Below is the full text of a two-part series that I wrote and posted last month
In what follows, I delineate a language with which we can think about the body as technology, and in particular, politicized technology. We can do so, I argue, with Ernst Schraube’s conceptualization of technology as materialized action. I begin by laying out this theoretical framework. I then apply this conceptualization to the body, with a focus on body size. more...
I made my digg.com account on March 15, 2007. I think I had an account before the current one because I clearly remember using Digg in high school, after I saw Kevin Rose demo the site on The Screen Savers. My enjoyment of that tech community, at the time, was so complete. It felt like my tribe. I dutifully listened to This Week in Tech and I am even willing to admit that I watched the bro-tastic video podcast associated with the site “Diggnation”. My late teens and early 20s were consumed with tech news and I loved every moment of it. The community fell off a cliff somewhere around 2008 as a few big users were banned for violating rules against scripting and gaming. The site hemorrhaged users through the last few aughts. By the summer of 2010, AlterNet reported on massive gaming and censorship by gangs of conservative Yahoo newsgroups. Within a month of the scandal, a terrible revision of the site crippled the service, causing day-long outages and spotty service. Now, the site has been sold for a mere $500,000 to a company called Betaworks. They plan on relaunching the site on August 1st after a massive overhaul. While a server might still point to digg.com, I know that it is not the site I grew up with and the Digg Diaspora has been cast to the edges of the internet. more...
Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:
“cupcakes match—& attempt to assuage—our cultural anxieties of the moment”
“Each second, I observe friends on Facebook contributing to a shared space of disposable moments”
“I’m wondering, now, if machines are, by default, gender queer?”
“the modes of constraint operating through [the Web] are material, while liberation is semiotic”
“typewriters alter the physical connection between writer and text“
If there’s a tendency in our culture to fetishize anything “IRL” – to treat the non-digital as somehow more real, more meaningful, and more authentic – a particularly pure expression of this can often be found in any discussion of ebook vs books in print. By now it’s a few years old and, like other great and frequently motionless debates, both sides are well-acquainted with each other and with each other’s arguments. This argument as a whole isn’t my primary focus here so I don’t want to spend too much time on it, but I think a summary of some of the major points is still useful.
Proponents of ebooks argue for efficiency, cheapness, portability, and the democratizing effects of self-publishing (which ebooks don’t constitute but arguably make easier). Interestingly, proponents of the dead tree format often make arguments that are essentially sensual in nature: in addition to bemoaning a hypothetical drop in quality from print to digital, they talk about the fundamentally tactile nature of print books, the weight and heft, the smell of the pages and the feel of turning them – in short, the physical “reality” of print is somehow more real and more legitimate than words on a screen.
In the last part of my recent essay “A New Privacy,” I described documentary consciousness as the perpetual (and frequently anxiety-provoking) awareness that, at each moment, we are potentially the documented objects of others. In this post, I use a friend’s recent ‘Facebook debacle’ as a starting point to elaborate on what documentary consciousness is, how it works, and whether it can be diminished or assuaged by the fact that “nobody… wants to see your status update from 2007.” I draw on Brian Massumi’s distinction between the possible and the potential to help explain why documentary consciousness entails “the ever-present sense of a looming future failure,” whether anyone reads that old status update or not.
Writing Tools and the Instrumentalist Conception of Technology
My recent article in The Atlantic, “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun,” is provocative in part because it suggests tools like guns might have more power of us than meets the eye. Given widely held views about autonomy (e.g., the notion that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”), this alternative way of looking at things can cause anxiety, especially when misunderstood and translated into terms like those offered by the first commenter, “Guns are magic mind control machines.” The article presented an account of how humans relate to technology, and to further illuminate those relations, I’ll briefly revisit media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s take on Friedrich Nietzche’s use of the typewriter. Like my gun essay, this analysis challenges the “instrumentalist” conception of technology.
In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler contends more...
“Otherness” has long been a concern of social scientists. It refers to those who are marked, set-apart, excluded, or included with qualification. Those who fail to fit into normative conceptions of belongingness are treated, unsurprisingly, as though they do not belong. They are a polluting force, an intruder, an outsider. In this post, we discuss the dual nature of Otherness and the Othered subject, as they must navigate a social space in which they are either excluded or fetishized, but never fully integrated. We exemplify this dual nature with a discussion of new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer—a tech industry power player marked with femininity, amplified by pregnancy. We begin with a theoretical discussion of Otherness.
The Dirty Other
As suggested by Sigmund Freud and Marry Douglas, “Dirt is matter out of place”; it threatens the integrity of boundaries—moral, aesthetic, symbolic, experiential and otherwise. The removal or neutralization of dirt is not an easy matter for its methods of contamination are many. The most effective method of contamination occurs within and through fantasy. Case in point, the non-normative Other acquires her pollution powers from the fantastic projections of “Normals.” But in analyzing the non-normative Other, we find that not all dirt is abject. Rather than demonstrating the power of horror, dirt may acquire the quality of seduction, indulgence and exotic profundity. Of course, Kristeva notes that the abject—while maintaining its horrifying quality—is the sight of fascination. Although such a stipulation is relevant to the present discussion, we may note that said fascination need not coincide with horror. For example, the “out of place” position of non-normative others facilitates the fantastic lure of systemic escape, reparation or atonement. After all, that which is not dirt: the normative, the systemic, the homogenized, carries the weight of morality and social judgment.
Who decided the Minority Report computer was the goal of 21st century interfaces? Why does anyone think its a good idea? Could you imagine doing a spreadsheet on that thing? And why the hell are they using physical media to transport information? What is so alluring, exactly, about this gigantic computer that requires two (two!) Nintendo Powergloves to operate and can only receive data (apparently) through physical media drives the size of VHS tapes? The resolution looks awful and, since the screens are transparent, I can only assume your computer always has to be up against a blank wall. But none of those things are nearly as important as the human element it ignores. The computer has no soul. Its a sterile interface meant to catch murders (or frame people as such), not share family photos. The obsession with the Minority Report computer is a betrayal of everything that is human about computers. more...
Oh, the irony…to find myself preparing to write about adaptations just months after the release of a motion picture based on a board game. A graduate student never had it so good: Battleship may not be a critical reflection of the delicate process of creating an adapted work, nor does it allow for the discussion of nuance and variation in the product of the adaptation process. But it is a rather wonderful example of the kind of derisive talk that swirls around them. Adaptations are spin-offs. Remakes.
Rehashed and retold, adaptations carry a stigma: the unoriginal story, not so much created as concocted. They are cobbled together from the source text – the original work, the one that was inspired by some spark of creative genius – and they can never be ‘as good as’ the story that came first.
To me, the adapted text is one that emerges out of an older, more established work. In the case of writing, it’s often a book that’s been made into a film, but it’s also novels that are based on older, more classic works. There is the original story – the source text. And there is the adaptation. Adaptations open up the original in a new way. A really good adaptation makes me read or watch the story with an awareness of the original source – it hangs in the back of my mind, and I compare what I know to be familiar or the same, and I am fascinated by what is different. Battleship aside, adaptations are original works of art – the same way a song that samples another is still music. But not everybody sees it this way…and so the debates go on, about what is art and what is not art, what is original and what is second-hand, and whether adaptations can stand on their own merits. more...
Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:
“Kickstarter is just another form of entertainment. It’s QVC for the Net set”
“the desire of theory always involves a dimension of universalism”
“What does it mean to feel empathy for a twitter feed?”
“Comic-Con protesters call cyberpunk doorway to demonic possession“
