cyborgology

As most of Cyborgology readers know, the blog puts on a conference called Theorizing the Web (now in it’s fourth year). We have some exciting new ideas for 2014. By popular demand, #TtW14 will now–for the first time–feature two full days of programming. We’ve also moved out of an academic-institutional space and into a gorgeous warehouse in Brooklyn, NYC. All of this means that, in addition to the competitively-selected papers and invited speakers, we can experiment with more ways to push the norms of academic conferences. The goal of Theorizing the Web has always been to create the event we’d want to attend.

If you are interested in presenting at Theorizing the Web, here’s the call for papers.

Anyone can attend, you just have to sign up. Traditional conferences get expensive and often leave people who don’t have some sort of institutional backing out in the cold. We want to include as many as possible, so TtW works on a pay-what-you-can model (minimum $1). This means that those with limited funds can still attend, relying on the generosity of those who can afford a little more. Register and pay what you can here.

All the information you’ll need should be on the conference website, and, if not, feel free to comment below or write to theorizingtheweb@gmail.com.

If you think others would be interested in this event, please share. The Twitter hashtag is: #TtW14

Thanks for all the support these first three years, and we’re excited for the fourth Theorizing the Web!

Today is Cyborgology’s third birthday (see the first post)! Each year we do a little reflecting. more...

Cyborgology launched two years ago today [see the first post], and we have a little birthday party post today. Below you will find lists of the most popular articles generated over the past twelve months since our first birthday. But first, we’d like to let each Cyborgology Editor highlight one post they wrote in the past twelve months, and say a little something about that post, where it went after being published, and a little about blogging itself.  more...

This post combines part 1 and part 2 of “Technocultures”. These posts are observations made during recent field work in the Ashanti region of Ghana, mostly in the city of Kumasi.

Part 1: Technology as Achievement and Corruption

The “digital divide” is a surprisingly durable concept. It has evolved through the years to describe a myriad of economic, social, and technical disparities at various scales across different socioeconomic demographics. Originally it described how people of lower socioeconomic status were unable to access digital networks as readily or easily as more privileged groups. This may have been true a decade ago, but that gap has gotten much smaller. Now authors are cooking up a “new digital divide” based on usage patterns. Forming and maintaining social networks and informal ties, an essential practices for those of limited means, is described as nothing more than shallow entertainment and a waste of time. The third kind of digital divide operates at a global scale; industrialized or “developed” nations have all the cool gadgets and the global south is devoid of all digital infrastructures (both social and technological). The artifacts of digital technology are not only absent, (so the myth goes) but the expertise necessary for fully utilizing these technologies is also nonexistent. Attempts at solving all three kinds of digital divides (especially the third one) usually take a deficit model approach.The deficit model assumes that there are “haves” and “have nots” of technology and expertise. The solution lies in directing more resources to the have nots, thereby remediating the digital disparity. While this is partially grounded in fact, and most attempts are very well-intended, the deficit model is largely wrong. Mobile phones (which are becoming more and more like mobile computers) have put the internet in the hands of millions of people who do not have access to a “full sized” computer. More importantly, computer science, new media literacy, and even the new aesthetic can be found throughout the world in contexts and arrangements that transcend or predate their western counterparts. Ghana is an excellent case study for challenging the common assumptions of technology’s relationship to culture (part 1) and problematizing the historical origins of computer science and the digital aesthetic (part 2). more...

Reason #15,926 I love the Internet: it allows us to bypass our insane leaders israelovesiran.com

— allisonkilkenny (@allisonkilkenny) April 22, 2012

Sherry Turkle published an op-ed in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times’ Sunday Review that decries our collective move from “conversation” to “connection.” Its the same argument she made in her latest book Alone Together, and has roots in her previous books Life on the Screen and Second Self. Her argument is straightforward and can be summarized in a few bullet points:

• Our world has more “technology” in it than ever before and it is taking up more and more hours of our day.
• We use this technology to structure/control/select the kinds of conversations we have with certain people.
• These communication technologies compete with “the world around us” in a zero-sum game for our attention.
• We are substituting “real conversations” with shallower, “dumbed-down” connections that give us a false sense of security. Similarly, we are capable of presenting ourselves in a very particular way that hides our faults and exaggerates our better qualities.

Turkle is probably the longest-standing, most outspoken proponent of what we at Cyborgology call digital dualism. The separation of physical and virtual selves and the privileging of one over the other is not only theoretically contradictory, but also empirically unsubstantiated.  more...

Theorizing the Web 2012 was great. Everyone involved did a bang-up job. I certainly learned more in a single day than I usually do at weekend-long establishment conferences. I have said a lot about conferences (here, here, and here) as have fellow cyborgologists (Sarah, Nathan, and PJ). All of these posts have a common thread: academia is changing, but conferences seem out of date in some way. They are needlessly insular, they rely on hefty attendance fees that are increasingly cost-prohibitive,  and they rarely take advantage of social media in any meaningful way. The relative obduracy of conference styles come into high relief once they are compared to the massive changes to institutional knowledge production. Universities have adopted many of the managerial practices of private companies. They are also acting more like profit-seeking enterprises: putting massive resources into patenting offices and business incubators, hiring less tenure-track teaching staff, and employing armies of professionalized managers that run everything from information technology services to athletic facilities. Conferences, on the other hand, have seen few innovations beyond what I call Tote Bag Praxis.  more...

“I must rule with eye and claw — as the hawk among lesser birds.”

-Duke Leo Atreides in Book 1: Dune

Over a week ago, Twitter announced a new censorship policy, stating that it would comply with any “valid and applicable legal request” to take down tweets. The announcement came just as we were still digesting Google’s unified privacy policy and were still debating the (now confirmed) rumors that Facebook was releasing an IPO. Twitter has since been applauded, denounced, and dissected by a variety of scholars, media critics, and business leaders. In this post I will give a brief summary of the controversy, briefly weigh in with a commentary of my own, and conclude with a discussion of what all this means for theorizing online social activity.

more...

Photo of the week

This week at Cyborgology…

Dave Strohecker is back at theorizing hipsters and authenticity, this time comparing them to “indie”

Editors Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey live-tweeted and archived the Twitter stream of the recent flash-conference on Occupy, the Tea Party and networked democracy

Jenny Davis writes on “responsible Googling,” or how teachers should best use the Web in the classroom

Nathan Jurgenson asks if Occupy can survive a winter without tents, arguing that most analyses of the movement has looked too much at space and not enough at time

David Banks writes his second post on Actor Network Theory, compares it to “augmented reality”  and again comes down hard on Latour and his disciples. The post continues to spark a terrific discussion in the comments

Sarah Wanenchak responds to Nathan’s previous post arguing that, yes, Occupy can withstand a winter without tents. Memories are strong, and people will not forget about what made the movement powerful. 

Picture of the week comes from David Banks. FourSquare and Occupy at that critical intersection of the digital and physical.

This week at Cyborgology…

Nathan Jurgenson’s photo-theory essay on the new Lytro so-called “living picture” technology and what it means for potentially more interactive social media objects

Guest author Gene Morrow disagrees with PJ Rey a bit and argues that Occupy cannot hibernate indoors this winter but instead needs a home in physical space

Sarah Wanenchak is welcomed on board as the newest member of the Cyborgology blog and writes a short essay linking the Occupy movement to the 1848 revolutions in Europe

Jenny Davis looks at social ties and Facebook, from the weak to close connections, from the global to the local

PJ Rey provides an essay on Cyberpunk with a critical eye towards the role of the Ayn Randian rugged individualism but embracing the Cyberpunk ethos of being at once deeply interested in as well as highly critical of technology and society

David Banks begins his project of applying “augmented reality” theory to other theories of technology by writing about and critiquing Actor Network Theory

David Strohecker round the week out with a look at Britain’s “safe text street” as it deals with our increasingly augmented reality

Photo of the week comes from the current protests in Egypt. The picture captures the flow of imagery across mediums, especially in times of protest. Al Jazeera ran the photo of a police officer who reportedly is shooting protesters in the eye. Infuriated, Egyptians stenciled his image on walls. The graffiti was then photographed and disseminated on social media, where Zeynep Tufekci saw the image and sent it to us. The image of the police officer flows from cameras to TV broadcast to paint on walls back into photo-form into social media and onto this blog where you see it now. Reality is augmented.

Meanwhile, this week on Cyborgology…

Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey co-author an essay about how today we breath in an atmosphere increasingly able to capture what we do as a social media document

Jenny Davis writes about the mileage Facebook critics get out of misusing the word “friend”

We repost a comment Distinguished University of Maryland professor and past President of the American Sociological Association Patricia Hill-Collins made about PJ Rey’s post on journals being the “dinosaurs” of academia

PJ writes about the trust we place in modern technologies to become and enjoy the cyborgs we have become today

PJ also thinks about what is in store for the #occupy movement as winter bears down and concludes it is partially in memes

David Banks gets into the Thanksgiving spirit and discusses sexism and Internet food videos

Dave Strohecker looks into why Hipsters are into vintage and retro technology, circling around the ideas of authenticity and nostalgia

Next is a guest post from Jeremy Antley on the analogue roots of digital dualism, looking at a similar process of “textual dualism”

And we round up this week with the second part of Dan Greene’s “augmented syllabus” project