reviews

A “catfish” is someone who misrepresents themselves online. This is all you really need to know about the movie catfish. The rest is kind of hard to describe, like trying to explain the movie Inception after you just watched it one time. I don’t want to debate the authenticity of the film, because it doesn’t really matter to this discussion (read about it on the wiki). I want to talk about the film’s noteworthy use of social media and the probing questions that it raises for scholars of new technology and Web 2.0.

The film incorporates social media in a very integral and experiential way. The producers take a pretty postmodern approach to depict the characters and draw out the narrative of the film. Mirroring some of the techniques seen Cloverfield or the Blair Witch Project, similar pseudo-documentary mystery narratives, hand-held cameras and panning screenshots allow us to experience the characters, to develop the plot arc, and to eventually come to the realization that all is not what it seems. We experience the characters through social media, as the protagonist Nev is gradually introduced to the family of a young girl Abby.  The camera pans across grainy computer screens, as Nev clicks through the Facebook profiles of the films characters and we, by proxy “get to know” these characters. The point of this exercise is for the viewer to gradually build trust for the characters alongside the central character Nev. So in effect, the film takes the technique of Takashi Miike in Audition The film builds this trust and then quickly shatters it, at which point the trust we had for the characters is broken. more...

“We’re not computers, […] we’re physical,” explains the Blade Runner‘s chief antagonist, a replicant named Roy Batty.  In this moment of dialogue, Blade Runner engages a frequent themes of the Cyborgology blog—the implosion of atoms and bits, which we term “augemented reality.”  In this statement, Roy unpacks the assumption that digitality and physicality are mutually exclusive, while, simultaneously, transcending the boundary between the two.  Put simply, Roy is contending that computers cease to be mere computers when they become embodied.  In contrast to the familiar theme of cyborganic trans-humanism, Roy is articulating (and embodying) the obverse theory: trans-digitalism.

This Copernican turn—de-centering humans’ role in understanding of the universe—is, undoubtedly, one of the great contributions  of the cyberpunk genre (and science fiction, more broadly).  Quite provocatively, it points to the possibility of a sociology, or even anthropology, where humans are no longer the direct object of inquiry.  The question, here, shifts, from how we are shaped by and interact with our tools, to how technology itself becomes an actors (or even agents!) in a particular social milieu. more...

During his plenary address a Theorizing the Web 2011, entitled “Why the Web Needs Post-Modern Theory,” George Ritzer was deeply critical of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s (2011), The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), a book which has received a great deal of media attention in recent months, for it’s lack of theoretical foundations.  The editors of the Cyborgology obtained the following excerpt from Ritzer’s paper:

The nature of, and problems with, a modernist approach are clear in Siva Vaidhyanathan’s (2011), The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). We were drawn to this book because the title is similar to, if not an outright rip off of, two similarly modernist books written by one of the authors of this paper- The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer, 1993/2011) and the Globalization of Nothing (Ritzer, 2003/2007). Thus we know from whence we speak in seeing Googlization as a modernist work and as such in understanding its liabilities (and strengths). In addition, while Ritzer’s works (mentioned above) use modern theories and ideas (e.g. rationalization) to deal with such clearly modern phenomena as the fast food restaurant and, more generally, the world of consumption, Vaidhyanathan employs modern ideas (not full-fledged theories) to deal with the arguably postmodern world of the Internet, Web 2.0 and especially Google. more...

The panel I organized for the Theorizing the Web conference was called, “Cyber Racism, Race & Social Media.”  A key theme of all the papers in this session was that race, racism and caste, are enduring features of media across geographic and temporal boundaries, and across cultures.

In the late 1990s, a popular television commercial advertisement captured the zeitgeist of thinking about the web at that time.

This notion that the Internet is a place where “there is no race,” is also one that’s permeated Internet studies.  Early on scholars theorized that the emergence of virtual environments and a culture of fantasy would mean an escape the boundaries of race and the experience of racism.  A few imagined a rise in identity tourism, that is, people using the playful possibilities of gaming to visit different racial and gender identities online (Nakamura, 2002; Turkle, 1997).

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Theorizing the Web 2011 was held on April 9th 2011 at the University of Maryland’s Art-Socy building.  It far exceeded our expectations in every way.  We received over 100 abstract submissions of which were able to accept 53%.  We were joined by Internet research experts from around the world, including presenters who traveled from Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Europe.  The conference pushed the capacity limits of the venue with over 230 official registrants and easily 250 people in attendance throughout the day.  Events ran from registration at 8 AM and ended with an afterparty that wound down around 11 PM.  The program was packed with as many as five concurrent panels in early sessions.  The plenary sessions by George Ritzer and Saskia Sassen as well as danah boyd‘s keynote drew audiences of over 150 people.

Sessions covered a wide range of topics pertaining to the social web, including the politics of infrastructure; the role of social media in contemporary social uprisings; the reproduction of race, class, gender, sexuality, and their intersections in a digital milieu; the co-determinacy of the online and offline world (i.e., “augmented reality”) and the dangers of viewing them in isolation; the performance of the self through one’s online Profile and the increasing need to accept the cyborg subject as sociology’s proper unit of analysis; the Internet as more post-Modern than the original objects of analysis under consideration by the post-Modern theorists; the new economies of the Web and the limits of traditional (e.g., Marxian, neo-liberal) modes of thought; the reconfiguration of norms pertaining to privacy/publicity; the democratization of (formerly expert) knowledge via crowdsourcing (e.g., Wikipedia); and the capacity of art to capture/predict our changing relationship with technology. more...

This content is reposted from Bonnie Stewart’s cribchronicals blog.

Theorizing the Web 2011 was a wicked conference. It was also a bit of a meta-experience in augmented reality.

Maybe not textbook augmented reality, admittedly, since – as happens at geek conferences – the sheer multitude of smart phones and laptops present overpowered the wireless system and the majority of us couldn’t get online much. I was disappointed that I couldn’t tweet a few of the presentations: one of the joys of digital participation is in turning a monologue into a forum, a conversation of sorts. more...

Saturday was Theorizing the Web, the culmination of weeks, nay, months of planning, organizing, and seemingly endless design work. In addition to building the website, laying out the programs, designing collateral and getting personalized nametags completed, I added on another project to my list called Public/Private. Projected in the main atrium, it consisted of a Twitter feed styled to match the TtW branding, and an ever-changing image next to it.  This project was far more experimental than anything I’d attempted before, and like many experiments it had mixed results.

Functionally, it did exactly what I wanted it to do; it took all of the conference-related tweets with the hashtag #ttw2011 and performed a Google image search for non-common words, then displayed the first medium-sized result along with the feed. As I hoped, some of the images directly illustrated the words searched while others left us either scratching our heads or laughing.  One of the great aspects of the search function is the image cache, which has left me with a permanent record of what words were searched and all the images displayed with them. more...