“Facebook has certainly taken notice of the desire for impermanence”
“It’s interesting that we now create things specifically to forget”
“networks can be far more tyrannical, opaque, and anti-democratic than hierarchies”
“use online connectivity not to try to define ourselves perfectly but to undo ourselves over and over”
“social media seem to intersect interpersonal sociality and corporate monetization”
Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...
This is just an off-the-cuff post as I do some weekend reading, namely David Brin’s The Transparent Society (1998). I’m curious about the common grand narrative that society has become more transparent and thus will continue to be more so, ultimately creating the state of full transparency, full surveillance, where everything is seen, recorded, and known. I’ve critiqued this line of thought before, as the issue is common in writing about surveillance or privacy, from silly op-eds to pieces by serious scholars like Zygmunt Bauman.
Brin begins his book by asking the reader to look 10-20 years in the future, which from 1998 means today. Brin claims in the world of the future-for-him / now-for-us there will be no street crime because surveillance cameras peer down from “every lamppost, every rooftop and street sign” which are “observing everything in open view” (4). more...
Ballard: “I’ve always wanted to drive a crashed car.” Vaughn: “You could get your wish at any moment.” –from Crash (1996)
David Cronenberg is so very Cyborgology. The fleshy, pulsating video game consoles that blur machine and body in eXistenZ (1999), or Videodrome (1983), the anti-digital-dualist counter-paradigm to The Matrix where a separate digital reality is rejected in favor of showing the augmentation of media and the body in bloody detail. Vaughn, a character in Cronenberg’s 1996 film, Crash, says that the car-crash is “the reshaping of the human body by modern technology.”
In Crash, the crash is a lust object, something to be witnessed in all of its reality and detail and in extreme close up. On YouTube, it’s the rise of Russian “dashcams.” more...
“the Internet is laughing. And Applebee’s is losing a lot of customers”
“People need to worry less about the future of print and worry more about the future of sentences”
“people click Like merely because humans have an irresistible desire to be counted”
“when DRM makes products less valuable, it also makes them less real”
Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...
“Vine’s six seconds feels like an eternity”
“These messages are intended specifically to shame and frighten women out of engaging online”
“Facebook is not *doing* anything to society”
“Why do we photograph the aftermath of misadventure?”
“Plato was right. The efficient and durable externalization of memory makes us personally indifferent to remembrance“ more...
Is there a Dunbar’s Number for our documentary consciousness?
Dunbar argued that we can only keep up with about 150 people at a time, at which point we reach a cognitive saturation. Can this similar sort of saturation occur with the proliferation of ways we can document ourselves and others on social media? The ways someone holding a working smartphone can document experience grows not just with the number of sites one can post to, but also the number of available mediums of documentation: audio, video, photo, and their recombinations into things like GIFs and Vines whatever else I’m forgetting or will come next. Each new app carries with it a different audience with different expectations, adding to the documentary chaos.
Or: Given the proliferation of options, how should I document this cat? more...
“JSTOR is a rent extraction mechanism that perpetuates fundamental inequalities”
“a ceremonial flyover of three combat drones”
“what is Elsevier going to do with Mendeley that warrants uninstalling it from you computer?”
“Nineteenth century viral culture is quite like today’s Internet culture”
“That was before Apple washed Siri’s mouth out with soap and curbed many of its talents”
“23 women have joined a class-action lawsuit against the “revenge porn” website”
“there is something disturbingly misogynistic about online bullying“ more...
Check out vinepeek.com. Watch the random videos—called Vines—follow each other without context. Take it in for a moment. more...
“now that we have a simple tool—and grammar—for looping a half second of video”
“The Internet makes this sort of writer-presence easier, more ubiquitous”
“What’s the point of this app? To forge a connection, or to gamify the dating process”
“I’d like to type in “dentists liked by people who don’t like horror movies”””
“The defining feature of a “real” arcade, however, is that there aren’t really any left”
“digital technologies enable abundant production, watering-down the meaning of an object and/or interaction“ more...
I’ve poked fun at these lazy op-eds before and, indeed, it must be tempting to retreat into the safe conceptual territory of “The Internet is fake!” when a juicy story of lies, deception, and computers makes headlines. The Te’o case is an almost unbelievable account of a football star allegedly tricked into falling for, and eventually mourning, a woman who didn’t exist. It’s the kind of fiction only non-fiction could invent. [More on the Te’o case]
What I’d like to point out is that people have incorrectly called this a cyber-deception, a digital-deception, an online-hoax, when this is not exactly right: it was a deception, and one that happened to involve digital tools in a significant way. This mistake is what I call “digital dualism”: conceptually dividing the digital and physical into separate realities. Dualists speak of “real” interaction as opposed to digital interaction, digital selves, and a digital life, like Neo jacking into The Matrix. [More. On. Digital. Dualism.] more...
