Last week I went down to Zuccotti Park out of an overwhelming desire to be a part of something intensely important. One of my professors  compared the occupation of Wall Street to People’s Park in Berkley, California. He also sees strong connections to the ongoing hacktivist activities in Spain. OccupyWallst.org draws their tactics explicitly form the Arab Spring. I have waited so long to write something about my own experiences because, frankly, it almost feels too personal. So, if you’ll indulge me, this post is going to be a little different from the ones I’ve written in the past.

While the major news outlets try desperately to shoehorn OWS into existing frames, smaller outlets have provided excellent commentary and insight. Jenny Davis was the first on this blog to write about the movement’s use of social media. Since her insightful post, social media has proven to be an effective tool in revealing police brutality and even possible entrapment by the NYPD. The various Twitter backchannels have been instrumental in organizing and publicizing the organization – as well as the results- of major protests. Nathan has also done an excellent job of discussing the relationship of online and offline action. And yesterday’s post by Sarah Wanenchak describes exactly my feelings on the confluence of various forms of technology. There truly is no easy way to describe the feeling you get when you hear the people’s mic for the first time. It is a little difficult to master, but a truly powerful tool.

Having participated in more...

When Michael Moore came to address the occupiers of Wall Street, he had no access to a mic and speakers to make himself heard. He had no access to a bullhorn. New York City requires a permit for “amplified sound”–they require permission from authority for a particular use of public space. But #occupy is all about reclaiming public space–they demand to be heard, and they won’t ask for permission to speak. But even given that many of the participants of #occupy are in full possession of smartphones, verbal address to the crowd from a singular source is still important. And the restrictions on amplification made that difficult.

So #occupy did what #occupy seems to do: They organized.

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Mass collective action is in the air, on the ground, on the web; indeed, there exists today an atmosphere conducive for revolutions, flash mobs, protests, uprisings, riots, and any other way humans coalesce physically and digitally to change the normal operation of society. [Photos of protests around the globe from just the past 30 days].

Some gatherings have clear goals (e.g., ousting Mubarak), however. there is also the sense that massive gatherings are increasingly inevitable today even when a reason for them is not explicit (e.g., the ongoing debate over the reasons for the UK Riots or the current #occupy protests). For some this is terrifying and for others it is exhilarating. And still others might think I am greatly overstating the amount of protest actually happening. True, we do not yet know if this second decade of the 21^st Century will come to be known for massive uprisings. But if it is, I think it will have much to do with social media effectively allowing for the merging of atoms and bits, of the on and offline; linking the potential of occupying physical space with the ability of social media to provide the average person with information and an audience.

For example, the current #occupy protests across the United States more...

I have been really enjoying the Google Correlate function lately. I think it is a very powerful tool for examining popular topics because more and more people are going online to look for information. More specifically, Google Correlate allows you to see the correlations between search terms, allowing you to see what other search terms are associated with one another. In some sense then, it provides a “window” into the Internet user’s mind. I took this as an opportunity to do a little investigating about the popularization of tattoos and tattooing. What I found is striking.

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While our collective imagination has been gripped with the images of downtrodden folks in other parts of the world uprising in seemingly spontaneous acts of defiance, here at home, we late industrial consumers continue doing what we do best: passively and uncritically absorbing whatever is in front of us.  In our zeal to dive into the next hot thing that the market offers us, we seldom have occasion to question what is absent—what is quietly being denied us—and what social costs are obscured by the price tag of a commodity.

Apple is an interesting contradiction in consumer society because, on the hand, it seems endlessly capable of producing new devices that we never knew we needed; yet, when we pick them up, they seem almost magical, enabling us to do things we hardly imagined—or, rather, to consume things in ways we never imagined.  In light of its continual innovation and its capacity to generate “cool,” Apple is often seen as progressive organization.  On the other hand, Apple is notorious for placing authoritarian controls on its products.  As the old quip goes: “Linux is great at letting you do what you want to do (if you are willing to stare for hours at line code), Apple is great at letting you do what they want you do, and Windows is great at crashing.”  Of even greater concern, Apple remorselessly outsources it labor to China’s most offensive factories, some of which recently received attention because they had to install nets around the buildings to end a spate of highly-public suicides.

Two recent artworks highlight the underside of Apple’s pristine white carapace. more...

The research and writing featured on this blog generally build from the idea that digital information and material experience do not exist in two separate realities à la The Matrix, but coexist in one augmented reality where the informational and material play a role in constituting one another. This semester at the University of Maryland, I’m exploring those moves between informational spaces and physical ones in a mixed online and in-person version of an American Studies course and wanted to share and get feedback on the process of planning, designing, and enacting this augmented introduction to the study of American culture. This design is specific to this course and its themes, but the general principles should work elsewhere and the cultural context of online higher education is important to anyone involved with that system.

Online education is playing a larger and larger role in the economics and pedagogies of the increasingly privatized and ‘right-sized’ U.S. research university and my course is certainly a product of these changes. At the same time, researchers and teachers in a variety of disciplines are using this moment of transition to question and revise outdated pedagogical routines and are designing classes to better facilitate multiple levels of student engagement with reference to the real world outside the ivory tower. I would have loved to have explored interventions such as contract grading or an increased focus on navigating and designing information systems within my course but, like many graduate students, I had to work within the boundaries of an already existing syllabus. The general shape of the course was set; so my pre-semester work become more about adjusting the course’s weaknesses and flexing its strengths within the mixed online/in-person environment, knowing that the different parts of that environment would lend themselves to different kinds of learning. I organized this effort around a few core principles that apply in any learning environment: more...

Just a quick Sunday post- At the beginning of this month, a U.S. Appeals Court ruled that filming police officers is protected under the first amendment. As we have covered before, social networking sites are very powerful tools for protestors. They are organizational tools for peaceful protest, they provide safety to those that wish to get out of dangerous situations, and they also broadcast the events of protests beyond their geophysical boundaries. Now that capturing video won’t land you in jail (or on the pavement) I think we are seeing some important citizen footage of the #OccupyWallSt Protests. The major news outlets have largely failed to cover them, but maybe our online platforms can get the word out. Until, of course, they start censoring protest as well.

Here’s one more- more...

Recently I stumbled across this interview with Jacqui Moore, a rather well-known and visible member of the body modification community for her extensive black and grey full body suit. Bearing the rather exploitative tagline (which states “A respectable mother celebrated her divorce by asking her new boyfriend to cover her entire body – with a single TATTOO”), which makes her sound not only impulsive but pathological, what does this case reveal about contemporary body modification practices? What is the relationship between gender, patriarchy, and body modification? And what are the costs of using indigenous iconography and rituals in one’s body modification practices?

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In the Spring semester of my third year of college I had a stats class that really took the life out of me. One day I elected to take a brief nap in a dorm lounge. The picture above was taken shortly after I laid down, and subsequently posted on Facebook. Out of context, it appears as though I am planking– an internet meme in which individuals are photographed intentionally laying face-down in strange places. It has popped in an out of the global media for almost a decade but resurfaced over this summer into a world-wide activity. It has since inspired similar activities including owling, Batmanning, and stocking. I will refer to the entire trend collectively as “performative memes.” Unlike Anthropology Major Fox or lolcatz, these memes are about performing a certain embodied act, not producing an image for visual consumption. All around the world, friends are taking pictures of each other doing strange stunts and posting them on the internet. What exactly are we doing –socially- when we engage in performative internet memes?

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