The philosopher Michel Foucault taught that sexual repression and taboos aren’t so much the repression of sex but instead evidence of obsession. I’m reminded of this lesson after reading about a terrible story wherein a Georgia high-school decides to make a presentation to hundreds of students and parents on what not to do on social media. In doing so, they project a photo of one student in her bikini, an image taken from her Facebook page [she says shared with ‘friends of friends’] without her permission. Her face is not blurred; in fact, her full name is printed below the image. Her photo, indeed, her body itself, is being projected to all these people as ‘what not to do’, her image and body construed as a problem, how one should not present themselves in 2013. Humiliated by the school’s disrespectful and irresponsible behavior, the woman is suing. In trying to warn students of the dangers of posting online, the Georgia high-school acted in exactly the dangerous way students—everyone—shouldn’t act. more...

Note: This article touches on slut shaming, body shaming, homophobia, and ableism.

I love swearing. It’s a weekly miracle that my essays don’t include “totally fucked” or “fucked up and bullshit” in every paragraph. If I were reborn as a linguist, I would study swearing and cursing. I watch documentaries about cursing, I play a lot of Cards Against Humanity, and this interview with Melissa Mohr, the author of Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing is my favorite episode of Slate’s just-nerdy-enough podcast Lexicon Valley. If you’ve been in the audience when I give a presentation, you probably (despite my efforts to the contrary) heard me swear five or six times. I would hate to live in a world without swearing because it would be fucking dull. Unfortunately, my (and most English-speaking people) love of swearing comes into direct contradiction with inclusionary social politics. I need a new arsenal of swear words that punch up and tear down destructive stereotypes. Every time I swear, I want to be totally confident that I’m offending the right people. more...

Today we’re featuring an interview with Olivia Rosane and Adam Rothstein, contributing editors for The State and the minds behind Murmuration, June’s month-long festival of drone culture. Given this blog’s close ties to that project, it seems appropriate to dig a little deeper into the thinking and aims behind it. Olivia and Adam were kind enough to sit down and answer some questions to that end.

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As drones become increasingly autonomous, there is growing concern that they lack some fundamentally “human” capacity to make good judgment calls. In the penultimate episode of this season’s Castle (yes, the Nathan Fillion-staring cheez-fest that is nominally a cop procedural)–titled “The Human Factor” (S5 E23)–addresses just this concern. In it, a bureaucrat explains how a human operator was able to trust his gut and, unlike the drone protocols the US military would have otherwise used, distinguish a car full of newlyweds from a car full of (suspected) insurgents. Somehow the human operator had the common sense that a drone, locked into the black and white world of binary code, lacked. This scene thus suggests that the “human factor” is that ineffable je ne sais quois that prevents us humans from making tragically misinformed judgment calls. more...

“Now that my father fit into a desktop-size box — my computer screen — the proportions seemed manageable”

“The chilling disciplinary effect taking place in the digital age affects everyone”

“street art is “so transitory” and ephemeral that without social media, “a lot of it would fall by the wayside””

“The term “cyberutopian” tends to be used only in the context of critique”

“passionate game fans are willfully blind to the communication gap between the games industry and everyone else”

“#Standingman is good activism for the same reasons it makes for a good meme”

“drone fiction denies the presence of human operators; it renders drones autonomous”

“Uber meets AirBnB for Helicopter Transport”

“In the nineties, tapping the Web, if not impossible, was certainly a pain”

“we are open-source-extremists, the feminist virus infecting your thoughts“ more...

One problem with taking social problems and re-framing them as individual responsibility is that it ends up blaming victims instead of pressuring root causes. This mentality creates a temptation to, for example, respond to the NSA scandal involving the government tapping into Internet traffic with something like, “well stop posting your whole life on Facebook, then”. Or less glib is the point raised many times this month that the habit of constant self-documentation on social media has made possible a state of ubiquitous government surveillance. The brutality of spying is made both possible and normal by the reality of digital exhibitionism. How can the level of government spying be so shocking in a world where people live-tweet their dinner? Perhaps we should stop digitally funneling so much of our lives through Gmail now that the level of surveillance is becoming clearer. Sasha Weiss writes in The New Yorker that, more...

Murmuration (a month-long festival of drone culture) is in full swing, and while I still plan to write a retrospective post once it’s all done, there are naturally already themes emerging as common to a number of the pieces. And like all powerful themes, they transcend the pieces themselves, speaking to wider technological and social issues, revealing existing things while pointing the conversational way forward. I think one of these themes in particular is worth some particular attention, not only for what it says about drones but for what it says about war in general.

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In Taksim Square, at around 8PM local time, a man started standing near Gezi park facing the Atatürk Cultural Center. According to CNN –and more importantly Andy Carvin (@acarvin) and Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) — the man is believed to be Erdem Gündüz, a well known Turkish performance artist who has inspired a performative internet meme that has already made it around the globe. (There’s a nice Storify here. Thanks to @samar_ismail for putting it on my radar.) Gündüz and his supporters were removed by police after an 8 hour stand-off (in multiple senses of the term) but now that small act has gone viral and spread well beyond Taksim Square. The idea is simple: a photo, usually taken from behind demonstrates that person’s solidarity with those hurt or killed by Turkish police actions in the past month, and the increasingly repressive policies of that country’s government in the last few years. On twitter, the hashtag #duranadam (“duran adam” is “the standing man” in Turkish) quickly spilled over the borders of Turkey and has been translated to #standingman as more people in North America and Western Europe start to stand in solidarity with those in Taksim. #standingman is an overtly political meme because, unlike other performative memes like #planking, #owing, or even #eastwooding, it is meant to demonstrate a belonging to a cause. more...

Over the weekend, I noticed that Facebook hashtags are now linked. “What!? When did this happen??” I quickly asked my network.

This simple shift opens avenues for  deeper discussions about the social media ecology of which I wrote a few weeks back. In particular, it shows the relational nature of the ecological system, and the back and forth multiply influential relationship between humans and technologies, all of which shape each other in a multiplicity of ways.

By social media ecology I refer to all of the media on and through which users are Social (in the capital “S,” linked and connected sense of the word introduced by Whitney Erin Boesel and Nathan Jurgenson). As social media increasingly integrates into the flow and logic of everyday life, users draw on a variety of digital tools to meet a diverse set of needs. The social media ecology refers to the set of tools users draw on, and the ways in which these tools, and their users,  are connected and/or compartmentalized. more...