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The New Aesthetic and critiques of digital dualism have much in common: they emerged in the same year; the nature of their conclusions are (partly) formed by the method of their construction – that is to say, they originated in the digital and as such are collaborative, speculative, and ongoing; and they both seem to spring from the close attention paid to the enticing bangs, whoops, and crashes issuing from the overlap of our digital and physical worlds. But more than this, I would argue that the two concepts are expressions of one another: it sometimes seems that New Aesthetic artwork is an illustration of digital dualist critiques; and likewise it is possible to read digital dualist critiques as descriptions of New Aesthetic artefacts.

This may appear an undeservedly grand claim, and it is certainly extremely speculative (the concepts involved are too varied and inchoate to ever be proper ‘expressions’ of one another). Nevertheless, as a comparison it does produce some interesting conclusions. Especially when we begin to consider what exactly it is that the New Aesthetic and ‘augmented reality’ theory have in common (I’m using the term  ‘augmented reality’ here as a broad label for thought that runs counter to strict digital dualism). In my own personal analysis the mechanism that links the pair is undoubtedly that of metaphor; that cognitive tool that provides us with mental purchase on abstract, complex concepts and systems. In this case the abstract system is none other than the digital world of the 21 st century. more...

EDIT (17 January 2013): Please see update below.

The scene is San Francisco, late 2009, and a friend is explaining—animatedly, excitedly—“why there are so many poly [polyamorous] people on OkCupid.” I wasn’t paying much attention to online dating at the time, so the precise details are fuzzy, but it basically boiled down to the options that OkCupid offered for “relationship status.” In addition to the expected categories like “single,” “seeing someone,” or “married” offered by other social networking and dating sites, OkCupid offered the label “available.”

To know why this distinction would matter to someone who identifies as “poly” or “polyamorous” (as did this particular friend), you need to know a little bit about what polyamory is. more...

In what follows, I attempt to diagnose the IRL Fetish, or the explicit preference of physical over digital, and in particular, the designation of the former as more “real” than the latter. Bear with me, the punch line is at the end.

I get invited to a lot of things. It’s not because I’m cool or popular—rest assured, I am not. I also get regular messages from friends offering deals on the products that they sell, such as Scentsy, MaryKay, and Tasteful Pleasures. It’s not because I’m rich or have expressed interest in these products—rest assured, I am a poor post-doc far more likely to buy new running shoes than liquefying candle wax .  Rather, I receive these invitations, messages, and deals because I am part of a large Facebook network, through which information can be easily spread.  And as a recipient under these circumstances, I think little of not only declining invitations and consumptive offerings, but often completely ignoring said objects with a fully clear conscience. No, I do not want any Fifty Shades of Grey Toys, nor do I want to attend an event entitled “Come Punch Me in the Face” (yes, that was an *actual* event someone invited me to), and I feel no inclination to articulate my decline, but assume that my silence implies disinterest. more...

There’s a song on the 1997 Chemical Brothers album Dig Your Own Hole that reminds one of your authors of driving far too fast with a too-close friend through a flat summer nowhere on a teenage afternoon (windows down, volume up). It’s called “Where Do I Begin,” and the lyric that fades out repeating as digital sounds swell asks: Where do I start? Where do I begin?*

Where do we start, or begin–and also, where do we stop? What and where is the dividing line between “you” and “not you,” and how can you tell? This is the first of a series of posts in which we will try to answer these sorts of questions by developing a theory of subjectivity specific to life within augmented reality.

As a thought experiment, consider the following: Your hand is a part of “you,” but what if you had a prosthetic hand? Are your tattoos, piercings, braces, implants, or other modifications part of “you”? What about your Twitter feed, or your Facebook profile? If the words that come from your mouth in face-to-face conversation (or from your hands, if you sign) are “yours,” are the words you put on your Facebook profile equally yours? Does holding a smartphone in your hand change the nature of what you understand to be possible, or the nature of “you” yourself? Theorists such as Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour, and others have asked similar questions with regard to a range of different technologies. Here, however, we want to think specifically about what it means to be a subject in an age of mobile computing and increasingly ubiquitous access to digital information. more...

Please excuse the Atlantic Magazine-worthy counterintuitive article title, but its true. The Consumer Electronics Show, more commonly referred to as CES is cheesy, expensive, and out-dated. I used to really love CES coverage. It was a guilty pleasure of mine; an unrequited week of fetishistic gadget worship. I savored it all: the cringe-worthy pep of the keynote addresses, the garbled and blurry product videos taken by tech blog contributors, the over-hyped promises that never come true. But this year, after watching the entire 90-minute Waiting for Godot-style keynote, I don’t see the point anymore. All the coolest stuff was made by indie developers and they introduced their products months ago, through awkward in-house YouTube videos. CES might be convenient for gigantic multinational corporations, but what’s in it for the Kickstarter-fueled entrepreneurs?  Is a Las Vegas trade show the best medium to show off your iPhone-controlled light bulb, or e-ink wrist watch?  Why does half of Maroon 5 need to half-heartedly churn out three songs at the end of an hour-long product description? The industry has matured, and CES is no longer sufficient.  more...

“The morbid fascination with the Myspace saga is not unlike our persistent national obsession with Lindsay Lohan”

“I think Facebook and Twitter should be prohibited”

“isn’t it time to admit that MOOC providers don’t primarily care about “how learning works?””

“talking about MOOCs in productive ways is getting harder for everyone”

“your book is somehow better for having successfully negotiated the transition from digital to physical”

“Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet”

“Did it occur to any of these terrified readers that perhaps this latest technological invasion wasn’t aimed at them?”

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...