Search results for digital dualism

#review features links to, summaries of, and discussions around academic journal articles and books.

Today, guest contributor Rob Horning reviews: Life on automatic: Facebook’s archival subject by Liam Mitchell. First Monday, Volume 19, Number 2 – 3 February 2014 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4825/3823 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i2.4825

If, like me, you are skeptical of research on social media and subjectivity that takes the form of polling some users about their feelings, as if self-reporting didn’t raise any epistemological issues, this paper, steeped in Baudrillard, Derrida, and Heidegger, will come as a welcome change. It’s far closer to taking the opposite position, that whatever people say about their feelings should probably be discounted out of hand, given that what is more significant is the forces that condition the consciousness of such feelings. That approach is sometimes dismissed as failing to take into account individual agency; it’s implicitly treated as an affront to human dignity to presume that people’s use of technology might not be governed by full autonomy and voluntarism, that it’s tinfoil-hat silly to believe that something as consumer-friendly and popular as Facebook could be coercive, that the company could be working behind users’ backs to warp their experience of the world for the sake of Facebook’s bottom line.

Mitchell is not so overtly conspiratorial in this paper; more...

File this one under “what is at stake” when we talk about the digital dualist critique. Bitcoin, the Internet’s favorite way to buy pot and donate to Ron Paul, hit an all-time high this week of around $900 to one Bitcoin (BTC). The news coverage of Bitcoin and the burgeoning array of crypto-currencies (according to the Wall Street Journal there’s also litecoin, bbqcoin, peercoin, namecoin, and feathercoin) has largely focused on the unstable valuation of the currencies and all of the terrible things people could do with their untraceable Internet money. What hasn’t been investigated however, is the idea that crypto-currencies are somehow inherently more “virtual” and thereby less susceptible to centralized control the way US dollars, Euros, or Dave & Buster’s Powercards are. Both assumptions are wrong and are undergirded by the digital dualist fallacy.  more...

From an augmented perspective, technologies both reflect and affect social structures and hierarchical relations. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that theorists of science and technology have long recognized how technologies are gendered. This goes beyond probing technologies of female reproduction, or masculine tools of object manipulation. This pervades even those seemingly gender neutral technological objects, and the ways in which we talk about, use, and make sense of them.

Awhile back, I talked about the gendering of Siri. I argued that the female voice, coupled with her designation as a “personal assistant” created an environment ripe for highly sexist/sexualized personification of the iphone application, and iphones themselves.  Far from Haraway’s utopic de-categorization, this melding of mechanical and organic solidified gendered meanings and strengthened interactional gender inequalities.

With this understanding, I still couldn’t contain my exasperated eye-roll when, after hooking up television in my home for the first time in almost a decade, I saw this (video after the jump): more...

It’s fall again—that time of year when the days shorten, the air turns crisp (at least in New England), and a young researcher’s mind turns to two things: 1) pumpkin beer, and 2) the Bay Area edition of the annual Quantified Self conference (which now goes by Quantified Self Global).

If that’s not where your mind turns, I guess that’s understandable: pumpkin beer isn’t for everyone, and this is only the second time Quantified Self Global has happened in the fall; QS2011, the very first Quantified Self conference, happened in the spring. Be that as it may, I’ve been thinking about QS13 for a while now, and—since I just realized I get on a plane to California a week from Monday—I thought I’d write about it. More specifically, I’m going to revisit my wrap-up post from Quantified Self Europe 2013 (QSEU13) last May, wander through some musings on individualism and Bay Area culture, consider some recent developments in the Boston QS community, and end with some speculation about what I might find in San Francisco next month.

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In 2006, my final year of undergrad, I participated in a Chinese language and culture scholarship program. We learned to speak and write in Mandarin for two semesters, followed by a month long trip in the summer.  As tends to happen, I’ve forgotten most of the language. The lessons, however, have stuck with me. Along with humbling experiences of climbing the Great Wall, walking through the Forbidden City, and sampling tea in the rural mountains, I remember a few incidents in which Chinese censorship took me by surprise. For instance, on the day after we visited Tiananmen Square, I studiously went to an Internet café to learn more about the events that transpired at the historic site. Besides iconic images of tanks and soldiers, I was admittedly uninformed about most of the details. The tour guide only made one quiet allusion to the Cultural Revolution, and quickly changed the subject. The Internet, I hoped, would help me grasp the cultural and historical magnitude of the space I’d just inhabited.  No such luck. Google was more tight-lipped about Tiananmen Square than our knowledgeable but cautious guide.

China is infamous for its censorship policies and practices.  Amnesty International claims that China imprisons more journalists and ‘cyber-dissidents’ than any other country, and maintains a sizeable “Internet Police” force, up to 50,000 officers strong. But recent studies by Political Scientist Gary King show interesting and surprising patterns in censorship enforcement.  His data show that government censorship of digital activity is less about quieting criticism, and more about squashing physical mobilization. more...

If you take off your glasses and cross your eyes, my resemblance to Nathan is truly uncanny.

“the Internet itself is based on a system of binaries. Dualism, mutual exclusion, and absolutes are inherent in its structure”

“Each space becomes its own Generalized Other, with normative expectations about who a person is and how that person should be in the world”

“You might start thinking that the enemy is the internet itself. Or, by extension, that the enemy is us”

“There were so many people standing behind the cause that it felt like you had an army at your disposal and you could just stick up for what’s right”

“DIS Images invites artists to create alternative scenarios and new stereotypes”

“Games are therefore a fantastic example of ways in which digital technology is profoundlyembodied and usually designed with the able-bodied default in mind“

“A suffocating deluge of violent misogyny is how American comedy fans react to a woman suggesting that comedy might have a misogyny problem”

“the selfie has come full circle, from sign of subject’s marginality to sign of his or her social-media importance”

“Now there’s an app that allows you to share the things you Hate”  more...

Are human genes patentable? At the beginning of this week, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) heard arguments to answer just that question. Specifically, the biotechnology company Myriad Genetics, Inc. wants to defend their patent on the isolation of BRAC1 and BRAC2—two genes related to hereditary breast and ovarian cancers. Such a patent grants the company 20 years of monopoly control over the genes for research, diagnostic, and treatment purposes. A group of medical professionals, scientists, and patients are challenging the patent.

The criteria for a medical patent are such that while tools, medications, laboratory produced chemicals etc. can be patented, “Nature” cannot be patented. That which is patented must therefore be created, not merely discovered (regardless of how costly or effortful the discovery). Opponents of the BRAC patent often evoke Jonas Salk, who famously said in response to the potential patent of his Polio Vaccine: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” more...

“The old Netflix Friends used people to personalize; the new Netflix with Facebook uses people to homogenize”

“If autonomous vehicles obey traffic laws, income from traffic violations should go down”

“It shows how necessary it is to now deconstruct, in the sense of Derrida, the theories about the virtual”

“The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not”

“Tumblr encourages unbounded use. It allows you to experiment and play”

“characterizations of digital or physical, virtual or material, necessarily obscure how each constitutes the other”

“Drones as killer robots, drones as children sent off to war”

“if engineers could come up with an iPotty that fits in your purse, links up to Twitter and takes photos, toilet access might catch up with phones” (thanks jenny!)

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...