billtron

Studio Guilherme Torres designed the LA House in Londrina, Brazil.

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Design: Studio Guilherme Torres

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Nancy Singleton and Tadaaki - teachers and farmers

at the Hachisu Egg Farm and School Saitama Japan

What’s the big deal about large, spherical ice molds? Well, besides them looking cooler than a bunch of small cubes, they melt slower, meaning they’ll cool your drink without watering it down (as much as a bunch of small cubes). And, if you’re a little skeptical about how well the sphere holds up, I can personally attest after 2 weeks of festive imbibing (hic!) these Tovolo ice spheres have kept their shape well past the last drop of each and every drink I’ve had. They’re also stackable, leak-free, and won’t tip in the freezer.

2.5” ice sphere, perfect to accompany your whiskey, bourbon, or scotch.

-Silicone cap
-BPA free ice molds
-Dishwasher safe

Also available from Amazon.

One of the problems with the move to digital humanities and big data is a kind of “gadget logic” taken from the advertising rhetoric of consumer electronics.  Lots of the reportage around digital humanities work on the big data side of the field focuses on what computer could do that people couldn’t.  By that I mean there is a “look! now you can ______” rhetoric that to my ears sounds exactly like an ad for a new consumer electronics product.  “Look, now you can update your friends on what you’re doing in real time” is not all that far from “look, now you can manipulate data in this new exciting way.”

The point, as a friend put it to me recently, is not whether you can do this or that kind of analysis, but whether you do carry it out and whether it tells us anything we don’t know.

Take this piece from The Awl for instance.  It’s all very cool, except for the following problems:

1.  The two main examples are feats of good research, but at least as summarized, they generate no substantial new knowledge OR don’t transform ongoing debates scholars are having — which is what I look for when reading new material (though I suspect that a reading of the Lim book would suggest deeper knowledge than the article represents–I did have a look at the article).  I realize the actual work may be more sophisticated than the article, but since the article is claiming that there’s a revolution in knowledge, I’d say it’s got a burden of proof to demonstrate that claim.  We knew that press use of sources was biased toward men (and as a comment points out, they are also biased toward official sources put forward by PR departments and agencies, which likely means more men).  We also knew that presidential rhetoric got less flowery and pedagogical over the course of the 20th century.

2.  The method discussion in the journalism article does not even approach giving us something that would look like reproducible science. If it’s going to claim to be scientific, then this is a major failure.  If, on the other hand, we’re doing some kind of interpretive humanities work, that’s fine, but then they can’t claim the mantle of science.  They use words like “data mining” and “machine learning” and “automatic coding” but good luck trying to figure out what judgments were encoded into their software and whether you might want to make different ones if you were to do the study yourself.

I agree with the authors that

Our approach — apart from freeing scholars from more mundane tasks – allows researchers to turn their attention to higher level properties of global news content, and to begin to explore the features of what has become a vast, multi-dimensional communications system.*

But that begs two questions: will that attention to higher-level properties of a phenomenon yield greater or more profound insight?  Only if scholars know how to ask better questions, which implies a greater sophistication with both theory and synthetic thought–two areas where current AI is woefully lacking.  There is also the question of the degree to which scholars should be free of direct engagement with the data.  Another group of people in the digital humanities seems to argue that you can’t be a real scholar anymore if you can’t code.  As I suggested yesterday, that’s a silly proposition, but people should of course know how stuff works, which would include their data.

Synthetic, abstract, large-scale work requires a good thinker needs to move between scales–something Elvin Lim appears to do more effectively in the article’s representation of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency.  The description makes it look more like real scholarship to me because Lim utilizes digital methods when they suit the specific question he’s asking, and utilizes other approaches when called for, and approaches the topic from multiple registers.  If you’re hearing echoes of what I said yesterday about writing tools, you’d be right.

Good work comes from good questions, and not shiny new tools.  In the hands of a skills craftsperson, a new tool and yield beautiful and unexpected results, and that’s ultimately what we want.  But we can also sometimes get those from old tools.

See also: musicians and instruments, surgeons and their instruments, drivers and cars, cooks and kitchens.

We also need to question the value of speed as a universal good.  For some things, like getting out an op-ed, speed is good.  But for certain kinds of scholarship, slowness is better–the time with a topic helps you to understand it better and say smarter things.  If everyone can write books and articles twice as fast as they used to–or faster–nobody will be able to read them and keep up, except for machines.

Oh, wait.  That already happened.

As one of my teachers told me, the hardest thing to do after jumping through all the institutional hoops is to remember why you got into academia in the first place.  But that’s also the most important thing.  Much as I love talk of and experimentation with new tools and processes, I worry that some of the DH discussions slide over into old fashioned commodity fetishism, and loses track of the purpose of the work in the first place.  As my friend said, it’s not whether you can that matters in scholarship.  It’s what you do.

—

*I disagree with the authors’ assertion that the modern media system is more complex and multilayered than earlier systems.  Have a look at Richard Menke’s Critical Inquiry essay on the Garfield assassination (which I just taught last week).  Sure, it’s different, but from a perspective of cultural analysis there is every bit as much complexity (perhaps more since less it automated and systematized) though people walking around and writing on giant bulletin boards isn’t really well enough archived to be data mined.

Last week, an Icelandic teenager made global headlines by launching a legal battle to use the name she considers her own. At her birth, the girl was named Blaer, which is Icelandic for “breeze.” Blaer is not traditionally used as a name, and was not on the government’s approved name list. The family appealed for a review, but the name was ultimately rejected because the word blaer takes a masculine article. (Iceland is one of a number of countries to prohibit names which cause confusion about the individual’s sex.)

The child’s legal name became the placeholder stulka (“girl”), with the expectation that her family would choose a new name. They didn’t. Little Blaer’s parents continued to call her Blaer, and defiantly left the placeholder as her legal ID. Now, at age 15, their daughter is suing to unite her personal identity and her legal identity.

In the USA, reaction to this story has generally run along two lines:

A. "Can you believe they actually have laws telling you what you can name your own kids?"

B. "Seems to me we could use some rules like that, with the kind of crazy names some parents use here!"

The two responses above may seem opposite, but they both grow out of the same fundamental worldview. Both assume that baby name choices belong to parents, and are a matter of personal expression. They differ only in how they would deal with the extremes of taste.

read more

I’m writing this from Cambridge (MA, USA; not UK), where I’m a few days into my stint as a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. I’m thrilled to be able to spend some quality time with the Social Media group here, including long-time colleagues like Kate Crawford (who has worked with us on our Crisis Communication projects), Nancy Baym, Mary Gray and danah boyd, without a doubt some of the smartest and most collegial social media researchers anywhere. It’s also a very interdisciplinary setting populated by some of the world’s leading computer scientists, mathematicians, and economists. I’m here until mid June, when I’ll return to QUT to continue on as Deputy Director of the CCI as well as taking on a new role as Director of Research Training Programs in the Creative Industries Faculty – so a big, bumper year ahead.

In the meantime, here are a couple of recent media interviews I did and that are still available online (for now).

The first was a live interview on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program. The story was called Your ‘Posts for Profit’, and this is the ABC’s summary:

There are millions upon millions of Twitter posts every day, a vast source of information for businesses and marketers. Access to this massive stream of data is sold by Twitter to those that can afford to buy it. But should it also be available to non-profit organisations for research purposes, and what will be the ultimate cost if these types of organisations are shut off from the data stream?

Full recorded audio and transcript available at the Radio National website.

The second is a segment on this week’s Queensland edition of the ABC 7.30 report, taking a look at the 2013 Queensland Floods, and how both community and government uses of social media in such situations have changed over the past few years. The video is available here (as I say, for now).

Cross-posted to the Mapping Online Publics blog.

There are two types of subway riders in the world. Those who wonder, during an idle moment at a station, if they could beat the train to the next stop; and those who attempt to do so. Observe.

atane:

So my friend’s Aunt is in town from Cameroon. She’s been on an exercise regimen for the last few months, and doesn’t feel she should stop because she’s in the US for 2 weeks. So he took her to a gym and she saw they were offering African dance class and she was interested. She got into it with the gym staff and trainer. I’m paraphrasing what my friend told me was said.

Aunt - What kind of African dance do you have?

Gym staff - Oh we have different levels of African dance. Are you a beginner?

Aunt - I don’t mean different levels of dancing skills. You say it’s African dance. What kind of dance? I’m from Douala, Cameroon. Where is your dance from?

Gym staff - It’s from Africa.

Aunt - But where in Africa?

Gym staff - Let me get the trainer. She should be able to assist you.

Aunt - Ok.

Trainer - Hello. How may I help you?

Aunt - Hello, I am inquiring about your African dance. What kind of African dance are you offering?

Trainer - We have different levels of African dance. Is this your first time?

Aunt - Is this my first time dancing as an African?

Trainer - I meant is this your first time taking an African dance class.

Aunt - Why aren’t you people telling me where in Africa your dance is from? I’m sure they don’t dance like where I’m from in many other African countries. Is there a dance class for Europe and Asia?

Trainer - It’s most likely a hybrid of African dances. It’s really a terrific workout!

Aunt - You’re most likely offering hybrid African dances?

Trainer - It’s a wonderful way to get in shape. Should I sign you up?

Aunt - You don’t know where this dance you are teaching is from do you? How do you know it’s even African? I’m not going to pay you to instruct me on African dance if you don’t know where in Africa it’s from. I want to know before I spend my money.

My friend said his Aunt walked out after that. I asked him why he didn’t say anything the entire time, and he said it looked like his Aunt had a handle on things and he was too busy trying to hold his laughter in. Aunties don’t play.

bwahahahahahahahahahaha

I can see and hear the entire thing playing out in my mind: her accent, her eternal side-eye.

“The problem here is not the message. The problem is the messenger. More specifically, it is the messenger using his own life as supporting evidence for the message. Were Graham Hill to simply write a fact-based essay arguing that Americans should cut down on material possessions in order to save the environment and gain peace of mind, he would doubtless hear a chorus of support. But for Graham Hill, a young millionaire who was fortunate enough to sell his “pre-Netscape browser” at the high point of the internet bubble, to say to the average American, “My journey through the perils of great wealth has bestowed me with wisdom that is directly applicable to you” is simply false. It is no wonder that Hill loved the recent TED talk by millionaire musician Amanda Palmer, in which she argued that it was perfectly fair for her to, for example, accept a free night of lodging in the home of poor Honduran immigrants and not pay them for it, because the beauty of her music is payment enough. Both are insulated enough from the realities of personal finance to forget about them entirely.”

- It Would Be Great if Millionaires Would Not Lecture Us on ‘Living With Less’

“Get ready for four days of cask-conditioned beers and ciders! March 20 - 23, 2013 The New England Real Ale eXhibition will return to Somerville American Legion Hall Post 388 163 Glen St
Somerville, MA 02145 Sessions and Admissions details are available here. Don’t Fear the Reaper”

- NERAX 2013

LONDON — A widow's wish to hear her late husband's voice again has prompted London's subway system to restore a 40-year-old recording of the subway's famous "mind the gap" announcement.

The Underground, also known as the Tube, tracked down the voice recording by Oswald Lawrence after his widow, Margaret McCollum, approached its staff and told them what it meant to her.

There was a young man from Honshu
Who tried limericks in haiku,
But

– Doug Holyman, in Word Ways, May 2007

beautyembrace:

1) Have a body.

2) Take it to the beach!

Baby Goes Skydiving In Wind Tunnel (by Network A)

Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality is opening two Shake Shacks and a Blue Smoke in Delta's new Terminal 4 at JFK airport.

Tags: Danny Meyer   flying   food   JFK airport   restaurants   Shake Shack

“Continuum was a pseudoscientific magazine published by an activist group of the same name who denied the existence of HIV/AIDS. It addressed issues related to HIV/AIDS, AIDS denialism, alternative medicine, pseudoscience and themes of interest to the LGBT community. It ran from December 1992 until February 2001, ceasing publication because all the editors had died of AIDS defining clinical conditions.”

- Continuum (magazine) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Facebook has so many features that at least one of them has to be useful, right? Here's the page on Facebook that just shows you links shared by the people you follow. No tweets, no photos, no jingoistic rants from distant cousins. Just the links. (And if you like links on Facebook, you should like kottke.org on Facebook.)

Tags: Facebook

Michelle Malkin’s always had a weird bone to pick with Michelle Obama. Calling FLOTUS the President’s “bitter half,” Malkin’s long considered her “fair game” despite Malkin’s own vigorous attacks on criticism of Republican politicians’ family members. Whether it’s Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign, or what she puts into her own daughters’ lunches, or fundraising for her husband’s re-election campaign–all benignly acceptable things for a FLOTUS to do–Malkin somehow manages to have a problem with it.

It wasn’t totally clear to me what Malkin’s obsession was–other than being a right-wing dick–until Michelle Obama went on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and made the hugely viral video “Evolution of Mom Dancing” (12 million views at the time of this writing), in which she busts the Dougie, among other moves, in a deliberately dorky Mom-ish way, and Michelle Malkin quickly created her own parody of the video thereafter called “Evolution of Liberal Dance” (185,000 views at the time of this writing), in which Malkin wears sunglasses for no discernible reason, dances like a nerd, and seems in places to be doing some kind of impersonation of Charlyne Yi at her most awkward.

No wonder Malkin’s called her critiques of FLOTUS “Michelle vs. Michelle”–it’s the most basic kind of junior high-girl grudge-match. Only this one is entirely one-sided. One Michelle’s well-liked and popular, the other Michelle’s roundly-hated and desperate for attention. One is sitting with the cool kids in the cafeteria, the other’s alone by her locker, eating her jellus sandwich.

[Evolution of Mom Dancing with Jimmy Fallon and Michelle Obama]
[Evolution of Liberal Dance]

In 1978, as violence and revolution gripped Nicaragua, Susan Meiselas traveled there to document the fall of the stifling Somoza regime there. She took many powerful images of the Sandinistas revolt, including the photo later came to be known as ‘The Molotov Man’. Unlike her other photos from Nicaragua, the photo above was not published anywhere at the time, but only reproduced in her book, emphatically named, “Nicaragua: June, 1978-July, 1979″, which is considered to be one of the best photojournalistic works.

The photo was taken on July 16, 1979, the day before Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last of the Somozas who had ruled Nicaragua since 1936; a Sandinistas rebel — later revealed to be a man named Pablo Arauz) was throwing a bomb at a Somoza national guard garrison — an image made all the more ironic by the pepsi-cola bottle he had appropriated to hurl at the nepotist regime long-supported by the United States. In the end, the Somoza-Sandinistas conflict left 40,000 people dead (1.5 percent of the population); 40,000 children orphaned; and over 200,000 families (one fifth of the population) homeless. Another hauntingly beautiful Meiselas photo show the smoke rising from the city of Esteli as a Somaza bomber departs the scene like some silhouetted cormorant.

As for The Molotov Man, it would later play a crucial role in a copyrights debate. In 2004, Joy Garnett, an appropriation artist based one of her paintings on the photo. Meiselas issued a cease and desist letter and demanded rights to the painting. Viral internet outrage followed; and two years later, two artists reached a compromise, appearing jointly at a fair-use symposium and penning together an article on the whole controversy in Harper’s (pdf).

Filed under: Contact Sheets, Politics, War Tagged: Joy Garnett, Nicaragua, Pablo Arauz, Sandinistas, Somoza, Susan Meiselas

[Update: Jurgenson replied in the comments below and with a longer post here.]

Nathan Jurgenson at the blog Cyborgology coined the term “digital dualism” to describe the common discourse, exemplified recently by Sherry Turkle in her Alone Together, that maps “online” and “offline” onto “virtual” versus “real,” with deep (but often unstated) ideological implications (e.g.). This culminated in an essay for The New Inquiry called “The IRL Fetish.”

Cyborgology is named for Donna Haraway’s  “Cyborg Manifesto,” which had similar anti-dualist motivations, trying to find a way to overcome the  mind/body and culture/nature dualisms that (1) are deeply rooted in Western epistemologies and (2) have profound and direct implications for the systematic subordination of women in and through their bodies. Cyborgology, then, has anti-dualism at is core, in ways that are really positive.

I’m struggling with ways that Jurgenson seems to undermine his critique of digital dualism by repeatedly protesting that he really doesn’t think that the “digital” and “physical” are the same, in ways that seem to me to concede the dualist categories that he so effectively critiques. For instance, Jurgenson recently responded to a critical post by Nicholas Carr, who argues that

Nature existed before technology gave us the idea of nature. Wilderness existed before society gave us the idea of wilderness. Offline existed before online gave us the idea of offline.

Carr is clearly wrong here, in some really important ways. The most important, to my view, is ethical: this is a collection of normative (value) statements couched in descriptive (fact) language. And as Haraway, among others, has shown at length, the fantasy of “nature” is all tied up with fantasies of unitary subjectivity, of authentic personhood, of mastery, that are themselves pillars of some pretty terrible politics. (As an aside, I tend to think that the stakes here, and the reason that the Haraway reference that’s built into all of this is so important, is that this nature/culture discourse ultimately reduces to some very specific questions about the value and autonomy of women’s bodies. This isn’t just subliminal: when we’re talking about nature and humans, reproduction is always half a breath away, and Turkle repeatedly gives this away; she can’t help but to constantly bring up, apropos nothing, how the really big problem with technology is that it might in some ways free women from oppressive childcare practices, which is presumptively terrible.)

Jurgenson responds, correctly, that “nature” and the “real” are always socially constructed, and therefore ideological:

“Nature” is always a social construction, and appeals to it should be followed by ‘whose nature’? Or, as I frame it in these discussions about digital-experience, who benefits when one person anoints themselves a worthy arbiter of what set of experiences is more or less real?

And:

I implore thinkers to always and deeply take on the digital as comprising real people with real politics, histories, struggles, with real bodies and real feelings and so on.

And:

we’ve falsely constructed the categories “on-“ and “off-line” in order to tell the story that there is something virtual impinging on the real, allowing us to claim one’s own disconnection makes one more real.

These are exactly right. Importantly these are not statements that “online and offline are the same,” which seems to be the position that  Jurgenson wants to attribute to his critics from the other direction:

@tylerbickford i get why ppl want my argument to be 'on/offline is the same!' it's easy, sensationalist. bad strategy to just go with that—
  (@nathanjurgenson) March 02, 2013

Instead these statements are correct not because they treat online and offline as two stable categories that are in fact identical (which would clearly be a bizarre and self-negating position), but because they problematize the stability of those categories in the first place. This is a standard critical move: identify a naturalized term or category, and show that it is actually a social construction full of ideological content. When folks are throwing around the word “real” to distinguish one set of ubiquitous and mundane human practices from another set of ubiquitous and mundane human practices, this is a pretty straightforward critique to level successfully.

But then where I get hung up is that, mixed among these strong and effective critical statements, are defensive responses to Carr that seem to concede exactly the categories that are being deconstructed. So to prove that he never made the straw-man argument Carr attributes to him, Jurgenson quotes himself in the “IRL Fetish” essay as writing that “the digital and physical are not the same”, and he goes on to protest that Facebook and coffee shops really are different.

Hopefully the whole disagreement doesn’t hinge on whether Facebook and a coffee shop are the same thing. A lot of pixels would be wasted on a not very interesting question. But this business about the “digital and physical are not the same” is important, and it seems to me to concede the entire argument. If the word for all the stuff that isn’t digital is “physical” (or elsewhere, “material,” which is to say, matter, stuff, substance), then I don’t see how we’re not just back at this dualist metaphysics where there is stuff, nature, bodies, matter, on the one hand, and information, minds, ideas, communication, on the other. (In fact, compared to “digital” versus “physical,” “online” and “offline” seem like supremely useful and non-ideological categories, that do describe and differentiate actually occurring activities, and don’t presuppose that one is somehow not made out of atoms and molecules. There must be an implicational hierarchy where deconstruction of online/offline implies the equivalent critique of parallel but even more metaphysically fraught binaries like digital/physical.)

In fact Jurgenson builds this problem in from the beginning, posing in the place of digital dualism what he calls “augmented reality.” Unfortunately, Carr has him dead to rights when he concludes his post with

An augmentation, it’s worth remembering, is both part of and separate from that which it is added to. To deny the separateness is as wrongheaded as to deny the togetherness.

Right! If you start with reality, and then you augment it, then you’ve got two distinct things that can always be distinguished. This is a dualist model! The solution here is to stop talking about “reality” altogether.

Another Cyborgology blogger, Jenny Davis, tries to find real-world examples of specific degrees of augmented reality, from bots playing video games (pure digital) to live-tweeting a conference (mild augmented) to motion-activated virtual reality (strong augmented). The implication is that there is digital and there is physical and they interact more or less in different situations. Jurgenson suggests something similar by suggesting we view the digital and physical as enmeshed and intersecting. Or another co-blogger, Whitney Erin Boesel, has a long post arguing that anti-digital dualists are obligated to come up with new boundaries to distinguish “online” from “offline,” rather than just rejecting the categories altogether. But if we’re left trying to sort out an empirical typology of intersecting digital and physical domains, or figuring out exactly what are the boundaries between the two categories, it seems to me like we’re in the position of Descartes trying to identify the organ in the brain where the soul interacts with the body. The dualism is established, and our job is just to figure out how these fundamentally different substances (soul and body, bits and atoms) can possibly interact.

I think it’s worth going back to Haraway again. The point of “cyborgs” is precisely to get beyond a binary model of natural (real) bodies, and artificial protheses. The discourse of cyborgs actively rejects “reality,” “nature,” and the “physical” (again, in large part because those are always already fantasies of unitary subjectivity that posit the “natural” female body and biological reproduction as the site of masculine self-realization):

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense [...] An origin story in the ‘Western’, humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psycho-analysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labor and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. (150–51)

Maybe everyone already gets this and I’m being pedantic by bringing up the old theory texts. But I think it’s important! The critique of digital dualism has real stakes, and not just for pro- and anti-technology partisans. The organic unity of offline reality that the Sherry Turkles of the world are pursuing is a masculinist Western fantasy of mastery through domination, in which “nature” is posited in order to be transcended. What we need is to “skip the step of original unity,” which means not starting with reality and then “augmenting” it. The right argument against Cartesian mind/body dualism isn’t “well then, smart guy, how does the soul interact with the body?!” but “your categories are blinkered and we’re going to stop using them!” Jurgenson’s co-blogger, DA Banks, argues that we are “always already augmented,” which is getting there, but why do we need to use “real” or “reality” at all? At best it grants the possibility that there might be phenomena in this world that are not “real,” which is nonsensical; at worst it reaffirms this fantasy of original unity that presupposes a deeply hierarchical politics.

Rather than “the digital” and “the physical,” can’t we just have “lots of different stuff”? I’m serious here. Digital is a perfectly useful word, but it’s not clear that it describes in any coherent way a broad category of human experience. It includes typing in MS Word, sharing photographs on Facebook, job interviews on Skype, talking with family on Skype, reading The New York Times, reading New York Times reporters’ Twitter feeds, recording voice notes, playing flash video games like Tanks, playing first-person shooter video games, playing sudoku, playing the guitar, making music, making art, making videos, sharing music, sharing art, sharing videos, sharing earbuds, texting, talking on the phone, watching TV, watching classic movies, watching new movies, watching movies at home, watching movies at the theater, watching time-shifted TV (on TV, on a laptop, on a tablet using cable On Demand, using Hulu, using bittorrent), using a calculator, typesetting, graphic design, analyzing quantitative research data, analyzing qualitative research data, watching old music videos, doing regression analyses, searching for information, consuming information, sharing lolcats, tracking packages, tracking financial transactions, tracking voter rolls, organizing phone banks…

So making a list like that is maybe more pedantry (sorry, really), but I can’t understand what is useful about “digital” as the category that describes all these things, especially in contrast with “physical”? Is there anything that these things share in contrast with “matter”? Categories like work, play, intimate, instrumental, public, private, investment, consumption, management, organization, entertainment, communication, and analysis, are much more relevant to understand these different practices. But when Jurgenson goes on to provide a typology of different positions on digital dualism, from strong digital dualism to strong augmented reality, none of the available positions has space for what I think is directly implied by a critique of IRL fetishism, which would be something like: “the categories digital and physical have very limited utility for describing things people do, and the widespread use of those categories in scholarly and everyday discourse mostly an expression of ideology (a form of fetishism).” (A fetish is a conceptual error, a misrecognition of something for something it’s not. Classically a misrecognition of relations among people as relations among objects. So for “IRL” discourses to be a fetish the problem needs to be that they misrecognize some phenomena as “real life,” when those phenomena in fact are something else.)

Evgeny Morozov, in his review of Stephen Johnson’s Future Perfect, advocates a “particularizing” approach that rejects broad categories like “the Internet” and instead “engages with platforms and technologies on their own terms, as if they share no common logic.” This seems exactly right to me. “The digital” is lots of stuff, all of which is material/physical. Digital dualism is a pervasive fetishistic discourse of which Jurgenson has provided a pointed and devastating critique. But then, just as that critique is leveled, we’re back to searching for the boundary between the digital and the physical!

(I feel like I’m talking past Jurgenson here, and I’m trying to figure out where/why I find his critique so excellent but his proposed alternative so disappointing. That confusion suggests to me that I am very possibly missing or misunderstanding something important. But I can’t tell what it is. So hopefully this will be read [if it's read at all!] in that spirit.)

According to Karl Polanyi, the economy had no specificity in western society until the eighteenth century. It was, he said, embedded in what he called the labyrinth of social relations. I believe this observation to be equally true of the conceptions of the Middle Ages, which did not include the notion of economy, other than in the sense of domestic economy inherited from Aristotle, and I have tried in this book to show that this was true of money too. Money is notoriously difficult to define. As I indicated in my introduction, Albert Rigaudière has neatly demonstrated that the notion of money always eludes those who try to define it. The principal dictionaries bear witness to the difficulty of providing a precise definition: ‘[any sort of money] and by extension what this money represents: capital, funds, fortune, specie, cash, takings, resources, wealth, not counting colloquial expressions such as bread, dough, dosh…’ (Le Petit Robert, 2003 edition).

This absence of a medieval notion of money has to be seen in conjunction with the absence not only of a specific economic sphere, but also of economic theses or theories. Historians who attribute an economic thought to scholastic theologians or to the mendicant orders, particularly the Fransiscans, are guilty of anachronism. As a general rule, in most areas of individual or collective existence, medieval people behaved in ways that make them alien to us and which mean that contemporary historians need to turn to anthropology to inform their interpretations. This medieval ‘exoticism’ is particularly visible in the sphere of money. We have to substitute, for the general idea we have of it today, the medieval existence of many moneys, the minting, use and circulation of which expanded considerably in this period. It is difficult for us to appreciate the scale of this in the absence of adequate numerical sources from before the fourteenth century, and we are often ignorant of whether the money indicated in a source is metal coin or money of account.

The rise of money, especially from the twelfth century, during what Marc Bloch called the second feudal age, also permeated the institutions and practices we call feudalism. To oppose money and feudalism is to defy historical reality. The growth of money went together with the development of the whole of medieval social life. Though it was associated with the towns, money also circulated widely in the countryside. It benefited from the growth of trade, which is one of the reasons for the importance of the Italians in this sphere, including in northern Europe. The increasing use of money in the Middle Ages was also associated with the formation of princely and royal administrations, whose need for funds led to the creation, with varying degrees of success, of a range of taxes paid in cash. The greater presence of money in the Middle Ages took the form of a proliferation of currencies and it was only at a late stage, from the fourteenth century, and to a limited degree, that the use of these currencies was replaced by other means of exchange and of payment, such as the bill of exchange or the annuity. Further, even if the practice seems to have been less common at the end of the Middle Ages, types of thesaurization persisted, not only in the form of ingots but also and predominantly in the form of treasure and gold and silver objects.

It is also clear that, in parallel with a certain social and spiritual promotion of the merchant, the management of money benefited from a shift in the ideas and practices of the Church which, it seems, wished to assist the people of the Middle Ages in their desire to safeguard both their money and their lives, that is, both their earthly wealth and their eternal salvation. Given that, even in the absence of specific conceptions, a sphere like that of the economy existed outside of any consciousness of it on the part of the clergy and the laity, or rather lack of consciousness of it, I remain inclined to locate the use of money in the Middle Ages within a gift economy, money sharing in the general subordination of human beings to the grace of God. Two conceptions seem to me to have dominated the use of money in the Middle Ages in earthly practice: the search for justice, most notably found in the theory of the just price, and the spiritual requirement expressed by caritas.

It may be true that the medieval Church, in the course of time, was induced to rehabilitate those who handled money, if only on certain conditions, and that in the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, within a restricted elite consisting of those we call the pre-humanists, wealth – and particularly wealth in money – was restored to respectability. It remains the case that, though it may have ceased to be accursed and infernal, money remained suspect throughout the Middle Ages. Lastly, I feel I need to spell out, like many famous historians before me, that capitalism was not born in the Middle Ages, and that the Middle Ages was not even a pre-capitalist age: the shortage of precious metals and the fragmentation of markets prevented the necessary preconditions from being realized. It was only in the period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries that there took place the ‘great revolution’ which Paolo Prodi wrongly situated, as I have tried to show, in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, money, like economic power, had not liberated itself from the global value systems of Christian religion and society. The creativity of the Middle Ages lay elsewhere.

Jacques Le Goff: Money and the middle ages. An essay in historical anthropology (2012)
First published as Le Moyen Age et l’argent (2010).

“In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.”

- Wolf Hall: A Novel: Hilary Mantel: Amazon.com: Kindle Store

FC Barcelona - El Barça en la mente de Mamadou (by FC Barcelona)

In the spirit of I, Pencil, here's how a can of Coke makes its way from the bauxite mines of Australia and the forests of Sri Lanka to your local grocery store shelf.

Coca-Cola is made from a syrup produced by the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta. The main ingredient in the formula used in the United States is a type of sugar substitute called high-fructose corn syrup 55, so named because it is 55 per cent fructose or "fruit sugar", and 42 per cent glucose or "simple sugar" -- the same ratio of fructose to glucose as natural honey. HFCS is made by grinding wet corn until it becomes cornstarch. The cornstarch is mixed with an enzyme secreted by a rod-shaped bacterium called Bacillus and an enzyme secreted by a mold called Aspergillus. This process creates the glucose. A third enzyme, also derived from bacteria, is then used to turn some of the glucose into fructose.

Tags: Coca-Cola   food

DrawQuest is a new iPad app from Chris Poole's Canvas. It's a super-simple drawing app that is sort of a combination between Draw Something and Instagram. I suck at drawing, but I've been using it for a few weeks and it makes me want to draw more.

Tags: Chris Poole   DrawQuest   iPad apps

Michael Jordan just turned 50 and so Deadspin's Emma Carmichael asked former Cavs guard Craig Ehlo what it was like to guard Jordan in his prime. Sometimes Jordan would tell Ehlo what he was going to do ahead of time and still score.

Usually, Ron Harper would start on him, then I would come in and go to him, and Ron would go to Scottie Pippen or something like that. I always felt very lucky that Coach Wilkens had that faith in me to guard him. Michael was very competitive when he got between the lines. He was never a bad talker or too arrogant, but it was just like what Jason [Williams] said: He'd tell you. He only did that to me one time, from what I remember. It was his 69-point game, and things were going so well for him that I guess he just went for it. We were running up the court side-by-side and he told me: "Listen man, I'm hitting everything, so I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna do this time and see if you can stop it. You know you can't stop it. You know you can't stop this. You can't guard me.

"I'm gonna catch it on the left elbow, and then I'm gonna drive to the left to the baseline, and then I'm gonna pull up and shoot my fadeaway."

And sure enough ...

Ehlo famously guarded Jordan during The Shot:

See also Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building and Jordan's top 50 greatest moments.

Tags: basketball   Craig Ehlo   Emma Carmichael   Michael Jordan   NBA   sports   video

Democrats

#soundstudies http://instagr.am/p/Wk2AWyNbTM/