledge that the conference is both information and people who are always simultaneously on and offline, we’ll be much better prepared to prosume this information environment. We can stop fetishizing both “revolutionary cyberspace!” as well as pure physical co-presence. It means no one is fully offline. It means there is no such thing as a front or back channel. It means we need to stop saying real and “IRL” to mean offline and “virtual” to mean online. The ASA IRL is Twitter, too. Remember that claims to what is “real” are always claims to knowledge and thus power; it is not insignificant that “real” and “true” have nearly the same antonym.

A Brief Reflection on Digital Dualism for Social Researchers

Behzod Sirjani on August 14, 2012

It feels like every time I’m at a gathering of social researchers, within 15 minutes of being there I’ll hear the words “digital world” and “real world” being used to discuss interactions that take place in a technologically-mediated context versus actions that take place in non-technologically-mediated context.

The sound of this always makes me cringe, because assuming that somehow the “digital world” is separated from the real world makes it seem as though every time anyone uses Google Maps they are quite lucky the fake Google world that exists in the digital realm somehow maps quite impressively onto the “real” one that the person is moving through. If the speaker seems receptive enough, I will often ask them, quite playfully, “what isn’t real about the digital world?” This often gets them to clarify their language, and I assume that little harm is done. Often people don’t mean to separate mediated interactions from “real” ones, they just shortchange their audience by using limited language. But it is often that limiting of language that is problematic, as it shifts the discussion to reductionist terms that may not fully address the concept or experiences at hand. It is also the reason that I hope more people can come to terms with the notion of “augmented reality.”

I’m not going to re-define the term “augmented reality”, as you can read an excellent post by Nathan Jurgenson that encapsulates the discussion here, but I want to share a story from a recent gathering of social researchers that helps illustrate why “augmented reality” is a better explanation for the way many people are interacting with and through technology.

[NOTE: I do want to acknowledge that there are a wide variety of experiences that people have with technology, and in some cases their experience in mediated environments, such as forums, chat rooms, MMORPGS, etc can be completely detached from the lived experience they are perceived to have by members of physical space around them. However, I want to use the following example to explain augmented reality in practice, and how it often can account for the link between mediated (by technology) and unmediated interactions.]

I was at a recent gathering of social researchers discussing what the future could hold for social technologies in a number of situations, such as education, health, political uprisings, and so on. We were discussing education and young individuals using technology, when one member of the group mentioned that s/he had read a recent and compelling study that social network use was making individuals less social and even lonely. While s/he couldn’t remember the particulars of the study, s/he found the evidence quite compelling and wondered what we thought about these side effects. There was a pause in the group, and so I offered her the following explanation (roughly paraphrased):

“Perhaps it is not the technology that is making them less social, but the technology is making them more aware of the actions of others. Let’s say, as an example, I go out to the park with my friends for a picnic. While there, I take photos of the picnic with and post these to Instagram, which then posts them to Facebook. Another friend takes pictures with her DSLR and posts those photos to Facebook as well. Our other friends there do not take pictures, but they post status updates and tag me in them. So while I may be out doing one activity in the physical world, I (and those around me) have created a large set of digital artifacts of this experience, which you observe through Facebook. In this scenario, instead of just hearing about my picnic from me, you see multiple sets of images and Facebook statuses about this experience. So while you know that I only did one thing, it feels like I was doing many things because the mediated interactions (comments, likes, and so on) on the digital artifacts extend and amplify my physical experience into an augmented one.”

The individual who had proposed the “less social” idea slowly nodded at this, responding, “so instead of you going to the park and telling me about it, you go to the park, and everyone I know tells me about it, right? Which means although only one thing ‘happened,’ there were a large number of interactions, both mediated and not, that resulted.”

Fortunately, the discussion that followed as a result of this example led the group to have a productive conversation about areas that more research should be done to understand the variety of experiences that social technologies facilitate. While that conversation will be saved for another time, I was glad to see the group embrace the idea that mediated interactions often not only support, but frequently amplify, physical interactions to create an augmented reality that persists the interaction to a greater extent that was previously possible.

If we, as a research community, want to continue to make progress in understanding the role that technology can play in our lives, it is imperative that we recognize and explore how technology facilitates our interactions. Some things do happen in physical spaces, and some things are contained to digital spaces, but many experiences have both a physical and digital component, and have relevance only in that intersection.

Behzod Sirjani is a PhD Student in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. He thinks out loud frequently on Twitter (@beh_zod) and on his blog.