“Facebook has certainly taken notice of the desire for impermanence”
“It’s interesting that we now create things specifically to forget”
“networks can be far more tyrannical, opaque, and anti-democratic than hierarchies”
“use online connectivity not to try to define ourselves perfectly but to undo ourselves over and over”
“social media seem to intersect interpersonal sociality and corporate monetization”
Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...
This is just an off-the-cuff post as I do some weekend reading, namely David Brin’s The Transparent Society (1998). I’m curious about the common grand narrative that society has become more transparent and thus will continue to be more so, ultimately creating the state of full transparency, full surveillance, where everything is seen, recorded, and known. I’ve critiqued this line of thought before, as the issue is common in writing about surveillance or privacy, from silly op-eds to pieces by serious scholars like Zygmunt Bauman.
Brin begins his book by asking the reader to look 10-20 years in the future, which from 1998 means today. Brin claims in the world of the future-for-him / now-for-us there will be no street crime because surveillance cameras peer down from “every lamppost, every rooftop and street sign” which are “observing everything in open view” (4). more...
A number of good pieces on Snapchat have already been written, on this blog and others, and I think there’s a lot yet to talk about. I’m jumping on the bandwagon today because I think I see a conceptual area that’s already been touched on that offers additional room for expansion.
People, I am certain, use Snapchat in myriad ways and for all kinds of reasons. Surely, people use the disappearing-message app to document juicy gossip, send goofy but not save-worthy photos, cheat on an exam, share an inside joke, engage in insider trading, or co-view a sunset in the fleeting moment in which the red-purple sky loses its light. I especially like Nathan Jurgenson’s deeply theoretical and thought provoking analysis of Snapchat in terms of image scarcity and abundance. And yet, when I think about Snapchat, my mind always goes to the same, possibly immaturity-induced, place: sexting.
Sexting, made particularly famous by such figures as Tiger Woods, and Anthony—I can’t believe this is your real name—Weiner, is the act of sending illicit images of oneself and/or erotic messages via SMS. Humans are sexual, and have long engaged the technologies of the time in their erotic practices (if you don’t believe me, read James Joyce’s pen-and-paper love letters to his wife).Despite moral panics surrounding sexting (especially among *gasp* teenagers) the problem with this phenomena has less to do with erotic communication, and more to do with the medium of erotic communication coupled with the affordances and dynamics of networked publics. Snapchat is a technological solution to the problem, but one with unique—possibly problematic in a different way—implications of its own. more...
Ballard: “I’ve always wanted to drive a crashed car.” Vaughn: “You could get your wish at any moment.” –from Crash (1996)
David Cronenberg is so very Cyborgology. The fleshy, pulsating video game consoles that blur machine and body in eXistenZ (1999), or Videodrome (1983), the anti-digital-dualist counter-paradigm to The Matrix where a separate digital reality is rejected in favor of showing the augmentation of media and the body in bloody detail. Vaughn, a character in Cronenberg’s 1996 film, Crash, says that the car-crash is “the reshaping of the human body by modern technology.”
In Crash, the crash is a lust object, something to be witnessed in all of its reality and detail and in extreme close up. On YouTube, it’s the rise of Russian “dashcams.” more...
“the Internet is laughing. And Applebee’s is losing a lot of customers”
“People need to worry less about the future of print and worry more about the future of sentences”
“people click Like merely because humans have an irresistible desire to be counted”
“when DRM makes products less valuable, it also makes them less real”
Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...
It’s interesting to look at something like DRM from both sides – or rather, from one of the two sides, the third being the assholes who put the DRM in place to begin with, yeah I’m tipping my hand here, deal with it – both that of the content-creator and the consumer. It’s not that I think people who occupy that conceptual and experiential space are rare; far from it. But when DRM gets talked about, I honestly feel like the actual creators of the content, who often have very little if anything to do with the DRM-application side of things, frequently get neglected. I had a novel come out this week (yeah, so I have this problem where I can’t seem to keep from mentioning it in whatever I say now), and then I saw this post by author Seanan McGuire on pirating ebooks, and it highlighted to me that I’m in this position now. Different kinds of digital actions are of course, not confined to digital aspects of reality; they spread and ripple and subtly change everything. If someone pirates my ebook who would have otherwise paid for it – which doesn’t characterize nearly all of the “illegal” downloading that goes on – then I get paid less. I have less quantifiable money. Which has very physical consequences.
The concept of “risk” comes up a lot in the classes I TA. Usually, it comes up as part of a conversation about acceptable levels of risk for consumer products: How safe should a car be? How much money should we spend on fire safety in homes? If you’re utilizing a cost-benefit analysis that also means calculating the price of a human life. How much is your life worth? These questions are familiar to safety regulators, inspectors, CEOs, and government officials but as private citizens and consumers, we like to think that such questions are sufficiently settled. Cars are as safe as we can make them because human life is incalculably valuable. We won’t be able to know when something bad happens, so it’s better to get sp30 car insurance to avoid disturbing future costs. After all, these sorts of questions sound macabre when we invert the function: How many cars should explode every year? How many jars of peanut butter should have salmonella in them? These questions are largely considered necessary evils in today’s risk-based society, but what kind of society does that create? more...
I have a dear family friend. She is highly educated, happily married, a wonderful mother, and incredibly successful in her career. She has also, however, always struggled with her weight. Like many people, she tried dieting about a million times. This produced the kind of yo-yo style results which bring people to maintain several wardrobes of varying sizes. Then, about five years ago, she started journaling. She wrote down everything she ate and the approximate caloric count of each item. With this tactic, this dear family friend was, for the first time, able to maintain her desired body size.
Don’t worry; this is not a post about how to lose weight. I could write one of those, but the anti-feminist self-loathing would probably be too much for me to bear. Rather, this is a short post about self-tracking. We all know that Cyborgologist Whitney Erin Boesel (@phenatypical) is our resident expert on self-tracking however, as she makes her way from one side of the country to the other, I will pick up the self-tracking ball and talk about some recent findings from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. more...
“Vine’s six seconds feels like an eternity”
“These messages are intended specifically to shame and frighten women out of engaging online”
“Facebook is not *doing* anything to society”
“Why do we photograph the aftermath of misadventure?”
“Plato was right. The efficient and durable externalization of memory makes us personally indifferent to remembrance“ more...
