technology - Jeremy Price on Diigo

11 Nov 09

09 Nov 09

Twitter as a Technology of Immediacy | Snurblog

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08 Nov 09

NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth

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internet web information ethics technology

Her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out; it wasn’t about preventing harm to others, but rather a simple case of – as I said two weeks ago – “look at me looking at this.”
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- What’s most alarming about Moore’s behaviour is that she probably thought she was doing the right thing. Certainly, looking at her MySpace page and her Twitter account (before the army finally forced her to lock it down) we see the portrait of a patriot. Someone who clearly cares a great deal about others, and who – despite the rhetorical question “remind me why I joined the army again” on her profile – is proud to serve her country. In tweeting from the scene, and calling out the media for not reporting the rumours from inside the base, I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference.
  
  And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.
- the answer isn’t censorship (which won’t work), but rather in our social evolution catching up with the state of technology. We need to get back to a point as a society where – without thinking – we put our humanity before our ego.
- And what did he do when he saw a young girl bleeding to death? Did he run for help, or try to assist in stemming the bleeding? No he didn’t.
  
  Instead he pointed his camera at her and recorded her suffering, moving in closer to her face for her agonising final seconds. For all of our talk of citizen journalism, and getting the truth out, the last thing that terrified girl saw before she closed her eyes for the final time was some guy pointing a cameraphone at her. “Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.”

06 Nov 09

Cat and Girl » Archive » The Trap

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social_networks social technology individual community

28 Oct 09

YouTube - A Vision of K-12 Students Today

Video that includes some weird stuff about being scared about China.

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video education technology 21st century skills

26 Oct 09

The End of Solitude - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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technology culture web self identity

Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants.
If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
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- So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can.
- Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism.
- The Romantic practice of solitude is neatly captured by Trilling's "sincerity": the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others. Especially, as Emerson suggests, one beloved other. Hence the famous Romantic friendship pairs: Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Melville.
- Modernism decoupled this dialectic. Its notion of solitude was harsher, more adversarial, more isolating.
- In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth
- The soul is forced back into itself — hence the development of a more austere, more embattled form of self-validation, Trilling's "authenticity," where the essential relationship is only with oneself.
- Solitude becomes, more than ever, the arena of heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast and terrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights. To achieve authenticity is to look upon these visions without flinching;
- But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined.
- Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing.
- A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity.
- As a result, we are losing both sides of the Romantic dialectic. What does friendship mean when you have 532 "friends"? How does it enhance my sense of closeness when my Facebook News Feed tells me that Sally Smith (whom I haven't seen since high school, and wasn't all that friendly with even then) "is making coffee and staring off into space"? My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude.
- But at least friendship, if not intimacy, is still something they want. As jarring as the new dispensation may be for people in their 30s and 40s, the real problem is that it has become completely natural for people in their teens and 20s. Young people today seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can't imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others.
- The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.
- There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation's experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern.
- Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state.
- Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom.
- And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct.
- But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind.
- The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."
- The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.

The Way We Live Now - Going Offline in Search of Freedom - NYTimes.com

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technology culture web information information overload

I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.

apophenia: Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates

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19 Oct 09

Digital Anthropology Report: Attitudes to technology = basis of future class divides

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class technology anthropology web

29 Sep 09

Lucy Suchman on framing technology – Og så alligevel…

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technology framing anthropology research humanism

This frame cuts out a lot of context in order to focus on the specific interactions.
Where are we to make the cut between human and machine in a given research frame? How do we make those frames? How might we expand those frames? How can we take responsibility for the cuts we make?
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- Suchman says that this illustration is a good way to illustrate the word “reconfiguration”, which she finds to be a vital part of using technology. She cites Donna Haraway’s notion of technologies as ‘materialized figurations’ (from her book, “Modest Witness”). That is: Technologies take part of our activities and practices and materialize them. Configuring a tool to fit with a certain activity or practice.
- She uses the example that when roboticists are designing human-like machines, they are expressing their notions of what it means to be human - of human practices - in their design.
- What they found was that this sort of utilizing different information sources is unremarkable everyday stuff to the controllers. This led to a new understanding of what an information system is:
  
  - multiple, partial information sources
  
  - assembled into a working system through the skilled practices of their use
- practices … used by members of a profession [that] shape events in the domains subject to their professional scrutiny. The shaping process creates the objects of knowledge that become the insignia of profession’s craft.
- We get different entities when we put technology and people together. She ends by quoting the feminist physicist Karen Barad (in her book “Meeting the universe halfway” (2007)):
  
  Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world.

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: PBS's Digital Nation: Another Great Resource For Teaching the New Media Literacies

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technology literacies media social knowledge education

Paradise Tossed: Three Theses on the Impossibility of Future Progress « Generation Bubble

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social technology web history critique critical theory politics

Technologically mediated sociality, rather than becoming the means by which radical democracy takes hold, is simply a testament to that very idea’s impotence.
a person’s reading proceeds geometrically while tweeted content expands exponentially
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- What’s more, we face a very McLuhanesque danger in which the medium quite literally becomes the message; all these romantic imaginings of spontaneous uprising are projected onto the technology, which consequently acquires a sort of messianic aura in the process and turns reportage into gospel. Perception management thus becomes more a bottom-up that a top-down affair purely as a consequence of situational constraints: a handful of tech-enabled eyewitnesses tweet their observations, which provokes a frenzy of re-tweets from which reporters, barred access to the scene of the action, cherry-pick with nothing to guide them but their intuitions as to the information’s reliability. The net effect is, then, that rather than offering immediacy, events like Twitter Revolutions introduce added layers of mediation, such that it is incredibly difficult to evaluate information sources. Call it crowd-sourced propaganda; it’s certainly not objective reportage.
- Prophets of social-media enhanced news reporting also tend to overlook the class element of their rosy prognostications. A trip to any library serving poor inner-city neighborhoods quickly reveals what social media’s revolutionary potential means to large portions of the citizenry. It means waiting an hour for a half-hour turn on a computer that was obsolete four years ago. This, I think, the dialectical image of the Twitter Revolution, which is really just an internecine power struggle between a monied superclass and its tech-savvy auxiliary. The former seek to preserve oligarchy; the latter to establish technocracy.

Youth-Media-Exchange-Final-Report.pdf (application/pdf Object)

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research education social technology web pedagogy

24 Sep 09

Neuroskeptic: fMRI Gets Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish

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science research technology critique neuroscience

23 Sep 09

New bibliography: Media in Everyday Life « media/anthropology

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bibliography research media technology internet anthropology culture society

21 Sep 09

16 Sep 09

Can Twitter Be Saved? | The Big Money

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technology twitter information overload social critique

the volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users' time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging.
he small number of people clicking on that link seemed to me an early sign that we've reached a point of Twitter saturation, in which the result of more people following more feeds adds up not to more communication but more noise.
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- network effects
- Twitter's growth has been so rapid that it is clearly bumping up against the limits of its usefulness. It is not only increasingly full of noise, but the sheer volume of stuff coming through the Twitter fire hose renders even what was useful much harder to pick apart and make sense of.
- But it does raise the question of just how much engagement we can expect with Twitter as each user signs up to follow more feeds and each active Twitterer tries to tweet more and more often to break through the static.
- inks that were closely related to the main subject of the feed did substantially better
- orporate tweeting is inherently problematic. Corporations invariably believe that they take up a much bigger part of their customers' mental space than they actually do. As the novelty of Twitter wears off, the little attention that people do devote to most corporate feeds will decline even more; I suspect that in the near future many of them will seem as pointless as the inane White Castle home page of 1996.
- the way to keep followers engaged is to narrow their focus and stay on topic. This is quite different from the strategy that many folks now seem to pursue on Twitter, which is to flood the zone with lots of tweets in the hope that simply sending out more messages is the key to getting noticed.
- A lot of people have already had the experience of seeing Twitter abruptly go from engaging to essential to all-consuming. But it's become a little bit like the map that Lewis Carroll once envisioned: having grown to be as big as the world itself, it ceases to be valuable as a map. The question now is whether Twitter can be tamed before it too has grown too world-encompassing to be useful, and the cacophony of signals turns into pure noise.

Can Twitter Be Saved? | The Big Money

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twitter technology social information overload interesting critique

the volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users' time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging.
The small number of people clicking on that link seemed to me an early sign that we've reached a point of Twitter saturation, in which the result of more people following more feeds adds up not to more communication but more noise.
1 more annotations...
- network effects

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Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: PBS's Digital Nation: Another Great Resource For Teaching the New Media Literacies

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