In my previous post on “Digital Dualism Versus Augmented Reality,” I lay out two competing views for conceptualizing digital and material realities. Some view the physical and digital as (1) separate, akin to the film The Matrix, or (2) as an augmented reality where atoms and bits are increasingly imploding into each other.

I prefer the latter, and want to apply this augmented paradigm to the revolutions occurring in the Arab world that have been taking place this winter as well as the subsequent debate over the causes. I, like many others, am equally frustrated by those who give either all or none of the credit for these uprisings to social media tools and argue instead that what is occuring is an augmented revolution.

On one side there are those that promoted the phrase “Twitter revolution” during the June 2009 protests in Iran and continue to reduce subsequent unrest in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere as being social media revolutions. To define a revolution in terms of a micro-blogging service is disrespectfully, insensitively and incorrectly reductionist to those on the ground, yelling, marching and being shot at in the streets.

On the other side are those like Malcolm Gladwell who swiftly dismiss how massively important social media truly are both symbolically and strategically to these uprisings. Gladwell states that people with grievances will always communicate and organize. Therefore, how they do so is not as important as why they did so. Unfortunately, such organization does not just happen; people have to make it happen and that is why it remains an important topic. People like Martin Luther King Jr and Mohandas Gandhi spent a great deal of effort outlining specific strategies for their movements. These strategies have been subsequently replicated by others, including the recent Egyptian movement whose organizational work accomplished what many in their country wanted done for decades -and much of this was done online.

Thus, this is no more and no less of a “Twitter revolution” than a Tahrir Square revolution. Let’s move past the reductionist binary and acknowledge that what we are seeing is an augmented revolution, one that utilizes both the physical and digital. Social media plays a key role, but so do the physical bodies standing in the streets taking up physical space, making speech heard not just through speak-to-tweet but also from voice to ear.

For instance, while a small revolutionary force was organized using Facebook in Egypt, specifically on Wael Ghonim’s We Are All Khaled Said page, the group expertly morphed its message once it took to the streets. The Egyptian resistance used web tools as well as physical space, and most importantly, they did so by looking at the intersection of both. They used the web to inform people how to behave in physical space, e.g., what to do with tear gas containers, who should stand in front of the crowds and how the crowds should move about the city.

It makes little sense to argue about whether these are social media revolutions or not. Instead, we should recognize them as augmented revolutions. Only then can we debate just how and how much of a role the digital aspect played.

Fellow Cyborgology editor PJ Rey sums up many issues surrounding social media and the recent revolutions.

We also spoke to WYPR about this issue.

Zeynep Tufekci provides my favorite explanation of the overdetermined nature of these revolutions.

Cool tool that uses Google’s Street View to allow users to tag street art from around the globe. Check it out.

Expect more on street art and social media right here on Cyborgology in the near future.

FlowingData posted this great infographic that shows how prostituion in Manhattan is increasingly dispersed. The Internet allows sex work to be less anchored by physicality when much of the process happens online. More analysis here.

The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.

And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.

In a 2009 post titled “Towards Theorizing An Augmented Reality,” I discussed geo-tagging (think Foursquare or Facebook Places), street view, face recognition, the Wii controller and the fact that sites like Facebook both impact and are impacted by the physical world to argue that “digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other.” This is opposed to the notion that the Internet is like the Matrix, where there is a “real” (Zion) that you leave when you enter the virtual space (the Matrix) -an outdated perspective as Facebook is increasingly real and our physical world increasingly digital.

I have used this perspective of augmentation to critque dualism when I see it. For instance, last year I posted a rebuttal to the digital-dualist critique of so-called “slacktivism” that claimed “real” activism is being traded for a cyber-based slacker activism. No, cyber-activism should be seen in context with physical world activism and how they interact. Taken alone, yes, much of the cyber-activism would not amount to much. But used in conjunction with offline efforts, it can be powerful. And, of course, my point is much, much easier to make with the subsequent uprisings in the Arab world that utilize both digital and physical organizing. This augmented dissent will be a topic for another post.

Recently, I have critiqued “cyborg anthropologist” Amber Case for her use of Turkle’s outdated term “second self” to describe our online presence. My critique was that conceptually splitting so-called “first” and “second” selves creates a “false binary” because “people are enmeshing their physical and digital selves to the point where the distinction is becoming increasingly irrelevant.” [I’ll offer my own take for what that digital presence should be called in a soon-to-come post.]

But the dualism keeps rolling in. There are the popular books that typically critique social media from the digital dualist perspective. Besides Turkle’s Alone Together, there is Carr’s The Shallows, Morozov’s The Net Delusion, Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, Siegel’s Against the Machine, Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, and the list goes on (we can even include the implicit argument in the 2010 blockbuster movie The Social Network). All of these argue that the problem with social media is that people are trading the rich, physical and real nature of face-to face contact for the digital, virtual and trivial quality of Facebook. The critique stems from the systematic bias to see the digital and physical as separate; often as a zero-sum tradeoff where time and energy spent on one subtracts from the other. This is digital dualism par excellence. And it is a fallacy.

I am proposing an alternative view that states that our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities, ala The Matrix, but instead live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits. And our selves are not separated across these two spheres as some dualistic “first” and “second” self, but is instead an augmented self. A Haraway-like cyborg self comprised of a physical body as well as our digital Profile, acting in constant dialogue. Our Facebook profiles reflect who we know and what we do offline, and our offline lives are impacted by what happens on Facebook (e.g., how we might change our behaviors in order to create a more ideal documentation).

Most importantly, research demonstrates what social media users already know: we are not trading one reality for another at all, but, instead, using sites like Facebook and others actually increase offline interaction. This is not zero-sum dualism. As the famous Network Society theorist Manuel Castells stated earlier this month,

Nobody who is on social networks everyday (and this is true for some 700 million of the 1,200 million social network users) is still the same person. It’s an online/offline interaction, not an esoteric virtual world.

None of this is to say that social media and the web should not be critiqued. Indeed, it should be, and I hope to do that work myself. However, critiques of social media should begin with the idea of augmented reality. Is a reality augmented by digitality a good thing? My job with this post is not to answer that question, but to help make it possible.

Really cool visualization that integrates the data with its physical-world context. Reminiscent of the point that our world is increasingly an augmentation of the physical and the digital.

More images here.

Facebook has conquered “the west” almost entirely, as well we South-East Asia and Oceania/Australia.

Since it’s blocked in China, Facebook has pretty much zero market penetration in the world’s largest online market.

Facebook is still weak in Japan, which is also one of the world’s largest online markets.

Facebook is significantly less popular in much of Eastern Europe and Russia than in the rest of Europe.

Via Royal Pingdom.

George Washington University students have taken action against sexual assault on their campus, and, interestingly, are using the social media site Formspring. Several student organizations have banded together to create the “3000 campaign” (which makes reference to the estimated number of GW students who will experience sexual asaault). The campaign adeptly uses Formspring to allow students to anonymously report sexual assaults. The Formspring page is here. See DC sex and gender columnist Amanda Hess’ excellent coverage of this story here and here.

Cyborgology editors PJ Rey and I have made the point before that social media is often painted as dangerous without looking to the new ways in which it provides support. Yes, bullying occurs on Facebook, but we can also think about how social media has been leveraged to provide social support, for instance, with Dan Savage’s YouTube-based It Gets Better Campaign. I also recently discussed Egypt’s Harassmap, which helps women organize over social media to fight harassment. The site that has been arguably most notorious in the recent fervor over cyber-bullying is Formspring.me (for those who do not know, users on this site answer questions often asked anonymously). The site is connected with a suicide and researcher danah boyd has stated that,

“While teens have always asked each other crass and mean-spirited questions, this has become so pervasive on Formspring so as to define what participation there means.” (from here)

However, while what boyd said was true when she said it (ten months ago), social participation on Formspring is about more than just bullying. Now it is a a tool that can also be used to fight assault and harassment, even that which occurs in the physical-world. Thus, any conversation about the role social media is coming to play in society should take into account both the potential risks and benefits of these emerging platforms. The anonymity of Formspring breeds both the secrecy needed to mercilessly criticize others as well as to provide voice to “silent problems” like sexual assault.

Infographic from New York Magazine’s amazing article on online porn. A must read.

Here, Marshall McLuhan argues to Norman Mailer that we see our present as a rear view image always placed in the context of the past. Only the artist can see the present as it really is.

Via Next Nature:

Our historical snippet of the moment is a Canadian television fragment from 1968 featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on the implications of media technology and whether nature still existed.

The two heroes of the ’60s are absolute opposites. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is assertive, animated, hot, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, leaning backward, cool. Mcluhan argues “The planet is no longer nature,” he declares, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.” Mailer: “Well, I think you are anticipating a century, perhaps”.

Here, Amber Case states something commonly repeated on this blog: we are all cyborgs. As such, she calls herself a cyborg anthropologist, similar to how we conceive of the study of technology and society as Cyborgology (perhaps without such strict disciplinary terms – but that is another discussion).

However, there is much disagreement between Case’s usage of the term and how I (and others) on this blog define a cyborg.

First, Case argues in the video above that the human cyborg is a recent invention. A product of new technologies that compress our mental capacities over time and space. On this blog, however, we tend to use the term much more broadly. For instance, one fundamental technology that structures other technologies built upon it is language. Post-structuralist thinking has long taught us about the power of language to drive what and how people think, how selves are formed, how power is enacted, and so on. Other technologies, such as spatial organization (think the architectural technologies of the amphitheater or panoptic prison) have profound impact on the mental processes of humans. The human mind has never been independent of technology, and, as such, we have always been cyborgs.

My second disagreement surrounds Case’s argument that our digital selves are a sort of “second self.” Instead, I’ll argue that the notion of first and second selves might be a false binary. For Case, the second self is that digital version of ourselves online. She argues that we have to constantly maintain this second self that is always connected with others. And in this frantic explosion of connection we are not taking the time grow, we reflect less on who we really are and precisely how we want to present our second selves online. “Kids today,” Case states (I always shudder as to what follows that phrase), are becoming “addicted” to clicking buttons.

And it is here that Case should note that this problematic is precisely why her theoretical binary between first (physical world) and second (digital) selves is false. People are enmeshing their physical and digital selves to the point where the distinction is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Facebook profiles are heavily anchored in the physical world, and our offline interactions are influenced by digitality. The reality in which we exist is increasingly augmented by atoms and bits, and this augmented reality is inhabited by an augmented cyborg self (opposed to the dualistic language of first and second selves).

In future posts I would like to question some other assumptions built into Case’s framework. Instant communication is not necessarily without deep reflection, as I have previously argued. And following Michel Foucault, I would like to equally trouble the utility of constant self-reflection and discovery in search of some “truth.” Instead, I view this new task of subjectivity promoted by Case as a powerful form of social control embedded within the logic of social media.