Search results for augmented

Primer on Marxist Theory of the Web

PJ Patella-Rey on June 4, 2011

Here, in this prelude panel discussion to the Internet as Playground and Factory conference, Tiziana Terranova presents a brief and excellent summery of how contemporary Marxist theory—particularly, Italian Marxist theories of socially-produced value—is useful in understanding the social and economic conditions of the Web.  It’s a bit dense, but, in brief, she argues that much of the value produced in modern capitalist societies now comes from outside the workplace.  Markets have learned to capture value from our everyday social activities.  The ideology of neo-liberalism has moved society even further away from the traditional wage-for-labor relationships that used to characterize the workplace by convincing people to view their individual labor-power as a (sometimes risky) investment that may or may not result in satisfying returns.

Terranova was an early advocate of viewing cyberspace and the material world as co-determining (what we describe, on this blog, as “augmented reality”).  Consider her (2000) statement:

I am concerned with how the “outernet” – the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that criss-crosses and exceeds the Internet – surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole.

The intrinsic materialism of Marxism proves quite productive in this case insofar as it draws Internet theorists toward viewing the material implications of digital politics. more...

Does Social Media Benefit Political Underdogs?

nathanjurgenson on June 3, 2011

As the 2012 presidential race ever so slowly gains momentum it remains clear that social media will be influencing elections for a long time to come. In the long run, does the shift towards social media campaigning change who is perceived to be a legitimate candidate? If so, social media might change who wins elections and therefore changes how we are governed. Avoiding [for now] the issue of whether social media has inherent tendencies towards the left or right, what I want to ask is: opposed to old media, does new media benefit political underdogs and outsiders?

As Republicans announce presidential bids on Twitter and Obama gets friendly with Zuckerberg and Facebook, it seems that the presidential campaign has found itself augmented by and reliant upon social media tools; some of the very same tools many of us use, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on. Part of their popularity is that one can view and be viewed by people from all over the world in an instant and for no cost. It does not cost money to publish this post or to tweet about it later on. Social media campaigning is also relatively cheap; indeed, often times free. Alternatively, print advertising is expensive because space is scarce and the scarcity of broadcast time makes television and radio too costly for underdogs and outsiders to fairly compete. However, when we exchange atoms for bits we enter into a world of abundance, a world where broadcasting a message quickly and globally becomes cheap and easy.

This cheaper social-media campaign style may remove or at least lesson more...

Augmenting the Cemetery

PJ Patella-Rey on May 31, 2011

YouTube Preview Image

A company called Quiring Monuments has recently begun marketing augmented tombstones that are designed to assist smartphone-carrying visitors in accessing digital information about the deceased.  On these tombstones, qr codes are given the kind of prominence once exclusively reserved for a person’s name, dates, and epitaph.  The qr codes link users to individualized sites that contain information about the person being memorialized.  This means that part of the memorializing process now includes constructing an enduring Web presence for the deceased.

This raises a few questions.  How important to the memorializing process is being in the physical presence of a the body?  Will crystallized bits of memory in cyberspace deepen, or even eclipse, the memorial experience found in physical graveyards?  Facebook has already adopted a policy for memorializing accounts (also discussed in the official blog).  Are graveyards becoming redundant?

For more, see Bellamy Pailthorp’s NPR story, “Technology Brings Digital Memories To Grave Sites.”

Get Real

David Banks on May 19, 2011

Lately I have been trying to list all of the spaces, places, moments in time, story telling techniques, life courses, and jobs that are not popularly considered “the real world.” Here is the not-so-comprehensive list I came up wtih:

  1. The Internet
  2. Video Games
  3. Books
  4. Graphic novels
  5. Reality television
  6. Movies
  7. School
  8. College
  9. “Theory”
  10. Fiction

A note about number 3 (and 4). I say “books” as a whole, to capture two sentiments. The first, is an aversion to the nerdy bookworm that is exemplified in The Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough At Last” (SPOILER). The second is a sort of anti-intellectualism more...

Cyberpunk Author Bruce Sterling on Cyborgology

PJ Patella-Rey on May 18, 2011

In his Beyond the Beyond blog (hosted by WIRED magazine),  cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling recently made some comments on my post, “Cyborgs and the Augmented Reality they Inhabit.”

Here’s how he describes the piece:
[…] an argument about the definition of Augmented Reality and the definition of Cyborgs, until you can get ‘em to click together like puzzle pieces. But so much debris is left on the floor when they’re done with the theory tin-shears, that the debris looks more interesting than the remainder.
Though it may appear quite critical, I actually agree with Sterling on this point—authors on this blog have rendered augmented reality (and the cyborgs that inhabit it) quite banal.  Or, rather, the techno-saturated world that has emerged in the 21st Century appears to us far more mundane than the exotic dystopian imagery that enveloped the famous cyberpunk novels of yesteryear.  The fantasy of ocular implants and digital immersion have given way to the seemingly unremarkable reality of smartphones and Facebook. Through the “theory tin-shears” futurist art of the past becomes the sociology of the present.  But, the study of present realities will never be as exciting as the imagining of future possibilities. more...

Digital-Physical Embodiment & the Kiss Transmission Device

jennydavis on May 17, 2011

The Kiss Transmission Device was recently created in a lab in Japan. This is essentially an internet connected French kissing machine. Yes, you read that correctly. It is a machine that allows you to share actual French kisses via the internet. Okay, they are not actual French kisses…but kind of.

A user of the device caresses an internet connected straw-like mechanism with their tongue, causing the device to transfer the motion to a second straw-like mechanism, ostensibly located in the mouth of a romantic partner. Developers hope eventually to make the device more “tongue like” by adding personalized flavor, moisture and breathing patterns.

The developers view this as a device that will aid in the maintenance of long-distance romantic relationships, allowing geographically separate partners to connect on a physical level. They also talk about marketing celebrity kisses—allowing users to swap spit (er, swap straw movements) with the likes of Justin Bieber or any other celebrity willing to sell a physical piece of hir sexuality. more...

The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Parts I, II and III)

nathanjurgenson on May 14, 2011

I am working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and have decided to take on theorizing the rise of faux-vintage photography (e.g., Hipstamatic, Instagram). From May 10-12, 2011, I posted a three part essay. This post combines all three together.
Part I: Instagram and Hipstamatic
Part II: Grasping for Authenticity
Part III: Nostalgia for the Present

a recent snowstorm in DC: taken with Instagram and reblogged by NPR on Tumblr

Part I: Instagram and Hipstamatic

This past winter, during an especially large snowfall, my Facebook and Twitter streams became inundated with grainy photos that shared a similarity beyond depicting massive amounts of snow: many of them appeared to have been taken on cheap Polaroid or perhaps a film cameras 60 years prior. However, the photos were all taken recently using a popular set of new smartphone applications like Hipstamatic or Instagram. The photos (like the one above) immediately caused a feeling of nostalgia and a sense of authenticity that digital photos posted on social media often lack. Indeed, there has been a recent explosion of retro/vintage photos. Those smartphone apps have made it so one no longer needs the ravages of time or to learn Photoshop skills to post a nicely aged photograph.

In this essay, I hope to show how faux-vintage photography, while seemingly banal, helps illustrate larger trends about social media in general. The faux-vintage photo, while getting a lot of attention in this essay, is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past. But we have a ways to go before I can elaborate on that point. Some technological background is in order. more...

The (Digital) Image of the City

David Banks on May 13, 2011

Kevin Lynch’s Original Study (Copyright MIT Press 1960)

In 1960 an architect by the name of Kevin Lynch embarked on a fascinating three-city study of how urban dwellers keep mental pictures of their hometowns. He and his team identified five “elements” of the city: 1) paths, 2) edges, 3) nodes, 4) districts, and 5) landmarks. These five components constitute most of the ways individuals think about and navigate their city. As smartphones become more and more ubiquitous, the way we navigate cities has changed. We have GPS devices, interactive maps, social networking applications that tell us where our friends are and where they like to go for pizza. The city exists in physical space, it exists in our minds, and now it exists in the digital “cloud.” How does this new layer of bits effect the way our cities look, act, and feel? To know more about the How to update the maps on your Garmin device , go through this.

I want to briefly discuss the five elements before conjecturing how access to information changes what these elements look like and how we organize the city in our heads. Paths can be more...

The Faux-Vintage Photo Part II: Grasping for Authenticity

nathanjurgenson on May 11, 2011

I am working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and have decided to take on theorizing the rise of faux-vintage photography (e.g., Hipstamatic, Instagram). I want to start fleshing out ideas and will do so with a three-part series on this blog: I posted part one yesterday (“Hipstamatic and Instagram”) and tomorrow I will post the third and final part (“Nostalgia for the Present”). [Update: Read the full essay here.]

If you use social media then you probably have noticed the recent proliferation of faux-vintage photography, often the product of smartphone applications such as Hipstamatic and Instagram. I describe in part I of this essay posted yesterday what faux-vintage photography is and noted that it is a new trend, comes primarily from smartphones and has proliferated on social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr and others. However, the important question remains: why this massive popularity of faux-vintage photographs? I will tackle this question today, and in part III tomorrow, will conclude that the rise, and potential fall, of faux-vintage photography illustrates larger points about social media in general.

What I want to argue is that the rise of the faux-vintage photo is an attempt to create a sort of “nostalgia for the present,” an attempt to make our photos seem more important, substantial and real. We want to endow the powerful feelings associated with nostalgia to our lives in the present. And, ultimately, all of this goes well beyond the faux-vintage photo; the momentary popularity of the Hipstamatic-style photo serves to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past. In fact, the phrase “nostalgia for the present” is borrowed from the great philosopher of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, who states that “we draw back from our immersion in the here and now […] and grasp it as a kind of thing.”* more...

Talking Theorizing the Web on the Radio

nathanjurgenson on May 4, 2011

The Cyborgology editors were on the radio (WYPR, Baltimore’s NPR affiliate) talking about the Theorizing the Web 2011 conference. We discuss the Twitter backchannel and the notion of an augmented conference, and how Facebook is similarly a backchannel to our Face-to-face interactions. Also, conference attendee Bonnie Stewart is mentioned!

Listen to the full audio here.