Editor’s Note: This pieces is a modified repost from Peasant Muse.

Author’s Note: In the original post I used the term ‘analog dualism’, which has been replaced in the version below with ‘textual dualism’.  The sentiment and argument remain the same, as the shift from ‘analog’ to ‘textual’ more precisely describes the phenomena I am trying to uncover.

It is often the case with new technology that the promise of change it brings often outstrips its capacity to actually enact that change.  This is certainly true with several digital constructs that emerged over the past decade, like Wikipedia or the Open-Source movement, that are increasingly becoming obsessed with the promise and potential ‘social’ can bring to the issue of user equality.  Free from the constraints once imposed by more traditional analog methods, digital means of knowledge production and creation offer the promise of true independence and interdependence- yet often these new methods fall prey to (con)structural weaknesses that do little more than perpetuate the previous modes of inequality found in their analog ancestors, albeit in digital terms and conceptions that mask the true nature of their operation in the combined realms of both online and offline activity.

The argument presented above largely comes from a very cogent essay written by Nathan Jurgenson on the blog, Cyborgology.  Titled ‘Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity‘, Jurgenson argues for abandonment of what he terms a ‘digital dualist’ perspective in favor a conception he calls ‘augmented reality’, defined in the quoted sections below more...

I came across this post a couple weeks back about the “11 Sounds That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard” and it got me thinking about hipsters, nostalgic revivalism, and technological regression as a source of authenticity.

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Since you are probably going to spend today arguing about Occupy Wall Street with your conservative family members and helping your parents with computer questions we figured you would appreciate some slightly ligher fare: internet cooking shows. But because we are social scientists, we can’t be satisfied with uncritical review. Therefore, I want to discuss how these cooking shows interact with, perform, reify, and probelmitize constructions of gender and nationality. The three shows I want to cover (I’m gonna have to pass on this and this. There’s a great article at dailydot.com that lists most internet cooking shows.) are Epic Meal Time, Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time, and My Drunk Kitchen. Full disclosure: I have a profound weakness for all of these shows, with increasing affinity in the order I just presented them. In case you’re unfamiliar with these shows, I’ll briefly introduce them and then get into the theory. [Images after the break might be considered NSFW.] more...

With police dismantling Zuccotti Park and other #Occupy encampments throughout the country and impending Winter weather, pundits and activist alike are asking: Does the #Occupy movement have a future? To survive, #Occupy must begin—and, in fact, has already begun—a tactical shift. However, before I attempt to discuss #Occupy’s future, let me first be clear: The #Occupy movement is already a success. Recent months have witnessed a radical shift in mainstream political discourse, where concerns over America’s widening income and wealth gaps now have near equal footing with the deficit-reduction agenda. It has become common knowledge that the top 1% receive roughly a fifth of America’s collective income and control a third of the wealth. More Americans view Occupy Wall Street favorably (35%) than Wall Street (16%), government (21%), or the Tea Party (21%); and, though the country is gripped by a state of general cynicism, more people hold unfavorable impressions of big business (71%), government (71%), and the Tea Party (50%), than of #Occupy Wall Street (40%). Put simply, #Occupy is the most popular (and least unpopular) thing we’ve got. more...

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about special pieces of technology (e.g., backpacks, glasses, a Facebook profile), which become so integrated into our routines that they become almost invisible to us, seeming to act as extension of our own consciousness. I explained that this relationship is what differentiates equipment from tools, which we occasionally use to complete specific tasks, but which remain separate and distinct to us. I concluded that our relationship with equipment fundamentally alters who we are. And, because we all use equipment, we are all cyborgs (in the loosest sense).

In this essay, I want to continue the discussion about our relationship with the technology we use. Adapting and extending Anthony Giddens’ Consequences of Modernity, I will argue that an essential part of the cyborganic transformation we experience when we equip Modern, sophisticated technology is deeply tied to trust in expert systems. It is no longer feasible to fully comprehend the inner workings of the innumerable devices that we depend on; rather, we are forced to trust that the institutions that deliver these devices to us have designed, tested, and maintained the devices properly. This bargain—trading certainty for convenience—however, means that the Modern cyborg finds herself ever more deeply integrated into the social circuit. In fact, the cyborg’s connection to technology makes her increasingly socially dependent because the technological facets of her being require expert knowledge from others. more...

Editor’s Note from PJ Rey: Several months ago, I wrote a post called “Why Journals are the Dinosaurs of Academia,” which argued that goal of academics to circulate their ideas as widely as possible was hindered by their own backward practice of attributing excessive symbolic value to print media. In fact, the academia’s incentive structure rewards the best practices of yesteryear, while wholly ignoring modern communication. This is largely a product of the entrenched interests powerful senior scholars who seeks to consolidate their privileged position by reifying their own established habits. I concluded that, for the academy to continue to be relevant (or, rather, to start being relevant again), we must begin to reward blogging, tweeting, wiki editing, etc.

Given recent interest in the topic, I thought I would repost Patricia Hill Collins’ response.

I agree that the status of a journal should be decoupled from the fact of whether or not it exists in print. The wind is already blowing in that direction as publishers realize how expensive print really is.

I don’t think that journals are necessarily dinosaurs. A good peer reviewed journal by experts in a field can become one important location that can help us wade through seemingly endless ideas on the web with an eye toward influencing informed decisions about quality. The sheer volume of ideas that are now available on the Web means that we need some sort of system (or multiple systems) of vetting those ideas. The journal system, especially in an era of ever-more-specialized journals, can help do that. Digital journals are well-positioned to help with this task. I, for one, don’t want a “thumbs up” Facebook model of voting on intellectual quality. more...

As I’ve written about elsewhere, Facebook and other social network sites structurally and architecturally facilitate the amassment of large, diverse, and publicly displayed networks. Because of this, Facebook is sometimes charged with weakening social ties, threatening authenticity, and imploding the meaning of friendship. This is highlighted in Jimmy Kimmel’s recent promotion of “National UnFriend Day”— a day in which Facebook users are asked to clean out their Friends lists because, as Kimmel explains:

Half of the people in the country are on Facebook, and many of those people have hundreds if not thousands of ‘friends’ – and I find this unacceptable. No one has thousands of friends.

As is the case here, humor often acts as a safe medium through which serious social anxieties can be addressed.  As such, Kimmel’s comedic call reflects real cultural sentiments about the meaning of friendship and the relational changes facilitated by an increasingly connected population.

The fear is that strong ties will be displaced by weak ties. That friendship will lose its meaning. We can think of this as a fear of social disconnection via over-connection. Like a dense drop of paint whose molecules spread when mixed with water, we fear that our relationships will bleed out into something paler and less vibrant. more...

We begin with the assumption that social media expands the opportunity to capture/document/record ourselves and others and therefore has developed in us a sort-of “documentary vision” whereby we increasingly experience the world as a potential social media document. How might my current experience look as a photograph, tweet, or status update? Here, we would like to expand by thinking about what objective reality produces this type of subjective experience. Indeed, we are increasingly breathing an atmosphere of ambient documentation that is more and more likely to capture our thoughts and behaviors.

As this blog often points out, we are increasingly living our lives at the intersection of atoms and bits. Identities, friendships, conversations and a whole range of experience form an augmented reality where each is simultaneously shaped by physical presence and digital information. Information traveling on the backs of bits moves quickly and easily; anchor it to atoms and it is relatively slow and costly. In an augmented reality, information flows back and forth across physicality and digitality, deftly evading spatial and temporal obstacles that otherwise accompany physical presence.

When Egyptians dramatically occupied the physical space of Tahrir Square this past January more...

Image of the week. augmented reality: the online infiltrates how we perceive the offline, made literal here.

Meanwhile, it was busy this week on Cyborgology…

PJ Rey writes about Klout and how it infiltrates our mind’s eye

Dave Strohecker and Jenny Davis team to write about the gender-switching ‘Jailbreak the Patriarchy!’ browser hack

Nathan Jurgenson provides some initial reflections on the OWS Raid at Zuccotti park

PJ Rey gets Marxian and discusses value, productivity, labor and the web

and Mike Bulajewski responds

Sarah Wanenchak reflects on the evolution of the ‘human microphone’ as Karl Rove gets mic-checked

David Banks tells the important story digitality and materiality with the example of getting Wi-Fi running at an Occupy park

And, finally, a guest-post by Doug Hill discusses the continuing issues of automation, jobs and how society should respond

There’s a new ebook out that’s attracting some attention, in part because its conclusions are so startling, in part because its conclusions come from an unexpected quarter. The title is Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Its authors, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, are two professors from one of the academic epicenters of tech, MIT.

I haven’t read the book, but I have read the three excerpts (pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3) run on The Atlantic magazine’s web site. I would definitely recommend them, both because they’re clearly written and because they document in a dispassionate way some of more important effects of our ever-increasing social and economic commitments to technology.

Suffice it to say that their prognosis for the working man and woman isn’t pretty. According to Brynjolfsson and McAfee, losers in the war between workers and machines could ultimately constitute a majority – perhaps more than 90 percent – of the population. more...