social media

Can an identity have a homepage?

Many have long argued that identity is the result of both  (1) performative work on the part of the individual as well as (2) the influence of society with all of its history, structures, institutions, norms and so on. We do not produce our identities in a vacuum, they are influenced by society. And we do not blindly consume our identities from the options given to us; humans are complex beings who creatively tweak, mix and remix to achieve something always unique. Not just producers or consumers,  it is best to think of ourselves as identity prosumers. Here, we will show how this process is made most explicit when identities are prosumed through social media technologies. more...

Cyborgology Editors Nathan and PJ have teamed up with Dr. Chris Donoghue to organize a session (or sessions, or perhaps a mini-conference, depending on the number of quality submissions) on social media at the Eastern Sociological Society Meetings, February 23-26, 2012 in New York City.

If you follow Cyborgology, Theorizing the Web, or know anyone who wants to present on social media at a Sociology conference, please see our Call for Abstracts. All we need is a title and a 200-250 word abstract (anything over 250 words will not be accepted). Papers will be competitively chosen.

Submit your abstracts here.

Like many others, I learned about the recent East Coast earthquake via Twitter. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the news traveled faster on Twitter than did the actual waves of the quake. For instance, many in New York City found about about the earthquake on Twitter from friends in DC before feeling the rumbling themselves.

See this cool video made by Eric Fischer and follow the quake-tweets represented by green dots travel north from the epicenter in Virginia up through and past New York City:

Twitter has even capitalized on this by making a commercial: more...

The 2011 American Sociological Association Meetings are about to start this week in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As the conference gets underway, the volume of tweets containing the #ASA2011 hashtag is rising.

Using NodeXL, I collected a set of tweets with the #ASA2011 tag and mapped the connections among the people who tweeted that term.

These are the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word ASA2011 when queried on August 15, 2011 more...

Why is it that authorities are so quick to fear, blame and entirely eliminate electronic communications in the face of unpredictable gatherings of people?

Hosni Mubarak pulled the plug on the Internet during the Egyptian uprising in an attempt to do away with the protesting masses. After the recent riots in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron blamed social media and pondered shutting down electronic communications. And, most recently, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (or BART) subway system turned off mobile coverage because there were rumors of protest. Authorities large and small across the globe are worried about people being more connected than ever.

Putting aside the important issue of free speech, I want to ask why BART officials feel that communication technologies are making people less safe in times of confusion? Is it part of a larger knee-jerk reaction to not understand social media and thus be scared of it? Ultimately, disrupting communications in a time of potential crisis to make people more safe is a fallacy; it does just the opposite.

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Most of us here at Cyborgology have written at least one post about augmented warfare and revolution. I suggested that the panopticon has moved to the clouds, and PJ warns that we may soon see it descend into a fog. In the wake of the Arab Spring, we have all commented on what it means to have an augmented revolution (also here, here, and here). The Department of Defense is well aware of this global trend, and is dumping lots of money into understanding how to maintain what I will call online superiority. Just as nations fight for ground, air, and sea superiority in a given conflict, they must now maintain a presence in online meeting spaces. Surveillance and intelligence efforts have always been a part of warfare, and monitoring and disrupting information flows has always been a tactical advantage. While previous engagements in informational warfare have been about information exchange, what we see now are efforts to gain online superiority in order to directly disrupt physical, financial, or tactical resources.

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