A “catfish” is someone who misrepresents themselves online. This is all you really need to know about the movie catfish. The rest is kind of hard to describe, like trying to explain the movie Inception after you just watched it one time. I don’t want to debate the authenticity of the film, because it doesn’t really matter to this discussion (read about it on the wiki). I want to talk about the film’s noteworthy use of social media and the probing questions that it raises for scholars of new technology and Web 2.0.

The film incorporates social media in a very integral and experiential way. The producers take a pretty postmodern approach to depict the characters and draw out the narrative of the film. Mirroring some of the techniques seen Cloverfield or the Blair Witch Project, similar pseudo-documentary mystery narratives, hand-held cameras and panning screenshots allow us to experience the characters, to develop the plot arc, and to eventually come to the realization that all is not what it seems. We experience the characters through social media, as the protagonist Nev is gradually introduced to the family of a young girl Abby.  The camera pans across grainy computer screens, as Nev clicks through the Facebook profiles of the films characters and we, by proxy “get to know” these characters. The point of this exercise is for the viewer to gradually build trust for the characters alongside the central character Nev. So in effect, the film takes the technique of Takashi Miike in Audition The film builds this trust and then quickly shatters it, at which point the trust we had for the characters is broken. more...

In a post titled “Why Journals are the Dinosaurs of Academia,” I recently considered whether traditional journals may, increasingly, be serving to hinder the communication of ideas, rather than optimally facilitating such exchanges.  I argued two main points:  1.)  We need to get beyond the notion that the mere fact that journals is printed makes it somehow more legitimate than digital-only journals.  2.) In the age of the Internet, conventional articles may no longer be the most efficient way to communicate some ideas (which was the original justification for making journals the centerpiece of disciplinary discourses).

Over the past few days, Twitter has been abuzz with academics discussing another, related issue: Whether disciplinary discourses are better facilitated by non-profit, open-access journals or proprietary, pay-walled journals.  I have archived that discussion below and will follow up with my own thoughts later in the week. more...

Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote a wonderful piece on the rise of a new geek anti-intellectualism. The essay sparked much discussion and Sanger has done a terrific job responding to comments and even offering a thoughtful follow-up piece. However, I would like to write a short critique on a couple of points that have yet to be addressed.

First, I have to mention that contemporary anti-intellectualism was really my first academic interest, spurred in 2000 when I heard that Al Gore lost debates to George W. Bush because Gore “sounded too smart.” Hyper-focused on epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) at the time, it was learning about the differences between Wikipedia co-founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales that first got me interested in technology as a topic of research. Sanger, himself having an epistemology background, wanted Wikipedia to have a component of expertism on the site. When that was rejected he left and started the Citizendium project. At war are two epistemologies: one based in populism and the other expertism (though, this conceptualization is far too simplistic, it will have to do for this short post). more...

This essay, like the one I posted last month on faux-vintage photography, is me hashing out ideas as part of my larger dissertation project on self-documentation and social media. Part II will argue that the media also overstate how public we have become, sensationalizing the issue to the point that the stigma associated with online imperfections erodes more slowly. It is no stretch to claim that we have become more public with social media. By “public” I mean that we are posting (1) more pieces information about ourselves online in (2) new ways (see the Zuckerberg Law of Information sharing), and are doing so more (3) honestly than ever before. We are connected to the web more often, especially given the rise of smart phones, and new layers of information are being invented, such as “checking in” geographically. And gone are the days when you could be anyone you want to be online; today we know that online activities are augmented by the physical world. People are mostly using their real names on Facebook and nearly everything one does there has everything to do with the offline world.

But we are not as public as this suggests. We need a balance to this so-called triumph of publicity and death of anonymity (as the New York Times and Zygmunt Bauman recently declared). “Publicity” on social media needs to be understood fundamentally as an act rife also with its conceptual opposite: creativity and concealment. And I am not talking just about those who use false identities on blogs (see Amina) and pseudonyms on Facebook, those with super-strict privacy settings or those who only post a selective part of their multiple identities (though, I am talking about these folks, too).  My point applies to even the biggest oversharers who intimately document their lives in granular detail.

I’ll describe below how each instance of sharing online is done so creatively instead of as simple truth-telling, but will start first by discussing how each new piece of information effectively conceals as much as it reveals. more...

While we generally focus on contemporary cyborgs and new technologies, the case below illustrates the longstanding entanglement of human bodies and technology. And yes, this is a medieval prosthetic hand.

According to David Forbes over at Coilhouse, this little guy belonged to famed mercenary and medieval knight Gotz Von Berlichingen of the early 1500s.

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Today, Google announced a new service called “Google+” that explicitly attempts to replicate offline social norms onto an online platform. Besides the conceptual consistency between this goal and the concept of “augmented reality” that I write about so often, I also find the timing of the announcement interesting.

When Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google, I critiqued his statement that having multiple identities online shows “a lack of integrity.” Schmidt stepped down in April of this year and less than two months later Google announces Google+ (which is an umbrella term for a whole host of services centered on better replicating physical world social norms in a digital social media environment).

The service is brand new and invite-only so we can only speculate at this point what it will actually provide. However, the announcement of Google+ on the company’s official blog provides some interesting statements about privacy. The post is an implicit retraction of Schmidt’s insensitive statements and perhaps a lesson-learned from Google’s Buzz debacle that angered and even endangered many of its users. Further, much of the post is also a direct attack on the Facebook platform and its inability to reflect offline social norms that long-since predate the Web (e.g., the platform’s often incorrect usage of the term “friend”). Some quotes from the Google blog: more...

There is a video floating around the internet of a woman getting 152 of her closest Facebook friends tattooed on her arm, creating a full sleeve composed of tiny profile pictures that looks like a geometric checkerboard. As a scholar and an avid tattoo collector, I find this very illuminating.

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Next month I’ll be in Kumasi, Ghana doing field research and I thought I’d share what I hope to accomplish over there, since my work is informed by much of what I write about on this blog. (I will be blogging over here.) We hope to set up an information system by which Ghanaians can find condom sellers nearby. The primary interface will be text messaging using a fantastic open-source project called FrontLineSMS. By texting a certain number, the user will be asked to send their district and a list of nearby landmarks. The database will send back a list of condom sellers within a reasonable walking distance. We also hope to have several other front-end access points that are already becoming popular places to socialize. Our aim is to increase access to condoms in order to reduce the infection rate of HIV/AIDS. As of 2009, according to UNICEF, 230,000 people (about 2% of the population) live with HIV in Ghana. I should also note that cell phones are not a luxury item in Ghana. Adoption has exploded over the past several years, and it is estimated that about 67% of Ghanians own a cell phone.

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This July, a new mobile app called SceneTap will further augment the hook-up scene. The app is linked to cameras in bars which count the number of patrons and based on facial features determine the average age and the male-to-female ratio. Of course, the decision to go to a particular bar (and not to go to another) effectively alters the dataset. We therefore make decisions about where to go based upon technologically transmitted data about physical bodies. The presence of our own physical bodies then become data to be recorded, transmitted, and factored into the social plans of others.