My attention was directed today (via Twitter, appropriately), to this post about the competing ASA Bingo Cards. I don’t have a lot to say about the deeper meaning of “gentle ribbing” or negativity, whatever you want to call it, in the original card. However, I do think that the “chronically hip grad student” square was not just, as Nathan Jurgenson asserted, a mainstream culture-embedded dig at hipsters, but also an indication of a general discomfort among less technologically savvy sociologists at the increasing use of technology to augment professional scholarly activities, often though not always by colleagues younger than themselves.
In particular, I suspect that the characterization of Twitter as “like passing notes during a talk, only if those notes were posted on a giant whiteboard behind the speaker so that everybody but her could read them” is quite accurate in terms of how the unfamiliar (and vaguely suspicious) think about Twitter. Twitter users think they’re better than us, just like those iPad-using hipster grad students, and they’re trash talking about it where we can’t see them. While it makes sense, I think it’s a very misguided analogy.
The critical difference between notes, or for that matter late-night trash talk at the hotel bar, and Twitter is that Twitter creates (for the most part) a documentary record. As interview participants have expressed to me over and over again in my dissertation research on self-presentation and information disclosure on Facebook, this record presents a concern that is very much a part of the communication process for users. People speak more carefully when they know that that their remarks are being recorded, and that even if they later think better of them and attempt to delete them from the record, a split second is all it takes for someone else to RT them. The documentary record of the Twitter stream may actually enhance civility at the same time that it enhances audience interaction.
That interaction doesn’t just benefit audience members who might otherwise be struggling to stay awake. As Nathan and Jessie Daniels highlighted in their admittedly Twitter-centric Bingo card (and PJ Rey commented indignantly on my behalf when I found myself shelling out for hotel wifi in an area of the conference that didn’t get the ASA signal), Twitter discussions are value added. While a Twitter stream may, in a pinch, substitute for session attendance, it’s more likely to allow for conversation among audience members that is all too often stymied by session time constraints if not some more sinister conference culture. In a worst case scenario, this may mean that the Twitter stream “turn[s] an otherwise boring session into something engaging”; more often, it may mean that audience members are able to hash their way to truly interesting questions by the time the question period begins, so that presenters are not left with a room full of people who won’t think of what they really wanted to ask for another 45 minutes. If conferences are supposed to create space for conversations, it’s hard to imagine a better tool.
E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; she tweets about sociology, social justice, and various and sundry personal interests at @cabell and probably qualifies as “chronically hip” by virtue of her weird hair alone.
Jessie Daniels and Nathan Jurgenson on August 28, 2011
Conference Twitter Bingo Card created by Jessie Daniels and Nathan Jurgenson
There was a popular “bingo card” for the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association held last week in Las Vegas. It poked a bit of fun at sociologists and the meeting itself. Nathan Jurgenson’s reaction was that the card itself revealed much about the sociological discipline and the problems with the annual meetings. He wrote a post here on Cyborgology calling for a more positive bingo card that might be helpful to improve the conference experience rather than just complaining about what is wrong. It is easy to be annoyed, much harder to be constructive.
CUNY sociologist Jessie Daniels responded to this call, and, toegther, we have created a more constructive and useful Bingo card that looks specifically at how to improve a conference by augmenting one’s experience with Twitter.
The card describes how conferences in general benefit from engagement on both the physical and digital levels. Conversations taking place move onto the web, and discussions in the “backchannel” flow back into physical space. In fact, we noted this trend during the Theorizing the Web conference this past spring, calling it an “augmented conference.”
Here are some summary statistics for the American Sociological Association annual meetings held this past week in Las Vegas. These statistics begin August 1st through the 25th.
Like many others, I learned about the recent East Coast earthquake via Twitter. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the news traveled faster on Twitter than did the actual waves of the quake. For instance, many in New York City found about about the earthquake on Twitter from friends in DC before feeling the rumbling themselves.
See this cool video made by Eric Fischer and follow the quake-tweets represented by green dots travel north from the epicenter in Virginia up through and past New York City:
Twitter has even capitalized on this by making a commercial:
Yes, I know it is just a game and it is fun and it is not something to get all blog-ranty about. But, sorry, we’re (mostly) sociologists and we learned long ago the importance of the mundane (R.I.P. Garfinkel this year, by the way). The number of “retweets” this card receives makes it something worth discussing. We made our sociological bed, so let me sleep in it for a second.We’ll notice that the popular bingo card, created by Kieran Healy, is pretty negative. This does not mean that Healy or those who get a kick out of this dislike the conference. Instead, it provides a lighthearted way of expressing our frustrations with the event. Such as:
Annoyance over those who complain about dues increasing
The excruciating performance of small talk out of convention rather than desire
Using phrases such as “brought back in”, “can you say more about”, “mixed-methods”; my guess is that people are annoyed with these phrases becuase they are over-used? (and if you think I am reading too much negativity in, see the people already apologizing on Twitter for using these phrases)
Wandering around in the book exhibit (which is gendered as “male” for some reason)
“Hipness” is critiqued, which gels with the larger “hipster hate” societal trend, alive and well at ASA
Similarly, there is the requisite “iPad” dis, which speaks to fact that many view this device as about performing hipness (or victims of the Apple spectacle) opposed to the idea that those users actually find the iPad useful
“Badge glancing”, where interpersonal exchanges are driven by potential social capitol
Too many slides for a short presentation
Audience and panel won’t disagree
Or, that the presenter doesn’t care if someone disagrees
These last three points speak directly to the frustration that the goals we have for conferences are often not met. We are here in Vegas partly to learn from each other and improve our own ideas, yet so many (though, not all) of the sessions lack good dialogue. When a person presents to five bored attendees checking their email, nothing is achieved. And this needs to change.
Thus, the card serves as a good list of important problems with the ASA meetings that should be addressed (understanding that many of the issues are simply inevitabilities. Which reminds me: why no mention of Wi-Fi?).
That said, I would love to see a more positive ASA Bingo Card. One that lists the reasons why we are here and what we can gain from this experience. What positives can we get out of this meeting? Perhaps a card like this could help people make the best use of their time spent at meetings like this. Or perhaps I typed too many words (“smugly”, on an iPad) about something as silly as a bingo card.
Why is it that authorities are so quick to fear, blame and entirely eliminate electronic communications in the face of unpredictable gatherings of people?
Hosni Mubarak pulled the plug on the Internet during the Egyptian uprising in an attempt to do away with the protesting masses. After the recent riots in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron blamed social media and pondered shutting down electronic communications. And, most recently, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (or BART) subway system turned off mobile coverage because there were rumors of protest. Authorities large and small across the globe are worried about people being more connected than ever.
Putting aside the important issue of free speech, I want to ask why BART officials feel that communication technologies are making people less safe in times of confusion? Is it part of a larger knee-jerk reaction to not understand social media and thus be scared of it? Ultimately, disrupting communications in a time of potential crisis to make people more safe is a fallacy; it does just the opposite.
To very quickly recap the events in San Francisco: The group No Justice on BART organized a protest on July 11th in response to a string of incidents concerning BART police officers including the killing of a local transient and a previous shooting of a restrained and unarmed man. There were rumors of another protest this past Thursday. BART responded by shutting down all mobile service in some of its stations, including access to 911, in an attempt to disrupt the protest. “It all boils down to the safety of the public,” Benson Fairow, BART Deputy Police Chief claimed.
The rumored protest never materialized, but the Mubarak-style restriction of communication resulted in condemnations from the ACLU and other free-speech organizations as well as angering the hacker-group Anonymous [see their response]. BART websites have been attacked and Anonymous has organized another protest scheduled for this evening (Monday, August 15th). BART has announced they may again shut down mobile service in its stations.
Why This Matters: This Precedent Makes Us All Less Safe
Groups like Anonymous and the ACLU are most worried about the important free speech issues at play here. The silencing of voices electronically is just as wrong as silencing individuals in physical space (indeed, as we know, the two have blurredinto each other). Further, journalists increasingly rely on citizens to take pictures, videos and tweet about what is happening on the ground. Without mobile technologies, it will be harder to expose, for instance, unwarranted police brutality against protesters. BART has responded that they are making a trade-off: less free speech for more safety.
Let’s leave the free speech issue aside for only this one post and focus on the safety of individuals during a protest. The precedent being set is exactly wrong; cutting off electronic communications in a time of potential crisis makes people less safe.
BART, or any other organization with its fingers on the electronic-communications switch, can only identify a so-called “security risk” (read: “protest”) once significant organizing for that protest has already been done. If BART, or any other authority, knows about an event, it is already viral and organized enough. Yes, without mobile service it will be more difficult for protesters to coordinate with each other, post pictures, videos, tweets and status updates to rally others and get their message out. But, once already organized, the crowd is a crowd and it will do what a crowd does. Mubarak turning off the Internet in Egypt, something that the U.S. condemned, most assuredly did not disperse the already-organized crowd.
If anything, what played out in Egypt might also be the case in San Francisco: far from disrupting the crowd, turning off electronic communications effectively galvanizes and instigates the crowd. This very timely research paper argues that pulling the plug offers only an “illusory sense of security.” Already upset and organized, the crowd is then faced with a basic attack on free speech in a moment precisely defined by getting one’s voice heard.
To silence someone in such a draconian manner in a society founded on free speech literally screams that what they are saying must be important. The silencing of speech simultaneously confirms its importance. For BART, this is a fundamental mismanagement of the economics of power.
Who does need mobile service in a volatile and thus less-safe moment are those potentially injured (protesters and bystanders alike).
BART knows that crowds are unpredictable and might bring about some amount of chaos (their justification for cutting off mobile service in the first place). And BART officials, no doubt, watched UK officials (stupidly) blame social media for their riots. In this state of confusion, disruption and exception, safety becomes an issue. Individuals very well might need to communicate unpredictable emergency situations by contacting others, 911, etc. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci is dead on when she, in a tweet, calls BART’s decision “wrong, evil, ineffective & dumb.”
Remember that electronic communications were overwhelmingly used for support during the UK riots, not just harm. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are being used to clean up the streets, out criminals, report facts on the ground, and so on.
Simply, what BART is effectively doing to those caught up in any protesting crowd is to (1) instigate a potentially chaotic situation and (2) remove the primary way in which one can get help. This is irresponsible, morally wrong, dangerous and a terrible precedent. It focuses only on the potential harms of electronic communications and none of the important benefits.
To conclude, this seems to be part of a larger trend to forget about the various ways in which electronic communications serve to support individuals and groups. PJ Rey and I have written on this blog before about the tendency for news outlets to over-report potential harm social media might bring. Think of the scares around so-called cyber-bullying or sexting. We have tried to point out that social media has also provided wonderful examples of social support, such as outing street harassers or the “It Gets Better” project. This same fallacy to view new communication technologies as only disruptive and unhelpful seems to have played out in the UK when Cameron ignored the positive use of social media and again in San Francisco where officials ignore the important role these technologies play in helping bystanders get through potentially chaotic situations.
Chris Baraniuk, who writes one of my favorite blogs, the Machine Starts, is experiencing the current riots in London first hand (they’ve spread to other cites). His account of both the rioting mobs of destruction as well as those mobs trying to clean up the aftermath imply the ever complex pathways in which what I have called “augmented reality” takes form. [I lay out the idea here, and expand on it here]
We are witnessing both the destructive and the constructive “mobs” taking form as “augmented” entities. The rioters emerged in physical space and likely used digital communications to better organize. The “riot cleanup” response came at augmentation from the reverse path, organizing digitally to come together and clean up physical space. Both “mobs” flow quite naturally back and forth across atoms and bits creating an overall situation where, as what so often occurs, the on and offline merge together into an augmented experience.
The rioting mob first realized itself in physical meat-space with relatively small and originally peaceful demonstrations in response to the shooting of Mark Duggan by the London police. Violence broke out and the crowd grew (many think that Mark Duggan’s death had little to do with this, but I will try to avoid the debate on what caused these riots for this post). What caught flame in physical space–bodies in motion, burning cars, shattering glass, human lives lost–was already augmented.
The mob of so many well-connected cyborgs did what mobs today do: they become augmented, blurring onto digital space mostly via the popular and mostly private Blackberry messaging service. The augmented mob can both destroy atoms and simultaneously melt into its digital form to avoid capture when needed. As Baraniuk writes,
If trouble had broken out, the police arrived on the scene 20 to 30 minutes later, and the mob at that point “melted away” only to reappear, it seemed, in a completely different district. The network, of course, operates without geographical restrictions and obstacles in its way. Digital communications travel as the crow flies, easily trumping ground-based reconnaissance.
The response to these riots as part of the “riot cleanup” is an effort to reclaim a ravaged city. The effort was formed largely online via the more public-facing networks of Twitter and Facebook. @riotcleanup has about 88,000 followerson Twitter as I type this and the #riotcleanup hashtag has been incredibly active through this ordeal. Baraniuk states that,
the #riotcleanup hashtag has to be one of the most inspiring Twitter topics of the year – hundreds of broom-wielding Londoners were mobilized into a kind of anti-mob
These citizens, so effectively organized online, became galvanized offline in the streets, brooms in hand. Like the rioters, augmentation is crucial for the effectiveness of this mob as well.
None of this is to say that social media is the cause (or solution) to the riots. These are no more “Blackberry Mobs” or “Twitter Mobs” than they are mobs defined by the streets that they burn or clean. Instead, these are augmented mobs where the pathways of materialization and digitization converge from all directions at once.
The recent and popular Hipstamatic war photos depict contemporary soldiers, battlefields and civilian turmoil as reminiscent of wars long since passed. War photos move us by depicting human drama taken to its extreme, and these images, shot with a smartphone and “filtered” to look old, create a sense of simulated nostalgia, further tugging at our collective heart strings. And I think that these photos reveal much more.
Hipstamatic war photographs ran on the front page of the New York Times [the full set] last November, and, of course, fake-vintage photos of everyday life are filling our Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter streams. I recently analyzed this trend ina long essay called The Faux-Vintage Photo, which is generating a terrific response. I argue that we like faux-vintage photographs because they provide a “nostalgia for the present”; our lives in the present can be seen as like the past: more important and real in a grasp for authenticity.
If faux-vintage photography is rooted in authenticity, then what is more real than war? If the proliferation of Hipstamatic photographs has anything to do with a reaction to our increasingly plastic, simulated, Disneyfied and McDonaldized worlds, then what is more gritty than Afghanistan in conflict? In a moment where there is a shortage of and a demand for authenticity (the gentrification of inner-cities, “decay porn” and so on), war may serve as the last and perhaps ultimate bastion of authenticity. However, as I will argue below, war itself is in a crisis of authenticity, creating rich potential for its faux-vintage documentation.
Another round of Hipstamatic images from Afghanistan have been published and widely circulated this past week. As part of a larger project, photojournalist Balazs Gardi shot and collected a series of Hipstamatic images in an e-book and the photos are being run by NPR, the Guardian and others. While not all of these shots are strictly “vintage,” there has certainly been a trend towards more war photographs showing signs of simulated aging, scratches, fading and other markers of images taken long ago using film and printed on paper.
To be clear, this is not an argument about photojournalists using effects in general. And I am not satisfied with just saying that the Hipstamatic filter simply “looks cool” and leaving it at that. Also, I do not think that the usage of faux-vintage filters is just a technical necessity of taking photos with a phone. There are many ways to effect a photo shot on any camera, phones included. I want to ask why the faux-vintage effect is being chosen by the photographers when snapping the photos, then again by the news agencies when choosing to publish them, and then again by us, the consumers of war photography, when we click the images, “like” them, share them and so on? The fact that we are now being presented with photos of current wars that look like they were taken 40 years ago cannot be explained away by randomness or technical reasons but must also take into consideration larger cultural processes.
We know that photography can shape how we understand the world, and this is perhaps most dramatically realized in times of war. Famous war photos such as the young Vietnamese girl running in horror after being burned by a napalm attack or those of Iraqi prisoners tortured and humiliated at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison altered public opinion about those conflicts.
And, importantly, photography remains one of the last remaining ways in which most Americans connect to the wars we currently fight. War, for many in the West, is something that happens far away, its consequences delivered on screens rather than felt personally. As an official states, there is a “growing disconnect between the American people and the military.” As the American military shrinks in numbers, it becomes increasingly its own segregated social sphere. Of course, those in the military and their friends and families do have a very real connection to our wars. But the trend of disconnection from war has gone so far that even the soldiers fighting in modern wars are less connected to combat than ever before. This is most strikingly exemplified by the computer-operated drones flown remotely by military personnel many miles away from the destruction the robots deliver.
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard argued in his controversial essay The Gulf War Did Not Take Place that Americans (even soldiers) now consume wars largely as media events disconnected from the reality of conflict. He links the literal media simulation of war to the larger point that war itself becomes liquidated of meaning. Baudrillard argues that modern warfare is unclear about “its status, meaning, its future.” Whether you agree that the root of this is the precession of media simulations or something else (government conspiracy, globalization, etc.), there now exists something of what he calls an “undecidability of war.” We are as epistemically and morally disconnected from war as we have become physically.
Simply, the point is that modern warfare is becoming unknowable. In addition to being removed from the actual conflict, it is increasingly unclear who is right and wrong, why we are fighting and what the metrics of victory are. We think back and romanticize conflicts like World War II: there was more (though, not complete) agreement over our involvement in the effort; we were good and the Nazi’s were evil; we declared war and we won with the conflict ending in an official surrender.
Today, we do not declare war and the announcement of “mission accomplished” is as comical as it is saddening. It is no longer as clear who we are fighting and just who is part of our coalition. It is unclear why we are fighting (we have only theories) and we do not know when it will end. An American public that is used to the Hollywood war-script (good/evil, winner/loser) has become more disconnected and confused about war than ever before.
Why was this simulated faux-vintage photo run instead of a higher quality and more realistically composed photograph?
Is there evidence that Americans are attempting to reclaim the Hollywood war-script in spite of the more confusing realities “on the ground”? Baudrillard gave examples of the “John Wayne” style rhetoric in the run up the first Gulf War and we surely remember George W. Bush’s similar hyperbolic speeches about good and evil this time around. I argued that the immediate celebrations across America online and in the streets in reaction to the announcement of Bin Laden’s death were partly about a cathartic reclaiming of the Hollywood script: Bin Laden was evil, and now he’s dead; finally, something easy to understand about the ‘war on terror.’
Perhaps this is a reason for the popularity of faux-vintage war photos: saturated, vignetted, faded, scratched and portrayed on simulated photo paper, Hipstamatic war photos frame contemporary conflict as like the wars our parents and grandparents fought. The simulated imperfections appear more real, dramatically gritty and borrow the cachet of war photos taken decades ago. We are reminded, often unconsciously, of those great images of wars long since passed; a time when fighting made more sense (even if this clarity is only the illusionary byproduct of hindsight).
The Hipstamatic images cathartically relieve our collective disconnectedness and confusion with modern warfare when the conflict is nostalgically depicted as akin to wars past. The contemporary battlefield is made to obey the logic of the movie set: good, evil, victory and defeat are comfortably clear. The simulated nostalgia reassures the viewer that today is just as important as was yesterday; our wars are just as significant, necessary, epic, heroic and dramatic.
To conclude, the Hipstamatic war images serve to remind us that the experience of war is vastly different depending on one’s social location. For some, war is experienced primarily as real (a reality overwhelmingly marked by pain). For others, especially those in the West, war is most often something to be aesthetically consumed. The Hipstamatic images from Afghanistan are shot for and consumed by the latter group. Faux-vintage war photography plays on this orientation to war by producing images less focused on reality and more on meaning. The photos on the one hand betray a strict actuality of war but on the other hand heighten the powerfully moving nature of conflict.
Given this, I worry that the Hipstamatic images from Afghanistan promote a nostalgia for war. Photography is one of the few remaining devices left to make war something most Americans can connect to, something that is close and real. The danger of the Hipstamatic war photos is that they may convey war as nostalgically beautiful and distant. But this is not some grainy, sleepy and warmly faded war of long ago; it is happening in the here-and-now in vivid detail. And it indeed is confusing and needs to be understood as such. We cannot run away from the fact that good and evil, right and wrong, winning and losing are all in flux.
The always impressive Information is Beautiful created this graphic about technology and distraction. It is also currently featured at the MoMA exhibit Talk to Me.
We live in a cyborg society. Technology has infiltrated the most fundamental aspects of our lives: social organization, the body, even our self-concepts. This blog chronicles our new, augmented reality.
E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; she tweets about sociology, social justice, and various and sundry personal interests at @cabell and probably qualifies as “chronically hip” by virtue of her weird hair alone.
