This year’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) is in San Francisco from Nov. 19th to Nov. 23rd. Looking through the preliminary program (PDF), there are a ton of interesting sessions. As usual, it’s bound to be an absolute clusterf*ck, and each time slot has about 30 sessions in different rooms. Oh well. Anyway, I pulled out just a few of the interesting sessions:

Wed. 11/19

12 - 130
REMIXING ANTHROPOLOGY: COLLABORATION
2.0 IN THE REPUTATION ECONOMY
Chair(s): P Kerim Friedman Organizer(s):
P Kerim Friedman, Michael L Wesch
Participant(s): P Kerim Friedman, Todd S
Harple, Kimberly A Christen, Eric C Kansa,
Casey K O’Donnell, Michael L Wesch
Discussant(s): Christopher M Kelty

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
ON ONLINE AND HYBRID EDUCATIONAL
COMMUNITIES
Chair(s): Chia Yuan Hung Participant(s):
Chia Yuan Hung, S A Mousalimas, Sundy L
Watanabe, Wesley R Shumar, JoAnne Kleifgen,
Katalin J Kabat

6 - 730pm
MOURNING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY IN
KOREA AND JAPAN
Chair(s): Eleana J Kim Organizer(s): Elise
Marie Prebin, Nan Youngnan Kim–Paik
Participant(s): Elise Marie Prebin, Nan
Youngnan Kim–Paik, Fabienne Duteil–Ogata
Discussant(s): Ellen Schattschneider, Michael
Herzfeld

Thurs 11/20

1015 - 12
NEW TECHNOLOGIES, GENDERED MEANINGS
AND SOCIAL INEQUALITIES
Chair(s): Barbara Herr Harthorn Organizer(s):
Barbara Herr Harthorn, Laury Oaks
Participant(s): Barbara Herr Harthorn, Theresa
A Satterfield, Muriel Vernon, Kathi R Kitner,
Lucia L S Siu, Laury Oaks Discussant(s): Jo
Murphy–Lawless

145 - 545
SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS AND
ANTHROPOLOGY
Chair(s)/Organizer(s): Arthur D Murphy
Participant(s): Thomas Pluckhahn, Carly L
Hertz, Arthur D Murphy, Linda J Jencson, Chris
McCarty, Christine B Avenarius

Friday 11/21

145 - 330
ENGAGEMENT WITH ART AND TECHNOLOGY
Chair(s): Joshua P Feola Participant(s): Joshua
P Feola, Shelia Pozorski, Ruben G Mendoza,
Louis W Fortin, Jeb J Card, Amy J Hirshman

Invited Session: BRICKS, BLOGS AND
BUNGALOWS: REDEFINING LEISURE,
REINVENTING SELF (Sponsored by NASA)
Chair(s): Lisa Bintrim Participant(s): Lisa
Bintrim, Amelia M Moore, Maria T Brodine

Presidential Invited Session: THE
ANTHROPOLOGIST AS SOCIAL CRITIC:
TOWARDS AN ENGAGED ANTHROPOLOGY
(Sponsored by SUNTA)
Chair(s)/Organizer(s): Sally Engle Merry,
Setha M Low Participant(s): Sally Engle
Merry, Signe L Howell, Maria Teresa Sierra,
Michael Herzfeld, Kamari M Clarke, Ida
S Susser, Alan Smart, Kamran A Ali, John
L Jackson Discussant(s): Barbara Rose
Johnston, Merrill C Singer, Sally Engle Merry,
Setha M Low

Saturday 11/22

1015 - 12
Invited Poster Session: PERSPECTIVES ON
PRACTICE: SOCIAL ACTION (Sponsored by
NAPA)
Chair(s): Philip E Coyle Participant(s): Patricia
J Hammer, Katherine S Nutter, Sarah D Cote,
Philip E Coyle, Marcela Uribe

145 - 330
Invited Session: FINDING COMMON GROUND:
OVERCOMING BARRIERS IN APPLYING
ANTHROPOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT,
HUMANITARIAN AND NONGOVERNMENTAL
ORGANIZATIONS (Sponsored by NAPA)
Chair(s): Daniel Hruschka Organizer(s):
Brandon A Kohrt Participant(s): Joanna P de
Berry, Kent S Glenzer, Lisa M Rende Taylor,
Brandon A Kohrt, David M Citrin Discussant(s):
Lynn M Sibley

330 - 530
MEDIA IDEOLOGIES
Chair(s): Lauren G Leve Organizer(s): Ilana
Gershon Participant(s): Jeffrey D Himpele,
Joshua Malitsky, Ilana Gershon, Laura E
Kunreuther, Daniel B Noveck, Amanda
Weidman Discussant(s): Susan Gal

Invited Session: THE ETHICS OF VISUAL DATA:
PICTURING INCLUSION, COLLABORATION
AND ENGAGEMENT (Sponsored by SVA)
Chair(s)/Organizer(s)/Introduction: Jonathan
S Marion Participant(s): Sara E Perry, Kate
Hennessy, Anne Zeller

Sunday 11/23

1015 - 1245
NEW COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND
HUMAN INTERACTION
Chair(s): Elizabeth Keating Organizer(s):
Elizabeth Keating, Chiho Sunakawa Inoue
Participant(s): Chiho Sunakawa Inoue,
Leighton C Peterson, Qing Zhang, Josh
Iorio, John Handy Bosma, Elizabeth Keating
Discussant(s): Lucy Suchman

Joe Hall reminded me of an interesting article from the New Yorker back in Dec.:

KNOWING THE ENEMY (The New Yorker, 12.18.2006)

The story is about an Australian Army Captain and anthropologist named David Kilcullen who has studied counterinsurgency and is now trying to help the US government make better decisions in the war on terror.

Many anthropologists are extremely wary of working for the gov’t, largely because of folks like Margaret Mead who worked for the War Relocation Authority during WW II. Unfortunately, this debatably-dubious application of anthropology has gone a long way to sullying the reputation of applied anthropology in the academic community. In my opinion, applied anthropologists should absolutely be working for the gov’t, especially in their capacity as cultural brokers and translators. Politicians are some of the most myopic people around - anthropologists can help.

This video from Michael Wesch, an Anthro. Professor at Kansas State, is less interesting to the tech. savvy crowd than it likely is to many anthropologists. Still, it’s fairly well done, and in my mind fairly uncontroversial. (Which means there’s sure to be some debate).

David Hakken, author of a series of fascinating but fairly impenetrable books like Cyborgs@Cyberspace? and The Knowledge Landscapes of Cyberspace dismisses the summary in a very ‘ivory tower’ sort of way:

I found it an interesting animation of much of the promotional drivel I hear from promoters of so-called social networking software, completely lacking in any critical perspective or sense that such claims about the world need to be evaluated against evidence. This is not an information ethnography in which I am interested.

Ken Erickson of Pacific Ethnography, on the other hand, understands what the video is actually about, responds with (I think) the appropriate amount of perspective despite his admitted lack of technical expertise:

I thought it was an introductory think-piece designed perhaps to inspire undergraduates to think more about the Internet. And on U-Tube. Why aren’t other anthropologists or IT design researchers on U-Tube? (Maybe they are and I’m just not an adept.) Do we all have nothing worth saying that can be said in five minutes? I bet we do. I say, Bravo Dr. Wesch. And, I’ll bet this could become an interesting thread. Maybe Dr. Wesch will join in.

And, of course, what would a ‘critical’ debate among anthropologists be without resorting to WMDs - that’s Weber, Marx, and Durkheim.

The idea that the web “learns”, that we are the web, etc. etc. restates the venerable Marxian argument about how human labor gets embedded in technology, and subsequent generations of that technology fully incorporate and make automatic what formerly could be done only through direct human action. It’s the same phenomenon one sees in the evolution of tools used to make other tools — Volume 1 of Capital has a chapter called “Machinery and Modern Industry” which lays out the basic ideas (It also discusses the “intensification of the working day” — something most dot-com worker bees like myself would’ve been able to relate to, if we’d had any free time to read long books.) — Jerry Lombardi

The discussion goes on through AnthroDesign, but where does this leave us with our impressions of anthropologists? Confused, I think, since even in this short debate we span from scholars like Hakken who are clearly extremely knowledgeable about new technologies but also overly dismissive and haughty about thought-provoking commentary on them, to others who attempt to integrate ideas about Web 2.0 with classical social theory.

For my part, I thought the video was a nice (if technocentric) summary of how the confluence of certain trends have laid the groundwork for the social phenomenon we see today (which is sometimes referred to by the shorthand Web 2.0. Ok, I’m cool with that). My only real ‘critique’ stems from the pet-peeve of my adviser, Coye Cheshire. And that’s this: let’s not start with the assumption that Web x.0 changes anything. Let’s assume - reasonably based on historical evidence - that seemingly paradigm-shattering technologies tend to influence organically, not seismically. What’s going on right now is not so fundamentally different. Although it’s all those little details that make it fascinating.

Couldn’t resist sharing this wonderful link, which came to me via AnthroDesign and to them via Steve Portigal:

MSN Careers 20 Oddest Jobs

Check out #19. Are these the sorts of things that people think of when they think about ethnographers??

There has been a lot of well-deserved discussion and praise around Paul Dourish’s Implications for Design paper at this year’s Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference. (Or so I’ve read, since I’m not actually there.) For the unfamiliar, CHI is a multi-disciplinary but computer science and design dominated conference. Many of the practitioners and researchers in that community have adopted various versions of ethnography in recent years, mostly bastardized, and almost always subsumed by a technology and design-centered focused.

Much of what Paul has to say mirrors debates that have been going on inside of anthropology over the last 25 years or so. (Writing Culture and after. For a nice, succinct synopsis of the last 75 or so years of anthropology see this.) More recently some of them have spilled out into the applied anthropology community, primarily I think because it is multi-disciplinary and hierarchically aligned much the way CHI is. I mention this not to degrade what Paul says - actually the opposite. One of the greatest challenges of applied anthropology is what we might call cultural brokerage - a translation between stakeholders inside of diverse groups. (Disclaimer: Wikipedia’s discussion of applied anthropology is pretty good IMHO, up until it gives a set of 4 example problems that do a remarkably terrible job of capturing what applied anthro. is about today.)

Paul clearly believes in the potential of ethnography but is keenly aware of the prevalence of misuse and misunderstanding. Case in point - and my own personal pet peeve - the widespread misconception that ethnography is a qualitative method. (In fact, ethnography is a mixed-methods approach that entails a specific perspective and analytical frame.) The paper is well organized and written, and does a clear job of illustrating his main points: that ethnography is too often poorly or incorrectly applied in the CHI community in a way that both misrepresents what ethnography is about (e.g. theory AND practice) and drains it of much of its potential for informing ongoing understanding about the design and use of technology in everyday life.

I tried to make many of these same points in my paper Cultural Assessment for Sustainable Kiosks which I’m presenting at next month’s International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, but I haven’t been nearly as eloquent about it as Paul has. Still, I hear a lot of people asking healthy questions like “What’s *is* ethnography really?” and thinking about how to apply it in the most meaningful way. I hope that signals a shift out of this transitional period where folks seem to know that ethnography is a powerful tool but have very little concept of how or when to use it, what to do with data once they’ve got it, or how to ground ethnography in theory.

I really appreciate what Paul is trying to do, and I think he’s uniquely positioned to do it. He’s someone who is extremely accomplished and respected as a member of the CHI and CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) communities, but clearly has a command of the disciplinary history of anthropology and the theoretical and analytical foundations of ethnography. That his paper has sparked so much interest and debate at CHI (including a nomination for the best paper award) is a testament to his quality as a thinker and writer.

Belatedly catching up on more of the SfAA meetings:

Wednesday afternoon I gave my talk about holistic cultural assessment in ICT for Development projects in an evaluation-focused session that my former advisor, Tony Whitehead, put together.

Aside from the fact that I thought my talk went pretty well, and Tamar was brilliant, there were a couple of other highlights of the session. First, Charity Goodman from the USGAO had some interesting things to say about ‘anticipatory anthropology’ and ‘foresight work’. Now, these were new concepts to me, and it seems like a formalization of something that most good researchers do anyway, but I like the idea of applying a systematic, culture-centered approach to thinking ahead.

I couldn’t find an easy definition of any of those terms. Anticipatory anthropology seems to be something that many folks put in their lists of interests, but skip out on defining. But I did find an interesting site on ‘Ethnographic Futures Research’ that probably overlaps quite a bit. This Wikipedia article on futures research is also an interesting (and slightly comical) read.

The second thing I wanted to mention about the session was the comments of Mary Odell Butler, who works at Battelle. Mary has had a long career in evaluation, and is one of those rare people who can speak broadly and concisely in a way that is easy to understand. I found her comments on all the papers to be wonderful and insightful. In particular I remember the wisdom of her suggestion that anthropologists ought to quit using the word ‘culture’ wherever possible, especially when working in multi-disciplinary and non-academic environments. It’s not that it isn’t a valuable concept, it’s just that it creates a discussion that can be as much an argument about what culture means as an exploration of the particular phenomenon under discussion. And really, she said, there’s no point in arguing about what culture means.

The larger and more interesting point she made is that talking about culture instead of more specific perceptions or processes, is a scapegoat. It relieves us of the burden of explaining specific ideas, habits, and histories. She gave an example that I remember well. Contrast these two statements:

Many African-American women have developed a culturally-based perception that they will be disrespected in community healthcare clinics.

vs.

Many African-American women have learned through their experience and that of their friends and family that they will be disrespected in community healthcare clinics.

Culture, in other words, is too often a gloss for actual perception and practice. Why not call a rose a rose? (I hope I’ve been fair to her intent with these remarks - and I hope I’ll hear about it if I haven’t!)

Today’s Distinguished Lecture at Berkeley iSchool was cancelled because the speaker, John Perry Barlow, got stuck in LA. Big bummer. The title of his talk was to be ‘Is Cyberspace still anti-sovereign?’ and I have to admit that I was going to go mostly for a view of the personality. So I was sad the lecture didn’t happen.

But people still came, since they didn’t cancel until the last minute. And it was an interesting group. I think Barlow brings the ‘anarchists’ and the ‘hackers’ out of the woodword - they glomb on to his rhetoric about freedom and regulation on the Internet. As we were standing around in the hallway, eating on the food that was supposed to be for the lecture reception, a guy walked up to me, dressed in a certain stereotypical way with torn clothes, patches and symbols, safety pins, jeans, a hoodie, etc… He had been sitting on the floor to the side with a friend. He raised his arms in the air and said ‘Who’s a programmer here?’ Surprised, and not ready for my ethnographic encounter, I said something non-comittal like ‘Well, I guess we all are sort of.’ I was standing with some folks much more saavy in that department than I. The guy paused for a minute and said in the same sort of way ‘Who’s a hacker?’ We looked at each other - probably because no one had ever asked us that before. I think a few thoughts went through my mind right then:

1. What’s a hacker?
2. I suppose I’m a hacker - I try in my own little way to ‘break’ technology to do what I need it to do. But that’s getting less and less unusual.
3. If I were really a hacker, would I admit it? Would I want to talk about it?

So I made some comment similar to the last. Not engaging, more surprised and confused than anything. He mentioned he runs a major ‘Whacker’ site - again, what’s that? And that he thought he’d meet a lot of like-minded folks at the lecture. He was dissapointed it wasn’t going on. Here’s a definition of ‘Whacker’ I found on answers.com:

1. A person, similar to a hacker, who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities. Whereas a hacker tends to produce great hacks, a whacker only ends up whacking the system or program in question. Whackers are often quite egotistical and eager to claim wizard status, regardless of the views of their peers.

Then he started to rail on ICANN. He actually said ‘Down with ICANN!’ And I was surprised and unready again. Of all the evil tech. institutions in the world, I have found relatively little attention to ICANN. He also mentioned that he loves Tor.

So then we left. And he left. And as I walked away, I thought, ‘Judd! You dumbass! You just missed a perfect opportunity to find out about another person’s life, another POV!’ I should have asked about ‘Whacking,’ and what he hates about ICANN, and why he likes TOR. I was curious what he does during the day, how he got into running a website, and why he likes John Perry Barlow. But I missed my chance. I hope, next time, I won’t be so dumb. I’ll be more prepared.

On Wed. morning I went to a great session titled “Knowledge Flow in ‘Real’ and ‘Virtual’ Spaces.”

Patricia Lange (San Jose State U.) led off talking about her analysis of ‘tech talk’ in online chats. She argued, in a nutshell, that debaters and ‘flamers’ often resort to morality as the basis for critiques in the great Linux/Windows debate. Her talk was an interesting mix of social-rhetorical analysis and ethnomethodology. Later on, Patricia and I talked a bit about whether the tense of statements in a chat room has any influence on the arguments, whether it’s intentional, etc. What I mean is, in most chats you can either type something directly, in which case the text appears as “: ” or you can give a command that makes a statement in the 3rd person, as in “ thinks the Linux/PC debate is pointless.” These two different forms might say something about the speakers’ strategy for conveying power or authority through online chats. Anyway, a point for further discussion.

Roxana Wales also gave a nice talk on her work at NASA with the Mars rover missions. She’s just recently moved to Google, not to work on a product, but to study work practice and growing pains at Google itself. Very cool stuff, and I can’t wait to hear more about it.

Elizabeth Churchill also gave a great paper in which she described her work with an interactive community bulletin board in a café space. I really loved her discussion, partly because it was well framed, and partly because it meshes really well with recent thinking I have been doing on the power of soundscapes as a shared ‘canvas’ for communication, collaboration, and creativity. Although Elizabeth’s story ended sadly (the touch-screen bulletin board broke and no one paid to fix it) I think it’s way ahead of its time. One question, largely unresolved, is how people will respond to the presence of new and potentially foreign interaction artifacts in their space. Which technological frames will they use to understand them? Are the ads? Are they like physical bulletin boards? Like computers or laptops? Fascinating questions.

Perhaps the best part of this session, which attracted a small but vocal and diverse group of people, was the discussion. We had a good 30 minutes of chatting about a variety of issues. This is why I love the SfAAs – they bring together a generous and curious group of folks who just want to share ideas. I hope there continue to be more IT-related folks at the meetings. Brigitte Jordan has been a fixture for the last few years, and I have really enjoyed her contributions, beginning with a roundtable on corporate anthropology at the 2004 meetings in Dallas.

More later…

So, Tamar and I just got back from this year’s Society for Applied Anthropology conference in Vancouver. I meant to write some posts while we were there, but I realized that I’d much rather spend my time actually going to the conference and hanging out with old (and new) friends than blogging.

Before we ever got to the conference, my first time to Canada started with a bang owing to the Dufferin Hotel. Two stars my ass. And a word to the wise: if the hotel doesn’t put any pictures of itself online, be worried. Very worried. Boy was I mad when I called Priceline. Smelly, dark, dirty, old, mostly broken, under construction, no deadbolt on the door. We lasted 20 minutes. Thankfully we got our money back, but because Vancouver was so full of anthropologists (or whatever) most of the hotels were full. So we ended up in the only slightly more upscale Boseman’s Motor Lodge. But at least it was clean and safe. Actually, over the course of the week we learned to appreciate the old Boseman.

But, to the conference. In a nutshell: this year’s SfAA was, as usual, a wonderful gathering of diverse people. The two best things about SfAA are that you can never guess which talks will turn out to be interesting and relevant, and the feeling of the meeting is so casual and collaborative. Even though many of the talks themselves can be tedious, usually owing not to the idea content but the presentation style, the discussions are always great.

And, of course, Vancouver is a beautiful city with lots of good food and drink. The weather was actually quite nice – better than expected.

Anyway, I have a few more comments on specific sessions and stuff, and I’ll make them in order – just a few days delayed from real time.

Tomorrow I’m off to Vancouver to attend the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). This is a wonderful conference, and I highly recommend it. In the last few years the number of people who are doing work combining anthropology with design and various IT-related fields is growing - and fast. Add to that the fact that the meetings provide a genuinely diverse set of perspectives, and include a group of people that are (in my experience) knowledgeable, humble, friendly, and eager to collaborate. As compared to the AAA meetings, SfAAs tend to be more informal and to have a great deal more discussion and debate. Check out the program if you want to get a sense of it.

This year I’m giving both a talk and a poster. My talk, terribly titled ‘Cultural Assessment of Kiosk Projects,’ is on Wednesday from 3:30-5:20. Hopefully I can learn from some of the insightful comments on giving talks from Steve and Lorenz. It’s on work I’m doing on integrating cultural assessment into the design and evaluation of projects in the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) space. This is getting to be a crowded field, and my own contribution is small, but I feel like I’ve got a good handle on the transitions that are happening from the perspective of applied anthropology.

And like many others, I have first hand experience with the fact that development researchers in many fields are starting realize that anthropology and ethnography are important, but they understand it as a set of methods only. While I have no pretensions about ethnography, as opposed to some who argue that ‘real’ ethnography can only be done by anthropologists, I do think many well-meaning researchers and practitioners in other fields actually do us a disservice by trying to use ethnographic-like methods. In trying to advance the case for ethnography to their colleagues, they often have no real ‘ammunition’ except that they know it ought to be done. This, in my opinion, is the same, and just as bad, as technologists who throw gadgets at development problems because they can, hoping that one will solve the problem.

My poster, during a session on Friday from 1:30-4, is based on work I did with Ben Gross regarding how people manage multiple email addresses, messaging accounts, and the like in the course of everyday life. We wonder: what are the factors that influence habits, perceptions, and decisions around complex, multi-faceted lives online? This is my first poster at the SfAA, and I’m kind of psyched for it. Poster sessions seem much more engaging than paper sessions, where the audience is always at a distance.

I hope to be online and blog some of the sessions as we go along. If you’re also attending the SfAAs, drop me a line.

And interesting article today in USAToday about a law professor who banned laptops in her classroom. Of course, the students are pissed. And they should be. On the one hand I think it’s fine for professors to control the environment in which they teach - within reason of course. That’s the job of a professor after all - to pass on knowledge and experience in the best way possible.

On the other hand, professors who do things like ban laptops seem to have a surprisingly thin grasp of the contexts of learning. When students’ using laptops makes professors uncomfortable it’s probably because it conflicts with their cultural conception of classroom behavior. A student should sit with a pen and paper, maybe a book, and pay attention to the front of the room, just like they did when they were students.

Of course, the contexts of learning, especially in higher education, are quite different now than they were then. Wireless internet in particular has changed the classroom experience. At the iSchool it is commonplace for students to sit in lectures with laptops out, a fact which has been appalling to some folks I’ve told about it. Often, it’s true, there is some distraction from email and the web, especially during those less than scintillating moments in class. But the fact is that laptops and connectivity have led to powerful new modes of learning. Take, for example, Sarita, Sarai, and Steve’s ClassChat Project as well as Jen & Matthew’s project, both of which explore the implications of the ‘the backchannel‘, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel that is active during many of the iSchool’s courses. They are proving that the backchannel has all sorts of interesting sociocultural functions that are entirely about enhancing comprehension and retention.

This morning’s ‘Morning Edition‘ on NPR included a story about the community that has sprung up around a makeshift kitchen outside the Yellow Cab lot in San Francisco. (Janete’s Midnight Cabyard Kitchen)

It’s a fascinating tale about spontaneous connections, sharing culture, and the unexpected mechanisms of diaspora.

One thing the story doesn’t tell us much about: how did it come to be that so many people from a small Brazilian town called Goiânia happen to be cabdrivers in San Francisco?

Feedyes.com lets you scrape pretty much any page, creating RSS feeds for pages that don’t publish them. Don’t ask me how, I just think it’s cool.

(via Purse Lip Square Jaw)

In preparing this week’s lecture on surveillance and risk for my science & tech class, I reread Anders Albrechtslund and Lynsey Dubbeld’s The Plays and Arts of Surveillance: Studying Surveillance as Entertainment (pdf). Although I still don’t think the authors are terribly successful at making their case, it’s such a departure from most surveillance studies that I’m really curious to see what the students think.

Surveillance could be considered not just as positively protective, but even as a comical, playful, amusing, enjoyable practice…[I]n this paper we are not concerned with the subverting, critical potential of cultural reflections on surveillance. Rather, our intent is to draw attention to an emerging range of surveillance manifestations the primary purpose of which is to entertain…

[T]here is a growing area of what could be called ‘surveillance games’ that seems to call for further analysis: games that use data processing technologies to provide or enhance entertainment, thereby appropriating surveillance devices for their own hedonistic purposes. These appropriations suggest that surveillance is not just a steady growing security industry that requires critical debate and extensive academic analysis (important as these are!); surveillance can also serve as a source of enjoyment, pleasure and fun, as is evidenced in the entertainment industry…

[L]ooking at surveillance from the perspective of the fun it can bring could contribute to developing analyses of how surveillance can come up in unexpected places, such as online gaming communities, and increase our sensitivity for identifying surveillance issues in innocentlooking practices such as board games…Further study of popular culture aspects of surveillance can contribute to an understanding of how we use concepts and metaphors derived from fiction in surveillance analyses.”

Like Anne, I appreciate that this paper is an alternative to the relentlessly critical approach that defines a lot of academia. By looking at the unexpected ways that sometimes oppressive and challenging technologies are adapted for alternative purposes that they wern’t necessarily designed for (and which don’t exist in the popular imagination), we can learn a lot.

Recently I saw ‘The Aristocrats: 100 Comedians, one very dirty joke’ which is a documentary film about the comedy world. Specifically, it’s about an old and famous joke which is really not one joke but a model for a joke – it’s different every time someone tells it. I think I can safely not give away anything about the movie by describing the joke to you:

A guy walks into an agent’s office and says to the agent, ‘I’ve got this great new act you’ve got to hear about. It’s really a killer, it’ll bring down the house.’

The agent says, ‘So what’s the act?’

{insert a description of the most foul scenario you can think of that includes all sorts of sexual acts, horrible scatological stuff, bestiality, incest, basically the most abhorrent stuff you can think of. Each comedian makes this part up on the spot, gives it his/her own flair.}

The agent, flabbergasted, can only say ‘Whaddya call that act?’ and the guy says, ‘The Aristocrats.’

Here’s Cartman telling the joke if you want to get a flavor for it (Warning: this is extremely vulgar and disgusting. Like, really, I think you ought to watch it if you want to get the feel of the joke, but it’s truly gross. You’ve been warned.):

The movie consists entirely of 100 different comedians telling the joke, talking about the joke, or talking about other people telling the joke. Apparently this joke is a big part of the construction of this community of comedians.

Somewhere about 30 minutes into the 90 minute movie, about five minutes after I stopped laughing and started wondering how the movie could possibly sustain itself for another hour, I realized something. The Aristocrats doesn’t work that well as a comedy, but that’s okay, because at heart it’s an ethnographic film. I started to look at it differently, and I LOVED it! This joke has so many flavors and so many characters – it’s something that 100 different famous comedians could all talk about and share stories about with excitement and passion. The film is a window into a history and a sense of community. Knowing the joke, telling the joke, talking about the joke, and loving it all become parts of the cultural construction of comedy. It’s more about comedy and the practice of comedy than it is about the joke – the joke is just the vehicle for the story.

Now I know I said it wasn’t that funny, but I almost lost control of myself when Steven Banks (a.k.a Billy the Mime) gave his wordless interpretation of the joke, standing right in the middle of the boardwalk near LA, people walking by behind him. After almost an hour of context about the joke, what it means, and the way it’s told, Billy the Mime absolutely tore it up. Dear lord. I wish I could find a video clip, but I can’t. I’ll keep a lookout.

Mimi Ito of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California (and PI on the Digital Youth project on which I work), is announcing 8 new postdoc positions.

The Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) (www.annenberg.edu) at the University of Southern California invites applications for up to eight postdoctoral positions and one visiting scholar position. These Visiting Research fellows will take part in a major multi-disciplinary research initiative to explore the “The Meaning of the New Networked Age: Innovation, Content, Society, and Policy.” We welcome researchers from various disciplines including anthropology, architecture, the arts, business, communications, computer science, design, economics, engineering, history, international relations, law, library science, neurosciences, political science, rhetoric, and sociology.

Anyone who’s done interview transcription themselves knows that it’s both necssary and a giant, unimaginable time-suck. When I’m getting towards the end of a 2 hour interview that took place in a loud cafe, I know I’m about to poke my eyes out. So I try to send them out to transcription services whenever possible. It isn’t cheap though, so sometimes we’re stuck.

Through the Anthrodesign list I learned of a new, free (Shareware) application called transScriber. It’s a simple and functional tool for playing back transcription audio while you’re typing it into a word processor. I like that it’s unencumbered and easy to use - you load the sound file into the app. and it sits in the background while you work in MS Word or whatever. To access the audio controls you just hold down the Alt key and hit an arrow key. Up is start/stop, left and right are for stepping back and forth in 10 second chunks. You can also set bookmarks by hitting the down key, but it looks like there is no way to save them if you quit the program. It supports a wide variety of audio formats, at the moment MP3, MP4, AAC, WAV, AIFF, GSM, and G.711.

So, I like tranScriber, but all things considered, I’d definitely choose Express Scribe (which I blogged about last year) instead. On the one hand, Express Scribe doesn’t do bookmarks, and transScriber’s Alt-function keys are nice compared to Express Scribe’s use of the function keys at the top of the keyboard. I found hitting ‘F7′ and ‘F8′ with any speed required a lot of accuracy since my hands have to move from the typing position. Alt - arrow is much easier. On the other hand, Express Scribe is also free, does everything transScriber does, and has a ton of flexibility and features:

• Supports foot pedals
• Lets you customize the playback speed, supports slow playback
• Let’s you customize the FWD and REW jump lengths
• Remembers audio position across sessions
• Supports a VERY long list of file formats

Still, you’ve gotta give transScriber’s author Mads Rydahl a huge amount of credit. He built the software from scratch to help out his girlfriend who is a social anthropologists. That’s get you points!!!

My buddy Alex, who is an editor at Baltimore magazine, has an interesting post about entitlement and class dynamics in Baltimore.

I spent 7+ years in and around Baltimore, and Alex’s perspective reminds me that Baltimore is a city with a deeply rooted identity crisis. In the October 21st, 1973 edition of the New York Times Magazine (that sadly I can’t seem to find online), famous Baltimore columnist Russell Baker published a piece titled ‘The Biggest Baltimore Loser of All Time.’ It’s a fascinating read about collective identity and social history in Baltimore. In it he basically argues that Baltimore has developed a massive penchant for underachieving as a result of everything from its position as the banking capital for the Confederacy to the fact that the Baltimore Orioles are the almost-winningist baseball team of all time. In other words, they have gone to the World Series without winning more times than any other team.

It would be interesting to revisit that argument in 2006. Alex, you up for it? Let’s get Russell on the line…

I was pretty thrilled to find out recently that my paper, Cultural Assessment for Sustainable Kiosks, was accepted to the 1st International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2006). In it I argue that most assessments of ICT4D projects are too narrowly focused on economic and technical factors, that the concept of sustainability needs to be refigured in terms of grassroots culture instead of business modeling, and that so-called ‘rapid’ ethnographic methods are a great way to captual cultural factors in an efficient and contextually appropriate way. An earlier version of this paper is available here.

It’s very gratifying because I’ve loved working on ICT4D over the last year, and at the same time I’ve been sad that I haven’t been able to devote more time to it. This gives me motivation to keep going. At the moment it is just a theory paper. This is the beginning of a long road that includes theory, method, and most importantly case-studies of successes and failures in ICT4D projects. The serious analysis of faliures is a glaring hole in the ICT4D community. Why has there been no effort to extract best practices? Considering how many ICT4D projects fail to some degree, it’s really amazing…

To keep up the theme of reblogging ancient posts (at least in blog time), here’s a fantastic summary, complete with academic references, of what it takes to build a virtual community. It’s framed in the context of a business that wants to develop online relationships with communities of customers, but it’s particularly relvent in the context of the Mycroft Project, which I previously blogged about.

Mycroft is off to an amazing start, and thus far we’ve been quietly rolling out a variety of mostly sucky content. However, a real prototype is almost ready, and we are working on our web presence. It’s okay for now, since we get next to no traffic. But anyway, as I hope will be clear from the description that Mycroft’s success and failure depends to a huge degree on how well we can create a distributed community of contributors.