Category: Academic

New on the Bookshelf – April 2025

A number of titles have come in, from the usual used and remaindered sources. Let’s have a look, and capture the theme and reasons why I got them.

24/7, Jonathan Crary (2013)

We’ve mentioned this a few times before, most notably in the “Cult of No-Sleep” in Issue 7 of the Implausibility Newsletter back in February, but I didn’t have a hardcopy in hand. So when this showed up as a deal, I had to grab a copy. It’s an insightful book; we’ll do a few review here soon.

The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson, (2003)

A historical non-fiction look at the Chicago World’s Fair, intertwined with the account of a serial killer during the Gilded Age. I grabbed this due to a recent mention of it somewhere (I’ll blame BlueSky), and I’m curious to how it reads, even though I’m not really enthused to read serial killer fiction. To be honest, this might site on the TBR pile for a while…

It’s Complicated, danah boyd (2014)

boyd’s work looks at the intersection of youth and online spaces, and this work is a more recent summary of the some of her earlier work, arguing that youth actually do find meaningful interactions online (contra to a lot of the doomer narratives that are presented in mass media), and are using the tools in ways that suit their needs. As the title suggests though, there’s a lot more nuance to the topic than is largely thought. Looking forward to reading this.

American Cosmic, D.W. Pasulka, (2019)

This remaindered title looked interesting, an ethnographic study with those who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, and how it is more mainstream of a belief that commonly suspected, and how media like the X-Files drives the spread and normalizes the assumptions. This ticks a lot of boxes for me, so I’m interested in checking it out.

Robot Proof, Joseph Aoun, (2018)

Written prior to the explosion in AI-related work in academia since the public introduction of ChatGPT and other LLMs, this book anticipates the coming changes to academia with the automation of education, and proposes where educators can focus their time and energy to ensure the students are prepared for what that future world looks like. I’m curious how much this overlaps with the elements of echanger we’ve already discussed.

Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy, Steiff and Tamplin, eds., (2008)

A rather lengthy anthology of articles on the theme of BSG and Philosophy. (There was a bunch of [Blank] and Phil books in the early 2000s, as I guess it sold books.) With the renewed focus on agentive robots and the push towards AGI by a number of companies, this showing up in the pile for $5 had a bit of serendipity to it, and I think it’s well worth another look.

Computing and Technology Ethics, Swiatek, Burton, Goldsmith, Mattei, Siler, eds., (2023)

Created as a textbook for a college class, this looks at key questions in ethics for a computer science class, and uses excerpts from several sci-fi stories to unpack them. I got it mostly for this last reason, as we’ve done similar things with the podcast and in our academic career, though not on this specific subject. Looking forward to a full read of this.

and Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams, (2025).

When I heard that promotion of this book was being suppressed by Meta, I figured it was worth grabbing a copy in case it eventually became harder to get. A memoir about the behind-the-scenes operations of Facebook in the pre-Meta era, this ended up being a collection of anecdotes and scenes that covered the authors time at the company. I was somewhat disappointed in it, as much I didn’t find anything really “new” or revealing, and spending that much time with the background of awful people wasn’t necessarily endearing either.

As always, as we get through them we’ll share the full review or notes about them in future posts.

UCSB Databases

Just a quick note, a link to self, a shared bookmark.

UC Santa Barbara A-Z Database

One of the challenges of drifting away from the academic institutions is the reduced access to academic work. This has impacted the material I’m able to draw on for research and reporting. So when a good open access database is available, such as the one provided by UC Santa Barbara, it’s nice to keep track of it, and in this case, share.

We’ll squirrel this away under the Research page for now, and add more updates to that as we go.

The 7G Network

Online spaces have often been labeled as ‘toxic’, and new entrants to an online community may unwittingly run into this before really engaging with the community. We’ve talked about this on the podcast a couple times, at least in passing, over the last two years (E0010 Eternal September, E0014 Dumpshock, and E0032 Baked In would all qualify, for a start), but this idea of the 7G network is something I started working on for a conference paper back in 2021.

At the time, I was frustrated with the behaviours I was witnessing in the D&D community within TikTok, and recognized some of the behaviours as being strikingly similar to ones I had noticed around gaming web-forums over two decades earlier. So I began to catalogue those practices, and how the members of online communities would deploy them, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unknowingly, and how these practices, these doxa, made the online space a worse place to be in, driving people away, often never to return.

So as part of an effort to communicate some better practices for online communities, I’m publishing these here (while I continue to work on the full paper) in hopes that people can recognize these toxic elements and take steps to stop or remove them when they occur.

The ‘G’ in 7G Network is mostly a mnemonic, as it helps to keep the characteristics in mind, and it is by no means an exhaustive list. The seven are Gatekeeping, Gaslighting, Gravedancing, Grandstanding, Griefing, Grifting and Grooming. The toxicity of most of these should be self-evident, but in case there’s some ambiguity I’ll go into them in a bit more detail below. The ‘Network’ part of the term means you’ll often find the toxic characteristics working in concert; where there’s one, there are likely to be more. This can also help when trying to identify some of the more subtle characteristics like Grifting and Grooming. Not sure if something qualifies as grifting? Were there other toxic characteristics that you noticed? Perhaps being a little more reticent in your interactions is warranted…

But without (much) further ado, let’s see what we’re talking about.

Gatekeeping is that class of activities that focus on exclusion. If the subcultural wars are a battle for territory waged using social and gamer capital, the gate is at the boundary of that territory.  It defines the limits of the group, the marker for inclusion or exclusion. And it is continually contested.

Gaslighting is the denial of objective reality for your audience. Now, there can be some quibbles about “objective reality”, but we’re not getting into the edge cases here. We’re dealing with “sun rises in the West” levels of denialism here. While gaslighting has gotten more attention in the “post-truth” era of the current political landscape, it still manifests in some ways in geek subcultures too. There’s different kinds of gaslighting too: we’ll group them as overt and covert for ease of use.

Gravedancing is a form of communal organizing and editing of collective memory. Once a person has been chased out of the community, there will often be a period of celebration, where the community justifies their actions, in which community members congratulate themselves on how they came together and worked towards a common goal.  Of course, that goal is ostracism and exclusion, but they were able to put aside whatever other differences they may have and achieve something, so it can often be somewhat celebratory. The community will engage in a reification of the past event, restating the reasons why the offender had to be chased out, and reframing the event in the groups’ collective memory.

Grandstanding is the typical online posturing and performative “tough talk” that is somewhat endemic in online spaces, where internet users drastically overstate their prowess, ability, and credentials from the safety of the couch or behind their keyboard, free from immediate reprisal and unlikely to be fact-checked or called on it.

Griefing is online harassment, trolling, and bullying, and we are grouping these here under the singular “griefing” which is a form of harassment common in online video games (Chesney, 2009).

Grifting. The prevalence of #venmo, #cashapp and other payment details in bios facilitates this. This is a challenge, of course, as not every cry for aid on GoFundMe is a grift, especially in the era of the gig economy typical of late-stage capitalism in the 21st century. Rather, the ease of payment options and transactions has made the opportunity for grifting that much easier. The barrier to entry is that much lower.

Grooming is the set of behaviours “in which an adult builds an emotional relationship with a minor in order to gain the minor’s trust for the purposes of future or ongoing sexual contact, sexual abuse, trafficking, or other exploitation.” (Bytedance, Inc., 2022). As these appear

To sum up (well, the sum should be “7”, but in words…), the 7G Network is a heuristic, a collection of interconnected hostile and anti-social behaviours that can be used to identify the if an online space is particularly “toxic”, however that might be defined.

And as a heuristic, it isn’t set in stone. The 7G is a mnemonic, and any or all of the components might be swapped out at some point. But it is a starting point, and I’ll share more on the heuristic and how it might be deployed in the coming weeks.

Bibliography:

Chesney, T., Coyne, I., Logan, B., & Madden, N. (2009). Griefing in virtual worlds: Causes, casualties and coping strategies. Information Systems Journal, 19(6), 525–548. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2575.2009.00330.x

A link to the past

Part of the return to the 90s web driven by the likes of the Fediverse is the re-introduction of the shared link page. While not a full-blown DMOZ revival, I think there is some value in it, for pages that still exist.

The Links page for the implausi.blog is here.

Obviously, there’s not much there at the moment. I’ll be adding to it with info and relevant links as we go, taking stuff out of bookmarks and back on to the public web.

Consider this a work in progress.

Cellphone, (2004), Paul Levinson

Currently on the reading pile, for some upcoming work, and this one is kinda interesting, especially coming at it in (early) 2024.

Because this book was published in 2004, twenty years ago, and the entire history of the smartphone hadn’t even happened yet.

This is a history of the cellphone, the ubiquitous pocket device, as it appeared in the era of Y2K and The Matrix movies. Of Nokia bricks, and flip phones and Razrs and maybe even a Blackberry or 3.

And it’s fascinating because of it.

I can’t go into too much detail about the current project, but the short version is that it’s about what changed with the arrival of the iPhone, and how our culture shifted.

But in order to figure that out, we need to know what it was like in the before times. And here Paul Levinson’s book does a wonderful job.

The most interesting part (for me) is Chapter 11, Future Calls, the speculative chapter about where the cellphone might be headed. But even in doing so, he shows how much of the current use of the phone showed up as early as 19`14, in various texts and comics, and it was only through some historical accidents that we didn’t get videophone development until much later. The picturephone has been floating around as an idea for nearly 100 years, even though now we take it for granted.

Much of the reason for the lack of development was the lack of interest: people couldn’t imagine them using it, and feared being seen on camera. It took half a century of television as passive entertainment, and the audience being accustomed to talking naturally on the phone to being comfortable with talking “face-to-face” as well.

So, I think this is a keeper, and I might have to track down a personal copy. This one was a serendipitous find at the local public library, and I grabbed a few others I’ll need to talk about soon too.

Levinson, P. (2004). Cellphone: The story of the world’s most mobile medium and how it has transformed everything! New York, N.Y. : Palgrave Macmillan.