{"id":19245,"date":"2014-10-27T09:45:08","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T13:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=19245"},"modified":"2014-10-27T12:53:58","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T16:53:58","slug":"cyborgology-turns-four","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/10\/27\/cyborgology-turns-four\/","title":{"rendered":"Cyborgology Turns Four"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cyborgology<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We here at Cyborgology recognize the extreme violence that has been done to the sincerity of birthdays. Facebook has hollowed out the intricate, cherished and beloved rituals of celebrating one’s birth and replaced them\u00a0with virtual Starbucks gift cards and Pusheen stickers. We’ve taken\u00a0the fake birthdays made up by journalists<\/a>\u00a0to heart and decided to celebrate the blog’s birthday (a day late, lol) with one really long post chock-a-block with announcements, retrospection, and nostalgia. So slow down, print out the post below, go to Cape Cod<\/a>\u00a0or somewhere that isn’t “online” and\u00a0have a nice long read.<\/p>\n

A note from Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey:<\/h2>\n

Four years ago, together, we launched a blog here at The Society Pages on technology and society. We pretty much just wanted to have fun with it, so we thought we\u2019d name it something ridiculous–something that played on Donna Haraway\u2019s classic conceptualization of the cyborg, which was at the root of our thinking and seemed to be missing in contemporary research. In four years, Cyborgology grew, added contributors, spun off the Theorizing the Web conference, and this blog has come to stand for a specific view of research and thinking about technology and society: one that understands them to be enmeshed; that rejects seeing the Internet as some separate, cyber, space; that speaks to broad publics; and that always takes into account social inequalities and vulnerabilities. We\u2019re immensely proud of Cyborgology. We want nothing more than to see it stay energized and continue to grow. So, we have decided that, after four wonderful years, it is time for new leadership and fresh ideas. We are passing the blog over to long-time Cyborgologists David Banks and Jenny Davis, and we are excited to see what they\u2019ll do running this show.<\/p>\n

Happy birthday, Cyborgology. Take care of it, David and Jenny!<\/p>\n

-Nathan & PJ<\/p>\n

From the New Editors:<\/h2>\n

Hi, Cyborgology readers. Long time contributors David Banks and Jenny Davis here.<\/p>\n

We are excited and humbled to take over editorship for the blog.<\/p>\n

We want to take a moment to thank PJ and Nathan for creating this venue, which has thrived as a space for debate, critical thought, and the development of a theoretical perspective on technology in society. At the onset of the blog, Nathan and PJ wrote all of the content themselves, along with the tedious and technical work that goes on behind the scenes. They then grew the blog by carefully curating a team of \u2018Cyborgologists,\u2019 and working tirelessly to construct and maintain an intellectual community. We are all richer for their work.<\/p>\n

David Banks became the first regular contributor, followed soon after by Jenny Davis. Here are our first ever posts (awww: David\u2019s first post<\/a>; Jenny\u2019s first post<\/a>). \u00a0It has been an honor to write for PJ and Nathan, and to write with our fellow Cyborgologists, Sarah Wanenchak, Whitney Erin Boesel, Robin James, and Dave Paul Strohecker.<\/p>\n

We have lots of new ideas for the future–including more guest posts, so start brainstorming your submissions. \u00a0We are also committed to maintaining a tradition of rigorous, critical, and theoretically enriching writing and conversation.<\/p>\n

Stick with us, there are big things to come.<\/p>\n

-Jenny & David<\/p>\n

Personal Messages from Cyborgologists<\/h2>\n

\"1383927_10201972285645410_1908949741_n\"Nathan-\u00a0<\/strong>I started Cyborgology four years ago with PJ Rey, and today we’re handing it to long-time Cyborgologists David Banks and Jenny Davis. I’m very excited for the future of the blog and happy to reflect on the past year. Again, the blog has been a central part of the Theorizing the Web conference, and #TtW14 was my favorite yet. We saw the inclusion of Robin James whose brilliant work has made the blog even more fun to read.\u00a0The one post of my own from the past year I’d like to highlight was a short reaction to a news story about Facebook throwing a sociology conference. Akin to what I’ve seen firsthand in academic department meetings and conferences as well as in governmental and corporate research groups, so-called “big” data swiftly passes right by basic methodological and ethical issues because the N is sooo biiiig. A sociology graduate student was quoted discussing how neutral Facebook is as a research environment and I responded with\u00a0a post about this fallacy of neutrality<\/a>. I was going to leave it there because this was a bad news story quoting a graduate student. I didn’t want to make too much fuss about knocking a straw-position, but I kept seeing this same fallacy even among professors as well as data journalists, corporate social media engineers, governmental research, and so on. The straw people were forming some kind of tragic majority, which lead to expanding that piece into\u00a0a longer essay for The New Inquiry on “big” data as a special form of contemporary positivism<\/a>. Hopefully the blog will continue to be a site for examining knowledge-power relations of the social web — and I know there’s a lot of exciting new changes in store for Cyborgology’s fifth year!<\/p>\n

\"unnamed-2\"PJ- <\/strong>It’s hard to believe that over four years have passed since Nathan and I sat in our neighborhood bar in DC, spitballing silly names for a technology and society blog. It seems impossible to have imagined where this idea was headed and how profoundly it would shape our experience as a grad students. Cyborgology allowed us to start communicating with a wide range people who were excited to discuss the same sorts of questions that we were asking about technology and society, even as our own department proved unreceptive. I quickly realized that many of the most profound insights on these issues were not coming from the conventional academic sources that grad students are taught to rely on (though journal articles and conferences certainly have their place). Most important, Cyborgology has connected me to my fellow Cyborgologists, who have been an invaluable source of support, information, and ideas. I consider myself incredibly fortunate for this. I wish Jenny and David luck as they step into their new roles as our chief editors. I expect Cyborgology’s fifth year to be its best yet!<\/p>\n

My favorite post this year, Sex Work and the Limits of American Libertarianism<\/a>, called out Silicon Valley companies for using free market rhetoric to justify discriminatory actions (namely, limiting sex workers’ access to payment processing and crowd-funding sites). While sex workers are particularly stigmatized, and thus particularly vulnerable to discrimination, these incidents exemplify a system of surveillance, risk identification, and social exclusion that increasingly exerts control over all our lives. I will be thinking about this a lot as I write my dissertation over the next year.<\/p>\n

\"unnamed\"Jenny-<\/strong> I\u2019m feeling pretty lucky that I got to spend another year blogging alongside, and exchanging gif-laden emails with, such a fantastic group of writers. Through the years, I\u2019ve found that my favorite posts are the ones I never meant to write, but felt I had <\/em>to write. This year, I wrote one such post, Digital Divide in Action: Lessons from a Canceled Flight<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> while sitting in an airport terminal, fueled by a few hours of sleep and lots of indignation. This post sticks out to me for its intersection of social theory and social justice, embedded in experience. The insistence upon combining social thought with social activism is a hallmark of Cyborgology, represented particularly well in numerous posts this year, such as Sarah Wanenchak\u2019s critique of Apple\u2019s Health app<\/a> (along with a corpus of writing about gender and gaming), Robin James\u2019 work on gender, capitalism, and \u2018Lean In\u2019 culture<\/a>, and David Banks\u2019 continued discussions of power and surveillance<\/a>. Taking on a new editorial role this year, I hope to foster this kind of engagement among both regular contributors, and increasingly, guest bloggers. I look forward to bringing new voices into the mix and challenging myself, my fellow bloggers, and our readers, to contend with lines of thought we haven\u2019t yet considered.<\/p>\n

\"TtW14_day1_033\"David-<\/strong> This last year was a blast!\u00a0 I had a great time writing\u00a0Modern Myths: Mundane Enchantment and Creating Ghosts<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Enhance! Ugly Websites, Flip Phones, and the Trouble With Technology in Storytelling<\/a><\/em>\u00a0with Sarah. Fellow Cyborgolgists have also been tearing it up this year with Robin’s ongoing\u00a0work on neoliberalism<\/a>, Sarah’s gaming culture<\/a> coverage, and Jenny’s insightful posts on her\u00a0own rules for writing and researching<\/a>.\u00a0This has been a really productive year for me. My November essay\u00a0Voting Reduces Diversity in Social Media Participation (Kinda)<\/a><\/em>\u00a0was the beginning of research that turned into my\u00a0first\u00a0New Inquiry<\/em>\u00a0essay<\/a>\u00a0which I was very proud of. I also really liked the conversations that formed around\u00a0The Parable of the Coffee Maker and the Design Sir<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and my two essays (1<\/a>\u00a0&\u00a02<\/a>) about wearables. My favorite essay of the year though has to be\u00a0Open (Source) for Business<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0That essay came out of some serious frustrations with my own dissertation research, where I am constantly working with open source software and hardware that can be maddeningly buggy or confusing. I certainly agree with and\u00a0support\u00a0the philosophy of free software but the\u00a0execution (even in my own work) almost always falls short for common users. It’s a sticky problem that I see myself returning to in the coming year. I also want to play with the form of posts more, perhaps returning to the style that I experimented with in\u00a0Time Traveling in Troy, New York<\/em>.<\/a>\u00a0I’ve been really inspired by my fellow Cyborgologists to experiment and push the limits of\u00a0my writing and I hope that as I take on a more editorial role, I can spend more time playing with form as well as content. I’m immeasurably excited to be taking on this new role and working with my fiends for another year. Finally, in case anyone was wondering, I’m still waiting to hear back about my application for the\u00a0#AmtrakResidency<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"unnamed\"Sarah-<\/strong>\u00a0This last year has been marked by a great deal of transition and reexamination – with my career, with where I live, with what I do and what I want and what truly matters to me. I think my writing here has been a reflection of that, and part of the process for me has been learning to be comfortable with letting more and more of it show – or at least learning to be comfortable with the discomfort. Probably one of the posts that stands out the most to me is “Gravitational Lensing: death, twitter, and (not) making sense of it all<\/a>“. It was written shortly after my cousin’s sudden and unexpected death from suicide, and is an example of the kind of painful, raw, messy place to which I’d like to have the courage to go more often.\u00a0It was a revelation for me, before even this last year, that I could write emotion into theory, that I could be sad and angry and passionate and it wouldn’t detract from the quality of what I produced. One of the most damaging things that academia can do, I think, is teach you that powerful emotion is antithetical to good work. So I’ve been unlearning that, and in the coming year I want to keep unlearning. I want to be braver than I have been in terms of where I go and what I’m willing to write about, and I want to push the boundaries of what kind of writing appears here. I want to charge headlong into places I find frightening. I think that’s where some of the best work often comes from.<\/p>\n

\"unnamed-1\"Robin-\u00a0<\/strong>Two of my most successful posts this year were On Twitter\u2019s Gender Metric<\/a> & Femininity As Technology<\/a>. When I wrote them, thought the argument I was making was so obvious that the posts were more or less filler (that is, they weren\u2019t breaking any new ground, just me blabbing on when I couldn\u2019t think of something more innovative to say). And was I wrong about that! So one thing I learned this year is that I\u2019m a pretty bad judge of what people will find interesting.<\/p>\n

My favorite posts of the year were generally the ones about music and sound: A Culture of Moderation: or, no more messages from Satan<\/a>, Coincidental Consumption & the Thinkpiece Economy<\/a>, & Big Data & the Physics of Social Harmony<\/a>. My favorite posts to write are the ones that begin as class discussion with my students; the posts are my attempt to follow up on the ideas and questions my students and I pursued together. For example, my summer 2014 class on Theories of Neoliberalism resulted in Social Media, Because Neoliberalism?<\/a>, The Financialized Girl<\/a>, Yo, It\u2019s Communicative Capitalism<\/a>, & An Attempt At A Precise & Substantive Definition of Neoliberalism<\/a>. My students are amazingly smart and they push me to be a better thinker; these posts are evidence of that.<\/p>\n

Reach Out And Touch\u2026: On Audio Social Media<\/a> is one post I wish more people would read…especially every time the \u201cwhy is there no Instagram for sound?\u201d question pops up (again). There, I argue that the reason it\u2019s so hard to make an Instagram for sound is not so much about sound so much as it is about the kind of sociality that social media is designed to support.<\/p>\n

I suspect that future posts will be related to both (a) the new book manuscript I\u2019m writing, which is about the relationships among post-identity politics, big data, and neoliberal political economy, and (b) the classes I teach. This spring I\u2019m set to teach Feminist Philosophy & a pop music appreciation class, so I bet there will be some posts stemming from class readings and discussions.<\/p>\n

Most Viewed\u00a0Posts Written This Year<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. Femininity as a technology: some thoughts on hyper employment<\/a>\u00a0by Robin James<\/li>\n
  2. The Coolest Thing About Online Dating Sites<\/a>\u00a0by Jenny Davis<\/li>\n
  3. Apple\u2019s Health App: Where\u2019s the Power?<\/a>\u00a0by Sarah\u00a0Wanenchak<\/li>\n
  4. Causes and Consequences of the Duckface<\/a>\u00a0by Jenny Davis<\/li>\n
  5. A Social Critique Without Social Science<\/a>\u00a0by David A Banks<\/li>\n
  6. Autobiography Through Devices (Part 1)<\/a>\u00a0by David A Banks<\/li>\n
  7. Don\u2019t Say Seminal, It\u2019s Sexist<\/a>\u00a0by Jenny Davis<\/li>\n
  8. On Pharrell\u2019s \u201cHappy\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by Robin James<\/li>\n
  9. Toward a Drone Sexuality \u2013 Part 1: Knowledge and consent<\/a>\u00a0by Sarah Wanenchak<\/li>\n
  10. An attempt at a precise & substantive definition of \u2018neoliberalism,\u2019 plus some thoughts on algorithms<\/a>\u00a0by Robin James<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"giphy-3\"<\/p>\n

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      We here at Cyborgology recognize the extreme violence that has been done to the sincerity of birthdays. Facebook has hollowed out the intricate, cherished and beloved rituals of celebrating one’s birth and replaced them\u00a0with virtual Starbucks gift cards and Pusheen stickers. We’ve taken\u00a0the fake birthdays made up by journalists\u00a0to heart and decided to celebrate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1159,"featured_media":17446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10055,9549],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meta-cyborgology","category-news-and-announcements"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2013\/10\/eyeovertext-small.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19245"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19321,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19245\/revisions\/19321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}