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We here at Cyborgology recognize the extreme violence that has been done to the sincerity of birthdays. Facebook has hollowed out the intricate, cherished and beloved rituals of celebrating one’s birth and replaced them with virtual Starbucks gift cards and Pusheen stickers. We’ve taken the fake birthdays made up by journalists to heart and decided to celebrate the blog’s birthday (a day late, lol) with one really long post chock-a-block with announcements, retrospection, and nostalgia. So slow down, print out the post below, go to Cape Cod or somewhere that isn’t “online” and have a nice long read.

A note from Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey:

Four years ago, together, we launched a blog here at The Society Pages on technology and society. We pretty much just wanted to have fun with it, so we thought we’d name it something ridiculous–something that played on Donna Haraway’s classic conceptualization of the cyborg, which was at the root of our thinking and seemed to be missing in contemporary research. In four years, Cyborgology grew, added contributors, spun off the Theorizing the Web conference, and this blog has come to stand for a specific view of research and thinking about technology and society: one that understands them to be enmeshed; that rejects seeing the Internet as some separate, cyber, space; that speaks to broad publics; and that always takes into account social inequalities and vulnerabilities. We’re immensely proud of Cyborgology. We want nothing more than to see it stay energized and continue to grow. So, we have decided that, after four wonderful years, it is time for new leadership and fresh ideas. We are passing the blog over to long-time Cyborgologists David Banks and Jenny Davis, and we are excited to see what they’ll do running this show.

Happy birthday, Cyborgology. Take care of it, David and Jenny!

-Nathan & PJ

From the New Editors:

Hi, Cyborgology readers. Long time contributors David Banks and Jenny Davis here.

We are excited and humbled to take over editorship for the blog.

We want to take a moment to thank PJ and Nathan for creating this venue, which has thrived as a space for debate, critical thought, and the development of a theoretical perspective on technology in society. At the onset of the blog, Nathan and PJ wrote all of the content themselves, along with the tedious and technical work that goes on behind the scenes. They then grew the blog by carefully curating a team of ‘Cyborgologists,’ and working tirelessly to construct and maintain an intellectual community. We are all richer for their work.

David Banks became the first regular contributor, followed soon after by Jenny Davis. Here are our first ever posts (awww: David’s first post; Jenny’s first post).  It has been an honor to write for PJ and Nathan, and to write with our fellow Cyborgologists, Sarah Wanenchak, Whitney Erin Boesel, Robin James, and Dave Paul Strohecker.

We have lots of new ideas for the future–including more guest posts, so start brainstorming your submissions.  We are also committed to maintaining a tradition of rigorous, critical, and theoretically enriching writing and conversation.

Stick with us, there are big things to come.

-Jenny & David

Personal Messages from Cyborgologists

Nathan- I started Cyborgology four years ago with PJ Rey, and today we’re handing it to long-time Cyborgologists David Banks and Jenny Davis. I’m very excited for the future of the blog and happy to reflect on the past year. Again, the blog has been a central part of the Theorizing the Web conference, and #TtW14 was my favorite yet. We saw the inclusion of Robin James whose brilliant work has made the blog even more fun to read. The one post of my own from the past year I’d like to highlight was a short reaction to a news story about Facebook throwing a sociology conference. Akin to what I’ve seen firsthand in academic department meetings and conferences as well as in governmental and corporate research groups, so-called “big” data swiftly passes right by basic methodological and ethical issues because the N is sooo biiiig. A sociology graduate student was quoted discussing how neutral Facebook is as a research environment and I responded with a post about this fallacy of neutrality. I was going to leave it there because this was a bad news story quoting a graduate student. I didn’t want to make too much fuss about knocking a straw-position, but I kept seeing this same fallacy even among professors as well as data journalists, corporate social media engineers, governmental research, and so on. The straw people were forming some kind of tragic majority, which lead to expanding that piece into a longer essay for The New Inquiry on “big” data as a special form of contemporary positivism. Hopefully the blog will continue to be a site for examining knowledge-power relations of the social web — and I know there’s a lot of exciting new changes in store for Cyborgology’s fifth year!

PJ- It’s hard to believe that over four years have passed since Nathan and I sat in our neighborhood bar in DC, spitballing silly names for a technology and society blog. It seems impossible to have imagined where this idea was headed and how profoundly it would shape our experience as a grad students. Cyborgology allowed us to start communicating with a wide range people who were excited to discuss the same sorts of questions that we were asking about technology and society, even as our own department proved unreceptive. I quickly realized that many of the most profound insights on these issues were not coming from the conventional academic sources that grad students are taught to rely on (though journal articles and conferences certainly have their place). Most important, Cyborgology has connected me to my fellow Cyborgologists, who have been an invaluable source of support, information, and ideas. I consider myself incredibly fortunate for this. I wish Jenny and David luck as they step into their new roles as our chief editors. I expect Cyborgology’s fifth year to be its best yet!

My favorite post this year, Sex Work and the Limits of American Libertarianism, called out Silicon Valley companies for using free market rhetoric to justify discriminatory actions (namely, limiting sex workers’ access to payment processing and crowd-funding sites). While sex workers are particularly stigmatized, and thus particularly vulnerable to discrimination, these incidents exemplify a system of surveillance, risk identification, and social exclusion that increasingly exerts control over all our lives. I will be thinking about this a lot as I write my dissertation over the next year.

Jenny- I’m feeling pretty lucky that I got to spend another year blogging alongside, and exchanging gif-laden emails with, such a fantastic group of writers. Through the years, I’ve found that my favorite posts are the ones I never meant to write, but felt I had to write. This year, I wrote one such post, Digital Divide in Action: Lessons from a Canceled Flight, while sitting in an airport terminal, fueled by a few hours of sleep and lots of indignation. This post sticks out to me for its intersection of social theory and social justice, embedded in experience. The insistence upon combining social thought with social activism is a hallmark of Cyborgology, represented particularly well in numerous posts this year, such as Sarah Wanenchak’s critique of Apple’s Health app (along with a corpus of writing about gender and gaming), Robin James’ work on gender, capitalism, and ‘Lean In’ culture, and David Banks’ continued discussions of power and surveillance. Taking on a new editorial role this year, I hope to foster this kind of engagement among both regular contributors, and increasingly, guest bloggers. I look forward to bringing new voices into the mix and challenging myself, my fellow bloggers, and our readers, to contend with lines of thought we haven’t yet considered.

David- This last year was a blast!  I had a great time writing Modern Myths: Mundane Enchantment and Creating Ghosts and Enhance! Ugly Websites, Flip Phones, and the Trouble With Technology in Storytelling with Sarah. Fellow Cyborgolgists have also been tearing it up this year with Robin’s ongoing work on neoliberalism, Sarah’s gaming culture coverage, and Jenny’s insightful posts on her own rules for writing and researching. This has been a really productive year for me. My November essay Voting Reduces Diversity in Social Media Participation (Kinda) was the beginning of research that turned into my first New Inquiry essay which I was very proud of. I also really liked the conversations that formed around The Parable of the Coffee Maker and the Design Sir and my two essays (1 & 2) about wearables. My favorite essay of the year though has to be Open (Source) for Business. That essay came out of some serious frustrations with my own dissertation research, where I am constantly working with open source software and hardware that can be maddeningly buggy or confusing. I certainly agree with and support the philosophy of free software but the execution (even in my own work) almost always falls short for common users. It’s a sticky problem that I see myself returning to in the coming year. I also want to play with the form of posts more, perhaps returning to the style that I experimented with in Time Traveling in Troy, New York. I’ve been really inspired by my fellow Cyborgologists to experiment and push the limits of my writing and I hope that as I take on a more editorial role, I can spend more time playing with form as well as content. I’m immeasurably excited to be taking on this new role and working with my fiends for another year. Finally, in case anyone was wondering, I’m still waiting to hear back about my application for the #AmtrakResidency.

Sarah- This last year has been marked by a great deal of transition and reexamination – with my career, with where I live, with what I do and what I want and what truly matters to me. I think my writing here has been a reflection of that, and part of the process for me has been learning to be comfortable with letting more and more of it show – or at least learning to be comfortable with the discomfort. Probably one of the posts that stands out the most to me is “Gravitational Lensing: death, twitter, and (not) making sense of it all“. It was written shortly after my cousin’s sudden and unexpected death from suicide, and is an example of the kind of painful, raw, messy place to which I’d like to have the courage to go more often. It was a revelation for me, before even this last year, that I could write emotion into theory, that I could be sad and angry and passionate and it wouldn’t detract from the quality of what I produced. One of the most damaging things that academia can do, I think, is teach you that powerful emotion is antithetical to good work. So I’ve been unlearning that, and in the coming year I want to keep unlearning. I want to be braver than I have been in terms of where I go and what I’m willing to write about, and I want to push the boundaries of what kind of writing appears here. I want to charge headlong into places I find frightening. I think that’s where some of the best work often comes from.

Robin- Two of my most successful posts this year were On Twitter’s Gender Metric & Femininity As Technology. When I wrote them, thought the argument I was making was so obvious that the posts were more or less filler (that is, they weren’t breaking any new ground, just me blabbing on when I couldn’t think of something more innovative to say). And was I wrong about that! So one thing I learned this year is that I’m a pretty bad judge of what people will find interesting.

My favorite posts of the year were generally the ones about music and sound: A Culture of Moderation: or, no more messages from Satan, Coincidental Consumption & the Thinkpiece Economy, & Big Data & the Physics of Social Harmony. My favorite posts to write are the ones that begin as class discussion with my students; the posts are my attempt to follow up on the ideas and questions my students and I pursued together. For example, my summer 2014 class on Theories of Neoliberalism resulted in Social Media, Because Neoliberalism?, The Financialized Girl, Yo, It’s Communicative Capitalism, & An Attempt At A Precise & Substantive Definition of Neoliberalism. My students are amazingly smart and they push me to be a better thinker; these posts are evidence of that.

Reach Out And Touch…: On Audio Social Media is one post I wish more people would read…especially every time the “why is there no Instagram for sound?” question pops up (again). There, I argue that the reason it’s so hard to make an Instagram for sound is not so much about sound so much as it is about the kind of sociality that social media is designed to support.

I suspect that future posts will be related to both (a) the new book manuscript I’m writing, which is about the relationships among post-identity politics, big data, and neoliberal political economy, and (b) the classes I teach. This spring I’m set to teach Feminist Philosophy & a pop music appreciation class, so I bet there will be some posts stemming from class readings and discussions.

Most Viewed Posts Written This Year

1. Femininity as a technology: some thoughts on hyper employment by Robin James
2. The Coolest Thing About Online Dating Sites by Jenny Davis
3. Apple’s Health App: Where’s the Power? by Sarah Wanenchak
4. Causes and Consequences of the Duckface by Jenny Davis
5. A Social Critique Without Social Science by David A Banks
6. Autobiography Through Devices (Part 1) by David A Banks
7. Don’t Say Seminal, It’s Sexist by Jenny Davis
8. On Pharrell’s “Happy” by Robin James
9. Toward a Drone Sexuality – Part 1: Knowledge and consent by Sarah Wanenchak
10. An attempt at a precise & substantive definition of ‘neoliberalism,’ plus some thoughts on algorithms by Robin James

I don’t remember exactly when I got into my first argument online. I don’t remember who I was fighting with or what it was about. I was probably angry. I don’t ever remember being afraid.

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Meet the folks who make the Cyborgology Blog happen.

Editors

David A Banks (@da_banks) is a writer, researcher, and teacher. He is co-chair for Theorizing the Web, editor-at-large for Real Life, and Associate Research Advisor for the Social Science Research Council. His work has also been featured in Real Life, The New Inquiry, The Baffler, Tikkun Magazine, The Alt, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. David’s work focuses on the geographies of authenticity: how places buy and sell their histories to visitors and potential new residents, usually on social media. He’s also interested in the ideological training of engineers. When he isn’t writing he is watching Star Trek with his partner Britney and their two cats. 

Jenny Davis (@Jenny_L_Davis) is a lecturer in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She studies identity, culture, and technology. She approaches her research theoretically and methodologically from multiple directions, utilizing formal theory and experimental work, participant observation and ethnography. She is engaged in several ongoing projects which often make guest appearances—in varying forms—through the content of her blog posts. Her publications appear in Sociology, Communication, and Interdisciplinary journals. An active proponent of accessible scholarship, you can find select articles un-paywalled on her academia.edu page. When she’s not teaching, writing, or editing Cyborgology, she’s running amok after three particularly high-energy dogs.

Regular Contributors

Crystal Abidin (@wishcrys) Dr Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist and ethnographer. She researches vernacular internet cultures and study young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. Her current projects look at contemporary internet folklore, grief and death in digital spaces, romance and coupling in public spaces, and mixed heritage. She is presently finishing up two monographs on blogshop culture and the Influencer industry. Crystal is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, Researcher with the Swedish Retail and Wholesale Development Council, and Adjunct Research Fellow with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University

Nathan Ferguson (@natetehgreat) is a writer who lives in Columbia, MO. He has a BA in creative writing and is interested in narratives – their affordances as a technology and in conjunction with other technologies, e.g. mass media and digital platforms, but also race, gender and carceral systems. When he’s not writing for Cyborgology or occupied at his desk job, he is active in the Mid-MO DSA chapter, learning to cook, hanging out with his girlfriend B or probably somewhere petting a cat.

Maya Indira Ganesh (@mayameme) Maya is an Indian feminist researcher, writer, and activist living in Berlin where she works with Tactical Technology Collective as the Director of Applied Research. At Tactical Tech, she works as an in-house writer, leads the organisation’s projects on Gender and Technology, and does research to support the organisation’s work on the social and political implications of living in a data society. She has a particular interest in ethnographic approaches to how individuals and communities interact with technology, from in-depth portraits of mobile phone use by women, and queer people in Bombay, to how LGBTQ, black, mixed race, and working class activists in Kenya and South Africa negotiate privacy and security in using technology for organising and activism. She conducted one of the first studies of Indian women’s online spaces in 2008, identifying patterns of online harassment, and intimacy, in the Indian internet. She has Masters degrees in Applied Psychology (Delhi, 1997) and Media and Cultural Studies (Sussex, 2007), and is a doctoral candidate at Leuphana University, Lüneburg studying how ethics is being shaped in terms of accountability for artificial intelligence in autonomous vehicles.

Gabi Schaffzin (@GabiSchaffzin) is pursuing his PhD in Art History with an Art Practice concentration at the University of California San Diego. His art and research consider the visual representation of pain and illness in a technologically mediated world dominated by a privileging of data over all else. You can see the emerging dialog between his research and artistic practice—much of which draws on the imagery and rhetoric of advertising and product design—at utopia-dystopia.com.

Marley-Vincent Lindsey (@MarleyVincentL) is a doctoral student in history at Brown University. He was happily studying Medieval Europe and the Hispanic Atlantic in college when he took a class called “Critical Videogame Studies.” Upon realizing people could (and should!) take the web seriously, he started writing about games, digital media and the digital humanities. Currently, he’s thinking about how the web transforms old questions asked by historians, how historical tropes are currently used and transformed online, and how people will write histories in the future (hint: with archives of memes and messengers.) In his spare hour, he’s probably playing Pokémon or exploring cities.

Jessie Sage (@sapiotextual) is an independent scholar interested in sex work advocacy, feminism, and reproductive justice. She has received an MA in Philosophy from Duquesne University, a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Duquesne University, an MA in Theology from the Graduate Theological Union at UC Berkeley, and a BA in philosophy from the University of San Diego. She has taught philosophy, ethics, and women’s and gender studies at Duquesne University and Chatham University, and has also worked as a doula. She currently works as a Pittsburgh based alternative model, clip producer, phone entertainer, and feminist activists. She is the co-creator, producer and host of the Peepshow Podcast (peepshowpodcast.com), a podcast which brings together sex workers, writers, activists, artists, and journalist to talk about issues of sex and social justice; and the co-founder of Pittsburgh’s Sex Worker Outreach Project (@PghSWOP).

Britney Summit-Gil (@bsummitgil) is a PhD student in Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research includes mass media representations and the negotiation of identity in digital environments, specifically constructions of masculine identities. She’s interested in bridging traditional humanities-based approaches with qualitative sociological methods, such as textual analysis informed by ethnographic inquiry. Her academic focus includes community building online, the “postfeminist” media landscape, and the various ways people interpret mass media texts from television and film to inform their understanding of the world. Using affect theory, rhetorical theory, and cultural and media studies approaches she tries, with varying degrees of success, to map the intersections of mass media, digital media, and capitalist ideologies. She lives in upstate New York with two awesome cats and her spouse David Banks. In her spare time she makes cookies, watches trash TV, and browses Reddit because “research.”

Sarah Wanenchak (@dynamicsymmetry) is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Maryland, where their work concerns technology and social movements and how emotion and meaning evolve when the two merge. They have also written extensively on the intersections of social justice, narrative, and video games, and their essay work has been featured in The New Inquiry. They write science fiction and fantasy under a pseudonym and have published several novels to date, and their short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, as well as in multiple Year’s Best collections. They spend way too much time yelling about things on Twitter.

Past Contributors

Whitney Erin Boesel (@weboesel) is a researcher at both the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the MIT Center for Civic Media, where she uses qualitative methods and network analysis to study framing and influence in online media (particularly as related to sexual and reproductive health and rights). She is a co-chair of the International Workshop on Misogyny and the Internet (Cambridge, June 2015), an organizer of the annual conference Theorizing the Web (NYC), and an organizer of the unconference Point to Point Camp (Cambridge, May 2015); in her “spare time,” she continues her ongoing (since 2010) ethnographic study of the group Quantified Self and does occasional freelance writing. Her Masters thesis focused on direct-to-consumer genetic testing, personal genomics, and self-tracking practices as part of a new form of biomedicalization that she cheekily terms “biomedicalization 2.0”; her undergraduate thesis was a three-act play. Her other major (academic) interests include social media, sex and gender, and the sociology of emotion; her theatre scripts have been performed in Cambridge, MA, and her creative writing has appeared both under her legal name and under various pseudonyms. [Whitney uses her full name in professional or formal contexts, and her last name is pronounced “basil”—like the herb.]

Robin James (@doctaj) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of two books: Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism will be published by Zer0 books in early 2015, and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music was published by Lexington Books in 2010. Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in The New Inquiry, Noisey, SoundingOut!, Hypatia, differences, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is also a digital sound artist and musician. Her website, which has PDFs of all her publications, is its-her-factory.com.

David Paul Strohecker (@dpsFTW) is getting his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies under Patricia Hill Collins and George Ritzer, focusing on issues of intersectionality, consumption, and popular culture. He got his BA in 2009 from Texas A&M University, where he studied under Joe R. Feagin, and wrote for the blog RacismReview.com. He currently studies popular culture, but remains interested in issues of race relations, white privilege, and gender inequality. He is currently doing work on the popularization of tattooing, a project on the revolutionary pedagogy of public sociology, and more theoretical work on zombie films as a vehicle for expressing social and cultural anxieties.

Founding Editors

Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) is a social media theorist, contributing editor at The New Inquiry, a researcher at Snapchat, and a sociology graduate student at the University of Maryland. The research is driven most fundamentally by the understanding that we increasingly live in an “augmented reality,” a perspective that views the digital and physical as enmeshed, opposed to viewing them as distinct (what he calls “digital dualism”). Nathan is also interested in and has published on how social media has triggered the rise of the digital “prosumer” (one who produces that which they consume and vice versa). Most recently, Nathan has been writing about surveillance, privacy, visibility, and the self. This is being applied to social media and photography for a forthcoming book, and in other work, the design of social platforms around ephemerality and metrics.

PJ Rey (@pjrey) is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland. He co-founded the annual Theorizing the Web conference and the Cyborgology Blog together with Nathan Jurgenson. His MA thesis argued that social media is an environment where exploitation thrives in a relative absence of alienation. He is beginning dissertation research examining digitally-mediated sex work with a particular interest in how such work is experienced as embodied interaction. When not dissertating, he dabbles in portrait/event photography and hifi geekery.

Guest Authors

Nilofar Ansher (@culture_curate) is pursuing her Master of Arts in Ancient Civilizations from the University of Mumbai, India. She is an editor, writer and researcher and blogs at http://www.trailofpapercuts.wordpress.com.

Jeremy Antley (@jsantley) is a writer/student/gamer who currently lives in Portland, OR and writes on all sorts of interests on his blog, Peasant Muse.

Sally Applin (@AnthroPunk) is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, in the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing (CSAC). Sally researches the impact of technology on culture, and vice versa.

Mike Bulajewski (@MrTeacup) is a Master’s student in Human-Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington.

Piergiorgio Degli Esposti (@pgde) studies Market and Consumption Behavior and is Assistant professor at Bologna University, Italy and a Marketing Consultant.

Ned Drummond (@maneatingflower) is a designer and artisan currently living in Washington, DC.

Nathan Fisk (@nwfisk) is a danah boyd fanboy and adjunct lecturer teaching “Youth and Teens Online” in the Science & Technology Studies department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Doug Hill (@DougHill25) is a journalist and independent scholar who has studied the history and philosophy of technology for fifteen years. More of this and other technology-related topics can be found on his blog, The Question Concerning Technology.

Rob Horning (@marginalutility) is an editor of the New Inquiry.

Airi Lampinen (@airi_) is a graduate student in Social Psychology at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Currently, she is interning at Microsoft Research New England.

Tanya Lokot (@tanyalokot) is a second-year PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a degree in journalism and media studies. Her interests include social social movements, urban protest in post-Soviet countries, digital media, augmented dissent, memes and data visualization.

Cheri Lucas (@cherilucas) focuses on literary nonfiction and memoir on her blog, Writing Through the Fog, and explores ideas on the self, relationships, social media, memory, and home in a physical-digital world. She is based in San Francisco.

Timothy McGettigan is a professor of sociology at Colorado State University – Pueblo.

Christine Moore (@thisthingblows) studies sexuality and is currently pursuing her Masters in sociology at the University of Texas San Antonio. She reluctantly tweets.

Sang-Hyoun Pahk is a sociology student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Dave Parry (@academicdave) studies how the digital network transforms our political relations. He is an assistant professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas at Dallas. His work can be found at http://www.outsidethetext.com.

Matt Rafalow is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at University of California, Irvine, studying intersections of technology, youth, and social inequality.

George Ritzer is a distinguished professor at the University of Maryland and the author of many books including The McDonaldization of Society and Enchanting a Disenchanted World.

L. M. Sacasas (@FrailestThing) is a PhD student in the University of Central Florida’s “Texts & Technology” program exploring the intersections of bodies, spaces, and technology. He blogs at The Frailest Thing.

Evan Selinger (@evanselinger) is an associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Behzod Sirjani (@beh_zod) is a PhD Student in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. He thinks out loud frequently on Twitter and on his blog.

Marc Smith (@marc_smith) is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith co-founded the Social Media Research Foundation, a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.

Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) is an educator, writer, and Ph.D student exploring social media subjectivities at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Francesca Tanmizi is an ex-Sociology major at Loyola Marymount University who only realized she missed writing Sociology essays after graduation.

Samuel Tettner is a Venezuela-born globally situated cyborg, interested in science, technology and their critical and empowering understanding, currently pursuing a Masters degree in Society, Science and Technology in the Netherlands.

James Vincent (@jjvincent) is a writer and journalist from London. He tweets in a generally noncommittal fashion.

Samuel Zwaan (@mediawetenschap) is a teacher and student in Media Studies at Utrecht University.

Facebook and Apple are offering  women employees the opportunity to “lean in,” which is great…right?

Humans both make and use technologies. Because of this, technologies themselves are imbued with politics, and the way people employ technologies have political implications. Untangling what those politics are, is sometimes a tricky process, as technological potentialities in both design and use are multiple and sometimes contradictory. Such is the case with egg-freezing technologies and the offer from Apple and Facebook to cover this procedure for women employees.

Since their announcement—a clear response to criticisms over Silicon Valley’s disproportionately dude populated work force—commentators have tried to discern the political implications. While the move certainly offers an opportunity for women who want to delay childbirth, it also presents a pressure to do so. more...

This is a cross-post from Its Her Factory.

Is data “vibrant” in the new materialist sense? That is, does it exhibit the “agency” or power that living things have to affect other things? It may not materially vibrate in the way sound waves do, but in its interaction with other phenomena (especially other data), data does exhibit the liveliness new materialists attribute to all things. In fact, some data scientists use concepts of “vibrancy” to describe data’s post- and extra-human capacities to percieve, know, and act.

Intel Vibrant Data from Incubate Design on Vimeo.

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Something that’s become a bit of a refrain for me here is stories matter – in one way or another I think it’s popped up in just about everything I’ve written about. I’m sure it can come off repetitive, but there’s a reason I keep flogging that particular horse: first, it’s one of the things I hold most deeply and personally true, and second, it’s surprising to me sometimes how many people don’t actually seem to grasp it. At least not in all the situations to which it applies.

I’ve been writing a lot about games recently, you know my favorites can be found at Spielesnacks DE, and a lot of people have been talking a lot about games. It’s one of those cultural moments. For a variety of reasons I’m not going to go into much more detail than that in this post, except to say that there are intense emotions wrapped up in games and those emotions are extremely apparent right now. Someone outside this particular subculture might be baffled regarding why people are feeling things so deeply about games.

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In the 60s there was this flourishing of  _________Studies Departments across Western academe. Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Urban Studies, African American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies set up shop in large Universities and small colleges and slowly but surely created robust intellectual communities of their own. These interdisciplinary fields of study sought to break apart centuries-old notions about the noun that came before “studies.” It was a radical idea for the social and behavioral sciences that now seems somewhat banal; focusing an entire department on a subject, rather than a method or tradition, allowed researchers to focus on pressing issues at the expense of traditional methodological barriers. One could easily argue that this approach produced some of the most influential academic and popular writing of the 20th century. The 21st century has seen an unfortunate decline in these institutions and the complex problems they sought to investigate and mitigate have come roaring back in uncanny ways. more...

The contemporary information economy is made up of prosumers—those who simultaneously produce and consume. This is exciting, as we lay-folk become micro-journalists, creating content and spreading what others create. However, such a system poses serious questions about the ethics of sharing practices.

In what follows, I offer a skeleton guideline for the ethics of sharing. It is purposely broad so as to remain flexible. I offer three key guiding principles: Who always matters; Intention always matters; and The law is a really good suggestion. more...

Let me start by saying, accessibility is a human rights issue, not an afterthought. Frankly, it’s an insult to people with disabilities that access is even a subject of debate. And yet…

The Technology, Equality, and Accessibility in College and Higher Education Act (i.e., the TEACH Act) is currently under debate in congress. The legislation requires that technologies used in college classrooms be accessible to all students, including students with disabilities. It is entirely possible that you have not heard of the TEACH Act, but for those who it most affects—students with bodies that deviate from the norm—the stakes are quite high. The bill has some strong support, but also strong opposition, from surprising sources.   more...

In truth, I didn’t pay a tremendous amount of attention to iOS8 until a post scrolled by on my Tumblr feed, which disturbed me a good deal: The new iteration of Apple’s OS included “Health”, an app that – among many other things – contains a weight tracker and a calorie counter.

And can’t be deleted.

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