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Archive: 2013/07/my-digital-dualist-fallacy/
Is there a difference between stuff that takes place on the Internet and stuff that takes place away from it? Now, quite clearly and from the outset, that question is problematic. First, it assumes that the Internet is a thing, and a singular thing at that. That’s neither particularly sensible nor particularly helpful. We use ‘Internet’ to mean many things. It is hardware, including servers, routers and browsers, and the various devices we use to access this hardware. It is software, including the web programming languages and the tools and services built using those languages. It is a web of tangled social, cognitive and behavioural complexities that, in different ways, are related to the hardware and the software that has become available. It is the people who use this technology to organise, communicate, describe, deny and delineate each other. Second, it implies that the Internet can be defined and bound in some way, so that one can say that the Internet is over here but not over there. Such a notion might have made sense when the Internet was only accessed via a fixed terminal and a dial-up modem, and when accessing it (which means... accessing the web pages stored on the servers elsewhere connected to the communication network?) was tied to a fixed location and a (modem-defined) timeframe, but it’s an idea that is now debunked[1]. At least, that’s the thesis proposed by Nathan Jurgenson and his colleagues at the Cyborgology blog. Starting in 2009 Jurgenson began to promote a concept he called augmented reality. Jurgenson holds it up as an alternative to another coinage, the “fallacy” of ‘digital dualism’. Digital dualism is, effectively, the idea that the Internet exists in one place but not another, or in one space or not another, or that it constitutes a “reality” distinct from our prevailing reality – what we might call the offline, physical or natural world. In Jurgenson’s own words: “Digital dualists believe that the digital world is ‘virtual’ and the physical world ‘real.’” Instead, he wants: “to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.” In a later post, Jurgenson moves away from the polarity of this view and describes different categories of dualism/augmentation: Strong Digital Dualism: The digital and the physical are different realities, have different properties, and do not interact. Mild Digital Dualism: The digital and physical are different realities, have different properties, and do interact. Mild Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality, have different properties, and interact. Strong Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality and have the same properties. [2] The two strong positions are ‘ideal types’ (in that no one seriously could possibly think those things could they?) and are used to develop the conceptual framework, whereas the real thinking, and the debate, should take place between the two mild positions. And a debate has been taking place, energetically and at some length here, here, here, here and here, for example. Grappling with the idea of these two realities (or domains, or spaces, or whatever) is clearly difficult, important and interesting. I agree, absolutely, that academia and techno-punditry alike have to sort out the various assumptions, misperceptions, wonkery, spin and damn inanity that characterizes much of our thinking about the supposed offline/online dualism. Defining a dualist/augmented binary is an interesting place to start the discussion. But since first reading Jurgenson’s paper [PDF] last year and, more recently, trying to work out whether the concept is helpful for a paper I’m writing, I’ve decided that it might be, but only in very a limited way, because I think that a) it’s inherently contradictory and b) it doesn’t tell us very much anyhow. To start with, invoking a notion of reality, be it digital or physical, is unhelpful. Most of our formulations of ‘reality‘ incorporate some degree of subjectivity, so to use reality as unifying coda on which to hang the dualist/augmented binary simply doesn’t work very well. We could talk about spaces, spheres or domains perhaps, but I guess that Jurgenson uses ‘reality’ because he wants to evoke the ontological and epistemological processes involved in generating a perception of reality. Perceptions of reality are different from the theoretical ideal of reality though. It makes sense to talk of reality when one is postulating a unified experience shared by all humans beings, augmented or not, but I don’t think it makes sense to use reality to define one half of a binary in which the other half has to deny unification. Sherry Turkle – who is “probably the longest-standing, most outspoken proponent of what we at Cyborgology call digital dualism” – doesn’t believe that logging into Facebook initiates some sort of trans-dimensional migration between realities, presumably, and I can’t believe that Jurgenson is accusing her of that. So how is he defining reality? Clearly reality can be split, at least in two, because this is the only difference between his two mild positions. He talks about the digital (virtual) and the physical as though they were the realities? But are we limited to digital and physical realities? Are there broadcast realities? Print realities? How far can you break down reality into realities before the idea loses logical and descriptive coherence? I would hazard a guess that this is not how most people are thinking about their online/offline experiences. What social phenomenon, then, does digital dualism/augmentation elucidate? The most frequently accused ‘digital dualist’ is Sherry Turkle. Examples of digital dualism are found in... her writing. So this new term represents a theory that describes the way that some other theorists describe their theories about this thing we call the Internet. Does it illuminate what people out there, in the world, think or feel when they use their Internet hardware? Does is explain collective or individual behaviour? Does it offer any insight into social processes or ideologies? Maybe it does. I have no idea. There are very few attempts to test this idea in the real world – or the augmented world. I’ve found just that one paper by Jurgenson, dated January 2012, in which he relates the idea to the Arab Spring, Occupy movement and UK riots, because all are “massive gatherings of digitally-connected individuals in physical space; and they have recently become the new normal.” I’m not certain that they have become the new normal, at least not in any numerical or mass-experiential sense, and I’m not certain either that these examples support Jurgenson’s argument that protestors and rioters are creating an augmented reality by tweeting while they protest. Partly it’s the problematic ‘reality’. I have no idea what ‘reality’ looks or feels like for someone with a smartphone in Tahir Square. But also it’s because I’ve struggled to find rigorous attempts to test this theory against the technologies, the subjects, the behaviours or the consciousness it is meant to describe. Of course, this is mainly a complaint about methodology. Jurgenson and his bloggers at Cyborgology are theorizing the web, working out ways to think about these technologies that they find helpful. Inevitably, and necessarily, there is an element of abstraction in this process. To talk of ‘digital dualism’ and ‘augmented reality’ is to abstract heinously complex social, liminal and subliminal process into a model that helps one make sense of them. I take a somewhat different perspective. Put simply, both terms are useful only inasmuch as they are metaphors that clarify the social experience. Metaphors are frequently used in the social sciences to help theorists order their thoughts about the social world. There’s absolutely no problem with that, as long as the metaphors have an explanatory power that relates directly to the social phenomenon being described. But, as Mark Erickson articulates in this paper about sociology’s love affair with the (social) network metaphor, it becomes problematic if a) the metaphor doesn’t relate very well (and doesn’t describe) the social phenomenon of interest, or b) the sociologist forgets that he or she is working with a metaphor and starts to study it as though it were the social phenomenon of interest. Unpicking the descriptive and the relational aspects of metaphors in sociology makes my head hurt, and I’m not sure I’ve decided how well the augmented reality idea works in the (limited) theoretical scope for which it is appropriate. I suspect that Jurgenson would debate vigorously even that this concept is metaphorical, perhaps arguing that our experience is augmented by Internet technologies in actual, real, physical and observable ways. And I’d agree with him, I’m not denying that smartphones exist and that people carry them everywhere, using them to guide, shape and augment their everyday experience. But I can’t escape the doubt that there are metaphors at work here, and that they’re being applied incorrectly. I think it’s the dualist/augmented binary that’s both metaphorical and problematic – the idea that reality can be broken down into an online and offline, so that dualism and augmentation can exist as separate states other than in a framework we employ to think about the world. So perhaps it’s best to put that worry aside for the moment and focus on the other test of a metaphor’s power: how well does it describe or illuminate social processes and shared consciousness relating to the phenomenon under inquiry? In short, what is it’s descriptive potential? I think that depends on two things: the extent to which the metaphor approximates what we observe in the social world, and the internal consistency of the metaphor. One criticism of augmented reality is that there are people, seemingly quite a lot of them, who do perceive that there is a difference between being online and being offline. One of Jurgenson’s colleagues makes exactly this point, before dismissing those people as being wrong. Nick Carr argues that, actually, whether they are wrong or right, the interesting question is why they should think or feel that the online and offline are separate domains. I agree with him on this point, partly because I think it is the interesting question, but also because trying to determine whether or not someone is wrong about reality, depends on identifying the correct version of reality, and, as discussed, I think that’s something so subjective it is essentially unknowable. Having said that, Jurgenson’s original point – namely that Internet technologies have penetrated so far into all aspects of our lives, it makes very little sense to talk about the Internet (the digital) as though it were some separate space – is something I can accept... with caveats. If you are a Western postgraduate student theorising the Internet then, yes, absolutely, it must be pretty hard to imagine a corner of your existence untouched by the digital. We bought my 87 year old grandmother an iPad but, more often than not, she cannot remember how to turn it on, and mostly does not want to. She will go days, often weeks, without any physical interaction with an Internet technology. I suppose that the Daily Mail might mention (angrily) something it read on Twitter, but for my grandmother, that domain is mostly unknown and, in many ways, quite separate. I think this is where augmented reality starts to run into real trouble. If it is meant to say, simply, that is wrong to talk of separate realities, because all experience is augmented, by the Internet yes, but also by all other technologies and all media, and always has been, then, well, fair enough, but so what? We already have a plethora of terms and frameworks to describe this phenomenon and invoking a notion of augmented reality doesn’t seem to add anything to what has been said. However, I think it's important to look, once again, at the two mild positions – the two positions which someone might reasonably take. Mild Digital Dualism: The digital and physical are different realities, have different properties, and do interact. Mild Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality, have different properties, and interact. The digital dualist believes that the digital and the physical are different realities. She is wrong. The augmented realist believes that they are one reality, but with different properties. He is right. So what is the difference between realities and properties? This is the only distinction between the two positions, it is fundamental to the binary, and yet it is unexplained. Clearly realities are composed of properties, but not defined by them, because it’s possible for there to be one reality incorporating competing properties. Elsewhere, Jurgenson writes that “atoms and bits have different properties, influence each other, and together create reality”. I’m not clear if atoms and bits are realities, proxies for realities, properties (with their own properties) or intermediaries between realities and properties. Attempts elsewhere to define the properties of atoms and bits don’t resolve this confusion for me, and don’t seem to pay much heed to the respective disciplines from which the terms atoms and bits are borrowed. Can a reality exist independently from the properties that create it? Even the single augmented reality seems to include other realities that are, in some way at least, distinct from each other. Jurgenson continues “the two [offline and online] are mutually constitutive, just not fully mutually constitutive”. I’m afraid I can’t make sense of this formulation, despite all my italics. Ultimately, I think all the augmented realist does is substitute the idea of properties for the idea of realities. In essence, then, he remains inherently dualist: there is still something different between the digital and the physical – they have different properties. Essentially, this is the argument Bankford makes in the post linked to earlier. Another cyborgologist, Whitney Erin Boesel, is troubled by what properties might mean in this follow up post, where she argues it’s necessary to start defining them. I absolutely agree with this. Looking for, defining, exploring and trying to explain the properties that make the digital different from the physical is exactly what I think we (?) should be doing. But she doesn’t think that this represents a problem for the binary logic upon which the critique of the digital dualist and the birth of augmented realist is founded. I’m afraid, I disagree. It’s illogical, imprecise and incorrect to dismiss the “fallacy” of digital dualism in favour of augmented reality if that new term recognises a distinction – a dualism – between digital properties and physical properties. This difference is semantic only, and I cannot resolve the logic behind the semantics. So I’m happy to call myself a digital dualist and I’m going to continue to work on the assumption that there might be something different between the digital and physical. Otherwise, there’s not much point in being a digital communication practitioner or, indeed, a digital-anything practitioner. I don’t think that there are separate realities defined by being digital or physical, I’m happy to proceed as though there was just one reality – or no reality. I think that digital and physical experiences both contribute to any formulation or perception of reality, but I don’t know whether there are properties that are only digital, and properties that are only physical, or if these two property-types work differently or similarly during this interaction. I think it is trite to reduce these two states to atoms and bits and to proceed as though these two terms – one borrowed from the natural sciences, the other from computer science – define inherent properties that explain how a social interaction works[3]. Which leaves me where? Wondering, I guess, what these properties might be and where I might find them. A fallacy perhaps, but I can live with it. [1] Actually, it didn’t make much sense even when the Internet was a tied to dial-up modems and computers required desks. Accessing the Internet never meant dialling up and connecting to the network, not in any popular parlance anyway. It meant accessing the information held on the servers attached to the network and that information could exist in other places, in other forms, could be downloaded and re-uploaded, shared, debated, further mediated, expanded or destroyed. In short, the content accessed, the software, the stuff of web pages, was never locked into some online space, for the very obvious reason that it relied (and it still relies) on people to put it there in the first place. [2] In Jurgenson’s framework, these four categories are distinct. It’s not possible to slip from the strong digital dualist category into the mild because there is another binary distinction in the way – a strong dualist believes that the digital and the physical ‘do not interact’; a mild dualist believes that they do. But to reach this framework of four categories, the original binary has been split apart, and I’m not clear with these four categories are therefore fixed or somewhat arbitrary. Why not pursue the logic further and create eight categories, or 16, or, inevitably, a spectrum of belief about dualist/augmented thinking? One could play with the combination of beliefs, or the strengths of interaction or, indeed, cite another parameter – time, perhaps – to distinguish between categories. [3] A practice which, I think, involves too much assumption and reduces very complex and specific concepts into board-stroke explanations for how the digital and physical might be different.
Refining a research question...
I thought it might be useful if I were to walk through some of the steps I take when trying to refine a broad area of research interest into a question I can hope to answer. Almost all research projects go through this process, which basically involves taking the big idea and then looking for either specific examples on which to test it, or more refined, narrower questions – that is, questions you can answer without several years of effort. I’ve also uploaded to the admin doc section a presentation I used to give to this course that covers much of the same ground (only with some pictures added). As a starting point, I’ve taken the very vague idea that I uploaded to the discussion boards as an example. It was: "Another idea occurred to me while I was playing around with Apple's new OSX – Yosemite – today, which moves the desktop os even closer to the mobile one. Given Apple's dominance within the creative industries (this doesn't need to be an Apple specific question, mind... the same Q could be applied to Micrsoft and other industries...) I was wondering about the influence that Apple's design and implementation choices have on the way you work... the design choices you make, for instance. Is it simply the case of Apple leading (or, indeed, following) prevailing trends in the design industry, or is there something more restrictive (even deterministic) about working predominantly in Apple's OS environment. It seems to me that a great deal of web design is following the flatter iconography, lighter typography and simpler colour palettes that Apple introduced in OS7. Is there a similar effect across different design cultures? Apple has a truly global reach – so is there an homogenisation-type effect or something more complex? I guess, in many ways, this is a pretty standard McLuhan vs Williams/ (technological determinism/social constructionism) type question. Still, I bet you could track OS releases and follow on trends pretty easily." First, I want to know that this question is appropriate for this course. So what are the major themes. This seems pretty straightforward. Apple is a global corporation, the reach of its operating systems and design culture is equally global. I seem to be asking a question about standardisation or homogenisation – key terms in globalisation theory, so that’s all good. Additionally, there’s a question about technological determinism (can Apple’s OS really dictate design culture)… and that’s a key concept in media studies. Furthermore, there’s the relationship between technology, media and culture that is so central to communication science and our concept of the mediasphere. So, I’m pretty happy that there’s plenty of scope for exploring course-related questions; and it looks like many of the course readings will are relevant here, so I’m looking good for a literature review. Box ticked. Next step. At the moment, the question is clearly really broad. My subject is quite specific: I’m interesting in Apple operating systems, and I can refine that further easily – mobile or desktop, or the redesign in iOS7. However, the outcome (the result, the effect) isn’t very clear at all. Am I interested in the effect that the OS has on designers and their professional practice, or on design culture more widely? How far do I want to stretch the effect? Do I think an Apple OS can influence design awards, art, popular culture? How do I think this would work? What are the mechanism involved. It’s best to keep things simple (and relatively unambitious) at this stage. Perhaps I can imagine a causal chain that involves changing design practices, wider adoption across the web, knock on effects in physical design and, finally, changes in prevailing perceptions of form, function and aesthetic… but it sounds pretty speculative, and I can’t see how I’d ever prove it. So, I’ll focus on just the first step: professional design practices. Better still, I’ll look at web design and try to make an argument that web design can be used as a barometer of emerging design practice (NB this may not be true… it’s an example). So already, I reckon, I've refined this question quite considerably. It now looks something like this: Does Apple’s mobile operating system have a standardisation effect on the professional practice of designers? Actually, scrub that, we can refine it further while keeping the major themes of the question. Did Apple’s upgrade to it's mobile operating system iOS7 have a standardisation effect on the professional practice of Australian web designers? Why Australian designers? Well, it should be easier for me to find data on Australian web designers, easier to access resources, it’s more relevant to my local professional practice and so on… So, final step: where should I look for answers? This depends, in part, on the sort of research I think is most appropriate (and this will depend, in part, on personal preference). I could interview Australian designers for one thing, and ask them how they think their practice responds to Apple’s design choices. Sadly, though, I can’t do that for this course, because interviews, surveys and focus groups tend to involve human beings, and I require ethics approval if I’m going to talk to human beings (NB ethics approval takes forever, making it wholly impractical for a small-scale, short-term research project like this). If I’m super keen on empirical methods (more of this in week 6) I need to find data (evidence/observations) somewhere. It’d be best if it were freely available and I could search for it and access it easily. A couple of ideas spring to mind. Perhaps I could run some search queries on a design marketplace like Behance or Themeforest (for Wordpress). It’d be fairly straightforward to restrict my search to local designers, and I could compare design trends before and after the developer release of iOS7. Or perhaps I could look at online design awards, or blogs of best design practice… it seems like there should be plenty of options. Or, and this is a bit more complex methodologically, I could choose just one major Australian redesign following the iOS7 release. A large company’s website, perhaps, or the output of a prominent design firm… and I could explore their designs in detail, bringing in some theoretical tools – discourse analysis, semiotics – to draw out the more complex relationships with iOS7 and wider design practice. With that decided, I could update my question to reflect my choice of method. What do the 2014 Behance designs of Australian web designers suggest about a possible standardisation effect of Apple’s iOS7 mobile operating system? And that looks pretty good to go to me.
The mediasphere is the mediated space where producers, audiences, governments and cultural forces come together to create meaning. I call it a space but it’s not a space in the sense that it has geographical dimensions or any sort of physical existence. We could just as easily describe it as a set of relationships or of processes. The problem is that each of these terms misses out on a dimension that, on reflection, seems quite important. This makes the mediasphere difficult to pin down. So Jeff Lewis recommends that we picture it as a series of interactions based around the text we are interested in. A text can be a written text, a video, or a piece of art, or design, a building… really any sign or symbol to which we attach meaning.
Meaning is equally hard to pin down as a concept. It has a long and evolutionary history in cultural studies, sociology, literature and philosophy. It can’t be summarised in a single sentence… but it is integral to the consciousness part of Steger’s globalisation definition. If we want to ask why human beings do the things we do, then usually we have to engage with meaning on some level. I'd say that meaning is the individual-subjective reason for social action. It’s the beliefs we hold that make us think something is the right way to act, or the right answer to a question, or the way the world really is. The confusing thing for sociologists is that even though we are all capable of thinking for ourselves and reaching our own conclusions based on what we have seen and heard – we all have individual subjectivity – we often all decide on the same answer and act in the same way. Why is this? It’s a pretty obvious thing to say, but one answer is that we can share meaning through communication. Once in communication theory that simply meant the transmission of messages (the Shannon & Weaver model), but since then plenty of authors have argued convincingly that the process is a lot more complex than that. We interact with a text – we reach our own conclusions about meaning based on our past experiences, our education, our cultural influences, government/state pressure, advertising… the list goes on. The mediasphere is the place where all these influences come together. Technology is an important consideration in the mediasphere because so many of our communication practices are dependent on technology. In fact, try and think of any type of communication that does not involve technology – some people would argue that even language is a type of technology (it depends on your definition). Certainly, though, if you want to communicate to more than one person at a time, you need a technology to help you. Do all technologies work the same? Well, we’ll think about that a lot in coming weeks – and you probably think about this question all the time anyway right? What’s the best tool for the job? Will a TV campaign or social media work best for the message you’ve got? How are you going to use JQuery on your webpage to increase sales of a particular product? Implicitly, these are questions about technology and meaning making (usually convincing someone that they want to buy a product… so that they then act to buy the product). I’ll spend some time on the forum trying to help with examples of the mediasphere in action – and try to make suggestions about how you can use the concept. If you find it confusing, though, say so. If you don’t think it’s helpful, say why, and we can discuss. On the plus side, in these opening two weeks, we’ve dealt with the most difficult concepts (the hardest to pin down, anyway). A lot of the discussion in the coming weeks extends and clarifies these concepts. Week three, for instance, is devoted to the globalisation effects of Internet technologies – especially the role that Internet communication technologies play in the mediasphere. Further reading Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso Hall, S. (1980). Coding and encoding in the television discourse. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies (pp. 197-208). London: Hutchinson. Lewis, J. (2005) Language Wars: the Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence London: Pluto Press
Week one... an introduction to globalisation theory
In the first week, our aims are pretty modest. The first thing we want to achieve is to get everyone registered and using Blackboard properly. We’re not there yet (12 introductions so far from a potential 20) but that’s not so bad… these things take time. Still, if you’re signed up and planning to continue the course, I’d urge you to get reading and to contribute to the forums. That’s where most of the action will take place, apart from these weekly blog posts and the occasional media link. In these posts I aim to summarise what I think are the main points from the week’s readings, make some observations about the topics under discussion and, basically, try and justify why I wrote the course the way I did… what makes this topic important in week one, why is this information useful to you, and why are these readings the best place to start? And I set myself a word limit of 600 words because, frankly, if you’ve read properly, you’ve read enough and have better things to do with the remainder of your weekend. These are very much summary posts; for a more thorough discussion, use the forum. The recommended readings in week one are really important because they provide the background context against which the course is set. Once you are comfortable with the general idea of globalisation*, we can move on and explore what it might look like, and how it might work, in detail and in ways that are more relevant to your media practice. Read Steger first. It’s far easier and includes an excellent working definition for globalisation: “Globalisation refers to the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space.” It may not be the most eloquent, but it quite deliberately summarises the main theoretical points. Globalisation is about certain processes – financial, industrial, technological – happening in ways that are unprecedented in human history. The processes are getting more intense, and they are moving faster and covering wider geographies (global geographies) than they ever did before. We should note that there is plenty of debate about whether or not these changes are completely new and transformative (discontinuist, to use Anthony Giddens’ term) or whether they are just continuations of processes that have always occurred… after all, people have always migrated, technology has developed and contributed to new forms of social activity and so on. There’s a huge amount of literature on whether or not globalisation deserves quite so much academic attention… and it’s own departments and funding and so on – why not let the historians and the sociologist cover these ‘new’ social processes as they did the traditional ones. You can read the second Steger paper if you’re interested in these particular issues and there are some good reading suggestions at the bottom of this post. The social relations in Steger’s definition are generally easy enough to spot and, if asked for a definition of globalisation, we might suggest them intuitively. Air travel, the global financial crises, global social networks and so on. The second element in the definition is just as important though. A huge element in globalisation is that we perceive it to be the case. We feel connected to distant places and foreign cultures; we think of ourselves less in terms of national identities but as part of a global community; we become used to working and studying online, or at a distant, and at times and in places that are fundamentally different from the 9 to 5 expectations of traditional working practices (traditional in the sense that they were previously established, following the industrial revolution, and not in the sense that they were original or foundational). Appadurai provides a framework for thinking about how these material social relations and these feelings and ideas interact to create something transformational. He lists five ‘scapes’ in which he imagine globalisation principally takes place, namely finanscapes, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. Not two things. First, these scapes are really very similar to the ‘dimensions’ of globalisation that Steger talks about. Second, the mediascape is enormously influential in Appadurai’s framework. He is concerned with how the media operates, and the social effect of media practice, but of course the other four scapes interact with the mediascape and cause effects that reconfigure how the mediascape itself work. It’s these interactions and effects that we’re particularly interested in – because it’s these effects that dictate how you work now, and how you might have to work in the future. * I spell globalisation with an ’s’ because I learned to spell in the UK. It’s perfectly acceptable to spell it with a ‘z’, many of the papers you read will spell it that way and I’m fine with that. But spell it with an ’s’. Further reading Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harvey, D. (1990) The condition of postmodernity : an enquiry into the origins of cultural change Oxford: Blackwell James, P. (2006). Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism. London: Sage. Lewis, J. (2008). Cultural Studies - The Basics. London: Sage Ritzer, G. (1983). The McDonalidization of Society. Journal of American Culture, 6(1), 100-107.
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Perspective in Aldeburgh
Mod_wsgi, Django and Apache daemons
First things first. Mod_wsgi is clearly brilliant, which is why everyone uses it to deploy Django applications. It's also well documented and assiduously supported by its creator, if a little intimidatingly. It's easy to install, setup is a breeze and initial configuration, though fiddly, is manageable as long as you follow the instructions. It's probably even more straightforward if you're half-way competent with Apache – I'm the opposite of that. Which is why, probably, I had this persistent error, which drove me insane yesterday for six hours until I hacked together a workaround, which is pretty ugly, but will have to do because whatever the elegant solution is... I couldn't find it. The issue: I was trying to run two simple applications on an ubuntu server – one which needed to update the time, and the other a cut-paste install of django's Spirit forum. Two things were happening. First, my datetime values weren't keeping pace with the server. They'd update only when I reloaded Apache, which seemed a bit weird. Second, Spirit provides an HTML form from the admin dashboard, from which it calls a preferred site name and some other basic settings. I'd enter these, it'd update, and then it would forget them, default to empty values unless, again, I reloaded Apache. I got annoyed with Apache before it dawned on me that I was using mod_wsgi to manage django and, more likely, I'd done something daft in the setup. Some early investigation revealed that I hadn't been that daft. I'd just set up mod_wsgi in embedded rather than daemon mode, which requires an Apache reload to update any changes in the source code – and because, presumably, the datetime function and the Spirit settings are determined by django views within the app... Anyway, switching to daemon mode is straightforward enough, just a few changes in the virtual host. But this doesn't resolve the symptoms – you still need to 'do' something to mod_wsgi to shut down and restart the daemon process and to serve up the source code changes. But what? There appear to be two options. Either you touch the mod_wsgi script file, which updates the time stamp and is sufficient to restart the daemon process. Or you embed a management script into the application – called something like monitor.py – and get the script file to call it, updating itself in the process. What this management should look like... I have no idea. I tried writing a function to mimic a unix touch, I googled endlessly, I re-read the documentation... As I said, surely my stupidity... So, as a workaround, I have a cron job running to touch the mod_wsgi script file sufficiently often to help Spirit remember itself and to keep the time pretty much up to date. Urgh. What I need is for the touch to come, or the script file to update itself, on request from the browser... any ideas?

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Out 'training' this morning in Suffolk
I put him in jail bc I swear he talked without batteries once
LET ME FUCKIN TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT SOME FERBIES. MY COUSIN AND I HAD HEARD SOME CRAZY ASS RUMORS THAT THESE FUCKERS DID SHIT WITHOUT BATTERIES SO WE DECIDED HEY LETS TEST THIS SHIT. WE WERE FUCKING HOME ALONE RIGHT AND WE LOCKED THIS FUCKER IN A STEEL BOX WITH NO BATTERIES. WE BOTH WENT OUTSIDE, LOCKED THE DOORS AND WE CAME BACK AND THAT FUCKING THING WAS OUT OF THE BOX AND WAS FUCKING TALKING AND SHIT WE BURNED THAT FUCKER WITHIN LIKE FIVE FUCKIN MINUTES.
Moral of the story: DONT BUY FUCKING FURBIES
FOR REAL GUYS THIS IS NO FUCKING JOKE
THESE FUCKERS WILL CONTINUE TO TALK AND MOVE EVEN WITHOUT THE FUCKING BATTERIES
THEY’RE TERRIFYING AS SHIT AND THEY’RE OUT TO PUT AN END TO THE HUMAN RACE
DON’T FUCKING BUY FURBIES
DONT BUY THEM OH MY GOD. LAST YEAR I WORKED AT TOYS ‘R US AROUND THE TIME THE NEW LINE OF THOSE FUCKERS CAME OUT. THEY SOLD OUT WITHIN A WEEK. NOTHING WEIRD HAPPENED BUT THEN A LADY RETURNED ONE CAUSE SHE SAID IT WOULDNT TURN OFF. WE TOOK IT BACK AND SINCE IT WAS “BROKEN” WE KEPT IT IN OUR STAFF ROOM. THEN I WAS IN THERE ALONE AND IT WAS SITTING ON THE TABLE WITH NO BATTERIES IN IT. THEN THE FUCKING FERBIE STARTED MAKING NOISE THAT DIDNT SOUND LIKE WHAT FURBIEA SHOULD SOUND LIKE. IT WAS LIKE DEMONIC SCREECHING. I PUT THE LITTLE SHIT IN AN EMPTY LOCKER AND WHEN I TOLD MY MANAGER HE PUT IT IN THE BROKEN TOY BIN.
THEN I WENT OUT TO WORK AGAIN AND WHEN I CAME INTO THE STAFF ROOM AFTER MY SHIFT, THE FURBIE WAS ON THE TABLE AGAIN. YEAH DONT BUY THOSE FUCKERS
I HAVE MY OWN STORY TO ADD. I ONCE HAD A FURBIE, BUT ONCE IT DIED WE NEVER REPLACED THE BATTERIES AND JUST LET IT LAY DORMANT FOR A WHILE. MY COUSIN (WHO MIGHT I ADD, WAS A 22 YEAR OLD MAN AT THAT TIME) WAS HOUSESITTING FOR US AND THE FURBIE WAS TUCKED AWAY ON A SHELF IN OUR CELLAR. HE WENT DOWN TO GO DO SOME LAUNDRY AND THAT LITTLE SHIT OPENED ITS EYES AND MUTTERED “PEEKABOO”. MY COUSIN ATTACKED IT AND THREW IT OUTSIDE, AND IT WAS LATER TOSSED IN THE DUMPSTER. IM STILL AFRAID THAT THIS FURBIE WILL COME BACK TO HAUNT ME. DO NOT BUY THESE THEY ARE FUCKING DEMENTED!!!!
OKAY STORY TIME SO LAST CHRISTMAS MY COUSIN GOT ONE OF THESE FUCKERS EXCEPT IT WAS ONE OF THE NEW ELECTRONIC ONES AND THOSE ARE JUST AS BAD. THE BATTERIES ARE SEALED IN WITH SCREWS, AND NO ONE HAD A SCREWDRIVER THAT FIT, SO WE WERE FORCED TO DEAL WITH THIS THING THE WHOLE TIME. THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE DAMN THING WILL GO TO ‘SLEEP’, BUT ANY SORT OF MOVEMENT WILL WAKE IT UP AND CAUSE IT TO DEMONICALLY LAUGH. ANOTHER COUSIN GOT UP FOR A GLASS OF WATER AT TWO IN THE MORNING THAT NIGHT, WALKED BY THE CLOSET WHERE WE’D SHOVED IT IN FEAR, AND HIS FOOTSTEPS WOKE THE FUCKING THING UP AND IT STARTED LAUGHING AND WOULDN’T STOP FOR THE NEXT HOUR. DON’T BUY THESE FUCKING THINGS. THEY’RE DEMONIC.
the amount of personal stories is alarming
MINE WOULD STILL TALK YEARS AFTER TAKING OUT THE BATTERIES HOLY SHIT I’M GLAD OTHER PEOPLE NOTICED THE SAME THING. THE ONLY KNOWN METHOD OF KILLING THEM IS SETTING IT ON FIRE.
OK SO NO JOKE WE HAD THREE FURBIES IN THE BUZZFEED OFFICE AND WE PUT THEM ALL IN A SMALL CONFERENCE ROOM FACING EACH OTHER ON A TABLE SO THEY COULD TALK TO EACH OTHER AND AFTER A WEEK OR SO THEY JUST DISAPPEARED AND WE NEVER SAW THEM AGAIN AND I THINK MAYBE WE SUMMONED THE ELDER GODS OR CREATED SKYNET OR SOMETHING.