How does one produce “truth”?

Today gnovis ran an article of mine considering this very question. It all started when I stumbled across an issue of Wired with a headline proclaiming “The End of Theory”. Evocative titles always seem to get me to buy magazines, but this one seemed to have some personal relevance and worth the $4.95. I suppose the gnovis article was inevitable. Here is a taste:

As we rush to reconstruct our physical lives in online spaces, digital worlds like Facebook and Second Life have largely forgone the potential freedoms of digital environments. When Anderson asserts that we should focus on what people are doing, he forgets Althusser’s Marxist response that “ideology is material” and as such, never offers a problem that is outside of material’s ability to respond. No wonder all of this data analysis is working. We are just measuring predefined user behavior in a digital world, a world we insisted on digitizing.

It is a fun piece, so I hope you will check it out.

This week gnovis published a special issue on “New Media, Technology, and Democracy“. With the elections just months away, the editor Brad Weikel (or “sleepcamel” on his blog) was right when he said that now is the perfect time to reflect on the intersection of technology and politics.

There are a number of fantastic articles, but I was particularly delighted to see my friend Tatyana Varshavsky’s article published. In the editor’s words:

Tatyana Varshavsky’s “Creating Community Through the Arts: Cultural Engagement, Democracy, and the Role of Civil Society” brings a valuable perspective to the discourse of civic engagement, examining the relationship between cultural and community engagement, and a broader notion of citizenship. By stepping out of the normative model of the Big Media / Big Politics spectacle, Varshavsky offers an inspiring view of civic engagement, at once pragmatic and idealistic, which would give even Robert Putnam a glimmer of hope.

I was having dinner with a colleague earlier this week who in a hushed and slightly embarrassed voice admitted that she just didn’t understand Twitter. Normally I would have assured her that Twittering is not a social requirement, but in her case, it was part of her job. Twitter, Blogs, Facebook - these are the bread and butter of an emerging professional class of “social media consultants.” Maybe it is a D.C. thing. After admitting to her that I am more confused about these jobs than the technologies they rely on, I happily agreed to help get her up to speed.

Internet culture, however, is incredibly memetic. I suppose this makes Dawkins the philosopher of choice for contemporary geekdom, but it also means that the distinction between popular and unpopular, in and out, can be dizzying.

Point and case: This video from CrunchGear. Somehow they managed to capture the simultaneous love, disdain, and absurdity of Twitter. And it only took Hitler to pull it off.

“I have to admit something. Sometimes I like to read the missed connections section in the paper, just for fun. And I really like them. Is that so bad?”

Without fail, every time I tell someone new that I am doing a research project on Missed Connections, they quickly interrupt me to exclaim how much they love reading these little messages. It is funny, I certainly can relate to how they feel, but I frequently am so “down in the trenches”, if you will, that I miss the beautiful potential embedded in each post.

While stumbling around the net this weekend I ran across a video that seemed to tug on this very point. An episode of Val’s Art Diary, this video gets right to the heart of the matter, and gives one artist’s interpretation of this suspended form of romance. In her words:

Every couple you talk to has a story of them meeting, and it is usually is a pretty random thing… what if your moment already happened and none of you did anything about it? It seems to me that as much as we like to shape our lives, somethings are simply beyond our control.

I hope you enjoy the video as much as I did.

When writing about the troubles Apple had last week during their v2.0 launch, I reminded about some of the load challenges we had with the MCAT system under heavy volume, and, of all things, software patents. should point out that the The following is a brief post that I wrote last semester after giving a presentation on the Amazon One Click patent case in a class on Internet policy. It never quite made it up, so I am sharing it now.

(I should point out that the load issues I talk about here were resolved with a rather popular queuing system that we build for the MCAT registration system that managed load throughout the system. I loved that project, and a great lessons learned about performance services oriented architecture! Okay, enough geek talk - carry on…)

I got to work at 6:30 am the day after a class presentation on the Amazon “One Click” legal issue, and walked into what we loving call “the war room.” It is exactly what you would expect. Computers are everywhere, monitors, projectors, and a conference phone I am determined to paint red. This, however, was not a military operation, although pretending sometimes helps us do a better job. This was a launch day for the MCAT software. We were opening over 50,000 testing seats, and war or not, pre-med students fighting for their future always results in blood. (more…)

The self is gone. What was once wrapped up in the confines of our skin has been scattered across a communication network that is so broad, and so tangled, that we don’t have any hope of getting it back. Our identities are not only continually mediated through the diverse technologies by which we communicate, but it seems quite plausible that they are no longer our own.

Thousands of databases across the world hold small pieces of our psyche. Separate, this data claim to represent some domain specific aspect of the self (a credit report here, an online profile there). Together, they create an endless and invisible representation of the self that Mark Poster aptly calls “the digital unconscious.” In an era comprised of social networking sites and online living, this can be unsettling. If our most essential pieces are in those databases, then we have inevitably relinquished control over our self-definition.

The policy debate over the Clipper Chip in the 1990s foreshadowed this modern dilemma of the self. (more…)

So minutes after “publishing” my last post, I found this image. Maybe our first interdisciplinary project should be with some academics in a Marketing department.

(via Academic Productivity)

What makes an academic blog “academic”?

Tonight’s thoughts are brought to you via a post by Ashley over at gnovis on the topic of information overload and blogging. We can all relate to Ashley’s thoughts. You fire up your blog, you throw your thoughts out into the interwebs, and before you know it you are part of a “revolutionary cultural movement” that seems sometimes to be moving, well, nowhere. You are latest victim of that increasingly popular topic: information overload (See Robot Foot and the recent NYT article).

Ashley confessed that the internet had become “something that has stopped [her] own creativity.” But where Ashley has started a new blog project as an answer to information overload, Brad, gnovis’ editor, posted a comment stating that he felt like the standards we set for posts have turned blogging into something of a chore. I can certainly relate to that. A little blog deamon sits on my shoulder all of the time, reminding me that “someone else has probably covered it.” That is probably true in the world of tech, and certainly in politics. Put the two together… and, well, pack your bags and go home. (Today I wanted to write about the DC Twitter feud, only to find that the Huffington Post had already got it, and, err, that it was 2 months old).

But what about academia? Ashley’s post, and Brad’s comment stirred some thoughts that have been lurking in an unpublished format, somewhere in my brain for several months now. Simply asked, what makes a blog “academic”? Compared to the rest of the blog-o-sphere, is academia a different beast? Does it exist outside of the information stream that can overload us? After all, it isn’t as driven by the news.

And so, Ashley, Brad (anyone!) I have a question: How high is the “bar” for an “academic blog”? (more…)

I recently gave a presentation on Agenda Setting Theory in a course on Communication Theories & Frameworks. It is a fairly straightforward theory that addresses the ways in which issues covered by the media influences public opinion, which in turn influences policy. All the same, I thought I would throw some artifacts online for prosperity and the next person who needs to explain how the media is responsible for everything.

Here is a video of my PowerPoint presentation:

Here is an overly designed handout that summarizes the theory and some of its applications.

In this presentation I played one of my favorite scenes from the West Wing, which should be enjoyed with or without this presentation. Enjoy!

What do LOLcats and silent film have in common? More than you might imagine.

This week gnovis, an academic journal focused on new media and technology, published its Spring issue. According to the editor, this issue is particularly “cute.” From his overview:

“wants moar: visual media’s use of text in LOLcats and silent film,” by Jed R. Brubaker, continues the trend of comparative historical analysis of media forms, but using texts that are infinitely more… well… cute. LOLcats, popular on the Internet since 2007, are photos of housecats with comical captions. Brubaker’s analysis compares the captions used in LOLcats to intertitles from the silent film era.

Yes, this is my first solo publication at the graduate level, and I am thrilled that it is on something that never fails to make me smile. (more…)