“If autonomous vehicles obey traffic laws, income from traffic violations should go down”
“Tumblr encourages unbounded use. It allows you to experiment and play”
“Drones as killer robots, drones as children sent off to war”
“if engineers could come up with an iPotty that fits in your purse, links up to Twitter and takes photos, toilet access might catch up with phones” (thanks jenny!)
Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...
This guest-post and #TtW13 review is cross-posted with permission from Technophilosophy, a French digital theory blog.
On Saturday, March 2nd, 2013, I made a presentation in New York as part of the International Conference Theorizing the Web. Organized by Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) and PJ Rey (@pjrey) [Yes, I also wonder what his real name is], both doctoral students in sociology at the University of Maryland (Washington, DC), the event was held in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A prestigious and perfectly equipped venue (no Wi-Fi issues), which promoted the sharing of high quality insights. more...
“It’s a fair guess that the attorneys in the Cannibal Cop case have never heard of digital dualism”
“our discomfort with Google Glass is drawn by body horror, not fear of surveillance institutions”
“the cultural and technological impact of Grindr is much broader than most people realize”
“A future of frictionless, continuous shopping fits with Google’s vision for the world”
“we really don’t have a choice between mediated and unmediated experience”
Watching the ideas materialize, disseminate, get knocked down and picked back up all in near real time is either the greatest advantage digital dualism theory has, or its biggest downfall—its best feature or worst flaw. Or both. Personally, I’m having a blast, even if it’s a bit of a distraction from my dissertation. It’s the spirit of this blog, a rare academic space to try ideas out, work on them, debate them, meet new people, and watch the idea, one hopes, get better and stronger. Or sometimes no one cares and we move on. This is what I love about my colleagues on Twitter (I’ll never type the word tweeps), this blog, and the Theorizing the Web conference.
The drawback is more...
“with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway”
“Is a tweet labor? Is a Facebook post labor?”
“Drone makers have been courting the paparazzi”
“there is no good pre-internet metaphor for what it’s trying to do”
“Drones permit and accelerate new topographies of warfare”
“we might someday wonder why our childhood memories are held under DRM”
Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...
I’m having a blast reading all of the recent posts about digital dualism. I (or someone else) will collect these all into a list and I’m sure I’ll write a response to them en masse, but here I’d like to point everyone to one particular response that is important and unique in its orientation. When Nicholas Carr set off this brouhaha (or is it brouLOL?) with a post on his blog, the responses came from many directions. I’m used to fielding critiques from the right, from the dualists, but what I found especially exciting was getting a response from the left, where Tyler Bickford argues that reality is more augmented than what I argue, that I do not go far enough in my critique of dualism and thereby reify the dualism I question. To conceptually situate his and my critiques, let me restate a theoretical mapping I produced last year: more...
Apologies for the typos and the general lack of editing of this piece, I’m hurriedly tapping this out right before putting on the Theorizing the Web conference in a couple of hours.
Nicholas Carr chose a great lead photo for his post yesterday critiquing the anti-digital-dualism argument put forth by myself and others on this blog. The image of a remote landscape evokes “wilderness”; well, it doesn’t “evoke”, it literally says “wilderness” right on it and the filename was “wilderness.jpg”. I think this image might be a fun way to illustrate one very fundamental disagreement Carr and I have. But before we can get there, I should spend some time replying to the various points in his post. Since Carr’s rebuttal to the digital dualism argument gets the digital dualism argument I have made wrong in some very fundamental ways, I’ll have to spend much of this post simply clarifying that; which is fine, reiterating things is a useful task. Though, what’s more fun than restating what’s already been said is jumping off into new directions, and hopefully we can do a little of that here, too, finishing with that lead photo. more...
This post expounds on just one section of Liquid Surveillance and should not be considered a proper “review” as such, though I have completed a full review for a journal [read it here]. Further, one of the co-authors of this book, David Lyon, is giving the keynote to the Theorizing the Web conference this Saturday in New York City [more info].
In Liquid Surveillance, the theorist of liquidity, Zygmunt Bauman, and the perhaps the preeminent theorist of surveillance, David Lyon, apply their unique perspectives to social media. I’ve already written a general review of the entire book, submitted to a journal; here, I’m expanding on one specific section of the book that was too much for the general review and deserves its own treatment. In any case, this post has more of my own ideas than would be appropriate for a journal review.
more...
“Catfish is Jerry Springer for the social media age”
“Let’s face it: panic about ‘people’ not pairing off is really panic about women not pairing off”
“the idea that technology comes from us, people, is something we are reluctant to accept”
“Stop Calling It ‘Digital Humanities’”
“temporary photography is doing something very interesting with time”
“the way that the Harlem Shake meme seems perfectly designed for the workplace”
“Everybody in the industry wants to see Spotify succeed”
“Who hates free speech? The powerful and the powerless“ more...
