“The primacy of contemplation over activity rests on the conviction that no work of human hands can equal in beauty and truth the physical kosmos, which swings in itself in changeless eternity without nay interference or assistance from outside, from man or god.” –Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition

I’ve been thinking a lot about methods lately. I want to spend a few paragraphs considering the current state of affairs for social scientists interested in science and technology as their objects of analysis. What kind of work is impossible in our current universities? What kinds of new institutions are necessary for breaking new ground in method as well as theory? Think of this post as an exercise in McLuhan-style probing of institutions of higher learning. I’m going to play with a lot of “what-ifs” and “for instances.” None of this is particularly actionable, nor am I even interested in proposing anything that would be recognized as “realistic” or even “pragmatic.” Mainly, I’m interested in stepping back, considering the state of our technosociety, and asking what kinds of questions need asking and what kinds of science is being systematically left undone. more...

Last week, I started a somewhat ridiculously ambitious post wherein, by way of making a whole bunch of points I’ve been wanting to make anyway, I intended to push us all toward strengthening and clarifying our ideas around both digital dualism and augmented reality. In light of some really excellent work by Jenny Davis (@Jup83), PJ Rey (@pjrey), and Tyler Bickford (@tylerbickford), in addition to some old-fashioned conversation on these topics with PJ and Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson), I’m now going to change course a bit. In this middle installment, I’m going to revisit the three problematic dualisms of digital dualism (Atoms/Bits, Physical/Digital, and Offline/Online), take up the two recent major critiques of the digital dualism framework, advance a few provocations in the service of breaking dualisms and promoting clarity, and then finally conclude for this week with a preview of this essay’s final destination.

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Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away. – Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

The patron of cyborg writing is the god Janus. Many-faced god, god of beginnings, passages, change and time as a stream through which we can freely move. God of transit, of transition. God of border-crossings. God of doorways. God of the spaces between.

In the beginning was the Word.

Well. Not literally. But you get the idea. Also, literally is sort of a problematic word in itself.

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A distinct feature of academically oriented blogs like Cyborgology is that these are spaces in which theories take shape over time through conversation, contradiction, progression, and stumbles. Rather than a finished product, readers find here a theoretical process, one that is far from linear and often fraught.  It is in this messy and fractured way that theories of digital dualism and augmented reality continue to develop here at Cyborgology and connected sites.  In this spirit of processual-theorizing, I want to further refine my material mapping of digital dualism for yet a third time*. With the ongoing dualism debates, the time is ripe for theoretical rethinking and adjustments. more...

Following Evgeny Morozov’s interesting article on Silicon Valley’s “pervasive and dangerous ideology” of fixing our reality with a simple click in order to perfect it (based on his upcoming book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism), I could not help but wonder if this is a ‘new’ phenomenon after all? more...

This is the second installment of Data Based,  a weekly Cyborgology feature producing original, insightful, and fun data visualizations.

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“The old Netflix Friends used people to personalize; the new Netflix with Facebook uses people to homogenize”

“If autonomous vehicles obey traffic laws, income from traffic violations should go down”

“It shows how necessary it is to now deconstruct, in the sense of Derrida, the theories about the virtual”

“The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not”

“Tumblr encourages unbounded use. It allows you to experiment and play”

“characterizations of digital or physical, virtual or material, necessarily obscure how each constitutes the other”

“Drones as killer robots, drones as children sent off to war”

“if engineers could come up with an iPotty that fits in your purse, links up to Twitter and takes photos, toilet access might catch up with phones” (thanks jenny!)

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