Tag Archives: social media

digital humanities, disability studies, social media research

Accessible Materiality

Accessibility can be defined as the ability to use, enjoy, perform, work on, avail of, and participate in a resource, technology, activity, opportunity, or product at an equal or comparable level with others. Separate is not equal and before or after the fact is also not equal. In the context of technology and systems, accessibility at the interface level, not as a retrofit or add-on, is true accessibility; all other options are fixes and are intrinsically inferior to the primary access available to the able-bodied.” –Sushil K. Oswal, “Multimodality in Motion.“

Continuing the topic of space from my last post, I was considering the role that the “material” or “materiality” more generally factors into the construction and engagement of digital space. In particular, I’ve been increasingly thinking about how disability gets constructed by the material, embodied, and social.

As I increasingly look at the assumptions implied in the material, I consider how the material constitutes certain practices and ways of being. For example, I think of Selfe and Selfe’s 2004 piece about the “politics of the interface” or Oudshoorn et al.’s case studies in “Configuring the Everybody” in which design goals, design teams, and assumptions–whether innovation or male experience–exclude people from the “everybody.”

The design of a digital space–how its constructed and organized–inform the how and the who of use. And though space gets encountered at an individual level, I argue that space can also order the larger systems and societies that engage these spaces. The same is true of technology and the other materials. As Arnold Pacey argues, for example, “technology-practice” involves “the application of scientific and other knowledge to practical tasks by ordered systems that involve people and organizations, living things and machines” (6; emphasis in original). These “ordered systems” are not just algorithms and circuitry, but social practice and potential practice are closely bound up in the possibility space of the material.

This connection can have important impacts for people with disabilities in our generally nondisabled society.

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digital humanities, research, social media research

Internet Spaces

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“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.”

-Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Starting off a reflection about social media with a quote from Byron about the solitude of nature seems counter intuitive. A “society, where none intrudes” clashes with the usual rhetoric surrounding the networked culture of social media and the digital, and the “lonely shore” and “pathless woods” probably lacks WiFi–or broadband.

But bringing in Byron highlights the paradox of place that the Internet and digital technology brings. We are networked selves, accessing the Internet in multiple ways from multiple places or portals, as our physical self continues to take up space and air “irl.” And much like the narrative locales of Romantic poetry, many digital spaces are constructed and emergent. They may have a url pinning them down, just as Byron’s saga traces the physical geography of Southern Europe, but Byron’s textual place–his “pathless woods” and roaring sea–arrive at us in ephemeral language. They are authored locales.

While I want to get into more concrete considerations of method, I want to pause initially and consider what “space” or “community” constitutes the subject of Internet inquiry.  More specifically, I think that the quality of born-digital space forces us to look at space as an ephemeral, emergent gathering, and this should affect our methods. As Richard Rogers argues in Digital Methods, our methods should “follow the medium.” For now, I want to reflect on what that medium is.

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digital humanities, Networks

Thought Germs, Filter Bubbles, and Virality

Sunday night, a friend and I ended up talking about the trolley problem, a thought experiment by Philippa Foot that aims at the  differences that minor changes can make in our moral calculations. While the problem itself is interesting, it mainly launched us toward a related topic: moral consensus and disagreement, i.e. what to do when what you think is “right” differs from what I think is “right.”

Though I didn’t mention it in the conversation, the debate brought me back to studying medical ethics, particularly the beliefs of Christian Science and Jehovah Witnesses. Christian Science says that diseases arise from sin and prayer provides the only solution. As one can expect, the reliance on spiritual healing does not always work, and in the case of children, the result can be tragic, with families getting prosecuted for child death. A similar death from belief occurs with Jehovah Witness, only by refusing blood transfusions instead of medicine at large.

Here, two things are particularly interesting. First, while many people will consider this a foolish, tragic loss of life, one must also consider it from their perspective: either a single, painful death or an eternity in damnation. From this belief system, the rejection of medicine is morally right. This does not condone the belief system, but only shows why the stakes are so high.

Second, many people may feel fine with letting the parent die from their beliefs, but the sticking point is the “innocent” child. In other words, you can lose your own life for your beliefs, but shouldn’t cost the lives of others. This fallout from belief challenges the libertarian bias that many Americans may feel: we are not as autonomous as we like to think and our beliefs affect our society and those around us.

These two elements–the persistence of radically different views and their affect on others–force one to examine the role of belief and the mechanisms of belief as a moral and ethical issue. In a sense it echoes Emmanuel Levinas: we are always in relation to one another and have a moral imperative to respect that relation.

Particularly, I want to consider the role of the Internet and Internet technology in this: how it might help and hinder the process of belief.

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identity

Networked

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When I first grew self-conscious that friends come and go–breakups, fights, forgotten phone calls a part of life–I found Nietzsche’s short aphorism in The Gay Science called “Star Friendship” helpful. In it, possibly alluding to his rift with Wagner, Nietzsche describes, “We were friends and have become estranged.” Even more, they are now “earth enemies.”

Yet, as Nietzsche also writes, “There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path — let us rise up to this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.”

So it’s a question of scale. At the one level, chance meetings, fights, or enduring partnerships exist in a certain way. We experience and name them with a certain vocabulary. But further up, in some “invisible stellar orbit,” these connections gain a different timbre or pattern. Like looking at a character map of Middlemarch, certain once-tangled relationships and social shifts emerge  with network forces affecting broader social cohesion.

For example, a meeting may bring together two distinct groups that were independent before, forming a “huge component” to use the language of Easley and Kleinberg. Or, as Merton describes, the “Matthew effect” might shift the circulation of a text, with a well-known scientist getting more coverage than a newbie simply through his or her tug in a network.

And with current technology, both in terms of data mining and visualization, we can get a better sense of that “stellar” perspective. I think the question remains, however, with what to do with it and how we understand it. In particular, I think it should shift the way we look at agency, moving it from an egosystem to an ecosystem, i.e. thinking of ways that we fit into broader networks and can influence them in a networked way and not in a purely self-based way.

I guess a way you could phrase it is this: how much agency do I have as a node and a collection of nodes?

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digital humanities, research

From Exchange to Ontology

In forensic science, Locard’s exchange principle forms one of its bedrocks. Formulated by Edmond Locard (1877-1966), the principle is pretty direct: anytime a crime gets committed, an “exchange” takes place, with a criminal leaving some sort of physical evidence behind and taking some sort of evidence with him or her. Through circumspect observation and sound reasoning, the detective can follow the evidence to learn something about the crime, hopefully solving it.

Whether it’s a drop of blood, some soot and gravel, or a thread of hair, something gets left behind or taken away that links the participants to the event, evoking a story from the materiality of what took place. We can never move through the world as ghosts, untouched and untouching. We’re always producing data.

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identity, research

Rethinking social media spaces as storage

Like most adolescent Americans, or so I crudely assume, I used social media to “express myself” with photographs, quirky quizzes, links to other media sites, etc., and to contact friends, giving a space to socialize outside school.

Though persisting in that usage for a while, I’ve started seeing many social media sites, and similar apps, as tools for storing, grouping, searching, and sharing information about a variety of topics. Doing so has really shifted the way I’ve been approaching them, providing a different sense of self and a helpful tool for research and the classroom.

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