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Academia is in the midst of a labor crisis. With two-thirds of instructional faculty made up of contingent workers (i.e., adjuncts) a critical mass of dissatisfied—and often hungry— advocates are joining together to decry the unacceptable working conditions within historically sacred institutions of higher education. And with new adjunct unions forming regularly, the movement is taking on undeniable prevalence.

But it is more than just a growing quantity of under-paid, over-burdened, college educators that has fostered a national movement, it is also the availability of digitally mediated platforms through which these workers can connect, aggregate data, and share personal and collective stories with a larger public. That is, digital media has been instrumental in creating this particular counter-public.

Contemporary social movements are inevitably augmented, with digital and physical inextricably tied. In the case of adjuncts, however, digital media plays an especially crucial role. Of course I can only engage in informed speculation, but I don’t believe the adjunct movement would be a movement at all (or at least not much of one) without Internet technologies. This has to do with the material and social realities of contingent labor within higher-ed. more...

My feeds this week kept popping up with a bothersome headline, stated in a variety of ways: Smartphones are Making Us Stupid, Technology is Making us Lazy, Does Smartphone use Decrease Intelligence?

The University of Waterloo released a paper this week that was originally published in Computers in Human Behavior back in July. Titled The Brain in your Pocket: Evidence that Smartphones are used to Supplant Thinking, the authors find a negative correlation between cognitive functioning and the use of search engines via smartphones.

The authors refer to smartphones as an “extended mind,” and make causal claims about the effects of this technological extension upon the current and futures state of human cognition. Namely, they predict that increased use of smartphones to gather information will indulge the human tendency towards lazy thinking, and we will become increasingly reliant upon devices. That is, the authors predict an outsourcing of critical thought. It’s kind of scary, really.

But before the phone stackers triumphantly proclaim that they told us so! Let’s look more closely at the research and the underlying assumptions of the research question.    more...

(Image from the People’s Climate March Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/peoplesclimatemarch)

When it comes to data analysis, sometimes non-findings speak louder than findings. Particularly when non-findings shine a light on questions that aren’t being asked.

 On 21 September 2014, UMd Professor of Sociology Dana R. Fisher took a small army of friends and graduate students to New York City to survey demonstrators at The People’s Climate March (PCM). The PCM survey is part of a longer thread of Dr. Fisher’s research, which surveys protestors to get a better understanding of who protests, how they are mobilized, and how their participation in protests relates to other forms of civic engagement they may partake in. Nate Silver’s data-nerd playground FiveThirtyEight.com sent a film crew to follow us to make a short documentary of our experience. The doc is part of their series The Collectors, a look at how scientists can apply rigorous research methods to a variety of unique settings outside of the laboratory.

The PCM’s greatest appeal—the thing that got us all up before dawn on a Sunday to take a bus from DC to Manhattan—was the sheer volume of potential data it made available to us. While more conservative estimates put the number of demonstrators at around 100,000, PCM organizers themselves suggest that it was closer to four times that. In any case, 350.org, who planned the march in collaboration with a long list of partner organizations, trumpeted the event as the “largest climate march in history.” By all accounts, they were right; the PCM was the brightest star in a constellation of nearly 2,600 simultaneous climate protests happening all over the world that day.

This thing was big, it was global, and it mobilized a lot of people.

Part of 350.org’s plan was to arrange protesters into neat blocks, according to where they fit along a spectrum of participant identities and organizational affiliations. Their hope was to organize participants into city-block-sized sections that would each represent a single unified ideological or social position. The map below details what these blocks were supposed to look like, and who was supposed to fill them during the assembly period before the march began. more...

Statistics are never objective. Rather, they use numeric language to tell a story, and entail all of the subjectivity of storytelling. Indeed, the skilled statistician, like the skilled orator, can bring an audience into the world of their creation, and get the audience to buy fully into the logic of this world. Numbers, like words, are tools of communication, persuasion, connection, and dissent.  Statistics are not objective. But my goodness, statistics can be powerful.

Check out this particularly compelling statistical story about Ferguson Missouri: more...

So I’m basically destroying my gamer cred here – to the extent that I had any, which is probably precisely not at all – by admitting that until this week I hadn’t yet played Destiny.

Look, I just hadn’t, okay? Leave me alone.

(Don’t worry, it gets a lot worse.)

Anyway, I had some free time so I dove into the demo. Many of the more critical (in the more academic sense, not the “this sucks” sense) reviews I had barely skimmed said it was both beautiful and ultimately pretty soulless, which I found – at least from the demo – to be true. But I can get behind a soulless game. I can even get behind a “walking simulator with stuff”. Sometimes I want to Not Think About Things in a fairly aggressive fashion.

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A couple of days ago I finished writing a short story and burst into tears.

Anyone who knows me knows I have a lot of emotions. The point of this story is the story.

It started out as a story about a mysterious plague of suicides documented and shared via social media, which I seized on just because it resonated for a bunch of reasons, and I felt like writing something profoundly troubling. What it became was a story about me, about what the last year has been like, about what the last six years have been like – in a graduate program regarding which I seem to be moving from feelings of ambivalence to outright anger and resentment – and really what it’s been like since we first started using these technologies to connect with each other.

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Twitter and Dove have teamed up in a new campaign to combat criticisms of women’s bodies on social media. The #SpeakBeautiful campaign, which kicked off with a short video (shown above) during the pre-show of this year’s Academy Awards, cites the staggering statistic that women produced over 5 million negative body image Tweets last year. The campaign implores women to stop this, to focus on what is beautiful about each of us, and bring our collective beauty to the fore. Set to musical crescendo and the image of falling dominos, this message is both powerful and persuasive. more...

I have a secret to tell all of you: I kind of don’t care about teaching evolution in science classes. Put another way, I’m less than convinced that most people, having learned the story of species differentiation and adaptation, go on to live fuller and more meaningful lives. In fact, the way we teach evolution ­­––with a ferocious attention toward competition and struggle in adverse circumstances–– might be detrimental to the encouragement of healthy and happy communities. I also see little reason to trust the medical community writ-large, and I cringe when a well-meaning environmentalist describes their reaction to impending climate change by listing all of the light bulbs and battery-powered cars they bought. I suppose –given my cynical outlook– that the cover story of this month’s National Geographic is speaking to me when it asks “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?” Good question: what the hell is wrong with me? more...

I was doing a post on writing for my author blog, and I wanted an image for it, so off to the Flickr Creative Commons search I went. I searched the “writing’ keyword. Almost all of what I got back was some version of the above. Almost all of the rest of it was just random stuff. There were a few shots of laptops or computers but they nearly always also prominantly included notebooks and pens/pencils. Do a Google image search for “writing” and you get the same damn thing. All very attractive photos of pens and hands and often lovely, swooping script.

I do not write that way.

I can’t write that way.

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There’s a tricky balancing act to play when thinking about the relative influence of technological artifacts and the humans who create and use these artifacts. It’s all too easy to blame technologies or alternatively, discount their shaping effects.

Both Marshall McLuhan and Actor Network Theorists (ANT) insist on the efficaciousness of technological objects. These objects do things, and as researchers, we should take those things seriously. In response to the popular adage that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” ANT scholar Bruno Latour famously retorts:

It is neither people nor guns that kill. Responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants

From this perspective, failing to take seriously the active role of technological artifacts, assuming instead that everything hinges on human practice, is to risk entrapment by those artifacts that push us in ways we cannot understand or recognize. Speaking of media technologies, McLuhan warns:

Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users.   

This, they get right. Technology is not merely a tool of human agency, but pushes, guides, and sometimes traps users in significant ways. And yet both McLuhan and ANT have been justly criticized as deterministic. Technologies may shape those who use them, but humans created these artifacts, and humans can—and do— work around them.   more...