Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

When faculty members really are Luddites

Hating laptops in class reaches a height in this video.  It feels like a charming liquid nitrogen exercise, until the furious denunciation at the end (around 1:39).

Which reminds me, I need to write up my argument about how most academics criticizing technology aren't Luddites, but Amish.

(thanks to Peter Naegele!)

The fearsome Chatroulette

Chatroulette is a new thing, and already building up a fearsome reputation.  The main fear seems to be inappropriate sexuality.

For instance, CNN reports in tremulous tones: 

The site has been called many things: the new Wild West of the Internet; a speed-dating replacement; a cesspool of porn; a voyeuristic follow-up to Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rear Window"; a way to get people from different social groups to interact.

There's an interesting opposition in cesspool vs... interaction?  It's a form of balanced journalism.  Note, too, the distancing of sources: "the site has been called."

CBS is more direct.  "A pedophile's paradise?"

[I]t's also raising fears that it could be fertile ground for pedophiles, sex offenders and child molesters...

More hedging there, with "it could be."

And:

it seems the site is gaining popularity among teens for its potentially sexually explicit sessions. 

Still more hedging, with "seems".  And again the old slide between children and teens.

The New York Times at first adopted a curious, worldly tone, then allowed itself one twitch of the disgust nerve:

“Right now it’s kind of like an online ‘Lord of the Flies,’ ”

(thanks to Jesse Walker and Ed Webb; screenshot from Buzzfeed)

Zombie economics, or the Great Recession shambles on

The economy is afflicted with a zombie plague: that meme has clung to popular culture since the eruption of the Great Recession.  Today's case in point comes from the Huffington Post.  

Rebekah and Stephen Hren focus on peak oil and Boomer demographics, which leads them to a Gothic vision:

we have an economic system -- whose only purpose is growth -- stuck in a shrinking vise of money and energy, inhabiting the hollowed-out body of a debt-bloated carcass that continues to stumble forward, 

Which is great.  But only the first half of the lyric:

...only to be bonked on the head or shot in the stomach every few years by never-ending financial crises that are the product of attempting to achieve infinite growth in a finite world.

Then the authors hit the heroic resistance to the living dead theme:

Until we have the wherewithal to remove our current collective zombie economic brain and immolate it, we'll be stuck in the land of the economic undead, giving our hard-won earnings to zombie banks and the ridiculously-compensated zombie CEOs that control them (and us). 

Feels like a connection to my view of White Zombie, and the left-wing rebel zombie story.  Does anyone have recent examples of the political opposite, stories seeing the unemployed as the living dead?

Previous Infocultismo on zombie econ:

• 2009 was the Year of the Zombie (Jim Kunstler)
• Paul Krugman wonders who's eating the brains
• Another New York Times writer catches on
• Some banks are zombie banks
• Time magazine nibbles

(thanks to Pecha Kucha-mad Steve Burnett; nice photo from atp_tyreseus)

Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations

A call for proposals for an exciting anthology has crossed our transom:

Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations (working title)

Editors: Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (Heidelberg University, Germany), Timothy Fox (National Yilan University, Taiwan), and Monika Mueller (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

The undead are very much alive in the contemporary cultural imagination. Vampires and zombies have garnered a generous amount of attention in print media, cinema, and on television. The vampire, with its roots in medieval European folklore, and the zombie, with its origins in Afro-Caribbean voodoo mythology, find multiple transformations in global culture and continue to function as monstrous representatives of zeitgeist.

A publisher has expressed interest in a volume examining the phenomenon of vampires and zombies as transnational cultural icons. Contributors are invited to submit papers on aspects of zombies and vampires as they relate to texts and media across cultural boundaries. Approaches and topics that papers may address, but in no way are limited to:

• Readings of individual texts, authors, and media
• Histories and anthropologies of the zombie and the vampire
• Genre, gender and sexuality, class, and race/ethnic interpretations
• Comparative, transnational, and translingual analyses (traveling tropes, cultural diffusion, mapping translations)
• Globalizations and cultural contexts (economies of power, colonialism, post-colonialism)
• Terrorism, modern warfare
• Migrations, creolizations, hybridizations, the cyber-undead
• Xenophobia: the Other, the alien, the invader, the intruder
• Horror, fear, anxiety, paranoia
• Encounters with Thanatos
• Tainted blood, disease, pandemic, viruses and other biological agents of infection
• Formation of inhuman Communities
• The postmodern, the posthuman, apocalypse and post-apocalypse
• The pop culture industry and consumption (series and sequels, slapstick, satire, the “mockumentary”)
• Video gaming and clubbing
• Graphic novels and comic books
• Self-publishing technologies (digital books, print on demand), the Internet (YouTube, social networks, blogs, e-zines)
• Interviews with authors or filmmakers

Please submit a 500-word abstract and a CV, including contact information, to: (vampzomb at mesea.org)

Deadline: March 15, 2010.

To facilitate procedures, we request that in the Subject space of the email you write: Abstract-[contributor’s name].

The editors will select from among the submitted abstracts according to suitability for the project and contact submitters by April 1. Successful abstract submitters will be requested to submit a full paper (approx. 7,000 words) by August 1.

School laptop spycams

A new twist on fearsome digital media came from Philadelphia last week, where a lawsuit alleged that a local school used laptops to spy on students at home.   

Here at Infocult the Lower Merion story is fascinating.  It combines several aspects of cyberanxieties: surveillance, children (or minors), crime, and domestic space.

As of this writing, the story stands like so: parents of children attending the Lower Merion high school have filed a lawsuit (embedded below), describing a laptop surveillance practice.  Allegedly school authorities use laptop cameras to look back at students, be they on campus or at home.

Unbeknownst to Plaintiffs and the members of the Class, and without their authorization, Defendants have been spying on the activities of Plaintiffs and Class members by Defendants' indiscriminant use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students by the School District.

The Lower Merion district responded by arguing that remote activation was "only" to keep track of stolen machines.  "The District never activated the security feature for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever."  Activated about 42 times, according to one report.  The FBI is apparently starting to consider it all.

This isn't the only case of this sort of thing.  As others have pointed out, the recent PBS Frontline program on kids and technology shows another school using networked laptops to see what students are doing.  How many other schools are frantically turning down their programs?  We watch the machines, while someone watches us through them - there's a nice 1984 telescreen reference waiting to be made.

How many fears come together in this - well, story isn't the right word.  "Movement" might be better.  In the school spycam movement, which anxieties appear?  A first list, each point overlapping others:

• Fears of minors misbehaving, usually sexual.  While the example cited concerns drugs (maybe), the looking subtext is of teens' bodies.   Example: "I just received an e-mail from my daughter, who's very upset, saying, 'Mom, I have that laptop open all the time in my bedroom, even when I'm changing.'"
• Fears of adults sexually misbehaving with minors.  The child porn meme is also in play, as Reason notes.
• Concerns about being surveilled.
• Fears of domestic space being violated (one key point is that these laptops could be remotely activated by the school when the machines were at home, not just on campus).
• Drug war panics.  The leading story seems to turn on a boy accused of holding drugs, which turned out to be candy (!).

At a different level, perhaps not one of fear but critique, is a concern about what this means for the students as learners.  As Stephen Downes writes, "I wonder what lessons we teach kinds when we spy on them through their own computer webcam."

The laptops themselves aren't attracting a lot of fear attention.  Are they all Macs?

One parent offers this spooked thought, in that Mainline story linked above:

whenever you're putting a laptop in a kid's hands, that's dangerous... you always need to be concerned about a laptop

Robbins vs. LMSD

(thanks to Laura, Annette, Jesse, Randy, Cole, and everyone; photo by Shenghung Lin)

Scary URLs

ShadyURL: this Web prank/service offers an elegant look into our digital fears.  ShadyURL is a link shortener, a service which trims down long URLs.  Usually the results into the name of the service, like http://bit.ly .

Shady adds a bonus, mixing in scary terms.  For instance, this blog's URL offers some hilarious spins:

http://5z8.info/dogfights_f0j6j_snufffilms

http://5z8.info/murdervids_c3z2q_killgays

http://5z8.info/how2pipebomb_t8y1j_how-to-skin-a-gerbil

(via BoingBoing)

Debunking technofear: Bell in Slate

A nice sketch of technology fear offers a counterintuitive model.  It's the mirror image of haunted media, a good doppelganger to media panic stories.

First, Vaughn Bell realizes that research has actually been done about possible problems.

There is, in fact, a host of research that directly tackles these issues. To date, studies suggest there is no consistent evidence that the Internet causes mental problems. 

I think that hits on the addiction trope, among other things.

Second, Bell checks to see if new media have any good effects.  

If anything, the data show that people who use social networking sites actually tend to have better offline social lives, while those who play computer games are better than nongamers at absorbing and reacting to information with no loss of accuracy or increased impulsiveness. 

Third, having reversed the polarity on the fear machine, Bell wonders about prior technologies:

In contrast, the accumulation of many years of evidence suggests that heavy television viewing does appear to have a negative effect on our health and our ability to concentrate. 

Fourth, return the ball to the scary media narrative court:

We almost never hear about these sorts of studies anymore because television is old hat, technology scares need to be novel, and evidence that something is safe just doesn't make the grade in the shock-horror media agenda.

Imagine if mainstream media had been reporting on the internet like this, since 1990 or so.  

There's a lot of good stuff in that piece, starting with its use of that terrific 2003 Journal of the History of Ideas issue.  For instance, this fine jab at a great deal of scary-tech reporting and its evidence problems:

All of these pieces have one thing in common—they mention not one study on how digital technology is affecting the mind and brain. They tell anecdotes about people who believe they can no longer concentrate, talk to scientists doing peripherally related work, and that's it. Imagine if the situation in Afghanistan were discussed in a similar way. You could write 4,000 words for a major media outlet without ever mentioning a relevant fact about the war. Instead, you'd base your thesis on the opinions of your friends and the guy down the street who works in the kebab shop. He's actually from Turkey, but it's all the same, though, isn't it?

Cold War Gothic: Soviet secret town sold

A Cold War ghost town sold: Skrunda-1 is an abandoned Soviet military town in Latvia.  The Baltic republic sold the unpopulated ville to a Russian business concern for a mere $3.1 million, which just might be the perfect post-Cold War short story.

Skrunda-1 was one of those secret Soviet cities:

Built in the 1980s, Skrunda-1 was a secret settlement not marked on Soviet maps because of the two enormous radar installations that listened to objects in space and monitored the skies for a U.S. nuclear missile attack. Like all clandestine towns in the Soviet Union, it was kept off maps and given a code-name – which usually consisted of a number and the name of a nearby city.

How did it become a ghost town?

in 1998 the last residents of Skrunda-1 departed, leaving behind hundreds of vacant apartments and dozens of buildings.

Now, here's a story idea:

It wasn't immediately clear what plans the buyer had for the 110-acre (45 hectare) property...

Although there's some horror, perhaps, to the idea of turning the thing into a giant pig farm.

(thanks to Andrew Connell)

The fish that shouts apocalypse

 Some deliriously weird news from the BBC:

"[C]o-worker Luis Nivelo, a Christian, was about to kill a carp to be made into gefilte fish in the city's New Square Fish Market in January when it began shouting in Hebrew. 

"It said 'Tzaruch shemirah' and 'Hasof bah'," Mr Rosen later told the New York Times newspaper. 

[It] essentially means [in Hebrew] that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is nigh."

It's a magical realist story, with a tinge of the Gothic.  And it gets better:

A disbelieving Mr Rosen then rushed to the back of the store, only to hear the fish identifying itself as the soul of a local Hasidic man who had died the previous year.

It instructed him to pray and study the Torah, but Mr Rosen admitted that in a state of panic he attempted to kill the fish, injuring himself in the process and ending up in hospital.

Ultimately,

The fish was eventually killed by Mr Nivelo and sold.

Finally, another New York touch: "'Ah, enough already about the fish,' Mr Rosen said."

PS: if this is a fish speaker, is someone at the Beeb trying out a really obscure Frank Herbert joke?

PPS: does the BBC run pranks on days besides 1 April?

(via Jesse Walker; image from carabou)

Facebook hooligans' night of mayhem!

Facebook mayhem and riot!  "How Facebook 'night of mayhem' lived up to its Park Lane billing", "A party arranged on social network site Facebook turned violent" - that's how the British Independent describes a London party last week.  A rave took over the top of a building, and got a bit out of hand.

Note that nobody was killed.  Any wounded? "London Ambulance treated two people for injuries."  Arrests?  "There were no arrests yesterday..."  What kind of violence actually went on?  "[A] small number of partygoers started hurling bottles and bricks", which apparently caused precious little damage.

Let's see how the article's rhetoric coolly and professionally treats the party's reality.  Beyond fifteen pages of photos, and being carried in the paper's Crime section:

It was billed as a night of mayhem and it certainly delivered. Riot police yesterday evening fought running battles with party-goers after an illegal rave in a multi-million mansion attracted thousands of teenage gatecrashers like hedonistic moths to a flame.

"hedonistic moths to a flame" - lovely stuff, there.  Yet "mayhem," "delivered"?  I'm a bit disappointed, to be honest.  Perhaps being an American blogger gives me higher standards for mayhem.  This doesn't even rise to the level of a tiff.  (Educated readers may now refer to Bill Hicks' British crime routine)

What was the Facebook angle, again?

The party was advertised widely on Facebook as a “night of mayhem” to celebrate squatters taking over a six-storey Georgian mansion on Park Lane. The squatters are thought to be part of an anti-capitalist collective who believed that the unoccupied mansion was owned by HSBC.

Ah, it was advertised on Facebook.  So the role of the world's leading social networking site was limited to... having a fan page?

Surely there's more.

But events rapidly spiralled out of control when thousands of teenagers heard about the planned revelry through social networking sites, passed the invite to their friends and then descended en masse.

Now it's clear.  Those teens used Facebook to communicate about the event.  The thing lived up to its billing after all.  There you have it: fan page plus messages yields mayhem!  Good thing we have established, sober, mainstream media to keep the masses from getting the wrong idea about things.

It's fascinating how so many juicy, classic newspaper story items get submerged by this vision of Zuckerberg mobs.  There's the political angle of ideological squatting organized by a left-wing group.  There's the classic rave panic story (no mention of drugs?).  There's the odd Courtney Love digression.  But Facebook rises above all of these, organizing the story into a cyberpunk-themed crime narrative.  Maybe the Brits will take Facebook into haunted media before we Yanks do.

(via Ed Webb)