internet | antropologi.info

antropologi.info is 20 years old – some (unfinished) notes and thoughts

Published on July 17, 2024 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, internal notes, internet

In June 2004, I bought the domain antropologi.info, and this website with blogs in English, German, and Norwegian soon became part of a steadily growing anthropology online community. Browsing through old posts, I get surprised by the number of discussions we have had here! That was fun. I really get nostalgic.

It is easy to get depressed when looking at today’s state of anthropology online—and the Internet generally. Such an anthropological community no longer exists, at least not in the open internet. Personal blogs are gone. They have been replaced by shorter posts we share in “walled gardens” like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram that are controlled by advertising networks. Many anthropologists (as people generally) tend to use these social media sites as a tool for self-promotion rather than for sharing ideas. Very boring, in my view!

Most blogs from the golden age of the Internet are no longer active or have shut down, for example, ethno::log and Savage Minds, which was renamed Anthrodendum in 2017. Others that still exist, like my favorite site Allegra, no longer call themselves blogs but “online multimodal publication platforms”. Their posts have lost their informal tone and now resemble journal articles that can be cited on CVs. Many of the blogs you find on feeds.antropologi.info are run by organizations or institutes that also use them for self-promotion. The culture of linking to other websites and blogs has died completely. What we see now are “blind” and “inward-looking” websites, as blogging pioneer and activist Hossein Derakhshan calls it in his fantastic piece The Web We Have to Save.

At the same time, most newspapers have moved their content behind paywalls. Sources for learning about the world are disappearing. There is less anthropological content available online than, let’s say, 10 years ago. Searching the web for new anthropological content (as I did before) hardly yields any interesting material to blog about anymore.

There are positive developments, though. More and more journals have become open-access journals. More and more academics have moved from Twitter to open, non-commercial platforms like Mastodon. Some have even started experimenting with open digital gardens as a new way to share knowledge as for example anthropologist Kerim Friedman.

I haven’t been active for some years either—an exception was the Corona lockdown in 2020 and 2021.

In 2016, I lost my job as a science journalist at the University of Oslo and moved to Germany one year later. Here, I was not able to find work within my field either and ended up becoming a freelance teacher for German as a foreign language in the least attractive part of the country (which is also the only place where you can still find affordable flats). Teaching German as a foreign language can be fun and rewarding, especially because of the contact with people from all over the world. But teaching full-time drains all my energy and leaves me bored, as I miss the stimulation from anthropology, university life, journalism, and blogging!

So, what now? There are many things one (or I, if I had time) could do, for example, combining language teaching with anthropology. Why not start something like “Learn German with Anthropology”? Most of the texts for language learners, especially at the beginner levels, are too banal to be interesting. So why not write some more inspiring texts so that you not only learn a new language but also something else?

As I mentioned, more and more anthropological journals have removed their paywalls; there are more and more open-access anthropology journals. I recently wrote a piece for the Norwegian magazine Forskerforum, Tidsskrifter er viktigere enn noensinne—meaning “Journals are more important than ever.” While mainstream media has locked down access to knowledge, scientific journals have opened up. Although journals have become a dumping ground for half-ready texts in the neoliberal university economy (“publish or perish“), there are still many academics who are interested in other things than impact factor and the number of publications on their CVs. You will find many of them writing or working for rather small non-commercial open-access journals.

Browsing through journals like the Finnish Suomen Antropologi, Scottish Medicine Anthropology Theory (MAT), or Brazilian Vibrant, I always find too many articles I’d like to read (and blog about…). Most of all, I am fascinated by the passion that shines through in their editorials! Many of their articles need more publicity. I wish I could write about more such hidden treasures as I did before. Maybe it is now more important than ever, as quality content about the state of the world is getting harder to find, and spammy websites dominate Google results.

Another issue: The blog software that I have been using since 2005 (b2evolution) is no longer maintained by the main developer François Planque, and no one has started forking it. Now I wonder how to migrate to another system and to which one, as choices are more limited than in the old times. More and more solutions have become “evil,” meaning commercial and no longer operating within a true open source and open access gift culture as b2evolution has done and WordPress did in the early years. By the way, developer François Planque just wrote a convincing blog post called My 7 reasons to maintain a blog or website in 2024

(to be continued)

PS: Congratulations to Erkan Saka, one of the first anthropology bloggers. His blog Erkans Field Diary also turned 20! And pioneering medicine anthropology blog Somatosphere just turned 15! Congrats!

Anthropologist counters Zoom-fatigue: "Your next video conference might resemble a video game"

Published on January 11, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, internet, technology

Why can we spend hours playing video games while many of us get exhausted by much shorter video-conferences?

That is without doubt no bad question that the magazine Inverse asks. They turn to an anthropologist who has researched our relation to the internet for at least 15 years: Tom Boellstorff. In 2007 I wrote about his fieldwork in Second Life about the "virtually human": "Second Life is their only chance to participate in religious rituals".

Now he is part of the research project Virtual Cultures in Pandemic Times that explores "how COVID-19 is reshaping online interaction" according to the project website:

> As many have noted, what we call “social distancing” is really physical distancing. Due to the pandemic, an unprecedented number of people have been socializing online, in new ways. Better understanding these new digital cultures will have consequences for COVID prevention: successful physical distancing will rely on new forms of social closeness online. It will also have consequences for everything from work and education to climate change.

Zoom and other video conference solutions (including open source alternatives as Jitsi Meet or Bigbluebutton) let us constantly stare at many faces that in turn also stare at us. This never happens in real-life conferences and causes what is now coined "Zoom fatigue".

The anthropologist says in the Inverse-interview:

> "Whether it’s a conference or a class… so much of what happens [socially] in these environments has to do with talking in the halls on the way to the bathroom [or] grabbing a cup of coffee. Zoom is almost like a phone call in that sense, where you miss all this other activity, and that’s part of what can make it exhausting for people."

Boellstorff thinks that there’s much to be learned from video games like World of Warcraft or Animal Crossing where you are constantly interacting with others in a "more emotionally and psychologically fruitful" way. Game-like video conference platforms, he thinks, are likely to become more popular.

Boellstorff himself has started teaching his courses in Second Life, as Wired explained in an earlier article:

> Boellstorff custom-built Anteater [Island] to include an office, spaces for lectures and group projects, areas to hang out, and even a roller coaster. He uses the island in tandem with Zoom for classes, partially because Second Life doesn’t run well on older computers and can’t be accessed from a smartphone. So far, the setup is working well. Being in the same virtual space “does seem to have supported interactions that would not have happened if only using Zoom or a similar conference call program,” he says.

In an interview with University of California, Irvine News website he says:

> “We need to get away from talking about the physical world as the real world. Online sociality is a set of cultures that can be just as real as what’s in the physical world.”

Both Wired and Inverse present some video conference solutions that already incorporate elements from video games: Kumospace and Gather Town that is based on Online Town.

Why can we spend hours playing video games while many of us get exhausted by much shorter video-conferences?

That is without doubt no bad question that the magazine Inverse asks. They turn to an anthropologist who has researched our relation to…

Pregnancy and baby apps, smart home devices: Anthropologist shows how surveillance capitalism targets children

Published on January 4, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, internet, politics, youth

When we are online we are constantly being watched and tracked. A huge industry has evolved to build profiles about us so that they can predict and influence our behavior – to make us buy products or vote for a specific politician. Our personal behavioural data is the new oil. We are living in an age of surveillance capitalism, as scholar Shoshana Zuboff explains in her famous and very disturbing book from 2018 (that I am currently listening).

The good news is that more and more people have become aware of this threat to privacy and democracy and try to move away from companies and services that operate within this surveillance economy (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Zoom etc) and never browse the web without an ad- and tracking blocker.

It is also good news that anthropology has become engaged in this struggle. Anthropologist Veronica Barassi for example has published a book a few weeks ago about how even small children and babies are tracked, how their personal information is collected, archived, sold, and aggregated into unique profiles that can follow them across a lifetime. It is called Child Data Citizen. How Tech Companies Are Profiling Us from before Birth.

Her goal was not only to understand but "to empower parents to seek legal change", she writes in the introduction:

> I wrote this book for my daughters, my family, and all the parents and families I met in this life-changing and personal research journey. I owe them everything. Their stories, their thoughts, and their everyday experiences have shaped my understanding of the injustice of surveillance capitalism. They made this book possible; they inspired me, questioned me, surprised me, and reminded me of why we need publicly engaged ethnographic research.
(…)

> Governments must step up and recognize that our data rights are tightly interconnected with our civil rights; as parents we need to start working together as collectives, organizations, and institutions to demand a political change.

The anthropologist is mother of two young girls. The idea for this book (and three year research project) came to her, when she realized that there are "vast—almost unimaginable—amounts of data traces that are being produced and collected about children":

> Not only my fellow peers (and myself included) were recording important medical data on mobile apps, but we were extensively sharing photos of our children online through public and private social media platforms. (…)

> Hence I started wondering: How were children’s data traces produced? How were parents negotiating with online privacy, data mining, and digital profiling? What type of data were companies collecting? Were companies profiling children from before birth?

> After staring my project, I became pregnant with my second daughter (A) and Google knew I was pregnant before my family did!

Positive as well: The anthropologist made a very informative website that also include some of her research findings and useful background information and a blog. (I could not find any practical tips and information about tools and alternatives, though, I hope she will add them in future posts. Personally I learned a lot by visiting Reddit’s subreddits Privacytoolsio and selfhosted).

She received some media attention, see among others the first review of the book An anthropologist investigates how data surveillance intersects with the 21st-century family (Kate Eichhorn, ScienceMag 16.12.2020), Call for smart home devices to bake in privacy safeguards for kids (Techcrunch 19.9.2018) and Children ‘need protection’ from AI home devices that collect and share their data (Telegraph 19.9.2018) about her earlier report Home Life Data and Children’s Privacy.

There are several open access articles by her, and below you will find an 11 minute-Ted Talk, and she is active on Twitter.

SEE ALSO:

Ethnographic Study: Social Websites Important For Childhood Development (antropologi,info 24.11.2008 – from old times before the age of surveillance capitalism)

When we are online we are constantly being watched and tracked. A huge industry has evolved to build profiles about us so that they can predict and influence our behavior - to make us buy products or vote for a…

"Religion in Digital Games": Relaunch of Open Access journal "Online"

Published on February 28, 2014 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, interdisciplinary, internet, journal articles / papers, media, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, religion cosmology, Us and Them

"Second Life is their only chance to participate in religious rituals": This seven year old post about the research by anthropologist Tom Boellstorff on the virtual world Second Life came into my mind when I heard about the new special issue "Religion in Digital Games" of the interdisciplinary Open access journal "Online. Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet".

The journal is published by the Institute of Religious Studies at the University of Heidelberg and has just been relaunched and redesigned.

Religion in online games seems to be still a new topic in the university world.

"Until now this certainly huge field of research remains mostly untapped and digital games have only recently been declared an interesting object for scholars of religion", Simone Heidbrink, Tobias Knoll, and Jan Wysocki write in their contribution "Theorizing Religion in Digital Games- Perspectives and Approaches".

As universities generally are conservative institutions, Simone Heidbrink and Tobias Knoll start their introduction with an apology for leaving established paths:

When researching a rather new, unusual or controversial topic in nowadays academia it seems to be a new kind of “tradition” to apologize in great length for doing something the scholar thinks the readerships thinks he is not supposed to study (or something equally confusing along those lines), based on the assumption that it is scientifically unworthy, insignificant or plain nonsense. That was our experience with the topic at hand. (…)

In order to follow the apparently mandatory academic ritual of apologizing and legitimizing, we would herewith like to express our deepest regrets for publishing this special issue of Online – Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet topics on “Religion and Digital Games. Multiperspective and Interdisciplinary Approaches”.

Religion plays a role in many games, as Simone Heidbrink, Tobias Knoll, Jan Wysocki show. This is also true for religious stereotypes that might be reproduced in "neglected media" like video games in more explicit forms – partly because these media are considered to be less relevant in cultural discourse and thus less subject to media critique.

They refer among others to Vít Šisler who in his research shows how Muslims are being stereotyped in different video games. The topic of the Middle East as war zone and virtual battleground has become even more significant in the post 9/11 era. Not only have the numbers of games with an objective of fighting terrorism increased significantly according to him. The stereotyping, the “othering” of the (virtual) Muslim counterpart have become even more racist as well.

>> Visit the specia issue "Religion in Digital Games"

Play as research method – new Anthropology Matters is out

Cyberanthropology: "Second Life is their only chance to participate in religious rituals"

Overview over Open access journals

Visions of Students Today – More Digital Ethnography

Published on June 27, 2011 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, internet, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia, Visual Anthropology

(LINKS UPDATED 22.4.2020)

Michael Wesch and his Digital Ethnography Research Team of 2011 has released Visions of Students Today: an exciting “video collage” about student life created by students themselves.

The collage consists of a large number of vidoes that can be watched seperately by clicking directly on the thumbnails (or on YouTube). Each of the students has been working for months to put together their own vision.

Striking: Several students criticize the current education system… (here the video by Derek Schneweis)

Or check here a summary:

One of the aims of the project is to enhance the students and the public’s media literacy in the digital age and to prevent that many of the basic freedoms we have become accustomed to" as for example net neutrality", sharing and mixing (…) may be stripped away without the public even noticing".

>> more about the project

Wesch is the creator of the most popular anthropology videos online, among others

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Via YouTube: Anthropology students’ work draws more than a million viewers

Interview: Meet Dai Cooper from The Anthropology Song on YouTube!

"YouTube clips = everyday ethnography"

New media and anthropology – AAA meeting part III

antropologi.info survey: Six anthropologists on Anthropology and Internet

Anthropology and the challenges of sharing knowledge online: Interview with Owen Wiltshire

(LINKS UPDATED 22.4.2020)

Michael Wesch and his Digital Ethnography Research Team of 2011 has released Visions of Students Today: an exciting “video collage” about student life created by students themselves.

The collage consists of a large number of vidoes that can…