Difference between revisions of "Glossary of Terms"
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| − | [[Glossary:Playground | + | [[Glossary:Playground as Factory]] - The Internet is both a Playground and a Factory. It is also the name of a recent conference on digital labor. The conference abstract is thus: "Today we are arguably in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media. The purpose of this conference is to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure, consumption, and production since the mid-century. In the 1950s television began to establish commonalities between suburbanites across the United States. Currently, communities that were previously sustained through national newspapers now started to bond over sitcoms. Increasingly people are leaving behind televisions sets in favor of communing with -- and through-- their computers. They blog, comment, procrastinate, refer, network, tease, tag, detag, remix, and upload and from all of this attention and all of their labor, corporations expropriate value. Guests in the virtual world Second Life even co-create the products and experiences, which they then consume. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? What are we doing to ourselves?" http://digitallabor.org/ |
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[[Glossary:Identity Production]] - The conscious production of identity through action, whether the action is physical, mental, virtual or both. The production of identity in virtual reality can occur on a social network, through text, image or video and can occur in small moments or large ones. Identity of large companies strives to maintain a static brand. Individuals often change. In virtual interaction culture, status updates must be technosocially attractive to viewers, or else identity loses gravity. Brands, and increasingly individuals, seek to increase gravity. | [[Glossary:Identity Production]] - The conscious production of identity through action, whether the action is physical, mental, virtual or both. The production of identity in virtual reality can occur on a social network, through text, image or video and can occur in small moments or large ones. Identity of large companies strives to maintain a static brand. Individuals often change. In virtual interaction culture, status updates must be technosocially attractive to viewers, or else identity loses gravity. Brands, and increasingly individuals, seek to increase gravity. | ||
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Revision as of 21:53, 9 May 2010
Glossary:Bee Dance - Insect behavior defined by bees locating pollen in distant fields and returning to the hive with a dance pattern that teaches other bees how to access the pollen location. In the digital realm, the bee dance takes the form of a hyperlink shared between one person to many others. Examples of bee dance behavior in humans can be seen on Twitter or Facebook in the form of posted URLs in status updates. Short URLs are a more efficient form of bee dance.
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Glossary:Data Geology - The idea of a participation architecture that encourages updates that have timestamps and can be seen over time. This gives users layers of history like the rings on a tree or the rock layers that make up the geological formations on the Earth's crust. Examples include Blogs, Foursquare, Google Search Results, Facebook and Twitter. Facebook archives one's data geology, and Twitter does not.
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Glossary:Fractal Value - The idea of value becoming so easily created that it begins to fold in on itself and create smaller versions of its value at increasing rates. Hipster culture relies on minute changes and signifiers. Fark, Slashdot and 4Chan are all spaces in which value has become increasingly fractal due to speed. This fractal value affects culture and makes culture a fractal itself.
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Glossary:Data Gravity - The pull of data on a user or system. Data with more attention has greater gravity and is more likely to reproduce.
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Glossary:Impossible Feast - A site with data that appears endlessly, inviting the user to consume to exhaustion without actually having depleted its resources. In the digital space, consumption does not deplete a resource, but rather encourages that resource to reproduce. The visitor can eat all they desire and never get full. Facebook is the prime example of an impossible feast in the digital space. The more a user logs into Facebook, the more tantalizing and targeted the data becomes. The feast takes on qualities of food that cannot be resisted. Over time, Facebook begins to target the individual food desires.
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Glossary:Hydrant Sniffing - This term categorizes canine-like behavior of marking territory for others to sniff later while visiting. On Foursquare, this is 'tips'.
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Glossary:Territory Marking - The canine behavior of marking places with scent and participating in sniffing formerly marked territory. This is also applied to Foursquare, as it is a territory marking participation architecture.
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Glossary:Panic Architecture - A participatory architecture that rapidly updates and reproduces human connectivity. Facebook is the most potent form of panic architecture because families and friends can panic each other or be heavily affected by photo posts and status updates. E-mail, especially when attached to an audible update signal, is another form of panic architecture because it invites the user to obsessively click it.
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Glossary:Celebrity - The celebrity is the ultimate form of cyborg. It exists on an actor network of technosocial connections attached to a system of production, reproduction and distribution. The celebrity consists of a series of perfect moment augmented by makeup, lighting, and video that are expanded to take up space and time in the minds of consumers. Like the impossible feast, the celebrity cannot be fully consumed, and the more times the viewer accesses the celebrity, the more their mental taste buds seek new celebrity data.
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Glossary:Node Centrality - Celebrities are often closer to the center of node networks, especially node networks with dense clusters. Those with the most efficient and communicated ideas are also near the center of node networks. Key influencers can be found at node centralities.
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Glossary:Supermodernity - This concept is key to defining the digital place. The concept of place in supermodernity differs essentially from place in modernity. Modernity is defined as that which integrates the new and the old such that both become familiar in the same space. Supermodernity, in contrast, is characterized by its excesses. There are three such excesses in supermodernity. In contrast to accounts of postmodernity in which there is a general collapse of an idea of progress, in supermodernity there is an acceleration of history that results, not in meaninglessness, but in the excess of meaningful events. This excess of historical significance, rather than leaving us complacent, makes us even more avid for meaning. Moreover, supermodernity accelerates the transformation of space. - Chapter 10 from 'Selected Index', Martin John Callanan, November 2004. Also see Marc Auge's Non-Spaces: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, which defines a place as one that has relation, identity and history. Under this view, an airport is not a place, but a cell phone conversation is, even if the person is only halfway present in the physical space and halfway present in the liminal in between space of the mobile connection.
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Glossary:Echolocation - A bat or whale-like behavior similar to the bee dance in which members of communities shout their location and status. Geolocal status update websites and networks are examples of these types of behavior. ---
Glossary:Liquid Modernity - The idea that as technology moves forward, the creation of value liquefies and flows more smoothly.
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Glossary:Time Geography - A new field of study that graphs out time and space spent doing certain activities over time. Founded in 1970, and recently revisited to include mapping techniques for internet communication technologies where geography is not necessarily bound to visibly adjacent territory.
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Glossary:Soft Architecture - "Soft Architecture is a place in which structure is defined by memory. The lines dividing interior and exterior are broken down, creating an uncanny relationship between organic forms and manufactured materials. Fueled by a rigorous investigation of a remembered space and time, the "real" becomes hyper-real. Shifts in scale and vibrating fields of contrasting colors result in a customized utopia" - Jenene Nagy, 2007.
Social networks are defined by soft architectures, in which inside and outside often change places. Wikis are a form of soft architecture that is structured, yet expandable.
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Glossary:Time and Space - Time and space are important when considering changes in culture and structure, especially transit and value production. Time and space were first compressed when trains begin to drive through human geography. The Railway Journey by Shivelbush is an excellent resource on understanding how time and space compression alter how work, free time, and community forms, grows and dies. The Internet compresses time and space of the mental arena. Vehicles reduce the time and space needed to transport goods. Each iteration of speed creates a faster culture. The compression of time and space create fractal value systems and hyperarchitectures that are characterized by the automatic production of space. Social networks, blogs, websites and the entirety of the Internet are the most recent examples of time and space compression. Time geography also maps this.
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Glossary:Prosthetic Culture - The idea that human culture is comprised of human and object interaction, specifically the set of objects from the earliest tools to the most advanced artificial limbs. Applied to digital culture, prosthetic culture treats the computer as an external brain or cybernetic mental attachment. Humans shed prosthetic devices, whether virtual or real, increasingly quickly. For more, see Cyborg Anthropology.
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Glossary:Playground as Factory - The Internet is both a Playground and a Factory. It is also the name of a recent conference on digital labor. The conference abstract is thus: "Today we are arguably in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media. The purpose of this conference is to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure, consumption, and production since the mid-century. In the 1950s television began to establish commonalities between suburbanites across the United States. Currently, communities that were previously sustained through national newspapers now started to bond over sitcoms. Increasingly people are leaving behind televisions sets in favor of communing with -- and through-- their computers. They blog, comment, procrastinate, refer, network, tease, tag, detag, remix, and upload and from all of this attention and all of their labor, corporations expropriate value. Guests in the virtual world Second Life even co-create the products and experiences, which they then consume. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? What are we doing to ourselves?" http://digitallabor.org/ ---
Glossary:Automation - Increasingly important in the digital space to help smooth a number of functions such as social data gathering, form filling, and any other redundant experience that might dull participation culture. Automation also helps to make Impossible Feasts more tantalizing to the user.
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Glossary:Mythology - Mythology is an important tool used to understand cultural values and beliefs. The mythology followed by movie-makers creates Blockbusters. All cultures have mythologies. The American Dream of progress and rags to riches is the most common one.
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Glossary:Cyborg Anthropology - A subsection of the Anthropology of Science dealing with human and non-human interaction, specifically prosthetic augmentation of natural systems and actors. Cyborg Anthropology studies tools as extensions of the body that can be removed and upgraded without having to rely on the time-consuming process of evolution.
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Glossary:Identity Production - The conscious production of identity through action, whether the action is physical, mental, virtual or both. The production of identity in virtual reality can occur on a social network, through text, image or video and can occur in small moments or large ones. Identity of large companies strives to maintain a static brand. Individuals often change. In virtual interaction culture, status updates must be technosocially attractive to viewers, or else identity loses gravity. Brands, and increasingly individuals, seek to increase gravity.
