augmented reality

This essay, like the one I posted last month on faux-vintage photography, is me hashing out ideas as part of my larger dissertation project on self-documentation and social media. Part II will argue that the media also overstate how public we have become, sensationalizing the issue to the point that the stigma associated with online imperfections erodes more slowly. It is no stretch to claim that we have become more public with social media. By “public” I mean that we are posting (1) more pieces information about ourselves online in (2) new ways (see the Zuckerberg Law of Information sharing), and are doing so more (3) honestly than ever before. We are connected to the web more often, especially given the rise of smart phones, and new layers of information are being invented, such as “checking in” geographically. And gone are the days when you could be anyone you want to be online; today we know that online activities are augmented by the physical world. People are mostly using their real names on Facebook and nearly everything one does there has everything to do with the offline world.

But we are not as public as this suggests. We need a balance to this so-called triumph of publicity and death of anonymity (as the New York Times and Zygmunt Bauman recently declared). “Publicity” on social media needs to be understood fundamentally as an act rife also with its conceptual opposite: creativity and concealment. And I am not talking just about those who use false identities on blogs (see Amina) and pseudonyms on Facebook, those with super-strict privacy settings or those who only post a selective part of their multiple identities (though, I am talking about these folks, too).  My point applies to even the biggest oversharers who intimately document their lives in granular detail.

I’ll describe below how each instance of sharing online is done so creatively instead of as simple truth-telling, but will start first by discussing how each new piece of information effectively conceals as much as it reveals. more...

Today, Google announced a new service called “Google+” that explicitly attempts to replicate offline social norms onto an online platform. Besides the conceptual consistency between this goal and the concept of “augmented reality” that I write about so often, I also find the timing of the announcement interesting.

When Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google, I critiqued his statement that having multiple identities online shows “a lack of integrity.” Schmidt stepped down in April of this year and less than two months later Google announces Google+ (which is an umbrella term for a whole host of services centered on better replicating physical world social norms in a digital social media environment).

The service is brand new and invite-only so we can only speculate at this point what it will actually provide. However, the announcement of Google+ on the company’s official blog provides some interesting statements about privacy. The post is an implicit retraction of Schmidt’s insensitive statements and perhaps a lesson-learned from Google’s Buzz debacle that angered and even endangered many of its users. Further, much of the post is also a direct attack on the Facebook platform and its inability to reflect offline social norms that long-since predate the Web (e.g., the platform’s often incorrect usage of the term “friend”). Some quotes from the Google blog: more...

Next month I’ll be in Kumasi, Ghana doing field research and I thought I’d share what I hope to accomplish over there, since my work is informed by much of what I write about on this blog. (I will be blogging over here.) We hope to set up an information system by which Ghanaians can find condom sellers nearby. The primary interface will be text messaging using a fantastic open-source project called FrontLineSMS. By texting a certain number, the user will be asked to send their district and a list of nearby landmarks. The database will send back a list of condom sellers within a reasonable walking distance. We also hope to have several other front-end access points that are already becoming popular places to socialize. Our aim is to increase access to condoms in order to reduce the infection rate of HIV/AIDS. As of 2009, according to UNICEF, 230,000 people (about 2% of the population) live with HIV in Ghana. I should also note that cell phones are not a luxury item in Ghana. Adoption has exploded over the past several years, and it is estimated that about 67% of Ghanians own a cell phone.

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Mediating Mediums, an architectural augmented reality video. Via Wired’s Beyond the Beyond.

The PEW Research Center just released new findings based on a representative sample of Americans on “Social networking sites and our lives.” Let’s focus on a conclusion that speaks directly to the foundation of this blog: that our social media networks are dominated by physical-world connections and our face-to-face socialization is increasingly influenced by what happens on social media.

Movies like The Social Network, books like Turkle’s Alone Together and television shows like South Park (especially this episode) just love the supposed irony of social media being at once about accumulating lots of “friends” while at the same time creating a loss of “real”, deep, human connection. They, and so many others, suffer from the fallacy I like to call “digital dualism.” There are too many posts on this blog combating the digital dualism propagated by these people who don’t use/understand social media to even link to all of them all here.

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Several weeks ago, David Strohecker wrote a post about Tattoos and the Augmented body.  In a response to this post, Ned Drummond wrote a thought provoking comment, in which she differentiates between “active” and “passive” cyborgs. I think this is an interesting distinction that deserves fleshing out.  A deeper exploration of this distinction will be fruitful in pushing the theoretical boundaries of of what it means to be a cyborg—or an inhabitant of augmented reality.

The first thing to acknowledge is that “active” and “passive” are necessarily fluid states, rather than hard dichotomies. This is something Ned and I fleshed out in the comments section of the above mentioned post. Specifically, I said:

I would venture to say that active and passive use of technology probably ranges on a continuum, and individual cyborgs are more or less active/passive in different moments.

I would add to this that individual cyborgs can be simultaneously active and passive—actively using one technology while passively using another, or even actively using one part of a technology while passively using another part.

Before I can offer examples of the activity/inactivity continuum, I must offer a definition of active and passive interaction with technology. When Ned wrote about it, the distinction hinged on rule following. Those who use a technology for its intended purpose(s) are more passive, while those who use a technology in unintended ways are more active.

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Here, in this prelude panel discussion to the Internet as Playground and Factory conference, Tiziana Terranova presents a brief and excellent summery of how contemporary Marxist theory—particularly, Italian Marxist theories of socially-produced value—is useful in understanding the social and economic conditions of the Web.  It’s a bit dense, but, in brief, she argues that much of the value produced in modern capitalist societies now comes from outside the workplace.  Markets have learned to capture value from our everyday social activities.  The ideology of neo-liberalism has moved society even further away from the traditional wage-for-labor relationships that used to characterize the workplace by convincing people to view their individual labor-power as a (sometimes risky) investment that may or may not result in satisfying returns.

Terranova was an early advocate of viewing cyberspace and the material world as co-determining (what we describe, on this blog, as “augmented reality”).  Consider her (2000) statement:

I am concerned with how the “outernet” – the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that criss-crosses and exceeds the Internet – surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole.

The intrinsic materialism of Marxism proves quite productive in this case insofar as it draws Internet theorists toward viewing the material implications of digital politics. more...

Costas K is a graphic designer who used Cyborgology Editor Nathan Jurgenson‘s post on digital dualism as part of a design project. The physical book explores the intersection of atoms and bits. The creator was invited to write a short essay about the project.

As kids, we were told to stop ‘wasting’ our time with electronic devices and that we should be outside, engaging with the ‘real’ world. Early on, the idea was planted into us that what we do using a computer is an alternative false state that bears no value. To still believe this is naive. Personally, I have met some of my best friends online. I make transactions, articulate opinions, receive feedback and get commissioned professional projects. How is this not real?

Still, when approaching the topic the first expressions that came to mind were ‘physical world’ and ‘digital world’ – the cornerstones of digital dualism. Nathan Jurgenson’s text ‘Digital dualism versus augmented reality’ helped me put things into perspective, before exploring them visually.

It is my belief that online activity is a continuation of what we do physically, more...

A company called Quiring Monuments has recently begun marketing augmented tombstones that are designed to assist smartphone-carrying visitors in accessing digital information about the deceased.  On these tombstones, qr codes are given the kind of prominence once exclusively reserved for a person’s name, dates, and epitaph.  The qr codes link users to individualized sites that contain information about the person being memorialized.  This means that part of the memorializing process now includes constructing an enduring Web presence for the deceased.

This raises a few questions.  How important to the memorializing process is being in the physical presence of a the body?  Will crystallized bits of memory in cyberspace deepen, or even eclipse, the memorial experience found in physical graveyards?  Facebook has already adopted a policy for memorializing accounts (also discussed in the official blog).  Are graveyards becoming redundant?

For more, see Bellamy Pailthorp’s NPR story, “Technology Brings Digital Memories To Grave Sites.”

Washington D.C.-based musicians Bluebrain created an album that is actually a location-aware iPhone app called The National Mall (out today via Lujo records). Open the app while on the National Mall in Washington, DC and the music reacts to how you move about your surroundings. As reported on Wired UK,

approach a lake and a piano piece changes into a harp. Or, as you get close to the children’s merry-go-round, the wooden horses come to life and you hear sounds of real horses getting steadily louder based on your proximity.

We have previously looked at augmented reality art on this blog, such as Jon Rafman’s compelling Street View images,  Google’s Street Art View and Clement Valla’s “Postcards from Google Earth, Bridges” project. The National Mall is an augmented album, imploding digital media with your specific movements within physical space. The listener-turned-cyborg’s experience of the album comes in the form of the codetermining interaction of media and physical space.

The artists will release their next location-aware augmented albums for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park followed by another set to the length of Rt1 in California.