It’s already been well-established by other posts on this blog that there’s something particular going on with regards to ICTs – especially social media technologies – and storytelling. My post last week dealt with how the atemporal effects of social media may be changing our own narratives and how those narratives are understood and expressed. This week I want to focus on some of the ways that social media technologies are making our narratives more communal in nature.
In preparation for the 2012 Quantified Self Conference on 15 and 16 September (#QS2012), I’m spending a couple weeks writing about the “self knowledge through numbers” group Quantified Self. Last week, I focused on self-quantification in relation to my masters work on what I’ve termed biomedicalization 2.0; this week, I focus on my upcoming dissertation project, which will look specifically at emotional self-quantification (or “mood tracking”).
I want to spend a few hundred words today, considering the geographic dimensions of digitally augmented/mediated social action. I am not only talking about GPS-enabled smartphone apps (Foursquare, Geocaching, SeeClickFix, etc.) but also the sorts of practices and habits– the kind that most people barely notice– that make up one’s daily Internet usage. Just as there are different car cultures in different parts of the United States (and the rest of the world), are there different “Interent Cultures” based on geographic region? Does where you connect, have any impact on how you connect? In some respects, yes– speed, availability, and stability of a connection matters; nations put up firewalls to prevent their citizens from accessing dangerous ideas; and you wouldn’t (or can’t) do the same things on your work computer that you could do on your home computer. All of this leads to a common provocation: can we utilize the properties of scale, place, and community to create radically new kinds of augmented realities. Can communities utilize a shared Internet connection to deal with local issues? Can we deliberately work against the individualist ethic of the Internet to revitalize public life? more...
I’m an admirer of the writer Ellen Ullman, the software engineer turned novelist. Her 1997 memoir, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, is a wonderfully perceptive reflection on her years as a professional programmer.
Ullman recently wrote a commentary for the New York Times on the computerized trading debacle triggered last month by the brokerage firm Knight Capital. In it she reaffirmed a crucial point she’d made in Close to the Machine, a point I find myself coming back to repeatedly in this space. To wit: If you think we’re in control of our technologies, think again. more...
Last week Sarah Wanenchak (@dynamicsymmetry) and Whitney Erin Boesel (@phenatypical) separately broached the tensions between technologies, bodies, ownership, and power. Here, I want to articulate this tension more explicitly, and argue that at a broad level, this is a tension between empowerment and dependence. Empowerment—as producers become consumers, reducing institutional authority over identity meanings and cultural representations; dependence— as these identity and cultural prosumers necessarily rely upon increasingly complex technical systems of implementation. more...
“we are probably the last generation to experience a clear difference between offline and online”
“technologically-mediated storytelling is every bit as world-destroying as it is world-creating”
“75 percent of all [Wikipedia] articles score below the desired [Flesch] readability score”
“We all participate in this strange authorship of the now”
“to really understand “the Internet” we need to forget it as a unified “it” altogether”
“The porn industry is on the same trajectory as all media: content itself no longer holds value”
“the internet hive mind might begin producing a new kind of anti-gonzo journalism”
“personal relationships seem to be the blurry edge of a quantified field of vision”
“All physical spaces already are also informational spaces”
Cory Doctorow’s recent talk on “The Coming Civil War Over General Purpose Computing” illuminates an interesting tension that, I would argue, is an emerging result of a human society that is increasingly augmented: not only are the boundaries between atoms and bits increasingly blurry and meaningless, but we are also caught in a similar process regarding categories of ownership and usership of technology.
In preparation for the 2012 Quantified Self Conference on 15 and 16 September (#QS2012), I’ll be spending the next two weeks writing about the “self knowledge through numbers” group Quantified Self (@QuantifiedSelf). This week, I focus on self-quantification in relation to my masters work on what I’ve termed biomedicalization 2.0; next week I’ll focus on my upcoming dissertation project, which will look specifically at emotional self-quantification (or “mood tracking”).
We all know the trope: In The Future—near or distant—food will come in the form of a pill. The pill will offer optimal proportions of all necessary nutrients. It will be calorically dense, vitamin infused, moderately fatted, protein filled, fiber enhanced, time released, and highly precise. The consumer will be satiated. The body will be healthy. This is a pill of perfect consumptive efficiency. This is the predicted diet of the cyborg.
Indeed, as cyborgs, our practices of (literal) consumption are characterized by scientific engineering. Our food and food practices are more a product of laboratory and factory work than the sweat of tilling farmers. And yet, we have not come up with a successful food-replacement pill. Instead, we’ve generally (though not ubiquitously) developed a market and a mindset that moves away from efficiency, developing and utilizing technological advancements to maximally consume with minimal caloric absorption. I offer here a few examples: more...
The cognitive linguist George Lakoff wants liberals to stop thinking like enlightenment scholars and start thinking about appeals to the “cognitive unconscious.” He asks that progressives “embrace a deep rationality that can take account of, and advantage of, a mind that is largely unconscious, embodied, emotional, empathetic, metaphorical, and only partially universal. A New Enlightenment would not abandon reason, but rather understand that we are using real reason– embodied reason, reason shaped by our bodies and brains and interactions in the real world, reason incorporation emotion, structured by frames and metaphors anad images and symbols, with conscious though shaped by the vast and invisible realm of neural circuitry not accessible to the conscious.” That quote comes from his 2008 book The Political Mind and –regardless of your political affiliation– it is certainly worth a read. Others appeal to your “embodied reason” all the time and, when they do it right, their conclusions just feel right. This is how, according to Lakoff, Republicans are so good at getting Americans to vote against their interests. Appeal to one’s sense of self-preservation, individuality, and fear of change and you have a voter that is willing to cut their own Medicare funding. I generally agree with Lakoff’s conclusions, but I do not think Republicans are the masters of this art. Internet pirates, the likes of Kim Dotcom, Gottfrid “Anakata” Svartholm, and even Julian Assange, state their cases and appeal directly to our cognitive unconsciouses better than any neocon ever could. more...
