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It feels like every time I’m at a gathering of social researchers, within 15 minutes of being there I’ll hear the words “digital world” and “real world” being used to discuss interactions that take place in a technologically-mediated context versus actions that take place in non-technologically-mediated context. more...

This piece is cross-posted on Microsoft Research New England’s Social Media Collective Research Blog.

In her recent post here on the Cyborgology blog, Jenny Davis brought the pervasive use of Facebook as a study site back into conversation. In brief, she argued that “studying Facebook—or any fleeting technological object—is not problematic as long as we theorize said object.” The take away from this statement is important: We can hope to make lasting contributions to research literature through our conceptual work – much more so than through the necessarily ephemeral empirical details that are tied to a time, a place, and particular technologies.

In this post, I want to give a different yet complementary answer to why it may be a problem if our research efforts are focused on a single study site. This is regardless of whether it is the currently most popular social network site or an already obsolete technological object. more...

Writing Tools and the Instrumentalist Conception of TechnologyMy recent article in The Atlantic, “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun,” is provocative in part because it suggests tools like guns might have more power of us than meets the eye. Given widely held views about autonomy (e.g., the notion that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”), this alternative way of looking at things can cause anxiety, especially when misunderstood and translated into terms like those offered by the first commenter, “Guns are magic mind control machines.” The article presented an account of how humans relate to technology, and to further illuminate those relations, I’ll briefly revisit media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s take on Friedrich Nietzche’s use of the typewriter. Like my gun essay, this analysis challenges the “instrumentalist” conception of technology.

In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler contends more...

A little over a year ago, I found myself conducting a focus group session with a handful of middle school students. As part of a research project looking to better understand how Internet safety programs conceptualize youth and Internet technologies, I became increasingly surprised – and at least somewhat frustrated – that cyberbullying rarely came during dozens of conversations with students, parents and school administrators. This particular focus group session was no different. Nearing the end of the session, I finally asked the students if they used the word cyberbullying when they talked to their friends. Their response, looking at me as if I was the most out-of-touch idiot they had ever spoken with, was a unanimous “Nooo!” I then asked them: If you do not use the word, who does? Various students replied with disgusted exclamations of “Parents!” or “Teachers!” and in what would be one of the defining moments of the project, a student said “It’s an old lady word” quietly under her breath. Looking beyond some problematic ageism and sexism that may be implied in her response, there is an element of truth behind what she was saying: children are using a very different interpretive frame than parents when it comes to so-called “cyber-bullying.” more...

Jacques Ellul

Last month the Heartland Institute, a climate-denying “think tank,” plastered Ted “The Unabomber” Kaczynski’s scowling face on a series of billboards in Chicago.

I still believe in global warming,” the copy read. “Do you?

Kaczynski has long been the figurative poster boy for technophobic insanity, of course, but the Heartland Institute made it literal. The billboard campaign was quickly recognized as a miscalculation and withdrawn, but it served as a reminder of what a gift Kaczynski turned out to be for some of the very enemies he sought to destroy. It also served as a reminder of how egregiously he misused the ideas of a philosopher who is revered as a genius by many people, myself included.

I refer to Jacques Ellul, author of The Technological Society. Ellul died 18 years ago last month; this year marks the hundredth anniversary of his birth. more...

A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry on technological autonomy. It made the point that a nation’s commitment to advanced technologies can result in a situation where its economic well-being is directly counter to the physical or psychological well-being of its people. The point I’d like to make today is that the commitments of corporations to advanced technologies can become similarly antithetical.

The example in that previous post was Japan’s commitment to nuclear power. Here I’ll consider two examples involving specific consumer products: the international sale of sports utility vehicles and the international sale of snack foods.Both examples raise an important definitional question: Which is the driving force, technology or capitalism? It’s a hard question to answer because at a certain stage of development the two are so closely intertwined that it’s often impossible to separate them. On the one hand, the spread of global capitalism would clearly be impossible without mass production technologies. On the other hand, capitalism is clearly the economic model most responsible for the development and exploitation of mass production technologies.

The historian David F. Noble has argued that technology is “the racing heart of corporate capitalism,” implying that capitalism directs the enterprise while technology supplies the motive force. I think you could just as successfully argue that the opposite is true. The best solution is probably to say that the relationship between technology and capitalism is dialectical, or symbiotic. Sometimes technology stimulates capitalism, other times capitalism stimulates technology; in advanced technological/capitalist societies neither could exist without the other. From either perspective an expansion of influence becomes a priority that overwhelms every other consideration, which is another way of defining a condition of de facto autonomy.

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Instagram has gained tremendous popularity over the last several years. It is popular with people of all sorts of demographics and from all walks of life. In the case with Instagram, the number of followers that you acquire is what is most important.

Number of followers equals Instagram success

It is important to be aware here that there is a lot more to Instagram than just the number of followers you can acquire. However, your number of followers is one of the important measurements (or metrics) of the social media tool. If you have a large number of followers, other people will have the perception that you (and your business) are a success. That lends itself to your professional credibility and trustworthiness.

For business progress, buying followers on Instagram can give you a lot of popularity. A strong number of followers also gives you the confidence that your message is being received by other people online and it allows you to increase your reach to a large number of good-quality connections. It also goes a long way to strengthening your relationship with your target audience, which is essential to your success.

Instagram is a smart phone application that acts as a social network and photo editing software. The application allows users to apply various filters and effects to their camera phone pictures, often in order to look like Polaroids from the 70s. The users can then upload the photos to the Instagram community where other members can view, “like”, and comment on them. A user’s Instagram feed can also be synced with other social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

Launched in 2010, the app was initially only available to iPhone users and those with iOS software. Its popularity became instant, and within a year, it had over ten million users. In April 2012, Instagram debuted their Android version of the app on the Google Play store, thus opening up its user base to those with Android smartphones. With this launch came an unexpected backlash from the original iPhone users, and a new form of class warfare began to arise on the internet.

Different cell phone providers offer iPhone versus Android devices. iPhones can only be purchased with more...

On Techno, Dancing, and the Augmented Self

1997, 3 am. I’m sitting against the concrete wall of a dark, empty warehouse, off Hegenberger Road in Oakland. My body is vibrating—a strong, healthy kick drum beating hard against my chest. I squint and see the DJ behind a booth, flanked by black speakers that look like monoliths. Silhouettes are scattered about: strangers dancing alone, in open spaces or near the speakers, but also in tribes, moving within circles.

My pulse is racing, thumping at the same tempo as the techno blasting in this space. The beat is urgent, extending each moment—making now last longer. And it’s kinetic, frenetic—like a rubber ball bouncing round the room. My friend’s forearm grazes mine, warm and slick from perspiration. As we touch, I feel the reverberation of the sound on her skin. The music is so loud, as if we’re in the bowels of a manufacturing plant, listening to machines repeating the same tasks over and over. These sounds consume each second, not giving me much space to think about much else.

I watch a cluster of dancers on the far side of the room. From afar, I see a flutter of geometric parts, picture flipbook pages turning in front of me. The dancers move too swift for my eyes to follow, and I see tracers of their limbs in the air. I think of Duchamp: his nude, descending a staircase, flashes before me. It feels like I have several pairs of glasses stacked sloppily on my face, and I’m peeking through a kaleidoscope in the dark.

Glowing bits and streaks of neon green and yellow and pink are sprinkled throughout this darkness, creating a network of electric vertices floating in space. A series of lasers shoots out from the opposite wall, casting a more...

Google’s “Project Glass,” is the Augmented Reality (AR) Heads-up-Display (HUD) glasses offering that Google is designing for a near future Internet interactive experience.

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(Video credit: Google)

From watching their demonstration video, I certainly have some questions and observations. Google’s vision (no pun intended) of the future is a place where people ignore women except as witnesses to their achievements, talk with their mouth full, and put their live friends on hold to interact with a machine (oh wait, that’s what people do now); and is one without ads (wait…what?). Thankfully, rebelliouspixels mixed them in: more...

A recent study on electronic medical records (EMRs) found that they may not fulfill the promise of lowered health-care costs. This  study, and the reaction to it, illustrates much of what is wrong with technology studies, and the unintended social effects of technology itself.

Many technology studies have false ideas of how web and interaction designers actually work. We collectively tend to think of technology as a “fix” that “automagically” eliminates  “waste,” even if this is not the intent of the designers themselves (which it frequently isn’t).  But as this study points out, there are far more subtle and nuanced issues relating to technology. Specifically, technology makes it easier to do some things. Is it any surprise we end up expecting more things to be done?

Let me illustrate with EMRs.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School found that the use of electronic medical records (EMRs) is actually correlated with a higher number of diagnostic tests, such as MRIs, which in turn implies higher — not lower — health-care costs. more...