Is technology – especially communications technology – a necessary component of contemporary fiction? This is the question posed by Allison Gibson in an excellent piece posted earlier this week; it shouldn’t really surprise most people that she comes down on the side of “yes”, but the question – and its implications – are worth some more serious consideration. Especially when one considers setting, or (I don’t love the term but it has a certain utility) “genre”.

The ubiquity of communications technology and social media would seem to make its inclusion in contemporary fiction a no-brainer, writes Gibson, but with ubiquity comes an element of the mundane. There are all kinds of tasks that people perform as a matter of course in everyday life that nevertheless aren’t included in your average narrative, partly for reasons of brevity, but also – and this is the crucial point – because they don’t do anything to progress the story, and when you’re writing fiction, pretty much anything that doesn’t do that singular job in some capacity probably shouldn’t be there. The thing about communications technology is that it’s about communication – like the fortuitous arrival of a letter or a mysterious telephone call, an email or text message between characters serves a specific narrative function, whether that function is to reveal important information about the characters themselves or to introduce something that will move the plot along. “Think of it this way,” writes Gibson, “in most cases, a bowel movement will not move the plot forward; an email will.”

Additionally, as many writers have observed, convincing storytelling is fundamentally about telling the truth – not in the sense of relaying a factual account of a series of events but in constructing a world and populating it with characters that behave in ways that your reader will find convincing. Good storytelling is breathing reality into the unreal; a false note breaks the spell, because it fills an attentive reader with the inescapable feeling that what they are reading is, on some level, unbelievable. A contemporary story without any reference to technology is probably going to feel that way. A character shouldn’t be ignorant of crucial information that could be easily obtained through a Google search unless there’s a good reason for her to have neglected to Google it. Two characters separated and trying to work out logistics should be able to communicate via cell phone unless one of them has lost theirs or forgotten to charge it. These are tiny mundanities, but their absence would be conspicuous.

Their absence – or their misuse. I think we can all call to mind instances in movies and TV shows where the internet makes an appearance in such a way that you wonder if the scriptwriter has actually ever used the internet at all, or just means to  eventually check out that information superhighway that all the kids are talking about.

Writing technology into contemporary fiction, Gibson notes, introduces its own set of unique issues: how central to make the tech? How much do you refer to it? What is it actually there to do, if it’s more than to add depth or realism to worldbuilding? And what do you do when the tech you’re writing about is out of date by the time the book comes out (I think a lot of people outside of the publishing industry may not know how long it takes to get a book published. It can take years. And that’s after you sign contracts.)?

One example of a book series that is laughably, insanely bad at this is the Evangelical apocalyptic Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (which is being wonderfully and ongoingly deconstructed over at The Slacktivist). The series was started before the age of cell phones but continued throughout their spread, and is supposedly set in the near future – and there is nary a cell phone to be found in most of its scenes, despite the fact that characters spend mind-numbing amounts of time on the phone addressing relatively bland things in very bland ways. LaHaye and Jenkins actually present a great example of how overreliance on technology to move the plot along creates major storytelling problems; a few crucial phone calls help bridge gaps between scenes and events and tie things together as well as move them forward, but scene after scene of endless phone conversations quickly becomes tedious in the extreme. And the fact that the technology is badly dated only calls attention to this.

If nothing else, the technology problems in Left Behind illuminate a slightly different problem than your technology going out of date by the time of release: how exactly do you play techno-futurist when writing in the near future? Or the far future? Every science fiction writer pretty much ever has had to either grapple with this problem or choose to ignore it (guess which tends to produce better SF) but SF writers are usually inherently dealing with technology in a different way than their contemporary fiction brethren. When we write SF, often we’re explicitly writing about technology, or at least about the effects that technology has on people and their lives. One is therefore extrapolating forward based on very incomplete data, and often one gets things wrong – many people in the early 20th century predicted that we’d have flying cars and moon bases by now but almost no one conceived of anything like the internet. Some writers have gotten things very close to right, in terms of feelings and concepts if not in the details of the technology itself – William Gibson and Geoff Ryman are two names that spring immediately to my mind.

Science fiction writer Larry Niven has laid out some guidelines for what writers should pay attention to if they want to make informed guesses about future tech – and ultimately these guidelines have far more to do with the enduring qualities of people than with technology itself:

• Look for the goals humankind will never give up. Instant travel, instant education, longevity. Then try to guess when it will appear and what it will look like.
• Pay close attention to parasite control. There is always someone who wants the money for something else.
• You’re obliged to predict not just the automobile but the traffic jam and the stranglehold on gas prices.
• Nobody invents anything unless there is at least the illusion of a profit.

So even if SF writers are free to invent and speculate and not be held especially accountable for guessing wrong, one can still make guesses that feel more true than not. We live in a world where documentation and communication are both massively prevalent and that’s reflected in our technology; present me a future world where that isn’t true and I’ll need you to give me some good reasons why not. Likewise, general trends seem to be moving in the direction of technology becoming ever-smaller and more portable; mobility appears to be a crucial element for most things. Anyone writing about the near or even the far future of human society is going to have to address that on some level. Increasingly the devices we use are linked and the information we store on them is accessible from a number of points; this all means something in terms of how we move through and interact with each other and the world. It’s small, in many cases it’s mundane, but it’s these things that create a world that feels real to us. Neglect it at your peril.

I ran into this myself when working on the worldbuilding for my forthcoming book Line and Orbit, which is set in the distant future and works with – really, relies on – a number of common space opera tropes. As such, my coauthor and I weren’t hugely concerned with exacting scientific accuracy or highly realistic speculations about technology, but in one particular scene, I did have to deal with the idea of cell phones. What the hell would they look like? How would they work? How would they resemble what we have now, and how might they be different? In the end I went with an implant in the brain itself, but it felt incomplete and possibly not as richly imagined as it might have.

Also, what happens to the internet once humanity is spread across multiple worlds? That’s a question I never really dealt with at all, but I think it’s an interesting one.

Regardless, as I indicated earlier, this is where I feel that SF particularly shines, and why I think that it still allows us to tell powerful, important stories: more than contemporary fiction, it allows us to perform thought experiments with technology and society – and with technology and individuals. It’s really more than guessing; at its best it’s highly theory-driven imagining. What if a version of the internet that exists inside people’s brains came to a remote village in Asia? (Geoff Ryman – Air) What if interfacing with computer networks was a profoundly physical experience? (William Gibson – The Sprawl Trilogy) What does an AI growing inside a human mind think and feel? (Catherynne M. Valente – Silently and Very Fast) What happens to digital news media if current trends continue unchanged? (Paolo Bacigalupi – “The Gambler”)

And then there’s steampunk, which – at its best – attempts to reimagine past technologies with expanded forms and functions.

Ultimately human storytelling of any kind is going to have to grapple with human experience. Technology is a necessary part of that experience, in the past, present, and almost certainly in the future. Storytellers of any stripe shouldn’t shy away from that. When done well, the products are remarkable and true, and one can’t ask for much more from one’s stories.

Sarah Wanenchak writes and lives SFnally under another name that shouldn’t be too hard to track down if you try. Incidentally, Line and Orbit will be released by Samhain Publishing in late 2012/early 2013.

It’s become something like accepted common knowledge in the literature concerning barbarization in warfare that technology increases not only the scope and devastation of the nasty things that human beings are willing to do to each other, but the willingness of people to do those things.

Technology dehumanizes, this line of argument holds, and increasingly technological warfare increases the distance between soldiers and the violent acts in which they’re participating. Aerial bombardment of urban centers is credited with being a milestone in the history of direct civilian targeting. The guilt and psychological fallout that pilots in bombers feel has been correlated to the height at which they were flying at the point that they let their payload drop. As violence becomes more technologically augmented and more scientific, scholars like Joanna Bourke and Elaine Scarry claim, additional violence is done to our very ways of thinking about violence against human bodies: injured flesh vanishes under the calculations of “wound ballistics” and the terms in which military operations are discussed become, in Bourke’s words, “a numbing glossolalia of techno-speak”.

This same line of argument holds that this effect is intensifying as the battlefield becomes increasingly “unmanned” but mediated and managed through technological means, by means of satellite and other forms of surveillance, and through the use of drones. The popular image is of a soldier sitting in a remote location and piloting a drone through an interface that resembles a video game. If this image is all we have to work with, discursively – and we go no further – then of course it makes sense to assume that technology must have a particularly alienating effect on the soldiers who are engaged in killing and a dehumanizing effect on the people they kill.

(The assumption that video games can’t and don’t engage us emotionally is problematic in and of itself, but that’s another post.)

What I would argue is that when we stop at that image – when we go no further in a consideration of what augmented warfare actually is and means – we do both it and ourselves a disservice. As in other discussions of augmented human experience, we should steer clear of problematic assumptions that technology is inherently cold and inhuman, and instead look for how it actually affects human connection to experience and action – both how it reduces and enhances that connection.

When we assume that technology removes the soldier from the battlefield emotionally as well as physically, we desensitize ourselves to experiences like those discussed in a New York Times article this past week:

Although pilots speak glowingly of the good days, when they can look at a video feed and warn a ground patrol in Afghanistan about an ambush ahead, the Air Force is also moving chaplains and medics just outside drone operation centers to help pilots deal with the bad days — images of a child killed in error or a close-up of a Marine shot in a raid gone wrong…Many drone pilots once flew in the air themselves but switched to drones out of a sense of the inevitable — or if they flew cargo planes, to feel closer to the war. “You definitely feel more connected to the guys, the battle,” said Dave, the Air Force major, who flew C-130 transport planes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the article points out, remote piloting technology also has the potential to extend a soldier’s connection with the occupants of a theater of war to moments outside actual combat. Rather than dehumanizing, by allowing a soldier to see some of the non-combat related mundanities of life in the area through which the vehicle is moving, technology can have an intensely humanizing effect:

From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks.

“I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Colonel Brenton said.

I think that Scarry and Bourke actually have it pretty much correct: the subtle dehumanizing effects of increasingly augmented warfare are not in the practice of the war-fighting itself but in the collection of official discourses that we construct around that warfare. We like to think of more highly technical warfare as cleaner, more controlled, less messy, less human – at least on our end. This kind of discourse is classically digital dualist; it assumes that the relationship between physical and digital – or between human and technological – is zero-sum in nature, and that less of one is necessarily more of the other. It rejects the notion that humanity and technology have been, are, and will be enmeshed, that the relationship between the two is complex and constantly evolving.

I’ve already discussed on this blog some of the ways in which technology – especially documentary technology – actually has the potential to enhance the discursive power and meaning of injured human bodies, to forge powerful connections between observers and violent events. It makes sense that this could hold as true for soldiers as for unarmed activists. As our methods of warfare become more profoundly augmented, it’s vital that we recognize the complexities inherent in that kind of augmentation – and reflect them in how we think and talk about the wars we’re fighting.

If there’s a tendency in our culture to fetishize anything “IRL” – to treat the non-digital as somehow more real, more meaningful, and more authentic – a particularly pure expression of this can often be found in any discussion of ebook vs books in print. By now it’s a few years old and, like other great and frequently motionless debates, both sides are well-acquainted with each other and with each other’s arguments. This argument as a whole isn’t my primary focus here so I don’t want to spend too much time on it, but I think a summary of some of the major points is still useful.

Proponents of ebooks argue for efficiency, cheapness, portability, and the democratizing effects of self-publishing (which ebooks don’t constitute but arguably make easier). Interestingly, proponents of the dead tree format often make arguments that are essentially sensual in nature: in addition to bemoaning a hypothetical drop in quality from print to digital, they talk about the fundamentally tactile nature of print books, the weight and heft, the smell of the pages and the feel of turning them – in short, the physical “reality” of print is somehow more real and more legitimate than words on a screen.

A more interesting extension of this argument is currently playing out in the realm of public libraries. Increasingly stretched for funding and facing a culture in which how we read and how we pay for it is changing in some important ways, many libraries are struggling with the question of how to adapt to the prevalence of ebooks – or, in some cases, with the question of whether to adapt at all. How exactly does one “lend” something non-physical (Harper-Collins actually limits the circulation of each copy to twenty-six “lendings”)? How do libraries compensate authors and publishing companies for ebooks? What happens to libraries as physical spaces when more and more of their lending occurs digitally?

What the ebook vs. print debate highlights is the fetishization of the physical in favor of the digital. What it misses – what is almost always missed in debates of that kind – is that the reality of the situation isn’t necessarily zero-sum in nature. The argument is not exclusively for one or the other. Publishing and reading are not and probably will not be be all digital or all physical; they’re far more likely to continue to be an augmented blend of the two, and a more useful approach would be “what will the nature of this augmentation be and what difference does it make?” rather than “EBOOKS BAD/PRINT OLD”.

By the same token, what the debate over digital technology in the context of public libraries highlights are some of the difficulties inherent in that very augmentation; it makes room for more interesting questions. Given that libraries are physical spaces and that the nature of those spaces often matters for how they’re used – for community, organization, and research – how does the increased adaptation of digital technology change those spaces? Do they become less public – perhaps more like some kinds of archives, only opened by specific permission and for specific use? Will more people borrow ebooks for ereaders or phones, and what difference will that make in terms of who actually makes use of libraries? How will that change as the technology itself changes?

Earlier this month The New Republic published an essay by David Bell that addressed many of these questions – and more besides – with the potentially more useful position that the existence of libraries is not necessarily threatened by digital technology, but that technology is going to change the nature of what we understand as a library and how we use it. Most importantly, Bell correctly identifies the ways in which the increasing enmeshing of the digital and physical in the consumption of information – and of stories – makes the physical existence of libraries even more important in some respects:

Librarians do not just maintain physical collections of books. Among other things, they guide readers, maintain catalogues, develop access portals for electronic sources, organize special programs and exhibitions, oversee special collections, and make acquisition decisions…the digital landscape is wild and wooly, and it is crucial to have well-trained, well-informed librarians on hand to figure out which content to spend scarce subscription dollars on, and how to guide readers through it.

The crucial point is not to separate the digital from the physical in this case but to recognize the complex and reciprocal relationship between the two – one informs the other and not always in the same direction. Digital technology is changing how libraries exist and function as physical spaces but the physical nature of libraries and all the cognitive frameworks that accompany our understanding of what libraries do and are also affects how we conceive of technology working within that context – for example, the very idea of “lending” at all.

Bell actually edges toward this trap a bit when he points out that physical libraries are communities of experts and scholars – they are, but so are people connected through technology, and one shouldn’t be privileged over the other as somehow more real or more authentic. As Nathan Jurgenson pointed out earlier this week in his piece on augmented education, false binaries ultimately lead us nowhere useful. When we consider learning, books, research and scholarship, and the spaces in which those things are done and used, we should be sensitive to the complex relationships involved, and we should be asking how technology can best be used in the service of those things.

Art teacher Gregory Euclide did something interesting to the nature of his art when he decided to release prints of it.

Using sumi ink, Euclide had made a practice of creating fantastically complex images on his classroom’s whiteboard during lunch breaks in order, he says, to show students what someone skilled could create in a very short amount of time. But the duration of the process wasn’t the only point at which time came into play in these works: Euclide would then simply erase the images, often shocking his students by doing so. It was this shock — which was frequently mixed with dismay — that prompted him to release more permanent forms of some of his images (one of which has already graced the cover of Bon Iver’s self-titled album).

The erasure of the image — its essential transience — seems to be a fundamental part of the work for Euclide, and in the article linked above he muses on this and on the nature of original vs. reproduction:

In our culture, there is a strong emphasis on reproduction and the original seems less important. My students were shocked when I would erase the original, because they saw it firsthand, and they were disturbed that it was destroyed. People who do not see the original have no problem only looking at it on a screen or as a print, but once you see the original it is hard to let it go or believe that it could be destroyed.

The idea that the point of a work of complex art should be the process of its construction rather than the permanence of its completion is not a new one. That same idea underlies the Tibetan Buddhist practice of the creation of sand mandalas, where the design is intricately and carefully brought into being and then ritually destroyed as a form of meditation on the transience of life. The whole of the art exists within the process itself in that case — if one captures an image of it, it could be argued that the image (being longer-lived if not actually permanent) has missed the artist’s point and therefore has failed to capture the essence of the art in a more meaningful way.

In the past I’ve written about how images of time-laden things have a way of removing them from time, or at least of changing their relationship with the temporal in some subtle ways, in the instances of images of ruined or abandoned space. Considering Euclide’s lasting captured images of originally transient work, I wonder what the translation of original to reproduction does to the nature and experience of these kinds of works of art (one could also make a case that a similar effect is at work in captured images of street art). What do these pieces mean without the ritual aspect of destruction? What do they mean when divorced from the purposeful effects of time?

Moreover, I think it’s worth considering what the phenomenon of ambient documentation does to our experience of process — of our lives as ongoing, fluid, moving realities rather than as a series of events captured or subject to capture through forms of technological documentation. If, as Nathan Jurgenson has put it, “social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past“, what does that do to our sense of the transience of that present? If we increasingly perceive our own lived experience as something constantly subject to documentation, what does that do to our experience of time as it relates to us — to our decline and eventual absence? How does the documentation of my life change my experience of my present and my imagination of my future?

The idea of documentation as a form of grasping for immortality is obviously not new at all, but I would argue that social media technologies — which seem to alter and augment rather than replace the preexisting in general — are changing exactly how and why this occurs. I (and lots of other people) have already argued that technology makes our experience of time more fundamentally atemporal; in addition I argue that it makes our grasp of transience more profoundly slippery.

We don’t have to contemplate the impermanence of a sand mandala or Euclide’s sumi drawings — in a few seconds we have their image, and then the image is everywhere. But — like Euclide’s students — do we feel like our relationship with the image is different from the time-laden original? Or does it matter if the original is something that we’ve never even seen?

This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). It was originally posted on 4.2.12 and was updated to include video on 7.11.12. See the conference website for

Any study of politics is going to be fundamentally about power, and about who is free to exercise it and how: How policy is made, how the public sphere is constituted and how boundary lines are drawn around it, who has a voice and who is excluded from

discussion or consideration, who is central and who is marginalized. By the same token, the study of contentious politics – as it focuses on dissent and protest – is fundamentally about how those who have been marginalized, denied a voice, and left without power act to seize the things that have been denied them: How activist communities form and frame themselves, how their objectives and tactics change over time, how they seek entry into the public sphere and engage the actors they find there, how the voiceless find a voice and what they use it to say. Moreover, it’s about what is visible and recognized: How we understand political action in light of what’s gone before and what might come in the future.

All of this would be complex enough without communications technology, and what this panel highlights is how technology changes and enriches this already-complicated picture. Communications technology has the potential to change what we understand by “public sphere” and how we construct meanings around events, as well as how different collective actors organize and react to each other. If knowledge and information are vital to the development of a social movement, then understanding how knowledge and information flow is additionally vital.

Given recent and ongoing global protest movements, the intersection of technology and protest is a subject both broad and deep. Rather than attempt to capture all aspects of it, the excellent papers in this panel call attention to more tightly focused corners of the political picture, and in so doing, illuminate further potential avenues for research and exploration. Additionally, the geographical and cultural focus of this panel is truly diverse, allowing us to push back a bit against the American-and-Eurocentric bias that appears too often in research of this kind.

Titles and abstracts are after the cut.

Kira Jumet – “Social Media: A Force for Political Change in Egypt”

There has been much debate surrounding the role of social media in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Though the movement that led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak has been dubbed the “Facebook Revolution,” it is not the first time that foreign media has been quick to connect a social networking site with a popular uprising. The 2009 Iranian protests were labeled the “Twitter Revolution,” and ever since there are those who are adamant that social media is a vital instrument for mobilizing the masses while others argue that social media is just a new means of communication in a history of popular uprisings that fared quite well without these new technological innovations. This paper explores the impact of social media on the development of Egyptian civil society and mobilization by the opposition. It shows that while social media is not necessary for organizing revolutions, it served two important functions leading up to the Egyptian Revolution. It aided in building a politically conscious civil society over the course of a number of years prior to the Revolution and it lowered the threshold for engaging in political participation and dissent by providing a relatively safe, easily accessible space for political debate in a country that outlawed gatherings of five or more people.

Theoretically, my paper adds an intervening step to Timur Kuran’s concept of transitioning from private preference to public preference. I argue that online spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs offer a third option somewhere between engaging in preference falsification and openly joining the opposition. While the revolutionary threshold, at which the external cost of joining the opposition falls below the internal cost of preference falsification, may be very high for individuals to publicly join the opposition on the streets, the threshold for participating in the online opposition or simply professing one’s true political opinion online is much lower. Thus, the significance of this paper is that it updates Kuran’s work to include the advent of social media and demonstrates how social media may or may not act as a stepping stone to open political action.

Hadi Khoshnevis – “Web as a Platform for the Global Moral Brain: A Case Study of Iran”

The compression of space and time brought about by globalization, and the consequent intensification of interactions beyond traditional barriers has given rise to global issues which require global solutions. Chief among these are moral issues, which are back at the center of academic debates on the inherited vernacularity or universality of moral values. By deploying and extending the usage of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar to the realm of morality, this paper will draw on empirical data gathered in Iran to argue that human beings are born with a universal moral faculty which underlies human actions and omissions. Virtual space, thanks to its decentralized, rhizomatic and discursive nature – as opposed to the arborescent structures of the state apparatus – is the platform upon which this potentiality can operate. Webs of non-formal learning and networking provide single individuals/communities, from antipodes of the world, the means of communication necessary for initiating an open dialogue beyond institutionalized stereotypes which have traditionally fueled the machines of states’ biased politics. Based on the data collected from an online survey in Iran, the paper concludes that although Iranians, for many reasons, are being detached from and deprived of free movement and interactions, they nevertheless manage to bypass existing barriers and contribute significantly to the actualization of an emerging global moral brain – a process which testifies to the existence of a universal moral grammar.

Paola Ricaurte (@paolaricaurte) – “Mexican cyberactivism: the power of the new digital intelligentsia”

The historical events of recent years have originated many studies about the role of technology as a catalyst for civic organization and social mobilization.  Some authors argue that technology enhances the construction of new forms of deliberative and participatory democracy. It is less common to find theoretical and empirical work about the subjects that take part in these movements. This paper argues that in the case of Mexico, with a significant digital, cultural and economic divide, instead of ‘smart mobs’ (Rheingold 2002) we are witnessing the emergence of a new digital elite. This cyberintelligentsia –composed of educated urban geeks- acts as a main instigator (Kanter 2010) of social cyberprotest. This paper reformulates Putnam’s (1976) approach to political elites and the different capitals (in the sense of  Bourdieu 1983) to explain the emergence of digital elites as key actors in Mexican cybermovements and their role in public policy making. The paper concludes that although technology has opened the possibility for a group of citizens to influence decision-making, this does not entail a quantitative increase of citizen participation in public affairs.

Murilo Machado (@MuriloMachado) – “Hacktivism and Anonymous: symbol of resistance in society of control”

In Deleuze’s society of control, inevitably permeated by cybernetic machines and computers – two exponents of digital culture –, digital communication acts increasingly, on one hand, as one of the main ways we have to keep in touch, create and access knowledge, produce cultural and informational goods; one the other hand, it acts as a way to exercise permanent control through the protocols. This paper discuss how, in this scenario, in which control protocols and cultural softwares are essential intermediaries in our communication, hacker activism (or hacktivism) becomes relevant, so that the hackers, because of their specific skills, become political actors that cannot be relegated. More specifically, we bring some results concerning the “hacktions” of Anonymous group in Brazil. Thus, we discuss the literature related do hacker culture and hacktivism in order to indentify the motivations and ideals of these actors, here perceived as a symbol of a new movement of resistance that, given the current circumstances, occurs not out of them, but through protocols.

This is a slight tonal change from what I normally write; given that it’s now topping a hundred degrees in the shade, this post is much more casually reflexive and much less overtly theoretical than usual.

People keep trying to add me on Facebook. This raises some interesting issues. Most of them have to do with the fact that I’m not on Facebook.

Technically I do have a Facebook account. It’s just not in my legal name (the name I write under here) — it’s in the name of my writerly pseudonym, and I got it primarily so I could maintain a Facebook fan page, which I read in some blog or other was a good thing for an aspiring up-and-coming writerly person to have.

When I got my writerly Facebook account, I also did have an account under my legal name, and I was pretty active there. As with many users, I used it as a means to keep up with a lot of distant friends and family, as well as to engage in conversation and link-aggregation with people I know more locally. It was fun. I liked it. I got a lot out of it.

Then, about a year ago, I left.

The reasons behind that decision were myriad and complex; some of them had to do with changes to Facebook’s interface with which I had aesthetic issues (yeah, it did mean that much to me) while some of them had to do with other gut-level issues. But after having spent this long away from something that almost everyone else I know uses on a daily basis, I think there’s an additional, more identity-based reason why I left: The name I used Facebook under just  didn’t really feel like mine. Not here. Which I realize might sound suspiciously digital-dualist, but bear with me.

I’ve been puttering around the internet since puberty. Like a lot of weird, misfit kids, the internet presented itself to me as a kind of social sanctuary: an odd appearance or obvious discomfort in physically co-present settings were suddenly no longer obstacles to meeting people and making friends, and I felt free to experiment with an incredibly liberating kind of identity-play. Gender, sexuality, my ideas of what was important and valuable to me — all of these things felt up for grabs in a way that they never had before. Moreover, for the first time I was talking to people as weird and misfitting as me, and we were getting along swimmingly.

I’m guessing that there’s a better than even chance that whoever is reading this right now has experienced something like that moment, where you felt like some people online who had never “met” in the traditional sense got you better than pretty much everyone at school. Then you know what I’m talking about, and you know how formative that moment can be. (Maybe I just had an unusually pathetic high school experience, but I really don’t think so.)

So this was — and is — profoundly empowering. I know these people. They know me. We get each other. They accept me for who I really am. And that last, that who I really am — that was and is my most powerful experience of the internet to date: building myself. Deciding who and what I’m going to be. This self isn’t divorced from my non-digital self; they have each profoundly influenced the construction of each other. So please understand that I’m not suggesting that I broke up with Facebook because I found these two identities somehow mutually exclusive — or even meaningfully separate. Because that’s not what I’m saying at all.

What I’m saying — among other things — is that the idea of using my legal name online was and remains very strange to me. It feels like a kind of denial of identity.

Even with the fact that it now allows pseudonyms, Facebook has always been a “real name” kind of place, a digital space where the physical is profoundly present, and where people create and maintain social connections that are also created or maintained in physically co-present space. Work, school, family: these are all deeply interwoven into the very fabric of what Facebook is and was constructed to be. Facebook and other forms of social media like it are built to be extensions and augmentations of the physical world, not imaginative escapes from it.

And for me it was like a collision of worlds. It felt very subtly out of my control. Things weren’t compartmentalized in the way I was used to. The truth is that on a purely instinctive level I never really felt safe on Facebook.

Another caveat: I’m not saying that identity play and management isn’t possible in a setting like Facebook. I think a huge percentage of its users would disagree with that pretty strongly, and again, there is the fact that they allow pseudonyms. What I’m saying is that Facebook felt fundamentally different to me in how identity was treated and transacted, and I never did get used to it.

So, for that and many other reasons, I left.

At first it was almost an experiment: let’s see if this is really possible. Then it became more of an experiment in seeing what it was really like. I remembered a life without Facebook, but it had been a while and my memory of it was sort of hazy. And then it became something that I wanted to try to maintain as long as I could — again, to see what would happen. I kept my writer account, but although I’m still accepting friend requests, I pretty much never use it for anything. It feels like cheating at this point. It still also feels extremely odd.

So what’s it been like, living (mostly) without Facebook? Am I more connected? Less lonely? Are my relationships more meaningful? Are my experiences more significant when not reduced to a status update?

Okay, for starters, kind of not at all because even if I’m not on Facebook I’m pretty much everywhere else. Twitter, Tumblr… yeah.

But no. To all of those questions. If anything, living (mostly) without Facebook has left me feeling more profoundly disconnected, from both distant friends and family and from people I see all the time in my PhD program. I don’t get to talk to my aunt in Texas with such ease and lack of effort; I don’t see her posting about my cousins or my other aunts and uncles. I don’t see what my sister posts about from college. I miss my spouse’s exchanges with many of his family members. I don’t see what my friends in Maryland and DC post about; I’ve missed some fairly big developments because of this, and only found out about them long after the fact. Sure, we meet face-to-face in the halls or for dinner or drinks, but there is still a second ongoing stream of discussion and interaction among them to which I’m simply not privy.

And given that I’m missing it, often I’m not even aware of exactly what I’m missing.

The idea that “opting out” has a cost isn’t a new one on this blog and has been better written-about and better theorized than this piece can or intends to do. My point is that yeah, there is indeed a cost, and it does indeed come into play within one’s own social group. And it’s not necessarily a small one. It’s larger than I expected when I first suspended my account, because I did not understand then what a significant part Facebook played in all aspects of my social world, distant and local alike. Perhaps on some level I assumed that my relationships could just continue independently of Facebook exactly as I imagined they had before — that, to draw on Jenny Davis’s connections made in the post linked above, I could continue my interaction rituals without suffering the damage caused by exits from them and without the repair and maintenance that Facebook allows for.

And that isn’t so.

Why don’t my other social media presences allow for this same kind of repair and maintenance? Because I don’t use them the same way I used Facebook. I use them very much like I used the internet from my earliest days on it: as half expression and half escape, slipperier and more fraught with fiction and roleplay than Facebook was. As I continue with what looks like it might actually become a career as a fiction writer, this is changing somewhat, but it’s still more true than not. My use of social media in particular and the internet in general is now more removed from the rest of my social life than it was before. It is still augmented, but it’s now more severely compartmentalized.

Do I miss Facebook? Yes and no; I miss what it allowed me to do, the ways in which it made me feel so connected. Someday I’ll probably go back, or on to whatever replaces it. I’ve been online for the better part of two decades now, and yet I still feel like I’m navigating practicality and comfort in the context of an augmented identity. The sad truth is that I’m still not really sure how any of this works.

I’m working on it. We all are, to some degree. You, me, and Sherry Turkle.

And if you send me a friend request, I’ll still probably accept. Just don’t look for me to like anything.

This post essentially serves as an addendum to last week’s piece on abandoned digital space, where I introduced an idea — or rather an image — but didn’t really give it the attention it deserves, given some of the things it suggests about our capacity for imagining the world without us and why exactly we find such images viscerally disturbing.

Last week I noted that when we imagine a world that we’ve abandoned, we almost always also imagine it ruined, for both practical and psychological reasons. Post-apocalypse is an ancient theme in stories and art, though it’s arguably come into a new kind of prominence since the beginning of the 20th century, and the images of a ruined world that this line of imaginative narrative has produced can be extremely striking. They can also be disturbing, given what they invite us to do: to mentally time-travel, to jump forward into the context of possible — and possibly vague — cataclysm and a world in which we are absent. But I would argue that a direct fear of future catastrophe is less disturbing to us than the more existential prospect of our own present as a forgotten and discarded thing. As Will Viney writes:

In the comparative exercise of managing the disrupted continuity of the future ruin, between imaginary times and familiar places, we encounter not only a future in itself but also a future in which the present has been abandoned, cut off, terminated or forsaken.

It’s worth noting, then, that there is something defiant about our images of post-apocalyptic ruined cities; they tend to have a darkly majestic flair in spite of — or perhaps even because of — the devastation they display.

This dark majesty, our deeply ingrained cultural connotations of ruined empires, and the implicit idea that someone might be there to look at the ruins and remember — all of these things arguably serve as a kind of comfort to us when we imagine the death of our own civilization and, by extension, the death of ourselves. We all want to leave something behind, but we want that something to miss us.

Which is why Parisian artists Lucie and Simon’s Silent World project is so particularly unsettling.

Using special filters and especially long exposures, Lucie and Simon have created digitally edited images of usually crowded spaces around the world, with most or all of the people in the image removed. The result is intensely unusual in post-apocalyptic imagery: A world largely devoid of people, but still full of structures. We are almost entirely gone, but nothing is ruined. What remains are lovely, quiet, empty spaces — built by humanity but divorced from it by humanity’s absence. This is arguably an even deeper level of abandonment than that usually displayed by post-apocalyptic imagery and other images of ruins — because it works both ways.

An imagined future in which our absence hasn’t resulted in ruin is an imagined future in which we have not only abandoned but have been abandoned by our creations. The world we built continues on without us. It doesn’t need us to stay standing.

This is entirely unrealistic, of course, but our imaginations have the luxury of not needing to trade in realism, and our emotions are the same. In a world distinguished by our excessive construction, production, and consumption of everything, these are images that invite us to consider a world in which our relationship with our stuff is completely severed.

One of the most unsettling things about these images — at least to me — is the fact that without any hint of ruin, there’s nothing telling about this imagined future. There’s no indication of what might be reasonably expected to have happened to remove human presence. Many post-apocalyptic images and stories purposefully leave the cause of the disaster ambiguous (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is an especially interesting example of this) but by contemplating the devastation we can at least hazard some guesses. Even a plague leaves its mark. But Lucie and Simon’s apocalypse is clean, tidy, and total.

We’re just gone. And not even the things we leave behind seem to miss us.

The problem is not just that all the humans have moved to Real Space. The Origami and Faberge digients have gone to Real Space too, and Ana can hardly blame their owners; she’d have done the same, given the opportunity. … There are vast expanses of minutely-detailed terrain to wander around in, but no one to talk to except for the tutors who come in to give lessons. There are dungeons without quests, malls without businesses, stadiums without sporting events; it’s the digital equivalent of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

— Ted Chiang, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”

A few months back, I wrote a piece on the atemporal nature of abandoned/ruined physical spaces and the equally atemporal nature of our digital representations of those spaces. As it goes with a lot of posts on this blog, one of the central points of that piece — though it was essentially grounded in a consideration of physical space — was the enmeshed nature of the digital and the physical and how they have to be considered together if sense is going to be made of either.

As much as that piece considered the digital coupled with the physical, it didn’t do much to address the much trickier issue of abandoned digital space and what it can reveal about how we imagine time and history. That’s where I want to place my focus now.

A quick refresher: atemporality most simply refers to the idea that our experience of time is not necessarily as linear as we like to present it; that we don’t just move in a straight line from A to B in time but that we often experience aspects of the past, the present, and the future simultaneously, simply by virtue of our nature as remembering, imagining creatures — as I wrote in my last piece on this topic, we remember the future, imagine the present, and experience the past. Moreover, this phenomenon is intensified by technology and especially by technologies of documentation and sharing. Abandoned physical space, because of the way it encourages us to imagine our own ruined futures at the same time as we imagine an unruined past, is uniquely atemporal.

One of my central arguments from that previous piece was that it wasn’t just the abandoned nature of these physical spaces that rendered them particularly atemporal; it’s the ruined nature of the space that allows us to imagine a future in which we’re dead or otherwise no longer present. We associate death and endings with corpses and ruins; we actually tend to have a very difficult time conceiving of one without the other. Some of this comes down to practical experience (religious mythology and tradition is full of people being bodily assumed into various other states without technically dying, but I’m assuming that no one reading this has experienced that personally) but I think a lot of it is also that we feel somehow that our taking leave of the world should make some kind of mark on it, whether in the form of our decaying bodies or our decaying buildings. Many of our post-apocalyptic visions feature devastated landscapes and a damaged world; it’s a rare vision that showcases a world that’s proceeding perfectly well without us. Some of this, again, is both practical and realistic, but I’d argue that not all of it is.

What does this have to do with digital space? Simply: digital spaces can be abandoned, but they don’t become ruined, at least not in the way that physical spaces do. When we enter an abandoned physical space, its ruined nature causes it to be especially time-laden; we feel the passage of time in what time has done to that space. Abandoned digital space is simply frozen at the last point at which something was done to it; nothing more will happen to it unless a hard drive is wiped clean or a server goes offline. It just stops.

We can therefore draw an important distinction between abandoned and ruined in the case of digital space; one doesn’t necessarily assume the other. I would argue that this has implications for how we experience time in these spaces. In the latter case, we experience the passage of time in the physical evidence of what time has done; time leaves a very evident mark. In the former, we experience the passage of time by virtue of how nothing has changed at all; an abandoned digital space is marked by emptiness and staticity.

I should note at this point that I’m not claiming that digital spaces are not atemporal, just that they’re atemporal differently than physical space.

A couple of examples might be helpful at this point, not least because I should draw a further distinction between spaces that were constructed for specifically social reasons, such as Second Life or the older digital social space Worlds, and spaces that were created simply to be repositories of content, often for commercial reasons. The former were created to be inhabited by users and to be built and altered by those users; when the users abandon the space and stop customizing it, it’s both the emptiness and the lack of new content that marks the space as abandoned. In the case of the latter, it’s the lack of new content — or the existence of content that hasn’t aged especially well, in the case of the official Space Jam website — that marks the space as abandoned. The Space Jam website also looks incredibly dated, as does Worlds; it’s not just the lack of new content, then, but also that these digital spaces generally no longer resemble the digital spaces we inhabit as a matter of course.

I would argue that it’s actually the “frozen” nature of these digital spaces that marks the passage of time; we can see — very clearly in many cases — the point at which they stopped changing and were marked by what is now our past. If a ruined physical space is a memento mori, abandoned digital space is more like a time capsule: a place in which the future has simply never happened. These spaces are atemporal, then, in that they give us a vivid glimpse of our own past that we can experience in the present and perhaps extrapolate forward into an imagined future — but because they aren’t ruined, we don’t imagine that future in the same way. To reuse a quote from Will Viney’s essay “Ruins of the Future”:

The politically, theologically and philosophically rich gesture of projecting ruins, of prophesying the demise of a building, as well as the people and activities associated with it, depends upon an end that can be experienced, a sense of dénouement that is not absolutely terminal. This is not the apocalypse as such, but an end to be seen, to be retold and represented – it is a telling end.

Without ruins, the space can’t tell in quite the same way, though they do tell, and just as strongly. If ruined physical space is atemporal but oriented toward the future — and I would argue that it is — abandoned digital space is atemporal but inherently oriented toward the past.

The staticity of abandoned digital space can lend it an odd feeling of permanence — that because things haven’t moved on or changed, they never will. But a lack of decay doesn’t mean no ending, and the physical and digital are still enmeshed. In a ruined post-apocalyptic world, when the last server goes offline and the last hard drive is rendered unreadable, empty static digital space vanishes into the ether and the ruins are silent, heavy with time.

When the novel Fifty Shades of Grey was published, it sparked a wide range of slightly frothy responses, from the (shocking!) truth about its history as Twilight AU (Alternate Universe) fanfiction to the (even more shocking!) indication that many women like to read erotic fiction and that sometimes that erotica can get pretty kinky. Much of the press coverage that paid attention to the fandom aspect of the story focused on the copyright issues inherent in fanfiction and other transformative works, which is still up for some debate —  and which, thanks to Fifty Shades, will likely continue to be debated into the foreseeable future.

To the extent that people seem willing to own that there might be something ethically amiss with the publication and subsequent success of Fifty Shades, the copyright issues seem, again, to be the primary focus. These rest not only with the fact that Fifty Shades began life as a work of freely available fanfiction and was then “pulled to publish” (removed and altered) — this is not an entirely uncommon phenomenon in publishing or in fandom, though opinions regarding its integrity as a practice vary somewhat in both spheres — but with the extent to which Fifty Shades appears to be different from its fandom incarnation. Which is to say, hardly at all, as the book blog Dear Author demonstrated.

This is the point at which copyright issues intersect with the ethical culture of fandom itself, and where we have to consider prosumption — the idea that the line between the producer and the consumer of a product is increasingly less intelligible or meaningful. Prosumption has already been recognized on this blog by Dave Strohecker as a fundamental part of fandom culture and of how fannish works are produced; fandom is intensely collaborative in nature, with fannish works being produced not only through inspiration by a media source but often strongly influenced by a communally constructed interpretation of that source (a “fanon”, as opposed to the officially accepted “canon”). Members of fandom are writers of fanfiction as often as they’re readers; indeed, to create within a fandom, one usually has to have a general sense of what’s been created already.  To produce, one must consume, and the two grow out of each other in a mutually reciprocating dynamic.

There are two primary elements of fandom culture that make Fifty Shades problematic, both of which incorporate and are slightly complicated by the idea of prosumption. The first is the general aversion to profit-seeking within fandom: given that fannish works are driven primarily by collective love for a particular media property, there is a sense among most members of fandom as a whole that the seeking of monetary gain from fannish works is not only legally questionable but sullies the respect that fans ideally have for the object of their fandom. Fans who actively seek profit from their works are likely to be considered not “true” fans by many members of the fandom.

Prosumption complicates this situation when one considers the Marxian question of the creation of value through labor — within fandom there is one kind of value that is generally considered desirable (pride in the product and the esteem of others within the fandom) and one kind of value that is generally considered questionable at best (monetary value). For most of the rest of the Western capitalist world, this last is most desirable, and Fifty Shades has generated a lot of it.

The second issue — and the one that has probably been the most neglected in mainstream discussions of the fandom aspect of Fifty Shades — proceeds from the above and touches more fundamental issues of how fannish works are created. As I said above, fandom is intensely collaborative in nature, with inspiration for a work often hard to trace to a single source, and with many potential participants in the creation of a work, even though it may technically have only one listed author. Fanfiction is frequently produced out of cycles of feedback and editing with other fan volunteers — the technical term is a “beta reader” — and sometimes, if the work is created and shared in installments, through the comments and feedback of other fans. The result is that members of a fandom are likely to feel — and to feel intensely — that they as a community have collectively helped to produce fannish works out of mutual love for a particular media source rather than any hope of monetary gain. And the last aspect is a point of special pride for fandom as a whole as well as a defense against legal action.

When Fifty Shades was posted as Twilight AU fanfiction — then under the title Master of the Universe — it was wildly successful, arguably garnering fans of its own. From within fandom, this is the source of much of the controversy around the book: From this perspective, the author built a following within a community founded in part on the explicit rejection of monetary gain in favor of fannish love, and then used that community and the work it helped her to produce in order to make a name — and a fair amount of money — in mainstream publishing.

From many in fandom’s perspective, this amounts to a considerable betrayal.

This is not to skewer E.L. James or to cast aspersions on her as an author. What the fandom controversy around Fifty Shades reveals so effectively is the increasingly complex nature of fannish prosumption and the cultural and ethical issues around it, especially as prosumption is becoming the norm for methods of content and value generation in other areas. As I said above, the practice of “pull to publish” is by no means unheard of, and may become more common with the success of Fifty Shades. Authors such as Naomi Novik and Cassandra Claire (the latter being the subject of a fair amount of fandom controversy herself) have emerged from fandom to become successful fantasy writers in their own right (click for a longer list of fans turned pro).

Fandom is still evolving. So is fandom’s technological home. Clashes of prosumption, the generation of value, and the culture of fandom did not begin with Fifty Shades of Grey and are unlikely to end there.

Last week, cell phone footage emerged on Youtube that purports to be taken by a Saudi Arabian woman in a mall, of her clash with the Saudi religious police. The woman is righteously indignant, insisting that they have no right to harass her, that it’s “none of [their] business if [she] wears nail polish”. She also tells them to “smile for the camera”, as she’s filming the entire thing and is sharing the footage.

The pattern of this particular encounter isn’t necessarily novel, and by Western standards a claim on the right to wear nail polish in public seems fairly mundane, but there is something worth noting about the specific dynamics inherent in sharing this kind of footage. Most obviously there’s the fact that in countries with repressive laws based on gender, wearing nail polish in public may indeed be an extremely subversive act, but that leaves aside the question of the cell phone footage itself, and what uploading it to Youtube does.

For women living in repressive regimes, communications technology has long served as an outlet for discussion and expression based around gender transgression –  Iranian blogs are an especially powerful example of this. But frequently in those cases women are forced by that very repressiveness to relegate the bulk of their self-expression to blogs and other forms of social media because physical public space is so tightly controlled by religious/state authorities. Technology helps to create a kind of fallback public space for communication and expression because physical public space has been made largely unavailable.

In the case of the video above, however, technology is being used in the opposite direction: to reinforce and expand claims on rights in physical public space. The woman in the video appears to feel secure in her existing rights to be in the public space of a mall and to make use of it – a right that the religious police are attacking and which she is entitled to defend.

This also isn’t a new point that I’m making; I’ve made elements of it before, regarding tents in Occupy and injured bodies in violent protest events. What this example serves to reinforce is the profound interconnectedness of public space in physical and virtual settings and the variety of different ways that the two can be used to shape and alter each other, as isolated tactics by single individuals or as elements of larger strategies on the part of organized social movements. Social media technologies don’t replace physical public space; just as the relationship isn’t a dichotomy, it also isn’t zero-sum in nature. “Augmented” isn’t only a description of a passive state of being but also of the various ways in which action can and does occur, lending those forms of action lesser or greater strength and efficacy, depending.

At this point, it’s also worth bearing in mind the existence of strengthening and expanding surveillance states, especially surveillance in public space as a means of control of that space; if claims by the public on public space are – increasingly as a matter of course – augmented by technology, counterclaims on that space by authorities are augmented by the same. The dynamic in this case isn’t only augmented but is also contentious and moving in multiple directions, a series of escalating claims and counterclaims, actions and counteractions. By altering existing tactics and facilitating new ones – such as using a cell phone camera and social media to shame and intimidate authorities – technology complicates an already complex picture.