On February 26, 2012 Trayvon Martin, a Black, 17 a year old, unarmed, high school student, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a White Hispanic man acting in the self-appointed position of neighborhood watch captain (click here for more details).

The case has become a symbolic battle ground for two important issues: gun laws and racism. Although both of these issues are inextricably entwined, for purposes of simplicity, I will focus here only on the issue of race.

As Jessie Daniels importantly points out on Racism Review, battles over racism have shifted into the realm of social media, where digital and physical race relations persist in an augmented relationship. We see this in both the progressive anti-racist discourses, and the racial smear campaigns surrounding the Martin/Zimmerman case.

Although it is important to expose the overtly racist tactics utilized by some of Zimmerman’s defenders—of which there are plenty—I want to talk here about a more subtle, and so perhaps more problematic form of racial discourse. Specifically, I will talk about how a prominent strategy of protest—coming out of the liberal left—may inadvertently perpetuate, rather than challenge, racial hierarchies in their most dehumanizing form. more...

This is the full Augmented Activism essay. The two parts provide prescriptive tactics for how to incorporate technology in activist work. Part 1 was originally posted here and part 2 was here.

Part 1

Academics usually do not talk about “tactics.” There are theories, methods, critiques, but we -as professionals-rarely feel comfortable advocating for something as unstable or open to interpretation as a tactic. In the latest edition of the Science, Technology, and Human Values (The flagship journal for Society for Social Studies of Science) three authors threw caution to the wind and published the paper “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey” [over-priced subscription required]. While the content of the paper is excellent, what excited me the most was their decision to describe their new “bag of tools” as a set of tactics. Kavita Philip, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish take a moment in their conclusion to reflect on their decision:

We call our results tactics, rather than methodologies, strategies, or universal guarantors of truth. Tactics lead not to the true or final design solution but to the contingent and collaborative construction of other narratives. These other narratives remain partial and approximate, but they are irrevocably opened up to problematization. more...

The idea that bodies are the loci and the focus for the movement of power is a well-established one in sociological thought. In this sense, bodies are inherently political things – they are not just sites for the production and reproduction of social power but they also have political significance. What they do matters; what happens to them and why matters. In social theory this is often centered around Foucauldian concepts of discipline and the production of knowledge, but for the purposes of this post I want to go back to a previous post, where I made an argument specifically about the political significance of bodies in contexts of violent protest:

[B]odies have symbolic weight and power, and often they have the most symbolic weight and power of any other part of the movement. A dramatic flush of international outrage was generated around the film of Neda Agha-Soltan bleeding to death in a Tehran street, but it was the physical suffering and death of her physical body that generated that rage. Outrage grew exponentially out of the footage and images of Lt. John Pike pepper-spraying seated UC Davis students, but again, that outrage was generated by and situated around the physical suffering of physical bodies.

It’s important to emphasize the aspect of physical suffering in itself; the body carries political, discursive significance not only when it is intact but when – sometimes especially when – it is in the process of being damaged and destroyed. And the context of this damage and destruction – the circumstances under which it occurs – is part of what imbues the  body with its significance and alters what nature it already has.

more...

You may have heard some of the exciting feline technology news coming out of SXSW this year. If not, check this out!

The video above displays three early “cat games” released by Friskies brand cat food at SXSW 2011, which included “Cat Fishing,” “Tasty Treasures Hunt,” and “Party Mix”. However, at this year’s SXSW Interactive they unveiled an all new cat game titled “You vs. Cat.” This game will allow for humans to play their companion animals for the first time. Because the earlier apps were designed simply for cats, people could not play alongside them. The result is a lot videos of confused cats slapping and rubbing on iPad screens.

The “You vs. Cat” application allows you to play a simple game on your iPad with your feline friend by lobbing virtual objects at your cat’s “goal” across the iPad screen. more...

By now, we have all heard the warning: potential employers will look at your Facebook page. We have been sufficiently terrified by the cautionary tale about the keg-stand profile pic (why is it always a keg stand?) that kept some otherwise capable candidate from getting hired. Indeed, we have taken note, with increased utilization of privacy settings and a collective awareness by job candidates about the visibility of social network sites.

Now, with the quickly spreading news of Justin Bassett, the warnings (and inevitable cautionary tales) become more epic. Bassett is a statistician out of New York, who, while on a job interview, was asked to log in to his social network profile. Bassett not only refused, but shared his story widely, sparking debates about privacy, employee rights, and the blurring line between personal and professional.   more...

“The internet is for porn.” Given that, pornography addiction and internet addiction  frequently show up together in the same discussion. The two have some important features in common being medicalized descriptions of certain sets of behaviors: the problematization of pornography addiction rests in part on the idea that unhealthy levels of consumptions of  porn precludes healthy, fulfilling relationships with “real people”. Jenny Davis’s post earlier this week on the “problem with internet addiction” highlights the same issue: the idea that digital interaction is somehow a zero-sum game, wherein more of the “virtual” means less of the “real”, instead of merely a part of the whole of augmented social interaction:

If we understand the internet as a means of sociality, a venue for business communications, an outlet for creativity, a source of news gathering and a space of recreation, then indeed, an addiction to internet technologies would be an addiction everyday life.

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We are currently facing a cultural crisis of authenticity. Since the early 2000s, we have seen the concept “authenticity” slowly move from margins to mainstream (Reynolds, 2011), encapsulated by feverish celebrity gossip surrounding breakout stars like Lana Del Rey, personified through the rise of the urban hipster as folk devil (those self-professed taste arbiters of cool who ride “fixies” through the urban landscape, collect obscure records, and wear vintage clothes), and exemplified in Web 2.0 and the rise of social media (especially curatorial media like LastFM and more recently, Pintrest), where we are all now encouraged to share, like, and make public pronouncements of our personal tastes. In the contemporary zeitgeist, it seems that we are all “grasping for authenticity” in an attempt to make our lives seem more important, substantial, and relevant (Jurgenson, 2011).

In this environment, identity is constructed both on and offline, but our online identities are increasingly coming to define our public identities. As such, the “online commons” (Lih, 2009) becomes an important space of identity construction and conflict. more...

I just published a piece in a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on the topic of Prosumption and the Prosumer. The article will likely be of interest to many of Cyborgology blog readers. In it, I consider the applicability of Marx’s two main critiques of capitalism—alienation and exploitation—to social media. Though Marx was describing the materialist paradigm of factory production, it is useful to see how far these concepts can be stretched to account for the immaterial paradigm of digital prosumption, because, even if we observe weaknesses in how the concepts graft on to social media, these observations become a starting point for new kinds of theorizing.

Additionally, I found it important to try to bring alienation into the conversation surrounding social media. Thus far, most Marxian analysis has focused solely on exploitation (many hyperbolically claiming that we have entered an era of hyper- or over-exploitation). I argue that exploitation has remained a constant between material and immaterial modes of production and that what is most remarkable is the fact that productivity occurs on social media with so little alienation.

You can access the article on the publisher’s site or as a .pdf here.

PJ Rey (@pjrey) is a sociologist at the University of Maryland working to describe how social media and other technology reflect and change our culture and the economy.

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Last Friday, Rachel Maddow reported (video clip above, full transcript here) that hundreds of citizens had suddenly started posting questions on the Facebook pages of Virginia Governor Ryan McDougle and Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. Their pages were full of questions on women’s health issues and usually included some kind of statement about why they were going to the Facebook page for this information. Here’s an example from Brownback’s page:

The seemingly-coordinated effort draws attention to the recent flurry of forced ultrasound bills that are being passed in state legislatures. Media outlets have started calling it “sarcasm bombing” although the source of that term is difficult to find. ABC News simply says: “One website labelled the messages ‘Sarcasm Bombing’ for the tounge-in-cheek [sic] way the users ask the politicians for help.” A few hours of intensive googling only brings up more headlines parroting the words “sarcasm bomb” but no actual origin story. These events (which have now spread to Governor Rick Perry of Texas as well) raise several important questions but I am only going to focus on one: Can we call Facebook a “Feminist Technology”? more...

SodaHead, an opinion gathering website, recently asked its users about “Internet Addiction.” From user responses (N=602), they produced the infographic below.  In the present post, I am not going to discuss this infographic in its own right. Instead, I am going to discuss “Internet Addiction” (from here on referred to as IA) as a condition—one that is slated for inclusion in the upcoming DSM-V. Specifically, I will argue that its existence rests on faulty assumptions, and that it is a problematic diagnostic category.

To deconstruct IA as a diagnostic category, I must begin with a brief discussion on the philosophy of science—specifically addressing the mutually constitutive relationship between research design and social reality. Simply put, no research is objective. The very questions that we ask are bound by the logics of culture, politics, and language—as are the measures we use to answer these questions. Moreover, new studies are rooted in existing research, further limiting the lens with which reality is viewed and understood. In turn, research findings influence how we think about our physical and social world, the language that we use, and the logics with which we understand ourselves and that which surrounds us. IA, as a diagnostic category, a social problem, and a potential identity, must be understood within this context. more...