commentary

Cyborgology readers, I need your help. I’ve put the post I was writing for today on hold because I’m short a key piece of terminology, and I’m hoping one of you can either a) point me to a good preexisting term, or b) help me to assemble a term that’s a bit more graceful than the ones I can come up with on my own.

The phenomenon I’m trying to describe is one that I’ve encountered a number of times over the past week, and is a theme I identify fairly often in conversations about newer technologies. I describe it below, first generally and then with a couple recent examples. more...

Presidential debates might be the single political event where Marshall McLuhan’s infamous phrase “the medium is the message” rings most true. Candidates know well that content takes the back seat, perhaps even stuffed in the trunk, during these hyper-performative news events. The video above of McLuhan on the Today show analyzing a Ford-Carter debate from 1976 is well worth a watch. The professor’s points still ring provocative this morning after the first Obama-Romney debate of 2012; a debate that treated the Twitter-prosumer as a television-consumer and thoroughly failed the social medium.  more...

The video above is a “funny” take on the role of Twitter in our everyday lives from this past summer (I think). I know, who cares about celebrities and nothing is less funny than explaining why something is funny. But because the video isn’t really that funny to begin with, we’ve nothing to lose by quickly hitting on some of the points it makes. Humor is a decent barometer for shared cultural understanding for just about everything, indeed, often a better measure than the op-eds and blog posts we usually discuss in the quasi-academic-blogosphere. Those who made this video themselves are trying to tap into mainstream frustrations with smartphones and social media and their increasingly central role in many of our lives. So let’s look at the three main themes being poked at here, and I’m going to do my best to keep this short by linking out to where I’ve made these arguments before.

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Previously, I wrote about the cyborg diet. Today, I want to not only elaborate on that post, but also engage in some self critique.

In the original post, I argued that despite our capacity for nutritional efficiency (i.e. the infamous food pill) we instead use our technological capabilities to optimize consumptive inefficiency. That is, we construct food products and pharmaceuticals that allow for maximum consumption with minimal caloric absorption. I have since reconsidered my position, and determined that my argument was incomplete, and worse yet, highly classed.

Perhaps the crux of the problem falls in my narrow definition of “efficiency” (which, incidentally, I failed to properly define in the original post). Well, if you’re trying to build muscle, the best supplement for you is a protein supplement, I’ve listed a few supplements, just click here to find out which type of supplement protein is right for your body. Let me do so here:  “efficiency,” as I used it previously, refers to a small amount of food that provides a large amount of energy (i.e. calories). Inefficiency then refers to a large amount of food which provides very little energy.   Operationally, we can think of this in terms of a calories-per-ounce ratio, such that high calorie-per-ounce ratios indicate efficiency, and low calorie-per-ounce ratios indicate inefficiency. more...

I’ve been thinking a lot about this question lately. I even wrote an essay awhile back for The New Inquiry. But, honestly, none of the answers I come up seem complete. I’m posting this as a means of seeking help developing an explanation and to see if anyone knows of people who are taking on this question.

I think question is important because it relates to our “digital dualist” tendency to view the Web as separate from “real life.”

So far, I see three, potentially compatible, explanations: more...

Whitney Erin Boesel’s most recent post addressing the potential “regentrification” of Myspace helps to illuminate a further point that we should bear in mind whenever we’re considering the implications of a site – or an interface – redesign/reboot: it’s not a sweeping, instantaneous change that’s rooted entirely in the present, and its users almost never perceive it that way. This can help to explain the frequent emotional intensity with which users often respond to redesigns.

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As if we needed more examples to demonstrate that ‘the digital’ & ‘the physical’ are part of the same larger world, it seems there’s no end to the applicability of demographic metaphors to trends in social media. I wrote about App.net and “white flight” from Facebook and Twitter last month, so you can imagine how my head broke on Monday when I first heard about “New MySpace.” My first question—after, “wait, what?”—was, “Is this like when the white people start moving back into urban cores to live in pricey loft conversions?”

I didn’t do a detailed overview of danah boyd’s (@zephoria) work on MySpace, Facebook, and white flight last time, so I start with that below (though I recommend that anyone interested in this topic check out boyd’s very readable chapter in Race After the Internet, which you can download here [pdf]). I then look at some of the coverage of New MySpace this week to make the argument that there are some strong parallels between the site’s impending “makeover” and the “urban renewal” efforts sometimes called gentrification or regentrification.

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PJ Rey just posted a terrific reflection on hipsters and low-tech on this blog, and I just want to briefly respond, prod and disagree a little. This is a topic of great interest to me: I’ve written about low-tech “striving for authenticity” in my essay on The Faux-Vintage Photo, reflected on Instagrammed war photos, the presence of old-timey cameras at Occupy Wall Street, and the IRL Fetish that has people obsessing over “the real” in order to demonstrate just how special and unique they are.

While I appreciate PJ bringing in terrific new theorists to this discussion, linking authenticity and agency with hipsters and technology, I think he focuses too much on the technologies themselves and not enough on the processes of identity; too much on the signified and not where the real action is in our post-modern, consumer society: the signs and signifiers. more...

Hipsters have been much discussed on the Cyborgology blog (see: here, here, here, and here). Cyborgology authors have also talked about the fetishization of low-tech/analog media and devices (see: here and here). As David Paul Strohecker pointed out, these two issue interrelated: “hipsters are at the forefront of movements of nostalgic revivalism.” I want to pick up these threads and add a small observation.

Nathan Jurgenson and I were discussing why low-tech devices have a seductive quality. Consider the popularity of, for example, fixed-gear bicycles or vintage cameras (such as the Kodak Brownie or the Polaroid PX-70 [correction: SX-70]). Though I think this phenomenon is probably overdetermined (in the Freudian sense of having multiple sufficient causes), I came up with a theory that seems worth further consideration: namely, that hipsters’ obsession with antique devices reflects a desire to escape the complex and highly-interdependent socio-technical systems that characterize contemporary society and return to time in which technology appeared to be something that humans could master and, thus, use to affirm their individual agency. In short, the fetishization of low-tech is about the illusion of agency; it provides affirmation for the hipster whose identity is defined by the post-Modern imperative to be an individual, to be unique.