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Hello fellow bloggers! Today I want to give you some helpful tips and tricks for using Twittr.com. Twittr, also called Twitter or http://www.Twitter.com, is like Friendster but not as good. (They’re working on it!) Twittr is a social network based off of the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds and only lets you post 140 characters at a time but lets you tweet as many times as you want. The service is fairly limited (the company doesn’t even know what harassment is) but there’s still a lot of options so let’s dive right in!

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Photo credit: Karri Huhtanen on Flickr

I sit too much. You probably do too. The rise of office jobs and screen-based work and leisure has taken its toll. Incredible advances in chair-comfort technology have made sitting irresistible. And if a cat crawls into your lap… forget it. That chair is your new home. Sitting is the new smoking. It’s killing you. Quick, run for the hills. Or better yet, buy an activity tracker. I guess.

Unfortunately, sitting and smoking are two of my favorite things

I bought an activity tracker. For all of my distaste of the quantified self, I did it anyway. This isn’t a product review—I’m not interested in the strengths of weaknesses of various activity trackers paired against each other—but if you’re interested, I bought a Fitbit Alta because it is small and not ugly and it tells me when I get a text message, which is fun and exciting. What follows is a personal reflection on why I bought it, how it’s changed my day-to-day activity, and why I think these observations are significant.

I bought an activity tracker for three major reasons. First, I wanted to track my sleep. I’ve always had problems with sleep—too much, too little, not restful, so restful that I could be mistaken for a corpse, and so on. Some times I can get nine hours of sleep and still need an afternoon nap, and other times I can run on three or four hours of sleep without even noticing. This is actually a symptom of bipolar disorder, and part of managing my health is paying attention to my sleep and understanding how it can trigger mania and depression.

That leads me to my second reason: the silent alarm. I’m an early riser and (sometimes) a heavy sleeper. My husband is a late riser and a light sleeper. A silent alarm seemed like a good solution—I can get out of bed relatively quietly without pangs of guilt. Now we just need to replace all of the flooring in the entire apartment so it doesn’t sound like an ogre is walking through the kitchen.

Finally, I was enticed by the “get up and move” feature, which reminds you to walk around for 2-3 minutes every hour. At ten to the hour it sends me a polite and encouraging message like “Get up and move!” or “Want to take a walk?” When I reach my hourly step goal it celebrates my achievement. It fact, it celebrates everything I do. 7,000 steps? Here, have some excessive vibrations and fireworks! Sleep well last night? “Sweet, you met your goal!” It’s like a little digital cheerleader, patting me on the back for slightly decreasing my sedentary lifestyle.

Fitbit never shames me, which is more than I can say for myself. If you don’t meet your goal, no worries. No frowny faces or bright red alerts. It is only celebratory. This works for me, as self-flagellation is a bad habit of mine. Of course, there’s a practical element of this for Fitbit as a company; who wants to wear a wrist band that chastises you for watching a movie in the afternoon?

I’m surprised how much I like counting my movements. I bought this device with the expectation that I would send it back. I thought it might be annoying, or that I would feel guilty for how sedentary I am. Or, I thought it would just be a piece of crap that didn’t work. But I’ve had it for almost two weeks now and I still like it. I also forgot how nice it is to have a clock on my wrist. Whoever thought that up was really on to something.

But here’s what troubles me about how much I like this tracker—I bought it because I felt so out of touch with my own body. I find it comforting to know, as a quantifiable fact, that I am tired because I didn’t sleep well. I’m surprised by how often I need to be reminded to move. It’s not exactly shocking, but seeing the direct correlation between how much work I get done and how little I move is disturbing. It’s almost as if my mind is waging a war against my body, and the activity tracker is a UN diplomat trying to broker a peace.

It’s a deeply human experience to look for a techno fix for our problems; from the first weapons and tools made by pre-homo sapiens to the index card I taped over my annoying coffee maker light, there is a long human tradition of seeing a problem and inventing a technology to fix it. Sometimes a techno fix has a reasonable amount of success addressing particular problems, and sometimes it offers a misguided alternative that fails to address the root causes of inequality and social ills.

So many problems can be solved with index cards and duct tape

Works on Microwaves as well!

The activity tracker does a bit of both; it helps mediate the gap that I feel between my perception of my body and the material conditions of that body, but fails to address the structural conditions of a society that requires so many of us to sit at a desk for eight to nine hours a day, five (or six!) days a week. Until we shorten the work day, demand more breaks that allow us to be active in whatever way we are able, or diversify the types of work that require long periods of sitting, activity trackers are a bandaid on the bullet wound of sedentary lifestyles that are killing us.

OK, gotta go—I need 56 steps to meet my goal for the hour.

Britney is on Twitter.

Toilets are rife with politics. The things we do immediately before and after using the toilet are subject to all sorts of social and cultural power structures. Even getting a toilet in the first place can be swept up in the larger political debates about development and infrastructure investment. Everything from global finance to local political corruption can determine whether or not any given person on this planet gets to relieve themselves with comfort and dignity. It is a sad but true fact that an estimated 2.5 billion people do not have regular access to a toilet. Enter “The Nano Membrane Toilet” an invention from Cranfield University which uses state-of-the-art nano technology to make a toilet that does not require plumbing. Instead it needs batteries, regular servicing of complex and proprietary parts, and safe, dry removal of wax-coated solid waste. The decision to help fix this enormous problem is laudable but the Nano Membrane Toilet side-steps the real social and economic problems that keep people in unsanitary conditions. It might even create new, unintended sanitation problems. more...

The students in my Cultural Studies of New Media course are currently in the process of giving midterm presentations. The assignment was to keep a technology journal for a week, interview a peer, and interview an older adult. Students were to record their own and others’ experiences with new and social media. Students then collaborated in small groups to pull out themes from their interviews and journals and created presentations addressing the role of new and social media in everyday life.

Across presentations, I’m noticing a fascinating trend in the ways that students and their interviewees talk about the relationship between themselves and their digital stuff– especially mobile phones. They talk about technologies that are “there for you,” and alternatively, recount those moments when the technology “lets you down.” Students recount jubilation and exasperation as they and their interviewees connect, search, lurk, post, and click.

Listening to students, I am reminded that the contemporary human relationship to hardware and software is a decidedly affective one. The way we talk about our devices drips with emotion—lust, frustration, hatred, and love. This strong emotional tenor toward technological objects brings me back to a classic Louis C.K. bit, in which the comedian describes expressions of vitriol toward mobile devices in the wake of communication delays. For Louis, the comedic value is found in the absurdity of such visceral animosity toward a communication medium, coupled with a lack of appreciation for the highly advanced technology that the medium employs. more...

CW: Cissexism, genital mutilation, penis shaming

“You know what they say about men with small hands?”

—Marco Rubio

Shame and genitals go together like peanut butter and jelly. The story of Adam and Eve tells us just how enduring this shame is. With knowledge came shame, and their nakedness and the differences of their genitals started a downward spiral of fear—fear of our own genitals, and fear of others. From mutilation of the labia and clitoris, to castration, to the disturbing obsession with the state of transgender and nonbinary people’s genitals, we have been conditioned to judge, manipulate, and even destroy these most sensitive body parts. And I really, really wish we would stop doing that. more...

I’ve dedicated a few essays to interrogating encryption and automation as a replacement for human judgement, politics, and inter-personal trust. Central to that argument is the observation that the replacement of institutions with technologies like blockchains are a rehashing of the arguments that set up those failing institutions in the first place. (You can read the full argument here and here.)

This is important because the problems with have with our present institutions –how they are exploitable, alienating, or otherwise broken– may very well be exacerbated by these technologies, not solved by them. To drive this point home I have pulled a few excerpts from Max Weber’s writing on bureaucracy but I have replaced a few nouns (in bold) so that his references to human organizations are replaced by algorithms, blockchains, and other technologies. With just these few noun changes a 19th century German sociologist of modern statecraft turns into the next great TED talk:

An algorithm offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations. Individual tasks are allocated to heuristicfunctions who have specialized training and who by constant practice learn more and more. The ‘objective’ discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and ‘without regard for persons.’

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs– these are raised to the optimum point with blockchain technology.

The tendency toward secrecy in certain development communities follows their material nature: everywhere that the power interests of the domination structure toward the outside are at stake, whether it is an economic competition of a private enterprise, or a foreign, potentially hostile polity, we find secrecy.

The absolute monarch is powerless opposite the superior knowledge of the crowd–in a certain sense more powerless than any other political head.

And here are the originals:

Bureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations. Individual performances are allocated to functionaries who have specialized training and who by constant practice learn more and more. The ‘objective’ discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and ‘without regard for persons.’

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs– these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration, and especially in its monocratic form.

The tendency toward secrecy in certain administrative fields follows their material nature: everywhere that the power interests of the domination structure toward the outside are at stake, whether it is an economic competition of a private enterprise, or a foreign, potentially hostile polity, we find secrecy.

The absolute monarch is powerless opposite the superior knowledge of the bureaucratic expert–in a certain sense more powerless than any other political head.

Facebook Reactions don’t grant expressive freedom, they tighten the platform’s affective control.

The range of human emotion is both vast and deep. We are tortured, elated, and ambivalent; we are bored and antsy and enthralled; we project and introspect and seek solace and seek solitude. Emotions are heavy, except when they’re light. So complex is human affect that artists and poets make careers attempting to capture the allusive sentiments that drive us, incapacitate us, bring us together, and tear us apart. Popular communication media are charged with the overwhelming task of facilitating the expression of human emotion, by humans who are so often unsure how they should—or even do—feel. For a long time, Facebook handled this with a “Like” button.

Last week, the Facebook team finally expanded the available emotional repertoire available to users. “Reactions,” as Facebook calls them, include not only “Like,” but also “Love,” “Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry.” The “Like” option is still signified by a version of the iconic blue thumbs-up, while the other Reactions are signified by yellow emoji faces.

Ostensibly, Facebook’s Reactions give users the opportunity to more adequately respond to others, given the desire to do so with only the effort of a single click. The available Reaction categories are derived from the most common one-word comments people left on their friends’ posts, combined with sentiments users commonly expressed through “stickers.” At a glance, this looks like greater expressive capacity for users, rooted in the sentimental expressions of users themselves. And this is exactly how Facebook bills the change—it captures the range of users’ emotions and gives those emotions back to users as expressive tools.

However, the notion of greater expressive capacity through the Facebook platform is not only illusory, but masks the way that Reactions actually strengthen Facebook’s affective control. more...

Donald Trump’s Twitter account is a huge part of his presidential campaign (Huge). The media quotes from it, his opponents try to score political points by making fun of it, and his fans / supporters constantly engage with its content. @realDonaldTrump is just that: a string of pronouncements that feel very (perhaps even a little too) real. As Britney Summit-Gil wrote back in December: “the beauty of Trump’s tweetability is that his fans don’t really care if he’s manicured or carefully crafted—it’s what they love about him. His tweets read just like his speeches sound. They’re off the cuff, natural, and engaging.”

I want to take a minute to dive into the powerful linguistic work that hides behind Trump’s natural and off the cuff style. Consider the following pair of tweets:

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Stephen Hull, editor of Huffington Post UK, created a bit of a stir a week ago when he admitted that the site does not pay its writers.

That statement alone would have raised eyebrows high enough. What made a lot of eyebrows especially frowny and angry is the way in which he then proudly defended this practice as something admirable, something the site’s unpaid writers should not only accept but be pleased about:

…we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.

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A recent Atlantic article introduced readers to Emma, a 28 year old woman who lives in a Dallas suburb, wears brightly colored blouses, sports a ‘blinged out’ case for her iPhone 6, and even met her boyfriend on the dating website, Plenty of Fish.  She also grew up without light bulbs and by age 18 had, just an 8^th grade education.  Emma, you see, grew up in an Amish community near Eagleville, Missouri and left her German-speaking religious community at the age when American youth acquire the right to vote, telling her parents in a note that she was “sorry to do this…but I need to try a different life.”  Her story is the topic of an interview conducted by Olga Khazan titled, Escaping the Amish for a Connected World, a piece that uses Emma’s status as an Amish outsider to offer “a fresh perspective on how our lives have changed since the digital revolution- for the better, and for the worse.” more...