reviews

This past weekend, the first Theorizing the Web conference was a great success, but as part of the committee, I didn’t get to check out most of the fantastic work that was presented. Yet, the one panel I did get to sit down in the audience for, “Counter-Discourses: Resistance and Empowerment on Social Media,” did not disappoint. In fact, it has taken me back to my work with a passion. Not so long ago, I wrote a blog post on Google Bombing, and this panel really triggered an interesting question: In the Foucauldian sense of power/knowledge, what does visibility mean in the era of augmented reality?

Each of the panelists presented work on discourses produced online. Each were empirically driven, some more so than others, but each addressed the notion of visibility in some way. For instance, in Katy Pearce’s work on the homeless using Twitter she found through social organizations, activists, and simply those who care, they were able to make their issues and concerns visible. Similarly, Randy Lynn and Jeff Johnson’s work examined how the use of karma on Reddit reinforced patriarchal and even misogynist discourse. By users voting up or down comments, the measure of karma literally works in such a way that the comments with the most karma are most visible, appearing at the top. These examples, along with the others brought me back to my own work. more...

Aimée Morrison (@digiwonk) posted a review of Theorizing the Web 2011 on her digiwonk blog.  See full text below:

What makes a great conference?

I’m not yet home from Theorizing the Web 2011, just sitting in the Starbucks at the Marriott wondering what it is that made this conference so awesome. Because it was awesome: I ran out of paper in my notebook from writing so much down.

I’m thinking it’s the grad students.

I go to a lot of conferences and, if I may be frank, was rapidly becoming disenchanted, nay, jaded, about the whole system. more...

Yes, even a CGI-filled big-budget glowing Disney spectacle can provide opportunity for theorization. Of the recent Internet-themed blockbusters – namely, Avatar (2009); The Social Network (2010) – Tron: Legacy (2010) best captures the essence of this blog: that the digital and the physical are enmeshed together into an augmented reality.

This seems surprising given that the film is premised on the existence of a separate digital world. Indeed, the first Tron (1982) is all about a strict physical-digital dualism and the sequel plays on the same theme: physical person gets trapped in a digital world and attempts to escape. However, Tron: Legacy explores the overlapping of the physical and digital. The story goes that Flynn, the hero from the 1982 film, develops a digital world that does not have the imperfections of its physical counterpart. His grand vision was to gloriously move humanity online. Simultaneously, the beings in the digital world want to export their perfection out of the digital world and to colonize the offline world, removing all of its imperfections (i.e., us). Flynn comes to realize that enforced perfection (read: Nazism) is unwanted. Instead of a highly controlled and orderly universe, what has to be appreciated is what emerges out of chaos. And it is here that the film makes at least two theoretical statements that are well ahead of most movies and popular conceptions of the digital.

First is the tension between more...

Last week, Wiley-Blackwell held an online conference, entitled: Wellbeing: A Cure-all for the Social Sciences? I was an invited respondent for a paper that might be of  interest to Cyborgology readers called, “Internet Technology and Social Capital: How the Internet Affects Seniors’ Social Capital and Wellbeing.”  Below, I have reproduced my summary and comments more...

We’re not living fully in our lives.  We’re living a little bit in our lives and a little bit in our Facebook lives.

Sherry Turkle has never failed to be a provocative and insightful theorist of human-technology interaction, but on this point, I could not disagree more.  Unfortunately, Turkle continues to reify the false dichotomy between the digital and material worlds.  We are NOT half in the digital and half in the virtual world.  Instead, we are all fully immersed into an augmented reality.

Moreover, I would argue that Second Life has become red herring in the digital/material debate.  Most Internet users don’t even know what Second Life is.  The paradigmatic example of online-offline interaction, at this historical moment, is Facebook, particularly Facebook mobile apps.

In any case, you can read the interview here and judge for yourself.