I’d like to point readers to a terrific three-part essay by Laura Portwood-Stacer on three reasons why people refuse media, addiction, asceticism, and aesthetics. We can apply this directly to what might become an increasingly important topic in social media studies: social media refusers, already (edit: and unfortunately, as Rahel Aima points out) nicknamed “refusenicks”. There will be more to come on this blog on how to measure and conceptualize Facebook (and other social media) refusal, but let’s begin by analyzing these three frameworks used to discuss social media refusal and critique some of the underlying assumptions. more...
jurgenson
“There is an essential lack of any heroic narrative in most films about the second Gulf War”
“In twenty years universal television will be an everyday affair” (1927)
“Romney campaign’s presence on Tumblr is more subdued”
“The pay-to-promote feature disrupts the interest-based algorithm”
“The symbiotic relationship between us and our apps will be seamless”
“ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out””
“the concept of ‘internet addiction’ relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the internet is”
“Will there ever be a laptop that needs to be broken in, and improves as you use it?”
“With these gardens as crypto-water-computers, they were taking measurements of the universe”
“A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes”
“the fighting of war is now augmented – war by physical and digital means are now inseparable”
“there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works”
“we’ll have a crack team of GIF artists cranking out instant animations of the best debate moments”
“And independent voters? The top term was “LOL,” short for laugh out loud”
“bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer”
“I am only as secure as the last time I was retweeted”
“everyone else seemed so natural in their tweeting. for me it was agony”
“the hate-blog phenomenon is basically anti-fandom”
“low-tech objects that are the paraphernalia of hipster culture”
“is Klout trying to smack a glossy veneer of Science™ onto social ranking?”
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
more...
“40% of Twitter users who log in on a regular basis never tweet”
“cyberpunk romanticisation of the ‘virtual’ plays a cultural role in propping up [digital dualism]”
“Drones will make traditional fences as obsolete as gunpowder & cannons made city walls”
“For the poor, there will be cyberspace”
“Percentage of folks living on a Native American reservation who have internet access: 10”
““Gangnam Style” signals the emergence of irony in South Korea”
“The Enterprise crew was driving a misfiring IBM PC in the service of a quasi-neoliberal agenda”
“Data’s positronic brain doesn’t have Wi-Fi”
“Desired Skills: Klout Score of 35 or higher”
PJ Rey just posted a terrific reflection on hipsters and low-tech on this blog, and I just want to briefly respond, prod and disagree a little. This is a topic of great interest to me: I’ve written about low-tech “striving for authenticity” in my essay on The Faux-Vintage Photo, reflected on Instagrammed war photos, the presence of old-timey cameras at Occupy Wall Street, and the IRL Fetish that has people obsessing over “the real” in order to demonstrate just how special and unique they are.
While I appreciate PJ bringing in terrific new theorists to this discussion, linking authenticity and agency with hipsters and technology, I think he focuses too much on the technologies themselves and not enough on the processes of identity; too much on the signified and not where the real action is in our post-modern, consumer society: the signs and signifiers. more...
“Ten, 20 years from now, the legacy of [Facebook] should be, we have connected everyone in the world”
“Becoming yourself is largely a matter of becoming someone who is paid attention to”
“Human self-awareness is multiplying itself onto an altogether new plane”
“Instagram is the new go-to platform for saying “I live a full life and here is photographic proof””
“Analog stuff is popular online”
“Number Of Users Who Actually Enjoy Facebook Down To 4”
“Grindr officially announces its plan to mobilize gay men as a political bloc in the 2012 elections”
“I can’t put Twitter or the little blue bird in jail, so the only way to punish is monetarily”
“About four grams of DNA theoretically could store the digital data humankind creates in one year”
“Google Glass is changing the implicit social contract with everyone in his or her field of view”
“Having opened up a chasm between the informational and material, we’re rapidly trying to close it”
“Imagine being excited to see what the Internet looks and feels like in a new town”
“remote sensing and screen culture might displace today’s commonplace demand for airbuses”
“human beings have not always tried to make sense of emotions through numbers”
“we are probably the last generation to experience a clear difference between offline and online”
“technologically-mediated storytelling is every bit as world-destroying as it is world-creating”
“75 percent of all [Wikipedia] articles score below the desired [Flesch] readability score”
“We all participate in this strange authorship of the now”
“to really understand “the Internet” we need to forget it as a unified “it” altogether”
“The porn industry is on the same trajectory as all media: content itself no longer holds value”
“the internet hive mind might begin producing a new kind of anti-gonzo journalism”
“personal relationships seem to be the blurry edge of a quantified field of vision”
“All physical spaces already are also informational spaces”
“Once you’re running at Internet speed, is there any turning back?”
“there is no option to “roll back” the impact the Internet has made on human existence”
“there is life after the compass, maps and even GPS”
“Why does Bokeh matter? First of all because there’s more of it than there used to be”
“social media functions to uphold or replicate hierarchies of print capitalism”
“our attack on Armstrong speaks to our collective discomfort with a cyborg nature”
“this is the most boring thought about technology that can be had”
“the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do”
“If ‘digital’ isn’t a place or a world or a reality, can it be a practice?”
“our culture’s reorientation from lived to statistical experience”
Photos by Nathan Jurgenson, taken in Washington, D.C., 17, January 2012.
Malcolm Harris has posted one of the most provocative things I’ve ever read about social media, “Twitterland.” I’d like to point you the story and go through some of the many issues he brings to light. Harris’ story is one of theorizing Twitter and power; it can reinforce existing power imbalances, but, as is the focus here, how it can also be used to upset them.
Digital Dualism
Harris begins by taking on the idea that Twitter is a “tool” or an “instrument”, arguing that, no, Twitter is not a map, but the territory; not the flier but the city itself; hence the title “Twitterland.” However, in nearly the same breath, Harris states he wants to “buck that trend” of “the faulty digital-dualist frame the separates ‘real’ and online life.” As most readers here know, I coined the term digital dualism and provided the definition on this blog and thus have some vested interest in how it is deployed. And Harris’ analysis that follows indeed bucks the dualist trend, even though I would ask for some restating of the more theoretical parts of his argument. I’d like to urge Harris not to claim that Twitter is a new city, but instead focus on how Twitter has become part of the city-fabric of reality itself. more...
“There is an essential lack of any heroic narrative in most films about the second Gulf War”
“In twenty years universal television will be an everyday affair” (1927)
“Romney campaign’s presence on Tumblr is more subdued”
“The pay-to-promote feature disrupts the interest-based algorithm”
“The symbiotic relationship between us and our apps will be seamless”
“ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out””
“the concept of ‘internet addiction’ relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the internet is”
“Will there ever be a laptop that needs to be broken in, and improves as you use it?”
“With these gardens as crypto-water-computers, they were taking measurements of the universe”
“A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes”
“the fighting of war is now augmented – war by physical and digital means are now inseparable”
“there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works”
“we’ll have a crack team of GIF artists cranking out instant animations of the best debate moments”
“And independent voters? The top term was “LOL,” short for laugh out loud”
“bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer”
“I am only as secure as the last time I was retweeted”
“everyone else seemed so natural in their tweeting. for me it was agony”
“the hate-blog phenomenon is basically anti-fandom”
“low-tech objects that are the paraphernalia of hipster culture”
“is Klout trying to smack a glossy veneer of Science™ onto social ranking?”
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson more...“40% of Twitter users who log in on a regular basis never tweet”
“cyberpunk romanticisation of the ‘virtual’ plays a cultural role in propping up [digital dualism]”
“Drones will make traditional fences as obsolete as gunpowder & cannons made city walls”
“For the poor, there will be cyberspace”
“Percentage of folks living on a Native American reservation who have internet access: 10”
““Gangnam Style” signals the emergence of irony in South Korea”
“The Enterprise crew was driving a misfiring IBM PC in the service of a quasi-neoliberal agenda”
“Data’s positronic brain doesn’t have Wi-Fi”
“Desired Skills: Klout Score of 35 or higher”
PJ Rey just posted a terrific reflection on hipsters and low-tech on this blog, and I just want to briefly respond, prod and disagree a little. This is a topic of great interest to me: I’ve written about low-tech “striving for authenticity” in my essay on The Faux-Vintage Photo, reflected on Instagrammed war photos, the presence of old-timey cameras at Occupy Wall Street, and the IRL Fetish that has people obsessing over “the real” in order to demonstrate just how special and unique they are.
While I appreciate PJ bringing in terrific new theorists to this discussion, linking authenticity and agency with hipsters and technology, I think he focuses too much on the technologies themselves and not enough on the processes of identity; too much on the signified and not where the real action is in our post-modern, consumer society: the signs and signifiers. more...
“Ten, 20 years from now, the legacy of [Facebook] should be, we have connected everyone in the world”
“Becoming yourself is largely a matter of becoming someone who is paid attention to”
“Human self-awareness is multiplying itself onto an altogether new plane”
“Instagram is the new go-to platform for saying “I live a full life and here is photographic proof””
“Analog stuff is popular online”
“Number Of Users Who Actually Enjoy Facebook Down To 4”
“Grindr officially announces its plan to mobilize gay men as a political bloc in the 2012 elections”
“I can’t put Twitter or the little blue bird in jail, so the only way to punish is monetarily”
“About four grams of DNA theoretically could store the digital data humankind creates in one year”
“Google Glass is changing the implicit social contract with everyone in his or her field of view”
“Having opened up a chasm between the informational and material, we’re rapidly trying to close it”
“Imagine being excited to see what the Internet looks and feels like in a new town”
“remote sensing and screen culture might displace today’s commonplace demand for airbuses”
“human beings have not always tried to make sense of emotions through numbers”
“we are probably the last generation to experience a clear difference between offline and online”
“technologically-mediated storytelling is every bit as world-destroying as it is world-creating”
“75 percent of all [Wikipedia] articles score below the desired [Flesch] readability score”
“We all participate in this strange authorship of the now”
“to really understand “the Internet” we need to forget it as a unified “it” altogether”
“The porn industry is on the same trajectory as all media: content itself no longer holds value”
“the internet hive mind might begin producing a new kind of anti-gonzo journalism”
“personal relationships seem to be the blurry edge of a quantified field of vision”
“All physical spaces already are also informational spaces”
“Once you’re running at Internet speed, is there any turning back?”
“there is no option to “roll back” the impact the Internet has made on human existence”
“there is life after the compass, maps and even GPS”
“Why does Bokeh matter? First of all because there’s more of it than there used to be”
“social media functions to uphold or replicate hierarchies of print capitalism”
“our attack on Armstrong speaks to our collective discomfort with a cyborg nature”
“this is the most boring thought about technology that can be had”
“the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do”
“If ‘digital’ isn’t a place or a world or a reality, can it be a practice?”
“our culture’s reorientation from lived to statistical experience”
Photos by Nathan Jurgenson, taken in Washington, D.C., 17, January 2012.
Malcolm Harris has posted one of the most provocative things I’ve ever read about social media, “Twitterland.” I’d like to point you the story and go through some of the many issues he brings to light. Harris’ story is one of theorizing Twitter and power; it can reinforce existing power imbalances, but, as is the focus here, how it can also be used to upset them.
Digital Dualism
Harris begins by taking on the idea that Twitter is a “tool” or an “instrument”, arguing that, no, Twitter is not a map, but the territory; not the flier but the city itself; hence the title “Twitterland.” However, in nearly the same breath, Harris states he wants to “buck that trend” of “the faulty digital-dualist frame the separates ‘real’ and online life.” As most readers here know, I coined the term digital dualism and provided the definition on this blog and thus have some vested interest in how it is deployed. And Harris’ analysis that follows indeed bucks the dualist trend, even though I would ask for some restating of the more theoretical parts of his argument. I’d like to urge Harris not to claim that Twitter is a new city, but instead focus on how Twitter has become part of the city-fabric of reality itself. more...