Jenny’s latest post on teen sexting, especially with its Salt-N-Peppa-referencing title, had me thinking about music, teen sexuality, race, and technology. These fears about newfangled technologies (and their means of distribution) corrupting (white) teen sexuality remind me of various mid-20th century (white) anxieties about (white) teen sexuality and rock music, and its circulation as records, radio broadcast, and TV performance. And notice all the repetitions of “white” in that last sentence. Race–specifically, blackness–was at the center of these anxieties. Back then, emerging technologies (recordings, radio, TV) could circulate racialized sounds, ideas, and affects in ways that confounded the institutions and informal practices that enforced a strict segregation between white and black bodies, white and black people. New technologies undermined older, segregationist technologies (like segregated theaters or clubs). So, these anxieties about media technology and teen sexuality were deeply and fundamentally racialized. John Waters’s original 1988 Hairspray does a brilliant job of connecting mid-century anxieties about racialized teen sexuality to specific technologies (i.e., records and television).
In a recent post for Cyborgology, I attempted to both refine the concept of digital dualism and explain its connection to the set of arguments that constitute conservative thought. With respect to the former, I argued that “digital dualism” should refer strictly to those instances where a person attempts to establish a normatively-charged ontology based upon some technological category. Thus, a digital dualist might first posit that the world is divided between the “real” and the “virtual” (or perhaps the “offline” and the “online”) and then imbue these categories with normative value by judging the former to be superior to the latter (or vice versa). more...
“If it weren’t for all of you I would have lost my mind at my job.” Its a familiar refrain that I hear at lots of small conferences and, occasionally, on Twitter backchannels. Its an amazing compliment to hear that your weak tie with someone means so much, but its also an immensely troubling prospect. Hundreds (maybe thousands?) of highly trained professionals have serious misgivings about their professional associations, their home institutions, and maybe even their life’s work. I had heard variations on this theme most recently this past week when I helped out at the (really, really cool) Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace Conference hosted here in Troy, New York. The conference was attended by an array of people: engineers, educators, activists, and social scientists like myself. Some people worked in industry, others in academia, and a significant portion worked for NGOs like Engineers Without Borders. And again, I just want to reiterate: No single person said the exact phrase above, and I certainly don’t want to (mis)characterize any of the attendee’s personal feelings about their jobs or work. Rather, what I witnessed at ESJP is more accurately characterized as a feeling of “coming home.” Think of it as the positive side of the same disaffected coin. This anecdotal trend was in my mind when I read this Seattle Times article about social scientists finding new and inviting homes in tech companies. Are social scientists finding better intellectual homes in industry than in academia? Or am I connecting two totally separate phenomena? Is it just the pay? More to the point: can social scientists do more and better things for the world working in Silicon Valley than the Ivory Tower? more...
The Today Show recently did a special on sexting, and NBC reporter Abigail Pesta wrote a piece about it, with a video link, here. Much of the piece is based around the expert opinion of Catherine Steiner-Adair, a psychologist who wrote a book on the topic based on interviews and observations with teenage students in the U.S.
In what follows, I leverage a rather harsh critique of the piece and the research that it cites. I do so because I think they show promise, but go wrong in very important ways. This critique is meant not as a fight, but as a push to researchers, policy makers, and general citizens to check their assumptions about the relationship between bodies, behaviors, and technologies. And moreover, it is an imploration to address root level issues, rather than seeking out blamable objects with naive hopes of eradicating social problems through destruction of material stuff. more...
There is no “backchannel”, there is no more or less “real” way to exist within this atmosphere of information, yet we continue to hear that the Twitter distraction whisks people away from the “real” conference in favor of something separate and “virtual.” Each time we say “real” or “IRL” (“in real life”) to mean offline, we reify the digital dualist myth of a separate digital layer “out there” in some ‘cyber’ space. And when we call Twitter a “backchannel” to mean a separate conversation, running tangent to the offline conference in some space behind precious face-to-face exchanges, we continue to support this digital dualism. The implicit, and incorrect, assumption is that the on and offline are zero-sum, that being offline means being not online, and vice versa.
In the comments, I agreed that Nathan had a point: “backchannel” really isn’t a great term for what we-who-livetweet do when we tweet at a conference. But what, I asked, should we call this activity? more...
A book in a vending machine. This is a thing that exists. Image by Jochen Jansen.
I want to preface this post by coming out against the term “ebooks”. There are a number of reasons why I’m not crazy about it – anything with “e” at the beginning of the word to denote “electronic” strikes me as a bit Information Super-Highway-esque at this point – but also because it discursively separates one medium for books from another and, in my opinion, contributes to a culture that subtly delegitimizes one as compared to the other. Ebooks are books. Period.
However, it’s so entrenched in the language at this point that I think I pretty much have to use it anyway.
That said, last Tuesday I went to a bookstore for the first time in a while.
A few recent events and articles/news items have me thinking, in a somewhat disjointed fashion, about both what it means to “do theory” or to practice philosophy, and how, exactly, one should go about doing and practicing these things.
In particular, it seems like philosophy is stuck between being reduced to a hard science, on the one hand, and being incompatible with “digital humanities,” on the other. And in the end I think this double-bind has the very troublesome effect of discouraging, silencing, and marginalizing what could be the most innovative things philosophy has to offer science, digital humanities, and contemporary intellectual life more generally. more...
[First, I need to apologize for the poor formatting in this post–I’m on vacation and working from an old iPad, which is doing wonky things to the WordPress interface.]
I’ve been chewing on some thoughts about this summer’s big musical releases–Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail (MCHG), Kanye’s Yeezus, and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (and somewhat relatedly, Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”). All of these records and singles used technology and social media in new-ish ways (or rather, ways relatively new to major-label releases and big hit records) to distribute, market, and generate buzz about the work. MCHG was released first as what Chris Richards calls “a data collection exercise disguised as a smartphone app,” and Yeezus’s “New Slaves” was debuted at guerilla listening parties across the globe, accessible via interactive map on his website (kanyewest.com now features an different interactive media object, the video for “Black Skinheads”). In an attempt to draw significant mainstream attention to mid-career artists who either never had or lost that sort of visibility, Thicke and Cyrus made sexist and/or racist videos to generate buzz on teh interwebs. (What’s new here is that sex and racial non-whiteness are no longer inherently outrageous and offensive to mainstream (white) taste–in post-feminist, post-racial America, that level of offense is reserved for certain types of misogyny and racism performed by people who supposedly ought to know better. This is a really interesting line of inquiry, but not, ultimately, the one I want to follow in this post.)
Sasha Frere-Jones has a provocative new piece about Jay and Ye’s new albums up at The New Yorker, so that spurred me to make my questions about these two albums a bit more choate. Frere-Jones’s article itself deserves careful analysis and discussion, and not only because he compares his disappointment with Jay Z’s politics and performance to his disappointment with the George Zimmerman verdict. (I’m happy to have that discussion in the comments here; I hope to have something up on my personal blog in the next week.) Here, however, I want to follow Frere-Jones’s general strategy of thinking about the broader social implications of MCHG. more...
Once upon a time, when I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 12 years old, it was my job to go with my mom to the laundromat to help do my family’s laundry. I wasn’t a huge fan of this—the nearest laundromat was kind of sketchy, to this day I remain mediocre at folding t-shirts, and there’s just something a little uncomfortable about having to fold your parents’ and brother’s underwear—but there was one thing I really liked about those trips, and that was the 20 minute lull in between when the last load went into a washer and the first load demanded sorting and partial transfer to a dryer. During that downtime, my mom would read her book, and I was free to do whatever I wanted. Invariably, I sat at a little folding station and, sheltered from view by washing machines on three sides, pretended to do my homework while reading from the laundromat’s stack of “trashy” magazines.
With rapt attention and furtive glances over my shoulder, I read ALL the sex tips (in Cosmo and in other such fine publications). I studiously absorbed articles that subtly (and not-so-subtly) encouraged me to feel insecure about body parts and features that I didn’t even have yet. I was also a huge fan of Ladies’ Home Journal’s “Can This Marriage Be Saved,” even though I was already developing opinions that sometimes clashed with those of whoever was doling out advice to unhappy wives.
Somewhere in all that secretive studying was when I first read about (what I think of as) The Marble Thing. more...
EXTRA!! EXTRA!!! DIGITAL MEDIA CONSUMPTION WILL SURPASS TRADITIONAL TELEVISION VIEWING THIS YEAR!!!!
The folks at eMarketer just released a study which projects that this year, adults will spend over 5 hours consuming digital media, as compared with about 4.5 hours watching television. This makes for a nice headline. It also makes for a wonderful example of the social construction of knowledge, and relatedly, the embeddedness of digital dualism.
A root assumption of Science and Technology Studies (STS) is that both science and technology, though billed as objective, are anything but. Knowledge systems, and methods of knowing (i.e. epistemologies), are necessarily based in human values, cultural norms, power structures, and historical context. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar famously deconstruct the notion of scientific objectivity in their 1979 anthropological study of Laboratory Life.In this vein, Emily Martin illuminates the gendered ways in which biologists depict the egg-sperm relationship within the reproductive process. And a few months back, I argued that to be a Quantified Self requires quite a bit of qualitative interpretation and decision making. In short, Big Data, statistical techniques, and laboratory procedures produce knowledge that is equally as biased as storytelling or ethnographic interpretation. Sorry, Enlightenment. more...
About Cyborgology
We live in a cyborg society. Technology has infiltrated the most fundamental aspects of our lives: social organization, the body, even our self-concepts. This blog chronicles our new, augmented reality.
During the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (#ASA13) in New York this last week, I was reminded of the post that I wrote last year before #ASA2012 in which I encouraged tweeting academics to reach out to non-tweeting academics to bridge the gap between those who participate on the conference hashtags at ASA and those who don’t. Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) followed up with a post titled, “Twitter isn’t a Backchannel,” in which he made the point that the term “backchannel” perpetuates digital dualist ideas of what does and doesn’t count as “real” participation at a conference:
