Jessa Lingel

Two articles out this week!

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:37:09 -0400

I have two articles out this week. The first is in a special issue of The Information Society on “the Death, Afterlife and Immortality of Bodies and Data.”

The second is from my summer internship with the Social Media Collective at MSR. The article is based on my work in the extreme body modification community, and talks about how issues of stigma and marginalization play out online.

Things I Like.: What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:19:50 -0400

Things I Like.: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? :

meagan-marie:

So here is the deal. I’m a person. I’m not just a ‘girl on the internet.’ I am not comfortable with you remarking on my breasts. I am not comfortable with you implying that you’d like to have sex with me. And I don’t appreciate you rating my looks against my girlfriends in candid photos. While I can’t stop these comments and questions from arising when they pop up on random blogs across the web, I can stand up and say that I won’t accept being talked to in this manner any more. I’m not simply going to ignore you; I’m going to call you out and tell you that you’re being inappropriate.

Librarian accolades

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:39:00 -0400

Librarian accolades

"The religion of information is another superstition, another distorting totalism, another..."

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:43:23 -0400

“The religion of information is another superstition, another distorting totalism, another counterfeit deliverance. In some ways the technology is transforming us into brilliant fools. In the riot of words and numbers in which we live so smartly and so articulately, in the comprehensively quantified existence in which we presume to believe that eventually we will know everything, in the expanding universe of prediction in which hope and longing will come to seem obsolete and merely ignorant, we are renouncing some of the primary human experiences. We are certainly renouncing the inexpressible. The other day I was listening to Mahler in my library. When I caught sight of the computer on the table, it looked small.”

- Leon Wieseltier

"I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime."

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:33:46 -0400

“I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.”

- Anne Carson

Thoughts on anonymity, ideology and the internets

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:21:27 -0400

Thoughts on anonymity, ideology and the internets

Punctuation goes hipster

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:38:47 -0500

Punctuation goes hipster

Photo

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:30:22 -0500

"You do not want me to reduce you from a drug store to a pill box."

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:45:47 -0500

“You do not want me to reduce you from a drug store to a pill box.”

- Texas aphorism

Technopatriarchy lives!

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:33:19 -0500

Technopatriarchy lives! :

It’s particularly interesting to read this so soon after hearing Alice Marwick give a talk about the myth of meritocracy from her upcoming book Status Update. Also, here’s the Gawker recap.

Via Mor Naaman

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:27:02 -0500

Via Mor Naaman

Tedium, thy name is converting references from APA to Chicago.

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:57:19 -0500

21 Aphorisms

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:53:39 -0500

21 Aphorisms:

The pleasures of recognizing the accidental are not to be confused with the pleasures of interpretation. Rather, they are a recognition of the point where power convulses itself.

The Honey Bear

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 02:32:03 -0500

The Honey Bear

A graveyard for footnotes

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 01:03:00 -0500

I am a very iterative writer, but although the process of drafting is very much a familiar one, sometimes it still makes me sad to surrender text that I can only begrudgingly admit doesn’t belong in the final version. Below are footnotes that I’ve stripped in the most recent round of revising the dissertation. I can’t attest to their grammatical correctness, topical relevance or conceptual rigor, nor am I interested in providing context. It would, I suppose, be fun to have a kind of poll where people vote for a footnote to be reinstated, but I think I’ll just leave them here as a testament to the long, long writing process that is my little life right now.

Having lived in three of New York City’s five burroughs, Queens has always seemed to me the most logically ordered. Addresses in Queens consist of four digits divided in half by a hyphen; on avenues, the first two digits correspond to the street to the West, on streets to the avenue to the north, such that every address effectively includes a cross street. Longtime Queens residents have sometimes looked at me in wide-eyed shock when I point this out, another indication of the ability of newcomers to spot the contours of infrastructure that are invisible to natives (Bowker & Star, 1999). Other hidden indicators of placement include the serial numbers on Central Park lamp posts that indicate one’s cross street. From a Latourian perspective, these lampposts are a sort of perennially underemployed tour guide.
Sassen’s (1990) work on global cities can be read in terms of technological fluency and affordances, where there are stark contrasts between the hyperprivileged, empowered financial workers and an ultra-poor underclass providing very different labor and technologies. This is an issue not only of what technologies enable these kinds of global trade (leading to the development of global cities) but also how access to these technologies constitutes its own kind of inculcating privilege. Influenced by Sassen, Caldeira’s (1996) work on fortified enclaves of Sao Paulo demonstrated ways in which technologies highlight efforts to ensure class separation, as in her example of side-by-side elevators segregated by use for mansion residents and home servants.
Noely’s comment was particularly striking to me in that as someone with access to a car and who enjoyed cycling, Noely was one of the most mobile people I interviewed. In fact, Noely made this comment about immobility while sitting 30 feet from her bike, a striking literalization of feeling physically trapped without access to digital maps, even as one has other tools of mobility.
On this topic, Baldassare (1992) has written on the construction of post-industrialization’s effects on suburban space from a sociological perspective, and Alba, Logan, Stults, Marzan and Zhang (1999) have written specifically on immigration to the suburbs.
One could draw conceptual connections between Simmel’s (1969) construct of the blasé and Benjamin (1999) on flânerie. Bull (2000) discussed at length the use of flânerie in urban studies in his text on the use of personal stereos in city life (p. 140-143), arguing that the term has largely been misused in studies of everyday urban life. I am less interested in the blasé as a result of city life and more as a process. What is the trajectory from stimulation to the blasé? Is it possible (or useful) to think of this process among the migrational as one of becoming familiar with one’s urban surroundings?

A feminist critique of the New York Tech Meetup

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 13:31:00 -0500

Without really meaning to, I found myself at this month’s New York Tech Meetup, tagging along with Aram Sinnreich after catching his guest lecture in Evan Korth’s undergrad class at NYU. The NYTM both is and is not my world - on the one hand, I’m an information scientist, I’ve worked as an information professional at a huge media company and as a researcher at (two parts of) Microsoft’s academic arm. Despite all that, I did not feel like I belonged at the Meetup. I was in fact somewhat repelled by the technopatriarchy (thanks to Aram for reminding me of the term) running rampant in that space.

I don’t want to slam the NYTM, which is only one facet of a much, much larger socio-industrial complex dominated by the same people who dominate pretty much everything else in Western society: straight, white dudes of privilege. But I do think it’s worth documenting how it felt to be a feminist and information activist at last night’s events. We can start with the obvious: Three women made it up on stage last night - one of the organizers, Bloomberg’s tech czar (who used a taped phone skit with her boss to announce an innovation contest for what to do with to the city’s pay phones) and an actual presenter showing off LUCI, which was the evening’s most socially-conscious presentation. The presentations were almost uncanny in their display of precisely the performances that are typically carved out as acceptable for women in an industry dominated by men - the maternal schoolmarm warning of appropriate and inappropriate Meetup behavior, the secretary catering to her boss’ idiosyncratic demands, and the pleading benefactress reminding a mostly white audience of our obligations to help people of color around the world. As an aside, I almost hesitate to sound so negative about LUCI, which undoubtedly has potential to help people whose everyday lives could be made safer and more environmentally friendly with a non-kerosene lamp. But from a critical theory perspective, I saw a slide show that depicted black bodies as always and only in need of white techno-assistance in an unapologetically paternalist, colonialist and capitalist (OF COURSE the only white person depicted in the slide presentation was Richard Branson - “no need to tell you who this is!” the presenter grinned) way, reminding me of Sara Ahmed’s work on the ways in which racism is reified collectively through an us-and-them alignment, which was absolutely taking place in the Skirball auditorium, not to mention Susan Sontag’s work on photography depicting suffering.

Beyond the low number of women on stage, which was not *at all* a surprise, is the fact that by my count, only two women were given the chance to ask questions - one of whom was me. If you’re wondering, my question went to the creators of hackerunion, as they seemed blithely unaware of what the term union signifies outside the technorati landscape. The absurdity of the audience laughing at the presenter’s response (“We’re not ignorant of the term, but I don’t think we’ll be doing any collective bargaining any time soon.”) even as we sat in the exact building where NYU graduate students have staged sit-ins as part of an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to organize was almost too much for me. I went to sleep that night imagining how different the event would have felt if it had been conducted by Occupy’s system of using hand signals to moderate group discussion.

But the gender disparities of the presenters and questioners isn’t the whole story - it was also fascinating to me that so many of the men on stage looked so much alike. Mostly white, mostly in their 20s and 30s, mostly dressed in a combination of American Apparel and Brooklyn Industries hipster chic. They cracked similar jokes about getting the attention of girls in clubs, about watching the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. They were similarly excited and nervous about talking to a room full of other dudes that they hoped would give them money to make products that were going to be of interest mostly to dudes. It’s not that I think most of these people are sexist jerks. If pressed, they’d probably see themselves as post-feminists who would genuinely love to see more gender equity in the industry and are only using references to things like hitting on women ironically. But when you’re one float in an overwhelmingly masculine parade, it’s worth asking about a sense of entitlement to the “post” part of post-feminism.

Throughout the event, Aram and Evan periodically looked at my face to gauge reactions to various products and comments and performances. Afterwards, Aram gently chided me for couching my response with “I don’t want to play the angry feminist card, but …” But what I was (and am) struggling to articulate is that my critical response to NYTM isn’t just about feminism - it’s about being an information activist, an anti-capitalist, a femme punk, a labor organizer. With so many threads of my activist outrage converging, being a feminist is almost besides the point.

I don’t want to write a post that is all critique and no action. What positive things came out of attending NYTM?

My favorite presentation was Hakim El Hattab’s open source presentation framework. I like that it’s an open source alternative to Power Point, but moreover, I liked that the presentation wasn’t cloaked in disingenuous or problematic language of community or social change. It is the only tool that I could realistically see myself using or being excited to pass on to a friend.
I have a renewed excitement for the course I teach in the ITI degree program at SCI on gender and technology. I have a genuinely fantastic time teaching undergraduates majoring in IT about gender construction, ethical design and issues of social justice as they relate to technology, but I now have a reinvigorated enthusiasm for the opportunity to contribute to an IT workforce that has at least some training in critical thinking about gender and technology.
In terms of agenda setting, while I’m not at all the first person to make this announcement, we need a serious overhaul of public education in order to shift norms of who is making technology for whom. Gender disparities were glaring at the NYTM, but they proliferate throughout the tech industry as well as education from primary school on. Girls aren’t afraid of programming because they’re bad at math, they’re afraid of programming because the spaces in which we build and legitimize technology are so often uncritical, uncomfortable and unwelcoming.

Bringing power to the people, literally. I spent most of...

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 19:11:00 -0500

Bringing power to the people, literally. I spent most of yesterday helping out at ABC No Rio, which involved using a Time’s Up bike generator to power a charge station. Basically, it was an environmentally friendly way to give people in the neighborhood who hadn’t had power a way to charge their phones - you can see the tangle of about ten different mobile cords on the table next to the bike. The other highlight was hitching a Time’s Up bike wagon to my Torker in order to bring a barbecue grill over the Williamsburg Bridge to ABC No Rio so that we could offer hamburgers to folks in the Lower East Side without power. I was actually inside a friend’s apartment (making soup by candlelight) when the power came back on in east Manhattan, which was almost a let down given how fun the energy had been on the street.

I love New York City like a person, so it’s been hard to see the city undergo so much stress. If you have the time, energy and resources, there’s lots more that needs to be done in the wake of Sandy. Feel free to check out ways to support the recovery efforts.

In Charm City for ASIST

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 17:20:17 -0400

I presented a paper at the Social Informatics symposium today, very thrilled that it won for best student paper. Sandy or no Sandy, I’m looking forward to connecting with LIS folk at the conference, plus getting to know Baltimore at least a little. Wish I’d brought my rainboots, though.

"I have to say that sometimes — rarely, but sometimes — it happens to me that I wake up in the..."

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 06:53:33 -0400

“I have to say that sometimes — rarely, but sometimes — it happens to me that I wake up in the morning, I look at myself in the mirror, I think that I’m very beautiful. You know, the sun is shining, I’m very, very happy. This day, it’s impossible that I go to my studio and I draw and I write something. This day, I go out, I buy myself a dress, I call my friends, I have some pina colada, I never create. If we were very happy we would be like cats — we would lick ourselves and then sleep and eat and probably we would be much happier. But we would be cats.”

- Marjane Satrapi

"In this context, May Day — and Occupy Oakland, more broadly — looks less like an expression of the..."

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 10:27:28 -0400

“In this context, May Day — and Occupy Oakland, more broadly — looks less like an expression of the city’s indomitable radical spirit than the last gasp of a protest movement overmatched by the encroaching forces of capitalism. Oakland is simply too geographically well positioned and financially underexploited not to absorb the creative, professional and entrepreneurial overflow from more expensive places like San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Berkeley. And as it continues to develop its own gritty-chic cachet, there’s a good chance Oakland might become more than just a default option for some of the Bay Area’s nouveau riche.”

- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/magazine/oakland-occupy-movement.html?smid=pl-share