Search results for digital dualism

Two weeks ago, I wrote a Brief Summary of Actor Network Theory. I ended it by saying,

My next post will focus on ANT and AR’s different historical accounts of Western society’s relationship to technology. While Latour claims “We Have Never Been Modern” we at Cyborgology claim “we have always been augmented.” I will summarize both of these arguments to the best of my ability and make the case for AR over ANT.

The historical underpinnings of ANT are cataloged in Laotur’s We Have Never Been Modern and are codified in Reassembling the Social. I will be quoting gratuitously from both.

In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour comments on a debate between the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes and natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Latour describes the debate this way: more...

This is a video from a talk given by James Bridle, one of the main forces behind the New Aesthetic Blog, about the ways in which he is seeing the collision between machine and human happen, and the transformations which are being brought to by it society.

I have to say that it is pretty phenomenal, and touches on some of the aspects already talked about on this blog. For example Bridle touches briefly on the phenomena of documentary vision, which has been discussed extensively on this site, just after the 30 minute mark of the talk.

While some aspect of a digital dualism is still present in the language of the talk, the references to real as dichotomous with digital (which may be inevitable in trying to talk about these things), I still think that Bridle covers an amazing breadth of ways in which the digital and physical are bleeding into each other and collapsing any reasonable difference between the two. He really highlights, and shows, how humans are developing ways of seeing which are dependent on our technology, on the ways which are machines see. As well as how the machines are developing ways of seeing which are dependent on our own naturalized concepts of vision and perception, they are learning to see like us.

I think this is an important aspect of the entire cyborgology exercise. That we are developing characteristics which are influenced by our machines and technology (and that we always have), and that our technology also develops characteristics which are like us. I think it further breaks down the divide between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, and shows how person and machine merge into a social space made up of equal parts of both.

All in all it is a really excellent talk, and well worth watching. I felt as though it absolutely needed  to be shared here.

Photo of the week comes from the current protests in Egypt. The picture captures the flow of imagery across mediums, especially in times of protest. Al Jazeera ran the photo of a police officer who reportedly is shooting protesters in the eye. Infuriated, Egyptians stenciled his image on walls. The graffiti was then photographed and disseminated on social media, where Zeynep Tufekci saw the image and sent it to us. The image of the police officer flows from cameras to TV broadcast to paint on walls back into photo-form into social media and onto this blog where you see it now. Reality is augmented.

Meanwhile, this week on Cyborgology…

Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey co-author an essay about how today we breath in an atmosphere increasingly able to capture what we do as a social media document

Jenny Davis writes about the mileage Facebook critics get out of misusing the word “friend”

We repost a comment Distinguished University of Maryland professor and past President of the American Sociological Association Patricia Hill-Collins made about PJ Rey’s post on journals being the “dinosaurs” of academia

PJ writes about the trust we place in modern technologies to become and enjoy the cyborgs we have become today

PJ also thinks about what is in store for the #occupy movement as winter bears down and concludes it is partially in memes

David Banks gets into the Thanksgiving spirit and discusses sexism and Internet food videos

Dave Strohecker looks into why Hipsters are into vintage and retro technology, circling around the ideas of authenticity and nostalgia

Next is a guest post from Jeremy Antley on the analogue roots of digital dualism, looking at a similar process of “textual dualism”

And we round up this week with the second part of Dan Greene’s “augmented syllabus” project

I should really post a review of this coffee shop. Maybe on Yelp. I could snap a photo of the cool little setup I have going here or tweet about the funny laptop rules at this place. Or I can get meta and type a Facebook update about how I am currently blogging about all of these possibilities to document my experience. While contemplating all of this, Spotify, a music-listening service, published the song I just listened to on Facebook.

Let’s reflect briefly on how we document experience. The first examples I just gave might be called “active sharing” whereas that last example, the Spotify one, highlights how self-documentation is also increasingly passive. And I think this furthers what I call “documentary vision”: the habit of experiencing more and more of life with the awareness of its document-potential.

Much has been made of so-called “frictionless sharing,” the new Facebook feature that automatically publishes updates from partnered sites and services. Sync Facebook with Spotify or the Wall Street Journal and what you listen to or read will be passively published on the new Facebook live-ticker.

This more passive sharing furthers an already established trend: we are increasingly living life under the logic of the Facebook mechanism. more...

The Cyborgology blog turns one today! [our first post]

We are thrilled with the blog’s success and the community that has grown around it. It has been exciting to see the increase in page views, high quality comments, and discussions on sites like Twitter and Facebook. The Faux-Vintage photo essay took on a life of its own and a recent post on Chomsky was rewritten for Salon.com (here). The blog has advanced a theoretical position we call “augmented reality,” positioned art as theoretically significant, focused on social justice issues and has played host to much audio and video from a range of events. The highlight was watching this community come to life at the Theorizing the Web conference that grew out of the blog.

We began Cyborgology to fill a void we observed in popular and academic discourse: conversations about technology often lacked theory, and theoretical debate often neglects technology.

Since we created the blog 365 days ago, more...

I spoke at the wonderful “Digital Ethnography Weekend” conference last month in Italy. There, I furthered my argument about what I call “digital dualism,” the fallacy that views the on and offline as separate spheres as opposed to my support of an “augmented reality” paradigm that views these spheres as always enmeshed and dialectically co-determining.

Because this was a “digital ethnography” conference, I applied the augmented reality framework to this methodology and argued that, instead, we should be doing “augmented ethnography”, an ethnography that takes as its unit of analysis a reality comprised of atoms as well as bits, always dialectically co-determining. Colleague Alessandro Caliandro and I debated these ideas in the question-and-answer portion of my talk (with much-appreciated thoughts from Adam Arvidsson, as well). Caliandro has posted his summary of my talk as well as his criticism here. I welcome this criticism and want to respond to it below.

First, Caliandro’s development of my argument is charitable. I also very much appreciate the thoughtfulness of the critique. However, I do need to make a correction to the way he summarized augmented reality, and this correction will be important for my response to the criticism. I do not think that the differences between the physical and digital are “irrelevant”; indeed, they are quite important and I’ve written about them before (e.g., here and here). Atoms and bits have very different properties (for instance, atoms tend to be scarce and bits more abundant). It is my contention that these very different spheres come together to form our augmented reality. In fact, as I argue here, it is only under the assumption of augmented reality that we can fully explicate the relevant differences between the physical and digital. With this correction in mind, let’s move forward. more...

There has been some terrific debate on my theorizing of what I call “augmented reality.” In brief, I reject “digital dualism”, the tendency to view the on and off line as separate spheres, and instead argue that we should view them as enmeshed, creating what I call “augmented reality.” [I talk more about this here.]

Today, I am posting some of the debate that occurred over Twitter and another post responding to a critique of a talk I gave on the topic.

One criticism has been that the augmented reality perspective somehow obscures the important ways in which the on and offline are different. I agree that the spheres indeed have different properties. I write here and here about, for example, how atoms tend to be more scarce than bits. Further, I write here about how these important differences are best viewed through the augmented lens.

It is this last point which I feel is most important in responding to the specific criticisms given by Zeynep Tufekci over Twitter. It is my hope that future conversations on this topic take into account the points made in that short essay. I’ll post the debate, still ongoing, below.

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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...

I recently met with the marketing department of a local organization. They asked to speak with me about social media, and how they could incorporate it into their “branding.” I know nothing about branding (or marketing) but I love to talk about social media, and I wanted to support my community, so I agreed.

The meeting attendants included: two marketing executives, their 21 year old intern, and me. We sat down at a table in a coffee shop. The three of them looked at me expectantly with blank yellow note pads and poised pens.

We began with the two (middle aged) marketing executives asking about the isolation caused by social media, and wondering if we should be “weeping” over the demise of our culture. Specifically, one of the executives described a “sad” situation, in which a group of students were waiting for the bus, engrossed with their phones and oblivious to each other.

I gently calmed their dystopian fears and explained the fallacy of digital dualism. The 21 year old intern immediately relaxed and chimed in. “We are being social” she said in reference to the bus stop phone incident.

The second marketing executive was unconvinced. She referenced a recent family trip, where her two teenage sons were on their iphones, missing the historic landmarks that the family had traveled to see. This time, I did not need to say a thing. The intern informed us all that looking at their phones in no way means that they missed the historic landmarks. “We are used to a lot of things going on around us at the same time, it’s how we do things” she said. The executives looked at me questioningly. I backed up the intern, explaining that the re-articulation of an experience is part of the experience for many youth today (although this is debatable).

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