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Greetings cyborgs,

I came across this interesting video last week on BME Modblog. If you are unaware, the Nintendo 3DS now offers augmented reality video games. One gamer was so excited by this new technology, he got the AR card tattooed on his forearm to allow himself to become part of the game experience itself.

This exemplifies what Nathan and others have discussed on this blog many times. That is, the merging of the digital and the material and the creation of an augmented reality. So is the man in this video truly a “cyborg?” I believe so. In fact, we all are to a certain extent. Heck, you are reading this blog right now, engaging in a dialogue with me from far away through the help of internet technology. In this sense, the Nintendo DS AR card tattoo serves as an exemplary case of modification and the new cyborg body that I have spoken about before in this blog. more...

Orcs, Trolls, Elves and more. With such fantastical races and landscapes, online gaming is an area where people can seemingly escape reality and all the expectations of society. For newcomers to the world of online gaming, it seems like anything can happen. You can be whomever you want to be, your race, gender, sexuality or physical limitations no longer matter. Games without avatars provide an even deeper layer of anonymity for players; for all you know, you could be playing against a faceless being behind a computer.

However as most people will quickly realize, the online gaming world is very similar to the “real life” world and strong assumptions and stereotypes regarding players still exist. Players can largely avoid racial stereotypes as it’s hard to tell the race of the person behind the screen, however, gender stereotypes are harder to escape.

After a short period of time, more...

The Kiss Transmission Device was recently created in a lab in Japan. This is essentially an internet connected French kissing machine. Yes, you read that correctly. It is a machine that allows you to share actual French kisses via the internet. Okay, they are not actual French kisses…but kind of.

A user of the device caresses an internet connected straw-like mechanism with their tongue, causing the device to transfer the motion to a second straw-like mechanism, ostensibly located in the mouth of a romantic partner. Developers hope eventually to make the device more “tongue like” by adding personalized flavor, moisture and breathing patterns.

The developers view this as a device that will aid in the maintenance of long-distance romantic relationships, allowing geographically separate partners to connect on a physical level. They also talk about marketing celebrity kisses—allowing users to swap spit (er, swap straw movements) with the likes of Justin Bieber or any other celebrity willing to sell a physical piece of hir sexuality. more...

I am working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and have decided to take on theorizing the rise of faux-vintage photography (e.g., Hipstamatic, Instagram). From May 10-12, 2011, I posted a three part essay. This post combines all three together.
Part I: Instagram and Hipstamatic
Part II: Grasping for Authenticity
Part III: Nostalgia for the Present

Part I: Instagram and Hipstamatic

This past winter, during an especially large snowfall, my Facebook and Twitter streams became inundated with grainy photos that shared a similarity beyond depicting massive amounts of snow: many of them appeared to have been taken on cheap Polaroid or perhaps a film cameras 60 years prior. However, the photos were all taken recently using a popular set of new smartphone applications like Hipstamatic or Instagram. The photos (like the one above) immediately caused a feeling of nostalgia and a sense of authenticity that digital photos posted on social media often lack. Indeed, there has been a recent explosion of retro/vintage photos. Those smartphone apps have made it so one no longer needs the ravages of time or to learn Photoshop skills to post a nicely aged photograph.

In this essay, I hope to show how faux-vintage photography, while seemingly banal, helps illustrate larger trends about social media in general. The faux-vintage photo, while getting a lot of attention in this essay, is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past. But we have a ways to go before I can elaborate on that point. Some technological background is in order. more...

In 1960 an architect by the name of Kevin Lynch embarked on a fascinating three-city study of how urban dwellers keep mental pictures of their hometowns. He and his team identified five “elements” of the city: 1) paths, 2) edges, 3) nodes, 4) districts, and 5) landmarks. These five components constitute most of the ways individuals think about and navigate their city. As smartphones become more and more ubiquitous, the way we navigate cities has changed. We have GPS devices, interactive maps, social networking applications that tell us where our friends are and where they like to go for pizza. The city exists in physical space, it exists in our minds, and now it exists in the digital “cloud.” How does this new layer of bits effect the way our cities look, act, and feel? To know more about the How to update the maps on your Garmin device , go through this.

I want to briefly discuss the five elements before conjecturing how access to information changes what these elements look like and how we organize the city in our heads. Paths can be more...

I am working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and have decided to take on theorizing the rise of faux-vintage photography (e.g., Hipstamatic, Instagram). I want to start fleshing out ideas and will do so with a three-part series on this blog: I posted part one yesterday (“Hipstamatic and Instagram”) and tomorrow I will post the third and final part (“Nostalgia for the Present”). [Update: Read the full essay here.]

If you use social media then you probably have noticed the recent proliferation of faux-vintage photography, often the product of smartphone applications such as Hipstamatic and Instagram. I describe in part I of this essay posted yesterday what faux-vintage photography is and noted that it is a new trend, comes primarily from smartphones and has proliferated on social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr and others. However, the important question remains: why this massive popularity of faux-vintage photographs? I will tackle this question today, and in part III tomorrow, will conclude that the rise, and potential fall, of faux-vintage photography illustrates larger points about social media in general.

What I want to argue is that the rise of the faux-vintage photo is an attempt to create a sort of “nostalgia for the present,” an attempt to make our photos seem more important, substantial and real. We want to endow the powerful feelings associated with nostalgia to our lives in the present. And, ultimately, all of this goes well beyond the faux-vintage photo; the momentary popularity of the Hipstamatic-style photo serves to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past. In fact, the phrase “nostalgia for the present” is borrowed from the great philosopher of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, who states that “we draw back from our immersion in the here and now […] and grasp it as a kind of thing.”* more...

I am working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and have decided to take on theorizing the rise of faux-vintage photography (e.g., Hipstamatic, Instagram). I want to start fleshing out ideas and will do so with a three-part series on this blog: I will post part two (“Grasping for Authenticity”) tomorrow and part three (“Nostalgia for the Present”) Thursday.

This past winter, during an especially large snowfall, my Facebook and Twitter streams became inundated with grainy photos that shared a similarity beyond depicting massive amounts of snow: many of them appeared to have been taken on cheap Polaroid or perhaps a film cameras 60 years prior. However, the photos were all taken recently using a popular set of new smartphone applications like Hipstamatic or Instagram. The photos (like the one above) immediately caused a feeling of nostalgia and a sense of authenticity that digital photos posted on social media often lack. Indeed, there has been a recent explosion of retro/vintage photos. Those smartphone apps have made it so one no longer needs the ravages of time or to learn Photoshop skills to post a nicely aged photograph.

In this essay, I hope to show how faux-vintage photography, while seemingly banal, helps illustrate larger trends about social media in general. The faux-vintage photo, while getting a lot of attention in this essay, is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past. But we have a ways to go before I can elaborate on that point (see parts II and especially III of this essay). Some technological background is in order. more...

The Cyborgology Blog has recently hosted much discussion on the topic of augmented reality (i.e., the co-constitution of online and offline, digital and physical).  A few threads to follow as background are:

Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality by Nathan Jurgenson

Virtual, Mediated, and Augmented Reality by PJ Rey

why i don’t like “augmented reality” by Sang-Hyoun Pahk

Defending and Clarifying the Term Augmented Reality by Nathan Jurgenson

I’d like to extend this discussion by clarifying the relationship between augmented reality and the namesake of the Cyborgology blog (i.e, the cyborg). The two concepts are intimately connected. more...

Answer: They wield enormous (and terrifying) power, yet  they are ill-adapted to function in a changing environment.

In most corners of society, it’s a become a trope to say that the Internet has changed everything; but online communication is still far from integrated into the norms and practices of the academy, whose pace of change and adaptation is nothing less than glacial.  Anyone familiar with academic careers knows that conventional (read print) journal publications are the be-all end-all criterion in evaluating potential hires—the meaning behind the well-worn cliché: “publish or perish.”

The practice of using journal articles as the sole criterion in evaluating an academic’s productivity is an artifact of an epoch long-passed.  In the age of the printing press, journals were, by far, the most efficient and enduring form of communication.  They enabled disciplines to have thoughtful conversations spanning decades and continents.  They also facilitated the transmission of the knowledge produced through these conversations to younger generations.  In fact, it is nearly impossible to imagine the emergence of Modern science without existence of this medium. Thus, in the beginning, journals become symbolically and ritually important because they were functionally necessary. (While journals were medium du jour during Durkheim’s productive years, he surely would have recognized the reason behind their status in the cult of the academic.) more...

The Cyborgology editors were on the radio (WYPR, Baltimore’s NPR affiliate) talking about the Theorizing the Web 2011 conference. We discuss the Twitter backchannel and the notion of an augmented conference, and how Facebook is similarly a backchannel to our Face-to-face interactions. Also, conference attendee Bonnie Stewart is mentioned!

Listen to the full audio here.