“Behaving as if our digital data is fleeting can cause serious trouble”
“Social Media” didn’t get anything wrong or right. Reporters got things wrong”
“I’m tired of contributing to the commodification of my own existence”
“There was no correlation between how much money users paid and how well they were treated”
“No, technology is not “rewiring” young people’s brains”
“Holiday cards were mostly maudlin crap as if that could make any real difference for stopping wars”
“To the photographer, this was simply a beating, not this particular man suffering”
“This glitch is a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure”
“Inbox Zero is a coping mechanism for the anxiety created by a constant flux of e-mail”
“the cybertheorists, however, are a peculiarly corporatist species of the Leninist class”
“I’m tired, technoutopianism. I’m tired of your sexy, shiny surface and your utter lack of substance”
“tablets aren’t a new medium which will support a whole new class of publications”
“We live for the moment because the moment is what an image captures”
“Social media is a major development in the creation and delivery of propaganda”
“to lose a cell phone would be to induce a state of partial amnesia”
“Hyper-visibility and invisibility are not mutually exclusive”
“the image may be the most-shared item in the eight-year history of Facebook”
“unboxing videos are maybe the exact opposite of ASMR videos”
“I happen to love Instagram because I’m mildly creative and a terrible picture taker“ more...
Since it’s the season for giving, I’d like to satirically write up some conclusions for that op-ed you need to finish. A cool way to crank out that “think-piece” before your deadline is to pick a topic—reading, driving, talking, pet-grooming, bedazzling, whatever—and say social media is making it less real, deep, true, meaningful, authentic, soulful, or whatever else makes you feel like a better type of human than the automaton masses. more...
“my favorite twitters share a sense of wonder expressed as comedy of the bizarre”
“Does Web 3.0 come after Web 2.0?”
“A sociological analysis must not conceive of algorithms as abstract, technical achievements”
“We’re gonna introduce the mapping stuff so you can stalk people”
“all of my digital masks are equally me and that all of my digital ghosts mean me no harm“ more...
“the Cyborgology school of digital criticism”
“A simple piece of software got us through the dark ages of computing”
“War existed before social media, but not like this. This is a new thing”
“A book is basically thousands of tweets printed out and stapled together between pieces of cardboard”
“does it even make sense to distinguish between the natural and technological sublime?”
“ideally, real human users will leave social networking altogether”
“Do we buy iPads b/c they change & improve our lives? Or because we need something we can believe improves our lives?” more...
“Perhaps it won’t be long before Google, not Gallup, is the most trusted name in polling”
“I took pictures of the panopticon while watching other tourists take pictures of the panopticon”
“the skeumorphic has begun to feel – in Lyotard’s terms – pornographic”
“Think of our password problem as being like polio”
“the system they’d developed could raise $3 million from a single email”
“Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A”
In the aftermath of what both sides agree was the most substanceless presidential election in our nation’s history, some variation of the phrase “post-truth politics” has begun haunting the pages of op-eds and news show roundtables (Seriously, its everywhere. Here’s the first five that I found: one, two, three, four, five.). To say that we live in an age of “post-truth politics” isn’t totally inaccurate, nor is it unworthy of the attention it is getting, but the discussion has yet to truly wrestle with the characeristics of commodified information. Information can be true, and it can be false, but how that information is disseminated, used, and ignored is what truly matters. Information doesn’t (just) want to be free, it also wants to be exploited. more...
“The lapses of disconnect between me and my avatar are occasional, but odd”
“social media nurtures the impulse to speak”
“since the election of Barack Obama, the worldview of online hate groups has become more violent”
“the vaunted FiveThirtyEight model is only as good as the data it runs through its algorithm”
Last week, Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) further delineated his theory of digital dualism, laying out a typology of dualist theoretical tendencies in relation to the “augmented” perspective. In this post, he critiques existing theorists/scholars/technology analysts not only for being dualist, but also for shifting sloppily and often indiscriminately between levels of dualism. Here, I want to diagnose the problem of slippery theorizing and emphasize the importance of a flexible perspective. I begin with an overview of Jurgenson’s typology. more...
