digital dualism

During my short time in Vegas I listened to and partook, in many formal, informal, academic and recreational conversations about technology and social media. This often resulted in debates over the digital/actual split (or lack thereof).  Those who espoused the digital/actual split did so with a clear privileging of the “actual” (i.e. physical).  This debate is in line with much of the work done on this blog, and in particular with a few recent comment threads (especially here, but also here). In response to this, I’ve devised a list of reasons why this split is so vehemently maintained by some, and why the digital is de-valued. more...

Nope.  It’s not a reference to some long-forgotten 80s movie.  On June 23, 2009, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates signed a memorandum creating US Cyber Command, a separate sub-command unit of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) headed by a four-star general, (currently, Gen. Keith B. Alexander). And, despite all its digital dualist rhetoric (exemplified by the rampant use of terms like “cyberspace” and “cyber-attackers”), Cyber Command should viewed as a major step toward the augmentation of warfare.  With the launch of Cyber Command, the US has quietly moved toward developing new first strike capacities that may, ultimately, prove more strategically important than even the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

While most media coverage has tended to focus on Cyber Command’s defensive postures (e.g., protecting classified data, securing the power grid, etc.), Cyber Command is also developing offensive capabilities to target and cripple other nations’ communication, transportation, and utility grids.  This demonstrates that, in the augmented warfare of the future, an effective assault on atoms will also require a simultaneous assault on bits.

Cyber Command’s capacities, however, are far from fully developed.  A recent report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Cyber Command “has not fully defined long-term mission requirements and desired capabilities to guide the services’ efforts to recruit, train and provide forces with appropriate skill sets.”

This Toyota commercial is narrated by a young woman who gets her parents on Facebook because they supposedly are not social enough. While she scoffs at how relatively few “friends” her parents have, the parents are shown to be out living by mountain-biking some decidedly offline trails. The daughter remains confidently transfixed and anchored to the digital world of her laptop screen.

I spend lots of time on this blog pointing out what I call “digital dualism,” the fallacy of viewing the physical and digital as seperate worlds (think The Matrix). Instead, the position myself and others on this blog favor is what we call “augmented reality,” the realization that our world is one where atoms and bits come together. Read more about this idea if you want.

Enter Toyota. They are playing off the pesky social media misnomer that people are using Facebook instead of doing things offline. Research consistently disproves this zero-sum/one-or-the-other fallacy by demonstrating 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...

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.

Further, 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...

Yesterday, Sang-Hyoun Pahk delivered a critique of the usage of the term augmented reality on this blog. First, thank you, criticism of this term is especially important for me (and others) because augmented reality is the fundamental unit of analysis about which I seek to describe. A quick catch-up: I initially laid out the idea of augmented reality here; expounded on its opposite, what I call digital dualism, here; and fellow Cyborgology editor PJ takes on the terms here. PJ Rey and I use the term augmented reality on this blog to describe the digital and physical worlds not as separate but instead as highly enmeshed together. And Sang is pushing us to further elaborate on what this all means.

I’ll tackle Sang’s second critique first because I think it is most important. The confusion comes from how two points hang together: (1) the digital and physical have enmeshed and (2) the digital and physical have important differences. Sang seems to be arguing that we cannot have it both ways, but I have and will continue maintain that we can.

Sang takes issue with PJ and I’s statements that the offline and online are mutually constitutive, which seems to “abolish the difference” between the two. I actually think we all agree here and perhaps PJ and I could have been clearer: the two are mutually constitutive, just not fully mutually constitutive. Let me offer new wording: atoms and bits have different properties, influence each other, and together create reality. more...

David Carr recently wrote a piece in the New York Times where he states,

Add one more achievement to the digital revolution: It has made it fashionable to be rude.

Has it?

The article is about how people are increasingly gazing into little glowing screens when in physical space. Carr views this as a “mass thumb-wrestling competition” where we are “desperately” staring at devices instead of making “actual” connections. And it is his usage of “actual” here that tips us off on why he has such a negative view of people looking at screens: he, like so many others, suffers from digital dualism. I’ve critiqued Amber Case, Jeff Jarvis and others on this blog for failing to make the conceptual leap that the digital sphere is not this separate space like The Matrix but instead that reality is augmented. I’ve been through the argument enough times on this blog that I’ll just refer you to the links and move ahead.

Carr’s digital dualism begins in his description of people looking at phones while at South By Southwest this past spring, something he then uses as evidence for the larger problem of increasing disconnectedness. He argues, more...

Last week, fellow editor Nathan Jurgenson made a post entitled “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality” with a call for more concept work surrounding this topic.  I hope to make a contribution to that effort by discussion three competing theoretical paradigms of Internet research.  These three distinct perspectives perceive the Internet as either virtual reality, mediated reality, or augmented reality.  I argue (in the spirit of Saussure) that these three perspectives are only fully comprehensible defined in relation to one another.

Let’s start with the definition of “augmented reality” found in Wikipedia, society’s great font of prosumptive wisdom:

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or a [sic… I fixed it] indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. By contrast, virtual reality replaces the real-world with a simulated one.

This is an unsatisfying definition.  While it does contrast augment reality and mediated reality to virtual reality (mediated and augmented reality describe relationships between the online and offline worlds, while virtual reality describes their separation), it (self-admittedly) fails to distinguish between mediated and augmented reality.  As presented in this definition, mediated and augmented reality are basically synonyms.

more...