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I was doing a post on writing for my author blog, and I wanted an image for it, so off to the Flickr Creative Commons search I went. I searched the “writing’ keyword. Almost all of what I got back was some version of the above. Almost all of the rest of it was just random stuff. There were a few shots of laptops or computers but they nearly always also prominantly included notebooks and pens/pencils. Do a Google image search for “writing” and you get the same damn thing. All very attractive photos of pens and hands and often lovely, swooping script.

I do not write that way.

I can’t write that way.

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A recent New York Times opinion piece by Hannah Seligson has declared “the unhappy marriage” to be “Facebook’s last taboo.”  As a scholar of Facebook, I found the singling out of marriage rather odd. For years now, critics have been decrying the general lack of unhappy anything on Facebook, arguing that the level of self-monitoring typical on the site strips it of authenticity and relational value. While it’s true that most people try to limit the amount of negativity they display on Facebook (as in any semi-public social space), and the interface itself privileges good news, Facebook users are leveraging the medium specifically for the delivery of “bad” (or uncertain) news.

That Facebook is a semi-public space with most, if not all, social norms for public spaces carrying over from face-to-face interaction is now a commonly accepted definition of the platform.  In fact, Seligson touches on this a number of times, comparing Facebook, for instance, to cocktail parties for which the married couple hosting must put aside private squabbles and present a united front.  That the space is now theoretically visible to hundreds or even thousands of Facebook “friends” certainly reflects a change of scale. more...

This post is co-authored with Justin D Burton.

File under “not at all surprising”: we are pretty sure Beats Music is sniffing users’ Gmail and feeding that info into their “Just For You” recommendations. A few weeks ago I (Robin) mentioned to Justin that I thought this was happening to me, and then he discovered that it’s likely happened to him, too.

Justin: I found a most welcome message in my inbox a few days ago. I teach popular music at Rider University, and a friend who knows 1). winter break is hyper-writing time and 2). I’m always on the lookout for writing and thinking music (you know, a friend) was recommending a recent Hot Since 82 mix I might try. I wrote back to coolly express my gratitude (“OMG! Thanks so much for this!!!”), made a mental note to download it when I was back from traveling, and went back to thinking of snarky things to say about year-end music lists. A few days later, as I scrolled through my Beats “Just For You” section, hoping to find the perfect soundtrack for my morning coffee (*not* The-Dream), there was Hot Since 82’s 2014 album, Knee Deep in Sound. I’ve only been using Beats for a couple of months, so my “Just For You” list is culled from my listening habits in recent weeks (mostly Nicki Minaj, Azealia Banks, and Rihanna…okay, fine, also Drake) and music I may or may not much like but play in the classroom to critique with my students (this is how The-Dream and most of my rock recommendations find their way to being “just for me”). In other words, I’m very interested in Hot Since 82, but it’s not likely Beats would know that yet. Unless, of course, Beats had peeped my email. I like that Hot Since 82 is part of my profile now–Data Claus stuffed some much-appreciated variety in my JFY stocking. But I have this feeling that maybe Beats reading my Gmail isn’t always going to work out so well…

Robin: I made the mistake of hate-watching an episode of Dave Grohl’s HBO series “Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways,” and then I made the further mistake of emailing someone about how awful it was, the Rock Dads and the nationalism and the interview with President Obama, like he was a musicology Ph.D. not a J.D. I mentioned Dave Grohl by name in the email, and then within a few days, the Foo Fighters–who I have never listened to on Beats (nor have I listened to Nirvana…L7 or Ministry are about as close as I get)–were all over my “Just For You” recommendations. It felt almost like the algorithmic version of the U2 album appearing in my iTunes: here is some music that I really, really don’t want in my digital space, crowding up my music feed. (I mean, it’s probably not coincidental that Apple is behind both the U2 album and Beats.) It also felt a bit like a Rickroll: I was surprised with unwanted music where I least expected it to show up. (In retrospect, the old internet meme of Rickrolling seems like it foreshadows late 2014’s series of unwanted media objects dropped in users’ feeds or libraries.) More importantly, Beats’ recommendation algorithm seems to be weighing my emails more heavily than my actual behavior in the app itself (my favoriting, my searches, what I actually listen to)–but I’d need to know more about it before saying anything more definitive.

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Note: This is half conventional Cyborgology post – if such a thing can be said to exist – and half explanation/personal apologia. It’s front-loaded with the latter. I usually assume it’s understood that when I have an opinion it’s not CYBORGOLOGY’S OPINION, all official-like, but I want to be very clear about that here for reasons that will become evident.

It seemed almost like fate, the way Vice’s tech blog Motherboard launched its new online science fiction short story magazine – somewhat ironically called Terraform – the day after nominations opened for the Nebula awards and all us SFF (science fiction and fantasy) writers were bemoaning the sheer amount of reading we all had to do to even have a prayer of being able to participate in the process.

Here’s why:

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One of the most dangerous misconceptions about our present political climate is that it is broken. That too many “bad apples” have achieved high-ranking positions and it s their greed and malfeasance that is to blame for rising inequality and state-sanctioned violence. Overcrowded prisons, rapid gentrification, industrial disasters, and predatory banking practices aren’t bugs, they’re features of our current historical moment. Even if CEOs and presidents wanted to end any of these problems tomorrow, they could easily be sued or even jailed for threatening their bottom lines. And while we should never hold critics to the impossible standard of “come up with a better system” it never hurts, from time to time, to play Minecraft with words and come up with some replacements for the current way of doing things. What would a vastly better technological society look like? more...

So it’s pretty hard to find a critique of Taylor Swift’s new record that isn’t also (or mostly) misogynist. As they say in academia, consider this piece an attempt to fill that gap in the literature. I may get to the actual record later, but for now I want to think about her business model.

Swift made headlines this week for two different, but ultimately, I think, related moves. First, she pulled her music from the free streaming part of Spotify. In an interview with Yahoo music, she explained that she was

not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.

In an economy that has made free labor a de facto requirement for middle-class and creative jobs, Swift’s claim about fair compensation seems, on the one hand, laudable. From this perspective, she’s pushing back on the increasing demand for unwaged labor. But then we have to ask, on Spotify, whose labor is free? What about the fan labor of training the streaming algorithms? Of liking and unliking, skipping and playlist building? Swift doesn’t mention the unfairness of this sort of free labor. In her view, “art” deserves to be compensated…but maybe fan labor, which is a kind of care work, doesn’t deserve such ‘fair’ compensation. Or, to use some of Swift’s own language, the “amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work” is deserving of fair compensation, but the affective labor of fandom isn’t? From this perspective, Swift’s refusal to perform free labor sounds a lot like bourgeois white feminist demands for waged labor that then pass the underwaged care work off to less privileged women. (Eric Harvey has some really incisive things to say about Swift v Spotify here.) more...

The blow-up over Samaritans Radar is a couple of weeks old now, but I still want to say something about it, because – watching stuff about it spin past on my Twitter timeline – some things struck me.

For those who don’t know, Samaritans Radar is/was a Twitter app – which makes use of the Twitter API – that allowed one to monitor someone’s Twitter profile for any tweets that suggested plans or intentions to commit suicide, and would accordingly send notifications to the person monitoring. It’s since been yanked while the developers hopefully sit in a corner and think about what they’ve done, but the intention was – ostensibly – to enable family, friends, and other loved ones to identify when someone was in trouble in situations where it might otherwise be difficult to tell and to reach out to that person, offering help and counsel.

All well and good, except for how no.

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Meet the folks who make the Cyborgology Blog happen.

Editors

David A Banks (@da_banks) is a writer, researcher, and teacher. He is co-chair for Theorizing the Web, editor-at-large for Real Life, and Associate Research Advisor for the Social Science Research Council. His work has also been featured in Real Life, The New Inquiry, The Baffler, Tikkun Magazine, The Alt, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. David’s work focuses on the geographies of authenticity: how places buy and sell their histories to visitors and potential new residents, usually on social media. He’s also interested in the ideological training of engineers. When he isn’t writing he is watching Star Trek with his partner Britney and their two cats. 

Jenny Davis (@Jenny_L_Davis) is a lecturer in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She studies identity, culture, and technology. She approaches her research theoretically and methodologically from multiple directions, utilizing formal theory and experimental work, participant observation and ethnography. She is engaged in several ongoing projects which often make guest appearances—in varying forms—through the content of her blog posts. Her publications appear in Sociology, Communication, and Interdisciplinary journals. An active proponent of accessible scholarship, you can find select articles un-paywalled on her academia.edu page. When she’s not teaching, writing, or editing Cyborgology, she’s running amok after three particularly high-energy dogs.

Regular Contributors

Crystal Abidin (@wishcrys) Dr Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist and ethnographer. She researches vernacular internet cultures and study young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. Her current projects look at contemporary internet folklore, grief and death in digital spaces, romance and coupling in public spaces, and mixed heritage. She is presently finishing up two monographs on blogshop culture and the Influencer industry. Crystal is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, Researcher with the Swedish Retail and Wholesale Development Council, and Adjunct Research Fellow with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University

Nathan Ferguson (@natetehgreat) is a writer who lives in Columbia, MO. He has a BA in creative writing and is interested in narratives – their affordances as a technology and in conjunction with other technologies, e.g. mass media and digital platforms, but also race, gender and carceral systems. When he’s not writing for Cyborgology or occupied at his desk job, he is active in the Mid-MO DSA chapter, learning to cook, hanging out with his girlfriend B or probably somewhere petting a cat.

Maya Indira Ganesh (@mayameme) Maya is an Indian feminist researcher, writer, and activist living in Berlin where she works with Tactical Technology Collective as the Director of Applied Research. At Tactical Tech, she works as an in-house writer, leads the organisation’s projects on Gender and Technology, and does research to support the organisation’s work on the social and political implications of living in a data society. She has a particular interest in ethnographic approaches to how individuals and communities interact with technology, from in-depth portraits of mobile phone use by women, and queer people in Bombay, to how LGBTQ, black, mixed race, and working class activists in Kenya and South Africa negotiate privacy and security in using technology for organising and activism. She conducted one of the first studies of Indian women’s online spaces in 2008, identifying patterns of online harassment, and intimacy, in the Indian internet. She has Masters degrees in Applied Psychology (Delhi, 1997) and Media and Cultural Studies (Sussex, 2007), and is a doctoral candidate at Leuphana University, Lüneburg studying how ethics is being shaped in terms of accountability for artificial intelligence in autonomous vehicles.

Gabi Schaffzin (@GabiSchaffzin) is pursuing his PhD in Art History with an Art Practice concentration at the University of California San Diego. His art and research consider the visual representation of pain and illness in a technologically mediated world dominated by a privileging of data over all else. You can see the emerging dialog between his research and artistic practice—much of which draws on the imagery and rhetoric of advertising and product design—at utopia-dystopia.com.

Marley-Vincent Lindsey (@MarleyVincentL) is a doctoral student in history at Brown University. He was happily studying Medieval Europe and the Hispanic Atlantic in college when he took a class called “Critical Videogame Studies.” Upon realizing people could (and should!) take the web seriously, he started writing about games, digital media and the digital humanities. Currently, he’s thinking about how the web transforms old questions asked by historians, how historical tropes are currently used and transformed online, and how people will write histories in the future (hint: with archives of memes and messengers.) In his spare hour, he’s probably playing Pokémon or exploring cities.

Jessie Sage (@sapiotextual) is an independent scholar interested in sex work advocacy, feminism, and reproductive justice. She has received an MA in Philosophy from Duquesne University, a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Duquesne University, an MA in Theology from the Graduate Theological Union at UC Berkeley, and a BA in philosophy from the University of San Diego. She has taught philosophy, ethics, and women’s and gender studies at Duquesne University and Chatham University, and has also worked as a doula. She currently works as a Pittsburgh based alternative model, clip producer, phone entertainer, and feminist activists. She is the co-creator, producer and host of the Peepshow Podcast (peepshowpodcast.com), a podcast which brings together sex workers, writers, activists, artists, and journalist to talk about issues of sex and social justice; and the co-founder of Pittsburgh’s Sex Worker Outreach Project (@PghSWOP).

Britney Summit-Gil (@bsummitgil) is a PhD student in Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research includes mass media representations and the negotiation of identity in digital environments, specifically constructions of masculine identities. She’s interested in bridging traditional humanities-based approaches with qualitative sociological methods, such as textual analysis informed by ethnographic inquiry. Her academic focus includes community building online, the “postfeminist” media landscape, and the various ways people interpret mass media texts from television and film to inform their understanding of the world. Using affect theory, rhetorical theory, and cultural and media studies approaches she tries, with varying degrees of success, to map the intersections of mass media, digital media, and capitalist ideologies. She lives in upstate New York with two awesome cats and her spouse David Banks. In her spare time she makes cookies, watches trash TV, and browses Reddit because “research.”

Sarah Wanenchak (@dynamicsymmetry) is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Maryland, where their work concerns technology and social movements and how emotion and meaning evolve when the two merge. They have also written extensively on the intersections of social justice, narrative, and video games, and their essay work has been featured in The New Inquiry. They write science fiction and fantasy under a pseudonym and have published several novels to date, and their short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, as well as in multiple Year’s Best collections. They spend way too much time yelling about things on Twitter.

Past Contributors

Whitney Erin Boesel (@weboesel) is a researcher at both the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the MIT Center for Civic Media, where she uses qualitative methods and network analysis to study framing and influence in online media (particularly as related to sexual and reproductive health and rights). She is a co-chair of the International Workshop on Misogyny and the Internet (Cambridge, June 2015), an organizer of the annual conference Theorizing the Web (NYC), and an organizer of the unconference Point to Point Camp (Cambridge, May 2015); in her “spare time,” she continues her ongoing (since 2010) ethnographic study of the group Quantified Self and does occasional freelance writing. Her Masters thesis focused on direct-to-consumer genetic testing, personal genomics, and self-tracking practices as part of a new form of biomedicalization that she cheekily terms “biomedicalization 2.0”; her undergraduate thesis was a three-act play. Her other major (academic) interests include social media, sex and gender, and the sociology of emotion; her theatre scripts have been performed in Cambridge, MA, and her creative writing has appeared both under her legal name and under various pseudonyms. [Whitney uses her full name in professional or formal contexts, and her last name is pronounced “basil”—like the herb.]

Robin James (@doctaj) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of two books: Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism will be published by Zer0 books in early 2015, and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music was published by Lexington Books in 2010. Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in The New Inquiry, Noisey, SoundingOut!, Hypatia, differences, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is also a digital sound artist and musician. Her website, which has PDFs of all her publications, is its-her-factory.com.

David Paul Strohecker (@dpsFTW) is getting his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies under Patricia Hill Collins and George Ritzer, focusing on issues of intersectionality, consumption, and popular culture. He got his BA in 2009 from Texas A&M University, where he studied under Joe R. Feagin, and wrote for the blog RacismReview.com. He currently studies popular culture, but remains interested in issues of race relations, white privilege, and gender inequality. He is currently doing work on the popularization of tattooing, a project on the revolutionary pedagogy of public sociology, and more theoretical work on zombie films as a vehicle for expressing social and cultural anxieties.

Founding Editors

Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) is a social media theorist, contributing editor at The New Inquiry, a researcher at Snapchat, and a sociology graduate student at the University of Maryland. The research is driven most fundamentally by the understanding that we increasingly live in an “augmented reality,” a perspective that views the digital and physical as enmeshed, opposed to viewing them as distinct (what he calls “digital dualism”). Nathan is also interested in and has published on how social media has triggered the rise of the digital “prosumer” (one who produces that which they consume and vice versa). Most recently, Nathan has been writing about surveillance, privacy, visibility, and the self. This is being applied to social media and photography for a forthcoming book, and in other work, the design of social platforms around ephemerality and metrics.

PJ Rey (@pjrey) is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland. He co-founded the annual Theorizing the Web conference and the Cyborgology Blog together with Nathan Jurgenson. His MA thesis argued that social media is an environment where exploitation thrives in a relative absence of alienation. He is beginning dissertation research examining digitally-mediated sex work with a particular interest in how such work is experienced as embodied interaction. When not dissertating, he dabbles in portrait/event photography and hifi geekery.

Guest Authors

Nilofar Ansher (@culture_curate) is pursuing her Master of Arts in Ancient Civilizations from the University of Mumbai, India. She is an editor, writer and researcher and blogs at http://www.trailofpapercuts.wordpress.com.

Jeremy Antley (@jsantley) is a writer/student/gamer who currently lives in Portland, OR and writes on all sorts of interests on his blog, Peasant Muse.

Sally Applin (@AnthroPunk) is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, in the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing (CSAC). Sally researches the impact of technology on culture, and vice versa.

Mike Bulajewski (@MrTeacup) is a Master’s student in Human-Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington.

Piergiorgio Degli Esposti (@pgde) studies Market and Consumption Behavior and is Assistant professor at Bologna University, Italy and a Marketing Consultant.

Ned Drummond (@maneatingflower) is a designer and artisan currently living in Washington, DC.

Nathan Fisk (@nwfisk) is a danah boyd fanboy and adjunct lecturer teaching “Youth and Teens Online” in the Science & Technology Studies department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Doug Hill (@DougHill25) is a journalist and independent scholar who has studied the history and philosophy of technology for fifteen years. More of this and other technology-related topics can be found on his blog, The Question Concerning Technology.

Rob Horning (@marginalutility) is an editor of the New Inquiry.

Airi Lampinen (@airi_) is a graduate student in Social Psychology at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Currently, she is interning at Microsoft Research New England.

Tanya Lokot (@tanyalokot) is a second-year PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a degree in journalism and media studies. Her interests include social social movements, urban protest in post-Soviet countries, digital media, augmented dissent, memes and data visualization.

Cheri Lucas (@cherilucas) focuses on literary nonfiction and memoir on her blog, Writing Through the Fog, and explores ideas on the self, relationships, social media, memory, and home in a physical-digital world. She is based in San Francisco.

Timothy McGettigan is a professor of sociology at Colorado State University – Pueblo.

Christine Moore (@thisthingblows) studies sexuality and is currently pursuing her Masters in sociology at the University of Texas San Antonio. She reluctantly tweets.

Sang-Hyoun Pahk is a sociology student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Dave Parry (@academicdave) studies how the digital network transforms our political relations. He is an assistant professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas at Dallas. His work can be found at http://www.outsidethetext.com.

Matt Rafalow is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at University of California, Irvine, studying intersections of technology, youth, and social inequality.

George Ritzer is a distinguished professor at the University of Maryland and the author of many books including The McDonaldization of Society and Enchanting a Disenchanted World.

L. M. Sacasas (@FrailestThing) is a PhD student in the University of Central Florida’s “Texts & Technology” program exploring the intersections of bodies, spaces, and technology. He blogs at The Frailest Thing.

Evan Selinger (@evanselinger) is an associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Behzod Sirjani (@beh_zod) is a PhD Student in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. He thinks out loud frequently on Twitter and on his blog.

Marc Smith (@marc_smith) is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith co-founded the Social Media Research Foundation, a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.

Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) is an educator, writer, and Ph.D student exploring social media subjectivities at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Francesca Tanmizi is an ex-Sociology major at Loyola Marymount University who only realized she missed writing Sociology essays after graduation.

Samuel Tettner is a Venezuela-born globally situated cyborg, interested in science, technology and their critical and empowering understanding, currently pursuing a Masters degree in Society, Science and Technology in the Netherlands.

James Vincent (@jjvincent) is a writer and journalist from London. He tweets in a generally noncommittal fashion.

Samuel Zwaan (@mediawetenschap) is a teacher and student in Media Studies at Utrecht University.

This essay is cross-posted with TechnoScience as if People Mattered

Micah Singleton (@micahsingleton) over at the Daily Dot has a really great essay about one of the biggest problems with the Apple Watch. You should read the whole thing but the big takeaway is that really great watches and mainstream tech have a fundamental incompatibility: nice watches usually become heirlooms that get handed down from generation to generation, but consumer technology is meant to be bought in product cycles of a only a couple of years. A really nice watch should be “timeless” in a way our devices never have been. Compared to the usual 2-year contract phone purchase, the technological evolution of high-quality watches moves about as fast as actual biological evolution. Is it possible to deliberately build timelessness into electronics? more...

Last week I wrote about the curious case of traditional love narratives in the face of online dating. In short, the profiled format, pay structure, and overall bureaucracy of online dating throws into stark relief the constructed belief in a fateful meeting of souls. And yet, the narrative persists. Here’s a brief snippet:

…[T]he landscape has drastically changed but the narrative, not so much. The maintenance of romantic love as a cultural construct, personal striving, and affective embodied response to courtship rituals speaks to the resiliency of normative culture and its instantiation through human action. Even as we transact and negotiate romantic relationships; even as we agree upon terms; even as we screen partners and subject ourselves to screening; we nonetheless speak of butterflies and hope for magic.

In the case of love and online dating, the narrative is both highlighted and strengthened through its empirical contradiction.

This idea sparked an interesting conversation among the Cyborgology team about how this principle—constitution through contradiction—is theoretically useful in understanding the relationship between technologies and culture. Technologies reflect cultural realities, but can also expose the constructed nature of these realities, threatening their taken-for-granted logic and concomitant guidance over behavior and interaction. In the face of such a threat, however, the logics remain, and even strengthen. more...