Search results for augmented

The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.

And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.

In a 2009 post titled “Towards Theorizing An Augmented Reality,” I discussed geo-tagging (think Foursquare or Facebook Places), street view, face recognition, the Wii controller and the fact that sites like Facebook both impact and are impacted by the physical world to argue that “digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other.” This is opposed to the notion that the Internet is like the Matrix, where there is a “real” (Zion) that you leave when you enter the virtual space (the Matrix) -an outdated perspective as Facebook is increasingly real and our physical world increasingly digital.

I have used this perspective of augmentation to critque dualism when I see it. For instance, more...

Via.

This great video demonstrates some possibilities of how our increasingly augmented reality might look in the future. Data will be displayed all around us in interesting new ways. Information can be incidental, ambient, playful, and above all we are given a picture of an augmented reality not driven exclusively by advertising.

Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Almost ten years ago, then-editor of Wired magazine Thomas Goetz wrote an article titled “Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops.” Goetz rightly predicted that, as the cost of producing sensors and other hardware continues to decrease, the feedback loop will become an essential mechanism used to govern many aspects of our lives through the stages of evidence, relevance, consequence, and action. Provide people with important and actionable information, and we can expect them to act to improve the activity monitored to generate that information. 

Behavior modification technologies (BMT) have indeed become a large market, especially in the wellness industry. These technologies augment the body and affect behavior through surveillance and feedback. One has  augmented willpower when using gamified apps which encourage physical activity, augmented memory through products that remind users of things they need to do, augmented sensations when a water bottle tells its user when to drink. Supplementing and replacing mental processes with feedback systems, users tie them to a standardized measure: a codified difference between enough and not enough. Users employ these technologies because they promise self-optimization with the technologies’ help. Failing to use these tools, or failing to respond to their prompts, is increasingly cast as irresponsible, as healthcare costs rise and chronic ‘lifestyle diseases’ lead the charts in causes of death in the United States. more...

At the end of May our local police department released a statement on city traffic stops, a day ahead of the attorney general’s annual report covering all stops made across the state. “Black drivers continue to be overrepresented in Columbia Police Department traffic stops” as a local newspaper summed it up, “and the numbers are even worse than in 2016.” Despite Black residents making up less than 10% of the city’s population, Black drivers were over 4 times more likely to be stopped than White drivers, as one city council member noted at the end of a public comment session where several local residents spoke out on the issue. From the statistical data, to residents’ critical comments, including one Black resident’s direct experiences being routinely followed and stopped, racial profiling by seemingly all accounts remains the norm, and overall appears to be getting steadily worse.

By all accounts, well, except for the police and the city manager’s anyway. “We continue to look at data and we have not seen an apparent pattern of profiling…,” the city manager assured. “[H]owever, we acknowledge that some community members have experiences with officers that make them have negative feelings and perceptions about police.” His assurances, among other things, sound eerily close to the police chief’s own statements last year about the previous year’s report: “We will vigilantly continue to look for additional data we can collect that would give our community a fuller picture of the reason each traffic stop is conducted” (emphasis mine). But if a “disparity index of 3.28 for African American drivers, an increase from 3.13 in 2016” doesn’t signify a pattern, what would? According to our officials, the answer is the same as it was a year ago: more data and/or analysis is needed to say for sure what the data is telling them. Meanwhile, the dissonance between what they say and what the data shows continues to grow. Indeed, it almost seems as though these two things exist in parallel dimensions from one another.

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“Designing Kai, I was able to anticipate off-topic questions with responses that lightly guide the user back to banking,” Jacqueline Feldman wrote describing her work on the banking chatbot. Feldman’s attempts to discourage certain lines of questioning reflects both the unique affordances bots open up and the resulting difficulties their designers face. While Feldman’s employer gave her leeway to let Kai essentially shrug off odd questions from users until they gave up, she notes “…Alexa and Siri are generalists, set up to be asked anything, which makes defining inappropriate input challenging, I imagine.” If the work of bot/assistant designers entails codifying a brand into an interactive persona, how their creations afford various interactions shape user’s expectations and behavior as much as their conventionally feminine names, voices and marketing as “assistants.”

Affordances form “the dynamic link between subjects and objects within sociotechnical systems,” as Jenny Davis and James Chouinard write in “Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse.” According to the model Davis and Chouinard propose, what an object affords isn’t a simple formula e.g. object + subject = output, but a continuous interrelation of “mechanisms and conditions,” including an object’s feature set, a user’s level of awareness and comfort in utilizing them, and the cultural and institutional influences underlying a user’s perceptions of and interactions with an object. “Centering the how,” rather than the what, this model acknowledges “the variability in the way affordances mediate between features and outcomes.” Although Facebook requires users to pick a gender in order to complete the initial signup process, as one example they cite, users also “may rebuff these demands” through picking a gender they don’t personally identify as. But as Davis and Chouinard argue, affordances work “through gradations” and so demands are just one of the ways objects afford. They can also “request…allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse.” How technologies afford certain interactions clearly affects how we as users use them, but this truth implies another: that how technologies afford our interactions re-defines both object and subject in the process. Sometimes there’s trouble distinguishing even which is which.

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Colin Koopman, an associate professor of philosophy and director of new media and culture at the University of Oregon, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times last month that situated the recent Cambridge Analytica debacle within a larger history of data ethics. Such work is crucial because, as Koopman argues, we are increasingly living with the consequences of unaccountable algorithmic decision making in our politics and the fact that “such threats to democracy are now possible is due in part to the fact that our society lacks an information ethics adequate to its deepening dependence on data.” It shouldn’t be a surprise that we are facing massive, unprecedented privacy problems when we let digital technologies far outpace discussions around ethics or care for data. more...

Augmented reality makes odd bed fellows out of pleasure and discomfort. Overlaying physical objects with digital data can be fun and creative. It can generate layered histories of place, guide tourists through a city, and gamify ordinary landscapes.  It can also raise weighty philosophical questions about the nature of reality.

The world is an orchestrated accomplishment, but as a general rule, humans treat it like a fact. When the threads of social construction begin to unravel, there is a rash of movement to weave them back together. This pattern of reality maintenance, potential breakdown and repair is central to the operation of self and society and it comes into clear view through public responses to digital augmentation.

A basic sociological tenet is that interaction and social organization are only possible through shared definitions of reality. For meaningful interaction to commence, interactants must first agree on the question of “what’s going on here?”. It is thus understandable that technological alteration, especially when applied in fractured and nonuniform ways, would evoke concern about disruptions to the smooth fabric of social life. It is here, in this disruptive potential, that lie apprehensions about the social effects of AR. more...

In our very first post, founding editors Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Patella-Rey wrote:

Facebook has become the homepage of today’s cyborg. For its many users, the Facebook profile becomes intimately entangled with existence itself. We document our thoughts and opinions in status updates and our bodies in photographs. Our likes, dislikes, friends, and activities come to form a granular picture—an image never wholly complete or accurate—but always an artifact that wraps the message of who we are up with the technological medium of the digital profile.

Too few people were talking about the internet in this way in 2010. Many were still paying close attention to Second Life more because it comported with prevailing theories of how identity worked online, not because it was representative of most people’s identity online. It was a different time: no one paid for music on the internet, men were afraid to walk out of the house with their new iPads, there was talk of Twitter Revolutions, Occupy gave us tons of opportunities to think about embodiment, planking was a thing, tattoos were talking to Nintendo 3DS’s, and the conversations around digital privacy that we have today were just taking their present form. The persistent media-rich profiles we made just a few years ago had lost their novelty and now we had to reckon with the context collapses, too-clean quantifications, algorithmic segregations, and liquid identities that they afforded.

Much has changed in the handful of years since Nathan and PJ started the blog. We say “cyborg” less and there are tons of new, wonderful people writing thoughtful essays and commentary about everything that is exciting, provocative, and downright frightening about our augmented society.

As always it is a pleasure to work alongside my co-editor Jenny and we couldn’t ask for a better crew of regular contributors: Crystal, Maya, Stephen, Gabi, Marley, Britney, and Sarah. And, of course, this site would be a 404 if it weren’t for Nathan and PJ.  To all of you and our guest contributors, Thank You!

It is hubris to predict the future but anniversaries are as good a time to look forward as they are to look back so here are a few topics and trends that seem worthy of research, debate, and clear-eyed thinking in the next year:

Geographic Thinking Will Take Prominence Alongside Historic, Anthropological, and Sociological Analysis

I study cities so maybe I am biased here but as more and more of our online interactions happen through our devices, instead of less-portable computers, geographic context will become a key component of social media’s affordances and thus our analyses of the social action that takes place on those services. Pair Snapchat’s recent map features with the steady increase of ride-sharing services and the continual fascination with the possibilities that drones represent, and it makes sense that geographers will be more helpful in understanding our digital age than ever before. We’re over-due for it anyway. As the recently-departed Edward Soja once said in his Postmodern Geographies: “For the past century, time and history have occupied a privileged position in the practical and theoretical consciousness of Western Marxism and critical social science. … Today, however, it may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the ‘making of geography’ more than the ‘making of history’ that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world.” Dromology (Paul Virilio’s term for the study of speed) also has a role to play here. As we seek out and interact with our friends across digital maps and subscribe to on-demand product delivery, the accounting and over-coming of large amounts of terrain and topology become an issue for individuals, not just nations’ armies.

The Return of InfoGlut

In 2013 Mark Andrejevic published Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know and that titular neologism was everywhere. Something similar is sorely needed again as “fake news” and its phenomenological antecedents pop up like mushrooms in the dark, damp swamp that is slowly engulfing our media landscape. The issue of too many people acting on and responding to information with questionable relationships to reality is serious, but framed badly. Yes there is too much misleading information out there but what is worse is that there is simply too much information being routed through algorithms that will mess up as surely as their human progenitors do. Perhaps we don’t need better information, just less.

Amazon is the New Facebook When It Comes to Privacy Norms

The recent headlines about Amazon Key, the service that lets couriers open your front door, are definitely having an outsized influence on my thoughts but I still think its accurate to say that Amazon —in its attempts to find and conquer new markets— will start playing with our privacy norms. This year alone it has released a slew of “echo” branded devices that judge your outfits and let people automatically turn on video chats to say nothing of their Alexa devices that are constantly listening. Amazon has every reason to feel like they can succeed where Facebook failed: while Facebook was pushing users to reveal more just as they were starting to share less, Amazon has actual products and services that it is offering consumers.

Acceptance and Mobilization Around Social Media Companies’ Authority

In 2014 Yo, Ello, and Emojli tried to shake us out of the social media duopoly of Twitter and Facebook, but fell short of establishing a beachhead. Let this next year be the time that we finish our grieving process and accept these imperfect companies as the major power-players for the foreseeable future. With this acceptance, should come a determination to build organizations that we feel comfortable living with. Instead of falling for the Silicon Valley myth that everything is a meritocracy and the next billion-dollar social media company is just one round of VC funding away, we must start doing the arduous work of reigning these companies in and learning to make demands of them. Not just regulation or transparency, but profit sharing and true, meaningful shared governance. If this doesn’t happen, we may stand to lose the cyborg selves we were just starting to understand.

It is no secret that we live in an era of vast and unprecedented technological advancement.  We are inundated in computers of all sorts, smart phones, drones (both commercial and military), juiceros, a growing and inescapable surveillance presence, robotic radiosurgery systems, the list goes on and on.  Some of this technology is miraculous, some of it is frivolous, some of it is downright scary. At times, it seems as though the conditions of the world as we know it are less than half a step away from the teeming circuitboard studded eco-systems of Cyberpunk fiction. The comparison has been made before, in this excellent Washington Post editorial, for example.

The backdrop of my favorite Cyberpunk works are commercialized wastelands; the walls built and buttressed by corporate power, floorboards laid by cyber crime and corporate espionage, furnished with wires, neon and advertising. With every passing day our world more and more resembles this speculative and cautionary setting.

However, Cyberpunk is more than a warning to me… it’s a road map. Cyberpunk, in many ways, leads us through the boundaries and pitfalls that it seems to predict. That’s not to say that Cyberpunk is a monolith, by any means. However, by examining the common narrative strands shared by different Cyberpunk works, themes and trajectories become all the more apparent and applicable to our lived experience.

The catalyst to my writing this piece is the recent result of the Supreme Court Case: Impression Products, Inc.  V. Lexmark International, Inc. The court case is fairly complicated- but here is the quick and dirty rundown: Lexmark sold two kinds of printer cartridges: refillable cartridges and single use cartridges. Impression Products, Inc was sued by Lexmark for adapting the single use cartridges into reusable cartridges (cutting down on waste and letting the consumer save some coin). The case made its way up to the Supreme Court and the court aired in favor of Impression over Lexmark.

Alright, so it’s ink, what’s the big deal? Well, Kyle Weins at Wired nails it on the head: “Why all the fuss? Because this wasn’t really about printer toner. It was about your ownership rights, and whether a patent holder can dictate how you repair, modify, or reuse something you’ve purchased.” Over the years, tech giants like Sony, Lexmark, HP, Microsoft, etc. have been pushing the idea that products purchased from them are, in fact, licensed and not owned by the consumer. Understandably, these licensing schemes are an attempt by these larger companies to consolidate and protect their intellectual property.

Apple and other large tech companies do everything they can to inhibit small time repair shops- in the name of intellectual property, of course. Apple went so far as to disable IPhones remotely if they were detected at a third party repair shop. I’m sure intellectual property was a factor in these policies but it’s convenient that companies like Apple simultaneously make a tidy profit on the micro monopolies they create by locking down the repair and expansion of the products that they sell to us.

These restrictions represent a kind of technological prescriptivism. From the perspective of large tech companies like Apple, we have to use manufactured items for their standardized manufactured purpose. Innovation has been consigned to the boardroom, the R&D lab or the Silicon Valley start up. We no longer literally “own” what we own. Copyright, intellectual property, and the very concept of economic exchange have become disgusting shams under these policies. Technological prescriptivism would rob us of our ability to tinker, to create, to experiment… we are to become naught but predictable and ever profitable consumers.

THIS is where we can learn from Cyberpunk. Those interested in Cyberpunk can quote William Gibson ad nauseum on this: “The Street finds its own uses for things – uses the manufacturers never imagined.” What Gibson is saying: characters in Cyberpunk overcome the assigned manufactured purpose of the things around them.

Cyberpunk fiction is filled with individuals owning what they own but simultaneously do not “own.” It’s filled with individuals who subvert prescribed use.

In the 1995 anime, Ghost in the Shell, Motoko Kusinagi’s body is literally not hers. Her state-of-the-art cybernetic body is government property. During a conversation with another member of her unit, Batou, Kusanagi says: “If we ever quit or retire, we’d have to give back our augmented brains and cyborg bodies. There wouldn’t be much left after that.” Throughout the plot of Ghost in the Shell (1995) Kusanagi’s search for answers forces her to push the limits of what her body is “allowed” to do. During the final scenes of the movie, Kusanagi literally tears her body apart through overexertion. Likewise, her search for truth eventually thrusts two Japanese governmental agencies into conflict with one another. Her own unit, Section 9 is pitted against Section 6. This conflict, indicative of a split in the otherwise autonomous interests of the Japanese government, reflects the collapsing authority that had once outlined the limits of Motoko Kusanagi’s ownership over her body. Cyborgs claiming their rightful bodily autonomy is not unique to Ghost in the Shell. Other examples are easily found in Ex-Machina and Blade Runner in which rebellious bots shed their chains and refuse subservience. In every case, these Cyborgs shift the terms of ownership to match the demands of their lived experience.

In the 1985 Terry Gilliam dystopian film, Brazil, there is a short scene wherein the protagonist, Sam, phones into the “Central Services” to get his heating and air conditioning fixed. He finds his requests dispassionately and politely declined. Amusingly, renegade repairman Archibald Tuttle intercepts the request and infiltrates Sam’s apartment in order to repair his air conditioning. This, of course, is a dangerous and highly illegal endeavor- “Central Services” eventually seizes Sam’s apartment because of the unauthorized repairs. Apple would be proud. In Brazil, Gilliam frames Tuttle, the third party repairman, as a literal subversive. To me, the third party repairmen who fix cracked IPhone screens are probably not that far off Gilliam’s Archibald Tuttle.

Finally, many Cyberpunk stories harbor a motif of necessary improvisation in the face of obsolescence. Two famous examples are Terminator 2 and Terminator 3. In both films, the T-800/T-850 (as portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger) is an outdated model of Android forced to hold his own against a technologically superior foe. The T-8XX and his allies must make due with what they have. John Connor, Sarah Connor, Kate Brewster and others have to be creative, they have to struggle, and they have to improvise. That improvisation is a crucial part of the Terminator movies, but it is an undeniable part of the Cyberpunk aesthetic generally speaking. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Ratz- the bartender has to make due with his outdated (described as antique) mechanical arm. In Deus Ex, Gunther Hermann and Anna Navarre- military cyborgs- find themselves at risk of being displaced by newer cyborgs. Hermann and Navarre are especially resentful because their extensive cyberization left them permanently disfigured- an ordeal the newer cyborgs don’t have to deal with. Despite their struggle against obsolescence, Hermann and Navarre prove themselves to be exceptional soldiers via tactical prowess and ruthlessness. The need for improvisation and struggle against obsolescence is something that’s been felt by anyone who has had to make due with an aging computer or wait for a contract renew before updating a dying mobile phone.

It is essential (or at least, helpful) to pay attention to the way characters in Cyberpunk fiction navigate the technological worlds in which they live. It is rare to see Cyberpunk characters depicted as luddites (although, it is not unheard of – In Deus Ex, the player can blow up the internet). Generally speaking, however, Cyberpunks turn their constraints back on themselves. In the finale of the surrealist cyberpunk horror film, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, when a man is faced with the loss of his humanity at the hands of a “Metal Fetishist,” this would-be victim subverts his transfiguration to corrupt the corruption he’s been forced to embrace.

Cyberpunks own what is theirs, even when it is not theirs. They repair and they tinker. They improvise and adapt. In Cyberpunk fiction, a spade is not a spade- a spade is whatever you can make it.

In our own world, we are quick to dismiss new technology. Many wish to escape the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, networks and surveillance. PsychologyToday even has a guide on how to escape and set boundaries. The impulse to toss it all aside makes sense- it’s clear that technology often isn’t presented to us as much as it is imposed. On this point, I turn to Hélène Cixous’ account of writing. In her 1975 article, Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous (philosopher, playwright and poet) highlights a certain anxiety the average person feels when they are called upon to write:

And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great-that is for “great men”; and it’s “silly.”

Technology is just the same- generally speaking, it is manufactured for an imaginary “average” everyday consumer. But as cyberpunk teaches us, we are not bound by the prescribed manufacture. As punk musician Amanda Palmer, would say- “we can fix our own shit”, too.

Winding down- I am reminded of my older sister who lives in New York City. In her spare time, she makes art from duct tape. She uses an exacto knife to cut out bits of different colored tape. From there, she arranges the bits into an reimagined sort of mosaic. The result is nothing less than stunning to me- Nikki is able to see past the standardized use of “duct tape” as material with a set use and function. Artists, like Cyberpunks, have an inert ability to see past the given. Artists and Cyberpunks alike innovate from the bottom up rather than the top down. Such a mindset is needed if we are to escape the strange pre-Cyberpunk dysphoria we currently find ourselves in.

Alex Palma is a member of the Philadelphia Historical Community; he’s worked in several archives and historical sites across the city. His interests include technology, videogames, film, genre literature, historiography, historic preservation and continental philosophy.