Okay, so let’s get it out front that we all have a lot of feelings about stuff.

Proceeding from there.

Nathan Jurgenson and David Banks have already writted excellent responses to Nicholas Carr’s very thorough and interesting critique of Cyborgology’s own criticisms of the concept of digital dualism – and all are well worth reading (there are additional links to more great responses here as well). What I want to offer here is my own take on a couple of the criticisms Carr offers, as well as an apparently-needed clarification to some of what I’ve said in the past. And, again, what it really comes down to for me is feelings.

more...

“digital poetics has reignited artistic emphases on processorial, fragmented conceptualizations of literature”

“TED talks just to keep from looking at the cops”

“Real life isn’t lived in just the “digital” or “physical” realm. It’s actually an interplay between both realms”

“If we want to protect privacy, we should be more clear about why it is important”

“a trend emerged where visual anonymity led to less disclosiveness”

“Is documentary vision a new way of dreaming? Does it enmesh the “virtual” with the “physical”?”

“Novels about robots are still novels. Get over it“ more...

In the beginning, there was nature. And in spite of the obvious lack of humans to give names to the animals and to categorize the trees, it all basically looked and felt like it does now: Leaves were green and rocks were heavy. Over time, humans (those natural tool makers!) developed a plethora of explanatory concepts and ways of knowing that gave their universe a discernable order. At different times and in different regions of the world, the universe took on vastly different shapes and personalities. There were the four humors, animism, Feng shui and by the mid 1660s some white guys had developed something called experimental philosophy. Today we just call it the scientific method. One of those white guys, Robert Boyle, was particularly vocal about the benefits of the scientific method and objective observation.[1] He believed deeply that if enough men[2] of reputable repute watched something happen, you could call it true. No monarch or bishop required. Thomas Hobbes was skeptical. Not because he believed truth had to come from an authority figure, but because he was, among other concerns, suspicious that by observing effects one could derive the underlying physical causes. While both men had strong and informed opinions about society and the natural world, today we remember Hobbes as a political philosopher and Boyle as one of the first modern scientists. The separation of society and nature didn’t have to look the way it does, but historical and social circumstances encourage us to separate these two realms. more...

Apologies for the typos and the general lack of editing of this piece, I’m hurriedly tapping this out right before putting on the Theorizing the Web conference in a couple of hours.

Nicholas Carr chose a great lead photo for his post yesterday critiquing the anti-digital-dualism argument put forth by myself and others on this blog. The image of a remote landscape evokes “wilderness”; well, it doesn’t “evoke”, it literally says “wilderness” right on it and the filename was “wilderness.jpg”. I think this image might be a fun way to illustrate one very fundamental disagreement Carr and I have. But before we can get there, I should spend some time replying to the various points in his post. Since Carr’s rebuttal to the digital dualism argument gets the digital dualism argument I have made wrong in some very fundamental ways, I’ll have to spend much of this post simply clarifying that; which is fine, reiterating things is a useful task. Though, what’s more fun than restating what’s already been said is jumping off into new directions, and hopefully we can do a little of that here, too, finishing with that lead photo.  more...

Dorothy Santos – “The Distant Gaze and Contemporary Notions of Perception: Re-examining the New Aesthetic Movement through an Analysis of Satellite Technologies in New Media and Digital Arts”

Panel: You Are What You Post

Within our ocular centric culture, the immediacy of photography gratifies our sense of connection yet the distant gaze of satellite photography catapults us into the foreign and surreal. For this reason, satellite photography and conceptually driven works from artists such as Trevor Paglen and Rachele Riley include an inherent discussion of the social and political implications of orbiting satellites on our vision and perception. Within new media and digital arts, the New Aesthetic movement’s agenda seems to include a harkening back to technologies combining the idea of two-dimensional and organic works through the pixelation and distortion of the image.

more...

Gina Neff and Brittany Fiore-Silfvast – “Pictures of health: Does the future of wellness need us?”

Panel: Bodies and Bits

As part of our project on health hacking—technological disruption and the meaning and metrics of care—one of us (Gina) attended The MIT Future of Health and Wellness conference. The conference, organized by MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program, was part of an on-going series to connect MIT faculty and industry, and it brought together policy, science, social media, medicine, economics and wellness. In other words, it perfectly captured the current buzz about technology-driven health and wellness, or “Health 2.0,” that is happening at conferences like TedMed, mHealth Summit, and Stanford’s Medicine X. Underlying these conversations is the hope that new forms of data can transform clinical care and motivate people to be healthier.

more...

Leading up to Theorizing the Web 2013, we’ll be posting a series of previews of some of the papers we’ll be showcasing at the conference. This is one of those. Stay tuned for more!

In this year’s Theorizing the Web, I will present a research that originated from my preoccupation with volatile encounters between photography and moments of social strife, as these are seen and mediated by traditional and social media. Homeless people in Libya, demonstrators’ confrontations with armed forces in Syria and Egypt, Kurd refugees in Northern Iraq, check points in Gaza, or Sudanese refugees in Sinai are just a few examples of current photographic undertakings, which are continuously mediated in independent and corporate media outlets. In this work in progress, I venture into documented ruptures while aiming to destabilize their initial appearance: to go beyond the immediate danger and visual narratives of an emergency in order to negotiate the apparatuses and discourses in which the photograph circulates, in which this practice is shaped and received. more...