commentary

My attention was directed today (via Twitter, appropriately), to this post about the competing ASA Bingo Cards.  I don’t have a lot to say about the deeper meaning of “gentle ribbing” or negativity, whatever you want to call it, in the original card.  However, I do think that the “chronically hip grad student” square was not just, as Nathan Jurgenson asserted, a mainstream culture-embedded dig at hipsters, but also an indication of a general discomfort among less technologically savvy sociologists at the increasing use of technology to augment professional scholarly activities, often though not always by colleagues younger than themselves.

In particular, I suspect that the characterization of Twitter as “like passing notes during a talk, only if those notes were posted on a giant whiteboard behind the speaker so that everybody but her could read them” is quite accurate in terms of how the unfamiliar (and vaguely suspicious) think about Twitter.  Twitter users think they’re better than us, just like those iPad-using hipster grad students, and they’re trash talking about it where we can’t see them. While it makes sense, I think it’s a very misguided analogy.

The critical difference between notes, or for that matter late-night trash talk at the hotel bar, and Twitter is that Twitter creates more...

There was a popular “bingo card” for the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association held last week in Las Vegas. It poked a bit of fun at sociologists and the meeting itself. Nathan Jurgenson’s reaction was that the card itself revealed much about the sociological discipline and the problems with the annual meetings. He wrote a post here on Cyborgology calling for a more positive bingo card that might be helpful to improve the conference experience rather than just complaining about what is wrong. It is easy to be annoyed, much harder to be constructive.

CUNY sociologist Jessie Daniels responded to this call, and, toegther, we have created a more constructive and useful Bingo card that looks specifically at how to improve a conference by augmenting one’s experience with Twitter.

The card describes how conferences in general benefit from engagement on both the physical and digital levels. Conversations taking place move onto the web, and discussions in the “backchannel” flow back into physical space. In fact, we noted this trend during the Theorizing the Web conference this past spring, calling it an “augmented conference.”

More on Twitter use at the ASA 2011 meetings.

British performance artist Alice Newstead is gaining attention for her recent performance inside LUSH cosmetics in San Francisco. The performance has become part of an increasing vocal outcry over the sale of shark fin soup in California. The proposed bill, AB376, has passed the California assembly and now awaits a Senate vote. more...

During my short time in Vegas I listened to and partook, in many formal, informal, academic and recreational conversations about technology and social media. This often resulted in debates over the digital/actual split (or lack thereof).  Those who espoused the digital/actual split did so with a clear privileging of the “actual” (i.e. physical).  This debate is in line with much of the work done on this blog, and in particular with a few recent comment threads (especially here, but also here). In response to this, I’ve devised a list of reasons why this split is so vehemently maintained by some, and why the digital is de-valued. more...

Yes, I know it is just a game and it is fun and it is not something to get all blog-ranty about. But, sorry, we’re (mostly) sociologists and we learned long ago the importance of the mundane (R.I.P. Garfinkel this year, by the way). The number of “retweets” this card receives makes it something worth discussing. We made our sociological bed, so let me sleep in it for a second.We’ll notice that the popular bingo card, created by Kieran Healy, is pretty negative. This does not mean that Healy or those who get a kick out of this dislike the conference. Instead, it provides a lighthearted way of expressing our frustrations with the event. Such as: more...

Why is it that authorities are so quick to fear, blame and entirely eliminate electronic communications in the face of unpredictable gatherings of people?

Hosni Mubarak pulled the plug on the Internet during the Egyptian uprising in an attempt to do away with the protesting masses. After the recent riots in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron blamed social media and pondered shutting down electronic communications. And, most recently, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (or BART) subway system turned off mobile coverage because there were rumors of protest. Authorities large and small across the globe are worried about people being more connected than ever.

Putting aside the important issue of free speech, I want to ask why BART officials feel that communication technologies are making people less safe in times of confusion? Is it part of a larger knee-jerk reaction to not understand social media and thus be scared of it? Ultimately, disrupting communications in a time of potential crisis to make people more safe is a fallacy; it does just the opposite.

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Chris Baraniuk, who writes one of my favorite blogs, the Machine Starts, is experiencing the current riots in London first hand (they’ve spread to other cites). His account of both the rioting mobs of destruction as well as those mobs trying to clean up the aftermath imply the ever complex pathways in which what I have called “augmented reality” takes form. [I lay out the idea here, and expand on it here]

We are witnessing both the destructive and the constructive “mobs” taking form as “augmented” entities. The rioters emerged in physical space and likely used digital communications to better organize. The “riot cleanup” response came at augmentation from the reverse path, organizing digitally to come together and clean up physical space. Both “mobs” flow quite naturally back and forth across atoms and bits creating an overall situation where, as what so often occurs, the on and offline merge together into an augmented experience.

The rioting mob first realized itself in physical meat-space more...

A group of volunteers are raising awareness about the lost art of letter writing by handwriting and snail mailing messages that people send them via e-mail. Those who request a snail mail letter can even request that the volunteer letter-writer includes a doodle along with the text. Volunteers and those who utilize the service talk about how hand written letters are more meaningful than messages sent through e-mail. They claim that hand written letters are more personal and represent time, care, and effort.

There are several interesting and related going on here. I will talk about each one in turn: more...

Just as we might have expected, the much-tweeted Facebook sleeve tattoo that I wrote about before has turned out to be a hoax. More specifically, it was a marketing campaign for the company Pretty Social. The company allows you to create custom handbags, stickers, and other products emblazoned with the profile pictures of your (digital) friends.

Nonetheless, the viral video itself made its way around the Internet, serving as but another case of tattoos as advertising. Much has been written on the topic already (Bengsston et. al 2005; McKelvey 1999; Kosut 2005), but I want to theorize further the use of tattooing in marketing as it relates to the phenomena of brand tattoos and lifestyle consumption and the repercussions these trends have for understandings of consumer culture. more...

Last Tuesday, Slate’s editor David Plotz wrote about a social experiment he performed last July.

I was born on Jan. 31, but I’ve always wanted a summer birthday. I set my Facebook birthday for Monday, July 11. Then, after July 11, I reset it for Monday, July 25. Then I reset it again for Thursday, July 28. Facebook doesn’t verify your birthday, and doesn’t block you from commemorating it over and over again. If you were a true egomaniac, you could celebrate your Facebook birthday every day. (You say it’s your birthday? It’s my birthday too!)

Plotz’s Facebook wall was filled by well-wishers on all three of his “birthdays.” He writes,

My social network was clearly sick of me. I received only 71 birthday wishes on July 28, down from more than 100 on my first two fake birthdays. And even more skeptics caught on to the experiment: 16 doubters, compared with 9 from three days earlier.

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