Tag Archives: identity

October 10, 2013 | 4 Comments

Alondra Nelson on the Social Life of DNA


Alondra_1.5

Alondra Nelson

Ed. Note: Alondra Nelson (@alondra) is an interdisciplinary social scientist who writes about science, technology and inequality. Her forthcoming book is The Social Life of DNA. In this interview we did via Skype, she talks about the implications of the expanding use of genetic analysis, touching on subjects such as the early Black Panthers’ use of community-based genetic screening for sickle cell anemia, the criminal justice system, and popular TV shows like Finding Your Roots and Who Do You Think You Are.
(PS: This edition of EM comes with a soundtrack. We asked Dr. Nelson what music the topics she is researching brought to mind for her, and she followed up with an email noting all the songs contained in this post, which will also be in our playlist.)

(Slideshow image:  DNA CC BY MIKI Yoshihito)

I wanted to ask you first about what you’re working on these days. I think you have a new book coming out.

My book The Social Life of DNA (@sociallifeofdna) is coming out next year with Beacon Press. “The social life of DNA” is both a methodological phrase and also an analytical or theoretical claim. The methodological use, you won’t be surprised to hear, comes from Arjun Appadurai and his edited collection The Social Life of Things, which was about material culture – much more material than the genetics ancestry testing that I follow in my work. Appadurai’s mandate is that scholars can understand social meaning, in part, by following things around. That important insight was from the late 1980s. And, then more proximate to us, about six or seven years ago Sarah Franklin and Celia Roberts wrote a book called Born and Made, which was on preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. In that book, they discussed what they called “the social life of PGD;” as ethnographers, they were in some regards following tests around and following users around. People who had done the diagnostic tests, and the various stakeholders who were involved in the tests…

I think what’s different about the way that I’m using [the social life of things model] is that there’s an ephemerality to genetics; you can’t see or follow necessarily with your eye — the gene or the genome. You can’t even really follow the genetic ancestry tests, which are often inferences about forms of identity: racial identity, ethnic identity. Increasingly, they’re inferences about health factors and the like. It’s harder to follow these around.

Interpreting genetic ancestry tests

[Jeans by Quadron]

In my earlier ethnographic work, I was trying to understand what people got out of the tests, because you’re basically sending cheek cells to a company in a FedEx package, and you get back pieces of paper that give you inferences about who you are. In some instances you’re getting sets of genetic markers written down on these pieces of paper, but the untrained eye doesn’t really know what to make of all of those As, C, G, and Ts. At any rate, these lists of genetic markers or “certificates of ancestry” that one receives are the outcome of the process. These artifacts aren’t always interesting in and of themselves. Far more interesting, I found, was the social life of the test results. I came to follow the way that these genetic ancestry tests came to be used in ways that we couldn’t necessarily anticipate.Read More… Alondra Nelson on the Social Life of DNA

July 25, 2013 | 2 Comments

Ethnography and the Geography of Learning


Alex Cho

Alex Cho

Editor’s Note: Alexander Cho (@alexcho47) is a doctoral student in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Radio-TV-Film. In addition to conducting fieldwork for the Connected Learning team in Austin, he helps coordinate the team’s qualitative data management and analysis efforts. His chief research interests involve how LGBTQ youth use social media in their daily lives. We are excited that he is contributing to this month’s theme on ethnography in education with and exploration of the lived experience of economically disadvantaged and minority high school students who are attending a low-income high school in the midst of a wealthy suburb of Texas. His group’s ethnography brings home the importance of experiences of place – both school and neighborhood – to what it means to be “suburban poor,” a phenomenon that is quickly becoming a defining feature of American cities.

When our Austin research team was initially designing “The Digital Edge” as part of the Connected Learning Research Network, we wondered: what would be the best way for us to gain a picture that was as comprehensive as possible of the daily lives and digitally-mediated learning ecologies of youth—especially youth from under-resourced minority communities? We were intrigued, for example, by Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that showed that youth of color were more likely than their white counterparts to use mobile internet. This was provocative survey-based quantitative information, but it left us wondering – what was the quality and character of this sort of access? Far from being celebratory, could it be that this was in fact because their quality of home access was poor? This was just one of many questions that we felt quantitative data on youth digital media practices left unanswered. And if we were going to marry youth digital media practices with their potential for informal and connected learning, we were going to have to figure out how to understand and describe these practices in much greater detail.

We realized that two facets of traditional ethnographic method would be invaluable to us: long time on task and nuanced qualitative data gathering. We wanted to pick up the stories where the quantitative data left off. What were these youth actually doing, why, and how? How were their lives impacted, what happened when something changed (If a mother lost her job? Or a college scholarship fell through?). We wondered: Can we begin to paint a picture of the daily lives, rituals, opportunities and challenges that  youth on the “Digital Edge” experience in school? And what, if any, is the potential or affordance of digital technology for these young people in creating education environments that develop the skills and literacies necessary to thrive in their next steps, be they post-secondary education, vocationally-oriented aims, or other sorts of civic opportunities?

Austin map

From “The Geography of Opportunity in Austin and How It Is Changing,” Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

Read More… Ethnography and the Geography of Learning

June 30, 2013 | 6 Comments

Why Weird Twitter


tl;dr There’s no such thing as Weird Twitter

Will there be a mythology in the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic, or only in computer code?

And after the questing spirit had gone into overdrive during the early Space Decades, after the great Captains had appeared, there did grow up a mythos through which to view the deeds. This myth filter was necessary. The ship logs could not tell it rightly nor could any flatfooted prose. And the deeds were too bright to be viewed direct. They could only be sung by a bard gone blind from viewing suns that were suns.

— R.A. Lafferty, Space Chantey

Imagine that there is a community or culture of people that use social media–let’s focus on Twitter–in a particularly interesting or funny or outlandish way. Would you give it a name? Would you try to understand its size or its structure? Its history? Its purpose? How would you go about doing that?

Could it be studied by an anthropologist? A data scientist? An economist? A philosopher? A critic? A journalist? Could it ever understand itself?

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with a name: Weird Twitter.

Traces

This is a Google Trends query for the string “weird twitter”.

There have been two spikes in search popularity of “weird twitter” in the past year. The second spike corresponds to the publication of the brilliant “Weird Twitter: The Oral History“, by Herrman and Notopoulos, (BuzzFeed, April 2013). The authors explain:

Weird Twitter is vast and amorphous; what it looks like depends hugely on whom you follow, when you followed them, and what you find funny. … Some of its best writers have a few hundred followers, while others have tens of thousands. Styles of tweeting and types of jokes that originated among its small sects have bled out into the mainstream: Even to comedians, these are some of the funniest people on Twitter.

The first spike in October 2012, which marks the beginning of a consistent hum of search activity for “weird twitter”, coincides with this tweet by erstwhile pseudonymous Gawker writer Mebute Sese Seko.

At the time, Mebuto Sese Seko had almost 10,000 followers. This tweet triggered a series of events that lead to the wider adoption of the term.

Notably, Mebuto didn’t use the phrase “weird twitter” himself, and he linked to screenshots, not to web pages. The second image was of an anonymous Quora post that identified Weird Twitter as Twitter’s equivalent of 4chan’s /b/, or “Random”, subcommunity. The first image pictured a blog post I had written the previous summer.

Boundaried symbolic network community

A lot was going through my head when I wrote that blog post. In the Spring of 2012 I was reading Anthony Cohen‘s work on the symbolic construction of community. For Cohen, a community is constituted by its creation and use of symbols. Especially critical for the community’s identity are the symbols it uses to mark its boundary–members and non-members. I was also reading Caroline Haythornthwaithe‘s work on Social Networks and On-line Community, which emphasizes the topological structure of on-line social networks over symbolic meaning-making.

Schematic diagrams of Cohen and Haythornthwaithe's models of community.

(I did this preliminary work in on-line community detection in collaboration with a classmate, Dave Tomcik.)

At the same time I was following a few of what now would be called Weird Twitter accounts. It got me thinking: most work on virtual communities in cyberspace depends on technical infrastructure to provide the community boundaries. A mailing list is a community circumscribed by the technicalities of mailing list membership. A web service like Reddit supports multiple communities by supporting multiple distinct subreddits. But Twitter supports the growth of an ad hoc network structure without distinct watering holes demarcated in the user interface.

How could one identify a community within such a social network? I had a hunch that these networks, which would depend on the organic social connections between individuals and not the commercially built and sustained technical environment, would be special.

Schematic diagram of a boundaried symbolic networks and containment relations between its lexicons

What sort of digital signature would such a community show? According to my reading of Cohen, it would be involved in vigorous, complex dialog about, among other things, what symbols to use to represent itself. Since the digital environment is one in which symbols (e.g. words) are constantly flying around and being recorded, I thought this kind of community could be algorithmically detected. Which I find both thrilling and chilling. Eric Snowden’s recent whistleblowing has let America know its on-line activity is under state surveillance all the time, on top of the surveillance by commercial interests.

Chaotic resistance

Duchamp's FountainI believe we have an opportunity to use the wealth of data available now to really advance social science. But the reality is our research will, if successful, be used for political manipulation, commercial advertising, and other kinds of social manipulation and control. For me, this makes it imperative that I present my research to the public. If I work on methods for on-line community detection, I should try to make those insights usable by communities to understand themselves and evade detection if they desire.

Most rhetoric about evading on-line detection is about making less information available. That makes sense for the individual. But in aggregate, this cleans the data set, making it easier to find patterns that haven’t been self-censored away.

The biggest challenges to behavioral data scientists are not the availability of data, but data’s complexity. If data has a high Kolmogorov complexity and perhaps logical depth, it will be very difficult to extract patterns from.

In other words: you cannot master noise and chaos. It is the abyss staring back. Much as Dadaism was a tool for eroding the establishment and Situationists sought to challenge society through liberated, authentic expression, social media users can resist surveillance by making their interactions more wild, original and complex. Big Brother is watching, but he can be blinded by confusion fu.

We are always already watched over by machines of love and grace, and other kindsI thought I had found a nexus of this kind of noisy on-line behavior on Twitter. If what I was seeing was a community at all, it was a community of chaos and exploration. And it knew it. I had read the term “weird twitter” in @regisl‘s tweets in March 2012 when he was writing a lot of exploratory, reflective thoughts on Twitter culture. His and others insights into virtual community were profound, echoes of some of the earliest musings on virtual community, such as by Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow in “Crime and Puzzlement” (1990):

As a result of [the opening of Cyberspace], humanity is now undergoing the most profound transformation of its history. Coming into the Virtual World, we inhabit Information. Indeed, we become Information. Thought is embodied and the Flesh is made Word. It’s weird as hell.

I figured that holding a mirror up to the noise, crudely describing and interpreting practices that could not be interpreted or described, could only make the chaotic system more complex. At the same time, it would be a test of Cohen’s theory of the symbolic construction of communities in an on-line context: what happens when a community confronts a symbol, in this case the string “Weird Twitter”, that purports to mark its boundary?

Stuart Geiger had introduced me to M.C. Burton’s idea that “trolling is the new critique.” I was interested in trolling as an experimental method. A grown-up Internet kid who had done and been dished his share of trolling, I figured it was time to put those skills to good use: clumsy live field notes.

The offending post

According to the Encyclopedia Dramatica, this kind of trolling is a Philosopher Attack (“a type of flame war
where a terminally bored, yet well educated person or group ambush an innocent bystander or group, who were just minding their own business”). I posted in August. Nothing happened.

Then Jeb Lund tweeted about it.

Read More… Why Weird Twitter

June 28, 2013 | 3 Comments

“The @Adderall_RX Girl”: Pharmaceutical self-branding and identity in social media


headshot of Tazin Karim

Tazin Karim

Editor’s Note:  Tazin Karim (@PharmaCulture) is a medical anthropologist who studies pharmaceutical culture in the US and contexts of prescription stimulant use.  She is also active in the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. In this post for our Virtual Identity edition, Taz examines the ways in which people use Twitter to construct virtual identities centered on the brand name stimulant Adderall.

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In today’s digital world, choosing the right Twitter username is an important decision. It’s the first thing people notice and immediately signals to a potential follower who you are and why they should be interested in what you have to say. Although many stick to their given names, others use the opportunity to highlight their best qualities and brand themselves as an expert academic, baseball fanatic, or mother of the year. So when I found out there were over a hundred people on Twitter with the word “Adderall” in their username, it definitely got my attention. Of all the things to advertise, why would someone want to brand themselves around a mental health drug?

Adderall is a prescription stimulant designed to treat the symptoms of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) – a condition affecting 12% of children and 5% of adults in the U.S. It is also used non-medically by a number of people from middle aged mothers to professional football players looking to manage their high-stress lives. My research in particular looks at the popularity of Adderall use among college students and how it is influencing cultural conceptions of mental health and academic performance.

Like other prescription drugs, the consumption of Adderall has become an important part of identity construction for many Americans. For a person with ADHD, it acts to reify the sick role by offering a tangible solution to an illness that is difficult to biomedically conceptualize. Lay conceptions of ADHD extend beyond biomedicine and are intimately tied to academic culture (“my grades are poor because I have ADHD” or “his grades are poor, he must have ADHD”). As a result, Adderall consumption can also construct and facilitate non-medical identities like being a good student, son/daughter, athlete, or friend. As the prevalence of these pharmaceutical practices increases, Adderall use is becoming not only de-stigmatized in American culture, but a normalized, and even glamorized way to achieve these idealized identities – both off and online.Read More… “The @Adderall_RX Girl”: Pharmaceutical self-branding and identity in social media

June 16, 2013 | 4 Comments

Virtual identity: Subversive attention


Related posts:

Eddie Vedder, Damien Echols

Eddie Vedder embraces Damien Echols
(CC BY-SA CarolinaaPPaz)

While working on this month’s edition on virtual identity, I’ve been reading Life After Death, Damien Echols’ memoir of a ruptured life. At 18, Echols was convicted along with two other men of the murders of three children, allegedly in a Satanic ritual.

It wasn’t until 2011, after Echols had spent 18 years facing execution on Death Row, that he and the other two members of the “West Memphis Three” were released in the wake of new DNA evidence and critical media attention. The prosecution’s case had rested on coercive confessions and unfounded fears about the involvement of local heavy metal enthusiasts in Satanic orgies. Thus it seems that one horror — the murder of three innocent second graders — was followed by another, in which three teenagers were convicted of those murders based on little more than the crime of liking Metallica [1]. Unfortunately stories like Echols’ aren’t that surprising.

Identity gets intertwined with attention — how we see ourselves, and how others see (or don’t see) us.

In addition to its portrayal of grave problems in the American justice system, the book is striking for the layered and conflicting accounts of identity that come into play. Identity gets intertwined with attention — how we see ourselves, and how others see (or don’t see) us.

Echols first came to the attention of local authorities because of his outsider identity. He was a ‘freak’ because he wore black and t-shirts advertising metal bands. He explored a range of religious practices — Catholicism (which led him to change his name [2]), Wicca, mystical esoterica — in a community where evangelical fundamentalism held sway. His difference made him a magnet for rumors.

Read More… Virtual identity: Subversive attention