jurgenson

“What thrill does one imagination hold, after all, when we can program a bot to voice the imagination of everyone who’s ever uploaded their words onto the web?”

“What happened at Zuccotti Park was not wholly unlike what had happened a few months earlier on Delicious and Google Reader”

“What happens when, as a result of social media, vigilantism takes on a new form?”

“In event of power or Internet loss, just shout 140-character comments out window”

“There aren’t enough terms of service to manage all the publics and space in the world, or the people who live in them”

“When disaster strikes, make sure to bring your sandbags of skepticism to Twitter”

“Death is denied when a Facebook activist can never prove it”

“the [cyberspace] metaphor constrains, enables, and structures very distinct ways of imagining”

“a dualistic offline/online worldview can depoliticise and mask very real and uneven power relationships“ more...

The semantics of Silicon Valley Capitalism are precise, measured, and designed to undermine preexisting definitions of the things such capitalists seek to exploit. It is no coincidence that digital connections are often called “friends,” even though the terms “friend” and “Facebook friend” have very different meanings. And then there is “social,” a Silicon Valley shorthand term for “sharing digital information” that bears little resemblance to the word “social” as we’ve traditionally used it. From “Living Social” to “making music social,” “social media” companies use friendly old words to spin new modes of interaction into concepts more comfortable and familiar. It is easier to swallow massive changes to interpersonal norms, expectations, and behaviors when such shifts are repackaged and presented as the delightful idea of being “social” with “friends.”

But is this “social” so social? Yes and no and not quite. To elaborate, we propose a distinction: “Social” versus “social,” in which the capital-S “Social” refers not to the conventional notion of social but specifically to Silicon-Valley-Social. The point is, simply, that when Silicon Valley entrepreneurs say “social,” they mean only a specific slice of human sociality. more...

When I first began as a graduate student encountering social media research and blogging my own thoughts, it struck me that most of the conceptual disagreements I had with various arguments stemmed from something more fundamental: the tendency to discuss “the digital” or “the internet” as a new, “virtual”, reality separate from the “physical”, “material”, “real” world. I needed a term to challenge these dualistic suppositions that (I argue) do not align with empirical realities and lived experience. Since coining “digital dualism” on this blog more than a year ago, the phrase has taken on a life of its own. I’m happy that many seem to agree, and am even more excited to continue making the case to those who do not.

The strongest counter-argument has been that a full theory of dualistic versus synthetic models, and which is more correct, has yet to emerge. The success of the critique has so far outpaced its theoretical development, which exists in blog posts and short papers. Point taken. Blogtime runs fast, and rigorous theoretical academic papers happen slow; especially when one is working on a dissertation not about digital dualism. That said, papers are in progress, including ones with exciting co-authors, so the reason I am writing today is to give a first-pass on a framework that, I think, gets at much of the debate about digital dualism. It adds a little detail to “digital dualism versus augmented reality” by proposing “strong” and “mild” versions of each. more...

“The digital and the physical are becoming one”

“Design is one of the linchpins of capitalism, because it makes alienated labor possible”

“My hologram rendered somehow less complete. A broken stream in the data mind”

“Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world”

“Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users”

““Invisible Users” is one of the few texts explicitly dealing with the Internet that will not feel dated in five years”

“Writing for a general audience, he said, was “a responsibility of scholars”

“Given a city block, the challenge will be to excavate and present that information which the most people are curious about at the precise moment they walk through it”

“Scrobbling might be “social,” but it’s not very personal”

“Wikipedians may be their own worst enemy”

“a Predator parked at the camp started its engine without any human direction, even though the ignition had been turned off and the fuel lines closed”

“I would challenge the idea that trolls, and trolls alone, are why we can’t have nice things online”

“Memory on the Internet is both infinite and fleeting”

“EDM lets listeners experience what feels like risk, and excess but is actually very tightly and carefully controlled”

“In this climate, it gets hard to draw strict distinctions between living systems and mechanical ones”

“A machine does far more than the task it performs. It is forged of historical moments, acts as a flash-point for contemporary questions, and always, inevitably, produces new cultures of its own”

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson