commentary

The concept of the Uncanny Valley is pretty well known by now – the idea, popularized by robotics professor Masahiro Mori, that as non-human objects approach a human likeness they start, for lack of a better phrase, to really creep us the hell out. It’s a fairly simple idea, and one that usually seems reasonable to us on both a visceral and an intellectual level, at least partly because it’s something that most of us have experienced aspects of at one time or another. But there are parts of this concept that often go unexplored, which is what I want to deal with here.

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Most Wanted posters, having lost their long standing place at the Post Office, have found a new home on Pinterest. Following the Philadelphia Police Department, police in Pottstown PA, are now electronically pinning  images of those with outstanding arrest warrants. Yes, the same place people exchange recipes and DIY home tips is increasingly also place in which police officers disseminate photographs of felons on the lam (time out: I just got to use the phrase “on the lam” in an academic-ish piece of writing.  *self high-five*).

This use of Pinterest for mugshot dissemination is theoretically interesting in a number of ways. Here, I denote three key interrelated insights: more...

“There is no such thing as ‘getting it right,’ only ‘getting it’ differently contoured and nuanced. When experimenting with form, ethnographers learn about the topic and about themselves what is unknowable, unimaginable, using prescribed writing formats.” –Laura Richardson “A Method of Inquiry” In The Handbook of Qualitative Research (1991, p. 521)

“The major issue is how to use the variety of available textual formats and devices to reconstruct social worlds and to explore how those texts are then received by both the cultural disciplines and the social worlds we seek to capture.” Paul Atkinson and Amanda Coffey in Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique After Postmodernism (1995, p. 49)

“You’re not the boss of me!”

“It’s a good thing you’re a volunteer then, since you’d make an awful employee.”

“To hell with you!” They both glowered at each other like a pair of hungry house cats eyeing the same can of tuna. It was 10:34PM, the printer was out of toner, and this meeting was going nowhere. In the next room someone was watching a youtube video with lots cussing and something that sounded like a revving truck engine. The florescent lighting made everyone look sallow and empty.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying the numbers worry me. There’s nothing in here that’ll guarantee a win in Cuyahoga or Franklin county.” Jeffrey motioned with an open hand to a printed excel spreadsheet on the table, the tips of his fingers briefly jabbing the top page before going back to their default position as support beams for his head. Jeffrey always held his head in his right hand when he was feeling attacked. He thought it made him look unaffected. more...

This piece was supposed to be about porn star James Deen.

After reading about Deen here and there and everywhere, I had the idea that perhaps there was something worth writing about. Only the problem was, that the more I watched of his work, the less I had a desire to write about it. Perhaps the point is not Deen himself and how he has been lauded via the wheel of favorable ratings by female audiences online. What needs to be written about is what happens when a woman sits down and engages with sex—specifically, her own, as tied to an exploration of her individual sexuality and liberation therein—via the medium of a computer screen. more...

Since it’s the season for giving, I’d like to satirically write up some conclusions for that op-ed you need to finish. A cool way to crank out that “think-piece” before your deadline is to pick a topic—reading, driving, talking, pet-grooming, bedazzling, whatever—and say social media is making it less real, deep, true, meaningful, authentic, soulful, or whatever else makes you feel like a better type of human than the automaton masses. more...

The thing about identity is that the stories we tell ourselves about our own are already forcibly consistent. We don’t need Facebook to make this so.

Last week there were several great posts on this subject. Nathan kicked things off with his claim that the social pressure to have a consistent identity is both subtly reinforced by how Facebook encourages – and constrains – the way we prosume identities, and that it potentially enables us to confront the fact that this consistency is an impossible and unreasonable standard to meet; identity is perhaps much more fluid than we’re comfortable thinking. Rob Horning was in agreement with at least part of this, suggesting that Facebook decontextualizes identity, making it seem less rooted in personal experience and more in data. Whitney went on to make a fascinating claim: that when our process of identity formation is recorded and made immediate in this way, it collapses the past into the present and removes temporal distance that basically alleviates the pain that’s all too often wrapped up in who we used to be.

This is the point I want to latch onto. Because this is significant. This is really about our stories. And this is really about not only remembering a more immediate past, but inhabiting that past. We are faced with who we used to be and we become that person – “to read the words that came from that person is to be that person again”. We occupy our old self’s cognitive and emotional space.

This hurts. There are a couple of reasons why.

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Don’t tell the Israel Defense Force (IDF) that sharing videos from your Twitter account is ineffectual. They will point to their two-hundred thousand twitter followers that have generated 35 million views on their official Youtube account. They will extoll the virtues of a ruthlessly efficient and effective ad campaign that invites participation without the young Israeli even knowing they are engaged in two wars: a war of flesh as well as a war of mind. Granted, the IDF is no Justin Beiber, but it is hard to deny the impact of the IDF’s 30-person social networking team. The IDF’s social media savvy has not gone unnoticed. Technology and business publications have been more than happy to publish uncritical, lengthy interviews of top officials. This meta-propaganda usually begins by noting that Pillar of Defense was first announced through Twitter. The conversation will then turn to their complete arsenal: (Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, Pintrest, and even Google+) before commenting on their brief tweet confrontations with Hamas. All of this happens almost apolitically. Every news pieces calls it propaganda, and yet it still has a powerful aesthetic and rhetorical effect. Social media is the Abrams tank of propaganda. Messages must navigate the harsh terrains of corporate and government-owned mass media and arrive safely in the minds of citizens. Unedited, unfiltered, pure. Social media can trample news cycles, navigate the minefields of editorial desks, and maintain total media superiority in the vacuum of Western under-reporting.  more...

In a recent post about communal storytelling via ICTs, Sarah Wanencheck highlights how digital media is breaking down the old narratological dualism of fiction and non-fiction. She argues non-fictional identities on social networks are communally constructed, in ways akin to the collaborative storytelling practices on fanfiction sites. Here I’ll look at how narrative roleplaying on the instant messaging service Omegle shapes new subjectivities on the social networks its roleplayers use to sustain and develop their fiction.

We perform identities on social networks, using filters and images, and timelines, and real-time updates – but those identities are never too far removed from those we perform in real-world frames. Roleplaying on Omegle offers a way of getting closer to other writers’ characters in ways which are paradoxically more personal and more immersed in the author’s creation than ever before. While fans wait for their favourite TV series or book series to start up again, they create narratives in collaboration with others which run parallel to their ‘real’ lives. What happens to the division between the fiction and nonfiction when we can experience being someone entirely different every day, within the frames of social networks like Tumblr and Facebook? more...

One of the aspects of techno-social life that I’ll be looking at closely in my forthcoming book Superconnected: The Internet and Techno-Social Life is the reality of the online experience. To explore this issue in the classroom, I invited Nathan Jurgenson of this blog to tweet “live” with my “Mediated Communication in Society” class, billing him as a special guest speaker tweeter! Here I describe what I did, why I did it, how I did it — and what happened, much of it unexpected, as a result. more...