jurgenson

“In social media, alienation appears as its opposite”

“A LinkedIn Body is made of the ways in which you’ve made money”

“it’s no surprise to see an app tracking your ability to disconnect”

“It’s no accident that both Manning and Snowden are former soldiers who served in Iraq”

“Should the government know less than Google?”

“7. Realize, w/ horror, that your boyfriend, unbeknownst to you, has had unprecedented access to all of your emails”

““Oh, don’t be such a digital dualist, Raymond,” Isobel quipped”

“In his egregious professional misstep, he inadvertently handed Fat Activists a microphone and a spotlight”

“Every wave of positivism eventually comes undone, when its central contradiction emerges”

“the digital beatdown he’d help deliver over Steubenville came back to haunt him”

“replacing cops and soldiers with PRISM and predator drones: Massively Open Online Police State (MOOPS)“ more...

Over the past few months, a lot of theoretical work has been done to further develop the concept of “digital dualism.” Following a provocation from Nicholas Carr, a number of thoughtful people have chimed in to help both further explicate and defend the theory. Their responses have been enlightening and are worth reading in full. They have also clarified a few things for me about the topic that I’d like to share here. Specifically, I’d like to do a bit of reframing regarding the nature of digital dualism, drawing upon this post by Nathan Jurgenson, then use this framework to situate digital dualism within a broader field of political disagreement and struggle.

In his reply to Carr, Jurgenson helpfully parses apart two distinct-but-related issues. (Technically he draws three distinctions, but I will only focus upon two here). First, Jurgenson identifies what he calls “ontological digital dualism theory,” a research project that he characterizes as focused upon that which exists. Such theory would seem to include all efforts that seek to explain (or call into question) the referents of commonly used terms such as “digital” or “virtual,” “physical” or “real.” In contrast to this ontological theory, he then identifies what might be called normative digital dualism theory—a branch of analysis concerned with the comparative value that is attributed to the categories established by one’s ontological position. Such theory would thus analyze the use of value-laden modifiers such as “real” or “authentic” in describing the “digital” or the “physical.”

I posit that digital dualism, in fact, draws from both the ontological and the normative analyses. Specifically the digital dualist: more...

“no sense arguing with the digital humanities. They don’t really exist. This is the age of the managerial humanities”

“The animated GIF is a Brechtian medium”

“Microphones + Crooning + Nazis + Radio + Bing Crosby + $50,000 = Silicon Valley”

“MOOC’s only make sense if you don’t think about it too much”

“Jane Austen’s internet success isn’t so surprising”

“a handful of people wearing Google Glass, now standing next to me at their own urinals”

“during this period, it was more common for digital animation to be emulated using hand-drawn techniques”

“Cars didn’t end up awarding us freedom, nor did they serve to better connect us to our friends and communities“ more...

“paying in Bitcoin could be more convenient than converting to local currency while traveling abroad”

“Paul Miller was never more aware of the internet than when he made himself live without it”

“Airbnb indulges the fantasy that we might temporarily inhabit another life”

“the MOOC threatens the liminal space currently held by colleges and universities within the life course”

“after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information”

“Apparently no one has ever sent Nicholas Carr or Sherry Turkle a tastefully brief Snapchat”

“no one remembers what YOLO meant“ more...

“attorneys have taken to Yelp to complain about prison procedures that delay or prevent them from seeing clients”

“The nostalgia that attracts a fan to “Garden State” is of a particular Internet variety”

“Next, simply disassemble the computer, shove the fragments back into those clams, harvest the clams, and puree them into a thick slurry in your home blender”

“there’s a lot of “reality” in the virtual, and a lot of “virtual” in our reality”

“this is a new way of expression that does not have a direct correlate offline”

“The mockdate is a type of status update that uses humor to publicly condemn all forms of “improper” bodies”

“Teens are the ideal tweeters because they are never happy and always interesting”

“the cell phone’s ability to signify status has given three beeps and vanished like a dropped call”

“they buy up thousands of dollars in pizza currency & then trade it for Bitcoin currency”

“Of all the millions of dollars of purloined bitcoin that’s floating around out there, not one Satoshi of it has been spent”

“Just because he used the acronym LOL in a text message and on Twitter doesn’t make him evil; it makes him a young person who sends text messages and uses Twitter. He is evil because he allegedly helped bomb the Boston Marathon“ more...

“Cable news is dead, but something keeps animating the corpse”

“Human genes do not augment the body, they are the body”

“memes circulate us rather than vice versa”

“many of the declarations whizzing around Boston look like sympathy but smell like attention-seeking”

“social networking sites are not a separate realm of political activity”

“We need a multitude of what I call “Denial of Positivism (DoP)” attacks from various directions”

“the Google car was treated with deference no matter how recklessly we drove”

“iPad painting: just of the many similarities between George W. Bush and Churchill“ more...

“On the whole, academia is quite anti-popular writing”

“Mainstream sociology & history have a bias towards thinking that nothing is new, ever, & thus ignored the internet”

“Use the emoticons & gift-wrap your message for data-miners or stick to plain English & limit yr audience to humans”

“I was hoping one of my cat vines was popular, not this tragedy”

“Think very carefully about whether tragedies belong on Vine, and about whether you should put them there”

“Goatse was the perfect totem for a burgeoning web culture that prized free speech and unpredictability”

“Jenna Marbles already embodies the future of celebrity”

“Digital dualism can blind us to the real and serious problems of online vigilantism”

“Facebook invites us to forget we even had a self before Timeline was there to organize it”

“the emoticon scheme makes us shoppers for new, bonus feelings à la carte”

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...