The New York Times has a great article on how we are increasingly “Turning to Social Networks for News.” The important contrast is between traditional top-down reporting and the way information spreads virally from the bottom on social media.
The Cyborgology editors were on the radio (WYPR, Baltimore’s NPR affiliate) talking about the Theorizing the Web 2011 conference. We discuss the Twitter backchannel and the notion of an augmented conference, and how Facebook is similarly a backchannel to our Face-to-face interactions. Also, conference attendee Bonnie Stewart is mentioned!
Project Cascade from the New York Times seeks to visualize how news stories break and are disseminated online. By illustrating how stories explode through the social web it provides a glimpse into our highly networked information society.
Would you be willing to give up your DNA data as part of an identification system? Cool design project by Jamie Thoms.
Product Designer Jamie Thoms has released a new public engagement project which invites the general public into the world of science and identity. The D.N.A Stamper, offers the public the chance to contemplate the impact of granting someone access to their biological data. The aim of his project is to challenge the public to think about how much they value their identity. Who should have access to this information. Your partner? Family? The police?
The D.N.A. Stamper simulates extracting a sample of the users D.N.A. and uses this to stamp a consent form, to verify the user’s identity and offer tissue for hypothetical testing. The owner of the sample will have to fill in the consent form expressing how much of the information in the D.N.A. the holder will be privy to.
Mr. Thoms has taken inspiration from companies such as “23andMe” which process peoples D.N.A. for a fee and films such as “GATTACA” which offer an extreme view of where we could end up if the use of the information contained in D.N.A. becomes public.
Jamie (21) stated “We have this whole new level of information so easily available now, and I feel it is important to make people more aware of this and involve them as soon as possible. If this service became a reality, would offering someone access to the information your D.N.A. holds, create a new level of relationship or increase the risk of genism and discrimination?”
Yesterday, Sang-Hyoun Pahk delivered a critique of the usage of the term augmented reality on this blog. First, thank you, criticism of this term is especially important for me (and others) because augmented reality is the fundamental unit of analysis about which I seek to describe. A quick catch-up: I initially laid out the idea of augmented reality here; expounded on its opposite, what I call digital dualism, here; and fellow Cyborgology editor PJ takes on the terms here. PJ Rey and I use the term augmented reality on this blog to describe the digital and physical worlds not as separate but instead as highly enmeshed together. And Sang is pushing us to further elaborate on what this all means.
I’ll tackle Sang’s second critique first because I think it is most important. The confusion comes from how two points hang together: (1) the digital and physical have enmeshed and (2) the digital and physical have important differences. Sang seems to be arguing that we cannot have it both ways, but I have and will continue maintain that we can.
Sang takes issue with PJ and I’s statements that the offline and online are mutually constitutive, which seems to “abolish the difference” between the two. I actually think we all agree here and perhaps PJ and I could have been clearer: the two are mutually constitutive, just not fully mutually constitutive. Let me offer new wording: atoms and bits have different properties, influence each other, and together create reality. [I had this same conversation with Bonnie Stewart in the comments section of the digital dualism piece.]
Thus, the term augmented reality does not need to imply that the differences between atoms and bits does not matter. Quite the opposite because we cannot begin to describe these differences until we start with the assumption of augmented reality. We cannot adequately discuss one without taking into account the other’s at least partial influence. Simply put, the assumption of augmented reality makes possible the very discussion about the relevant differences between atoms and bits that Sang (and myself) wants to have. “Like” the concept of augmented reality or not, ultimately, we need it.
The second critique, and I hope I am getting this right, is that Sang argues the term “augmented reality” implies a non-augmented reality, creating a new dualism. However, I do not think that this implication is essential and I share his concern that this sort of dualism would be problematic. PJ and I have worked hard on this blog to argue that technology has always augmented reality, be it in pre-electronic times (e.g., architecture or language as technologies) or how those offline are still impacted by the online (e.g., third-world victims of our e-waste or the fact that your Facebook presence influences your behavior even when logged off).
All this said, we will continue to describe how reality is differently augmented by digital social media than by other technologies. This does not create a dualism of reality versus augmented reality, but instead a view of reality as always a multiplicity of augmented realities coming in many flavors. The important task is not describing if, but instead how and why augmentation occurs the way it does.
David Carr recently wrote a piece in the New York Times where he states,
Add one more achievement to the digital revolution: It has made it fashionable to be rude.
Has it?
The article is about how people are increasingly gazing into little glowing screens when in physical space. Carr views this as a “mass thumb-wrestling competition” where we are “desperately” staring at devices instead of making “actual” connections. And it is his usage of “actual” here that tips us off on why he has such a negative view of people looking at screens: he, like so many others, suffers from digital dualism. I’ve critiqued Amber Case, Jeff Jarvis and others on this blog for failing to make the conceptual leap that the digital sphere is not this separate space like The Matrix but instead that reality is augmented. I’ve been through the argument enough times on this blog that I’ll just refer you to the links and move ahead.
Carr’s digital dualism begins in his description of people looking at phones while at South By Southwest this past spring, something he then uses as evidence for the larger problem of increasing disconnectedness. He argues,
We were adjacent but essentially alone, texting and talking our way through what should have been a great chance to engage flesh-and-blood human beings. The wait in line for panels, badges or food became one more chance to check in digitally instead of an opportunity to meet someone you didn’t know […]It’s not just conferences full of inforati where this happens. In places all over America […]people gather in groups only to disperse into lone pursuits between themselves and their phones.
What Carr might be unaware of is the vast amount of research that demonstrates being digitally connected is also related to being connected with people offline. Checking in digitally might facilitate precisely that offline opportunity Carr assumes it precludes. The glowing screen does not always indicate “a lone pursuit,” but often quite the opposite.
Perhaps another reason Carr views glowing screens so negatively is revealed in the title of the panel he moderated at SXSW: “I’m So Productive, I Never Get Anything Done,” which is about how the Internet has distracted us to the point we do not have time to do the work we get paid for. This makes me think: you’re doing it wrong.
Yes, digital tools can distract us too much. And when this happens we need to use those tools differently. Similarly, Carr mentions people who start typing on their phone when he is talking to them and how much that annoys him. The solution seems simple: If you do not like being around people who are always on their phones, don’t be around those people who are always on their phones.
People always had and will continue to have bad manners. The question is whether social media and mobile phones have caused a social epidemic of bad manners. While I do often become annoyed at the way people use technology in public, I do not share Carr’s bias for seeing glowing screens as people being a-social and distant and in some separate reality. Quite the opposite, I view it as them sharing their digital connections in physical space, navigating socially through our augmented reality.
In sum, Carr makes the same mistake as the film The Social Network: blaming all of social media for the actions of the few rude and socially inept users, be they Mark Zuckerberg or that annoying blue-lit person in your bar group who won’t put the phone away.
Is the QR code soon to be a thing of the past?
There is also a provision for user-created content, that is likely to create a wild and wooly augmented world and perhaps a new generation of video graffiti artists, if the service takes off.
via.
The 2012 presidential race is beginning to take shape, and it is interesting to see how social media is being differently used by candidates. Obama kicked off his re-election campaign on YouTube and is at Facebook today with Zuckerberg to do a Facebook-style town-hall Q&A. Mitt Romney (R-MA) annouced his presidential bid on Twitter and Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) announced on Facebook and even created a Foursquare-style gaming layer where supporters earn points for participating in his campaign. I’ll be analyzing how social media is used throughout the 2012 cycle, but I’d like to start all of this with the question: who will be our first social media president?
FDR became the radio president with his famous “fireside chats” and JFK the television president with his image-centered debates with Nixon. Many consider Obama the first social media president due to his massive fund raising and organizing efforts during the 2008 campaign using the web (though, Howard Dean was there four years earlier – remember his use of meetup.org). However, now that Obama has been in office for more than two years, has he really used the social web effectively in interesting new ways? The New York Times states that Obama treats the Internet like a “television without knobs,” using it primarily to simply upload videos for us to consume. Obama-as-president has thus far been a Web 1.0 leader instead of embracing the Web 2.0 ethic of users collaboratively and socially creating content.
To put it another way, go to Obama’s Twitter account and ask yourself if he is really using the medium in an effective way? It is clearly ghostwritten and not at all in the style of mainstream Twitter users. In contrast, we can look at his opponents on the right. For example, looking at Sarah Palin’s Twitter account reveals that she uses the medium more in line with Twitter norms and appears to be Twitter-savvy in style. She better understands the medium compared to Obama (however, her more off-the-cuff style did get her in trouble over the shooting in Arizona earlier this year). All of this also speaks to the fact that the right has caught up (surpassed?) the left when it comes to utilizing social media politically.
I am left with the question: when will we see a Web 2.0, social media president?
Or will we ever? Is it the case that the very idea of a president, that ultimate figure in a top-down hierarchy, runs counter to the bottom-up ethic of Web 2.0? Social media requires a degree of honesty, openness and collaboration that simply may not mesh with the office itself. For instance, would it be appropriate for Obama, the leader of the free world, to tweet the banalities of his day? [e.g., “awesome lunch on Air Force 1 today #BFD #winning”]
Or will there emerge a candidate (or candidates) that can campaign and govern in line with social media? One that is “willing to wade into the messy digital fray and cede some control over their message”?
*Sarah Palin Twitter Bird photo comes from the Express newspaper out of DC. The Obama/Zuckerberg photo comes from the LATimes.
I want to reflect on Theorizing the Web 2011 by asking for a discussion about what academic conferences should look like. In fact, let’s forget the term “conference” for a moment and ask how thinkers should best organize to discuss intellectual work in public?
Theorizing the Web 2011 was PJ Rey and I’s first attempt at tackling this question [read PJ’s review of the event here]. We started this blog to provide a public forum for ideas and the conference was intended to do the same. Many reviews of the event have emerged (some posted on this blog over the past ten days). What has surprised me most is the degree to which the conference itself has been a main topic of discussion. And while we are very proud that the reviews have been so overwhelmingly positive about our view of an academic event, we understand that this is also a result of the failing of traditional venues for the intellectual exchange of ideas. Academic conferences are too often suffered through and individual sessions often poorly attended. Media outlets tend to ignore anything that smells too much like intellectualism, a term itself that has come to be viewed pejoratively because, at least in part, intellectuals have so poorly communicated ideas to the public. As graduate students, we know we needed to create a world that is better prepared to communicate the critical theories so important to understand our changing realities.
And the result on April 9th went well above our expectations.
We attempted to bring in art, multi-media, interdisciplinarity, and even non-disciplinarity to this event. Registration was pay-what-you-want. The event began with beers in an alley and finished with a loud band. We tried lots of things and will try much more if we do this again next year [we want to].The art was fun, and us organizers can take credit for that.
However, my lasting impression of that day is that there was a vibe, an emergent zeitgeist, of people having fun exchanging smart and important ideas on under-theorized topics. Presentations were intellectual and entertaining. They appealed to people in many disciplines and even to those in attendance who are not academics. This was exactly what we wanted idea-exchange-in-public to look like, and the credit for this goes entirely to all those in attendance [thank you, everybody!].
So I want to continue this conversation about what conferences should look like. What different sorts of public intellectual projects can be done to give thinkers room to speak publically about their ideas?
There will be a special event the evening before Theorizing the Web at the important intersection of theory and art. Admission is open to all and is free of charge.
When? This Friday, April 8th, 6:30P
Where? Irvine Contemporary Gallery, DC, 1412 14th St NW
Why? Art plays a prominent role on this blog and also with this conference. The media-prophet Marshall McLuhan argues (see 10:58 in this video) that only the artist has the “sensory awareness” to tell us what our changing world is “made of.” While many of us are not willing to go this far, it very well might be the case that artists are uniquely prepared to give insight on this new, augmented reality that social media and other new technologies are creating. In a sense, artists sometimes precede theorists and academia. And in this spirit, Theory Meets Art literally precedes Theorizing the Web.
We begin with a brief performance by ambient musician Yoko K. Then, we will screen a feature film that we feel should be centrally important for thinkers on technology, art and society. The film is a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning documentary called We Live in Public that chronicles the story of one Josh Harris while also making important theoretical points about privacy, publicity, capitalism, identity and much more through the lens of art. For more on the film, see my review in a recent edition of Surveillance and Society. After the film, we will have a discussion on art and social media with world-renowned street artist Gaia. The night will be hosted by Dr. Martin Irvine, who is giving a talk on street art and social media on Saturday. Last, there will be a social reception at the gallery.
We are very excited to start this conference at this wonderful gallery in the heart of DC. Away from the concrete spectacle of downtown, the gallery is situated in a beautiful section of the city, a short subway ride from College Park. We encourage everyone to come to this event and begin a wonderful weekend of Theorizing the Web!
Yoko K
We Live in Public
Gaia
A flier for this event [.pdf].
More details and directions can be found on the conference website.