Search results for Digital dualism versus augmented reality

During the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (#ASA13) in New York this last week, I was reminded of the post that I wrote last year before #ASA2012 in which I encouraged tweeting academics to reach out to non-tweeting academics to bridge the gap between those who participate on the conference hashtags at ASA and those who don’t. Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) followed up with a post titled, “Twitter isn’t a Backchannel,” in which he made the point that the term “backchannel” perpetuates digital dualist ideas of what does and doesn’t count as “real” participation at a conference:

There is no “backchannel”, there is no more or less “real” way to exist within this atmosphere of information, yet we continue to hear that the Twitter distraction whisks people away from the “real” conference in favor of something separate and “virtual.” Each time we say “real” or “IRL” (“in real life”) to mean offline, we reify the digital dualist myth of a separate digital layer “out there” in some ‘cyber’ space. And when we call Twitter a “backchannel” to mean a separate conversation, running tangent to the offline conference in some space behind precious face-to-face exchanges, we continue to support this digital dualism. The implicit, and incorrect, assumption is that the on and offline are zero-sum, that being offline means being not online, and vice versa.

In the comments, I agreed that Nathan had a point: “backchannel” really isn’t a great term for what we-who-livetweet do when we tweet at a conference. But what, I asked, should we call this activity? more...

“digital poetics has reignited artistic emphases on processorial, fragmented conceptualizations of literature”

“TED talks just to keep from looking at the cops”

“Real life isn’t lived in just the “digital” or “physical” realm. It’s actually an interplay between both realms”

“If we want to protect privacy, we should be more clear about why it is important”

“a trend emerged where visual anonymity led to less disclosiveness”

“Is documentary vision a new way of dreaming? Does it enmesh the “virtual” with the “physical”?”

“Novels about robots are still novels. Get over it“ more...

The way fiction deals with technology – the kinds of technology it tackles and how, and whether it actually should, directly – seems to still be a pretty thorny issue for a lot of folks. Or at least for some folks. Usually in conjunction with this is some variety of handwringing over what technology has Done To Reading, or Done To The Novel, often with the implication that no one reads anymore because ebooks don’t count as reading and also everyone is too stupid and/or distracted to read anyway.

This summary isn’t actually all that hyperbolic. Hang around a bunch of writers for long enough and you’ll probably hear some version of it.

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A great many words – though a lot of people would probably say not nearly enough – have been spent on the United States’s drone war, on what it means, on who dies, on what it suggests about what war will look like in the future, though of course we appear to remain generally unconcerned about what it looks like to civilians on the ground watching their villages explode. But a recent piece by Adam Rothstein in The State makes a powerful and provocative claim: That when we write and think and talk about “drones”, we’re really writing and thinking and talking about a thing that needs to be understood as distinct from the actual specific varieties of UAVs themselves. more...

For a novelist, the route to publication is frequently strange and even more frequently frustrating. For me, one of those frustrations has been really frustrating because I get the distinct sense that I shouldn’t even feel that way.

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Since it’s the season for giving, I’d like to satirically write up some conclusions for that op-ed you need to finish. A cool way to crank out that “think-piece” before your deadline is to pick a topic—reading, driving, talking, pet-grooming, bedazzling, whatever—and say social media is making it less real, deep, true, meaningful, authentic, soulful, or whatever else makes you feel like a better type of human than the automaton masses. more...

One of the aspects of techno-social life that I’ll be looking at closely in my forthcoming book Superconnected: The Internet and Techno-Social Life is the reality of the online experience. To explore this issue in the classroom, I invited Nathan Jurgenson of this blog to tweet “live” with my “Mediated Communication in Society” class, billing him as a special guest speaker tweeter! Here I describe what I did, why I did it, how I did it — and what happened, much of it unexpected, as a result. more...

She passes through a sheet of bloody glass. On the other side, she is being born. – Catherynne M. Valente

1.

My self began with words, which were stories.

It’s always important to understand that words do not belong to the digital. Nor do they belong to the physical. Words belong to people. People are in both. Nevertheless: my first overt experience of the digital was in words. Words have always been my playthings; I was always a storytelling child. They have always been a means of performance but more for the benefit of myself than anyone else. I have always engaged in a dialogue. Who am I? What do I want to be today? We create mythologies with extraordinary explanatory power. We cannot separate ourselves from our stories.

I have words. In the end they are all I have.

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I’d like to point readers to a terrific three-part essay by Laura Portwood-Stacer on three reasons why people refuse media, addiction, asceticism, and aesthetics. We can apply this directly to what might become an increasingly important topic in social media studies: social media refusers, already (edit: and unfortunately, as Rahel Aima points out) nicknamed “refusenicks”. There will be more to come on this blog on how to measure and conceptualize Facebook (and other social media) refusal, but let’s begin by analyzing these three frameworks used to discuss social media refusal and critique some of the underlying assumptions. more...

The video above is a “funny” take on the role of Twitter in our everyday lives from this past summer (I think). I know, who cares about celebrities and nothing is less funny than explaining why something is funny. But because the video isn’t really that funny to begin with, we’ve nothing to lose by quickly hitting on some of the points it makes. Humor is a decent barometer for shared cultural understanding for just about everything, indeed, often a better measure than the op-eds and blog posts we usually discuss in the quasi-academic-blogosphere. Those who made this video themselves are trying to tap into mainstream frustrations with smartphones and social media and their increasingly central role in many of our lives. So let’s look at the three main themes being poked at here, and I’m going to do my best to keep this short by linking out to where I’ve made these arguments before.

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