As someone working out of a Science and Technology Studies (STS) Department, I was proud to see that Dr. Chris Kelty (Author of Two Bits) had just won a major battle for open access. Kelty is an excellent example of the kind of scholar that reflexively applies the findings of his scholarship to the everyday concerns of his job. As an Associate Professor of Information Studies at UCLA, he studies open source communities and concepts of responsibility in scientific research. As the chair of the UC University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC), he just spearheaded one of the largest windfalls for open access publishing.

On July 24, 2013 the University of California Senate approved a state-wide Open Access Policy that will, according to the press release, make all “future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC… available to the public at no charge.”  This is a huge step forward for the Open Access movement because, as the press release goes on to say,  more...

[First, I need to apologize for the poor formatting in this post–I’m on vacation and working from an old iPad, which is doing wonky things to the WordPress interface.]

I’ve been chewing on some thoughts about this summer’s big musical releases–Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail (MCHG), Kanye’s Yeezus, and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (and somewhat relatedly, Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”). All of these records and singles used technology and social media in new-ish ways (or rather, ways relatively new to major-label releases and big hit records) to distribute, market, and generate buzz about the work. MCHG was released first as what Chris Richards calls “a data collection exercise disguised as a smartphone app,” and Yeezus’s “New Slaves” was debuted at guerilla listening parties across the globe, accessible via interactive map on his website (kanyewest.com now features an different interactive media object, the video for “Black Skinheads”). In an attempt to draw significant mainstream attention to mid-career artists who either never had or lost that sort of visibility, Thicke and Cyrus made sexist and/or racist videos to generate buzz on teh interwebs. (What’s new here is that sex and racial non-whiteness are no longer inherently outrageous and offensive to mainstream (white) taste–in post-feminist, post-racial America, that level of offense is reserved for certain types of misogyny and racism performed by people who supposedly ought to know better. This is a really interesting line of inquiry, but not, ultimately, the one I want to follow in this post.)

Sasha Frere-Jones has a provocative new piece about Jay and Ye’s new albums up at The New Yorker, so that spurred me to make my questions about these two albums a bit more choate. Frere-Jones’s article itself deserves careful analysis and discussion, and not only because he compares his disappointment with Jay Z’s politics and performance to his disappointment with the George Zimmerman verdict. (I’m happy to have that discussion in the comments here; I hope to have something up on my personal blog in the next week.) Here, however, I want to follow Frere-Jones’s general strategy of thinking about the broader social implications of MCHG.  more...

Once upon a time, when I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 12 years old, it was my job to go with my mom to the laundromat to help do my family’s laundry. I wasn’t a huge fan of this—the nearest laundromat was kind of sketchy, to this day I remain mediocre at folding t-shirts, and there’s just something a little uncomfortable about having to fold your parents’ and brother’s underwear—but there was one thing I really liked about those trips, and that was the 20 minute lull in between when the last load went into a washer and the first load demanded sorting and partial transfer to a dryer. During that downtime, my mom would read her book, and I was free to do whatever I wanted. Invariably, I sat at a little folding station and, sheltered from view by washing machines on three sides, pretended to do my homework while reading from the laundromat’s stack of “trashy” magazines.

With rapt attention and furtive glances over my shoulder, I read ALL the sex tips (in Cosmo and in other such fine publications). I studiously absorbed articles that subtly (and not-so-subtly) encouraged me to feel insecure about body parts and features that I didn’t even have yet. I was also a huge fan of Ladies’ Home Journal’s “Can This Marriage Be Saved,” even though I was already developing opinions that sometimes clashed with those of whoever was doling out advice to unhappy wives.

Somewhere in all that secretive studying was when I first read about (what I think of as) The Marble Thing.  more...

EXTRA!! EXTRA!!!  DIGITAL MEDIA CONSUMPTION WILL SURPASS TRADITIONAL TELEVISION VIEWING THIS YEAR!!!!

The folks at eMarketer just released a study which projects that this year, adults will spend over 5 hours consuming digital media, as compared with about 4.5 hours watching television.  This makes for a nice headline. It also makes for a wonderful example of the social construction of knowledge, and relatedly, the embeddedness  of digital dualism.

A root assumption of Science and Technology Studies (STS) is that both science and technology, though billed as objective, are anything but. Knowledge systems, and methods of knowing (i.e. epistemologies), are necessarily based in human values, cultural norms, power structures, and historical context. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar famously deconstruct the notion of scientific objectivity in their 1979 anthropological study of Laboratory Life. In this vein, Emily Martin illuminates the gendered ways in which biologists depict the egg-sperm relationship within the reproductive process.  And a few months back, I argued that to be a Quantified Self requires quite a bit of qualitative interpretation and decision making. In short, Big Data, statistical techniques, and laboratory procedures produce knowledge that is equally as biased as storytelling or ethnographic interpretation. Sorry, Enlightenment. more...

“internet trolling is not random—it is a sentient, directed, strong-armed goon of the status quo”

“It could be used for anything depending on how creepy you want to be”

“yes, they are collecting everything, contents word for word, everything of every domestic communication in this country”

“So women aren’t geeks, so is that your conclusion?”

“Online and offline only scratch the surface of dualist language”

“It’s the heart of the video, surgically removed and held aloft, endlessly beating”

“a game where players could connect to someone, someone they could trust but who they knew nothing about”

“The war on whistleblowers is just as much a war on journalists”

“To blame Reddit is to pretend that the platform is the problem”  more...

As the American Sociological Society Annual Meeting approaches, I want to take this opportunity to give some theoretical attention to the language of digital technologies. The following is perhaps an overly verbose way of asking what to do with heavily integrated but problematic vocabularies? The timing here is significant, as I believe the meetings next weekend will include a lot of dualist language that we, as a discipline, aren’t quite sure what to do with.

***** more...

I was halfway through what I thought was going to be today’s post, and then Hugo Schwyzer up and quit the internet (so, you’re gonna have to wait till next week to get that post about Magna Carta Holy Grail & the kinds of social relations music facilitates when it is packaged or formatted as an app). I assume that Schwyzer’s retirement will likely follow the Jay Z or Bret Farve model, but, while it lasts, it’s a good opportunity to open out conversations about privilege, oppression, and the media, about the role of men in feminism, and about allies more generally. 

Hugo Schwyzer is a professor of history and gender studies at Pasedena City College, and he has been a sort of male feminist superstar, writing for widely-read mainstream venues like Jezebel and The Atlantic. So, he’s a very, very public male “face” of and for feminism. And for a lot of reasons, he’s been the subject of vehement criticism, trolling, and plenty of ad hominem attacks, too, much of it from feminists (male, female, trans, queer, and otherwise) on the left. (And let me just say, if I was influential enough to make Malcolm Harris bring out his A-game trolling, well, I’d be pretty happy about that, even if it meant I was wrong about something.) more...

Last week I came across an announcement on Facebook that said, “Introducing: The Occupy Money Cooperative.‪ #‎LetsCooperate‬.” At first, I’ll admit, I thought it was a poorly executed joke. Perhaps I’m projecting a little bit, since I’m one of those terrible people that still think occupy jokes puns are funny. (“Occupy toilets!”) Still thinking the link was from Occupy Lulz I clicked on it (maybe it would be funny…?) and was brought to a page that could have been mistaken for the Chase website. The cool blues and abstract shapes scream “financial institution” and the video still looks like it might come from a credit card company. All the distinguishing aesthetic features of finance are there. But this is definitely an Occupy venture, and a serious one at that. Why would a radical leftist movement try to make a bank?

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