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More and more blogging anthropologists – but the digital divide persists

Published on May 18, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, internet, websites

Savage Mind – the new anthropology group blog is big news and is being discussed in many blogs (interesting to see how fast the news is spread). Recently I mentioned several new anthro-blogs – Kerim Friedman has discovered even more, for example The Old Revolution by “tak”, a cultural anthropologist and New Yorker and a Tokyoite who has compiled a list of Anthropology and Japan blogs – even more to explore.

I began to work with this blog (which also includes a kind of Norwegian anthropology journal), because I missed anthropological content on the web. Much has changed since then. But nevertheless, my impression is that Internet is still a quite new medium for many anthropologists – at leasts in Norway. People here do read the national and regional newspapers online, send mails and transfer money. But none of my friends and people I know at the University know what a blog is, let alone RSS. Only a few have heard about Wikipedia. They’re not familiar with the gift economy principles on the Internet either (I heard of anthropologists who don’t publish online because they don’t want their ideas to be “stolen” (!) before they can elaborate them in a traditional paper-journal.

Those people (the majority) don’t participate in discussions. They are the unknown passive readers. It’s quite striking: All the (few) comments to entries in my Norwegian blog are made by people who already have a website or an own blog.

I think here we see another type of a digital divide – between those who know how to use the internet actively (or are interested in it) and those who don’t.

UPDATE: See also the post by Alexander Knorr on xirdalim on academic blogging and its difficulties: “What struck us most was the fact that the vast majority of our institute’s anthropology-students (and we have 1200+ !) never made good use of the ethno::log >> continue

Savage Mind - the new anthropology group blog is big news and is being discussed in many blogs (interesting to see how fast the news is spread). Recently I mentioned several new anthro-blogs - Kerim Friedman has discovered even more,…

Technologies of the Childhood Imagination- new text by anthropologist Mizuko Ito

Published on May 11, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, fieldwork / methods, internet, journal articles / papers, media, technology, youth

Mizuku Ito has published a new text, a keynote speech she gave at “Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media”. Ito is involved in the new research project on “Digital Kids”.

From her introduction:

“I’ve been trying to develop ways of studying, from an ethnographic perspective, processes that are more commonly pursued from a macro sociological perspective, such as the relationships between production, distribution, marketing and consumption. The work I’ll be describing for you today is based on several years of fieldwork in Tokyo, focused on the period between 1999 and 2001.”

“Rather than see centralized and highly capitalized sites as the sole sites of cultural production, I have been looking at the activity of children and young adults as sites of not only consumptive activity — that is, buying, watching, and reading centrally produced media — but also productive activity – not only reinterpreting these texts, but actually reshaping and recreating related media content and knowledge and selling and trading those locally created products.”

From her conclusion:

“I would suggest that media mixes such as Pokemon and
Yugioh are tied to a changing politics of childhood. I think part of the appeal of these media mixes for children and young adults is that it explicitly recognizes entrepreneurism and connoisseurship in children’s culture, traits that, by some cultural standards, are not considered appropriate for children. In part, these media mixes are becoming ambassadors for a Japanese vision of childhood internationally.”

>> continue

Mizuku Ito has published a new text, a keynote speech she gave at “Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media”. Ito is involved in the new research project on "Digital Kids".

From her introduction:

"I've been trying to develop ways…

News from Kerim Friedman: How folksonomy websites can be used by anthropologists

Published on May 1, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, internet

In a new Anthropology News article, Anthropologist Kerim Friedman gives a short introduction in folksonomies and provides examples of how folksonomy web sites can be used by anthropologists. The term folksonomy, he explains, “owes its roots to the anthropological study of “folk taxonomies,” popular in the 1960s, it is a new term, coined by blogger Thomas Vander Wal to describe an emergent, decentralized approach to classifying information on the Internet.” >> continue

Ethnographic Flickr

Published on April 16, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, fieldwork / methods, internet, technology

Anthropologist Kerim Friedman, Keywords

Last year, when I was offered the opportunity to teach a course on anthropology and photography at Haverford College, I immediately knew I wanted to do something with Flickr. I have to admit that it was exhausting correcting papers with dozens of hyperlinks to photos on flickr. But it was also fun. I especially enjoyed seeing the various ways students used Flickr’s tags to come up with interesting paper topics. >> continue

Anthropologist Kerim Friedman, Keywords

Gift economies and open source software: Anthropological reflections

Published on April 13, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, gift economy gift giving, internet, persons and theories, technology

David Zeitlyn, University of Kent at Canterbury

Building on Eric Raymond’s work this article discusses the motivation and rewards that lead some software engineers to participate in the open source movement. It is suggested that software engineers in the open source movement may have sub-groupings which parallel kinship groups such as lineages. Within such groups gift giving is not necessarily or directly reciprocated, instead members work according to the ‘axiom of kinship amity’ – direct economic calculation is not appropriate within the group. What Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic capital’ can be used to understand how people work in order to enhance the reputation (of themselves and their group). >> continue (pdf) (Link updated 12.4.2021)

(Found in the huge paper collection on Open Source at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Cyberanthropology – links

David Zeitlyn, University of Kent at Canterbury