Thursday, January 18, 2018

Signs of Latency

One of the ideas I've been playing with over the last few years is the idea of latency in the networked age.  As we relate, communicate and move through increasingly connected action along digitally augmented lives, clouds of latent social relations, latent geographies and, overall, latent belonging develop around us.  Many of these latent clouds form around technologies of surveillance, but even these suggest potential relatedness--a latency from below.

We've already written about some of these in Networked Anthropology (with my co-author, Matt Durington).  For example, here's a graph of tags linked to "Busan":






















That is, tagging one's photo "Busan" links that photo to related tags, some ("water," "ocean," "Haeundae") are strongly connected, while other ("Buddhist," "temple") are much more weakly associated.  Nevertheless, images tagged with "Buddhism" form a latency around images, places and the people posting about them, one that could coalesce into new meanings and relationships.  

This is the same for people.  Here is a graph of a Facebook page, "부산맛집여기," that depicts a few  posts about food in Busan, followed by a complex skein of commentary and "likes" from other Facebook users.












Relatively few of the page users are actually communicating with each other.  Instead, they comment on the central posts.  This accounts for the vague, star-shape of the graph.  Still, if we zoom in












on the graph, we see not only weak connections (largely through 'likes' generated by comments), but also latent relations, missed opportunities for communication that--through the structure and permanence of Facebook--could be exploited at a later date. 

In the United States (and other countries), Twitter contracted with Foursquare to provide gelocations for tweets. So, tweeting from my home, I can choose from a number of locations within a few miles of my domicile:

Even if I don't choose one of these alternative pins, these form a cloud of related locations, a weakly defined zone of geolocation.

Finally, place itself is rendered latent.  Here's a photo I took of Sejong-no in Seoul in 2015:


 













And here's an "imagequilt" of pictures generated by uploading this picture to Google for an image search:












This suggests a locative latency--a belongingness--that extends from the digital life of a photograph. 

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

National Science Fiction Day --- 1/2/2018

On this day devoted (by some) to a genre fiction, my thoughts have turned to dystopia and utopia--these are not, however, co-extensive with SF, but see Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future for a utopia-centric understanding of the field.  When I look around at events in the U.S., it is hard not to center on the imminence of dystopia: state terror, totalitarianism, white supremacy.  But, I am reminded of Ernst Bloch: even in the midst of dystopian actualization, there are utopian potentialities, and the challenge for my scholarship and teaching in the new year is to mine the present for these tendrils of utopia, and to utilize those for an everyday practice of SF that looks to the present as the source of a more just, more equitable society that allows people to pursue their lives without structural inequalities and environmental injustice.