“the magazine of Christian unrest”
“In [Tricia] Wang’s theory, a network like Facebook, which enforces real name registration and consists of a person’s friends and family from time immemorial, encourages bounded use. It’s like the small town you never left, the grammar school class you couldn’t pass out of, the first dead-end job. It’s a network mired in past and present, and by its nature it enforces a limited sense of identity and expression.
By contrast, something like Tumblr encourages unbounded use. It allows you to experiment and play. It’s the big city, and each new tumblelog you create is like a new bar or neighborhood where you can try on a new self and see how it fits. In one instant you can be a pug lover, reblogging the best animated GIFs of the flat-faced dogs. In the next, you can dive deep into the Go Pro snowboarding community and post snaps from your latest run.
Hence Wang’s notion of the elastic self. Like rubber bands, when we step into Tumblr we can stretch and reshape ourselves into different configurations. Each new hat we try on stretches the rubber band just a little bit further, and over time it might evolve into a new configuration. This allows for remarkable opportunities to explore different potentials of self and self-expression.”
—
oh i love it i love it i love it. i love it. yes. thank you tricia. thank you.
From An Xiao Mina’s The Social Ties That Unbind (via kenyatta)
I’m really big into talking about identity creation and the internet. This will be rumbling around my head for a while.
(via meganwest)
I love Tricia. My friends are so smart. This is spot on.
(via zadi)
Good stuff from my friend T (who keeps a couple dozen Tumblrs as I do).
(via kthread)
(via kthread)
Google searches expose racial bias, says study of names -
as reported on BBC.
it may be that the search engines are reflecting society’s own prejudices
emphasis added
Hyman Victor: re-animating the past on Facebook -
a great-grandson discovers documents about his great grandfather. Creates a Facebook profile for him. Fascinating way to memorialise the past in the present.
HT @davidfg
Cheating in School: How the Digital Age Affects Cheating and Plagiarism
“What mainly goes up… is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively” —
The Social Brain Hypothesis (Dunbar, 1998) tested on Facebook, using generic behavioural closeness metrics (number of friends who people a) post on their wall, status updates or photos; or b) message/chat with), by the social network’s in-house sociologist Cameron Marlow.
from The Economist (26 Feb 2009): Social networks: Primates on Facebook
...how headlines can be more easily misunderstood online -
from the readers’ editor at The Guardian
“People often wander around cemeteries and look at gravestones and wonder who that person was. By using the QR codes they can find out all they need to know” —
Interactive gravestones: how the dead live on, online
timely. just finished editing the chapter on death yesterday.
Power lunching with wizards and warriors -
as powerful as the Fortune 500? As the Bilderberg Group? A 2006 article on the We Know World of Warcraft guild, by Daniel Terdiman
Quinn Norton’s exquisite deconstruction of the Anonymous hacker collective, describing in as much poetic detail as Julian Dibbell did in 1993 in the Village Voice about the text-based community LambdaMOO, the stages this de-organised organisation went through to become a fully-fledged and untied community capable of “focused, disruptive action.”