This post originally appeared on The Frailest Thing and is replicated here with permission.

By one of those odd twists of associative memory, John Caputo’s little book, On Religion, recently came to mind. Caputo, a well regarded interpreter of Jacques Derrida and a philosopher in the continental tradition, opened with a question culled from the work of Augustine of Hippo. Splicing two lines from Augustine’s Confessions, Caputo framed his study by asking, “What do I love when I love my God?”

I appreciate this formulation because it forces a certain self-critical introspection. It refuses the comforts of thoughtlessness. Precisely where some might be most inclined to rely on taken-for-granted assumptions and unquestioned constructs, Caputo’s Augustinian query interjects a searching critique. And it is the structure of the question that I want to borrow to consider one dimension what we are doing when we use social media.

But first, a little more from Caputo who takes the liberty of elaborating on the spirit of Augustine’s quest. Channeling the African saint, Caputo writes, “… I am after something, driven to and fro by my restless search for something, by a deep desire, indeed by a desire beyond desire, beyond particular desires for particular things, by a desire for I-know-not-what, for something impossible. Still, even if we are lifted on the wings of such a love, the question remains, what do I love, what am I seeking?”

Then Caputo makes an important observation. “When Augustine talks like this,” he cautions, “we ought not to think of him as stricken by a great hole or lack or emptiness which he is seeking to fill up, but as someone overflowing with love who is seeking to know where to direct his love.”

Not too long ago I posted some thoughts on what I took to be the Augustinian notes sounded in Matt Honan’s account of his time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and Kevin Kelly’s subsequent reflections on Honan’s experience. In that post, I employed the very language Caputo cautioned against — in part because Honan’s rhetoric invited it. But now I’m chastened; I’m inclined to think that Caputo is on to something. His distinction is not merely academic and I’ll return to it a little further on.

Plummeting, perhaps, from the sublime to the … what to call it, let us just say the ordinary, the formulation of Caputo’s question somehow triggered a more contemporary re-articulation: “What do I like when I “Like” on Facebook?” Putting it this way suggests that what I like may not, in fact, be what I “Like”. The question pushes us to examine why it is that we do what we do in social media contexts (Facebook being here merely a synecdoche).

What we do on social media platforms is often analyzed as a performance or construction of the self. On this view, what we are doing is giving shape to our identity. What we “Like” is the projected identity, or better yet, the perception and affirmation of that identity by others. This, of course, does not exhaust what is done with social media, but it is an important and pervasive element.

When we think about social media as a field for the construction and enactment of identities, we tend to think of it as the projection, authentic or inauthentic, of a fixed reality. But perhaps we would do well to consider the possibility that identity on social networks is not so much being performed as it is being sought, that behind the identity-work on social media platforms there is an inchoate and fluid reality seeking to take shape by expending itself.

Caputo distinguished between love or desire understood as a lack seeking to be filled and love or desire understood as a surplus seeking to be expended. This distinction can be usefully mapped over the motivations driving our social media activity. Sometimes we preform our identities seeking to fill a desire structured as a lack experienced by an ostensibly consistent self. At other times the performance amounts to a less coherent project, the expenditure of desire structured as a surplus in search of itself.

The entanglement of our loves (or, likes) and our identity on social media has, it turns out, an antecedent in the Augustinian articulation of the human condition. Caputo went on to note that the question of what we love is also bound up with another Augustinian query: “Augustine’s question — ‘what do I love when I love my God?’ — persists as a life-long and irreducible question … because that question is entangled with the other persistent Augustinian question, ‘who am I?’”

What we love and desire and who we are — these two are bound up irrevocably with one another.

“I have been made a question to myself,” Augustine famously declared. And so it is with all of us. The problem with our talk about the performance of identity is that it too often tacitly assumes a fixed and knowing identity engaging in the performance. The reality, as Augustine understood, is more complex and whatever it is we are doing online is tied up with that complexity.

L. M. Sacasas is a PhD student in the University of Central Florida’s “Texts & Technology” program exploring the intersections of bodies, spaces, and technology. He blogs at The Frailest Thing and you can follow his tweets at @FrailestThing

Rob Horning has been working on the topic of the “Data Self.” His project has a close parallel to my own work and after reading his latest post, I’d like to jump in and offer a conceptual distinction for thinking about the intersection of the online/data/Profile and the offline/Person.

The problem is that our online presence is too often seen as only the byproduct of our offline selves. Sometimes we talk about the way online profiles are passive reflections of who we are and what we do and other times we acknowledge our profiles are also partly performative adjustments to the “reality” of the person. However, in all the discussion of individuals creating this content what is often neglected is how the individual, in all of their offline experience, behavior and existence, is simultaneously being created by this very online data. We cannot describe how a person creates their Profile without always acknowledging how the Profile creates the person.

Let me begin by offering some useful terminology: I use the term profile (lower-case ‘p’) to mean our presence on any specific web service, e.g., our Twitter or Facebook profiles. I use the term Profile (capital ‘P’) to refer to the aggregate set of our entire online presence across all profiles including data we have uploaded or others have gathered.

And let me call the “agentic bias” the tendency to conceptually grant too much power to individuals to create their online Profiles by neglecting the ways in which individuals are simultaneously being created by their digital presence. Lots of social media writing, academic and popular, looks like this:

Many otherwise terrific articles about the self, identity and social media suffer from this bias. In a forthcoming post, I plan on going through a list of some prominent examples. For now, I want to focus on responding to and joining in on Rob Horning’s work on “the data self.” He makes many useful points, but fundamentally conceptualizes “data” and “self” in a manner in which the latter causally precedes the former (I happen to know he doesn’t like that ‘latter-former’ turn of phrase).

In this article, Horning describes how we “convert ourselves into data”; we are “monitoring [our] vital statistics and uploading them for analysis and aggregation.” Further, Horning goes on to say,

“data collection is slowly becoming the ideological basis of the self”

“interactions within social networks are now easily captured”

“The assumption is that by letting Facebook capture and process everything, a more reliable version of the self than our own memory can give us will be produced.”

And Horning cites Facebook as saying “the Timeline to be a place for self-expression: A way for users to reveal who they are and what their lives are about”

(all emphases mine)

The “data self” as described here has everything to do with how self creates, produces, collects and revels itself through data. This is indeed an important concern, and, to be clear, there is far more I agree with than disagree with in Horning’s analyses.

However, so far, lots of attention has been given to how the self creates the data, what I called the agentic bias above; but what about when this data also creates the self? Both considerations must be simultaneously taken into account to understand either.

Instead of an agentic bias, I propose a dialectical understanding of the causality between the individual/offline/self and the data/online/Profile:

PJ Rey and I have been arguing something similar since we started this blog. Indeed, the name Cyborgology makes explicit reference to Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory of bodies and technology as enmeshed. Further, I have written extensively on what I call “augmented reality,” the perspective that views the on and offline as enmeshed, opposed to the “digital dualist” bias to view atoms and bits as separate. To fully theorize the self from the “augmented” perspective, one must rigorously take into account the data-flesh-enmeshment from both directions.

For example, in a recent essay I describe how one great power of social media is not just what happens to us when logged in uploading data about ourselves and our lives, but also how sites like Facebook change how we view the world even when logged off and not staring at some glowing rectangle; what I call The Facebook Eye. To only focus on how the self produces data is to miss how data influence our experience of the world; how we behave within it and how data creates that same self that creates the data.

Let’s take some concrete examples:

When listening to music on Spotify, a streaming service that syncs with and publishes to one’s Facebook profile, I am publishing that listening-data to Facebook for others to see. It becomes part of my Profile. But to end the story here is to suffer from the agentic bias. Let’s put the other causal arrow back in and think dialectically: because my Profile contains listening behaviors that I know are being judged by others, I may choose to listen to slightly different music to “give off” the impression I wish to portray. More than just a better-than-accurate presentation of self, the fact that the Profile exists changes my experience and behavior as a person.

If you plan on taking photos while on vacation and posting them to Facebook, might you choose to do slightly different things? Walk different paths?

But we must go further than just potential changes in behavior. What I find most interesting is how the Profile changes our experience of that behavior.

Maybe you wouldn’t change the songs you listen to or what paths you travel when on vacation simply because of social media self-documentation. However, the fact that one can increasingly document their life certainly changes how we experience the world (much more on this point here).

We experience a concert differently when we know we can post photos on Facebook and videos on YouTube; hence the music-venue-plague of glowing document-screens held high instead of hands. We see the food we just prepared differently when we know we can post a photo of an especially delicious-looking meal to Facebook. As I’ve posed before: think of traveling with and without a camera in your hand: the experience is at least slightly different. Today, we are always living with the camera in-hand; we can always document our lives via status updates, tweets, check-ins, photos, videos, etc. Like those on reality TV, social media users are deeply influenced by the fact of near omnipresent documentation potential.

Taken to the extreme, the conceptual opposite of the agentic bias would be a structure-bias that views people as only the result of our Profiles. Once, on a subway, I heard a woman claim that “the real world is the place where we take pictures for Facebook.” But this is probably going to far, right?

To conclude, and to provide a last probe to Rob, the implications of all this is that we cannot continue to view the Person as the temporal and causal antecedent and the Profile as something that is the subsequent result. We have clear evidence that the person is also being co-constructed by the Profile. Experience creates documentation and documentation creates experience.

This is a disorganized photo essay with my photos and random ruminations from Occupy Congress last week.

Larger versions of these photos; am very happy to share them, just ask and/or credit me: twitter.com/nathanjurgenson

I went into Occupy Congress wondering if the movement still has momentum. Is Occupy simply part of a short-lived newscycle? Is it in hibernation for the winter?

Walking up to the Capital, I was surprised by the small-ish size of the crowd. One police officer told a protester, “you know, the Tea Party fills this place up and then some.”

Of course, the WikiLeaks truck those at Zuccotti Park are all familiar with was parked out front.

Is the social and cultural capitol gained by the Occupy movement being put to good use?

When I arrived, the protesters were primarily facing the Capitol building.  However, the focus of attention quickly became fixated on the police.

While cities across the country have used the police to clear occupation encampments, DC has been more relaxed, allowing Occupy DC to remain. Police in DC have been less violent and less likely to arrest protesters. However, this did not stop many protesters at Occupy Congress from berating police officers. The anger over police-brutality in general is still strong.

Protesters running across the police line. Arrests were made.

To be clear, many involved with Occupy Congress did not fixate on the police and kept attention on what the rally was about (issues with congress, including, but not limited to, corporate influence in Washington). However, the distraction of  “us versus the police” that was evident at Occupy Congress is a microcosm of this issue for the Occupy movement on the whole; something Todd Gitlin warned against.

Should Occupy ever spend its social and cultural capitol by focusing a specific issue/demand?

Protesters rushed other congress offices. Most of these shots are at the Rayburn building.

Protesters then gathered to march through the streets.

Below is Tim Pool, the somewhat infamous livestreamer whom I have written about before.

Others were live streaming as well…

Ray Lewis, the Philladelphia police Captain who was arrested…

In the end, what I was most struck by was the size of the anarchist crowd at Occupy Congress. The major banner that was central to the street march declared “no congress” and “no state.” While there were many at Occupy Congress organizing and strategizing reform actions for the movement, the largest contingent were anarchists more concerned with eliminating ‘the system’ altogether. This split-between those who want to reform ‘the system’ versus those who want to overthrow it has been an important divide within Occupy from the outset. Last week, for the first time, I got the feeling that the power has tilted within Occupy towards the anarchist sect.

Or: Intellectual Accessibility by Availability and Design

As a sociology graduate student, I sometimes feel like Simmel’s “stranger,” close enough to academia to observe, but distant enough to retain an outside perspective. Like many graduate students staring down a possible academic career-path, I’m a bit terrified at the elephant in the room: is what academics do really important? are they relevant? does it matter?

Who reads a sociology journal? As my former theory teacher Chet Meeks once posed to my first social theory course,  how many people look to sociology journals to learn anything about anything? While the occasional sociologist is quoted in the New York Times or appears on CNN, the influence these experts have is vanishingly small. I do not know as much about other disciplines, but the point for most of the social sciences and humanities is that, in my opinion, expert knowledge is largely going to waste.

And to echo folks like Steven Sideman or danah boyd, we have an obligation to change this; academics have a responsibility to make their work relevant for the society they exist within.

The good news is that the tools to counter this deficiency in academic relevance are here for the taking. Now we need the culture of academia to catch up. Simply, to become more relevant academics need to make their ideas more accessible.

There are two different, yet equally important, ways in which academics need to make their ideas accessible:

(1) accessible by availability: ideas should not be locked behind paywalls

(2) accessible by design: ideas should be expressed in ways that are interesting, readable and engaging

To become publicly relevant, academics must make their ideas available to and articulated for the public.

I. Accessible by Availability

PJ Rey argued on this blog that journals and their articles are the “dinosaurs” of academia because “they wield enormous (and terrifying) power, yet they are ill-adapted to function in a changing environment.” Print, and even digital, articles are said to be vestigial organs of a different time.

Unlike PJ, I do think journal articles have a continuing and important role in intellectual discussions today and moving forward (a point Patricia Hill-Collins also made in reply to PJ’s piece). Not vestigial organs, journals remind me more of the process of exaptation, referring to the evolutionary process where something evolves in one environment for one purpose but comes to take on a new purpose in a different environment (feathers are the classic example of this co-optation). The five-to-ten-thousand-word well-researched, rigorously-argued, highly-edited, peer-reviewed and jargon-heavy format continues to have its place. Highly-technical arguments need to be hashed out. Even intellectual discussions that have no larger pragmatic purpose should be embraced for their own sake (in that same way we embrace art or sports). That “mental masturbation” is used as a pejorative has always confused me. More importantly, understandings that are best achieved in the article format can be translated into other formats (blogging, tweeting, giving talks and so on).

But PJ and I both agree that the academic journal system as it currently exists is fundamentally broken. Most prestigious journals are “closed,” locking articles down behind paywalls. This is one reason for academic irrelevancy.

First, there is the issue of print publishing. Typesetting, printing, binding and whatever else goes into making the print journal that is then shipped across the globe (using gasoline!) once made sense. These once were necessary costs to disseminate information widely. Because you are reading a blog you already know that the Web radically changes the dissemination of information. Journals with all the same rigorous peer-review and editorial standards can exist online at a fraction of the cost of print journals without letting articles wither away behind paywalls. Yesterday, print journals were created to facilitate the spread of information; today, the continued existence of print journals comes at a cost to the spread of information.

Printing, of course, is only part of the cost involved with maintaining a journal. Editorial work (both in managing the various authors as well as the articles themselves), web-server space as well as web design and maintenance are all costly. However, as many current open-access journals have proven, these costs can be mitigated while keeping articles free to access.

Here’s an idea: if University libraries paid for every penny it would take to run the current crop of prestigious journals across all disciplines as web-only-open-access and stopped buying them from publishers those libraries would save a massive amount of money and all the articles could be available to all. This would save tax-payer and undergrad-tuition dollars and make academic research more available and therefore more relevant. Even if it would cost $100,000/year to operate, say, the American Journal of Sociology as web-only and open-access, this could be paid for with a tiny fraction of the money libraries are collectively paying the The University of Chicago Press for this journal now.

But this is only half of the availability fight. While top-tier journals should be made open access, open-access journals should also be made top-tier. Danah boyd wrote a terrific post covering much of this ground back in 2008, asking academics to boycott closed journals. She has also curated a good list of open-access publications.  To second her call, academics need to prioritize reviewing for, citing from and publishing in open-access journals. Academics in positions of power need to consider intellectual availability in hiring and tenure decisions. Did this particular candidate attempt to make their ideas available for the public or did they participate in locking their ideas behind paywalls?

II. Accessible by Design

I can get everything I wished for above–i.e., a world where articles that are available free to everyone that have not been printed and shipped are considered as legitimate by academics in power–and this would only be one small, but important, step in expanded public relevance for academics. The other half of the battle is for academics to express their insights, data and solutions in ways that are accessible.

The Internet disrupts the music, film, news, porn and other industries because of high demand for the content. If I snapped my fingers and the American Journal of Sociology was completely open-access there probably would not be a massive rush of people scrambling to start downloading articles. As a fan of thinkers like Adorno or Hofstadter, I should confess that my first reaction is to scoff at the anti-intellectual nature of mass culture. But that would be short-sighted; there is popular demand for cutting-edge ideas, new data and smart solutions. But academics have, by and large, done a poor job expressing themselves to the public.

As I said above, there should be space for highly intellectual, jargon-heavy debates where interested parties can have fun nerding-out over some super-technical detail of an obscure theory. However, academic conversations usually revolve around issues of larger importance (as obscure as they sometimes sound). Thus, research should (also) be written in a way the public wants to consume it.

Journal articles, especially those in open-access publications, can be written in a way that those outside of one’s discipline can understand. This is especially crucial if one wants journalists to report on the findings. Perhaps more importantly, academics need to think beyond the journal article: blogging, tweeting, and writing in newspapers, newsmagazines, news websites, etc. all allow academics to reach larger publics.

And, of course, writing for larger public outlets means writing differently than academics are often trained to do.

I understand that not every academic may have the skills to write their research in a way that is interesting to the public in general. It is sad that this skill is not included in academic training. Making complicated topics, ideas and research easy to understand and egaging is an under-valued and difficult task. Here, perhaps we can lean on journalists. Recruit them to cover your work. Most of them value and have learned to communicate to the wider public.

 *********

To conclude, academics have a responsibility to make sure their insights, research and solutions are publicly relevant. And the current irrelevancy crisis academia is suffering is not just the fault of an anti-intellectual news system or general public, but is also because academic work is simply not accessible. It’s not accessible because the work is not available when locked behind excessive pay-walls, and it is not accessible because few would want to read the work even if it was free.

Thus, the attack is two-pronged: (1) accessibility by availability: we have to make top-tier journals open-access and open-access journals top-tier; (2) accessibility by design: write research in blogs, tweets, open-access journals, op-ed’s, whatever, in ways that are readable, understandable, fun and relevant to larger publics.

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

How academics can become relevant summary list

• make prestigious journals open-access
• make open-access journals prestigious (publish in them, cite them, consider them in hiring/tenure decisions)
• blog about your research
• tweet
• write for popular outlets like newspapers, newsmagazines, news websites, etc
• explain your research to journalists
• write in a readable way (explain why your research is important; make it entertaining/engaging; design is important, use good images, slick website, etc)

I snapped this photo at #OccupyCongress yesterday.

There is a good conversation to have on just how leaderless the Occupy movement is. It is more networked and decentralized, but, of course, not perfectly so. Structures and hierarchies always emerge. Unfortunately, this important conversation is derailed when some try to create fictional leaders for a movement that, for the most part, does not have them. Articles like, for instance, John Heilemann’s New York Magazine expose on Occupy, again and again force leader-language on the movement. And they do so unsuccessfully.

The traditional media wants to tell a traditional story, and this is why they get Occupy so terribly wrong. It is easier to describe a movement of leaders, of charismatic personalities and of specific ideas, messages and demands. The media momentum favors retelling the type of story they have told before.

But the reality for Occupy is much more complicated. Yes, the movement is not completely leaderless. Participation and efficaciousness are not evenly distributed across the 99%. For instance, the term “occupy” was not arrived to by some consensus but instead the creation of Adbusters. However, the magazine has claimed that they “have no interest in a continuing leadership role.” Instead, the magazine’s role has been aesthetic: to come up with good memes.

While pure leaderlessness may not be possible or even wanted for Occupy, the bigger story is that it is more decentralized than previous political movements. The high degree to which Occupy is leaderless continues to be a defining characteristic in how the movement operates.

I think we have a good idea of what Occupy-with-leaders might look like: the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. And much of the movement which supported Obama-the-candidate with vigor has become disappointed with Obama-the-president. The energy has drained from him towards something new. And it may not be coincidence that it is a movement not driven by a grand, charismatic leader-of-leaders, but instead an Occupation that is largely the opposite. Occupy evades easy dismissal of specific demands not universally made and easy take-downs of leaders that do not exist.

That is, unless the media attempts to create leaders where they do not exist.

The strategy is simple: without a head, neck and throat to dig into, one must create the figure easy to attack. Here, Fox News calls an occupier who spoke to TMZ about Miley Cyrus a “leader of the movement.” Using the term “leader” cuts straight to the heart of Occupy by implicitly saying a fundamental premise of the movement is false. Or take this article that claims leftists academics are the leaders of the movement. Many more examples, usually from the right, could be given.

In a profile of the Occupy movement in The New York Magazeine, John Heilemann says,

“The people plotting these maneuvers are the leaders of OWS. Now, you may have heard that Occupy is a leaderless ­uprising. Its participants, and even the leaders themselves, are at pains to make this claim. But having spent the past month immersed in their world, I can report that a cadre of prime movers—strategists, tacticians, and logisticians; media gurus, technologists, and grand theorists—has emerged as essential to guiding OWS.”

The argument is clear: Occupy has leaders, but claims to be leaderless. Heilemann makes important insights, specifically the way that hierarchies always emerge, what is sometimes called the “iron law of oligarchy.” However, the point that some are marginally more influential does not refute the ways in which Occupy remains so radically decentralized. It only shows how a more decentralized movement does not achieve impossibly pure leaderless perfection.

I understand that writing an expose is easier and more compelling when you have human-interest characters, and all the better if you get to call them “leaders” and “prime movers.” How exciting to unveil hidden leaders thought to be non-existent! This unmasking makes for compelling fiction.

The individuals identified by Heilemann do seem to have more influence within the movement than the average protester. However, the so-called leaders in the article attempt to make Occupy about clear goals and are instead trumped by the consensus of a crowd that supported a “glorification of…vagueness.” The “leaders” wanted clear demands, the decentralized crowd did not. Demands were not given and “leaders” they were not.

In another instance, Heilemann states that many people could step up and fill the leader void, “if only the rank and file will permit it.” But if these folks are leaders, then there should be no void to fill. If the rank-and-file are making the final decisions, don’t we have a model closer resembling leaderlessness?

Ultimately, Heilemann’s portrayal of Occupy as being leader-driven but dishonestly claiming leaderlessness is unsatisfying. Moving forward, media need to allow themselves to be confused by a purposefully vague movement. Over time, one victory of the Occupy movement will be the way it forces the creation of new space, new thoughts and new language. And this is an important victory for any progressive movement.

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

Photo of the week

This week at Cyborgology…

Dave Strohecker is back at theorizing hipsters and authenticity, this time comparing them to “indie”

Editors Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey live-tweeted and archived the Twitter stream of the recent flash-conference on Occupy, the Tea Party and networked democracy

Jenny Davis writes on “responsible Googling,” or how teachers should best use the Web in the classroom

Nathan Jurgenson asks if Occupy can survive a winter without tents, arguing that most analyses of the movement has looked too much at space and not enough at time

David Banks writes his second post on Actor Network Theory, compares it to “augmented reality”  and again comes down hard on Latour and his disciples. The post continues to spark a terrific discussion in the comments

Sarah Wanenchak responds to Nathan’s previous post arguing that, yes, Occupy can withstand a winter without tents. Memories are strong, and people will not forget about what made the movement powerful. 

At exactly the moment when tents are disappearing, when, at least for the winter, Occupy is trading long-term omnipresence for short-term actions, Occupy DC made news for building a large, wooden, winterized structure in a city park. The Occupy DC barn fiasco can be understood, in part, as a move to double-down on the endurance of the Occupy movement precisely when it is at risk of losing that secret ingredient that made it powerful: time.

As Sarah Wenechak wrote, tents pitched in city parks come to be more than practical but also symbolic. And part of this value is that they represent time. Overall, much of the writing about Occupy has focused on space. Traditional protest actions, like marches, claim physical space but merely do so for short periods of time (especially as the march moves from location to location occupying any particular space for a only very brief amount of time). While that big umbrella term “occupy” certainly refers to space, there has also been a special focus on time.

A tent, for example, proclaims that these are not just marches or protests that appear with fury and dissipate when the point has been made but instead signify the passing of time, of bodies sleeping and enduring together in a permanent way. And this is (was?) part of the fundamental character of the movement.

But, of course, the environment became increasingly hostile to the tent. Cold weather can be debilitating as anyone who has spent time at one of the icy encampments knows well. Most importantly, many cities simply stopped tolerating the encampments by dramatically and sometimes violently clearing them away one by one. In response, most of the various geographically-based Occupy movements have decided not to attempt re-camping through the winter but instead focusing on what some have called “phase 2” which involves a variety of quicker actions. Prominently, there has been the “occupy our homes” day of action as well as the focus on West Coast ports.

However, given the power of permanence, what does the movement lose when focusing on brief actions versus the interminability of long-lasting occupations?

Enter Occupy DC and their big, wooden barn:

This particular occupation in McPherson Square near the White House has enjoyed relatively little interference from a city used to political protest. Occupy DC is now the largest remaining encampment. Faced with the option of moving to “phase 2” and focusing mainly on short-term direction actions, Occupy DC has doubled down on unbroken permanence and further dug in.

The first major police standoff for Occupy DC came December 4th when the group erected a 24x24x17-foot wooden barn overnight. The city immediately told the group to take it down. Instead, protesters clamored to the roof, prompting a day long standoff that ultimately resulted in 31 of the protesters arrested and the structure trashed by the city.

The symbolism of a large wooden structure appearing overnight in a city-park is clear: Occupy can still be about persistence, durability, omnipresence and longevity. “We need a symbol of our permanency here”, one protester said.

This ethic of ceaseless immovability has been critical for the movement. When you wake up, there will be tents. When you go to lunch or out to a bar, there will be tents. Regardless what you think of the movement you knew at any given moment there were people sleeping in tents in city spaces all across the country. The physical perpetuity of the camps leads to a sort of cognitive permanence, lingering in the head of people across the country and world. The endlessness forces questions about who these people are, what they demand and what this movement means.

If time was the movement’s secret ingredient, that is, if the endurance of the movement is central to its efficacy, then taking a break might very well kill momentum. Will there be consequence to the disappearance of tent-based Occupy encampments around the country? Can a movement forcefully and sometimes violently denied physical space still hold onto the power of time?

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

“From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street and Beyond–The Future of Networked Democracy” is starting now. Cyborgology Editors Nathan Jurgenson are live-tweeting the event.

Follow Nathan here: @nathanjurgenson

PJ here: @pjrey

The conference hashtag here: #PDMteaows

The conference is streaming here: http://personaldemocracy.com/teaowslive

Picture of the week is of Victorian audio surveillance. Note the listening device taking on the form of an ear. Augmented reality predates electronics and has come to take on creative forms.

This week at Cyborgology…

Sara Wanenchak discusses the symbolic power of the tent for the Occupy movement

Jenny Davis draws on Barthes to describe how memes are the mythology of our augmented society

Guest author Doug Hill discusses the relationship between Ellul’s concept of technique and the Occupy movement

Dave Strohecker continues his series of posts on hipsters and technology calling them a “folk devil”, a group we can project our insecurities upon

Guest author Gene Morrow highlights a video-talk that describes the increased blurring of the physical and technological

David Banks describes “the beast of Kandahar” and its role in augmented warfare

Last, listen to Cyborgology Editors Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey talk on the radio about technology and the Occupy movement