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Once upon a time in Winchester, VA, a nurse and a psychologist wondered what to name their second child (a newborn boy). This little boy would one day grow up to be a famous politician, so it was important to give him a good name. Eventually they settled on Richard (which means “powerful leader”) for a first name, and John (which means “God is gracious”) for a middle name; they gave him his father’s last name, because that was the custom at the time. Yet today, when someone says “Santorum,” do you first think of the former U.S. Senator? Or do you maybe think of columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage?

Much to the former Senator’s likely chagrin, “santorum” is an excellent example of how words (and objects) that were not originally intended or designed to be “political” can take on new meanings–as well as new politics–once out in the world. more...

Is there a Dunbar’s Number for our documentary consciousness?

Dunbar argued that we can only keep up with about 150 people at a time, at which point we reach a cognitive saturation. Can this similar sort of saturation occur with the proliferation of ways we can document ourselves and others on social media? The ways someone holding a working smartphone can document experience grows not just with the number of sites one can post to, but also the number of available mediums of documentation: audio, video, photo, and their recombinations into things like GIFs and Vines whatever else I’m forgetting or will come next. Each new app carries with it a different audience with different expectations, adding to the documentary chaos.

Or: Given the proliferation of options, how should I document this cat? more...

“JSTOR is a rent extraction mechanism that perpetuates fundamental inequalities”

“a ceremonial flyover of three combat drones”

“what is Elsevier going to do with Mendeley that warrants uninstalling it from you computer?”

“Nineteenth century viral culture is quite like today’s Internet culture”

“Seeing this as only a story about digital technologies & their risks is to overlook how cultural communication is”

“That was before Apple washed Siri’s mouth out with soap and curbed many of its talents”

“23 women have joined a class-action lawsuit against the “revenge porn” website”

“there is something disturbingly misogynistic about online bullying“ more...

Check out vinepeek.com. Watch the random videos—called Vines—follow each other without context. Take it in for a moment.  more...

Whether they’ve joined me on Twitter, sneakily coerced me into spending more time on Facebook, or just like to go on at length about how social networking sites are “stupid and a waste of time,” it seems my friends never tire of talking to me about social media. Given my line of work, this is pretty great: it means a never-ending stream of food for thought (or “networked field research,” if you will). This post’s analysis-cum-cautionary tale comes to you through my friend Otto (we’ll refer to him by his nom de plume), who got himself into some pseudonuptial trouble last week.

It started when Otto was invited to a “wedding party”— more...

Back in October, Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) created a typology of digital dualism, which I followed by mapping this typology onto material conditions that vary in terms of physical-digital enmeshment. Today, I want to apply this typology and its material-mapping to discourses and conditions of embodiment in light of technological advancements. If you have been following the blog and are up-to-date with this line of discussion, feel free to scroll down past the review. more...

I really love putting things in order: Around my house you’ll find tiny and neat stacks of paper, alphabetized sub-folders, PDFs renamed via algorithm, and spices arranged to optimize usage patterns. I don’t call it life hacking or You+, its just the way I live. Material and digital objects need to stand in reserve for me, so that I may function on a daily basis. I’m a forgetful and absent-minded character and need to externalize my memory, so I typically augment my organizational skills with digital tools.  My personal library is organized the same way Occupy Wall Street organized theirs, with a lifetime subscription to LibraryThing. I use Spotify for no other reason that I don’t want to dedicate the necessary time to organize an MP3 library the way I know it needs to be organized. (Although, if you find yourself empathizing with me right now, I suggest you try TuneUp.) My tendency for digitally augmented organization has also made me a bit of a connoisseur of citation management software. I find little joy in putting together reference lists and bibliographies, mainly because they can never reach the metaphysical perfection I demand. Citation management software however, gets me close enough. When I got to grad school, I realized by old standby, ProQuest’s Refworks wasn’t available and my old copy of Endnote x1 ran too slow on my new computer. So there I was, my first year of graduate school and jonesing heavily for some citation management. I had dozens of papers to write and no citation software. That’s when I fell into the waiting arms of Mendeley. more...

“now that we have a simple tool—and grammar—for looping a half second of video”

“The Internet makes this sort of writer-presence easier, more ubiquitous”

“What’s the point of this app? To forge a connection, or to gamify the dating process”

“I’d like to type in “dentists liked by people who don’t like horror movies”””

“The defining feature of a “real” arcade, however, is that there aren’t really any left”

“digital technologies enable abundant production, watering-down the meaning of an object and/or interaction“ more...

The past U.S. elections season was exciting for social scientists for many reasons, but none so much for the web theorist crowd as the amazing proliferation of election memes. In his essay “Speaking in Memes”, Nathan Jurgenson aptly dissects the phenomenon and its various facets: why and how election memes become viral, whether this virality is subject to campaign control, and how audiences and media conjure meaning by rebroadcasting and reporting these memes. There are many things I would love to further discuss in Jurgenson’s essay, but I will latch on to the issue of meme longevity and the possible reasons for some memes surviving far longer than most. I will also attempt to speculate about factors that afford memes the power to shift shape and adapt to new contexts, and about how and why their meaning might be transformed by the public in the process. more...

I’ve poked fun at these lazy op-eds before and, indeed, it must be tempting to retreat into the safe conceptual territory of “The Internet is fake!” when a juicy story of lies, deception, and computers makes headlines. The Te’o case is an almost unbelievable account of a football star allegedly tricked into falling for, and eventually mourning, a woman who didn’t exist. It’s the kind of fiction only non-fiction could invent. [More on the Te’o case]

What I’d like to point out is that people have incorrectly called this a cyber-deception, a digital-deception, an online-hoax, when this is not exactly right: it was a deception, and one that happened to involve digital tools in a significant way. This mistake is what I call “digital dualism”: conceptually dividing the digital and physical into separate realities. Dualists speak of “real” interaction as opposed to digital interaction, digital selves, and a digital life, like Neo jacking into The Matrix. [More. On. Digital. Dualism.] more...