Image of the week. augmented reality: the online infiltrates how we perceive the offline, made literal here.
Meanwhile, it was busy this week on Cyborgology…
PJ Rey writes about Klout and how it infiltrates our mind’s eye
Nathan Jurgenson provides some initial reflections on the OWS Raid at Zuccotti park
PJ Rey gets Marxian and discusses value, productivity, labor and the web
Sarah Wanenchak reflects on the evolution of the ‘human microphone’ as Karl Rove gets mic-checked
Image of the week is a photo Cyborgology editor Nathan Jurgenson took yesterday while visiting Marshall McLuhan’s Coach House at the University of Toronto. A former horse stable, this was the home of McLuhan’s research center and where he held his famous weekly seminars that attracted celebrities like John Lennon and Woody Allen. Many described the atmosphere as similar to Andy Warhol’s Factory.
This past week on Cyborgology…
David Banks reflected on the recent Society for the Social Studies of Science meetings in Cleveland
Last week, Cyborgology editors Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey were on WYPR (Baltimore’s NPR affiliate) talking about death and dying on Facebook. This is part of the conversation, the rest will be aired in the near future.
The Cyborgology blog turns one today! [our first post]
We are thrilled with the blog’s success and the community that has grown around it. It has been exciting to see the increase in page views, high quality comments, and discussions on sites like Twitter and Facebook. The Faux-Vintage photo essay took on a life of its own and a recent post on Chomsky was rewritten for Salon.com (here). The blog has advanced a theoretical position we call “augmented reality,” positioned art as theoretically significant, focused on social justice issues and has played host to much audio and video from a range of events. The highlight was watching this community come to life at the Theorizing the Web conference that grew out of the blog.
We began Cyborgology to fill a void we observed in popular and academic discourse: conversations about technology often lacked theory, and theoretical debate often neglects technology.
Since we created the blog 365 days ago, more...
This is the first of a two-part series dedicated to answering the question “Do we need a new World’s Fair?” It is an honest question that I do not have an answer to. What I aim to do here is share my thoughts on the subject and present historical data on what these sorts of events have done in the past. In the first part, I explore what previous World Fairs have accomplished and what we must certainly avoid. The second part will investigate what a new 21st century fair might look like, and how it would help our economy. Part 1 is here.
Yesterday we looked at the last few World Fairs that were held in the United States. Those 20th century fairs demonstrated technologies that today we take for granted as common-place. Everything from Juicy Fruit gum to fluorescent lighting has been introduced to the world through these massive fairs. World Expos still take place, but are now found in China, Japan and South Korea. The 2012 expo will be held in Seoul, South Korea. The latest World’s Fair, Expo 2010, was held in Shanghai, China and set historic records as the largest and most well-attended expo. But the success of the Shanghai Expo doesn’t quite translate to America’s shores. As The Atlantic’s Adam Minter wrote last year:
To American ears, the concept of a World’s Fair sounds archaic, and when applied to Shanghai, a contemporary symbol of all that is new, vibrant, and even threatening, it’s disconcerting. But in Shanghai, where the future is an obsession, this reported $46 billion hat-tip to the past makes perfect sense: just as New York once announced its global pre-eminence via World’s Fairs in 1939 and, again, in 1964, the organizers of Expo 2010 view the six month event as nothing less than Shanghai’s coronation as the next great world city. more...
Check out The Big Ideas podcast over at The Guardian UK today for a quick discussion of his work. The CBC has a very good article. Also, check out some Cyborgology posts on McLuhan, including his 1969 Playboy interview, Sheppard Fairey’s redesign ofThe Medium is the Message and perhaps most interesting is a website cataloging McLuhan’s video appearances.
How relevant is McLuhan today? In which disciplines? How about outside of academia?
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...
While we generally focus on contemporary cyborgs and new technologies, the case below illustrates the longstanding entanglement of human bodies and technology. And yes, this is a medieval prosthetic hand.
According to David Forbes over at Coilhouse, this little guy belonged to famed mercenary and medieval knight Gotz Von Berlichingen of the early 1500s.
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.
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...
