What Information Wants

David Banks on November 14, 2012
Obama Victory Speech at the Romney Headquarters. Image c/o White People Mourning Romney

In the aftermath of what both sides agree was the most substanceless presidential election in our nation’s history, some variation of the phrase “post-truth politics” has begun haunting the pages of op-eds and news show roundtables (Seriously, its everywhere. Here’s the first five that I found: one, two, three, four, five.).  To say that we live in an age of “post-truth politics” isn’t totally inaccurate, nor is it unworthy of the attention it is getting, but the discussion has yet to truly wrestle with the characeristics of commodified information. Information can be true, and it can be false, but how that information is disseminated, used, and ignored is what truly matters. Information doesn’t (just) want to be free, it also wants to be exploited. more...

Pure Dualism and Pure Integration: Take Two

jennydavis on November 13, 2012

Last week, in response to Jurgenson’s earlier typology of dualist theorizing,  I typologized empirical/experiential reality upon a porous continuum between pure digital dualism and pure integration. Each of these poles represents a problematic and unrealistic ideal type. The intervening categories, however, represent theorizable empirical situations. In an effort to explicitly link my argument to Jurgenson’s,  I labeled these intervening categories using the language of his typology. Jurgenson critiqued this linguistic choice, and I agree.  Having driven home the connection, and diagnosed the “slipperiness” of theory that Jurgenson decried,  I now re-work the language of my typology to more precisely represent the meaning behind each categorical type. Although the adjustments are slight (I change only two words–but very important ones), the meaning is far more lucid. Below is the original post, with my typological categories reworked linguistically. Changes are indicated by red text. Further suggestions/critiques are welcome. 

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In Their Words

nathanjurgenson on November 11, 2012

“The lapses of disconnect between me and my avatar are occasional, but odd”

“social media nurtures the impulse to speak”

“bloggers have reached the level of pop culture acceptance that comes w/ having a dog do their jobs for comedic effect”

“since the election of Barack Obama, the worldview of online hate groups has become more violent”

“the vaunted FiveThirtyEight model is only as good as the data it runs through its algorithm”

“Items that evoke sadness or contentment are unlikely to spur the clicks and conversations that lead to virality”

“Now a slightly more stomach-churning bit of online past can be yours with a custom Goatse email address”

“the anxious and microfamous risk their reputation and the immediate deciding outcome is likes, reblogs”

“few things make me contemplate digitally-mediated sociality the way being unwillingly cut off from it does”

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson more...

Time Traveling in Troy, New York

David Banks on November 10, 2012
Original: http://instagram.com/p/R0mwsdzeVH/

There’s nothing particularly glamorous about Troy, New York. Troy is a city that, in an alternative universe, might have been a major metropolitan region. It stumbled early though, one of the first places to suffer the oxidation of the iron belt. What it lacks in size or elegance it makes up for in internal contradictions and a special brand of awkward coquettish charm.  It is the home of Uncle Sam and the setting for Kurt Vonnegut‘s novels. Its buildings have been painted by Norman Rockwell and torn down by public officials in search of progress. The local university has one of the highest-paid presidents, but also hosts the Yes Men. My campus office is on the fifth floor of a 19th century chemistry laboratory. The former lab sits atop a steep hill, providing a view that, on clear days, can go for miles.  The view from my office (above) is an eclectic blend of multiple decades of technological achievements and blunders. Highways, public housing, suburban enclaves, and the husks of Victorian factories stand in conversation with one-another like old friends. It is obvious that they need each other.  Some get along better than others, but they would be lost without the others’ continued existence.  New technology may be introduced to us as singular entities; improvements and replacements that make the old obsolete and irrelevant. More often than not however, these technologies find themselves sitting next to veterans of past technological revolutions. I have lived in Troy for almost three years now, and each day is a lesson in the history of technology.  more...

On Technology, Memory and Place

Miranda Ward on November 10, 2012

A week or two ago, Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse’s ‘Ghosts of History’ project made the rounds online. Using Photoshop, Teeuwisse has blended photographs from World War II with modern day photographs taken of the same location. The images have been reproduced at the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, The Daily Mail, and The Sun, to name a few, and similar projects have been popping at regular intervals for awhile now – here are some different examples – so there’s evidently something compelling about this kind of series.

In an email interview, Teeuwisse tells the Atlantic’s Rebecca J. Rosen that she hopes her particular project will encourage people to “stop and think about history, about the hidden and sometimes forgotten stories of where they live.” About one image (in which World War II soldiers dash across the modern-day Avenue de Paris in Cherbourg; one of the soldiers hangs back, semi-transparent, and he appears to be fading, like a shadow growing dull as clouds pass across the sun, or a mirage) she says: “it to me sort of suggests the idea of someone being left behind, history hanging around and staying.”

The reason these kinds of images are compelling is because they present us with an opportunity to see what’s always there but has been made – by time, by forgetfulness – invisible. Here are (some of) the layers of history made visible again; here’s a kind of manifestation of place-memory; a new way of bridging whatever gap exists between then and now. more...

Narrative Consumption and Production: A response

Sunny Moraine on November 9, 2012
Image by Robert S. Donovan

Last week Jenny Davis posted a great critique of the position taken by Jessica Helfand, that on-demand TV is corrosive for both the attention of the viewers and the quality of the product. Aside from some nebulous concerns about viewers no longer being part of a viewing community as a result of being tied to a regular episodic schedule – and I add my voice to those who can say from personal experience that no community is lost as a result of this – Helfand holds that once viewers/consumers can pick and choose what elements of a narrative they want to consume, violence is done to the narrative integrity of shows. Additionally, she worries that the focus of narrative production is shifting to the technology through which stories are told – to “the box, or the screen” – rather than the stories themselves.

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A (Semi-)Augmented Festival: Twitter, Instagram, and Cybersociality at Iceland Airwaves 2012

whitneyerinboesel on November 8, 2012
Sigur Rós at Iceland Airwaves 2012

Little known fact: I profoundly dislike going to events longer than four or five hours entirely by myself. Though I enjoy my own company, and have a visceral need for regular time alone, one thing I really do not enjoy (understatement) is awkwardly standing alone in a crowd of complete strangers who are having conversations. This doesn’t stop me from going to all sorts of things by myself, as I have an even stronger dislike of missing out on events that seem interesting, exciting, or useful to me. But as someone who falls somewhere between “awkward at” and “terrified of” approaching people she doesn’t yet know, there’s a certain level of OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD involved each time I have to contemplate keeping myself socially occupied for longer than an average night of rock shows.

How do I deal with this? Put simply: Twitter. more...

Pure Dualism and Pure Integration: An Empirical Typology

jennydavis on November 5, 2012

 

 

 

 

Last week, Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) further delineated his theory of digital dualism, laying out a typology of dualist theoretical tendencies in relation to the “augmented” perspective. In this post, he critiques existing theorists/scholars/technology analysts not only for being dualist, but also for shifting sloppily and often indiscriminately between levels of dualism. Here, I want to diagnose the problem of slippery theorizing and emphasize the importance of a flexible perspective. I begin with an overview of Jurgenson’s typology. more...

In Their Words

nathanjurgenson on November 4, 2012

“What thrill does one imagination hold, after all, when we can program a bot to voice the imagination of everyone who’s ever uploaded their words onto the web?”

“What happened at Zuccotti Park was not wholly unlike what had happened a few months earlier on Delicious and Google Reader”

“What happens when, as a result of social media, vigilantism takes on a new form?”

“In event of power or Internet loss, just shout 140-character comments out window”

“There aren’t enough terms of service to manage all the publics and space in the world, or the people who live in them”

“When disaster strikes, make sure to bring your sandbags of skepticism to Twitter”

“Death is denied when a Facebook activist can never prove it”

“the [cyberspace] metaphor constrains, enables, and structures very distinct ways of imagining”

“a dualistic offline/online worldview can depoliticise and mask very real and uneven power relationships“ more...

Books in Ruins: Ebooks, temporality, and tension

Sunny Moraine on November 2, 2012
The library in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights building at Lafayette College. Photo by Benjamin D. Esham.

Most of us still think of books as physical things by default. This is in the process of changing, as anyone who’s taken a look at recent sales and consumption statistics for ebooks will know very well, but I think it still holds true most of the time. We think of “books” as things on shelves, possibly dusty, often dog-eared – or perhaps in carefully kept condition: hardback first editions, family heirlooms, or books that are simply old and kept mainly for the simple fact of possession more than the act of reading.”Book” to us does not yet mean – or necessarily even include – “ebook”. The fact that we linguistically differentiate between the former and the latter is significant. The physical, dead tree “book” is the default; the “ebook” is the upstart Other that is essentially defined by what it isn’t as much as by what it is. This Basic Interior book design services is ideal for simple layout books (such as fiction and basic non-fiction that don’t consist of equations or, formulas).

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