Alex Juhasz and I initiate a conversation about social media that sidesteps the panic over youth and digital distraction, and instead looks head-on at their everyday engagements with mobile devices and social networking. Our aim is to challenge pathologizing discourses that frame young users of social media as simultaneously victims and threat.

On June 14 and 15, 2011, six upper division undergraduate students from the University of South Carolina went out into the streets of Columbia [SC]. Their assignment: to observe how surveillance happens in and around them everyday. Their findings are presented here. Informed by readings in theory, visual-material culture, and constitutional law, as well as fiction, films, and online news articles, the students offer a timely commentary on the routine—and ...

The grocery list: scribbled on the back of last month’s electricity bill, or stored on the Droid, where it’s conveniently organized by supermarket aisle number. That minor epiphany that struck on the subway: transcribed to a Moleskin, or translated into a Voice Memo on the iPhone.

This cluster examines how different processes of and platforms for note-taking shape the everyday ways we think, record, and remember.