“Once you’re running at Internet speed, is there any turning back?”

“there is no option to “roll back” the impact the Internet has made on human existence”

“there is life after the compass, maps and even GPS”

“We are technologists by nature. Or to use philosopher Andy Clark’s apt phrase: We are natural-born cyborgs”

“Why does Bokeh matter? First of all because there’s more of it than there used to be”

“L.A.-area residents share a passion for listening to police scanners and spreading that news online, in real time, via Twitter”

“Hyperdocumentation makes us all aware of the one life we’ve chosen and leaves less room to imagine alternatives”

“social media functions to uphold or replicate hierarchies of print capitalism”

“our attack on Armstrong speaks to our collective discomfort with a cyborg nature”

“this is the most boring thought about technology that can be had”

“Twitter’s largest implications are micropolitical, changing the rules of our interpersonal collisions”

“the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do”

“If ‘digital’ isn’t a place or a world or a reality, can it be a practice?”

“our culture’s reorientation from lived to statistical experience”

“Twilight of the Elites is a good example of a nonfiction book written in the shadow of the blogosphere”

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

After the final night of the convention, Robert Gehrke (@RobertGehrke) a reporter with the Salt Lake City Tribune, had a colleague take a picture of him pointing at a chair. He was mimicking Clint Eastwood’s now infamous prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention. The performance was (almost) undeniably awkward and strange. Rachel Maddow described Eastwood’s one-man improv skit as, “the weirdest thing I have ever seen at a political convention in my entire life.” Before the network morning shows could pass judgement, twitter users had developed an entire visual language that not only made fun of Eastwood, but the entire Republican party. The performative internet meme called “#eastwooding” had taken shape within hours of Gehrke’s tweet, offering thousands of people a simple framework for creating their own political satire.

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Last week I wrote a piece on the increasing prevalence of the Bokeh blur effect – and other filmic effects – in forms of visual media where we once saw them rarely if at all. Nathan Jurgenson then followed up with a response that articulated some interesting and important questions that this trend raises – which I want to consider further here, though please don’t mistake this as anything other than additional groping toward something that still needs a lot of working-through.

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I’ve been thinking on and off since mid-summer about a hole I’ve identified in our collective theorizing of augmented reality. To illustrate it, imagine the following conversation:

Digital Dualist: ‘Online’ and ‘offline’ are two distinct, separate worlds!
Me: That’s not true. ‘Online’ and ‘offline’ are part of the same augmented reality.
Digital Dualist: Are you saying that ‘online’ and ‘offline’ are the same thing?
Me: No, of course not. Atoms and bits have different properties, but both are still part of the same world.
Digital Dualist: So ‘online’ and ‘offline’ are different, but not different worlds?
Me: Correct.
Digital Dualist: But if they’re not different worlds, then what kind of different thing are they?
Me: …

I don’t know about you, but this is where I get stuck.

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Photos by Nathan Jurgenson, taken in Washington, D.C., 17, January 2012.

Malcolm Harris has posted one of the most provocative things I’ve ever read about social media, “Twitterland.” I’d like to point you the story and go through some of the many issues he brings to light. Harris’ story is one of theorizing Twitter and power; it can reinforce existing power imbalances, but, as is the focus here, how it can also be used to upset them.

Digital Dualism
Harris begins by taking on the idea that Twitter is a “tool” or an “instrument”, arguing that, no, Twitter is not a map, but the territory; not the flier but the city itself; hence the title “Twitterland.” However, in nearly the same breath, Harris states he wants to “buck that trend” of “the faulty digital-dualist frame the separates ‘real’ and online life.” As most readers here know, I coined the term digital dualism and provided the definition on this blog and thus have some vested interest in how it is deployed. And Harris’ analysis that follows indeed bucks the dualist trend, even though I would ask for some restating of the more theoretical parts of his argument. I’d like to urge Harris not to claim that Twitter is a new city, but instead focus on how Twitter has become part of the city-fabric of reality itself. more...

The online magazine Slate recently ran an essay that asked the question, “Why Do We Love To Call New Technologies ‘Creepy’?” The article was written by Evan Selinger, an associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology. My initial reaction to that essay, posted on my blog, was critical, but Selinger suggested in a tweet that I’d missed his point, which he said was “‘creepy’ discourse + normative analysis.” He’s right, I’m sure, that I missed his point – to be honest I don’t know what “normative analysis” is. So, with apologies to Selinger, I’ve reworked the essay to ask, simply: What is it about some technologies that makes us feel creepy? more...

Alva Noë at NPR wrote an excellent opinion piece over the weekend on Lance Armstrong’s decision to stop fighting the United States Anti-Doping Agency—which accuses the seven-time Tour de France winner of ingesting performance enhancing drugs.

Noë argues not that Armstrong ‘didn’t do it’—on the contrary, most expert commentators agree that he probably did dope, along with all other high level cyclers—but that ‘doping’ is a logical component of competitive sports in a cyborg era. Noë concludes with a key point and a provocative question:

He didn’t win races on his own. No, Like each of us in our social embeddings, he created an organization,  drawing on other people, and the creative and effective use of technology, the mastery of biochemistry, to go places and do things that most of us never will, that no one ever had, before him. That we now attack him, and tear him down, and try to minimize his achievements…what does this tell us about ourselves?

I want to take on this question, and in doing so, further flesh out the points that Noë brings to the fore. more...

Stories In Focus, posted by Sarah Wahnecheck two days ago, is a brief exploration of Bokeh that strikes me as a great start to something bigger. This is just a quick followup, asking Sarah and others to think more about the reality that amateur, documentary and news footage is increasingly coming to look like art films, specifically the effect of having one thing in sharp focus with the rest blurred and out of focus. more...

“facebook asks you to produce yourself in terms that are corporate”

“We love books for what they carry within them, not for what they’re made of”

“Already, [QR code] technology boasts a certain retronostalgic appeal”

“if you discard the digital dualist viewpoint, you don’t have to choose between online and “real” life”

“Internet shopping and drone flying can happen in the same remote space anywhere in the world”

“where fiction generally resists reader alteration, board games take it for granted”

“Bieber’s role in popularizing the song reflects the importance of both social media & old-fashioned celeb promotion”

“The result is a private, digital ranking of American society unlike anything that has come before”

“to touch and feel the Internet, to do with our virtual experience what Surrealists did with their dreams”

“It won’t be enough to touch our screens, some day. Our screens will touch us back”

“A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher”

“Women lie, and they do it to ruin men in positions of power. We shall henceforth call this “The Reddit Defence””

“a rapidly growing group of L.A.-area residents who share a passion for listening to police scanners and then disseminating that local news online, in real time, via Twitter”

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

A couple of nights ago I noticed that Paul Mason’s piece on the BBC’s website “In Praise of Bokeh” had earned a number of a “the medium is the message” style comments on the community blog Metafilter. One could characterize these comments as cliche, and so they arguably are – but things have a way of becoming cliche because they happen to be extremely useful frameworks for approaching the world. And I think Bokeh as an effect is worth some approaching, because it suggests some powerful things regarding how we tell stories with visual media and how that storytelling is in the process of changing in conjunction with technology.

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