Et in Athenis ego: update on ongoing research on the body + riots
I know I should be in Lyon for the www12 conference with all the Internet big shots, but instead I’m taking a plane and heading to Greece. The opportunity came via an invitation to deliver a speech at the New Sensorium, an international symposium that will take place on April 20-21 at the BIOS, in Athens. If you are around, you should definitely attend! The conference deals with some of my main research foci (digital technologies, media and the body) and it is the outcome of a collaboration between the Department of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University and the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto (I was their guest a few months ago).
The New Sensorium symposium – BIOS, Athens (20-21 April 2012)
Just so you know my speech carries the somewhat cryptic title The Virus and the Avatar. Ways of socializing the sensible in computer culture – and if you don’t have a clue of what it’s about, here are two texts in Greek and in English that might be of help.
But this Athens trip will also be the chance to do more than a bit of field research for our ongoing ICCU (Internet Censorship and Civil Unrest) project. You might remember the project was kickstarted by this blog post about last year’s UK riots.
Our research received a lot of attention and eventually became a working paper, then an article coming up in the Bulletin of Sociological Methodology and started a number of prospective spin-offs in other nations. The Athens one is based on the idea of studying media and internet use during the Greek 2010-12 protests (and the way they are linked with the 2008 riots). Won’t go into details because I don’t want to spoil the party. But, if I manage to grasp a little wifi, I might be blogging a postcard or two from my Athenian fieldwork.
Banning pro-ana websites? Not a good idea, as Web censorship might have a ‘toothpaste tube effect’
[Update 26.04.12] This post has received a lot of media attention – maily because it was Boinged thanks to danah boyd. Among other things, I did a nice interview with Jian Ghomeshi on CBC Radio Canada. Also, jump to the end of this post to read my answer to French academic blogger @affordanceinfo about the difference between the ‘toothpaste tube effect’ and the ‘Streisand effect’ of Web censorship.
Tumblr, Pinterest and the toothpaste tube
On February 23rd, 2012 Tumblr announced its decision to turn the screw on self-harm blogs: suicide, mutilation and most prominently thinspiration – i.e. the ritualized exchange of images and quotes meant to inspire readers to be thin. This cultural practice is distinctive of the pro-ana (anorexia nervosa), pro-mia (bulimia) and pro-ED (eating disorders) groups online: blogs, forums, and communities created by people suffering from eating-related conditions, who display a proactive stance and critically abide by medical advice.
A righteous limitation of harmful contents or just another way to avoid liability by marginalizing a stigmatized subculture? Whatever your opinion, it might not come as a surprise that the disbanded pro-ana Tumblr bloggers are regrouping elsewhere. Of all places, they are surfacing on Pinterest, the up-and-coming photo-sharing site. Here’s how Sociology in Focus relates the news: Read more
“Anamia” social networks and online privacy: our Sunbelt XXXII presentations (Redondo Beach, March 18, 2012)
[This is a joint post with Paola Tubaro's Blog]
So, here we are in the (intermittently) sunny state of California for Sunbelt XXXII, the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) annual conference. This year the venue is Redondo Beach and the highlights are both old and new stars of social network analysis: David Krackhardt, Tom Valente, Barry Wellman, Emmanuel Lazega, Anuška Ferligoj, Ron Burt, Bernie Hogan, Carter Butts, Christina Prell, etc.
Here are our presentations, both delivered on Sunday 18th, March 2012.
Taking liberties: why feeling closer on social media can lead to higher conflictuality
A short note on an apparent paradox highlighted by Ronald E. Anderson on the blog Compassionate Societies. While commenting on a recent PEW survey on the “tone of life” on social networking sites, the author points out two interesting facts :
1) heavy social media users are prone to conflict (and, more generally, a lot of users experience negative interactions, physical fight and even end up breaking friendships because of online communication)…
2) ..yet overall people declare they feel closer to others, more compassionate and feeling good about themselves.
How can this contradiction be explained? According to the author “social networking is a mixed bag of good and bad”. I, for one, would like to suggest another way of interpreting these results: social media users are not hostile despite the fact they feel closer to one another. Rather, they are hostile because they feel closer. Closeness primarily comes to mean that users approach social media sites with higher expectations about friendship and togetherness. Social networking might thus imply adopting a social style characterized by a hypertrophied sense of intimacy, verging on liberty – like in the expression “taking liberties”: being too friendly in a way that shows a lack of respect to others.
Facebook “friending” rhetoric plays a part in this process, of course: by spreading an irenic vision of harmonious social life, any deviation from emotional proximity is perceived as a major break in the code of communication. In this sense, while interacting in the informal environment of social media, individuals not only fail to cultivate deference, but they even come to think of it as a transgression of an implicit social norm, as a manifestation of distance – or, worse, indifference – that compromises social cohesion and introduces an element of mistrust conducive to conflict.
Snob.ru : distinction 2.0 ou inégalité en réseau ?
Au hasard de mes explorations en ligne, je découvre Snob.ru, service de réseautage pour « l’élite de la société russe ». Tout comme son homologue international asmallworld.net, ce site créé en 2008 permet à des personnes aisées d’afficher leurs goûts et leurs styles de vie distinctifs dans un cadre valorisant. Sponsorisé par le milliardaire Mikhaïl Prokhorov, le réseau a été souvent présenté dans la presse internationale comme un repaire de nouveaux beaufs, symptôme de la décadence anthropologique de la Russie de Putin.
Mais il est surtout une mine d’or pour tout chercheur travaillant sur les pratiques de consommation actuelles, et surtout une occasion unique pour mettre à jour certaines notions sociologiques, de la consommation ostentatoire de Veblen à la distinction de Bourdieu, de l‘élite du pouvoir de C. Wright-Mills au rôle de la violence symbolique chez Michel Pinçon et Monique Pinçon-Charlot.
A century of McLuhan: understanding social media
I was among the invited speakers of the McLuhan centenary conference McLuhan100 Then Now Next at the University of Toronto. So I’m back from a full week of scientific research, art, concerts, and conversations with great contemporary media scholars such as Ian Bogost, Barry Wellman, Arthur Kroker, Jay Bolter, Derrick de Kerckhove, Peppino Ortoleva, Mike Wesch, Joshua Meyrowitz, Michaël Oustinoff, Hervé Fischer. But enough with the name dropping. Here’s my own presentation (slides+text), where I mix up McLuhan, Merton, Facebook and Teilhard de Chardin. Enjoy.
Text of the presentation: Read more
Six interesting facts about social networking
A few interesting facts about Social Networking Services (mainly Facebook) taken from the recent report issued on June 16 2011 by PEW Internet and American Life. The report, whose title is Social networking sites and our lives is authored by Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions Goulet, Lee Rainie, Kristen Purcell. Food for thought.
Fact #1: The average age of adult SNS users is now 38.
Sure, as user base increases, the gen Y is ‘caught up’ by gen X-ers, Baby Boomers and the like…
Fact #2: 26% of SNS members are now aged more than 50 (vs. 16% aged 18-22)
Definitely the ‘digital immigrants’ are catching up big time. But this was already clear from the 2009 Generations online Pew Report.
Read more
Parution de « Cultures du numérique » (Ed. du Seuil)
Le voilà entre mes main : le premier exemplaire de « Cultures du numérique » que j’ai dirigé et dont j’ai le plaisir de vous annoncer la parution aux Editions du Seuil.
Il s’agit du numéro 88 de la revue Communications, un numéro spécial qui marque le cinquante ans de cette glorieuse publication fondée en 1961 par Roland Barthes et Edgar Morin. Nous en sommes tous très fiers, et à juste titre. Ce numéro est appelé à devenir un ouvrage de référence pour les étudiants et les chercheurs qui – en nombre croissant – s’intéressent au Web et à ses conséquences sociétales, culturelles, politiques.
« Cultures du numérique » propose un panorama des études francophones sur les usages des technologies de l’information et de la communication. Vingt-trois chercheurs, venant des domaines les plus disparates, ont participé : psychologues, philosophes, médecins, économistes, sociologues, experts de digital humanities et de sciences de la communication.
Voilà la table des matières complète, Read more
Friendship changes, but ‘friending’ stays the same across cultures
Following in Judith Donath and dana boyd’s researches on online friendship and drawing on social network analysis of tie formation, this Hui-Jung Chang article sets up to detect cross-cultural variations in ‘friending’ between a US-based service (Myspace) and a Taiwan one (Wretch).
Hui-Jung Chang (2010). Social networking friendships: A cross-cultural comparison of network structure between MySpace and Wretch Journal of Cultural Science, 3 (2).
Understandably, Taiwanese and US cultures have different approaches to friendship. The author characterizes Taiwan as a more collectivistic culture where explicit messages and content exchange are less important that the context (all the information either coded in the physical setting or internalized in the person) for establishing who’s your friend. US, on the other side, is defined as a « low-context », individualistic culture [note: pictures are just random. Neither peace sign nor thumbs up in photos appear to bear any significant effect on friendship formation]. Consequently, Hui-Jung Chang formulates the hypothesis that Taiwanese offline friends networks are larger and denser. Does the same apply to online networks?
Bums, bridges, and primates: Some elements for a sociology of online interactions
This text was presented at the conference “Web Culture: New Modes of Knowledge, New Sociabilities”, Villa Gillet, Lyon (France), February 10th, 2011. Check against delivery. Click here for the .pdf version. Click here for the French translation.
In today’s presentation I will focus on the kind of social structures that users of computer-mediated global online communication networks (notably, the Web and social media) contribute to put in place. The point I will try to make is that science understanding of Web-based sociabilities has progressed enormously in the last decade, and that this should inform public policies touching on the Web, its regulation and governance.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE COMPUTER BUMS GONE?
Early glimpses into the social implications of ICT at a micro-level (that is: for the users themselves) date back to the mid-1970s and focus on the negative effect of these technologies. At the very origins of computer culture, we witness the emergence of the stereotype of the socially awkward computer hacker, isolated by the calculating machine which alienates him and keeps him apart from his peers. This characterization dates back to a time before the Web. In his Computer Power and Human Reason : From Judgement to Calculation (1976) Joseph Weizenbaum delivers us the portrayal of this subculture of compulsive computer programmer – or, as he liked to dub them, “computer bums”.
These are “possessed students” who “work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer. […] Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers.”
Since this first occurrence, and for a long time, common sense has almost unmistakably associated computer use and social isolation. Cultural analysts, novelists, commentators have been developing on this trope. Iconic cyberpunk author William Gibson, famously described Case, the main character of Neuromancer (1984), as a cyberspace-addict incapable of functioning in an offline social situation.
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What’s this blog about?
I'm an associate professor of Digital Humanities at the Paris Institute of Technology (ParisTech) and a researcher in sociology at the Edgar-Morin Center (EHESS, Paris). Bodyspacesociety offers regular updates about my ongoing research, publications, and teaching. If you want updates on media features and conferences, please click here.
The views presented on this blog are solely mine and do not represent the positions of my institutions of affiliation.
New books out now!
The special issue of the journal 'Communications' Cultures du numérique is out. Also, you might want to check my latest book Les liaisons numériques. Vers une nouvelle sociabilité?. Both published by Editions du Seuil, both available in bookshops and online.
» Buy Liaisons numériques
» Visit the companion website
» Buy Cultures du numérique (Communications, n. 88)
All blog content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 France License.
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