Computer-Mediated Anthropology

Is the Internet Liberal or Conservative?

2007-02-01T20:23:31Z

Can the Internet be described as either predominantly liberal or conservative? Scholars and pundits have weighed in on this question, sometimes coming to opposite conclusions.

Different surveys have painted differing pictures of political ideology among Internet users. Citing large-scale surveys from 2000 and 2002, Hindman finds significant differences between the Internet-usage of liberals and conservatives: “Liberals seem to dominate the audience for politics online. Across a wide range of politically relevant activities, from gathering news online to visiting government Web sites, liberals outpace conservatives by a wide margin” (Hindman 2005: 179). On the other hand, Bimber and Davis (2003: 106) found, according to their surveys, that the political orientation of people visiting campaign websites in 2000 was 31% liberal, 27% moderate, and 41% conservative, and the party identification of those surveyed was 47% Republican, 45% Democrat, and 8% Independent. In studying Usenet political groups, Davis looked at the political ideology of the groups that posters subscribed to, and found “the vast majority belonged to groups on the ideological right. This was true across all groups analyzed… which suggests Usenet posters likely are more right-wing ideologically than the general public” (Davis 1999: 155-6). Providing an explanation for these apparent contradictions, Hill and Hughes write:

We started with the research question, How does the Internet affect politics? We then proposed three hypothetical answers to this question. First, we thought that the Internet would be dominanted by Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians. As shown in chapter 2, Internet activists as a group are actually more Democratic and liberal than the public at large. If we had stopped with this analysis of the demographic and political profiles of Net users in general, we may well have abandoned the hypothesis that the Internet is conservative, Republican and libertarian. But chapters 3, 5, and 6 demonstrated that the actual content of the Usenet newsgroups, chat rooms, and the World Wide Web’s political areas is in fact dominated by conservative ideas. We have an apparent contradiction here: if the bulk of Internet activists are Democrats and liberals, how in the world can the Net’s major venues be dominated by conservatives? After all, aren’t these liberal, libertarian, and Democratic activists the very people posting messages, engaging in chats, and creating Web sites? Yes and no…. we strongly believe that based on our empirical evidence, politics on the Internet is dominated by a relatively small, though vociferous and technologically savvy, conservative minority. While Internet activists as a group may not be overwhelmingly conservative, a conservative subset of those people is very active posting messages, engaging in political chats, and creating Web pages. [Hill and Hughes 1998: 179-80]

Arguing conservative dominance across all forms of media including the Internet, Alterman makes the following claim: “While the Internet has enormous value for more reasons and purposes than can be profitably counted… for political purposes it turns out to have a great deal in common with radio. Not unlike the way in which the irresponsible right-wing talk-show network forms its own self-referential information circuit, ‘news’ on the Net is passed along from one site to another with little concern for credibility. Also like radio, this tactic of combining the verifiable with a metaphorical microphone has been perfected by the far right to create a doubly deceitful dynamic of ideological extremism, false information, and accusation against which truth—and liberalism—have little chance to compete” (Alterman 2003: 75). He points to specific websites as evidence of conservative dominance: “Web sites like Drudge Report, NewsMax.com, WorldNetDaily.com, FreeRepublic.com, Townhall.com, Lucianne.com, JewishWorldReview.com, and National Review Online boast regular readers in the millions. What’s more, they are dedicated readers and in many cases…so far to the right as to tend toward outer space” (Alterman 2003: 75-6). He does point out that “Liberals, of course, have their own sites, and some generate a great deal of traffic. But the best known, Salon.con and Slate.com, are run by journalists, not activists” (Alterman 2003: 76). Looking more specifically at the conservative website FreeRepublic.com, he points out that “the average ‘Freeper’ Web visit lasts an amazing five hours and fourteen minutes. It’s not a hobby for these people, it’s a life.” (Alterman 2003: 76). There is some countervailing evidence against these claims of conservative dominance, however. For instance, liberals have sought to create their own “self-referential information circuit” called the Media Consortium (Clark and Van Slyke 2006). While the Media Consortium still appears to be a work in progress, partisanship can be seen in the blogosphere (Adamic 2005), book purchases (Krebs 2004, 2006), and news audiences (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2004), suggesting “self-referential information circuits” are already in place. In addition, while Alterman claims liberal are lacking in popular, activist websites, according to Alexa’s list of the most popular activism websites, there is no clear conservative dominance in this area:

1. Independent Media Center - news
www.indymedia.org - Site info

2. Free Republic
www.freerepublic.com - Site info

3. BugMeNot.com
bugmenot.com - Site info

4. The Petition Site
www.thepetitionsite.com - Site info

5. The Association for Progressive Communications (APC)
www.apc.org - Site info

6. ZNet
www.zmag.org - Site info

7. NewsBusters.org
newsbusters.org - Site info

8. Democracy Now!
www.democracynow.org - Site info

9. Global Voices Online
www.globalvoicesonline.org - Site info

10. Speakupwny.com
www.speakupwny.com - Site info [Alexia Internet Inc. 2007]

Clearly, some very different conclusions about the prevalent political ideologies of Internet users can be drawn depending on which political activities we look at. Are we considering reading political news online, visiting campaign or government websites, self-identification with a political party or ideology, participating in online political discussions, donating to political organizations, or using the Internet to organize political meetings offline? In addition, the use of simple binary categories of party and/or political ideology may mask important differences in cultural beliefs, as Segal and Handler point out in their article on the alleged bias in academia:

Reports that squeeze the range of political views in academia into the Democratic/ Republican binary collapse a range of political differences that is in fact broader than that present in any other major institution or sector of US society. Consider that within our secular colleges and universities alone, one typically finds an identifiable minority of “conservatives” (notably free-market economists and foreign policy hawks), a large glut of “liberals” (many “classical,” some “neo-”), and yet another minority of “leftists.” The complexity and range of this ideological field is obscured, however, when it is reduced to the question of which of the two mainstream political parties garners the most faculty support. [Segal and Handler 2005: 5]

Therefore, in order to claim either liberal or conservative dominance online, we must not only operationalize what practices constitute this dominance, but also describe the cultural homogeneity/heterogeneity of those within these categories. To a large extent, online social networks and have been forming around these emic categories of political identity, with liberal and conservative groups often forming “nodes within the broader party networks” (Skinner 2005: 1). Which “liberals” and which “conservatives” are being overrepresented and underrepresented within these networks? How can we describe the complex network of political actors and their negotiations of these political identities? Arturo Escobar, in his discussion of biodiversity discourses, states: “As they circulate through the network, truths are transformed and re-inscribed into other knowledge-power constellations. They are alternatively resisted, subverted, or recreated to serve other ends, for instance, by social movements, that became, themselves, the sites of important counterdiscourses” (Escobar 1998: 56). We may similarly ask: how are political discourses transformed as they travel through the “broader party networks”? Answering these questions should give a more nuanced view than simply claiming liberal or conservative dominance of the Internet.

References:

Adamic, Lada
2005 The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog. Electronic document, http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/AdamicGlanceBlogWWW.pdf, accessed February 1, 2007.

Alexia Internet Inc.
2007. Alexia – Browse: Activism. Electronic document, http://www.alexa.com/browse?&CategoryID=361, accessed February 1, 2007.

Alterman, Eric
2003 What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News. New York: Basic Books.

Clark, Jessica, and Tracy Van Slyke
2006 The Emerging Progressive Media Network 2006: In These Times. Electronic document, http://inthesetimes.com/site/multimedia/mediamap/, accessed December 8, 2006.

Davis, Richard
1999 The Web of Politics: The Internet’s Impact on the American Political System. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Escobar, Arturo
1998 "Whose Knowledge, Whose Nature?: Biodiversity, Conservation, and the Political Ecology of Social Movement". Journal of Political Ecology 5:53-82.

Hill, Kevin A. and John E. Hughes
1998 Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Hindman, Matthew Scott
2005 Voice, equality, and the Internet (Howard Dean). Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Politics, Princeton University.

Krebs, Valdis
2004 Political Patterns on the WWW -- Divided We Stand. Electronic document, http://www.orgnet.com/divided2.html, accessed February 1, 2007.
2006 Political Books and Polarized Readers. Electronic document, http://www.orgnet.com/divided.html, February 1, 2007.

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, The
2004 News Audiences Increasingly Politicized. Electronic document, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=215, accessed December 24, 2006.

Segal, Daniel and Richard Handler
2005 Republicans, Democrats, Anthropologists and Others. Anthropology News 46(2 Feb.): 4-5.

Skinner, Richard M.
2005 Do 527's Add Up to a Party? Thinking About the "Shadows" of Politics. The Forum 3(3):Article 5.

cmanthropology @ 2006-11-28T12:36:00

2006-11-28T16:36:18Z

I've spent the past few days writing up a survey about IM conversation behavior for my sociolinguistics class. If you have a few minutes, I'd really appreciate it if you took it. It's for a good cause (my GPA) and it's fun. Seriously, I have testimonials! Here is the link: https://websurveyor.net/wsb.dll/82755/SocioSurvey.htm

When you finish, please forward this link on to anyone you know who uses IMs - friends, family, students, teachers, bosses, minions, coworkers, ex-boyfriends (or girlfriends), etc.

Thanks for any effort you might give this (even reading this post. That is the first step to survey victory!). I really appreciate it.

Cross-posted around.

Why we blog

2006-10-18T18:13:29Z

Reposted from Dialogic

I would like to extend an invitation to bloggers to join in on a collective blogging section of our upcoming winter issue of Reconstruction. The issue is the “Theories/Practices of Blogging.” In addition to the special section of posts on blogging there will be about a dozen essays on blogging.

The deadline is October 27th.

Our intent in this section of the issue will be to collect a wide range of bloggers and link up to their statements in regards to why they blog (something many of us are asked) and any statement they have on the theories/practices of blogging.

If you already have a post on this you can feel free to use it, or, if you are interested, you can submit a new one.

We will link to each statement from the issue at our site, with the intent of creating a hyperlinked list of statements on blogging that can serve as an introduction to blogging (or an expansion of knowledge for those already blogging).

If you are interested please contact me at mdbento @ gmail.com

x-posted like mad

Theoretical perspectives on blogs

2006-07-07T17:34:56Z

Hello, I hope this community hasn't become defunct. Anyway, I'd just like to solicit suggestions and discussion of ways to examine blogs theoretically. Right now, I have three different perspectives:

1. Blogs as impression management. This comes from Erving Goffman's work. I especially like his discussion of the personal front and how ego tries to control the impressions of observers in an infinite cycle of revelation and discovery.

2. Blogs as performance. This I get from Judith Butler mostly, and it's rather intuitive if you think about it. Still, despite some background in feminist theory I'm rather weak in this area and would like some help.

3. Blogs as speech genre. This comes from Mikhail Bakhtin by way of Alireza Doostdar, who wrote a very interesting analysis of Persian weblogestan (a neologism for blogosphere) in the Dec 2004 issue of American Anthropologist.

What I also like is Bakhtin's concept of the superaddressee. Essentially, all dialogue consists of a minimum of three participants: the speaker, the listener, and the superaddressee, a greater audience which the speaker takes will understand the utterance perfectly. That is, while misunderstandings can occur between the speaker and the listener, always in the back of the speaker's mind is the belief that his or her utterance has an intended meaning that can be grasped, if not by the listener, then some perfect audience (God, reasonable people, history, etc).

What I am not looking at is blogs as panopticon. The panopticon is a tool of control that is used without the consent of the observed, which is not what blogging is at all, since it is done at the will of the blogger. The gaze of the blogosphere is one that is invited by the blogger, so it is not entirely a panopticon. In fact, many bloggers don't even consider that anyone besides their intended audience might be able to read their blogs.

Anyway, whatever thoughts and suggestions anyone else can share would be appreciated.

x-posted to blog_sociology and lj_research

real responsibilites located in the physical life of the body vs online life

2006-02-04T08:57:51Z

i'm not sure i entirely agree; what do you think?

"[C]yberspace resurrects rather than transcends the dualist legacies of the past...[W]e would do well to remember that we are, for the forseeable future, 'here to stay' in these bodies, on this planet, and that our responsibilities are located precisely here, not in some parallel digital universe (Dery 1996; Slouka 1995; Williams 1998). Real bodies, real lives, real responsibilities" (Williams and Bendelow 1998: 88).

cross-posted: blog_sociology

Virtual Ethnographer’s Toolkit: a software fantasy

2005-12-23T17:28:59Z

As researchers of cyberspace, virtual ethnographers approach social software with different needs than the typical user. While the typical user may only seek out conversational technologies for communicative purposes, the virtual ethnographer tends to ask questions about the patterns of online communication. Like in traditional ethnography, there is no substitute for “being there” doing participant observation. After all, virtual ethnography “is not so much a method in itself, but is often a way of applying in a new context…various [other] methods” (Bird & Baber 2003: 130). But unlike traditional ethnography, the raw data already exists in digital format, and should be easier to analyze with the proper software. However, as someone just beginning my dissertation research which will include a virtual ethnography component, I have found myself wishing on more than one occasion that I had software capable of automating certain tasks. With this in mind, I want to use this entry to imagine a software package, which I will call “The Virtual Ethnographer’s Toolkit” (VET for short) that would be able to perform the tasks that existing programs do not seem able to do. (If anyone either knows of existing software packages that can perform these tasks or is interested in creating such a program, I invite you to respond to this entry.)

One of the problems that I find with some of the existing software that would be of use to virtual ethnographers is that they are specific to one particular conversational technology. I am thinking specifically here of Netscan, which is very useful for analyzing Usenet, but cannot be used for any other conversational technologies. I even e-mailed Microsoft to ask if there were any plans to expand Netscan’s capabilities to blogs and message boards, or if they could direct me towards any other software with this capability. Unfortunately, the answer was no in both cases. I also ran across the webpage of an HCI professor who that mentioned plans to develop a program based on Netscan that looked to be exactly what I was looking for. However, when I e-mailed him about it, he told me that the program never materialized. To overcome these sorts of problems, VET would be able to apply its analyses of virtual communities to multiple conversational technologies, and would be able to import modules that would allow it analyze new conversational technologies as they developed. Common conversational technologies that exist now include:

E-mail
Static and database-backed web pages
Discussion forum
Internet chat/instant messaging
Video and audio streaming
Video and audio conferencing
Weblog (“blog”)
Wiki
RSS [Green & Pearson 2005: 2]

Netscan allows automatic graphs to be generated for the number of posters, returnees, posts, and so forth. I think being able to do the same thing for e-mail listservs, discussion forums, and blogs would be quite useful to virtual ethnographers interested in questions of whether the group has a stable membership and whether participation is increasing or decreasing.

The second feature I envision VET having is being able to automatically extract tabular data from social software. Many different types of social software allow users to create profiles of some sort, and some feature community profiles of some sort (e.g. how many visits and posts were made that day). VET would be able to automatically collect this data and export it into a format of your choice so that you could use an appropriate program (Excel, SPSS, etc.) to statistically analyze it or create charts based on it. If that data happens to include geographic information, VET would also be able to geocode it so it could be imported directly into a GIS program.

Third, VET would be able to function like a “meta-search engine” for the various types of social software, allowing the virtual ethnographer to get a variety of background information on a particular virtual community without requiring the researcher to know about and visit all the websites that can provide such information. If the virtual ethnographer wanted to analyze a website, for instance, VET could search for the specified website on Alexa, the Internet Way-Back Machine, Textalyzer, and Whois domain explorer, and then generate a thorough background report on the site based on the information it gathered.

Fourth, for synchronous conversational technologies, VET could function like a bot. This would allow the researcher to keep archives of conversations, and the bot could be programmed to conduct interviews, thereby saving the virtual ethnographer time and allowing participants who keep different hours to be reached. These interviews could either be just a straightforward list of questions asked in order, or the bot could be programmed to ask follow-up questions based on the responses, similar to ELIZA. While programs like ELIZA tend to be “dumb” and cannot pass for an actual person, it has the potential to provide “a reassuring encounter with an almost-other” (Turkle 1995: 109) thereby encouraging participants to be more talkative. Unlike ELIZA, however, the VET bot would limit the number of follow-up questions. The virtual ethnographer would, of course, have to be familiar with the cultural context of the virtual community before deciding to use this feature since reactions to ELIZA vary (Turkle 1995: 105-109).

Fifth, VET would be able to automatically generate texts to analyze based on certain criteria. There are (at least) three ways that text analysis may be done: (1) content analysis, where repeated observations of themes or content within a body of text leads to the development of analytic categories (LeCompte and Schensul 1999: 129; McCarty 2005: sec. II-A-2-I-A), (2) concordance analysis, which is the systematic transformations of textual data to “direct your attention to the immediate linguistic environment of the specified word” (McCarty 2005: sec. II-A-2-III-C), and (3) statistical analysis, which “involves counting particular features of the textual data and then applying one or more mathematical transformations” (McCarty 2005: sec. II-A-2-I-A). VET would be able to aid all three of these not only by compiling all the communication within a virtual community into a single body of text, but being able to recognize and separate particular users and thematic categories to generate a body of text for analysis. For example, if I wanted to do a textual analysis on SavageMinds.org, VET would be able to generate a text file consisting only of posts within the “Technology” category, only posts containing the phrase “virtual ethnography” within them, or only posts by Rex. These texts could then be exported into programs like Concordance or Weft QDA.

Sixth, because it is important for “critical cyberstudies” to look at discourses about online discourses (Silver 2000), VET would allow the virtual ethnographer to search for what is being said elsewhere about a virtual community. VET could see what is being said about a particular virtual community on television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books message boards, and blogs through searching Lexis-Nexis, Technorati, Google Print, Board Reader, Blinx, and Google News. A virtual ethnographer interested in a particular LiveJournal community would probably not find anything about that specific virtual community, but could probably find discourses on LiveJournal and blogs in general to help contextualize his or her research.

Seventh, VET would be able to aid in analyzing the social networks of virtual communities, having the capability to generate a sociogram, which is “a visual graph of the network that will help you clarify its characteristics” (Wolfe & Hagen 2002: 148). VET could also generate data files for programs like UCINET for more complex analyses. VET could automatically identify network connections in a variety of ways. One way is to keep a running tally of which individuals reply to each other. Replies should be easily identifiable in conversational technologies that represent replies through a tree-like structure (like LiveJournal, Google Groups, and certain styles of EZboard), although they may also be identified through subject titles that begin with “re:” and by the quoting of another user’s text. When VET encounters posts with “re:” titles and/or quotes, it will automatically search for messages within that thread to see if they can be connected to a single message within that thread. Discovering social networks within chat rooms would be more difficult since there is no tree-like structure and no subject titles; however, users are likely to quote each other’s names and text in order to make it clear who they are addressing. It may be problematic that users could communicate each other without these easily identifiable indicators for VET to pick up on, simply relying on the context of what is being said for the receiver to know they are the intended recipient of the communication. Should these gaps be of concern, the virtual ethnographer could manually add these communicative acts to VET’s tally of who is conversing with whom, and also “contact each individual in the network…[and p]rovide each member with a copy of your list and ask each of them to indicate every individual that they have regular communication with” (Wolfe & Hagen 2002: 146).

Unfortunately, the Virtual Ethnographer’s Toolkit exists only in my imagination (and perhaps yours as well now). However, in imagining VET with these features, I tried to make it plausible that something like this could be developed, given what I know of software that already exists. Even if VET were to be created with all the features I listed, it would still have trouble handling data that is not text-based such as podcasts and photo blogs. Also, VET would merely be a tool for virtual ethnographers, not a replacement for them. A great software package alone cannot guarantee insightful analysis. However, with better tools, virtual ethnographers may be aided in making insightful analyses of the virtual communities they study.

If you have ever done a virtual ethnography, I invite you to participate in this fantasy and add whatever features you think VET should have that I did not already think of.

References Cited

Bird, S. Elizabeth, and J. Barber
2002 Constructing a virtual ethnography. In Doing Cultural Anthropology: Projects for Ethnographic Data Collection. M. Angrosino, ed. Pp. 129-139. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.

Green, David T., and John M. Pearson
2005 Social Software and Cyber Networks: Ties That Bind or Weak Associations within the Political Organization? Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

LeCompte, Margaret D., and Jean J. Schensul
1999 Designing & Conducting Ethnographic Research. 7 vols. Volume 1. Walnut Creek & Lanham & New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

McCarty, Willard
2005 Sources, topics and exercises for YEAR 1 2005-2006 Fundamentals of the digital humanities: Index to readings and reference materials by topic. Electronic document, http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/year1/course.html, accessed October 16, 2005.

Silver, David
2000 Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000. Originally published in Web.studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, edited by David Gauntlett (Oxford University Press, 2000): 19-30. Resource Center For Cyberculture Studies. Electronic document, http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/intro.asp, accessed October 10, 2005.

Turkle, Sherry
1995 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone.

Wolfe, Alvin W. and Guy Hagen
2002 Developing an Electronic Ethnography. In Doing Cultural Anthropology: Projects for Ethnographic Data Collection. M. Angrosino, ed. Pp. 139-149. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.

CMA Conference Papers Archive

2005-12-13T17:15:33Z

The 104th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association happened a few weeks ago. They put up a meeting page (American Anthropological Association 2005) which, frankly, looks like a brochure for tourists. One anthropologist blogger remarked: "Unfortunately....none of the conference papers are available online for public viewing" (Friedman 2005). You cannot even get paper titles and abstracts online, unlike other academic organizations (e.g. International Studies Association 2005). I am reminded of something David Hakken wrote: "the AAA remains only slightly ahead of my neighborhood muffler shop in terms of its creative use of cyber-media" (2003:194).

This is why I decided to go through the AAA program book, and e-mail everyone whose paper title sounds CMA-related to ask permission to host their paper on my site. You can see the archive here:

http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/cma/CMA-conferences.htm

I hope to include other conferences in the future. If anyone reading this has a paper they would like on the page, let me know.

References

American Anthropological Association
2005 2005 Annual Meeting Photo Gallery. Electronic document, http://www.aaanet.org/annual_meeting/2005/gallery.htm, accessed December 13, 2005.

Friedman, Kerim
2005 What happens at the AAA, stays at the AAA. Electronic document, http://savageminds.org/2005/12/05/what-happens-at-the-aaa-stays-at-the-aaa/, accessed December 13, 2005.

Hakken, David
2003 An Ethics for an Anthropology in and of Cyberspace. in Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for an Ethically Conscious Practice. Flueher-Lobban, Carolyn, ed. Pp. 179-195. Alta Mira: Walnut Creek.

International Studies Association
2005 ISA CONFERENCE PAPER ARCHIVE. Electronic document, http://www.isanet.org/archive.html, accessed December 13, 2005.

Virtual Culture Shock?

2005-11-28T19:21:42Z

Someone said this to me recently on another blog:

I wonder if it mightn’t be a good idea to separate, at least analytically, physical and psychological comfort. Traditional fieldwork has never been justified (except incidentally because it is, as Noah points out, part of the myth) by physical suffering. The shock and distress of dealing with people whose beliefs and behavior violate your own, often tacit, assumptions and spending enough time with them to work through the inevitable conflicts and develop a solidly grounded, as non-judgmental as possible, understanding of what they’re about is, however IMHO, a critical differentiator of serious ethnography.

(...)

This is why I do remain skeptical that ethnography of virtual communities counts as anthropological fieldwork or at least the sort of experience that a first round of fieldwork ought to be. Perhaps I simply don’t know enough about virtual communities; but I’ve never heard of one whose assumptions aren’t familiar—if only because I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction. And the virtual aspect makes it all too easy, I suspect, to keep the different assumptions, e.g., a quasi-feudal form of social organization, safely behind the computer screen. Where is the shock? Where is the challenge? Where is the being forced to live in the flesh, tastes, smells and sounds of people, some of whose behavior may disturb or disgust you? Where is the learning to deal with that?

Now to me, Ozma is a different case. She’s paid her dues, she’s done real fieldwork as I understand it. If she has good theoretical reasons (and I can imagine many) for wanting to see what happens to Guarani speakers in an area modernized by Mennonites, I’d say why not and agree with Noah’s conclusion completely. But a virtual community or where someone grew up for his or her first fieldwork….something’s missing there. (McCreery 2005)

I think McCreery raises some interesting questions for virtual ethnography. Does virtual ethnography offer the same potential for the "shock and distress of dealing with people whose beliefs and behavior violate your own, often tacit, assumptions"? Are there virtual communities that are different enough for us to experience culture shock, or is it rare or impossible to find a virtual fieldwork setting where "assumptions aren’t familiar"?

The traditional narrative of anthropological fieldwork has been described as “structurally phallic” (Killick 1995: 86), filled with “narratives of penetration” (p. 86) where “the heroic figure of the lone anthropologist in search of self-renewal” (p. 85) by participating in “a rite of separation from, and reincorporation into, an academic community” (p. 86). Yet some anthropologists are finding that this sort of narrative is becoming less applicable:

Either because of the wholesale incorporation of cultural traits or because of the more subtle but effective process of modernization, the informant's culture becomes an impoverished version of the ethnographer's. The sphere of the informant's knowledge is less and less distinctive and more and more restricted. It becomes more difficult for the pair to perform the roles of the man of wisdom instructing his most talented student. Occasionally the structure collapses, and the pair find themselves playing out the farce of ethnographer as patron and the informant as the unfortunate who begs favors. The proud primitive now whines; the sensitive student now commands. The massification of the ethnographer. The proletarianization of the informant. Disillusion. Bitterness.

The collapse of the traditional pattern of fieldwork against the reality of the contemporary field experience is a major cause of the feeling of disaster and guilt that permeates ethnology, and through ethnology, American anthropology. The traditional pattern justified the ethnographer's being an ethnographer through the message of cultural relativism which rested on the theory of cultures, of shining monads, intricate, complete, dazzlingly crystal against the black sky of nature. Once these monads began to merge into a uniform, brown sameness, how could the doctrine of cultural differences have any appeal? Once the informant was a man who fought with Geronimo. Now he is a Saturday drunk in the white man's jail. How can the ethnographer profess that every culture has equally valid solutions to the human problems? How can the ethnographer find a special niche for himself in the informant's society? He bumps into others seeking the same niche, sociologists, political scientists, and local ethnographers (the last, exasperated by the constant demands of foreign social scientists, wish that they all would take their problems and go elsewhere). How can the ethnographer be reborn by immersing himself in a truly different culture, when nearly all cultures are becoming the same and the informant looks more and more like the people from across the tracks? How can he handle the guilt generated by seeing how his society exploits the informant's society, when there is no flash of exotic culture to lure his attention away from shacks built of cardboard and lives built from braggadocio and abnegation?

He can't. The collapse of the traditional model of fieldwork, with its moral justification grounded on the theory and experience of cultural differences, against the uncompromising reality of the contemporary structure has left the ethnographer, ethnology, and to a degree, anthropology without a sense of mission.(Richardson 1990, references removed)

Are anthropologists really being left with a "uniform, brown sameness"? Others would say they are not:

As the end of the twentieth century draws closer it is becoming increasingly apparent that the world is changing, not just incrementally but also qualitatively. Human societies are moving into new phases of history. Economic and technological developments are giving rise to even greater cultural diversity, fragmentation and differentiation in place of the homogeneity and standardization that were once the hallmarks of modernism and mass society. Flexible specialization, de-industrialization, time-space compression, the decentering of the human subject, discontinuity, and the 'end of history' -- these processes are said to characterize the condition of postmodernity in the world today. At the same time, however, there appear to be contradictory tendencies within the process of globalization. On the one hand, there is an increasing centralization of power in high-level planning and decision-making and the emergence of what the international business press calls a 'de-facto world government' with its own institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, G-7, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As Noam Chomsky says (quoting the Financial Times), 'these are becoming the governing institutions of a "new imperial age"'. One the other hand, however, these tendencies have been matched by a revival of localism and ethnic chauvinism and an increase in xenophobia and nationalism throughout Europe and beyond. At the same time there is talk of a 'global culture' -- increasing supernationalism, multinational corporations and globalized consumerism (epitomized in the seemingly ubiquitous presence of McDonald's, Mickey Mouse, commercial video, Japanese electronics and so forth). Revolutions in information and communications technology, mass consumption and the globalization of capital appear to be contributing to a fundamental dislocation of everyday working practices and social relations. (Ahmed and Shore 1995: 12-13)

Ahmed and Shore go on to say that "this pattern of economic restructuring, rationalization, migration, and mobility is resulting in the emergence of new identities -- consumer and media-oriented, ethnic, regional, national, and migrant -- and new subjectivities....these processes are everywhere creating new communities of 'insiders' and 'outsiders', new patterns of interethnic relations and new hybrid cultures" (1995: 13). Where Richardson saw a "uniform, brown sameness", they see "new hybrid cultures." Various forms of media are contributing to these "hybrid cultures", as this example from Malaysian Borneo shows:

My resolve to attempt this project waivered, I confess, in the face of the new media bombardment, so indiscriminate were the fragments of popular culture that littered the Upriver mediascape. The most trying example concerned the enormous popularity of professional wrestling. I first noticed it in the late eighties, when Hulk Hogan was a veritable cult figure. His picture was tacked up on longhouse walls, and he waved his fists from the back of T-shirts. He was even used as a conversation opener. Upriver languages contain no formula of greeting, and there is no such thing as an introduction in societies where personal names are not lightly to be bandied about. Consequently, conversation begin abruptly, in mid-thought, often with a question. In the seventies, people looked me up and down and asked: "How did the Americans get to the moon?" In the late eighties it changed to: "Do you know Hulk Hogan?"

At first, I put the Hogan cult down to a passing fad, but when I returned in the mid-nineties, I found professional wrestling more popular than ever, and Hogan joined by a new generation of muscular heros. What bothered me about this was that I could not make it fit--and there's that word again--with what I knew of Upriver culture. Aside from the fact that he looked like a latter-day Viking, with his long blond hair and whiskers, and piercing blue eyes, his body language was so outrageous that it embarassed me to watch him with Upriver People. In the ritual pre-bout interviews, he postured absurdly, hurled puerile school-yard threats at his opponents, and contorted his face into a mask of hatred. No Upriver Person would ever be so undignified. He appeared perpetually to be throwing a tantrum; when children do that in the longhouse, adults turn away in disgust. Moreover, how could the bouts themselves be convincing to a people with their own sturdy martial traditions--every man a warrior? (Metcalf 2001: 174-5)

Metcalf found, however, that Hulk Hogan was incorporated in culturally-specific ways:

The theme of Hulk Hogan as a hero of plain folk took on darker hues, however, when I paid attention to what Upriver People most often wanted to say about wrestling bouts. What they emphasized again and again was not the drubbings he gave, but the extraordinary punishment he received. Watching the bouts, Upriver People would grunt in sympathy as their hero took terrible blows that seemed to stun him, and then got jumped on so hard the floor shook. Any normal person, they remarked, would surely be carted out of the ring unconscious, and taken to the hospital with broken limbs. But then comes the climactic moment: the hero struggles to his feet again, turns to face his tormentor, and the audience lets out a sigh of satisfaction. Like Lamusak, Hogan may be untutored and unsubtle, but he was a survivor. However theatrical his performance, he manifested the ultimate martial value: indifference to adversity.

Recent history has made plain to Upriver People their own vulnerability. Before their world was cut down around their ears, they had a cheerful sense of their own self-worth. They were capable of a remarkable cultural relativism, based on centuries of contact with other cultures and their peculiar ways. They could say calmly: you do it like this, we do it like that. That poise is now severely shaken. Upriver People now know that they count for nothing in the calculations of the Muslim politicians who control the government. They know that in any business venture, they will quickly be outwitted by the Chinese. They ask themselves, and they asked me: is it us, are we stupid? Is it our leaders, did they sell us out? Or are the cards stacked against us so that we can never win? (Metcalf 2001: 177)

This suggests to me that "hybrid cultures" is a better way of conceptualizing what is occuring rather than "uniform, brown sameness".

If the results of globalization are hybrid cultures rather than uniform sameness, then we should expect to find these sorts of familiar elements to be more intermixed with the exotic in the course of ethnographic fieldwork. You might find something as mundane and familiar as Hulk Hogan in Malaysian Borneo, but you still may be surprised to find how he fits within their cultural logic. Surely we can still say that culture shock occurs with hybrid cultures? Metcalf still seemed to experience culture shock despite the fact that globalization had hybridized the culture he was studying (and perhaps was even more shocked because what he found defied his expectation of exoticness).

Is there any reason to think that virtual ethnography is incapable of doing the same when we open a virtual window upon other hybrid cultures? Let's consider a few general types of culture shock experiences (with examples):

1. New experiences (trying something new that you probably wouldn't have experienced otherwise): "Students often follow highly individualized, personal schedules. Most are not accustomed to eating three communal meals a day. A significant proportion cannot put themselves to bed at a regular time" (Ward 1999: 230); "Understandably, most students want U.S. creature comforts. They expect to bathe well at least once a day in hot water. For some, the words travel, Italy, or castle mean a summer resort and a glamorous vacation. As the program is structured, 'fieldwork' includes literal workdays in the fields and vineyards. Despite lengthy lectures, orientations, maps, and charts, many students seem unable to locate themselves in chronological time or in geographical and social space. Their journals often contain a poignant existential wail, 'Where am I? What am I doing?'" (Ward 1999: 230); "One category of students, which I call 'the children of privilege' stands out. This is my term; I can find little in the pedagogical or anthropological literature about teaching students whose cultural baggage centers on their social class advantages. My economically challenged university has few such students. I recognize children of privilege from their questions and requests: 'There is no phone in my room. I absolutely must have a phone'; 'I NEED two hot showers a day'; 'My father is a psychiatrist [or surgeon] and my mother is a psychologist [or social worker]. I don't DO [chores, dishes, hiking, farm work, etc.]'; 'I can't wear THOSE THINGS [the required sensible shoes with socks]. My tan lines would be absolutely ruined'; 'Where is the swimming pool?'" (Ward 1999: 230)
2. Strong emotional experiences (having emotional connections and reactions): "I think of Larry Crissman, who like me did fieldwork in Taiwan. When asked about culture shock, he replied, “Culture shock is discovering that your best informant, someone you consider a close friend, has just sold his daughter into prostitution to buy a motorcycle.”" (McCreery 2005)
3. Personal revelation (learning something about yourself from your fieldwork experience): "I think of the shock I felt when, for the first time, I was dragged off to a Chinese temple by a neighbor, handed burning incense sticks, and directed to bow to the statue of the Golden Mother on the temple’s altar. I had thought that my years of doing philosophy as an undergraduate and anthropology in grad school had turned me into a confirmed skeptic. I wasn’t at all prepared for the way my Lutheran upbringing and Protestant assumptions about the sinfulness of bowing down to graven images would well up inside and leave me waiting in fear and trembling for the Lord God Jehovah to smite me with a thunderbolt." (McCreery 2005)
4. Personal transformation (where your fieldwork experiences are not just new collection of memories to recall, but significantly change you as a person): "My practical hypothesis is that about one-third experience qualitative changes in their lives that are visible to the naked eye. They change majors: go into anthropology, get out of anthropology. They make plans for and carry out major career goals—like going to graduate school or medical school. They stop drinking. They start to write. They travel in imaginative new ways. They add serious avocations to their lives. They credit these changes to their experiences at Brunnenburg. For them, the field school was a watershed." (Ward 1999: 233)

Perhaps there are more categories that should be added or these categories are problematic in some way I am not considering, but I think they work as an entry point to exploring this issue. Let's look at them in relation to virtual ethnography.

Can virtual ethnography lead to new experiences? In a sense, every experience is a new experience, but not every new experience is qualitatively different enough for us to feel like it is new in contrast to our previous experiences. Lysloff finds that it does: "In conducting on-line ethnographic field studies of the mod scene, as I have done since 1997, I have learned new musical and linguistic skills, interviewed composers, visited numerous research websites, collected relevant texts and audio recordings, and observed various kinds of music-related activities" (2003: 234, emphasis added).

Can virtual ethnography lead to emotional experiences? Julian Dibbell's classic article leaves us with little doubt here: "the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face - a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere playacting" (Dibbell 1993; for further discussion, see Porter 2004).

Can virtual ethnography lead to personal revelation and personal transformation? Turkle (1995) provides numerous examples of this happening, such as an amputee who comes to terms with her condition through the online identities she assumes.

This is not to say that there are no differences in the types, frequencies, or intensities of online versus offline culture shock experiences. However, I think I have shown that most if not all cultures have become hybrid cultures to some degree, so we cannot completely reproduce the traditional anthropological narrative of the fieldwork experience even if we tried. Also, if an anthropologist tries his or her best to be fully immerse in a virtual community, he or she may find culture shock is quite possible.

References Cited

Ahmed, Akbar S., and Cris N. Shore
1995 Introduction: Is Anthropology Relevant to the Contemporary World? In The Future of Anthropology. Ahmed, Akbar S., and Cris N. Shore, eds. Pp. 12-45. Athlone Press.

Dibbell, Julian
1993 A Rape in Cyberspace. Originally published in Village Voice, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 51, December 21. Electronic document, http://www.ludd.luth.se/mud/aber/articles/village_voice.html, accessed November 28, 2005.

Killick, Andrew P.
1995 The Penetrating Intellect: On Being White, Straight, and Male in Korea. In Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork. D. Kulick and M. Wilson, eds. Pp. 76-106. London and New York: Routledge.

Lysloff, René T. A.
2003 Musical Community on the Internet: An On-line Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 18(2): 233-263.

McCreery, John
2005 Response #3 to “What now?”. Electronic document, http://savageminds.org/2005/11/27/what-now/#comment-2220, accessed November 28, 2005.

Metcalf, Peter
2001 Global "Disjunctive" and the "Sites" of Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology 16(2):165-182.

Porter, Noah
2004 CMA Methodology: Establishing Rapport Online. Electronic document, http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/cma/CMAmethodology-rap.htm.

Richardson, Miles
1990 Cry Lonesome and Other Accounts of the Anthropologist's Project. Albany, NY: Suny Press.

Turkle, Sherry
1995 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster (Touchstone).

Ward, Martha C.
1999 Managing Student Culture and Culture Shock: A Case from European Tirol. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 30(2): 228-237.

Default Homepages and Becoming

2005-11-09T00:56:32Z

Mahmood (2001) did ethnographic research with some Islamic women who did not come from devout families, but sought to live their lives more in accord with Islamic doctrine. Achieving piety "entailed the inculcation of entire dispositions through a simultaneous training of the body, emotions, and reason as sites of discipline until the religious virtues acquired the status of embodied habits" (p. 212). In her conversations with these women, she found that their actions such as being shy and wearing a veil made them feel hypocritical or untruthful at first, but then they came to the realization that their actions were intended to create an internal state rather than announce its existence. They are "the critical markers, as well as the ineluctable means by which one trains oneself to be pious.... at stake in this conceptualization of veiling as a disciplinary practice....is an entire conceptualization of the role of the body in the making of the self in which the outward behavior of the body constitutes both the potentiality, as well as the means, through which an interiority is realized" (p. 214). There are some similar findings for cyberspace, where someone's online activity serves as a script for remapping their identity. Turkle's (1995) research on MUDs discovered "slippages--places where persona and self merge, places where the multiple personae join to comprise what the individual thinks of as his or her authentic self" (p. 185-6). For example, one woman told her: "I was born in the South and I was taught that girls didn't speak up to disagree with men" (p. 221), but her experiences on MUDs "enabl[ed] her to reach a state of mind where she is better able to speak up for herself in her marriage" (p. 221).

One specific way that that people can use online activity to redefine identity is through one's selection of a default homepage. This is not to say that everyone selects their default homepage for this reason, but merely to point it out as a possible motivation. For a while, I made the Pew Internet & American Life Project my default homepage because I wanted to make sure that I remain informed about cyberspace studies. Might it be possible that other people have chosen a default homepage to achieve the "inculcation of entire dispositions through a simultaneous training of the body, emotions, and reason" (Mahmood 2001: 212)?

References Cited

Mahmood, Saba
2001 Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival. Cultural Anthropology 16(2):202-236.

Turkle, Sherry
1995 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone.

Strategies for Researching Lurkers

2005-10-24T23:43:59Z

On another virtual community, someone asked: “does anyone know of any good sources on the problems of documenting online reading ("lurking")? Most of what I've seen deals with the problem of the researcher as lurker, I'm more interested in the lurker as a research subject...” This is an excellent question, and one that I would like to suggest a few possible answers for.

Various organizations release research reports about the demographics associated with particular online activities. This could tell us that the average income of RSS users is $65,509 (Kerner 2005) and that “15% of internet users download video files to their computer, and 3% do so on a typical day” (Madden and Rainie 2005: 7). Also, some websites provide demographic information about their own users (e.g. Livejournal.com n.d.). This sort of information may not be sufficiently context-specific for a researcher interested in a particular virtual community, however.

Through log files and web trackers (see Statcounter.com 2005a), information such as “the date and time of visit, ip address, browser (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0), operating system version (e.g. Windows 2000), screen resolution (e.g. 800x600), referring link, the current page url and the current page title” (Statcounter.com 2005b) may be collected. This information may be helpful for understanding lurkers. However, unless the researcher happens to run the virtual community, gaining access to this information may be practically problematic. Web trackers may also be ethically problematic; according to spyware expert Ben Edelman, “each of the so-called adware networks has obtained installations and is still obtaining installations in ways that offer such poor notice and obtain such limited consent--sometimes none at all--that users can't fairly be said to have consented” (McCullagh 2005).

In some cases, a list of group members, complete with profiles, can be found. Yahoo! Groups are a good example of this. In such a case, researchers can just compare the member list of the virtual community with a list they create of who has participated in discussions and other activities to find out who is a participant and who is a lurker. If they have filled out their profiles completely and accurately, the researcher should have some basic demographic information about lurkers, and possibly ways to contact them for surveys or interviews. Even in virtual communities with member lists, however, the researcher would not know about lurkers who had left the virtual community already.

Perhaps the easiest way to study lurkers is for a researcher to announce his or her presence, and ask that lurkers participate in his or her research. This avoids the problems of inadequate consent and imprecision with the other methods. However, simply asking lurkers to participate may not work since it may not address the reason why they are lurking in the first place. Nonnecke and Preece (2001:6) give this list of the most common reasons for lurking:

• wanted to be anonymous, and preserve privacy and safety
• had work related constraints, e.g., employer did want work email address to be used
• had too many or too few messages to deal with, i.e., too many messages was burdensome, and it was easy to forget low
traffic groups
• received poor quality messages, e.g., messages were irrelevant to topic or had little information value
• were shy about public posting
• had limited time, i.e., other things were more important

Given that researchers would be asking lurkers to spend some time talking about themselves, lurkers concerned about privacy and limited time do not seem likely to respond to this type of approach.

In the end, if we cannot encourage lurkers to reveal themselves of their own accord, we may simply want to let them remain lurkers. Battaglia (1999) writes:

…the presumption of value for situating a subject…must not be allowed to close off the question of who controls ambiguous situations.

I am thinking of the subject we seek to clarify but who herself seeks obscurity. I am thinking of persons striving as a matter of physical or political survival to maintain or achieve the blurred contours of a moving target, unaccountability of narrative agency, relief from an identity displaced, obviated, or shed, under some form of social pressure. I am thinking of cases where ambiguity is an aesthetic or poetic goal, or where it is a subject’s only hope of self-preservation against the forces of colonial expansion, the manipulations of late capitalism, a sorcerer’s determined program of power, or against others’ proprietary interests in subjects’ knowledge, or their bodies, or body parts. (p. 117)

Battaglia, Debbora
1999 Towards an Ethics of the Open Subject: Writing Culture in Good Conscience. In Anthropological Theory Today. H.L. Moore, ed. Pp. 114-150. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Kerner, Sean Michael
2005 Who's Using RSS. ClickZ Network, August 2. Electronic document, http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/traffic_patterns/article.php/3524511, accessed October 24, 2005.

Livejournal.com
n.d. LiveJournal.com Statistics. Electronic document, http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml, accessed October 24, 2005.

Madden, Mary, and Lee Rainie
2005 Music and Video Downloading Moves Beyond P2P. Pew Internet & American Life Project, March 23. Electronic document, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Filesharing_March05.pdf, accessed October 24, 2005.

McCullagh, Declan
2005 Spying on the spyware makers. CNET News.com, May 4. Electronic document, http://news.com.com/Spying+on+the+spyware+makers/2008-1012_3-5694455.html, accessed October 24, 2005.

Nonnecke, Blair and Jenny Preece
2001 Why lurkers lurk. Americas Conference on Information Systems 2001. Electronic document, http://old-www.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nonnecke/research/whylurk.pdf, accessed October 24, 2005.

StatCounter.com
2005a Free Invisible Web Tracker / Site Tracker / Visitor Tracker. Electronic document, http://www.statcounter.com/free_invisible_web_tracker.html, accessed October 24, 2005.
2005b How Does It Work? Electronic document, http://www.statcounter.com/how_it_works.html, accessed October 24, 2005.

Anthropological Ethics and Spyware

2005-10-07T22:25:26Z

Anthropologists have an ethical obligation to those they study, which includes protecting their fieldnotes (American Anthropological Association 2000; LeCompte and Schensul 1999a: 190). When it comes to storing data, LeCompte and Schensul recommend that data be stored in safe places to prevent theft (1999b: 39-40). It is for this reason that Schensul et al. (1999) advise against "using computers in the field.... Portable computers and the fieldnotes stored in them are easily lost or removed with consequent loss of data and threats to confidentiality" (p. 116).

These are valid points, but they do no take the Internet into account. Spyware, defined as "software that tracks what we type, where we visit and what we do on our computers", has infected an estimated 67%-90% of PCs (Kidman 2005). If we are keeping fieldnotes on our computers, it would seem that we have an ethical obligation to make sure our computers are not among them. Unfortunately, no software is 100% effective at removing spyware (Adware Report 2005), but some are more effective than others. If effective software could conceivably prevent informant confidentiality from being compromised, then perhaps this should be included in our discussions of research ethics rather than just seen as a personal choice.

References Cited

Adware Report
2005 August Spyware Effectiveness Test Results. Electronic document: http://www.adwarereport.com/mt/archives/000049.html, accessed October 7, 2005.

American Anthropological Association
2000 AAA Statements on Ethics - Principles of Professional Responsibility. Electronic document: http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/ethstmnt.htm, accessed October 7, 2005.

Kidman, Angus
2005 Who's watching you? The Australian, SEPTEMBER 20. Electronic document: http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,16651078%5E15382%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html, accessed October 7, 2005.

LeCompte, Margaret D., and Jean J. Schensul
1999a Designing & Conducting Ethnographic Research. Edited by M. D. LeCompte and J. J. Schensul. 7 vols. Vol. 1, Ethnographer's Toolkit. Walnut Creek & Lanham & New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
1999b Analyzing & Interpreting Ethnographic Data. Edited by M. D. LeCompte and J. J. Schensul. 7 vols. Vol. 5, Ethnographer's Toolkit. Walnut Creek & Lanham & New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Schensul, Stephen L., Jean J. Schensul, and Margaret LeCompte
1999 Essential Ethnographic Methods: Observations, Interviews, and Questionnaires. Edited by M. D. LeCompte and J. J. Schensul. 7 vols. Vol. 2, Ethnographer's Toolkit. Walnut Creek & Lanham & New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

cmanthropology @ 2005-09-04T15:43:00

2005-09-04T19:49:02Z

This is a paper I wrote for a class last year. It could use a lot of revising, but I was under the gun to get it finished and turned in at the time I wrote it.

The Tampa Indian-American Virtual Community: Online Socialization, Offline Social Capital, and Digital Divides

Web Design and the Virtual Panopticon

2005-04-23T21:37:15Z

Since the CMA site has been mentioned in AAA E-News (Porter 2005), I have received a few e-mails and blog mentions (e.g. Golublog, TechnoTaste, Xirdalium) which compliment my site for its content but criticize it heavily for its web design. While I do not deny that there is plenty of room for improvement on the site, the criticism did raise some questions for me.

How is it that a website comes to be construed by individuals and groups as “good” or “bad”? While practical considerations are undeniable, culture surely has a large role to play as well: “Information designers know that the intangibles of culture are critical for user acceptance. They pay a lot of attention to colours, metaphors, patterns of argumentation, and appropriate types of evidence when dealing with multiple audiences in a single nation. Unfortunately, when faced with a mix of national audiences, the range of variation seems endless” (Gould 2000: 162). Others also recognize the importance of culture in mediating website interpretation as well:

Critics see media content as signs/representations/reflections of values and beliefs of a particular time and place or social group. Meaning is viewed as a social construct and messages are also decoded according to the social situation of those in the receiving audience…Websites, as cultural products, are signs of the society and time to which they belong. [Ramakatan & Clarke 2003: 2]

In my view, when you design with the cultural context in mind you are aware, or have an understanding of, the socially communicative side of the product, how it will be perceived by groups and individuals in society. [Johansson 2004: 2]

The upshot of this for web designers is that “there is a need for understanding the totality of user’s everyday life. There is an overrepresentation of information technology focused on helping us solving tasks and work related problems, a development which has resulted in designers focusing on functions that are efﬁcient, time saving and generic” (Johansson 2004: 1; emphasis added).

The current global economic system has been claimed by some to promote “global mental homogenization” (Barndt 2002: 61), resulting in centralized authorities that “[impose] standardized notions of quality and taste in the creation of a national market” (Rosebarry 1996: 764). Rosebarry was talking specifically about coffee, but the principle holds for other products as well, such as tomatoes:

McDonald’s prefers to buy Florida beefsteak tomatoes that are pulpier, firmer, and easier to slice for a hamburger bun, while the tastier Mexican produce are juicier and more likely to fall apart. It is clearly a question of appearance and not taste. The draw of McDonald’s is often more the lifestyle, reflected in the glossy ads, billboards, TV commercials, toys, and videos that promote dominant popular culture…

Perfectly sliced tomatoes on a cookie cutter hamburger and bun are part of a global trend toward homogenized diets. In fact, the term McDonaldization is now equated with this rationalizing and homogenizing process, which is built on principles of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control; other businesses and social institutions are increasingly modeled on practices similar to the fast-food restaurant. [Barndt 2002: 29]

Even the criminal justice system has been affected by McDonaldization (Robinson n.d.). Given all these symptoms, is it any surprise that that web design has a tendency towards being “generic”? Indeed, some sing the praises of such a development:

Design, by definition, is a plan. As such, it starts with an intention and it employs the elements most likely to bring about success. In this larger and more accurate view, there is no distinction between “design” and “strategy.”

The goal of “graphic design” could then be described as “the use of visual stimulus to bring about a desired effect.” And it is here that we distinguish between the common view of design (the beautification of content) and the appropriate and successful use of design (a catalyst for action). [Kalinowski 2004]

… productivity benefits from the electric motor took decades to reach fruition. The real breakthrough came from miniaturization and the possibility of rearranging the production process. Henry Ford, and the entire managerial team, were down on the factor floor every day fine tuning the flow of parts through the assembly line as they perfected the process of mass production.

The challenge facing us now is to re-engineer the flow of information through the enterprise. And not only within the enterprise—the entire value chain is up for grabs. Michael Dell has shown us how direct, digital communication with the end user can be fed into production planning so as to perfect the process of “mass customization.” [Varian 2003: 12]

The term “mass customization” seems reminiscent of strategies to market “diversity”, as demonstrated in Barndt’s discussion of tomatoes: “At the consumption end of the tomato chain…Loblaw’s role has been not only to sell us tomatoes but also to sell us an illusion of diversity” (Barndt 2002: 142).

Some have disputed the extent to which McDonaldization influences the Internet. Block, in his discussion of linguistic homogenization, notes: “predictions that English would dominate the Internet have proven overly pessimistic and that there is increasingly greater diversity” (Block 2004: 26). Meikle (2002) expresses concern about corporations trying to reduce the level of social interaction online to one-way flows of information, yet gives case studies of resistance and offers guarded optimism about the possibility of resistance. However, these examples do not invalidate my point; even non-English speaking online social movements may feel pressure to conform to hegemonic principles of web design. Indeed, Meikle writes that “[o]ne challenge for Internet activists…is to develop ways of telling stories which are issue-focused, without replicating the conflict-based narrative structure of the established media” (2002: 99). If there exists pressure to emulative the narrative structure, why would they not also feel pressure to reproduce the structure of presentation? Indeed, one web columnist listed defiance of design convention as one of the top-10 “mistakes” in web design:

The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users' expectations, the more they will feel insecure...

Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other websites."

This means that they form their expectations for your site based on what's commonly done on most other site. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave. [Nielsen n.d.]

They may do more than just leave, however; criticism and ridicule are also viable strategies for dealing with a disliked site.

Some point out that “New more dialogical communication forms such as the Internet… offer new possibilities for choice of content and discovering diversity” (Featherstone 2004: 2). Perhaps, but the content and diversity available is limited by digital divide issues, as well as what Yelvington referred to as definitional power: “Power is manifested by the effects of specific attempts at domination and by exercises that define the social situation, that erect the ‘taken for grantedness’ of cultural meanings that is present in all social situations” (Yelvington 1995: 18). When turned against a social entity, definitional power can take the form of informal ways of limiting and excluding participation in public forums. Examples of such exertions of definitional power on the web include sites where approval or disapproval for particular sites is asked for or volunteered. Here are a few examples of this for web design:

http://www.losers.org/design.html
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/community/ratemysite/

Let me point out here that I am not taking an extreme relativist view and saying that any web design is just as valid as any other. There are certainly practical considerations that make certain site designs confusing and unappealing. Yet at the same time, it seems to me that the IT industry may be setting hegemonic standards of web design that go beyond practical considerations and are shaping our tastes in such a way that those who lack the training to create a site that lives up to these standards will be criticized, resulting in their message being tainted. Mary Douglas wrote: “Any given system of classification must give rise to anomalies, and any given culture must confront events which seem to defy its assumptions. It cannot ignore the abnormalities which its scheme produces, except at risk of forfeiting confidence” (Douglas 1966: 39). A site with worthwhile content but “poor” design may be considered such an abnormality, resulting in self-silencing. A comparison to Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon may be fruitful: “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” (Foucault 1995: 201).

What I am trying to call attention to is best summed up in one of the responses to these critical blog entries, which said: “This is exactly why I don’t have my own site yet. I’d rather wait until I have the time to do it right, y’know?”

References Cited:

Barndt, Deborah
2002 Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Block, David
2004 Globalization, Transnational Communication and the Internet. International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS) 6(1): 13 – 28.

Douglas, Mary
1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Featherstone, Mike
2004 The Globalization of Diversity: Knowledge Formation and Global Public Life. UNU Global Seminar, “Living Together in Cultural Diversity”, Hayama, September 6-10th, 2004. Electronic document, http://www.unu.edu/hq/japanese/gs-j/gs2004j/shonan20/featherstone.pdf, accessed April 19, 2005.

Foucault, Michel
1995 Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. NewYork: Vintage Books.

Gould, Emilie W., Norhayati Zakaria, Sh~z Affendi Mohd. Yusof
2000 Applying Culture to Website Design: A Comparison of Malaysian and US Websites. Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society Pp. 161-171.

Johansson, Magnus
2004 Designing With Culture in Mind. MSc Thesis in Interaction design. Göteborg, Sweden. http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/soniccity/pdf/Johansson_DesigningWithCulture.pdf

Dan Kalinowski
2004 Design = Strategy. ITtoolbox Web Design. Electronic document, http://webdesign.ittoolbox.com/documents/document.asp?i=4447, accessed April 21, 2005.

Meikle, Graham
2002 Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Nielsen, Jakob
n.d. Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. Electronic document, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html, accessed April 23, 2005.

Porter, Noah
2005 Computer-Mediated Anthropology: Introducing a New Web Resource. AAA E-news (Apr 05): GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS sec. 5.

Ramakatane, MG and P. A. Clarke
2003 ANALYSIS OF CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL VALUES TRANSMITTED BY UNIVERSITY WEBSITES. Electronic document: http://general.rau.ac.za/infosci/www2003/Papers/Ramakatane,%20MG%20&%20Clarke,%20PA%20Analysis%20of%20cultural%20and%20ideolo.pdf, accessed April 19, 2005.

Robinson, Matthew Barnett
n.d. How criminal justice is a lot like McDonald’s? Electronic document, http://www.justiceblind.com/new/mcds.htm, accessed April 19, 2005.

Roseberry, William
1996 The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States. American Anthropologist 98(4 Dec.): 762-775.

Varian, Hal R.
2003 Economics of Information Technology. Electronic document, http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/mattioli/mattioli.pdf, accessed April 21, 2005.

Yelvington, Kevin A.
1995 Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

The Politics of Political Blogs and Academic Freedom

2005-04-08T13:25:51Z

My university is now offering a blog service, which they announced through e-mail. The e-mail announcement ("Introducing blog@USF", sent April 7, 2005) read in part:

Blog@USF makes it simple to:
[...]
*Create "topic arenas" with colleagues/friends
*Engage in cross-blog conversations with comments and/or "TrackBacks"

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at this point. However, the terms of service adds some alarming caveats about what kinds of conversations may be engaged in:

I will not use USF resources to distribute or link to content that:
[...]
promotes a religious or political group [Blog@USF n.d.]

The EFF notes that "most states have laws designed to prevent employers from firing people who talk openly about their politics outside of work" (Electronic Freedom Foundation 2005). However, if you're at home and posting on a university-provided blog, is this considered outside of work? Could the university actually sanction someone for a political post on their blog? If this were to happen, it would not be the first time that USF fired a professor for political reasons (see United Faculty of Florida n.d.). Depending on how the words "promote" and "political" are defined, this provision could be used to stifle academic freedom.

Restrictions like this may be related to what Altbach identified as the rise of "managerialism" in universities:

A[n]... issue, not usually discussed in the context of academic freedom, is the growth of what some have called “managerialism” in higher education – the notable increase in the power of administrators and other officials as distinct from the authority of the professoriate in the governance and management of academic institutions. Academic freedom and autonomy are related, and these trends in governance reduce the autonomy and power of the professoriate. The authority of the professors to determine the direction of the university, to develop the curriculum, and ultimately to maintain full control in the classroom and in the selection and implementation of research topics is compromised by this trend. There seems little doubt that the shift in power and authority from the professoriate to professional managers and external governing bodies will dramatically affect the traditional role of the academic profession – with repercussions on academic freedom as well. [Altbach 2001:216]

How ironic would it be to see a professor turning to Blogger or LiveJournal for a degree of academic freedom lacking from his or her own university's blog service!

References Cited

Altbach, Philip G.
2001 Academic freedom: International realities and challenges. Higher Education 41: 205–219.

Blog@USF
n.d. USF Computer and Network Access Agreement. Electronic document, http://blog.usf.edu/register/, accessed April 8, 2005.

Electronic Freedom Foundation
2005 How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else). April 6. Electronic document, http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/blog-anonymously.php, accessed April 8, 2005.

United Faculty of Florida
n.d. Academic Freedom, Due Process, and Sami al-Arian at USF. Electronic document, http://w3.usf.edu/~uff/AlArian/index.html, accessed April 8, 2005.

Quantifying the Internet?

2005-03-07T08:23:07Z

Both Nielsen//Netratings and Comscore agree that for the month of December 2003, DeanForAmerica.com received more unique visitors than Georgewbush.com (Nielsen//Netrating 2004: 1, Comscore Networks 2004). However, the actual numbers they come up with are significantly different. The former claims that DeanForAmerica.com received 940,000 unique visitors, while the latter says it was 605,000. That's a difference of 335,000 people! I am not sure what accounts for these differences, but I think this should serve as a reminder to be skeptical of quantifications of online behavior. As Paley said, "numerical data...by its nature imposes categories. Statistical knowledge thereby transforms what is in fact interpretation into what comes to be seen as hard facts about society... What gives quantification its legitimacy is the supposition that statistics are scientific and neutral accounts that have no interpretive dimension" (2001: 142). Yet clearly this is not the case, online or offline.

References Cited

Comscore Networks
2004 Political Web Sites Have a Significant Impact on Americans’ Pre-Election Attitudes and Behaviors, comScore Reports: Breakthrough Survey Reveals Trends Critical to Presidential Campaigns. January 28. Electronic document: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=414, accessed February 27, 2005.

Nielsen//Netrating
2004 More Than One Million People Visit DeanforAmerica.com and GeorgeWBush.com, Making Them the Most Visited Presidential Candidate Sites. January 21. Electronic document: http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_040121_us.pdf, accessed February 27, 2005.

Paley, Julia
2001 Making Democracy Count: Opinion Polls and Market Surveys in the Chilean Political Transition. Cultural Anthropology 16(2): 135-164.

Democratic Potential of the Internet?

2005-02-12T22:39:28Z

Meikle (2002) notes a change in the nature of the Internet overall, labeling one ‘Version 1.0’ and the other ‘Version 2.0.’ He contrasts the former from the latter by saying that the Internet is moving from an open system to being a closed system (p. 10-11). “A close system Internet is the e-commerce holy grail, and for a time it seemed that every search engine and service provider was trying to turn itself into a portal, or one-stop Net shop, closing the system as much as it could” (p. 10). He elaborates:

In the sense in which I used the terms, Version 1.0 offers change; Version 2.0 offers more of the same. Version 1.0 demands openness, possibility, debate; Version 2.0 offers one-way information flows and a single option presented as ‘choice’. Version 1.0 would try to bring the new space of virtual possibility into the world as we know it; Version 2.0 would take the world as we know it – politics-as-usual, the media-as-before, ever more shopping – and impose it upon cyberspace. Version 1.0 would open things up. Version 2.0 would nail them down. [Meikle 2002: 12-13]

In other words, Meikle claims that corporate attempts to corral the public decrease the potential of the Internet to be utilized effectively by social movements. Chomsky also notes this trend:

…The huge mergers that are going on in the media megacorporations carry the threat which is not at all remote that they’ll be able to effectively direct access to favored sites, meaning turning the Internet system even more than it is now into a home shopping service rather than information and interaction.
[…]
The megamergers like AOL and Time Warner offer technical possibilities to ensure that getting on the Internet will draw you into what they want you to see, not what you want to see. That’s very dangerous. The Internet is a tremendous tool for information, understanding, organizing, and communication. There is no doubt at all that the business world, which has been given this public gift, intends to turn it into something else. If they’re able to do it, that will be a very serious blow to freedom and democracy. [Chomsky & Barsamian 2001: 137]

On the other hand, a report by Pew Internet found that "While all people like to see arguments that support their beliefs, internet users are not limiting their information exposure to views that buttress their opinions. Instead, wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions" (Pew Internet 2004: ii). This suggests that people are at least being exposed to differing points of view, but does not necessarily mean that the venue of their exposure allows for interaction. A data memo released last month suggests that many people are using interactive forums, however: "27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers. Much of the attention to blogs focused on those that covered the recent political campaign and the media" (Pew Internet 2005: 1).

Do you think that that opporunities for being exposed to different points of view and discussion of them (as well as the potential for political participation as a result of them) are being threatened by the business world?

References Cited

Chomsky, Noam and Davd Barsamian
2001 Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Meikle, Graham
2002 Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Pew Internet
2004 The internet and democratic debate. October 27. Electronic document: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Political_Info_Report.pdf, accessed February 12, 2005.
2005 Re: The state of blogging. Electronic document: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_blogging_data.pdf, accessed February 12, 2005.

Crossing Academia's Communication Divide

2005-01-11T18:26:50Z

In my last entry, I quoted a blogger to illustrate my point about how even online, the distinction can be made between information given and information given off (to borrow a term from Goffman). To my surprise, the blogger found my post and made a post of his own about it:

http://crymeariverii.blogspot.com/2004/12/strange-conflations.html#comments

I was pleased to see my writing getting a read from someone who perhaps would not ordinarily read anthropological texts. Anthropologists are often unaccustomed to communicating with the general public online, as these examples demonstrate:

University professors in the United States are peculiar in the separation they make between theory and practice, between private and public careers, between their professional lives and their concerns as citizens. Pick any part of the world…and the picture is different because intellectuals qua intellectuals are expected to participate in large questions, they do so even if such activity lands them in prison. [Nader 2000: v]

…a member found and posted an article I had written to the list, and invited me to respond to a discussion of the article. This was an exciting and rather worrying opportunity for me. In the rarefied world of academe, we rarely find out what people actually think of our work, or indeed if anyone even reads it at all. How many academics have the chance to watch their work being discussed in a forum of people who are not fellow-scholars looking for validation of their own work, but who have an entirely different set of loyalties and interests? [Bird 2003: 54]

Some other members’ responses were more challenging, although not hostile. They explicitly called on me to explain and defend my research goals and methods… Defending my research to these educated locals was more of a challenge than any dissertation defense or peer review process I have experienced. [Constable 2003: 48]

Putting up academic webpages is certainly an important first step since it increases the availability of scholarly knowledge to the general public. However, I'm not sure of how often it will be found, read, understood, and put to use effectively by those who could benefit from it; indeed, the aforementioned quotes suggest that anthropological research is not usually done with these goals in mind, even when the research population is on the Internet.

I recently ran across an interesting example of a more proactive approach to presenting one's research online. George Lakoff, a linguistics professor, has presented his work on framing to the Democracy For America movement in the form of an exercise, a worksheet, and a DVD:

http://democracyforamerica.com/meetuphosts/framing.php

Is anyone familiar with any other examples of social scientists writing for an online group rather than just writing about them?

References Cited

Bird, S. Elizabeth
2003 The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. New York and London: Routledge.

Constable, Nicole
2003 Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail Order" Marriages.

Nader, Laura
2000 Preface. In The Unity of Theory and Practice in Anthropology: Rebuilding a Fractured Synthesis. Carole E. Hill and Marietta L. Baba, eds. Napa bulletin 18.

Online Accents?

2004-11-21T23:08:03Z

For a class project, I am examining the use of virtual communities by Indian diasporas. In the course of my research, I found some discussion of how having an accent can be a hindrance to sociocultural integration:

As I arrived there [at the immigration counter] I was greeted by a wonderful voice. I tried to greet back but felt as though someone had stitched my mouth shut. Words were battling to come out. I had spent months preparing for this day. But nothing could prepare me for this moment. I was answering every question by moving my head. I am sure by the time we finished he would have thought that I could not speak…
I feared being rejected. The very idea of not being able to express myself or being understood due to my accent used to make me uneasy. I feared my ability to adjust in new environment and culture… [Srinivasan 2004: 2]

Delta still employs more than 5,000 of its own reservations agents at eight U.S. reservations centers, including one in Tampa's West Shore district, and centers in Latin America and London. No Delta agents lost their jobs because of the outsourcing, Estes said.

But the service has spurred complaints from customers who say the contracted agents in India lack the training, language skills or knowledge of U.S. geography to handle certain types of transactions. The frequent flier Web site FlyerTalk.com has hosted online discussions with titles such as "India Call Center Incompetence." [Huettel 2004: 1A]

...according to a survey of 1,084 Indian call-center workers from 19 companies, conducted on the sly at local parks, cafes and private homes, the employees are starting to feel more like characters in the Stepford Wives than The Ten Commandments:

+ Forced to work odd hours to accommodate the American business day, Indian workers find they are estranged from their families and friends, eating poorly, and stressed out by the unending calls from sometimes abusive customers.

+ The typical Indian worker is required to Americanize his name, change his accent and study American sports and popular culture. What may seem novel at first often adds to his sense of alienation from Indian society. [Barancik 2003: 1E]

My first thought upon reading this was that perhaps recently-emigrated Indians might like virtual communities as a venue for socialization because no one would be able to detect their accent online. However, I quickly realized that is not correct. It is true that other people wouldn't actually hear differences in pronunciation, but there are still canonical ways of writing (spelling, grammar, cultural references, etc.) that would be the virtual equivalent of an accent if not follow. For instance, take a look at this blogger's speculation about the identity of Riverbend, an Iraqi blogger:

before we go any further I need to deal with what has caused the most speculation about her: her English. It's not just good. It's flawless. I'm pretty good at "literary voices" and can usually detect an accent in writing, but she has none (from this American's point of view). She says she was raised "abroad" and she's "bilingual" which suggests she speaks her native tongue and English. So "abroad" is not France or Russia. It's somewhere where the native language is English: Britain, Australia, South Africa, Canada, America, the Carribeans (Am I leaving anything out?). But once again, she has no "accent" in her writing...no non-American idioms or words. For "abroad", I'd say we're looking at America or Canada.

Most Canadians live within 150 miles of the US border. But I think the claim that she's "bilingual" almost dispenses with the possibility that she was raised and educated there. I "was raised" across the lake from Canada. I have several close Canadian friends, and, personally, I've never met a Canadian (teen-aged and up) (even those in Western Canada) who would admit to not being able to speak French (even though, excepting French Canadians, most seem to speak it only marginally better than most anglo-Texans speak Spanish.)

Besides, there's no "Canada" in her posts. She bears no self-conscious pose of superiority over American culture in which Canadians stew. Her tone when referencing aspects of the American movies and government is like an American's. She lacks the subtle quaint false presumptions most Canadians have about Americans from experiencing the US almost entirely from US television yet (because of proximity) believing they know it. There is no self-perceived distance from America. She usually reads like an American exiled to Iraq. She explains her knowledge of American culture in that Iraqis closely follow American culture, but this doesn't answer it for me. Put her posts side-by-side with the Jarrar boys and with The Iraq the Model brothers (whose English is also very good), and I think any American ought to see the difference.

There is also Mahir Cagiri, who became an Internet celebrity based on his online accent:

I like music , I have many many music enstrumans my home I can play

I like sport , swiming , basketball , tenis , volayball , walk .........

I like sex

I like travel I go 3-4 country every year

I went , Germany , Nederland , Belgium , Austria , Denmark , Sweden , Hungary

Moldovia , Ukraina , Bulgaria , Romania , Macedonia , Azerbaijan , Georrgia , Iran .....

My profession jurnalist , music and sport teacher , I make psycolojy doctora

I like to take foto-camera (amimals , towns , nice nude models and peoples).....

My tall 1.84 cm (6.2 feet) My weight 78 kg.

My eyes green .. I live alone !!!!!!!!!

I have home - car .........

I like to be friendship from different country ..

I live in TURKEY -town IZMIR ...( 4 million peoples - near the sea - old history)...

Who is want to come TURKEY I can invitate .....

She can stay my home ........

I speake turkish , english , rusian , I want to learn other language !

It seems clear that accents do exist online; however, do they exist to the same degree that regular accents do? In other words, are online accents easier to conceal than accents in face-to-face communication? Might an immigrant concerned about his or her accent prefer Internet communication for this reason?

Have any articles been written on this? I'd be surprised if there wasn't.

References:

Barancik, Scott
2003 INDIA'S CALL-CENTER WORK FORCE: DIFFERENT WORLD / SAME OLD STRESS. St. Petersburg Times (Florida), September 3. South Pinellas Edition. SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. 1E.

CMAR II
2004 CryMeARiverbend II: Who Is Riverbend? Electronic document: http://crymeariverii.blogspot.com/2004/06/who-is-riverbend.html, accessed November 21, 2004.

Huettel, Steve
2004 Delta thinks of charging more for American voice on phone. St. Petersburg Times (Florida), July 28. South Pinellas Edition. SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. 1A.

Srinivasan, Krishnan
2004 The longest 30 minutes of my life… Reflections of India: A Newsletter of Students of India Association of USF. November 6, pp. 2.

HRAF Ignores the Internet

2004-11-17T16:58:10Z

The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) is probably the largest collections of ethnographies anywhere in the world. Their website describes its purpose as follows:

The growing concern of students, scholars, and the general public to understand ethnic conflict, cultural diversity, and global problems has generated a demand for educational and research programs emphasizing the worldwide, comparative study of human behavior and society. The development of cross-cultural and area studies requires a large mass of readily available, organized cultural information; conventional sources of such information are widely scattered and often inaccessible, and at any rate expensive to assemble and utilize effectively. The HRAF Collections are designed to overcome this traditional barrier to research.

The HRAF Collection of Ethnography is a unique source of information on the cultures of the world, and currently contains over 800,000 pages of indexed information on more than 365 different cultural, ethnic, religious, and national groups around the world. The collection was developed by the Human Relations Area Files, Inc. (HRAF), a non-profit research organization. For almost fifty years, HRAF has served the educational community and contributed to an understanding of world cultures by assembling, indexing, and providing access to primary research materials relevant to the social sciences, and by stimulating and facilitating training and research in these fields. [HRAF n.d.]

This sounds pretty thorough, doesn' it? However, if you go to HRAF and do a search for "internet", you get only three results. First:

Telephones, television, and the internet link kith and kin together, and help nourish common thoughts and sentiments by stretching social space beyond backyards and work sites. But face-to-face encounters, aided by the ordinary routes of cars and airplanes, helped ground their communal connections, and mine. [Harney 1997]

The second is part of a bibliography, saying that a particular article is also available on the Internet. The third is a citation of a government website.

All those ethnographies from all over the world, and only three measly mentions of the Internet (only one of which was actually in the text instead of the bibliography, and even that was only to dismiss the community's Internet use)! I'd love to hear an explanation of why this is.

Better yet, I'd love to see the equivalent of HRAF that indexes Internet communities because I think they do have a point about sources being scattered and difficult to track down. For instance, let's say I want to find out if there have been any ethnographies done on the use of MeetUp.com. Where would I look? Doing a search for "meetup.com" and "ethnography" on Google doesn't give me any (or perhaps I just haven't sorted through enough junk to find relevant results).

References

Harney, Nicholas De Maria
1997 Eh, Paesan!: being Italian in Toronto. Toronto & Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.

Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)
n.d. The Development and Applications of the HRAF Collections. Electronic Document: http://www.yale.edu/hraf/collections_body_development.htm, Accessed November 17, 2004.

Does the Online Availability of Perspectives Lead to a Postmodern Perspective?

2004-11-13T21:52:01Z

Does the Internet exert a homogenizing influence on culture? Lurie writes:

... Like reading or breathing, web browsing itself is agnostic with respect to politics and culture. Unlike reading or breathing, however, surfing mimics a postmodern, deconstructionist perspective by undermining the authority of texts. Anyone who has spent a lot of time online, particularly the very young, will find themselves thinking about content -- articles, texts, pictures -- in ways that would be familiar to any deconstructionist critic. And a community of citizens who think like Jacques Derrida will not be a particularly conservative one.

HTML, hyperlinks, frames, and meta-tags are the essential building blocks of the web. They combine to create a highly associative, endlessly referential and contingent environment that provides an expanse of information at the same time that it subverts any claim to authority, since another view is just a click away. [Lurie 2003]

While I agree that computers do offer new ways to think about identity as Turkle (1995) has pointed out, I think Lurie is badly mistaken if he thinks an internet browser is a philosopher's stone that turns conservatives into Derrida clones. Di Leonardo points out that a "fissioning of the American public sphere has taken place" (1998: 271), where gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, political viewpoint, and many other categories of identity have become "potentially marketable boundaries of difference," so that people with different identities flock to different media products. If the mere existence of media alternatives were sufficient to create postmodern thinking, then I think it would have happened already. Just because another view is only a click away does not mean that you will click on it; and, even if you do, it does not mean you will be convinced by it. As Godwin (2003) points out, "when readers of encoded messages come across messages that challenge their beliefs, worldview, ideology, etc. they may be likely to either misinterpret the message to fit with their beliefs or they may disapprove (dismiss as crazy, for example) what they see as socially or psychologically unsound or wrong" (p. 36).

It could perhaps be argued that the Internet has different characteristics than other forms of media, so the fact that this fissioning of the American public sphere has been occuring for decades does not invalidate Lurie's claim. Yet some have argued that the characteristics of the Internet promote less civil social interactions:

...I find it...plausible that the transfer of academic rhetorical practices into cyberspace amplifies the aspects of those practices that problematize self-construction, self-representation, and self-control. Textual cyberspace filters away all qualities of a personal self save the highly mediated, acutely self-conscious elements that appear in written language. Phatic or metacommunicative cues, the linguistic and paralinguistic signs that maintain cognizance of the social relation between the sender and the receiver of a message, are drastically reduced in this medium. [Millard 1996:147]

I think a good case to examine these issues is the Raed in the Middle blog. Raed shares a lot of information that is not reported in mainstream media, yet I have not seen any of the commentators change their opinion because of it. Those who are for the war remain for the war, and vice-versa. One comment in particular jumped out at me recently:

Listen, there isn't going to be much reasoned argument on this weblog. You realize that, don't you?

I'll be honest. I comment to blow off steam after reading and correcting compositions. Commenting is kind of a hobby.

Jeffrey -- New York

This hardly seems like the right sort of mindset for allowing one's views to be challenged, although I suppose it is possible that could be an unanticipated result.

References Cited

di Leonardo, Micaela
1998 Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Other, American Modernity. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Godwin, Jonathan
2003 Film in the Classroom: Toward a More Effective Pedagogy. M.A. Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida. Available: http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/SFE0000157 .

Lurie, Peter
2003 Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left: Deconstructing Hyperlinks. CTHEORY A125: www.ctheory.net/text_file?pick=380 .

Millard, William B.
1996 I Flamed Freud: A Case Study in Teletextual Incendiarism. In Internet Culture. D. Porter, ed. Pp. 145-160. New York & London: Routledge.

Turkle, Sherry
1995 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone.

Virtual Verification of References

2004-11-13T02:22:26Z

There have been many points raised concerning the advantages and disadvantages of online publishing. (For a bulleted list of these points, see the Hypertext Ethnography and Virtual Reality page on the Methodology section of the CMA Page.) In this post, I'd like to discuss one in particular: the ability to more easily check citations and data. Zeitlyn writes:

Some anthropologists are beginning to use hypertext in a variety of ways particularly to try and make explicit some of the routes to their summary conclusions. This is a rather more subversive enterprise than it may seems at first sight since it allows a healthy dose of empiricism to enter a discipline that has reacted to extreme versions of post modernism by turning its back on suggestions that conclusions have a relationship (however complex) to supporting evidence and that our colleagues and students might wish to examine that evidence and reach their own conclusions. [Zeitlyn 1998]

When we read academic articles, we are sure to encounter dozens of references we have not read for ourselves. Most likely, we won't have time to investigate the references that were cited because of time constraints; we usually (provisionally) take it on faith that we are getting an honest representation of the cited work.

In the course of my research, I encountered an incident where I was amazed at how selective one author was in what she cited from a report by Amensty International about the torture of Falun Gong practitioners. Take a look at what she wrote:

The FLG have made repeated claims of torture in custody, stating that as of May 2001 over two hundred practitioners have died either during or soon after detention. The government denies the allegations, stating that those who have died in custody died of natural causes, complications from hunger strikes, refusal of medical treatment or suicide. A 2001 Amnesty International report states that: 'Torture and ill-treatment of detainees and prisoners is widespread and systematic in China' and that this is especially true during 'high-profile political campaigns'. Regarding the FLG accusations against the government it states that: 'By mid January 2001, at least 120 Falun Gong practitioners...were reported to have died since the beginning of the crackdown... All had died in official custody, or shortly after release, in circumstances that remain unclear and most following reports of torture and ill-treatment'. It acknowledges that 'Amnesty International is not able independently to verify these reports of torture resulting in death', however it goes on to say that the 'blanket denial of official wrongdoing will not be convincing'. [Rahn 2002:52]

From reading this, you probably get the impression that Amnesty International is a little suspicious of the Chinese government's claims, yet does not have much to corraborate Falun Gong's claims, right? Now let's take a look at the original report:

By mid January 2001, at least 120 Falun Gong practitioners (62 women) were reported to have died since the beginning of the crackdown on the group in July 1999. (28) In Shandong province alone, 24 practitioners died, nearly half in Weifang city, and 15 people died in Heilongjiang province. All had died in official custody, or shortly after release, in circumstances that remain unclear and most following reports of torture and ill-treatment. Active attempts by officials to coverup or destroy evidence were alleged in over one third of the cases.

Of these practitioners, 17 (4 women) according to a official reports ''jumped'' to their deaths whilst being transported or interrogated by police; and 15 (8 women) ''fell'' whilst in detention, the majority in provincial representative offices in Beijing.

Twenty six ( 16 women) of those who died had reportedly engaged in hunger strikes during their detention, with 10 ( 9 women) allegedly dying after attempts to force-feed them. Many reports indicate that force feeding was carried out by people with no medical training or experience, resulting in damage to the windpipe and other reportedly fatal complications.

An additional 8 practitioners (5 women) are confirmed to have committed suicide whilst at liberty, although several were reportedly still under police surveillance.

Official sources have confirmed many of these deaths, rejecting outright all allegations of torture and ill-treatment. Amnesty International is not able independently to verify these reports of torture resulting in death. It is however extremely concerned at the inadequate, contradictory response of the authorities to mounting credible evidence. In the face of numerous corroborating testimonies, blanket denial of official wrongdoing will not be convincing, especially when accompanied by evidence of official cover up, including reports of hasty cremation before autopsies can be performed, and the continuing detention of those who seek to publicize their experience of ill-treatment (see Section 7.4). The organization calls on the Chinese government to ensure all allegations are thoroughly and independently investigated and the results publicized. [Amnesty Internation 2001: sec. 3.3; emphases added]

Don't you get a different impression of the situation from reading what she left out?

Now imagine if Patsy Rahn had written her article in an online journal instead. If you were curious, you could investigate her citation with just a few mouse clicks, which would obviously require less time and motivation than switching mediums from print to computer. Perhaps Zeitlyn is right; I wonder if Rahn would have been as selective with her quoting if it seemed more likely that someone would call her on it.

References Cited

Amnesty International
_____2001 PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA: Torture - A Growing Scourge in China -Time for Action. Electronic Document: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engASA170042001?Open , accessed November 12, 2004.

Rahn, Patsy
_____2002 The Chemistry of a Conflict: The Chinese Government and Falun Gong. Terrorism and Political Violence 14(4):41-65.

Zeitlyn, David
_____1998 Anthropology Nine Hundred Years After the Invention of Hypertext. Electronic document: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/iriss/papers/proceed.html. Accessed July 12, 2004.

Imagining Others in Cyberspace

2004-11-10T18:54:22Z

Lockard (1996) claimed that cyberspace was conceptualized as white space, even in the rare cases that people other than white middle or upper class Americans used it. It has been 8 years sincle Lockard wrote that chapter, which is a fairly significant amount of time given the pace of which the Internet has grown and changed. Was it true then, and is it still true now? According to Pew Internet (2004), "While 42% of Americans say they don’t use the Internet, many of them either have been Internet users at one time or have a once-removed relationship with the Internet through family or household members... Some 24% of Americans are truly offline; they have no direct or indirect experience with the Internet" (p. 3). They report that American Internet users are roughly equal in terms of gender, and that whites make up 77% of Internet users. While certainly still short of ideal, their findings of 23% of American Internet users being minorities suggests to me that overall, it is probably harder to automatically assume whiteness of other Internet users.

Jacobson (1999) writes:

Although researchers have emphasized the difficulties involved in impression formation in computer-mediated communication, people in the text-based virtual communities of cyberspace do develop images of one another. These impressions are based not only on cues provided, but also on the conceptual categories and cognitive models people use in interpreting those cues. Prototypical effects associated with different models, including but not limited to the stereotypes noted in previous research on computer-mediated communication (Lea and Spears, 1992, 1995; Walther 1996), contribute to discrepancies between online images and offline realities. Moreover, models and categories vary across individuals, further contributing to differences between online expectations and offline experiences. Prototype theory advances the findings of social identity models of information processing in CMC (Lea and Spears 1995, Walther 1996), which focus on the development of online impressions, by analyzing sources of variation in the specific impressions formed and by accounting for the mismatches between online impressions and offline experiences.

Differences in online impression formation, and in the stereotypes, exemplars, and other theory-based views of the world on which they are grounded, provide further evidence that cues gain their significance in terms of the cognitive models or contexts within which they are viewed. When participants in interaction employ different conceptual frameworks, different meanings are attributed to the same message. Of course, this pattern is not peculiar to cyberspace. Geertz (1973) portrayed this scenario as a "confusion of tongues." It is also evident in other studies of offline life, including Suttles' ethnography (1968) of ethnic and racial miscommunication, Tannen's account (1990) of gendered misconceptions, and Jacobson and Ziegler's (1996) analysis of misinterpretation and mistrust between scientists and non-scientists. Paradigms, including prototype theory and related models of "theories of the world", developed to understand offline behavior, are applicable to online behavior, and studies of the latter can contribute to assessing and expanding the former.

However, we must be careful not to homogenize cyberspace. Some communities are associated with particular identities, and simply by posting there associated you with that identity. For instance, I shared some pictures I took of a Uighur dancer I took with a Uighur virtual community, and someone replied to me in the Uighur language to thank me, assuming that I must be a Uighur myself if I was posting there.

Maybe there is something to Lockard's assumption that cyberspace is conceived of as white American space when we are looking at online interactions that do not take place in contexts specifically associated with another ethnic or national identity. Take a look at this quote from Riverbend (2003):

You know what really bugs me about posting on the internet, chat rooms or message boards? The first reaction (usually from Americans) is "You're lying, you're not Iraqi". Why am I not Iraqi, well because a. I have internet access (Iraqis have no internet), b. I know how to use the internet (Iraqis don't know what computers are) and c. Iraqis don't know how to speak English (I must be a Liberal). All that shouldn't bother me, but it does. I see the troops in the streets and think, "So that's what they thought of us before they occupied us... that may be what they think of us now." How is it that we're seen as another Afghanistan?

I've also heard stories about celebrities like Howard Stern and Trent Reznor attempting to talk with fans on Internet forums, and immediately being accused of being someone pretending to be them. (If I can find sources for this, I'll add them as comments later.)

There are a number of good questions that CMA researchers could investigate on these topics. What identities are questioned? By whom are they questioned? How are people convinced? How have assumptions about the plausibility of particular categories of people changed over time? (For instance, is it easier to believe someone's claim to being female online now than it was 10 years ago?)

References

Jacobson, David
1999 Impression Formation in Cyberspace: Online Expectations and Offline Experiences in Text-based Virtual Communities. Journal of Computer Mediated Communications 5(1): http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol5/issue1/jacobson.html .

Lockard, Joseph
1996 Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism and the Myth of Virtual Community. In Internet Culture. D. Porter, ed. Pp. 219-232. New York & London: Routledge.

Pew Internet
2004 THE EVER-SHIFTING INTERNET POPULATION: A new look at Internet access and the digital divide. Electronic document: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Shifting_Net_Pop_Report.pdf, accessed November 10, 2004.

Riverbend
2003 Another Day... August 18. Electronic document: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#106122676780415054 , Accessed November 10, 2004.

CMA of Consciousness?

2004-11-08T06:21:04Z

How does computer use affect human consciousness? It is a rather broad question, so a theory of consciousness is in order:

Reality construction takes place when the neurons of the intermediate network develop an interpretation of -- or more precisely, a hypothesis about -- the sensory information coming in from the interoceptors (which provide information abou the internal environment of the body) and the exteroceptors (which provide information about the world outside the body).

The information being provided to the brain, however, is of only limited utility for this task, for it has already undergone some processing since it left the receptor sites. In humans, all sensory neurons synapse with other neurons before they ever reach the brain, and the information they are carrying tends to be bundled, filtered, and converted every time this occurs... In this way, the vast amount of information which the senses are picking up at any one moment can be check for its relevance and reduced to a manageable mass. Depending upon nature and the significance of the information, an affective charge may be attached to this interpretation before it is consigned to a subdomain of the brain known as memory.

It is inevitable that information will be lost in the process, and one criterion which the intermediate network uses to determine whether afferent data will be shunted along to the next processing level concerns the relative significance of that date. For example, the signals originating in the pressure-sensitive receptors of your buttocks is usually screen out of awareness one you have sat down. Similarly, the sensations from the clothes on your body tend to diminish as the day goes on -- unless you sense that you are too warm or too cold, or that your trousers are too tight.

To compensate for the fact that the intermediate network's ability to process information is much less than the amount of potentially available information, all levels of the nervous system are designed to habituate to repetitive information, i.e., signals coming in from individual afferent neurons tend to be filtered out by subsequent neurons if the information they are conveying is redundant for too long a period... One upshot of this is that new information which is recognized as having a similarity to previously encountered information will tend to be processed more quickly than non-recognizable information (especially if that information has been highly relevant in the individual's recent past...). The counterpart to the tendency to habituate is that the nervous system is sensitive to novelties -- to changes in the status quo. [Baker 1994: 55-56]

To me, this suggests two broad areas of study for a CMA of consciousness. First, there is mundane computer usage; in other words, doing "analytically interesting studies of the socially uninteresting" (Brekhus 2000). Second, we could examine computer usage that is new and our brains do not find repetitive. Examples of this might include people using computers or particular computer programs for the first time:

When I got my own personal computer in 1979, I saw the hobbyist and the user modes come together in myself. My first personal computer was an Apple II. It ran Scribble, an early wordprocessing program. When I used Scribble, I gave commands to the machine: Mark this text, copy that text, paste that text, delete taht text. I didn't know and I didn't care how Scribble communicated with the bare machine. I delegated that problem to the program. I was a user. Yet, there was something about working on that Apple II that reminded me of the thrill I had first felt the year before, when a home computer owner I interviewed, a hobbyist, let me work alongside him as he built his computer from a kit and talked about "the pleasure of understanding a complex system down to its simplest level."

My 1979 Apple II computer began its service as my wordprocessor by being stripped naked. Its plastic cover had been removed so that the Apple processor (and associated chips) could be replaced with another, which could run the operating system, called CP/m. Thus altered, the Apple II offered itself to me as a potentially transparent technology, that is, it offered the promise that ultimately it could be understood by being reduced to its constituent elements. So even though Scribble gave me the opportunity to relate to the machine as a user, as someone who was only interested in the machine's performance, the Apple II communicated a vision of how one could understand the world. [Turkle 1995: 33]

Studies of attempting to use items other than computers for tasks that one had become accustomed to using computers for is noteworthy as well:

By noon the next day, I remembered how humiliating it is for me to write in longhand. The effects of brain damage are immediately apparent on the page, my letters jumpled, words missing, sentences colliding, spelling contorted. The handwriting looks like a poor forgery of my former script. My paper becomes a jungle of dense linguistic growth, cross outs and arrows and looping lines connecting disparate thoughts, the whole thing too dense for the least sense to shine through.

I ripped page after page off my pads, crumped and tossed them into the wastebasket. This wasn't the normal process of revision, it was a parody of composition; I was as lost as a rat in a maze. My own confusion made visible on the page brought all thought to a standstill.

At home, writing on my computer, I maintain a sense of order and progress by moving words around, "cutting and pasting." My software signals when a word is misspelled and mistakes can disappear rather than mass on the page like glacial debris. Now the wastebaket was filled... [Skloot 2003:60-61]

Skloot's account is also interesting in terms of CMA of consciousness because of his brain damage.

And, of course, an obvious candidate for examining altered states of consciousness during computer use is the practice of cybersex:

Sometimes late at night when the mood strikes and my husband is asleep I log onto IRC and find an anonymous man to masturbate with. I would never cheat on my husband in real life, but it is exciting sometimes to pretend. He has no idea that I do this and I'm not entirely sure how he'd feel about it. However, there are lots of things about my solo sex life he doesn't know about. I see cybersex as nothing more than a harmless way to spice up my masturbation.

Last night I weaved a very nice fantasy with an articulate man. We started out in a restaurant, fondling each other under the table. Before long I wanted more than what we could do there so he took me to a secluded beach. We made out passionately in his car for a while and then went down on the beach, blanket in hand, to enjoy ourselves in the open air under the night sky.

We undressed each other and I went down on him for a bit. Yet he was very anxious to penetrate me. I love being desired and felt flattered and excited that he wanted me so much. I spread my legs and let him take me.

Of course in real life I was sitting at the computer with my bathrobe open and my knees spread, stroking myself between typing lines to my anonymous lover. It usually takes me an extra long time to build up to orgasm when I cyber because of all the starting and stopping. But the orgasms are often extra special as a result.

Last night, though, my partner seemed very aroused. In only a few minutes he told me that he wanted to cum. I was excited by the idea of him ejaculating inside of me and so I encouraged him. In just a few moments he did.

Afterwards, he logged off almost immediately. Saying he had to go, he told me goodbye and vanished from our shared fantasy world in an instant. I was left alone on that beach, naked, aroused, and full of his semen. I wasn't too surprised. I've had that happen to me before. Some men are considerate enough to make sure, even over IRC, that their partner is satisfied before taking their leave. Some at least chat for a while afterwards to share a few friendly moments before logging off. Yet others don't bother. I don't fault them for it, really. I know it's all fantasy anyway.

I thought about trying to find another partner to finish up but that didn't seem right somehow. Also it was getting late and I needed to get to bed soon. So I logged off from the computer and went into the living room. I sat down on the sofa with one foot on the floor and the other leg stretched out on the couch. I opened my robe and started stroking myself again. [Anne 2004]

Why does all this matter? I think that developing a CMA of consciousness will aid in doing virtual ethnography. I've seen a dissertation defense in which the committee seemed to really challenge the doctoral student on epistemological grounds because he did not interact with his informants face-to-face. Having a theory of consciousness during human-computer interactions should help contextualize data gathered online.

References Cited

Anne
_____2004 Masturbating after Cybersex. Solotouch.com. Electronic Document: http://www.solotouch.com/contri.php?story=10987, accessed November 8, 2004.

Baker, John R.
_____1994 Consciousness Alteration as a Problem-Solving Device: The Pyschedelic Pathway. in Christian Ratsch & John R. Baker (eds.) Yearbook for Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness, Issue 3. Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage, pp. 51-88.

Brekhus, Wayne
_____2000 A Mundane Manifesto. Journal of Mundane Behavior 1(1 February): http://www.mundanebehavior.org/issues/v1n1/brekhus.htm .

Skloot, Floyd
_____2003 In The Shadow of Memory. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

Turkle, Sherry
_____1995 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone.

Public CMA?

2004-10-31T00:58:49Z

Borofsky writes: "Public anthropology demonstrates the abilitiy of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline - illuminating the larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change. It affirms our responsibility, as scholars and citizens, to meaningfully contribute to communities beyond the academy - both local and global - that make the study of anthropology possible" (2004). Merrill Singer has criticized the concept of public anthropology, claiming that it ignores the work that applied anthropologists do, and that "if they utilize their university credentials to monopolize the media spotalight, they will reinforce the existing hierarchy of academic and applied anthropology. This is indefensible" (Singer 2000: 7). In my opinion, Singer overstates the case; while anthropologists have been able to garner some media coverage (see AAA Members in the News, Anthropology in the News, Anthropologists in the Media), these scraps hardly qualify as "monopoliz[ing] the media spotlight".

There is reason for traditional anthropologists to reach out to the public, since "few ethnographies average more than five hundred copies in lifetime sales" (di Leonardo 1998: 148). Margaret Mead had a regular column in Redbook, which currently has a readership of approximately 500,000 (Hoheb 2004) (although I'm not sure of its readership from 1961 to 1978 when she wrote in it), though I know of no other anthropologist who has had a regular column with such a wide readership. Instead, most of the contributions listed on the AAA Members in the News page are in newspapers. A major newspaper like The Washington Post ranges in readership from about 700,000 to 1,000,000, depending on which day of the week it is (Washington Post 2004).

For anthropology to really demonstrate "the abilitiy of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline", there must be a large readership and anthropologists must be able to discuss their subject matter freely. Relying on major media outlets will certainly get more readers than an ethnography will, but the anthropologists' work may be distorted (see di Leonardo 1998: 354-358; Merry 2003). How might anthropologists find a public forum that has a large readership(/viewership/listenership) but is not mediated by a newspaper editor's desire for a certain type of story?

One possibility:

"Already, bloggers such as Instapundit or DailyKos have bigger readerships than many daily newspapers," said Ken Layne, who's been blogging for five years, and an online journalist for 10. "For example, my local paper in Reno claims to reach about 60,000 readers a day. That's in a metro area of over a quarter-million people. Kos and Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit) easily surpass that, and they are lone Web-slingers compared to the hundreds of people needed to put out a daily newspaper." (Pitts 2004)

This sounds like it has potential to be the forum that public anthropologists have been looking for. Yet when we look at anthropology on the web, we find "problems such as broken links, poor visuals, jargon-filled text and obsolete information" (Panagakos 2003). David Hakken wrote: "Despite the efforts of the AAA's Advisory Group on Electronic Communication, of which I was a member, the AAA remians only slightly ahead of my neighborhood muffler shop in terms of its creative use of cyber-media" (2003:194).

Can we find another Margaret Mead for the digital age?

References Cites

Borofsky, Robert
2004 Conceptualizing Public Anthropology. Electronic document: http://www.publicanthropology.org/Defining/definingpa.htm, accessed October 30, 2004.

di Leonardo, Micaela
1998 Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Other, American Modernity. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Hakken, David
2003 An Ethics for an Anthropology in and of Cyberspace. in Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for an Ethically Conscious Practice. Flueher-Lobban, Carolyn, ed. Pp. 179-195. Alta Mira: Walnut Creek.

Hoheb, Marisa
2004 Kunes axed from struggling Redbook: Hearst moves in former top Marie Claire editor. July 21. Electronic document: http://69.20.6.242/news2004/Jul04/Jul19/3_wed/news2wednesday.html, accessed October 30, 2004.

Merry, Sally Engle
2003 Human-Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture. Anthropology News 44(2 February):4-5.

Panagakos, Anastasia
2003 Anthropology for the Cybermasses. Anthropology News 44(9 December):http://members.aaanet.org/an/0312/ke-new.cfm. Accessed July 15, 2004.

Pitts, Ryan
2004 APME Survey: Newspaper Readers Use Blogs Cautiously. October 13. Electronic document: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=72653, accessed October 30, 2004.

Singer, Merrill
2000 Why I Am Not a Public Anthropologist. Anthropology News 42(6 September):6-7.

Washington Post
2004 The Washington Post: Circulation Data. Electronic document: http://washpost.com/gen_info/quickfacts/info_circ.shtml, accessed October 30, 2004.

cmanthropology @ 2004-10-25T16:19:00

2004-10-25T20:50:01Z

In my previous entry, I contended a powerful argument for CMA being central to the discipline is that the Internet's impact goes beyond its direct use. I read a couple articles today that give food for thought on what this means for anthropological fieldwork.

Simonelli and Earlie's wrote this about about the early stages of a research project in Chiapas:

Our encounter with autonomy began even before leaving the United States. Our field program was to be 5 weeks long, and the students each brought their own research interests, which dovetailed with our own ongoing work concerning nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and community development (CD) in a conflict zone (see Simonelli & Earle, in press). Prior to leaving, we each spent days locked in contentious exchange with our respective institutional review boards (IRBs). We attempted to point out that it was unethical and unsafe for our so-called subjects to sign individual informed consent documents. They would welcome us, if they chose to welcome us. The impuse to consent or reject would be of their design.

As we struggled to arrive at an agreement with the IRBs concerning informed consent for both our work and our students' projects, an e-mail arrived from Chiapas. It was a messase from the Cerro Verde community, relayed by Irina, a Mexican colleague who remained in contact with the group while we were away. We marveled at the dimensions of virtual fieldwork, as she conveyed the concerns of the community's members. (p. 75)

Lipson contrasts ethnography done in the past with ethnography done in the digital age. She points out that "Ethnographers studying remote tribal or village groups often assumed that distance, geographical isolation, and/or social change over time were adequate to safeguard informants and that the individuals or groups they studied would not be reading their reports" (p. 1), and then goes on to say: "The explosive increase of electronic resources such as the Internet and World Wide Web allows access to reports that may have been previously hidden away in obscure journals or library corners" (p. 1).

It seems that anthropologists may have access to more information about their informants before entering the field, and informants are more likely to find out what anthropologists have written about them afterwards because of the Internet.

References Cited:

Lipson, Juliene G.
(in press) The Politics of Publishing: Protecting Participants' Confidentiality. in Completing a Qualitative Project: Details and Dialogue.

Simonelli, Jeanne and Duncan Earle
2003 Meeting Resistance: Autonomy, Development, and "Informed Permission" in Chiapas, Mexico. Qualitative Inquiry 9(1): 74-89.