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What is an identity worth? According to PhoneDog, a ‘personality-driven’ tech-review site, Noah Kravitz’s identity is valued at $42,500 per month. A former employee of PhoneDog, Kravitz successfully acquired a large following on the microblogging site Twitter—17,000 at the time of his leaving. In an attention economy, each follower becomes a valuable and tangible asset. The legal dispute between Kravitz and PhoneDog is over ownership of these 17,000 assets.

When Kravitz left the company, he changed his Twitter handle from @PhoneDog_noah to @noahkravitz and took his growing list of followers with him (I became his 24,390^th follower/asset today). Complicating the issue further, he now writes  for TechnoBuffalo, a competing tech news site which presumably benefits from Kravitz’s vast following. Last week, a federal judge granted permission for the case to move forward. The existence of such a case, as well as its outcome (which remains yet unseen) both demonstrates and further constructs the shifting relationship between identity, labor, private rights, and worker obligations.

PhoneDog argues that Kravitz’s extensive network was built on the company’s foundation—and on the company’s dime. The notoriety of the site and the legitimacy of the name (i.e. the attachment of PhoneDog to his Twitter handle) facilitated the growth of Noah’s online persona. Moreover, they invested in a sizeable PR campaign to grow PhoneDog’s social media presence, and promoted Noah as the representative. Not only did this help raise Noah to micro-celebrity status, but made him an influencer—or someone who has enough influence to sell ad space. In short, PhoneDog argues that Kravitz gained his followers under the PhoneDog name and under the PhoneDog payroll, making these followers the property of the company. They estimate that each of his followers is worth $2.50 per month, and they seek reparations. In a message to readers dated January 3^rd 2012, PhoneDog describes Noah’s rise to fame as follows: more...

Academics usually do not talk about “tactics.” There are theories, methods, critiques, but we -as professionals-rarely feel comfortable advocating for something as unstable or open to interpretation as a tactic. In the latest edition of the Science, Technology, and Human Values (The flagship journal for Society for Social Studies of Science) three authors threw caution to the wind and published the paper “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey” [over-priced subscription required]. While the content of the paper is excellent, what excited me the most was their decision to describe their new “bag of tools” as a set of tactics. Kavita Philip, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish take a moment in their conclusion to reflect on their decision:

We call our results tactics, rather than methodologies, strategies, or universal guarantors of truth. Tactics lead not to the true or final design solution but to the contingent and collaborative construction of other narratives. These other narratives remain partial and approximate, but they are irrevocably opened up to problematization.

I will employ the language and approach of the “tactical survey” to offer a new set of conceptual tools for understanding augmented protest and revolution. It is my aim that they prove useful for activists as well as academics and journalists following Occupy Wall Street and similar movements. This first part focuses on the intersections of transparency, social media, privilege, and public depictions of protest. Part 2 will cover the utilization of corporate technological systems (e.g. Apple products, Twitter) and building alternatives to those systems (e.g. Vibe, Diaspora). These tactics are forged from observations (first hand and otherwise) of the #OWS movement. They are intentionally abstract, because they are menat to apply to a wide range of instances and scenarios.  more...

Last week, I wrote a piece entitled “There is no Cyberspace,” where I argued the today’s World Wide Web bears little resemblance to the thing that cyberpunk authors like William Gibson imagined as cyberspace. I explained that Gibson defined cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” and proceeded to argue that the Web was neither consensual nor hallucinatory. I noted that even Gibson himself acknowledges that the cyberspace concept is outmoded—that, rather than being sucked into the world behind the screen, computers have “everted,” overlaying the physical with the digital. I concluded that the term “cyberspace” confounds our ability to makes sense of a social Web that has very real consequences in our lives because it evokes images of fantastical space apart from reality that we can enter and exit at our leisure.  The piece received thorough feedback and critique in posts by Mike Bulajewski (on his Mr. Teacup blog)  and Jeremy Antley (on his Peasant Muse blog), which has encouraged me to further develop my argument.

My claim that the “cyberspace” misleadingly evokes elements of fantasy left room for possible confusion insofar as I failed to define what I meant by fantasy. Bulajewski, for example, attempted to invert my argument, making a sort of post-Modern claim that “there is only cyberspace” because both our individual psyches (à la Sigmund Freud) and our collective consciousness (à la Emile Durkheim) mediate and interpret experience through the lens of our history, memory, traumas, etc. As Immanuel Kant (and his sociological successor Georg Simmel) explained long ago, there is no access to “real,” unmediated experience—all subjective input is filtered through the pre-existing structures of our consciousness. Bulajewski wants to call all experience “fantasy” because it is historically and culturally relative. Perhaps this is an important distinction in an arcane philosophical context, but I’m rather more concerned with what people actually mean when they say “real” in the context of the Web, as in: “real” life vs. cyberspace. more...

Reposted from Peasant Muse.

What does the term ‘cyberspace’ mean?  Does this Gibsonian construct adequately fulfill the task, currently asked of it by many, of defining the digital/physical realm interaction in terms of its scope and function?