Last week, in response to Jurgenson’s earlier typology of dualist theorizing, I typologized empirical/experiential reality upon a porous continuum between pure digital dualism and pure integration. Each of these poles represents a problematic and unrealistic ideal type. The intervening categories, however, represent theorizable empirical situations. In an effort to explicitly link my argument to Jurgenson’s, I labeled these intervening categories using the language of his typology. Jurgenson critiqued this linguistic choice, and I agree. Having driven home the connection, and diagnosed the “slipperiness” of theory that Jurgenson decried, I now re-work the language of my typology to more precisely represent the meaning behind each categorical type. Although the adjustments are slight (I change only two words–but very important ones), the meaning is far more lucid. Below is the original post, with my typological categories reworked linguistically. Changes are indicated by red text. Further suggestions/critiques are welcome.
There’s nothing particularly glamorous about Troy, New York. Troy is a city that, in an alternative universe, might have been a major metropolitan region. It stumbled early though, one of the first places to suffer the oxidation of the iron belt. What it lacks in size or elegance it makes up for in internal contradictions and a special brand of awkward coquettish charm. It is the home of Uncle Sam and the setting for Kurt Vonnegut‘s novels. Its buildings have been painted by Norman Rockwell and torn down by public officials in search of progress. The local university has one of the highest-paid presidents, but also hosts the Yes Men. My campus office is on the fifth floor of a 19th century chemistry laboratory. The former lab sits atop a steep hill, providing a view that, on clear days, can go for miles. The view from my office (above) is an eclectic blend of multiple decades of technological achievements and blunders. Highways, public housing, suburban enclaves, and the husks of Victorian factories stand in conversation with one-another like old friends. It is obvious that they need each other. Some get along better than others, but they would be lost without the others’ continued existence. New technology may be introduced to us as singular entities; improvements and replacements that make the old obsolete and irrelevant. More often than not however, these technologies find themselves sitting next to veterans of past technological revolutions. I have lived in Troy for almost three years now, and each day is a lesson in the history of technology. more...
Little known fact: I profoundly dislike going to events longer than four or five hours entirely by myself. Though I enjoy my own company, and have a visceral need for regular time alone, one thing I really do not enjoy (understatement) is awkwardly standing alone in a crowd of complete strangers who are having conversations. This doesn’t stop me from going to all sorts of things by myself, as I have an even stronger dislike of missing out on events that seem interesting, exciting, or useful to me. But as someone who falls somewhere between “awkward at” and “terrified of” approaching people she doesn’t yet know, there’s a certain level of OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD involved each time I have to contemplate keeping myself socially occupied for longer than an average night of rock shows.
How do I deal with this? Put simply: Twitter. more...
Last week, Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) further delineated his theory of digital dualism, laying out a typology of dualist theoretical tendencies in relation to the “augmented” perspective. In this post, he critiques existing theorists/scholars/technology analysts not only for being dualist, but also for shifting sloppily and often indiscriminately between levels of dualism. Here, I want to diagnose the problem of slippery theorizing and emphasize the importance of a flexible perspective. I begin with an overview of Jurgenson’s typology. more...
The library in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights building at Lafayette College. Photo by Benjamin D. Esham.
Most of us still think of books as physical things by default. This is in the process of changing, as anyone who’s taken a look at recent sales and consumption statistics for ebooks will know very well, but I think it still holds true most of the time. We think of “books” as things on shelves, possibly dusty, often dog-eared – or perhaps in carefully kept condition: hardback first editions, family heirlooms, or books that are simply old and kept mainly for the simple fact of possession more than the act of reading.”Book” to us does not yet mean – or necessarily even include – “ebook”. The fact that we linguistically differentiate between the former and the latter is significant. The physical, dead tree “book” is the default; the “ebook” is the upstart Other that is essentially defined by what it isn’t as much as by what it is. This Basic Interior book design services is ideal for simple layout books (such as fiction and basic non-fiction that don’t consist of equations or, formulas).
Can being a ‘generalized other’ feel like being a friend?
How did the Awkward Party Comment shift from “I know, I read your Livejournal” to “You read what I posted on Facebook, right?” As I explained last week, this change is related to what I call the devolution of friendship. In devolved friendship, we expect our friends to take on a greater share of the friendship-labor involved in being friends with us. I link the devolution of friendship to the affordances of social media sites, and particularly to general broadcasting and frictionless sharing. While I don’t go so far as to say devolved friendship is necessarily a bad thing (or a good thing), at least two of its characteristics deserve a closer examination: the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor and the depersonalization of friendship-labor. I explore both below.
A version of this essay was delivered at the military sociology miniconference at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, 2011.
War is fundamentally a cultural phenomenon. It is profoundly entangled with shared meanings and understandings, stories both old and new, and the evolution of the same. These stories and meanings concern how war is defined, what it means to be at war, how enemies are to be identified and treated, how war itself is waged, and how one can know when war is finished – if it ever is. The shared meanings and narratives through which the culture of war is constructed are diverse: oral stories told and retold, myths and legends, historical accounts, and modern journalistic reports – and it’s important to note how the nature of those last has changed as our understanding of what qualifies as “journalism” has changed as well.
Sweaty palms. Racing heart. Mind wandering to extreme and alarming places. No, this is not a horror movie or a bad dissertation dream. This is Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).
FOMO is a colloquial phrase to describe the anxiety people feel in light of constant streams of information. Not only are broadcast news cycles 24 hours, but so too are social news streams. All day, at all times, the Facebook and Twitter tickers move forward, populated by people, information, and interaction. These streams go on with or without us. It is impossible to keep up. And yet, widespread access through home computers, work computers, smart phones and tablets tempt many of us to try, often wavering between frenzied efforts stay afloat, and resolutions to let the digital world spin without us, determinately avoiding connected devices with clenched jaws, white knuckles, deep breaths, and quick sideways glances full of both longing and animosity. more...
I don’t know about you, but when I get this question from a friend, my answer is usually “no.” No, I don’t see everything my friends post on Facebook—not even the 25 or so people I make a regular effort to keep up with on Facebook, and not even the subset of friends I count as family. I don’t see everything most of my friends tweet, either; in fact, “update Twitter lists” has been hovering in the middle of my to-do list for the better part of a year. And even after I update those lists, I probably still won’t be able to keep up with everything every friend says on Twitter, either.
I’ve spent the last twoposts in this series building up a background set of claims regarding a) how the stories we tell about war have changed over time, and b) how the relationship between technology and war has changed in the last century, particularly as regards different forms of simulation. These are important points to make, but they’ve also been leading up to what I want to talk about this week: specific examples of war-themed video games and the stories they’re telling, and what difference it all makes.
We live in a cyborg society. Technology has infiltrated the most fundamental aspects of our lives: social organization, the body, even our self-concepts. This blog chronicles our new, augmented reality.
