Week 9
Hakken, David. (1999). Cyborgs@Cyberspace? An Ethnographer Looks to the Future. New York: Routledge.

I am so tired of ethnographic writing that I really cannot take it anymore. And Hakke is adding to my goal to desacrilize the giants and wanna be giants of anthropology. Nevertheless, I jumped sky high when I read weeping of Hakken that he was attacked by Paul Gross. I quickly checked Gross name on the Internet. The first one that came was an actor. Never heard of him either, but that was not him. I finally found this devastating attacker and his article on education at: http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring2008/gross.htm.

I love this article. Gross should be the president of Concordia. Although I suspect that Gross is on the left, at least he has enough intelligence and talent to see through it. So although I think that Hakken is writing about nothing, I did get something out of it. He directed me to Paul R. Gross whose essay I will be using in my research.

The second part of Hakken’s writing gets a little bit better better. He provides an account of some anthropological writing in the field of cyber ethnography: e.g. Kling, Wynn, and Suchman.

He lists factors that inhibit appreciation of anthropological cyberethnograpy’s contribution:
1. Holistic ethnography approach that strives to explain as well as describe, contextualizing the results of participant observation in relation to broader structural dynamics (p. 45).
2. the extent to which one must/should master and /or identify with the professional field(s) relevant to her research (p. 57).

And finally a paragraph I do agree with:
Many of the difficulties in analyzing cyberspace ethnographically derive from inadequately developed sense of culture. These difficulties parallel those encountered by an earlier generation of ethnographers, like Margaret Mead and Oscar Lewis. They were trying to use the notion of culture, developed in anthropological ethnography to analyze simpler social formations, to study more complex ones. p.62.

Another person that Hakken directed me to was Oscar Lewis. Surprisingly, Lewis’ name is avoided in a university classroom. Unfortunately, index was not provided so I don’t know from which article these quotes were taken, probably from his book. I agree with Lewis’ culture of poverty, but not with the final analysis that “the primary cause of the cultures of poverty is lack of resources” (p. 62). If that is what Lewis really said.

In general, Hakken took on a task to show that the subject of cyberethnography has come of age and has a maturity, which is spite of his enemies (Gross) can’t be longer dismissed. Was he successful in proving it?