An Aggregations of PJ's Blog Posts

Ambient Documentation: To Be is to See and To See is to Be

• November 21st, 2011
• Posted in Cyborgology

This post was co-authored with Nathan Jurgenson.

We begin with the assumption that social media expands the opportunity to capture/document/record ourselves and others and therefore has developed in us a sort-of “documentary vision” whereby we increasingly experience the world as a potential social media document. How might my current experience look as a photograph, tweet, or status update? Here, we would like to expand by thinking about what objective reality produces this type of subjective experience. Indeed, we are increasingly breathing an atmosphere of ambient documentation that is more and more likely to capture our thoughts and behaviors.

As this blog often points out, we are increasingly living our lives at the intersection of atoms and bits. Identities, friendships, conversations and a whole range of experience form an augmented reality where each is simultaneously shaped by physical presence and digital information. Information traveling on the backs of bits moves quickly and easily; anchor it to atoms and it is relatively slow and costly. In an augmented reality, information flows back and forth across physicality and digitality, deftly evading spatial and temporal obstacles that otherwise accompany physical presence.

When Egyptians dramatically occupied the physical space of Tahrir Square this past January (as they do, again, at this very moment), the events unfolded live before the eyes of the world, despite considerable geographic barriers. The authors write this post in one browser tab and, in another, watch live streaming footage of protests in Tahrir Square thousands of miles away. Less dramatically, but still important, we get a first-hand perspective of several #Occupy encampments being dismantled, despite police efforts to diminish visibility by performing the raids under the cloak of night. With an eye on the Twitter streams of protesters exchanging information and strategizing movements, it has become clear that physical events transmit digitally, and vice versa. Our augmented reality is an atmosphere increasingly capable of documenting and transmitting information fluidly across atoms and bits.

When information transmission becomes less costly both in terms of resources and effort, documentation becomes more ubiquitous. An obvious example is the invention of the digital camera. Photographers not so long ago had to be judicious in an attempt to save film for the 24 or 36 best shot. In the digital paradigm, the photographer has virtually unlimited resources to capture nearly everything and only retroactively selects the best images. Digital photography gives new meaning to the cliché “shoot first, ask questions later;” our capacity to document well exceeds our capacity to process those documents in real time.

Once captured, we tend to share and disseminate much of our documentation of ourselves and others. Indeed, this is what social media is: (1) the documenting of ourselves, our lives and others, and (2) sharing, interacting and collaborating with those documents in a social way.

The ease of digital documentation and our desire to gain social benefits from sharing these documents creates an environment where documentation is nearly ubiquitous. The default assumption—even when in a semi-private location such as a house party—is that cameras are rolling. Most every action is potentially just one smartphone click away from becoming a (quasi-)public document, and those around us often have a vested interest in creating such documents, be they photos, tweets, check-ins, or status updates.

We are increasingly in the spotlight even if we are unaware that we are performing. When online, many of our searches, shares, and clicks are registered in innumerable databases; sometimes visibly and sometimes invisibly. The abundance of documentation mechanisms means that simply existing implies that we are leaving a trail of recorded information behind us. Ambient documentation is what we call the condition of documentation that occurs as result of one’s mere presence in an environment.

As such, we are constantly confronted with the means of documentation (e.g., cameras, phones, keyboards, etc.) as well as the documents themselves, leading us to assume that we are always being recorded. As Nathan has stated before, the consequence is that our present is increasingly lived as a potential document; the present is now always a future past. A condition that can be described as “documentary vision.”

Spotify, the music streaming service that syncs with one’s Facebook account, offers an excellent example of the pathway by which ambient documentation leads to documentary vision. Spotify users sign up using their Facebook profile, and then watch as what their music choices are published to Facebook in a stream that also includes what their friends are listening to, watching, and reading. Friends can then comment on a user’s choices, serving as a constant reminder of pervasive documentation.

We, of course, make choices with this in mind. What music makes me look good? What selections, when documented for all to see, will make the best impression? This could mean, for example, Top40 is out and Pitchfork darlings are in—or vice versa—depending, of course, on the social circle one is performing for. Newspapers such as the Washington Post and The Guardian are now similarly tracked by Facebook. Will I click on a certain newspaper article if I know my choice will be documented and disseminated? Or, will my reading habits change? Similar questions can be asked in light of Foursquare or Facebook Places: Will I choose the same bar whether or not I intend to “check in?”

The point is that we weigh decisions differently in environments that are capable of documenting much of what we do. With new technologies, from smart phones to social media, the atmosphere of documentation is far more pervasive than ever before.

As it always has, documentation takes on new cultural forms and norms. None of this neglects the important point that much of what we do and think remains anonymous, hidden, and undocumented. But we are living in a state of heightened publicity; one where the fact of our existence guarantees public documentation, and public documentation guarantees our existence.

[ READ MORE ]

Frictionless Sharing and the Digital Paparazzi

• November 1st, 2011
• Posted in Cyborgology

(Or: How we’ve come to be micro-celebrities online)

(Co-Authored by Nathan Jurgenson)

Facebook’s recent introduction of “frictionless sharing” is the newest development in a growing trend: data is being increasingly produced passively as individuals conduct their day-to-day activities. This is a trend that has grown both on and offline. We will focus on the former here; especially “frictionless” sharing that involves syncing Facebook with other sites or apps. Once synced, much of what a user listens to, reads or otherwise accesses are automatically and immediately published on Facebook without any further action or approval. Users may not even need to “opt into” frictionless sharing because many services are changing their default setting to automatically push content to Facebook. In short, we can say that users play a passive role in this process.

Contrast this to more active sharing: when we “like” or “+1” something (by clicking the eponymous buttons that have spread throughout the Web) it requires the user to make a conscious and affirmative action to share something with others in their network. Nathan Jurgenson (one of this post's co-authors) previously described these two models as types of “documentary vision:” We actively document ourselves and our world around us as if we have a camera in our hand (“liking”, status updates, photos, etc.), or we can passively allow ourselves to be documented, curating our behaviors along the way (e.g., reading a magazine article so that you can present yourself as the type of person who “likes” that sort of magazine) much like a celebrity facing a crowd of paparazzi photographers.

Let’s make another layer of complexity to this documentary model: In many cases, we not even aware that we are being documented. For decades, A-list celebrities have had to live with the reality that every time they go out into the world, someone may be documenting their every move from afar. Today, the experience is becoming universal. The Internet is full of digital paparazzi; that is, invisible data collection mechanisms that track and surveil users. Google has long collected data about users behavior-patterns to improve its page-rank algorithm. Without such data, the algorithm would be largely ineffective in predicting what sites best respond to the users’ inquiry. The paparazzi-like invisibility of the documentation is significant because users have less opportunity play as active of a role is shaping the documentation produced about them. We could come up with many examples of this passive, invisible digital-paparazzi: from Amazon tracking user habits to make recommendations to the iPad tracking your every behavior and location to send statistics to the company and app developers. What is clear is that much of the data we produce comes from something like a paparazzi hiding in the bushes, rather than from the posed self-portrait.

Of course, the subject of invisible digital-paparazzi documentation is not always completely inactive in the documentation process. Many of us know, to some degree or another, that we are being tracked. Celebrities know that paparazzi might be present at any time and place and learn to behave as if they are always being watched. We might think of the residents of the Real World or Big Brother houses: they are engaged in a perpetual performance for an invisible, omnipresent audience, giving new meaning to Shakespeare’s declaration that “all the world’s a stage” (or, at least, a red carpet or confessional room). These tabloid-darlings who stroll through public venues with the express purpose of being seen and documented are no longer a separate caste. All of our lives are increasingly resembling theirs.

Some have argued that social media has turned the average person into a “micro-celebrity,” to use Alice Marwick and danah boyd’s term. Let’s differentiate between celebrities who (1) embrace documentation; the Paris-Hilton-like famous-for-being-famous celebrity who exist to be documentable; and (2) those J.D. Salinger or Howard Hughes types that attempt to avoid the spotlight, (which, of course, makes documentation of them all the more valuable). The former is active while the latter are much more passive in their own documentation. We-micro-celebrities on Facebook have generally been active as own documenters. We choose what photos we post and de-tag ourselves from the non-flattering ones others post of us. The interesting change brought about by this new so-called frictionless sharing is that act of documenting has gone from being active to much more passive. And, at the same time, frictionless sharing has made this passive documentation more visible.

And, as such, we are increasingly aware that we are being documented, and thus increasingly calibrate our behaviors as such.

The issue at stake here is whether social media users are content to accept this newly-assigned role: the Paris-Hilton-like-micro-celebrity who is highly active, visible, but not allowed behind the camera? Are we willing to be the production while handing the role of producer to some paparazzi behind the digital bush?

Perhaps not entirely, as the reaction to Spotify has demonstrated. Spotify, a music-streaming service, can sync to Facebook and passively publish what you listen to on the live-ticker-like space at the top-right of the Facebook screen. When Spotify made it mandatory that all users sign-in via Facebook, users rebelled and more privacy options have been included. Nevertheless, the logic of frictionless sharing remains intact and is likely to expand into other sectors of the Web.

Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) | PJ Rey (@pjrey)[ READ MORE ]