“toward an understanding of being human that contains being online”
“Titstare got “very loud applause.” Bros are pack animals”
“a larger project to make Facebook’s public interactions not just public but visible”
“Siri might not want to be like you. Siri might want to be Siri”
Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].
Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist in the employ of Intel, says that the day is coming when people will form meaningful, emotional relationships with their gadgets. It’s unclear to what degree “relationship” involves reciprocity, but it’s implied that that may at least be a possibility. This in turn introduces the question of whether responsiveness and anticipatory action count as reciprocity, but the claim is still interesting.
I’m in the midsts of one of those unavoidable grad student extended crises this month so I I thought writing something this week was going to be out of the question. But last Monday I had an interaction with a PDF that I really need to tell someone about. Trust me, its more interesting than it sounds.
Lately, I’ve been taking advantage of my institution’s (appropriately ancient-sounding) ILLiad Inter-Library Loan System. Usually, if I can’t find journal article I need, I just ask a fellow grad student friend over GChat or Facebook to get me the article from their library. If I can’t find anyone (or I’ve asked them too many times) I resort to ILLiad. Getting a book from ILLiad means waiting about 24 hours for an undergrad on work study to copy and paste a DOI and send me the article under another institution’s journal subscription. It is the ultimate exercise in artificial scarcity: A teenager in a library basement, fueled on Moe’s burritos and motivated by the threat of crushing student debt, orchestrates the transfer of a few ones and zeroes in such a way that my desire for the article can be monetized to the benefit of a publishing company’s CEO and a couple of computer system designers. The physical scarcity of a paper journal is transmuted into a new kind of scarcity: the scarcity of student labor and my own dedication to reading this article that I saw in someone else’s bibliography. more...
In 2006, my final year of undergrad, I participated in a Chinese language and culture scholarship program. We learned to speak and write in Mandarin for two semesters, followed by a month long trip in the summer. As tends to happen, I’ve forgotten most of the language. The lessons, however, have stuck with me. Along with humbling experiences of climbing the Great Wall, walking through the Forbidden City, and sampling tea in the rural mountains, I remember a few incidents in which Chinese censorship took me by surprise. For instance, on the day after we visited Tiananmen Square, I studiously went to an Internet café to learn more about the events that transpired at the historic site. Besides iconic images of tanks and soldiers, I was admittedly uninformed about most of the details. The tour guide only made one quiet allusion to the Cultural Revolution, and quickly changed the subject. The Internet, I hoped, would help me grasp the cultural and historical magnitude of the space I’d just inhabited. No such luck. Google was more tight-lipped about Tiananmen Square than our knowledgeable but cautious guide.
China is infamous for its censorship policies and practices. Amnesty International claims that China imprisons more journalists and ‘cyber-dissidents’ than any other country, and maintains a sizeable “Internet Police” force, up to 50,000 officers strong. But recent studies by Political Scientist Gary King show interesting and surprising patterns in censorship enforcement. His data show that government censorship of digital activity is less about quieting criticism, and more about squashing physical mobilization. more...
Becoming a parent has inflected how I see everything in the world, including the practice of “being online.” I apologize for using scare quotes so soon into this essay, but it feels necessary. “Online” contains several types of possible connection, as Jenny Davis and others at Cyborgology have argued. And the “being” part is what needs to be at stake: how does the way in which we exist change when that existence is networked and distributed? The anthropology of “being online” therefore includes a consideration of the ontological effects on people as much as empirically measurable effects of using iPads and Facebook.
A common narrative, and one Cyborgology has consistently disputed, is that “technology” or “social media” or “the digital” have impinged on an authentic mode of life that previously existed and which we retroactively call “offline.” This narrative relies on constructing images that can quickly code as “authentic,” as in this video that Nathan Jurgenson has dissected. The graphic above, from a New York Times essay, crystallizes this narrative as it makes us of family and child-rearing as an icon of authentic offline living. Devices and the information they present come between a parent and the child. They blot out the child’s pleading face. Tellingly, the phone is represented as blank–the viewer is not asked to make a judgment about the value of what the person is doing with the phone (checking Twitter? responding to an email? calling 911?), they are asked to condemn its vacuity. more...
The recent flurry of activity around the #DiversityinSFF hashtag has involved discussions about the current state of the science fiction/fantasy genre, where it’s deficient in making space for diverse (non-white, non-straight, non-western, non-male, non-cisgendered, non-ablebodied) voices to be heard, where those voices can be found, and what should be done in the future to make the genre more inclusive and welcoming, and less tolerant of some of the amazing bigotry that’s popped up a number of times recently.
But this is a conversation with a much longer history and with ties to long historical processes of sexism/racism/ableism/classism/heteronormativity. It’s all been a problem for SFF for a long time now. more...
or, “‘Reality’ is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes”
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I get really nervous when people start making claims about what is and isn’t “real” music. Like Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, “I have a bad feeling about this” because these arguments, like the “cave” the Leia was exploring, are not what they seem. Usually they use “music” as a proxy to talk about something else–gender, race, (sub)culture, class, etc. They don’t have a lot to tell us about music, even though they may reveal other things, like the social values and biases implicit in the argument. I’m so certain of this that I wrote a whole book on it. more...
My Facebook feed, which had nearly gone dormant for the past week, is once again teaming with life; this means that somewhere, in a nondescript plot of desert, 50,000+ souls are packing tents, scrubbing dust from their hair, and beginning an exhausted journey home from their annual pilgrimage to the Burning Man festival. After last year’s impulsive decision to fund the the trip on student loan debt, I find myself once again relegated to the social media sidelines by financial constraints. One benefit of watching this year’s event unfold at a distance is that it has given me time and space to reflect on my experiences with Burning Man 2012. more...
One of these days I’ll find something to cite on the topic of Early Internet Adolescence that isn’t my own experience, but here goes: I like to joke that the Internet and I went through puberty at about the same time. As a result, I spent my teenage years on the cusp of being what we now think of as “connected”—I journaled on paper but wrote poetry on computers (also napkins); I wrote letter-length notes during class but sent email during my free periods; in general, I communicated with friends and family (as well as myself) through an array of both analog and digital media. Though sometimes I hung out talking to strangers in AOL chat rooms (especially before I had friends who, like me, didn’t have a curfew), my digitally mediated interactions were a lot like my telephone-mediated interactions in that they occurred primarily with people I already knew from in-person contexts.
Digitally mediated interaction was new and exciting (especially to a shy kid who already fancied herself a writer), but from the very beginning, it was just another piece of the life I was already living. It didn’t make me a new or different person (in contrast, sometimes I felt more free to be myself via email), and nor did my friends interact with me through chat or email in ways that were incongruous with the ways they interacted with me in person. So what were those interactions like, especially as my friends and I tried to navigate the complicated social- and emotional politics of attraction in the context of a small high school? This was back in the pre-SMS era, mind you, so to hear The Today Show’s Matt Lauer tell it last month, I should have been receiving graceful, articulate, hand-written notes from classmates who fancied me, and perhaps responding with notes of my own if the fledgling twitterpation was mutual.
Oddly enough, this is not what I remember happening. more...
