meta-cyborgology

Well that was quick. Around 18 months after launching their ambitious “ZOZOSUIT” product, the Japanese clothing company has shut down all international operations and is no longer offering the custom-fit service. Quartzy, which seems to have an unhealthy obsession with ZOZO and its founder and CEO, Yusaku Maezawa, has covered the rise and fall of ZOZOSUIT pretty well, so I’ll let you catch up over there. But I wanted to post something with a few quick reactions to the demise of “Custom-Fit Clothing for a Size-Free World”.

My first reaction when I received the email letting me know they were shutting the service down was, “are they going to keep my data?” The answer, of course, is yes. More specifically, “All body data will be anonymized and rendered unidentifiable by July 31, 2019.” It’s an old story that anonymized data is everything but, so color me unimpressed. One assumes they will be using the data for a future custom-sizing related project, or, given their recent financial troubles, selling to an interested acquisition or merger partner. Remember how their Privacy Policy claims to “not sell your data to third parties, ever”? Now that it’s considered “anonymized” is it still “my data”?

Then I put on my scholar hat (to be honest, it’s just a red beanie that I ironed a DSA patch onto) and had a few broader questions. Right now, I’m working on a dissertation that looks at the history of those designs which we use to self-report pain to our doctors. You know, like the smiley face chart on the wall at the doctor. I’m exploring questions of who designed them, when, how, etc. I want to contextualize their prominence in the experience of someone actually experiencing pain. And so of course, I am considering a chapter on new ways to facilitate pain self-reporting—mobile sites and apps with body diagrams and color codes or EEG-based offerings that promise “true” readings of someone’s pain.

The problem is, what happens when the latest and greatest goes defunct? I dropped 1,500 words on ZOZOSUIT back in October and, while it was a great excuse to put on a spandex onesie and teach readers about Henry Dreyfuss Associates, did I jump the gun? I suppose that’s the luxury of writing for a blog like Cyborgology—we’re focused on what’s being promised next, not what’s guaranteed to stay. Still, I don’t see that post aging very well. I worry about the same thing when picking which apps or services to include in my PhD research.

It’s a struggle any scholar working on tech and culture has. Even the most exciting books I’ve read that came out in the last year document and analyze websites that are not longer active. When our collective attention (and venture capitalist’s funding) jumps from latest app to newest device, it’s tough to predict what really has staying power. So I suppose the best alternative we can hope for is that something we’ve documented has some sort of influence as a precedent, a critical step in the genealogy of something big to come. Who knows, maybe in 2040, when Cyborgology turns 30, an emerging scholar will need some sort of reference to understand where that multi-billion dollar digitally-fit clothing industry came from and they’ll stumble upon my post. 

If so, I hope our image archive has degraded by then…

Gabi Schaffzin is a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism, with a concentration in Art Practice, at UC San Diego. He’s glad to know that those jeans really didn’t fit…it wasn’t just him being super un-hip.

About 60 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, there is a break in the already existing wall built on the border between the United States and Mexico. When you stand at the Shell Gas Station (the one with the Subway in it) off exit 73 on the I-8, near Jacumba, turn towards the southwest and look at the beginning of this fence opening. Paying attention to the terrain just east of where the last bar of steel juts out of the ground, it won’t take you long to figure out why the wall stops: anyone who attempts to travail the 10 miles of wilderness between the last road in Mexico and the Californian freeway must be well equipped physically and mentally.

This doesn’t mean that American border patrol agents don’t survey and patrol the space without a barrier. The militarization of the US-Mexico border started well before the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, President Clinton’s “war on crime”, or the “war on drugs”. In 1924, the US Border Patrol was created in an effort to keep immigrants from Asian countries from coming into the country. During that time, agents also sought to block illegal shipments of alcohol into the country during prohibition.

The 1996 “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act”, signed into law by Clinton, was responsible mainly for authorizing the mass deportation of undocumented migrants, as well as a major expansion of the barrier between the US and Mexico, as well as a secondary wall slightly north of the primary structure. After 9/11, billions more (one estimate has it at $286 billion since 1986) were poured into the border: Blackhawk helicopters, drones costing $18 million a piece, 20,000 border patrol agents in military grade Humvees, heat sensors, seismic sensors, motion sensors, and the willful disregard of vigilantes in border-adjacent towns all stand in the way of individuals looking to cross the border—and that’s once they get there.

A large number of the migrants come from Central America to escape political or gang violence. Once in Mexico, options to get to the US border are as dangerous as they are limited: one “popular” way to do it is by hitching a ride on top of a freight train known as La Beastia (The Beast), or El tren de la muerte (The Death Train). Riding this train means risking kidnapping, robbery, or serious injury (limbs are easily removed by obstacles along the train’s route). To reinforce a point made by immigrant and refugee rights activists the world wide, if someone is willing to risk absolutely everything for entry into this country, a place that, with all of its very real and very serious faults, is still safer than the place from where that individual is fleeing, what right do we have to deny them entry, treat them like an animal, arrest them, and/or deport them?

* * *

I’m writing this here because I’m not sure what else to write.

Cyborgology is a pretty laid back operation and I don’t necessarily feel pressure from my editors to post. But I’m listed as a contributor to this community and I’d like to live up to the title. Over the past few months, I’ve had some work and school obligations that have slowed me down, but what’s really kept me from posting since my last essay over six months ago is the absolute fear that (at the risk of being a digital dualist) what I’m going to write here does not have enough to do with what’s going on out there (I want to be very clear here that my colleagues at Cyborgology have written a good number of posts about the current administration and so my fear is not based on whether or not my fellow authors focus on the right issues—they do).

Reading about the immigrant detention centers inspired me to turn to a favorite of Cyborgology authors and prolific authority on discipline, Michel Foucault. I found plenty there to draw connections. Similarly, Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception would be extremely relevant here. And normally, that’s how I would start a post—think of a technology, say, seismic sensors embedded in the desert sand, and then turn to someone who has written abstractly about the sort of apparatus of control embedded within the sensor. Or I’d turn to the use of DNA testing for the reunification of families and consider what it means when an archive of marginalized bodies is being built anew, fortified with the very code of each individual’s physical manifestation.

I just don’t see where my analysis changes the fact that these abominations exist. Foucault was a brilliant historian—a self-proclaimed “archeologist” of power. He set up a multitude of signposts that we can read today to recognize how structures of society organize and control the individual. Has his work changed anything?

This is not an argument against online activism—we know how important and inclusive that element of resistance is. And it’s not a plea to ask you to get into the streets and start punching Nazis (for all I know, you’re already doing that). A few times during the last couple of years, I’ve gone out to the Jacumba wilderness and left water and supplies with an amazing organization called Border Angels. And I’ve attended a few protests. But, primarily, when I fret over what I’m doing to make change, I convince myself that being an artist, historian, and writer is what I do well and what I should keep doing. Is that going to be enough? I try hard to be an ally to the marginalized, but when does allyship fall too short?

* * *

My grandmother was lucky enough to escape Europe while the rest of her immediate family was sent to Auschwitz. Three of my great aunts, through a series of luck and generosity from otherwise barbaric Nazis, lived through the experience until the camp was liberated. They traveled on foot and by hitchhiking from one Red Cross shelter to another before finally getting back to their family’s house in Czechoslovakia. They discovered that their neighbors had taken over their home and the shop which their father ran from within. “You were dead,” their neighbors proclaimed, “we figured you weren’t coming back. This is ours now. Go back to being dead.”

Walking through the desert near the routes taken by migrants seeking a better life in the United States, you’ll see evidence of those people: empty cans of food, a body-sized imprint in the sand in a crawlspace. One time I saw a Little Mermaid backpack and another I saw two large dish sponges with shoelaces and foot imprints—most likely someone trying to walk without leaving footprints or disturbing a seismic sensor. How can I make sure that these people—if they make it through the mountains, and the desert, and past the helicopters and drones, and through the sensors, and to the highway, and out of detention centers—how can I make sure that they aren’t told, “go back to being dead”?

In our very first post, founding editors Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Patella-Rey wrote:

Facebook has become the homepage of today’s cyborg. For its many users, the Facebook profile becomes intimately entangled with existence itself. We document our thoughts and opinions in status updates and our bodies in photographs. Our likes, dislikes, friends, and activities come to form a granular picture—an image never wholly complete or accurate—but always an artifact that wraps the message of who we are up with the technological medium of the digital profile.

Too few people were talking about the internet in this way in 2010. Many were still paying close attention to Second Life more because it comported with prevailing theories of how identity worked online, not because it was representative of most people’s identity online. It was a different time: no one paid for music on the internet, men were afraid to walk out of the house with their new iPads, there was talk of Twitter Revolutions, Occupy gave us tons of opportunities to think about embodiment, planking was a thing, tattoos were talking to Nintendo 3DS’s, and the conversations around digital privacy that we have today were just taking their present form. The persistent media-rich profiles we made just a few years ago had lost their novelty and now we had to reckon with the context collapses, too-clean quantifications, algorithmic segregations, and liquid identities that they afforded.

Much has changed in the handful of years since Nathan and PJ started the blog. We say “cyborg” less and there are tons of new, wonderful people writing thoughtful essays and commentary about everything that is exciting, provocative, and downright frightening about our augmented society.

As always it is a pleasure to work alongside my co-editor Jenny and we couldn’t ask for a better crew of regular contributors: Crystal, Maya, Stephen, Gabi, Marley, Britney, and Sarah. And, of course, this site would be a 404 if it weren’t for Nathan and PJ.  To all of you and our guest contributors, Thank You!

It is hubris to predict the future but anniversaries are as good a time to look forward as they are to look back so here are a few topics and trends that seem worthy of research, debate, and clear-eyed thinking in the next year:

Geographic Thinking Will Take Prominence Alongside Historic, Anthropological, and Sociological Analysis

I study cities so maybe I am biased here but as more and more of our online interactions happen through our devices, instead of less-portable computers, geographic context will become a key component of social media’s affordances and thus our analyses of the social action that takes place on those services. Pair Snapchat’s recent map features with the steady increase of ride-sharing services and the continual fascination with the possibilities that drones represent, and it makes sense that geographers will be more helpful in understanding our digital age than ever before. We’re over-due for it anyway. As the recently-departed Edward Soja once said in his Postmodern Geographies: “For the past century, time and history have occupied a privileged position in the practical and theoretical consciousness of Western Marxism and critical social science. … Today, however, it may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the ‘making of geography’ more than the ‘making of history’ that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world.” Dromology (Paul Virilio’s term for the study of speed) also has a role to play here. As we seek out and interact with our friends across digital maps and subscribe to on-demand product delivery, the accounting and over-coming of large amounts of terrain and topology become an issue for individuals, not just nations’ armies.

The Return of InfoGlut

In 2013 Mark Andrejevic published Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know and that titular neologism was everywhere. Something similar is sorely needed again as “fake news” and its phenomenological antecedents pop up like mushrooms in the dark, damp swamp that is slowly engulfing our media landscape. The issue of too many people acting on and responding to information with questionable relationships to reality is serious, but framed badly. Yes there is too much misleading information out there but what is worse is that there is simply too much information being routed through algorithms that will mess up as surely as their human progenitors do. Perhaps we don’t need better information, just less.

Amazon is the New Facebook When It Comes to Privacy Norms

The recent headlines about Amazon Key, the service that lets couriers open your front door, are definitely having an outsized influence on my thoughts but I still think its accurate to say that Amazon —in its attempts to find and conquer new markets— will start playing with our privacy norms. This year alone it has released a slew of “echo” branded devices that judge your outfits and let people automatically turn on video chats to say nothing of their Alexa devices that are constantly listening. Amazon has every reason to feel like they can succeed where Facebook failed: while Facebook was pushing users to reveal more just as they were starting to share less, Amazon has actual products and services that it is offering consumers.

Acceptance and Mobilization Around Social Media Companies’ Authority

In 2014 Yo, Ello, and Emojli tried to shake us out of the social media duopoly of Twitter and Facebook, but fell short of establishing a beachhead. Let this next year be the time that we finish our grieving process and accept these imperfect companies as the major power-players for the foreseeable future. With this acceptance, should come a determination to build organizations that we feel comfortable living with. Instead of falling for the Silicon Valley myth that everything is a meritocracy and the next billion-dollar social media company is just one round of VC funding away, we must start doing the arduous work of reigning these companies in and learning to make demands of them. Not just regulation or transparency, but profit sharing and true, meaningful shared governance. If this doesn’t happen, we may stand to lose the cyborg selves we were just starting to understand.

This year was, by all accounts, a tumultuous one. The last 12 months did, however, produce some amazing work, and we’d like to share some of our favorite texts of 2016. Below are the media that made a lasting impression on us. more...

Just a quick note to commemorate the 6th birthday of Cyborgology. We’ve gone from a small band of grad students to a slightly larger band of grad students (and faculty) who live all around the world.  We’ve covered everything from the (probably) last presidential election to the resurgence of memes as a cultural object worthy of careful dissection and analysis (admit it—people were barely talking about those things for like a year or something).

We are proud to announce several new contributors to the blog, all of whom have been writing all month without a proper introduction:

• Crystal Abidin is covering everything viral including (but definitely not limited to) Pen Pineapple, Apple Pen, shifts in the influencer industry, and grotesque microcelebrity.
• Gabi Schaffzin has written about Angela Washko, the War on Science, the XOXO fest, and Mr. Robot.
• Stephen McNulty has essays up about trans rights, viral geographies, and media desire.
• Marley-Vincent Lindsey has got an essay up about the meme that fell from grace: Pepe. And, most recently, reflected on communities in World of Warcraft and the reserach that engendered.

And of course Britney Summit-Gil has been keeping track of the election and most recently wrote about all the tech around controlling people through controlling menstruation. Click on everyone’s names to get a list of everything they’ve written for the blog and be sure to check out the editors and authors page to read more about them. We are also looking forward to a few new regular by lines in the near future including Maya Indira Ganesh and Gabriele de Seta.

Your editors have been very busy as well! Jenny has taken a job at Australian National University and David earned his PhD last summer and is doing a bunch of different academic odd jobs. Co-Founder Nathan Jurgenson is crushing it with his new publication, Real Life Mag and PJ Patella-Rey is in the final stretch of dissertating.

Image source

Hello Everyone,

We are excited to announce that co-editors David A. Banks and Jenny Davis will be guest editing a special issue of the open access journal Social Sciences on Social Media, Internet, and Society. The CFP is below and we hope to get lots of submissions from the extended Cyborgology family! CFP and submission instructions are below and here.

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We here at Cyborgology recognize the extreme violence that has been done to the sincerity of birthdays. Facebook has hollowed out the intricate, cherished and beloved rituals of celebrating one’s birth and replaced them with virtual Starbucks gift cards and Pusheen stickers. We’ve taken the fake birthdays made up by journalists to heart and decided to celebrate the blog’s birthday (a day late, lol) with one really long post chock-a-block with announcements, retrospection, and nostalgia. So slow down, print out the post below, go to Cape Cod or somewhere that isn’t “online” and have a nice long read.

A note from Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey:

Four years ago, together, we launched a blog here at The Society Pages on technology and society. We pretty much just wanted to have fun with it, so we thought we’d name it something ridiculous–something that played on Donna Haraway’s classic conceptualization of the cyborg, which was at the root of our thinking and seemed to be missing in contemporary research. In four years, Cyborgology grew, added contributors, spun off the Theorizing the Web conference, and this blog has come to stand for a specific view of research and thinking about technology and society: one that understands them to be enmeshed; that rejects seeing the Internet as some separate, cyber, space; that speaks to broad publics; and that always takes into account social inequalities and vulnerabilities. We’re immensely proud of Cyborgology. We want nothing more than to see it stay energized and continue to grow. So, we have decided that, after four wonderful years, it is time for new leadership and fresh ideas. We are passing the blog over to long-time Cyborgologists David Banks and Jenny Davis, and we are excited to see what they’ll do running this show.

Happy birthday, Cyborgology. Take care of it, David and Jenny!

-Nathan & PJ

From the New Editors:

Hi, Cyborgology readers. Long time contributors David Banks and Jenny Davis here.

We are excited and humbled to take over editorship for the blog.

We want to take a moment to thank PJ and Nathan for creating this venue, which has thrived as a space for debate, critical thought, and the development of a theoretical perspective on technology in society. At the onset of the blog, Nathan and PJ wrote all of the content themselves, along with the tedious and technical work that goes on behind the scenes. They then grew the blog by carefully curating a team of ‘Cyborgologists,’ and working tirelessly to construct and maintain an intellectual community. We are all richer for their work.

David Banks became the first regular contributor, followed soon after by Jenny Davis. Here are our first ever posts (awww: David’s first post; Jenny’s first post).  It has been an honor to write for PJ and Nathan, and to write with our fellow Cyborgologists, Sarah Wanenchak, Whitney Erin Boesel, Robin James, and Dave Paul Strohecker.

We have lots of new ideas for the future–including more guest posts, so start brainstorming your submissions.  We are also committed to maintaining a tradition of rigorous, critical, and theoretically enriching writing and conversation.

Stick with us, there are big things to come.

-Jenny & David

Personal Messages from Cyborgologists

Nathan- I started Cyborgology four years ago with PJ Rey, and today we’re handing it to long-time Cyborgologists David Banks and Jenny Davis. I’m very excited for the future of the blog and happy to reflect on the past year. Again, the blog has been a central part of the Theorizing the Web conference, and #TtW14 was my favorite yet. We saw the inclusion of Robin James whose brilliant work has made the blog even more fun to read. The one post of my own from the past year I’d like to highlight was a short reaction to a news story about Facebook throwing a sociology conference. Akin to what I’ve seen firsthand in academic department meetings and conferences as well as in governmental and corporate research groups, so-called “big” data swiftly passes right by basic methodological and ethical issues because the N is sooo biiiig. A sociology graduate student was quoted discussing how neutral Facebook is as a research environment and I responded with a post about this fallacy of neutrality. I was going to leave it there because this was a bad news story quoting a graduate student. I didn’t want to make too much fuss about knocking a straw-position, but I kept seeing this same fallacy even among professors as well as data journalists, corporate social media engineers, governmental research, and so on. The straw people were forming some kind of tragic majority, which lead to expanding that piece into a longer essay for The New Inquiry on “big” data as a special form of contemporary positivism. Hopefully the blog will continue to be a site for examining knowledge-power relations of the social web — and I know there’s a lot of exciting new changes in store for Cyborgology’s fifth year!

PJ- It’s hard to believe that over four years have passed since Nathan and I sat in our neighborhood bar in DC, spitballing silly names for a technology and society blog. It seems impossible to have imagined where this idea was headed and how profoundly it would shape our experience as a grad students. Cyborgology allowed us to start communicating with a wide range people who were excited to discuss the same sorts of questions that we were asking about technology and society, even as our own department proved unreceptive. I quickly realized that many of the most profound insights on these issues were not coming from the conventional academic sources that grad students are taught to rely on (though journal articles and conferences certainly have their place). Most important, Cyborgology has connected me to my fellow Cyborgologists, who have been an invaluable source of support, information, and ideas. I consider myself incredibly fortunate for this. I wish Jenny and David luck as they step into their new roles as our chief editors. I expect Cyborgology’s fifth year to be its best yet!

My favorite post this year, Sex Work and the Limits of American Libertarianism, called out Silicon Valley companies for using free market rhetoric to justify discriminatory actions (namely, limiting sex workers’ access to payment processing and crowd-funding sites). While sex workers are particularly stigmatized, and thus particularly vulnerable to discrimination, these incidents exemplify a system of surveillance, risk identification, and social exclusion that increasingly exerts control over all our lives. I will be thinking about this a lot as I write my dissertation over the next year.

Jenny- I’m feeling pretty lucky that I got to spend another year blogging alongside, and exchanging gif-laden emails with, such a fantastic group of writers. Through the years, I’ve found that my favorite posts are the ones I never meant to write, but felt I had to write. This year, I wrote one such post, Digital Divide in Action: Lessons from a Canceled Flight, while sitting in an airport terminal, fueled by a few hours of sleep and lots of indignation. This post sticks out to me for its intersection of social theory and social justice, embedded in experience. The insistence upon combining social thought with social activism is a hallmark of Cyborgology, represented particularly well in numerous posts this year, such as Sarah Wanenchak’s critique of Apple’s Health app (along with a corpus of writing about gender and gaming), Robin James’ work on gender, capitalism, and ‘Lean In’ culture, and David Banks’ continued discussions of power and surveillance. Taking on a new editorial role this year, I hope to foster this kind of engagement among both regular contributors, and increasingly, guest bloggers. I look forward to bringing new voices into the mix and challenging myself, my fellow bloggers, and our readers, to contend with lines of thought we haven’t yet considered.

David- This last year was a blast!  I had a great time writing Modern Myths: Mundane Enchantment and Creating Ghosts and Enhance! Ugly Websites, Flip Phones, and the Trouble With Technology in Storytelling with Sarah. Fellow Cyborgolgists have also been tearing it up this year with Robin’s ongoing work on neoliberalism, Sarah’s gaming culture coverage, and Jenny’s insightful posts on her own rules for writing and researching. This has been a really productive year for me. My November essay Voting Reduces Diversity in Social Media Participation (Kinda) was the beginning of research that turned into my first New Inquiry essay which I was very proud of. I also really liked the conversations that formed around The Parable of the Coffee Maker and the Design Sir and my two essays (1 & 2) about wearables. My favorite essay of the year though has to be Open (Source) for Business. That essay came out of some serious frustrations with my own dissertation research, where I am constantly working with open source software and hardware that can be maddeningly buggy or confusing. I certainly agree with and support the philosophy of free software but the execution (even in my own work) almost always falls short for common users. It’s a sticky problem that I see myself returning to in the coming year. I also want to play with the form of posts more, perhaps returning to the style that I experimented with in Time Traveling in Troy, New York. I’ve been really inspired by my fellow Cyborgologists to experiment and push the limits of my writing and I hope that as I take on a more editorial role, I can spend more time playing with form as well as content. I’m immeasurably excited to be taking on this new role and working with my fiends for another year. Finally, in case anyone was wondering, I’m still waiting to hear back about my application for the #AmtrakResidency.

Sarah- This last year has been marked by a great deal of transition and reexamination – with my career, with where I live, with what I do and what I want and what truly matters to me. I think my writing here has been a reflection of that, and part of the process for me has been learning to be comfortable with letting more and more of it show – or at least learning to be comfortable with the discomfort. Probably one of the posts that stands out the most to me is “Gravitational Lensing: death, twitter, and (not) making sense of it all“. It was written shortly after my cousin’s sudden and unexpected death from suicide, and is an example of the kind of painful, raw, messy place to which I’d like to have the courage to go more often. It was a revelation for me, before even this last year, that I could write emotion into theory, that I could be sad and angry and passionate and it wouldn’t detract from the quality of what I produced. One of the most damaging things that academia can do, I think, is teach you that powerful emotion is antithetical to good work. So I’ve been unlearning that, and in the coming year I want to keep unlearning. I want to be braver than I have been in terms of where I go and what I’m willing to write about, and I want to push the boundaries of what kind of writing appears here. I want to charge headlong into places I find frightening. I think that’s where some of the best work often comes from.

Robin- Two of my most successful posts this year were On Twitter’s Gender Metric & Femininity As Technology. When I wrote them, thought the argument I was making was so obvious that the posts were more or less filler (that is, they weren’t breaking any new ground, just me blabbing on when I couldn’t think of something more innovative to say). And was I wrong about that! So one thing I learned this year is that I’m a pretty bad judge of what people will find interesting.

My favorite posts of the year were generally the ones about music and sound: A Culture of Moderation: or, no more messages from Satan, Coincidental Consumption & the Thinkpiece Economy, & Big Data & the Physics of Social Harmony. My favorite posts to write are the ones that begin as class discussion with my students; the posts are my attempt to follow up on the ideas and questions my students and I pursued together. For example, my summer 2014 class on Theories of Neoliberalism resulted in Social Media, Because Neoliberalism?, The Financialized Girl, Yo, It’s Communicative Capitalism, & An Attempt At A Precise & Substantive Definition of Neoliberalism. My students are amazingly smart and they push me to be a better thinker; these posts are evidence of that.

Reach Out And Touch…: On Audio Social Media is one post I wish more people would read…especially every time the “why is there no Instagram for sound?” question pops up (again). There, I argue that the reason it’s so hard to make an Instagram for sound is not so much about sound so much as it is about the kind of sociality that social media is designed to support.

I suspect that future posts will be related to both (a) the new book manuscript I’m writing, which is about the relationships among post-identity politics, big data, and neoliberal political economy, and (b) the classes I teach. This spring I’m set to teach Feminist Philosophy & a pop music appreciation class, so I bet there will be some posts stemming from class readings and discussions.

Most Viewed Posts Written This Year

1. Femininity as a technology: some thoughts on hyper employment by Robin James
2. The Coolest Thing About Online Dating Sites by Jenny Davis
3. Apple’s Health App: Where’s the Power? by Sarah Wanenchak
4. Causes and Consequences of the Duckface by Jenny Davis
5. A Social Critique Without Social Science by David A Banks
6. Autobiography Through Devices (Part 1) by David A Banks
7. Don’t Say Seminal, It’s Sexist by Jenny Davis
8. On Pharrell’s “Happy” by Robin James
9. Toward a Drone Sexuality – Part 1: Knowledge and consent by Sarah Wanenchak
10. An attempt at a precise & substantive definition of ‘neoliberalism,’ plus some thoughts on algorithms by Robin James

As most of Cyborgology readers know, the blog puts on a conference called Theorizing the Web (now in it’s fourth year). We have some exciting new ideas for 2014. By popular demand, #TtW14 will now–for the first time–feature two full days of programming. We’ve also moved out of an academic-institutional space and into a gorgeous warehouse in Brooklyn, NYC. All of this means that, in addition to the competitively-selected papers and invited speakers, we can experiment with more ways to push the norms of academic conferences. The goal of Theorizing the Web has always been to create the event we’d want to attend.

If you are interested in presenting at Theorizing the Web, here’s the call for papers.

Anyone can attend, you just have to sign up. Traditional conferences get expensive and often leave people who don’t have some sort of institutional backing out in the cold. We want to include as many as possible, so TtW works on a pay-what-you-can model (minimum $1). This means that those with limited funds can still attend, relying on the generosity of those who can afford a little more. Register and pay what you can here.

All the information you’ll need should be on the conference website, and, if not, feel free to comment below or write to theorizingtheweb@gmail.com.

If you think others would be interested in this event, please share. The Twitter hashtag is: #TtW14

Thanks for all the support these first three years, and we’re excited for the fourth Theorizing the Web!

Today is Cyborgology’s third birthday (see the first post)! Each year we do a little reflecting. more...

If you’re a regular reader of Cyborgology, chances are good that you caught the most recent “brouLOL” (yes, that’s like a 21^st century brouhaha) over digital dualism and augmented reality. If you’re a careful reader of Cyborgology, chances are good you also caught (at least) one glaring omission in much of the writing featured in this wave of commentary. What was missing?

Ladies, gentlemen, and cyborgs, allow me to (re)introduce you to Jenny Davis (@Jup83) and Sarah Wanenchak (@dynamicsymmetry)—oh yeah, and my name’s Whitney Erin Boesel (I’m @phenatypical). None of us identify as men, and all of us have written about digital dualism. In fact, you may have seen our work referenced recently under some collective noms de plume: “the other digital dualism denialists,” “others on this blog,” “others,” “other Cyborgologists,” “other regular contributors,” etc. If you’re a crotchety sociologist with a penchant for picking apart language (ahem: guilty), it doesn’t get much better than this. During the conversation earlier this month, the named and cited Cyborgologists were (almost) always men—while Jenny, Sarah, and I were referenced obliquely (at best) in an unnamed “other” category. more...