Cyborg Self-ies – Sam Wacks

In this selfie, I wanted to convey the tension between the digital and analog aspects of my life. I consider possessions like my smartphone and my headphones to be essential parts of my life and even my identity. At the same time, I often wish to disconnect from these digital objects because of the stress that technology can induce, so I turn to more analog forms of tech like my Polaroid camera and physical pieces of art. The framing of my cyborg self within the Polaroid selfie illustrates this tension and internal conflict.

The Digital is Real – Briana Li

This post is for the weekly topic: Digital Ethnography. The reason I chose to use a Tweet format for this topic is because Twitter and the digital world gives anthropologists an impressive new tool for studying trends in modern human existence. What’s more, the data is easy to gather and essentially free.
The idea behind this tweet is to point out a contradiction with our behavior online. We often forget that our lives online are just as real as our lives “in real life” because they exist even after we turn off or log off of our computers and our actions online can still affect our lives offline. But it also seems true that what people do or say online does not add up to their offline behavior, nor their state of mind. The contradiction lies in the fact that our lives online are real, but our behavior and actions don’t always necessarily add up to who we are in person. As Tom Boellstorff states in ‘Theorizing the Digital Real’, “in virtual worlds, individuals exist even if no one is currently ‘in world,’ whether they take the form of online games or have a more open-ended character.” Because we are always so connected to the online world, we become more concerned about the virtual representations of ourselves, rather than our manners and interactions in real life.

Choose Your Own Adventure: Interactive Narratives and Databases (by Lin-ye Kaye)

While interactive narratives are often electronic, not all interactive narratives are digital and digitation does not guarantee interactivity. For example, print copies of choose your own adventure books are interactive because the reader is required to make choices and the narrative varies based on these choices. On the other hand, films are digital but not interactive because they do not require any interaction from the user to proceed once they have begun (barring a subset of films that are specifically designed to be interactive). But while interactive narratives are not necessarily digital, the interactivity of software makes it a particularly suitable media for these narratives.

Professor Wendy Chun indicated that software uses signs attached to meaning to abstract specific tasks into general processes. In other words, it is not necessary for the user to understand how a hard drive deletes a file provided that the user understands that the recycling bin signifies the process of deleting a file. The idea that software relies on its users’ knowledge of signs is related to Professor Warren Sack’s idea that computer interactivity relies on common sense. Sacks discussed this idea in a text on databases, which provide ways of organizing and accessing information. Sharon Daniel took advantage of the interactivity of databases in her interactive documentaries Blood Sugar and Public Secrets. In Public Secrets, Daniels recorded interviews with women inmates and sorted these interviews by topic. In Blood Sugar, she interviews drug users at a needle exchange program and preserved the individual interviews instead of dividing them by topic. The contrast between these two structures- dividing the interviews by topic and preserving the individual interviews- shows the creative freedom afforded by Daniels’s use of databases.

It is important to note that databases may have constraints, but they cannot verify that the data are correct; databases may require that age be represented as a non-negative integer, but they cannot verify that a given individual is actually 20 years old. Databases can also take many different forms, from traditional relational databases to a collection of hypertext. Hypertext increases interactivity, according definition given by N. Katherine Hayles, because it is any form of text that contains multiple paths and a mechanism for linking the discrete sections into a continuous path. The construction of these paths is crucial for creating narratives that are interactive.  Furthermore, since databases are not restricted to representing true information, and they come in various forms, they can also be used to create fictional narratives. For example, the choices people make in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch are stored on a Netflix database; the narrative is changed according to these stored choices, so the database plays a role in the story’s interactivity and nonlinearity.


Racism and Sexism Permeate our Media—Including Video Games By Rachel Groth


In today’s exceptionally digital world, we immerse ourselves in technology through various virtual worlds, including social networking websites, blogs, forums, and of course, video games. Video games are one of the most prominent virtual worlds that exist today, especially for young Asian and white men. While virtual worlds are constructed and perhaps meant to represent an ideal world, they carry the weight of the racist and sexist biases that exist in our real, non-digital world. However, this should not surprise us— although we often think of our digital world as its own autonomous object, it is important to remember that technology (like video games) only works through the operation of the humans who have caused our real-life problems in the first place. Video games, like other forms of digital media, are a reflection of the humanity that created it.

Old Media vs New Media By Alice Wu

According to dictionary.com, “technology is the sum of the ways in which social groups provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization.” Today, if you were to ask a millennial what their definition of technology is, there would be a general consensus that it must be digital and rechargeable. However, what they would really be referring to is new media. The revolution of new media is the conversion of making numerical data accessible digitally. The definition of technology has clouded now that computers are immersed into every nook and cranny of our lives. Most technological advancements, as of late, have been implemented with new media. The progression exemplifies the ideas, state, and priorities of the current society

Paper, the most classic form of old media, has probably reached version 403281 at this point. As early as 1200 BC ancient Egyptians used papyrus, a weed that grows along the banks of the Nile River, to create the very first prototype of paper. Documentation was finally able to be written on a light, tangible medium and soon enough paper became the latest rave. It became ubiquitous and quintessential to society. This day-long process of soaking, mashing, and drying became quickly industrialized by Egypt’s neighbors. Fast forward to the 15th century the printing press was invented and accessibility to information spread. Not only was information able to be spread to a greater audience, but also in a shorter duration of time. People who used to wait for months to weeks for mail now had accessed to it in seconds. Technology is moving at a pace faster than what people could have imagined. Writing on papyrus was revolutionary for its time, and is now being superseded by computers or tablets, otherwise known as new media.

Culture and technology is always tied to what we plan for the future. Phantom of the Operator, a documentary about the history female telephone operators, illustrates the progress of telephone operators transitioning to automated voices. In the early 20th century, civilian telephone operators were almost exclusively women. Women were believed to be naturally more polite and welcoming. Companies used to put out promotional videos directed at women implying their dream job is to be a telephone operator until they becomes a housewife. These women had to undergo intensive training and had to adopt the slogan, “Voices with a Smile” to optimize the experience for the person on the receiving end. Thousands of women were working as an operator but soon lost it’s appeal and demand as dial service and then computerization, gradually displaced women workers.

People continue to daydream about what the future of technology has in store for us. Fire, for example, is one of the most primitive and underrated technologies. It was and still is an essential source of light and heat. There are many elements required in making a fire, such as wind currents or the materials available. Before technologies that could easily make fires, wet and rainy night could potentially mean no food and no heat for the night. One could only imagine of a lighter or matches to add convenience to their lives. Revenue of sci-fi movies is very telling of how people are dreamers. 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, is one of the most successful sci-fi movies in its time. Premiering in 1968, this film is about two astronauts on a mission with their computer system Hal. Hal was a super robot that was able to communicate and control the space ship. These fantasies of being able to communicate with robots are now our reality as evident through our current generation where asking their Google Home Assistant to turn up the heat, adjusting the temperature to just right, is considered our norm.

Today, technology is inseparable from sociocultural ideas. Phantom of the Operator exemplified the desire for innocuous female voices. With time, telephone operators have been substituted by automated voices, and not surprisingly with female voices such as Apple’s Siri. Siri having a female voice displays the notion that women as subservient still holds in the 21th century. As virtual assistant, Siri minimizes the use for people defers people from doing things manually. Old media, like papyrus or manual tasks such as turning on the heat, are being superseded by new media. New media has done an amazing job at maximizing the scope and reaching masses. Siri, for example, has a target demographic of anyone who can communicate by listening and speaking. The traditional means of accomplishing tasks are now digitized and transitioning to new media.