Instagram has gained tremendous popularity over the last several years. It is popular with people of all sorts of demographics and from all walks of life. In the case with Instagram, the number of followers that you acquire is what is most important.

Number of followers equals Instagram success

It is important to be aware here that there is a lot more to Instagram than just the number of followers you can acquire. However, your number of followers is one of the important measurements (or metrics) of the social media tool. If you have a large number of followers, other people will have the perception that you (and your business) are a success. That lends itself to your professional credibility and trustworthiness.

For business progress, buying followers on Instagram can give you a lot of popularity. A strong number of followers also gives you the confidence that your message is being received by other people online and it allows you to increase your reach to a large number of good-quality connections. It also goes a long way to strengthening your relationship with your target audience, which is essential to your success.

Instagram is a smart phone application that acts as a social network and photo editing software. The application allows users to apply various filters and effects to their camera phone pictures, often in order to look like Polaroids from the 70s. The users can then upload the photos to the Instagram community where other members can view, “like”, and comment on them. A user’s Instagram feed can also be synced with other social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

Launched in 2010, the app was initially only available to iPhone users and those with iOS software. Its popularity became instant, and within a year, it had over ten million users. In April 2012, Instagram debuted their Android version of the app on the Google Play store, thus opening up its user base to those with Android smartphones. With this launch came an unexpected backlash from the original iPhone users, and a new form of class warfare began to arise on the internet.

Different cell phone providers offer iPhone versus Android devices. iPhones can only be purchased with the three big name cell phone providers in the US (Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T) and are often sold at a discounted rate with a 2-year contract. These providers offer Android phones too, but the Android phones can also be sold with a pre-paid plan through companies like Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Cricket, and Walmart’s Straight Talk. With these different businesses come different sets of customers. According to a Stevenson survey, 50% of all prepaid cellphone users have a high school diploma or completed some college whereas 50% of those with contracts are college or post-college graduates. Racially speaking, 10% of all prepaid users are African American as well versus 7% of those with cellphone contracts, and those prepaid users are increasing 1.6% more than contract users.

In August 2011, the website Hunch published an infographic highlighting various differences between Android and iPhone users. Of the 700,000 users surveyed between March 2009 to July 2011, 80% of all Android users are more likely to have only a high school diploma versus 37% of iPhone users having a graduate degree. Android users are also 24% more likely to earn between $50,000 to $100,000 annually whereas 67% of iPhone users are more likely to earn over $200,000. These vast differences in income and education reflect sociology’s constant references to the dissimilarities between the working and bourgeoisie class.

Full infographic available here: http://blog.hunch.com/?p=51781

A typical Android dinner consists of sirloin steak, General Tso’s chicken, or cheesesteak. While General Tso’s chicken could be considered an exotic and ethnic dish, it is an Americanized Chinese meal born in New York City. Protein-heavy and fatty dishes such as these make food “a material reality, a nourishing substance which sustains the body and gives strength” (Bourdieu 1984: 197) and further align Android users with Bourdieu’s working-class.

This class distinction between bourgeois and working is even more prevalent in different smartphone users’ ice cream choices. Android users enjoy the simple flavors of chocolate chip cookie dough, vanilla, and cookies and cream. These are easily found in any grocery store’s freezer section or ice cream parlor. By contrast, iPhone users like the flavors salted caramel, mint chip, and lemon sorbet. It’s like comparing a quart-sized carton of Dreyer’s ice cream to a pint of Häagen-Dazs.

These very different demographics and cultural preferences combined with the overtly negative and elitist Twitter posts from Instagram iPhone users highlight a very important issue in today’s digital culture. Despite residing in the classless, race-less, and even gender-less world of cyberspace, prejudice still reels its ugly head on the internet. All these findings can relate back to Eszter Hargittai’s article, “The Digital Reproduction of Inequality” and her concept of digital inequality. Hargittai’s expands on the idea of the digital divide to define digital inequality as “a more refined approach [that] considers different aspects of the divide, focusing on such details as quality of equipment, autonomy of use, the presence of social support networks, experience and user skills, in addition to differences in types of uses” (Hargittai 2008: 937).

Applying her argument to Android and iOS users, we can see the differences between these users show that “while all population segments may have become increasingly connected, serious divides persist with the most disadvantaged trailing behind the more privileged in significant ways” (Hargittai 2008: 938). These distinctions create digital inequality in the realm of cellphone usage and highlights how “differentiated uses of digital media have the potential to lead to increasing inequalities benefiting those who are already in advantageous positions and denying access to better resources to the underprivileged” (Hargittai 2008: 943).

Digital inequality can become even more persistent as well because it ensures “that people’s socioeconomic status influences the ways in which they have access to and use information and communication technologies” (Hargittai 2008: 939). Even though Instagram was launched in 2010 through the iTunes store, Android users didn’t get to access until 2012. This two-year gap created a distinct user base and sense of entitlement amongst the iPhone Instagram community. The user base was even further isolated through the way in which Instagram acts as a social network. There is no online access to the app or photos through their website. The only way users can browse and share photos is through their cellphone. Therefore, Android users couldn’t access this “gated community,” allowing them to be further alienated and seen as unwanted intruders storming the gates of the sacred iPhone community.

The Instagram social network will probably become an even stronger community now that Facebook purchased it for $1 billion. Instagram has the ability to create internet celebrities based on whatever images a user happens to post. With a user’s status in increased popularity come various forms of financial success. For example, as seen with the popularity of different Tumblr blogs, a well followed feed can lead to lucrative book deals. Perhaps art gallery openings featuring Instagram photographers will soon be on the horizon — oh, wait, that already happened.

Digital inequality will continue to persist as app developers choose to limit which mobile operating systems have access to their own technologies. For example, the popular sharing and bookmarking site Pinterest has yet to launch an official app through the Google Play store, but there is one available for free on iTunes. While the Pinterest is also accessible online, thus allowing all internet users to access its services, preventing easy smartphone/tablet use still limits the audience of those wishing to engage in the community while away from a computer. As we become even more reliant on mobile devices, this divide will become an even bigger issue and highlight major differences through technology use in various communities. It’s a very optimistic, but now faded notion, to see the internet as “The Information Superhighway.” In reality, the highway is turning more into “The Information Toll Road” as technology evolves.

Sources: Twitter, BuzzFeed 1, 2, Lifehacker, CNET, Hunch, Distinction, GigaOM, Huffington Post, Mashable 1, 2, Tumblr, and The Digital Reproduction of Inequality

Christine Moore studies sexuality and is currently pursuing her Masters in sociology at the University of Texas San Antonio. She reluctantly tweets @thisthingblows.

–Listen to the show here–

The Diane Rehm Show took to the air, ending 45 minutes ago, to debate how Facebook is making us lonely and disconnected and ruining just about everything. This is my quick first-reaction. On one side was Sherry Turkle, that avatar of “digital dualism” (more on this below) who recently wrote “The Flight From Conversation” in the New York Times and Stephen Marche who wrote “Is Facebook making us Lonely?” in The Atlantic. On the other side was Zeynep Tufekci, a researcher who communicates as well as these journalists*, responding to Turkle (also in the Atlantic). While Turkle and Marche’s headlines are intentionally catchy and dramatic, they are also sensationalist and misleading. The reality is not as captivating and Tufekci’s headline in response is far more accurate: “Social Media’s Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships.”

This is one of the many lessons provided by this hour of NPR: catchy arguments tend to trump data, even on nerdtacular public radio. Tufekci, outnumbered, did well given the dearth of air time provided relative to the more sensationalist ideas on the show. Further, the show (@drshow) seemed completely unaware of the fast-moving and engaging Twitter backchannel discussing the topics in much more nuance and detail than much of what was said on-air. [You’ve already enjoyed the irony of this as opposed to Turkle’s argument, right? Obviously.]

The next lesson we learn is that while many of us social scientist and humanities scholars all take for granted that self-presentation is, in part, somewhat a performance, many still hold onto the notion that the self is purely authentic; no performance involved. When Turkle and Marche started saying that we perform ourselves online (indeed we do), they mistakenly pitted this against the offline. My reaction on Twitter, “dear @sturkle, performing the self is not an invention of social media.” Marche replied to me, “You lead a different life from mine. Your life is constant self-presentation?”

This is a telling response: the assumption that his offline self is not performed (I’m basing this on the whole series of tweets from Marche to me, check Twitter for more; anyone want to do a Storify of the conversation?). Sociology 101 might be obvious to most of us, but still new to many, even those with authority to speak in high-profile outlets. As social media researchers, we need to do a better job talking about social media trends keeping in mind history did not start or end with these new technologies (@pjrey made this point during the show). If we talk about self-performance online, we must take into account how this operates offline. Goffman wasn’t writing about Facebook and identity-theater predates Twitter.

This takes me to the main take-away from this hour of radio, and it is a major disconnect between how Turkle/Marche and Tufekci fundamentally understand the relationship between the on and offline. On one side -introducing Team Turkle- there are those who see someone on Facebook or texting and assume they are removed from the offline, physical world. This is the zero-sum view of the on/offline: the more time you spend online, the less offline; we are trading one for the other. The term I coined to capture this assumption is “digital dualism,” that the on and offline are separate and thus one displaces the other. David Banks also compellingly made this point in reaction to Turkle: “Sherry Turkle’s Chronic Digital Dualism Problem.”

Tufekci tried to promote the opposite view, that the on/offline are not separate, that time spent online can actually increase offline connection. I have described this enmeshing as the formation of an “augmented reality.” Read more: “Digital Dualism Versus Augmented Reality.”

In short, the data here is not “ambiguous” as Marche stated and made established social media researched Shelia Cotten laugh. No, the data clearly demonstrates that the on and offline do not always displace each other (see Tufekci’s piece above for a bunch of great links, or, my favorite is Pew’s Internet and American Life project). The digital dualism of Turkle and Marche is unfounded. It simply does not reflect the social media that we have come to know. I get that for many social media non-users or newcomers Turkle’s description of people alone and disconnected while staring at their Facebook screens like Sad-Zuckerberg at the end of The Social Network is intuitively true. But, in the end, it isn’t intuition that counts, it’s data. And I wish that Turkle, Marche and especially the Diane Rehm Show cared more about data than sensationalism.

To end on a positive note, I am happy the show had Tufekci on, even if not giving her half of the story anywhere close to half the time (not that all opinions should be given equal time; if i had my druthers the Turkle/Marche argument could have been made by a caller and then deconstructed with data by Tufekci and we’d all move on, but, oh well, people have ads to sell). I’m happy because Tufekci provided a compelling and important counterpoint to web-fallacies in a high-profile outlet. And, most of all, this hour of radio dramatically illustrated why we need to Theorize the Web.

*I know Turkle is not a “journalist” but her style seems to fit that label best

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

Here is Storify of some of the highlights of the Twitter backchannel conversation during the show courtesy of Behzod Sirjani: “Social Media and Loneliness.” [The embed code is not working for me, sorry.]

I like Ellen DeGeneres. Lots of people respect what she does and she has a reputation of treating people right. However, I was surprised when I came across a clip from her popular daytime television show where she unsuspectingly broadcasts compromising Facebook photos of random audience members, a sketch I saw for the first time yesterday, and there seems to be at least a few more of these on YouTube.

I get it, it’s a gag on context collapse: photos taken in and for one time and place are dislocated onto broadcast television, to unexpected and hilarious results. Cute. However, the reality of this is not so funny, and The Ellen DeGeneres Show should know better.

The problem here is that Ellen is setting a precedent that it is okay and fun to share each others information to a larger audience than was initially intended; that blasting compromising photos from someone’s Facebook profile to other audiences, large or small, is a funny joke. For many, it isn’t.

Ellen’s lighthearted joke takes the form of much modern bullying; especially what is often called “cyberbullying” (however, bullying flows back and forth on and offline which makes me a bit uncomfortable with the “cyber” prefix). From private photos emailed to entire classes to Facebook photos ending up with their parent’s bosses, broadcasting social media information to new and unintended audiences causes real harm. There are countless stories of just this sort of action leading to deep and long-lasting embarrassment, distress, depression or worse.

Yes, The Ellen DeGeneres Show likely only used photos posted as “public” on Facebook meaning that, technically, the audience for the photos was always potentially the whole world. However, the reality is that most users post photos to Facebook not under expectation they will be broadcasted to the entire nation. Indeed, this is precisely why the skit is supposed to be humorous in the first place: that the photos are being taken out of context and made far more public than the users originally intended. This level of publicity was technically possible but certainly never practically probable. We know this, and Ellen knew this. It is the source of the humor, but it is also the reason why glorifying this behavior is unacceptable.

Violating privacy is not just violating the written privacy policies of websites, it is knowingly violating the intentions of other users, regardless whether it is technically or legally possible to do so. Corporate, legal documents do not decide privacy, we do. And sharing information without prior consent is a violation. Sharing compromising information to a colossal audience without prior consent is a massive privacy violation.

Simply put, just because we can scrape public data like Facebook photos doesn’t mean that we should. This was the issue with Girls Around Me, an app that made news earlier this year for displaying the physical proximity of women along with many details about their lives. The app achieved this simply by using public Facebook and FourSquare information. It did not create new data, but took existing fully-public data out of its original context and into a new, creepy, sexist context. The Ellen DeGeneres Show is certainly not as despicable as that app, but the mistake is the same: knowingly moving someone’s personal information into an unintended context is often dangerous. And knowingly moving compromising information into an unintended context as public as a popular national broadcast television show such as Ellen’s is especially wrong (Ellen’s show reaches millions of people every day).

And, importantly, this bully-like behavior has greater consequences for more vulnerable individuals. While many do not mind seeing their most compromising Facebook photos blasted to others, even the entire country, some may be unequally damaged by these violations. Google wasn’t thinking about vulnerable populations when, with the introduction of Buzz, they made visible who people emailed most. But this indeed caused real harm, for example, a woman with an abusive ex fearing for her safety. Facebook wasn’t thinking of these sorts of social inequalities when they suddenly made friends lists and other information visible that, for example, implicitly outted queer teens with bigoted parents. I’ve written before how compromising photos are forgiven much quicker for males than females. And, most dramatically, while no one wants their rooms secretly recorded, the fact that Tyler Clementi was gay certainly made his situation exponentially more terrifying, and one that ended tragically.

After tweeting my disgust over The Ellen DeGeneres Show’s privacy violation stunt, others predictably responded that this is a lesson to double-check privacy settings. Or, disappointingly, that these folks deserved what they got for being brazen enough to post these photos or not smart enough to remember to lock them down (as if that is ever truly possible) and should be happy Ellen gave them an iPad in compensation for glorifying online privacy violations.

However, watching the Ellen clips, these are not lessons on social media privacy management, they are attempts to make violating user privacy fun. Given the real consequences at stake, violating personal privacy is not fun and Ellen DeGeneres probably can’t send iPads to everyone harmed by her example.

Also, maybe, just maybe, before we start telling victims of privacy abuse how to behave better, perhaps we should first be calling the violators out; you know, say what they did is wrong.

Our hearts are in the right place, but why is the first reaction to blame the victims? Instead, let’s make very clear that taking other people’s data and putting it in front of new audiences is not cool. Doing this has been shown to be damaging to others. And that The Ellen DeGeneres Show specifically preyed on compromising data to broadcast to the entire nation sets a terrible precedent; one that I hope is not imitated.

The lesson should not be that we should all cover up and hide; it should be that misusing others data is wrong.

Ellen: please stop doing this and maybe run an episode on bullying and being responsible with others online data. I’m a fan, and you are better than this.

Nathan Jurgenson is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Maryland. Follow him on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

On Techno, Dancing, and the Augmented Self

1997, 3 am. I’m sitting against the concrete wall of a dark, empty warehouse, off Hegenberger Road in Oakland. My body is vibrating—a strong, healthy kick drum beating hard against my chest. I squint and see the DJ behind a booth, flanked by black speakers that look like monoliths. Silhouettes are scattered about: strangers dancing alone, in open spaces or near the speakers, but also in tribes, moving within circles.

My pulse is racing, thumping at the same tempo as the techno blasting in this space. The beat is urgent, extending each moment—making now last longer. And it’s kinetic, frenetic—like a rubber ball bouncing round the room. My friend’s forearm grazes mine, warm and slick from perspiration. As we touch, I feel the reverberation of the sound on her skin. The music is so loud, as if we’re in the bowels of a manufacturing plant, listening to machines repeating the same tasks over and over. These sounds consume each second, not giving me much space to think about much else.

I watch a cluster of dancers on the far side of the room. From afar, I see a flutter of geometric parts, picture flipbook pages turning in front of me. The dancers move too swift for my eyes to follow, and I see tracers of their limbs in the air. I think of Duchamp: his nude, descending a staircase, flashes before me. It feels like I have several pairs of glasses stacked sloppily on my face, and I’m peeking through a kaleidoscope in the dark.

Glowing bits and streaks of neon green and yellow and pink are sprinkled throughout this darkness, creating a network of electric vertices floating in space. A series of lasers shoots out from the opposite wall, casting a grid of green lines above me. When I lift my arm to touch them, a pattern projects on my hand. I stare at the electrified crisscrossed bars superimposed on the creases of my palm and keep it raised, as if soaking in the charge.

A dense cloud sputters out from a smoke machine on the floor, and in this white puff a body materializes. Our friend is shifting within a sac, filled with a clear viscous substance. Only I can see this. Or perhaps others can see it. Or maybe they see something else.

I stare at him as he tries to break free. He gingerly pushes his elbows out, and then freezes for a moment, before rolling his left shoulder backward and then his right shoulder backward, loosening his upper half, pushing through this gel. He crouches slightly, pushes his left knee out and then his right knee out. He repeats these leg motions faster and with more force, appearing to walk forward in place as if on a speeding conveyor belt. Suddenly, he breaks free from the sac and begins to shuffle his feet, hardly lifting them off the ground. As he glides, he pushes his open palms away from him, and then retracts, his limbs like mechanical arms returning to their original positions. He pauses for a moment, then releases and unlocks his elbows. He is methodical, like a robot.

The human body can move this way.

The beat ceases, and a feathery sonic sweep, like the echo of an angel, envelops the room. The other dancers stop, but sway slightly. Tempted by this lull, I get up. Feeling metal springs on the bottoms of my sneakers, I bounce on the balls of my feet for a moment, then walk to an open space several feet from my friend. I glance at him, and the other dancers around us; their bodies, like mine, are still but taut. We subtly nod our heads in unison, listening to the frequencies—the layers of electricity churning to build up a charge—and wait for the next drop of the beat.

And the music builds: first, a sheet of ethereal white noise, then a tapestry of crisp sounds and a chorus of sirens, extending this moment of waiting—of longing for that pulse. The dancers around me cheer, whistle, raise their fists. One girl tosses her glow stick in the air, and I watch it rise, in slow motion, seeing the bone twirling in the sky in the beginning of 2001. As the tempo speeds up, I break off my gaze, and spring on the balls of my feet again. Sounds swirl around the room in a crescendo. I slink my hips to the left and the right, my arms swinging at my side, in the seconds before the track climaxes.

The beat drops. The entire room erupts. The glowing grid in which we’re all enmeshed shatters. I hop on top of the beat, like a nimble video game character jumping onto a moving target. My friend spins right as I twirl left, our alternating steps unplanned and automatic responses to one another. We never physically touch, but despite the open space between us, we are dancing together. It feels like a cable connects us, not just to each other but to all the dancers, to the sound system, as if everything is powered by a single source.

Outside these walls, the city is quiet and still. But here, in the innards of this place, another world has come alive.

* * * * *

That year, I remember spending more time on my parents’ computer—entertained by AOL chat rooms—than in front of the TV. It was a time when my high school friends were snagging internships at mysterious places called dot-coms, and when “technology” was suddenly everywhere. It was a gadget. A promising new career. An elite lifestyle. It all seemed really cool, but I didn’t understand much. Instead, I felt a sense of awe: of going online, of the vast World Wide Web, of the future.

Nathan Jurgenson writes that people now enmesh their physical and digital selves to the point where the distinction is becoming irrelevant. Looking back, my experiences in the electronic dance subculture fifteen years ago were my first encounters with the augmented self. There was no distinction between the physical and the digital on the dance floor, and the future materialized through that world in ways that I struggled to understand.

Today, when my nephews play video games with the Kinect—a motion sensor device allowing them to interact with an Xbox with their bodies instead of a controller—I think back to the Bay Area warehouse rave scene in the years before the millennium, just before the movement peaked. Of how “technology” materialized in a sensory, eye-opening way. Of how the warehouse morphed into a massive machine, its insides rumbling and churning with sounds that were primal and raw. Of how we responded to techno through dancing, using our bodies to show what the sound looked like, but also how a machine seemed to be dancing with and leading us.

It was a world in which we truly played with technology—where the field was level, and where everyone, no matter who they were or where they were from, had access to it. I came back to this place each weekend, as if returning to a womb to be reborn as an upgraded being—to interact in a frictionless realm where we allowed machines to manipulate our bodies like yo-yos, and where we responded to their maternal calls.

In Generation Ecstasy, music critic Simon Reynolds writes that while techno can be performed live, it is seldom born in real time. Instead, it is programmed and assembled sequence by sequence and layer by layer, using synthesizers, drum machines, and other electronic instruments. Later, it’s the dancer who actualizes the sound in physical space, who translates electronic into corporeal and sensual. “Techno is an immediacy machine,” writes Reynolds, “stretching time into a continuous present.” The beats that drove us were quick and constant—a hypnotizing measure of time itself—and dancing was an intimate, often carnal, yet largely public interpretation of what now looked like.

In that world, the DJ was revered, but he or she was a mere messenger of sound—a far cry from today’s on-stage performer at the helm with dance crews performing in light suits. Back then, the music was faceless, often stripped of vocals, controlled by no one. We did use tools to enhance the experience—glow sticks, for example, created the illusion of a continuous electrical flow while dancing—but we interpreted the sounds as we wanted, creating our own synaesthetic journeys on the dance floor. Immersed in the dark cosmos of cybertrance, whisked away at 160 BPM on a voyage through a wormhole, I would dance inside the beat, manifesting the trip with my own motions. As dancers matured alongside the scene, we came to see glow sticks as juvenile, as an unnecessary prop—we could attain that seamless physical-digital state on our own. Yet the glow stick remains an artifact of that enmeshed experience.

While you can still have this experience at today’s stadium-sized electronic dance music “concerts,” the dynamics have changed. With a stage and audiovisual setup, the music now has a face. Dancers have become spectators. We can interact with the sound, but the event seems controlled and contrived. There is less space, physically and mentally, to play; and it no longer feels like we are participating, collaborating, and creating as we once were.

For many years, I kept returning to that warehouse, where our shared encounters were organic, positive, even transcendent, and where my relationship to technology was symbiotic: it pumped life into me, but also needed me—my conductive body, my mind, my soul—to bring it to life. It was an augmented reality inside those walls, where physicality and technology intersected. A physical place of gyrating bodies, a space abuzz with technologies.

And in this world, the future was not a distant, fantastic vision. It was now, manifested in front of us, through us, and within us. Perhaps this is how we should think about technology: it is not a thing, but a flow—something we feel and breathe.

Cheri Lucas (@cherilucas) focuses on literary nonfiction and memoir on her blog, Writing Through the Fog, and explores ideas on the self, relationships, social media, memory, and home in a physical-digital world. She is based in San Francisco.

We would like everyone who participated in, attended, followed and helped with making Theorizing the Web 2012 a success! The sessions were smart, the energy was fun and the tweets were so prolific that we were Twitter-trending in Washington D.C. More news, reactions, analyses, photos and videos to come.

This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). See the conference website for information as well as event registration.

Jason Hughes (@hughesalicious) of the STAMP Gallery and I (@Praxis_In_Space), organized an invited panel session that addresses the link between new media and art and a gallery exhibit for the day of the conference.  When we organized the panel and exhibit, we felt it was important to give artists a place at the conference to discuss and share their perspectives on the influence of new media and the web.

The aims of the panel are to highlight the ways in which art often reflects ubiquitous social changes (namely the presence of new media) and the ways the creative and artistic uses of new media are pushing/challenging academic understandings of new media. More importantly, in the spirit of this conference, we will foster a discussion that will engage what role(s) social theory(ies) and/or practices have in their epistemological approach to new media and art.

We are pleased to announce the panelist will be Krista Caballero, Cliff Evans (@cliffevansnet), and Alberto Gatián (@nootrope) and Jeremy Pesner (@The_Pezman) will be moderating the panel.

[descriptions of the art projects after the jump] 

Krista Caballero is an interdisciplinary artist whose work unpacks cultural myths relating to the “American” West, technology, gendered land use, and ideas of the sublime. Her work strives for an integrated approach where questions of mental, social and environmental ecology might activate imaginations, shift perceptions and reveal the connections between our vision of the environment and our understanding of society and self. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University and in 2009 attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Caballero is currently the Associate Director of the Digital Cultures and Creativity Program at the University of Maryland.

Cliff Evans’ works are a mash-up of unrelated styles that mesh effortlessly using the medium of video. Evans uses a rich variety of imagery sources, such as Northern Renaissance devotional paintings, and blends these into present-day single and multi-channel digital video pieces resulting in cohesive works that portray his outlook on the modern and future worlds. Evans graduated in 2002 from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA where he was recently visiting faculty in video arts. Evans is represented in Washington DC by Curator’s Office.

Alberto Gaitán is a multi-media artist living and working in the DC area since 1980. He has worked collaboratively in cross-media projects with musicians, poets, choreographers, visual artists, software programmers and engineers, and has built solo pieces that mashup different disciplines. His process pieces sonify and visualize aspects of physical and data spaces to expose the potential and limits of transcription and the impossibility of communion with the massively parallel processes at work in the ecosphere and noosphere.  More about his work can be found here: http://curatorsoffice.com/gaitan.

We hope that you will attend the panel session for what promises to be a very interesting discussion about the enmeshing of new media and art!

This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). See the conference website for information as well as event registration.

This panel consists of four presentations that exhibit a theoretically rich range of approaches to understanding theory of mobile technologies in contemporary contexts. Jason Farman’s “The Materiality of the Mobile Internet: An Object-Oriented Approach to Mobile Networks” uses the path of a single mobile phone signal to illustrate the importance of considering both human and non-humannodes in digital networks. Katy Pearce’s “Is your Web everyone’s Web? Theorizing the web through the lens of the device divide” considers the social implications of accessing the Internet via mobile vs. traditional interfaces. In doing so, she casts a much-needed theoretical spotlight on a notion many of us grasp intuitively: that the quality of one’s online experience depends critically on the device(s) used to get online. Along similar lines, David Banks’ “Finding it ‘Otherwise’: Culturally and Geographically Situating The Practice of Texting” takes a sociotechnical approach to mobile phoneuse in Ghana, discovering how residents use their phones to move about their world. In a laudable instance of research informing real-world practice, data from the project will inform the deployment of a regional condom distribution network. Finally, Jim Thatcher’s “MobileGeo-Spatial Devices: a theoretical approach to the GeoWeb” critically interrogates the mediation of geographical knowledge-gathering through mobile devices. Applying a critical Marxist understanding oftechnology, he develops a radical reading of ostensibly innocuous “apps” that may serve to reinforce offline inequalities.

[Paper titles and abstracts after the jump.]

Jason Farman – (@farman) – “The Materiality of the Mobile Internet: An Object-Oriented Approach to Mobile Networks”

In contrast to the study of human social networks and location-awareness through mobile devices, this paper seeks to trace the flows of mobile information through the vibrant materiality of their networked infrastructures. At the core of this inquiry is the question: who is the audience for mobile information? By approaching this question through the lens of performance studies, phenomenology, and object-oriented ontology, I wrest the terms “audience” and “user” away from a human-centered approach to argue that mobile networks address the various nodes within the network, one of which is human.

This paper draws from a primary example that, for me, became emblematic of the object-oriented approach to mobile networks. In October of 2011, I visited one of the major internet hubs on the East Coast: the Equinix internet peering center in Ashburn, Virginia. When I first arrived to the data center, I “checked-in” to the building using the locative social network, Foursquare, on my cellphone, which was connected to the internet over a 3G network. After I checked in, I was curious about the path that the cell signals took in order to locate me, access the data on the internet, and return that data to my phone. The pathways that this information flow took were quite fascinating: the 3G signal on my phone connected to the nearest cell tower. At this site, the signal ran down the antenna to connect with the fiber optic infrastructure of the internet, which then came racing straight back to my location at the internet data center. Here, in the building in which I was standing, the request prompted by my mobile device accessed Foursquare’s database housed in the Equinix facility. The signal was then sent back out to the towers and eventually back to my mobile phone. Within this circuitous path of information — which ultimately defines “mobility” — the “ephemeral” data of the mobile internet is seen as profoundly grounded on the material infrastructure of the network. Within the pathways of information in this network, I was only one node in the network. Here, the “audience” of the information cannot be restricted to human agents since many of the requests and exchanges happened at a level that did not directly address me in any way.

In this paper, the embodiment of information flows through these various audience members is studied through N. Katherine Hayles’ work on information materiality, Jane Bennett’s work on vibrant matter, and Ian Bogost’s work on object-oriented phenomenology. Ultimately, this paper argues for a practice of location-awareness that presents spatial objects and bodies as actors that produce space and are produced by that space.

Katy Pearce – (@katypearce) – “Is your Web everyone’s Web? Theorizing the web through the lens of the device divide”

Much of the theorizing of the web is conducted by those of us (selves included) for whom the “web” is always on, and is available through multiple devices. This certainly influences our theorizing. The device divide – the differences in personal computer and mobile phone-based Internet access – has important implications for social exclusion being reaffirmed through technology use. Using a study of Internet users with different device access abilities, we look at the ways that users engage with the Internet (which sometimes includes the Web but often does not). Moreover, looking at the contributions of both demographic characteristics and primary Internet access device to the activities that people engage with is a novel way to explore digital inequalities.

Jim Thatcher – (@alogicalfallacy) – “Mobile Geo-Spatial Devices: a theoretical approach to the GeoWeb”

The use of mobile geospatial devices radically alters human experience as design, technology, and socio-political life coalesce in new ways. Programmed applications influence how human beings move through space. Through repetitive use, these applications influence what and how end users come to know their environment and other humans. Microsoft’s recent patent for GPS technology that automatically routes end-users away from neighborhoods deemed “unsafe” suggests this radical shift: A private corporation, using private decision making algorithms and data, is now able to effectively select what areas of a city are rendered visible and invisible. Consumption and communication patterns across space are now open to virtual “red-lining” in the name of private definitions of “safe” and “optimal” routes. As mobile spatial applications extend human awareness beyond the body and through programmatically defined spaces, they influence the epistemic limits of end-user knowledge. Through an always-mediated, always-calculated technological process, users “come to know” places without physical presence as social and political life become constituted in code.

While much work in geography and cognate fields has focused on the body in space and the body as it interacts with technology, very little has asked what happens when a human extends their sensory apparatus through the technological flow of data in order to physically navigate through systems of modern capitalism. Studies of the GeoWeb remain predominantly instrumental and discrete, focusing on specific technological forms and leaving un-thought the question of what radical potentials are opened as humans gain the near instant ability to know the location of oneself and others? Further, and perhaps more importantly, what potentials for action and experience are foreclosed in this mediated environment of calculation?

This talk addresses the gap in literature through an examination of older theoretical approaches to the relationship between individual and society as mediated through technology. A theoretical orientation that roots the GeoWeb in embodied relations between actors within a critical Marxist understanding of technology is developed. This comprehensive approach directly engages the relationship between capitalist modernity and geospatial communication and navigation technologies. As code has become ubiquitous, it has also disappeared from critical consideration. The talk presents a theoretical framework for the rigorous understanding of the shifting relationships between individual, state, and technology.

David Banks – (@da_banks) – “Finding it ‘Otherwise’: Culturally and Geographically Situating The Practice of Texting”

Social constructionists and actor network theorists consistently claim that assemblages of technosocial systems are historically contingent or otherwise –to varying degrees- arbitrary. In other words, things could have been another way. The main criticisms of this these programs have been a lack of critical focus on power distribution and the influence of institutions. Rebuttals focus on the “seamless web” of social action that provides no clear beginning or referent for analysis. We must be satisfied with identifying the salient characteristics of relevant actants and working outward analytically, and forward historically. I contend that the statement “it could have been otherwise” belies a lack of sufficient comparative analysis. There are cases where it was, in fact, otherwise and from this comparative analysis we can find a basis for talking about power.

Over the course of two weeks I conducted over two-dozen interviews with patients, caretakers, administrators, and pharmacists in and around a government hospital in the city of Kumasi in central Ghana. My goal was to set up a text messaging system that helped Ghanaians find pharmacies that sold condoms. In the course of asking questions about privacy, frequency of phone use, navigating urban environments, and contraception, I also learned something about the culturally situated nature of large sociotechnical systems.

Mobile phone technology plays a much different role in Ghanaians lives than in Americans. Investigating these differences tell us something about the power relations embedded in western and non-western cell networks. The cell phone plays a much different role in Ghanaians lives than in Americans. In Ghana, the cell phone takes the place of the home phone and internet-enabled computer. (A tendency that we are only just now seeing in America.) In this comparative analysis, we can parse out meaningful relationships between sociotechnical networks and draw conclusions about what makes networks useful and powerful.

This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). See the conference website for information as well as event registration.

Last year, at the inaugural Theorizing the Web Conference many of the presentations and indeed conversations outside of the formal panels centered on attempting to understand the role of social media in political movements. Understandably many of these discussions were heavily informed by the events surrounding, for lack of a better term, “the Arab Spring.”

A year later criticism about the role of social media in political protests has matured, for the most part the conversation has moved beyond the reductive and simplistic, “Twitter and Facebook caused the revolution vs. Social Media was the least interesting thing” polarity, instead crystalizing on a more nuanced approach. While scholars have more or less come to terms with the notion that social media can play a role in social protest, contributing to a media ecology which empowers revolutionaries in a way not possible during prior struggles, the ensuing struggle has raised questions about the role social media can play in establishing a new power structure (not just in overthrowing an existing one). In short social media might be good for revolutions, but is it good for democracies?

Indeed a year out critics are now pointing out that the social media enabled protests in Egypt have yet to yield a stable democracy. And in another example critics are also quick to claim that while social media helped to drive the Occupy Protests, the digital network has not been as useful in helping the Occupy Movement produce any substantial policy change.

This session seeks to address these questions, examining the effects of social media on re-building power after a revolution, asking not only what effect has it had, but how might social media technologies be engineered to help with the moments after the revolt.

Panelists after the jump:

Azza A. Raslan (@araslangirl) is one of the team members managing @TahrirSupplies, an account created during the clashes of November 19th, 2011 in Egypt. The account served as a tool to coordinate the logistics of the supply and delivery of medical and food supplies to the twelve field hospitals establish in and around Tahrir at the time. Azza is also a PhD candidate in laws at the University College London.

Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her main research interests are the social impacts of technology, theorizing the web, gender, research methods, inequality and social media. She isalso interested in applying complex systems methods to sociological problems. More information on her research and some of of her papers available here. She blogs at: http://www.technosociology.org

Dave Parry (@academicdave) studies how the digital network transforms our political relations. He is an assistant professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas at Dallas. His work can be found at http://www.outsidethetext.com.

This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). See the conference website for information as well as event registration.

Experiencing global events through social media has become increasingly common. For those in the West, the uprisings over the past few years in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere were especially striking because social media filled an information void created by the lack of traditional journalists to cover the dramatic events. By simply following a hashtag on Twitter, we tuned into those on the scene, shouting messages of revolution, hope, despair, carnage, persistence, misinformation, debate, sadness, terror, shock, togetherness; text and photos bring us seemingly closer to the events themselves.

But of course the Twitter medium is not neutral. It has shaped what we see and what we do not. Where is the truth in all of this? The intersection of knowledge, power, struggle and the radically new and transformative power of social media begs for intense theorizing. How we conceptualize, understand, define and talk about this new reality lays the path forward to better utilizing social media for journalistic and political purposes.

This is why the keynote for Theorizing the Web 2012 conference (College Park, MD, April 14^th) features Andy Carvin (NPR News) and Zeynep Tufekci (UNC) in conversation. Carvin (@acarvin) has become well known for his innovative use of Twitter as a journalistic tool. Tufekci (@techsoc) has emerged as one of the strongest academic voices on social movements and social media and brings a theoretical lens to help us understand this new reality. Together, insights will be made that have impact beyond just journalism but to all researchers of technology as well as those outside of academic circles.

Who is Andy Carvin; and What Do We Call Him?

Without a deep background in professional journalism, Carvin’s actual title at NPR is “Senior Strategist.” However, during the recent Tunisian revolution, Carvin began interacting with Tunisian contacts on Twitter he made formed at previous job, a task that eventually crowded out much of his previous day job. Today, his work day is much different: In Andy’s words, “what I try to do is identify all the voices in the field involved in the revolutions and try to make a story out of it.” He explains further, “rather than spending the revolutions in country, with them, I spend my time online where they’re collaborating and congregating in order to get a sense of not only how social media is being used to organize each revolution, but also to have insights of the people on the ground who are using social media to communicate what’s going on.” Information on the ground is collected, sifted through, fact-checked, cross-referenced and vetted on his Twitter stream.

Carvin is not flying to the far-away places he reports on; nor is he embedded on-the-ground like the heroic journalist-image the term “foreign correspondent” sometimes conjures in our heads. Instead, Carvin is embedded at a cubicle, or often on his smartphone that his wife calls an extension of his palm. However, what Andy Carvin does smells a lot like journalism.

The scope of what Carvin is attempting is dizzying. The cacophony of voices shouting on social media during any major event in the 21^st century can be deafening. To get a better sense of the scope of the Andy Carvin Experiment, @acarvin gets up to 2,000 @replies a day on Twitter. He guesses that he once tweeted 1,400 times in a single 20hour shift, which gives us an idea of the life of a Twitter journalist. The result has been what one site called “the words best Twitter account.”

That so many around the globe now have the tools to “report,” what some have called the rise of citizen journalism, means that massive amounts of data are being produced all the time. But simply shouting information is not journalism; those voices need to be made usable. What tweets are important? What tweets are true?

This verifying is precisely what Carvin is attempting to do. He relies on a large team of trusted contacts to help him source and vet information. While Andy Carvin is a human being, @acarvin is a network; the product of a large crowd checking facts, inserting their own knowledge, giving tips, garnering their own information, translations, and, perhaps most importantly, they correct Andy when he is wrong.

Curatorial Journalism

So that is Andy Carvin and this is where need to start theorizing. Do we have a new journalistic model, one that sits somewhere between the citizen on the ground and the gate-keeper at the top? The curatorial space in the middle might just be the future of journalism.

When a news story breaks, we can look to traditional, top-down outlets like The New York Times as well as finding information produced from the bottom-up by, say, searching a hashtag on Twitter. And we also have the new model positioned squarely in the middle, that space between “new” and “old” media that I have previously called “curatorial media.”

Carvin is Marshall McLuhan’s Goldilocks, finding the middle between one model that is too “hot” and the other too “cool.” Global Voices is another important example of curatorial journalism, creating a digest of the most important information on global events being posted across various social networks.

To Anticipate Carvin and Tufekci’s Theorizing the Web Keynote

To close, we might think of some questions to frame this issue moving forward: What slice of the bigger picture do we get when relying on social media for journalism? An article in The Washington Post argues that Carvin is more likely to get information from rebels than regimes, thereby fundamentally biasing his data-source.

How do we best integrate Carvin’s feed with other, more traditional, journalistic sources to get a broader picture? What role does professional journalism still play when news-production tools continue to be further democratized?

How can this type of curatorial journalism be fast and efficient on the one hand (1,200 daily @replies?!) and accurate on the other?

Bring your own questions and insights to this keynote conversation in-person or via the #TtW12 backchannel. We will monitor the feed for questions before and during the event.

Nathan Jurgenson is co-chair of the Theorizing the Web conference. Follow Nathan on Twitter.

On constructing a lesson plan to teach Pinterest and feminism

I teach sociology; usually theoretical and centered on identity. I pepper in examples from social media to illustrate these issues because it is what I know and tends to stimulate class discussion. It struck me while reading arguments about Pinterest that we can use this “new thing” social media site to demonstrate some of the debates about women, technology and feminist theory.

We can view Pinterest from “dominance feminist” and “difference feminist” perspectives to both highlight this major division within feminist theory as well as frame the debate about Pinterest itself. Secondly, the story being told about Pinterest in general demonstrates the “othering” of women. Last, I’d like to ask for more examples to improve this as a lesson plan to teach technology and feminist theories. I should also state out front that what is missing in this analysis is much of any consideration to the problematic male-female binary or an intersectional approach to discussing women and Pinterest while also taking into account race, class, sexual orientation, ability and the whole spectrum of issues necessary to do this topic justice.

“What’s a Pinterest?”

Before we begin, let me very briefly explain what Pinterest is [or read a better summary here]. Likely, most readers of this blog already have some experience with the site. Simply, one can post collections of images of things you come across on the web to the site; that is, one “pins” these images to various “boards” you can create under your name. Think of something you like, say, landscape photography. You can pin such photos to your “landscape photography” board and search other people’s boards for the same. The usefulness of the site comes immediately into focus when you are looking to purchase something: you can find dozens of photos of a type pinned by other users. The site has been especially useful for things like wedding planning, where one can collect cakes, centerpieces, dresses and so on that one likes.

The site has taken off, driving more customers to retail sites than “Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.” People spend lots of time on Pinterest, too. In fact, the average user spends about thirty times as many minutes on Pinterest than Google+.

The next step in the typical tech-site-Pinterest-description is to go on and on about how woman-heavy the site is. Current statistics show that the site is 70-80% female, and a perusal of the main page usually reminds users of this. While the female-centeredness of the site is sometimes overstated, it also should not be dismissed.

And, no surprise, the tech community, which is still a boys club, has been terrible at writing about how people, especially women, use Pinterest. The site has been used as an excuse to make fun of women, stereotype women as shoppers, dismiss the site as overly gendered and anger some of the feminist blogosphere.

Of course, there is no one single feminist position on Pinterest or anything else. Some have celebrated and some have critiqued Pinterest as a safe space for femininity on one hand and also a sometimes troubling version of femininity on the other. This is a useful rehashing of a fundamental theoretical distinction we can make within feminist theory: difference versus dominance feminism.

Difference versus Dominance Feminism

The “difference” perspective holds that there are fundamental differences between men and women that should be respected and celebrated. Traditionally, in the non-feminist sense, differences have been used to justify male dominance. A famous case is Kohlberg developing his stages of moral development using a standard created by studying just men. He found that men typically scored higher than women on his scale and therefore men, on average, are more moral than women. One of his colleagues, Carol Gilligan, had a different take. In her book, In a Different Voice (1982), Gilligan notes that men and women have different ethics: men an ethic of justice and women an ethic of care; each not better or more moral than the other. We can consider this a paradigmatic version of difference feminism; that the differences between men and women are more fundamental than the inequalities those differences take on socially. The solution is to value that which makes women different.

“Dominance” feminism holds that those differences are themselves a result of patriarchy and to celebrate them is to celebrate the dominance that created them. Catherine MacKinnon, for example, argues that many sex differences, especially with respect to sexuality, are constructed by a patriarchal society in such a way as to reproduce these inequalities. This perspective holds dominance as more fundamental than difference, and thus the strategy is to critique both the socially-constructed differences between men and women and also the systems of oppression that created them.

This is a far too short overview of these two perspectives (which, of course, are not the whole of feminist theory!) but enough to begin applying examples from the Pinterest debate.

The difference perspective tends to view Pinterest as something distinctly feminine and therefore something to celebrate. As Tracie Egan Morrissey writes, Pinterest “is giving ladies what they want”; which is the whole point. When visiting the site, one quickly notices the refreshing “lack of misogynist content.” Amanda Marcotte states that “the pink and girly exterior of Pinterest works as a jerk force field, keeping the most piggish men away.” Women are using the site and enjoying it and spending lots of time there and that is a good thing. [In the comments, it would be great to get more examples of posts, papers, essays taking on this perspective.]

From the other side come those who view the type of femininity on Pinterest as itself problematic to some degree. The dominance perspective does not view the fact women are collectively doing something as essentially good, but the starting point of critique. Some view Pinterest as exemplifying a particularly juvenile and defanged version of women and empowerment that is ultimately more appealing to men; a critique that has been laid on so-called “domestic” or “cupcake feminism”; aka “the Zooey Deschanel problem.”

Perhaps the most biting critique of the site I have read is Bon Stewart’s argument that Pinterest creates a Stepford Wife version of identity that is hollow and uncreative. While not explicitly “feminist” in language, the argument is that what happens on social media sites, even those women enjoy, can be problematic. [Again, please send along more arguments from this perspective.]

To be fair, those taking on the “difference” position above are not responding to the dominance arguments but to the general tech-writer-trend to dismiss the site because of the number of women using it. In fact, this demonstrates another fundamental feminist theoretical point.

Pinterest, Beauvoir and the “Othering” of Women

The difference-feminist arguments above had to remind the tech world that a site should not be dismissed because women are using it; rather, this is precisely what makes it important. The cultural conversation around Pinterest has followed that similar path perhaps best outlined by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949). There has been a historical trend to view the male as “natural,” devoid of gender and able to stand in for all of humanity (remember Kohlberg only using males to construct a scale applied to everyone). Another example is the continuing usage (especially in tech-writing in the year 20-f’n-12) of male pronouns to stand for humans in general. As Beauvoir states,

In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.

This othering means that websites comprised mostly of men are seen as “neutral” and those that have even the slightest hint of femininity come to be seen as thoroughly saturated with gender; indeed, Pinterest has almost come to be defined by it.

Take Wikipedia: 87% of its contributors are male; a bigger discrepancy than Pinterest by any count. However, when discussing Wikipedia, it certainly is not the norm to go on and on about how male the site is. Instead, it is far more common for the site to be praised for its “neutral point of view.” Usually-male tech writers describing the male Wikipedia have convinced themselves that the site is neutral and thus useful to all of humanity. Pinterest, on the other hand, is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, dismissed as merely female.

Even the description of how feminine Pinterest actually is can be overstated. Using Pinterest for the past month or so, I have noticed a great diversity in content. Yes, people post about cupcakes, but architecture, food, photography, design and lots of other things are popular, too. As Rebecca Hui states, “Pinterest is, very simply, a place for pretty things, and last I checked, beauty wasn’t gender-specific.”

In fact, over in the UK the majority of Pinterest users are male. Is the UK press going on and on about how male Pinterest is? (Of course not; remember, ‘male’ is thought to be neutral).

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It seems that Pinterest can be effectively used to illustrate at least these two points when teaching feminist theory: the Dominance/Difference divide and the Othering hypothesis. I hope that these perspectives also help us understand Pinterest and how the site is discussed in general.

Last, I hope others can help me with this lesson plan and provide more links/examples and other feminist perspectives I have not yet mentioned. Again, the articles I have linked to and my own analysis do not problematize the male-female binary. And these analyses are rarely intersectional or queer in nature. Perhaps these perspectives have not yet been written up, or, more likely, I don’t know how to find them. How else can the conversation be improved, especially with the goal of using all of this as a teaching tool?

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson