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My small city of Troy, New York is drawing up a new comprehensive plan. Lots of towns and even universities do this from time to time as a way of coordinating and re-aligning the institutions and organizations into some kind of general direction. These sorts of moments encourage individuals to be reflective as well as divisive. There’s a lot at stake (or at least it feels that way) and people feel the need to protect what they see as threatened by change, or go on the offensive and try to root out what they see as a long-standing problem. More than anything, these sorts of comprehensive planning efforts force us to confront our everyday lives as a set of conditions and decisions that exist outside of our control but are ultimately steerable if enough political will can be leveraged, if enough organizing around a particular issue gets done. Last night, a wide variety of people came together to discuss what they thought was working and what was needed attention in our city. more...

Jasmine Rand, lawyer for Trayvon Martin’s family, came and spoke at my university last week. I held my breath as she walked out on stage. She began with the emotional announcement that we were on the eve of what would have been Trayvon’s 20^th birthday. Along with a crowd full of students, professors, staff, and members of the community, I settled on the edge of my seat and listened eagerly for what this woman, in this moment of racial upheaval, had to say.  As I tweeted just before the talk: this was a big deal.

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A quick update regarding Keurig instituting the coffee maker form of Digital Rights Management in their products: Not so great for Keurig.

“It is a HUGE SHAME that the company decided to remove the ability to use your own coffee grounds in the home brew k-cup. …They should have just said we made these changes so our products would sell more so we could make a bigger profit,” reads a typical review. “They took a potentially killer machine and added horrible DRM – a rights management system, in the greedy attempt to get all other coffee pod manufacturers to pay them so their pods work,” reads another of the hundreds of one-star reviews. Many lamented the ability to give no stars. If you Google “Keurig 2.0,” the first thing that autocompletes is “hack.”

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I thought for reruns week I would re-post something I wrote back in February that fits with our ongoing CFP on Small Town Internet. Problems of governance, especially of small, geographically defined groups, is surprisingingly understudied especially when it comes to our present state of augmented reality. 

It is certainly good news that the Obama Administration has come out strong for net neutrality. The President recently made an announcement that his office would help promote local broadband competition as part of a broader effort to improve the country’s data infrastructure. More specifically, the federal government plans to help municipalities develop their own data networks, fight state laws that prevent municipal governments from offering public broadband options, and help small businesses compete in local markets with companies like Verizon and Time Warner. The chairman of the FCC followed suit by announcing (in WIRED Magazine…?) yesterday that he would be circulating a proposal to apply Title II to telecom companies and mobile phone carriers, effectively making it illegal to throttle connections based on what sorts of services you are connecting to. This is all good news but I’m also hesitant to trust local authorities with my internet connection. Aren’t these the same governments that defend murderous police forces and cooperated with the federal government to shut down political dissent? Why should these organizations control the network? While I am definitely not a fan of huge telecom corporations, I don’t trust my local government either.  more...

We’ve all been there. Sweaty palms, racing heart, left eye that winks at involuntary intervals. You’re emotionally fraught and having a physiological response. It could be an upcoming exam, a big presentation, or that one friend who can’t stop telling you about their fantastic job/spouse/kids/new shoes while wondering out loud how you manage living in such messy quarters.

Our bodies are key sources of information and guidance. Bodied reactions, coupled with culturally situated reflexive analyses, help us make sense of day-to-day events and make behavioral decisions. Feel like you’re going to vomit every time that colleague stops by your office? Maybe they’re toxic. Maybe you’re in love. The bodily response prompts you to do something, and how you interpret that response tells you what that something is. more...

Quiet, please, for Art.

ACTUAL BEST
by Sunny Moraine

Fabulously awesome, congratulations
That wouldn’t be weird, right?
Put up with for a lot of reasons

Me. It also still has no title.
I may be able to help you out
Gorgeous. Sorta choked up a little.

Might fly better if it has a name.

Dudes are just not even human.

When I decided to try to throw something together about Poetweet it went without saying that I’d have to see what it scraped together out of me (note the “me”; I used that word without thinking about it and we’ll return to that shortly). And of course, looking at it, I’m making instinctive sense of it. I recognize those as my words, and arranged in that fashion they do indeed seem to make a kind of sense. Further, it’s a pleasurable kind of sense – doofy, a little ridiculous, a little nonsensical in spite of itself, but I read and I (granted the bias) am all like hey, I kinda like that person.

Which is actually somewhat remarkable considering how difficult it can be to like oneself.

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“Have you been on Yik Yak?”

My graduate student friends can attest to the fact that I ask this question of almost everyone at some point. Sometimes more than once, like when you’re excited about something and can’t help but tell the story over and over again to the same audience. Annoying, I know, and I’m sorry to all my friends.

But it’s just because I find Yik Yak absolutely fascinating. I’m drawn to it because, for at least some users, it serves as a sort of technologically cultivated hive-mind therapy session. For the uninitiated, Yik Yak is an anonymous social media app available on Android or iOS mobile devices. Users can post, vote on, and publicly reply to “yaks.” Users collect “Yakarma” based on how many votes their yaks receive and how often they vote on other yaks. Once a post receives more than five down votes it is removed. Rather than following other users or adding friends, Yik Yak shows posts from others within a ten-mile radius of your location, so when you visit the Yik Yak stream you are seeing the anonymous posts of other users in your area. As such, it is particularly popular among college students—a place to gripe about classes you hate, snoring roommates, bad cafeteria food, and attractive people that won’t give you the time of day. Of course, it’s also a place for inside jokes and celebrating particularly rowdy parties, but to be frank, there’s a lot of complaining. more...

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a radical shift in the structure of education at the national level. With a tone of idealism, he set forth the intention to provide all students in good standing two free years of community college. In response to this highly anticipated announcement, half of the room stood in applause, while the other half sat firmly in their seats. Unsurprisingly, standers and sitters divided along party lines, with democrats welcoming the proposal and republicans opposed.

In theory (and in general) I’m with the standers on this issue. In practice, the issue is complicated and I have some deep concerns— concerns that stem from troubling trends within higher education. If I had to locate myself among the split-level congressional crowd, I would be out of my seat, but remain in an awkward and uncomfortable squat. more...

NPR launched a new show this month called Invisibilia that “explores the intangible forces that shape human behavior – things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions.” The show’s hosts Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller are great personalities and the show is beautifully edited in a way that doesn’t reach the Reggie Watts-esque soundscape of Radiolab nor does it stick closely to the dry public radio persona that has been lampooned countless times. I was, however, really disappointed when I learned that the huge topics under investigation in this show would only be understood through “psychological and brain science.” There are a lot of different disciplines that can be brought to bear on huge topics like “ideas” so why are we getting another show that confuses humans for brains? Also, the education and support families need. Millions of people in the US have a loved one living with Alzheimer’s disease or another type of dementia. For many, understanding the disease, knowing how to best support the loved one living with dementia and navigating the increasingly complex healthcare system are overwhelming. Many care partners find themselves frustrated, confused and exhausted. Internet searches leave many families more lost than they were as they struggle to find answers to basic questions like “What things should I be planning for at this time?”, more...

A recent New York Times opinion piece by Hannah Seligson has declared “the unhappy marriage” to be “Facebook’s last taboo.”  As a scholar of Facebook, I found the singling out of marriage rather odd. For years now, critics have been decrying the general lack of unhappy anything on Facebook, arguing that the level of self-monitoring typical on the site strips it of authenticity and relational value. While it’s true that most people try to limit the amount of negativity they display on Facebook (as in any semi-public social space), and the interface itself privileges good news, Facebook users are leveraging the medium specifically for the delivery of “bad” (or uncertain) news.

That Facebook is a semi-public space with most, if not all, social norms for public spaces carrying over from face-to-face interaction is now a commonly accepted definition of the platform.  In fact, Seligson touches on this a number of times, comparing Facebook, for instance, to cocktail parties for which the married couple hosting must put aside private squabbles and present a united front.  That the space is now theoretically visible to hundreds or even thousands of Facebook “friends” certainly reflects a change of scale. more...