There is something about the AI moment that reminds me a lot of when the internet was new. A lot of what was imagined and promised about the internet was never realized. But much was.
I’ve been reading Ellen Ullman’s memoirs - “Life in Code” and “Close to the Machine” - and her observations about proximity to technology feel relevant here. Being close to the machine means understanding its actual capabilities and limitations apart from the prevailing sales narratives.
In 1999, academic and theorist Judith Butler famously won an award for the worst academic sentence, raising good questions about how we read difficult texts, who gets to access academic ideas, and the role of academic and plain language in and around the academy:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Tiktok is not much better or worse than other major social platforms, I say. The primary arguments against TikTok, including data collection, algorithmic manipulation, potential foreign government access, addiction and influence on public opinion, apply with equal or greater force to American platforms. Meta has faced billions in fines for allowing privacy violations, enabled documented election interference, and its algorithms have been linked to mental health harms and the amplification of extremist content globally, including perpetuating a genocide in Myanmar.
If you spend time around cycling and pedestrian advocates, the debate between bans and regulations is familiar territory. When I got deep into road biking, where I learned to ride long distance through a red state with almost no bike infrastructure outside tight urban and exurban areas, one of the best things I did was take road classes through the League of American Bicyclists. You learn the rules of the road from a cyclist’s perspective and practice skills like riding with car traffic under expert guidance, including how to change a flat on the side of the road in the height of summer, gritty with sweat and road grime.
Reading this blog post by a political scientist explaining the problem with our fractured information landscape, and how calls for more information and media literacy are not likely solutions:
“In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short.
I suspect these three trends are connected: Women reportedly use AI at significantly lower rates than men—25 percent lower on average—in part because they’re more concerned about ethics, including privacy, consent and intellectual property. At the same time, countries with more positive social media experiences tend to be more open to AI, while Americans’ distrust is shaped by years of watching tech platforms erode trust. Meanwhile, one of the largest social platforms has turned its AI chatbot into a harassment tool—generating roughly one nonconsensual sexualized deepfake image per minute, disproportionately targeting women and girls.
I just completed my first attempt at coding using AI, in this case having Claude assist me with putting together a simple client-side OPML parser using Dave Winer’s Feedland service.
Winer’s original script is pretty slick, and includes a list of all my feeds with titles, URLs, and categories; click-to-expand functionality to see the 5 most recent posts from each feed; clickable post titles that open articles in new tabs; sort options (by title or by update); and automatic updates when I change my FeedLand subscriptions.
“… every text is connected to other texts by citations, quotations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation, and the like. Every text is in a dialogical relationship with other texts. In sum, intertextuality describes the relationships that exist between and among texts. What follows is a discussion of the strategies of intertextuality.”
In recent history I stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse the social platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on my private IG and here.
What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life — I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great.
While I’m cleaning up the cruft around my social presence, I’m finding more references to the heyday of blogging that explain how people organized online (Web 1.0) before the era of platforms (Web 2.0). One is this interview with Jill Filipovic, my one-time co-blogger and comrade at Feministe, with the folks at LGM who interviewed me on the subject a few years ago. Jill and I differed (and still do) on the meat of many issues, but have a lot of our thinking in common about how to handle disagreement and advance our ideas in common (and risky!
There are certain pieces of writing I return to when thinking about our relationship with technology. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” published in 1985, is one of them. Despite being nearly forty years old, it continues to offer insights into how we understand technology’s role in our lives.
Haraway used the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, as a metaphor for understanding identity in an increasingly technological and scientific world.
Purdue Exponent students distributed 3,000 copies of a special “solidarity edition” newspaper in Bloomington after IU spanked their student paper for insubordinance, ending the IDS print edition and firing their director. The media landscape in Indiana is bleak, generally, after years of disinvestment, so student reporters fill a social and political gap that the free market left behind. Given those conditions, the wider community depends on student media, much like public radio, to fill the information gaps.
As communications professionals in higher education, we work for institutions built on the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, yet many of us feel uncertain about how to thoughtfully integrate one of the most significant technological advances of our time: artificial intelligence. I offer some thoughts here.
While institutions are backing away from making position statements, news outlets are making lengthy statements of intent. This one from Madison is interesting because it also acknowledges that a portion of their audience may be intentionally avoiding news about the White House. This is a traditional trust-building strategy applied in a new way: explaining how the news outlet plans to allocate their resources in an era of “flooding the zone.”
Posting about my latest quilt for posterity. This is a “wonky star” quilt using 10” precuts, measuring about 60 X 70”. I completed the sides last night and will hand quilt all of it with a mix of big stitch quilting.
Been playing with micro.blog for a bit now and very much recommend the experience. The interface is friendly and the team behind the app is ultra responsive. My fav features are Bookshelves - and the ability to push new posts to Bluesky and Mastodon.
In other news, I got a new bike.
It’s soup season - and I’m a newly-minted member of the bean club. This is more or less my favorite lentil soup recipe, except I deglaze the pot with a healthy dose of dry red wine before adding the lentils and stock, and I stew it with a big sachet of fresh thyme.
This butchery on the east side is owner-operated, and features meats only from local, humane farms. In addition, they are a “whole animal” butcher, in that they buy and break down a whole animal at a time, thus offering an array of extremely fresh products from sausage to steaks to specialty cuts (picanha, anyone?). One of the owners was working the counter this Saturday when we came in and greeted us with some suggestions for the day.
Last week I joined an old friend on a road trip through Wisconsin. We saw a folk show, stayed at a vintage motel, and camped in the crook of Green Bay.
In our early years, we were both shit-kicking dirtbags, rebels, people who thumbed our noses at convention and were told (and fully believed) we wouldn’t amount to much. Today, we’re regular middle-aged ladies secure in our work, home and ambition, figuring out what the rest of our lives will look like.
This has a bad headline, but the gist is that AI is already beginning to be used to power racketeering and ransom business models against vulnerable human enterprises. The net effect is a general erosion of the trustworthiness of written communication, especially online, as the same tools we use to perform our work and extend our social lives are increasingly used to scam us.
A quick read by a singular voice, heavy on descriptions of the New York art and music scene of the 90s. Like many punk memoirs, it’s a tribute to the many names that made the movement and a memorial for a city that no longer exists. Gordon’s voice is kind and bold, curious and smart. Her descriptions of growing up in LA and coming of age in New York are painterly and poetic.
The Bookshelves feature of Micro.blog is easily my favorite of this platform. It sits right at the intersection of medium and function: as a reader I want to keep track of things, but I don’t need so much infrastructure around it. Just some checkmarks and a place to dash off my immediate thoughts.
I’ve been keeping my virtual bookshelf up to date while pushing myself to take on a bunch of literary fiction, but I’m tired, reader.
The internet says Joann fabrics is going to declare bankruptcy, putting a huge market of individual crafters without access to in-person retail craft spaces into a tailspin. It’s likely they will ask their creditors to restructure their debt, making them able to keep some stores open. The whole market relies heavily on in-person shopping (it’s a textural and sensory shopping experience, which is the point!) and hasn’t pivoted well to e-commerce.
I’ve been waiting for this one because it’s a story I know well. It is an impeccably reported book covering how young women navigated a compromised, stigmatized, coercive landscape around unplanned pregnancies in the late 20th century. Sisson is a comprehensive writer whose reporting is deeply empathetic, based on her personal experience as an activist and academic working in reproductive justice alongside extensive research. She discusses the history of the adoption movement at length, connecting it to other institutional family separation movements, and considers it alongside the choice to abort unplanned pregnancies and against the decision to parent anyway, often in a deeply compromised social and political climate.
I finished my latest quilt on my birthday, a Halloween quilt made from precuts (no pattern) that I started in 2021? 2022? I don’t know how old it is. It’s been languishing.
I don’t love shoving a huge quilt through my lil sewing machine, so I still hand quilt these puppies using 6-strand embroidery floss. It’s hard on my hands but gives the final quilt so much texture and weight.
My delightful book club pulled this YA graphic novel out of the 2023-24 “best of” lists and loved it. There is a remarkable amount of information on each page - truly, you could build a dynamic reading curriculum off of each section - between the written and visual communication. A triumphant example of quality science writing, a great gift book, suitable for just about any audience over the age of ten.
This story spun up yesterday with broad outcry from academics, and with good reason. Institutions needs to define and clarify their relationship to tech in order to assuage ongoing concerns about monetization in a fast-moving landscape. gizmodo.com/universit…
I just spent a pile of money on books, with the goal of reading for pleasure every day, and with the intention of sprinkling some light stuff around my generally serious reading preferences. While I usually read like a dad, heavy on the serious memoirs and book-length nonfiction explainers, I’m trying to take on some lighter reads because mom needs a little sugar with her medicine.
So far, I’m doing an okay job of keeping track of my reading habits here, which is why I ponied up for a paid membership to this site at all: flotisserie.