A number of good pieces on Snapchat have already been written, on this blog and others, and I think there’s a lot yet to talk about. I’m jumping on the bandwagon today because I think I see a conceptual area that’s already been touched on that offers additional room for expansion.
Ballard: “I’ve always wanted to drive a crashed car.” Vaughn: “You could get your wish at any moment.” –from Crash (1996)
David Cronenberg is so very Cyborgology. The fleshy, pulsating video game consoles that blur machine and body in eXistenZ (1999), or Videodrome (1983), the anti-digital-dualist counter-paradigm to The Matrix where a separate digital reality is rejected in favor of showing the augmentation of media and the body in bloody detail. Vaughn, a character in Cronenberg’s 1996 film, Crash, says that the car-crash is “the reshaping of the human body by modern technology.”
In Crash, the crash is a lust object, something to be witnessed in all of its reality and detail and in extreme close up. On YouTube, it’s the rise of Russian “dashcams.” more...
It’s interesting to look at something like DRM from both sides – or rather, from one of the two sides, the third being the assholes who put the DRM in place to begin with, yeah I’m tipping my hand here, deal with it – both that of the content-creator and the consumer. It’s not that I think people who occupy that conceptual and experiential space are rare; far from it. But when DRM gets talked about, I honestly feel like the actual creators of the content, who often have very little if anything to do with the DRM-application side of things, frequently get neglected. I had a novel come out this week (yeah, so I have this problem where I can’t seem to keep from mentioning it in whatever I say now), and then I saw this post by author Seanan McGuire on pirating ebooks, and it highlighted to me that I’m in this position now. Different kinds of digital actions are of course, not confined to digital aspects of reality; they spread and ripple and subtly change everything. If someone pirates my ebook who would have otherwise paid for it – which doesn’t characterize nearly all of the “illegal” downloading that goes on – then I get paid less. I have less quantifiable money. Which has very physical consequences.
I have a dear family friend. She is highly educated, happily married, a wonderful mother, and incredibly successful in her career. She has also, however, always struggled with her weight. Like many people, she tried dieting about a million times. This produced the kind of yo-yo style results which bring people to maintain several wardrobes of varying sizes. Then, about five years ago, she started journaling. She wrote down everything she ate and the approximate caloric count of each item. With this tactic, this dear family friend was, for the first time, able to maintain her desired body size.
Don’t worry; this is not a post about how to lose weight. I could write one of those, but the anti-feminist self-loathing would probably be too much for me to bear. Rather, this is a short post about self-tracking. We all know that Cyborgologist Whitney Erin Boesel (@phenatypical) is our resident expert on self-tracking however, as she makes her way from one side of the country to the other, I will pick up the self-tracking ball and talk about some recent findings from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. more...
Facebook just enabled its new Graph Search for my profile and I wanted to share some initial reactions (beyond the 140 character variety). Facebook’s new search function allows users to mine their Facebook accounts for things like: “Friends that like eggs” or “Photos of me and my friends who live near Chuck E. Cheese’s. ” The suggested search function is pretty prominent, which serves the double role of telling you what is searchable and how to phrase your search. More than anything else, Graph Search is a stark reminder of how much information you and your friends have given to Facebook. More importantly however, it marks a significant change in how Facebook users see each other and themselves in relation to their data.. You no longer see information through people; you start to see people as affiliated with certain topics or artifacts. Graph Search is like looking at your augmented life from some floating point above the Earth. more...
Each morning, after reading the news and checking my emails, I reward myself with a quick (okay, not that quick) scroll down the Facebook News Feed. Over a peanut butter bagel and strong cup of coffee, I look at pictures, laugh at status updates, ignore political rants, and leave small traces along the way: Likes, congratulations, the occasional snarky retort. I look forward to my Facebook time. It’s the dessert portion of my morning routine. The little sugary something that warms me into my day. And yet, this is a precarious treat—one day sweet, the next lip-puckeringly tart.
I never know quite how I will feel at the end of my scroll session. Some days, I am energized, connected, warm, fuzzy, and one with the world. Other days, I feel annoyed, left out, jealous, regretful that I let that half hour slip away while others were doing something more productive, more impactful, more meaningful. Admittedly, on most days, my feelings lie between these poles in the far less dramatic realm of mild amusement or hinted anxiety. more...
Once upon a time in Winchester, VA, a nurse and a psychologist wondered what to name their second child (a newborn boy). This little boy would one day grow up to be a famous politician, so it was important to give him a good name. Eventually they settled on Richard (which means “powerful leader”) for a first name, and John (which means “God is gracious”) for a middle name; they gave him his father’s last name, because that was the custom at the time. Yet today, when someone says “Santorum,” do you first think of the former U.S. Senator? Or do you maybe think of columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage?
Much to the former Senator’s likely chagrin, “santorum” is an excellent example of how words (and objects) that were not originally intended or designed to be “political” can take on new meanings–as well as new politics–once out in the world. more...
Is there a Dunbar’s Number for our documentary consciousness?
Dunbar argued that we can only keep up with about 150 people at a time, at which point we reach a cognitive saturation. Can this similar sort of saturation occur with the proliferation of ways we can document ourselves and others on social media? The ways someone holding a working smartphone can document experience grows not just with the number of sites one can post to, but also the number of available mediums of documentation: audio, video, photo, and their recombinations into things like GIFs and Vines whatever else I’m forgetting or will come next. Each new app carries with it a different audience with different expectations, adding to the documentary chaos.
Or: Given the proliferation of options, how should I document this cat? more...
“JSTOR is a rent extraction mechanism that perpetuates fundamental inequalities”
“a ceremonial flyover of three combat drones”
“what is Elsevier going to do with Mendeley that warrants uninstalling it from you computer?”
“Nineteenth century viral culture is quite like today’s Internet culture”
“That was before Apple washed Siri’s mouth out with soap and curbed many of its talents”
“23 women have joined a class-action lawsuit against the “revenge porn” website”
“there is something disturbingly misogynistic about online bullying“ more...
Check out vinepeek.com. Watch the random videos—called Vines—follow each other without context. Take it in for a moment. more...
