Wilson, Samuel M. and Leighton C. Peterson. (2002). “The Anthropology of Online Communities.”
In their article Wilson and Leighton raise these questions: How have scholars approached
online communities and online communication in general? Is the concept of community
itself misleading? How are issues of power and access manifested in this
arena?
They state that the shortage of “mainstream anthropological
research on the Internet and computing reflects the fact that anthropology has not
played a central role in studies of mass media in the past; anthropologists have positioned
media as peripheral to culture.”
They argue that “anthropology is uniquely suited for the study of socioculturally situated
online communication within a rapidly changing context. Anthropological
methodologies enable the investigation of cross-cultural, multiileveled, and multisited
phenomena…” This is changing as “Recently there have been calls for an ethnographic approach to the issues of new media, an approach that is timely and indispensable as we begin to theorize the sociocultural
implications of new communication technology.”
Kollock, Peter and Marc A. Smith. (1999). “Communities in Cyberspace.”
The authors show two visions associated with description of social networks. One, optimistic that “highlights the positive effects of networks and their benefits for democracy and prosperity” (p. 22), the other, pessimistic, shows individuals who “are trapped and ensnared in a ‘net’ that predominantly offers new opportunities for surveillance and social control” (p. 4).
They provide examples to illustrate participation in community networks’. the Big Sky Telegraph community networks that managed to attract less than 1/3 of potential users of one-room teachers in Montana was a failure, and the success story of the Jervey Place taskforce that attracted a host of help from prominent architect and community leaders, which would not be possible without the Internet.
I agree with their conclusion that the overly optimists view of new technology is not the serious analysis but prediction. In the past, new technologies such as “the telegraph, radio, movies, and television did create revolutions, but no the ones that were expected” (p.23).
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Hine, Fay, Wittel
Hine, Christine. (1998). “Virtual Ethnography”.
In “Virtual Ethnography” Christine Hine describes the Internet not just as a communication medium but as the Louise Woodward case shows also culture and as cultural artefact. As she states her paper should not be read as an announcement of already achieved project, but rather a “starting point which aims to map” virtual ethnography. She disagrees with “Marcus (1995) [who] identifies a trend for ethnographies to encompass multiple sites in a bid to follow complex objects through a series of cultural contexts” (p. 4) and although she chooses “to encompass multiple sites in considering the Internet as a culture and cultural artifact” she describes her approach “as a virtual ethnography rather than a multi-sited one” (p.5) for the following reasons:
1. “Virtual” is the metaphoric term which means that occurring action exists online, not depended on “time, location and presence” (p. 5) This occurrence makes it “a-sited rather than multi-sited ethnography”(p. 5).
2. Her second point is as obscure as the first one. She talks about “virtual to play on the anxieties which this kind of ethnography can produce” (p.5). Whatever that means.
To sum up, I find her article an attempt not a starting point to make sense of the Internet, its culture, and virtual ethnography.
Fay, Michaela. (2007). “Mobile Subjects, Mobile Methods: Doing Virtual Ethnography in a Feminist Online Network.”
The second article is so useless that I don’t think I can bring myself up to write anything witty. It is a boring and predictable feminist writing about nothing. Michaela Fay says, “the aim of the article is to demonstrate how online connectivity, alongside a differentiated understanding of mobility and academic feminism, shapes belonging in the context of a transnational feminist network” (p. 1). Then she boasts, “women are playing an increasingly important role as ‘agents of change’ (p. 1) as they have been “closing the ‘technology gap’ between the sexes, using the internet and communication technologies” (p.1).
Michaela Fay and the feminists are about 20 years late with this statement. Women were always the first to use new technologies from cellular phones, to video-cameras, to on-demand streaming, to the Internet – prostitutes and stripers. Prostitutes are extremely mobile AND in terms of using and utilizing new technology, ahead of everybody else. It is for this reason that Fay’s article did not bring any insights into the topic of women and technology, but let me tell you Ms. Fay: your 2000 conference sponsored by German taxpayers money was on the periphery of a real technological happening. Wake up.
Wittel, Andreas. (2000). “Ethnography on the move: From field to net to Internet”.
Main idea of Wittel’s article is that the purpose of ethnography, or cultural anthropology as Clifford Geertz described, "they have a culture out there and your job is to come back and tell us what it is" (p. 1) is outdated. Outdated as “societies have modernised and differentiated and so have cultures” (p. 2). Therefore, the concept of “the field” cannot be geographically defined to one place as people became mobile. Wittel proposes after Marcus and Fisher that “ethnographies should be conceptualised multi-locally or as multi-sited “ (p. 2). He also insists that “ethnography …is on the move [from geographically defined ‘fields’] towards socio-political locations, networks, and multi-sited approaches” (p. 8).
My angle is that Geertz’s idea of “cultures out there” but not in his office or in Manhattan was already outdated in his times as he adopted anthropology of British Empire but without understating that British anthropologists inspired by Darwin and his evolutionism tried to find out answers to modern day problems in understanding of the workings of ‘savage’ cultures.
To Wittel’s idea that “ethnography is on the move” I propose this question: did culture move from radio to television?
In “Virtual Ethnography” Christine Hine describes the Internet not just as a communication medium but as the Louise Woodward case shows also culture and as cultural artefact. As she states her paper should not be read as an announcement of already achieved project, but rather a “starting point which aims to map” virtual ethnography. She disagrees with “Marcus (1995) [who] identifies a trend for ethnographies to encompass multiple sites in a bid to follow complex objects through a series of cultural contexts” (p. 4) and although she chooses “to encompass multiple sites in considering the Internet as a culture and cultural artifact” she describes her approach “as a virtual ethnography rather than a multi-sited one” (p.5) for the following reasons:
1. “Virtual” is the metaphoric term which means that occurring action exists online, not depended on “time, location and presence” (p. 5) This occurrence makes it “a-sited rather than multi-sited ethnography”(p. 5).
2. Her second point is as obscure as the first one. She talks about “virtual to play on the anxieties which this kind of ethnography can produce” (p.5). Whatever that means.
To sum up, I find her article an attempt not a starting point to make sense of the Internet, its culture, and virtual ethnography.
Fay, Michaela. (2007). “Mobile Subjects, Mobile Methods: Doing Virtual Ethnography in a Feminist Online Network.”
The second article is so useless that I don’t think I can bring myself up to write anything witty. It is a boring and predictable feminist writing about nothing. Michaela Fay says, “the aim of the article is to demonstrate how online connectivity, alongside a differentiated understanding of mobility and academic feminism, shapes belonging in the context of a transnational feminist network” (p. 1). Then she boasts, “women are playing an increasingly important role as ‘agents of change’ (p. 1) as they have been “closing the ‘technology gap’ between the sexes, using the internet and communication technologies” (p.1).
Michaela Fay and the feminists are about 20 years late with this statement. Women were always the first to use new technologies from cellular phones, to video-cameras, to on-demand streaming, to the Internet – prostitutes and stripers. Prostitutes are extremely mobile AND in terms of using and utilizing new technology, ahead of everybody else. It is for this reason that Fay’s article did not bring any insights into the topic of women and technology, but let me tell you Ms. Fay: your 2000 conference sponsored by German taxpayers money was on the periphery of a real technological happening. Wake up.
Wittel, Andreas. (2000). “Ethnography on the move: From field to net to Internet”.
Main idea of Wittel’s article is that the purpose of ethnography, or cultural anthropology as Clifford Geertz described, "they have a culture out there and your job is to come back and tell us what it is" (p. 1) is outdated. Outdated as “societies have modernised and differentiated and so have cultures” (p. 2). Therefore, the concept of “the field” cannot be geographically defined to one place as people became mobile. Wittel proposes after Marcus and Fisher that “ethnographies should be conceptualised multi-locally or as multi-sited “ (p. 2). He also insists that “ethnography …is on the move [from geographically defined ‘fields’] towards socio-political locations, networks, and multi-sited approaches” (p. 8).
My angle is that Geertz’s idea of “cultures out there” but not in his office or in Manhattan was already outdated in his times as he adopted anthropology of British Empire but without understating that British anthropologists inspired by Darwin and his evolutionism tried to find out answers to modern day problems in understanding of the workings of ‘savage’ cultures.
To Wittel’s idea that “ethnography is on the move” I propose this question: did culture move from radio to television?
Friday, January 18, 2008
Escobar and HIne
Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture by Arturo Escobar looked like an interesting article until I came to the point where Escobar with his mouth wide open calls on Foucault (p. 213). I refuse to take seriously anyone who quotes or refers to Foucault as an authority. Anyone who borrows from Foucault, the French “intellectual” who attended sadomasochist parlours in California and supported Baader-Meinhof terrorists is a person who betrays philosophy as a noble and arduous discipline. To my critics who will say that I use ad hominem argument to attack one of the greatest thinkers of our modern era (Foucault) I kindly remind that ad hominem may apply to a mathematician, for example, one can beat his wife and still be good with numbers, but if a philosopher’s moral behaviour is questionable then his ideas are questionable too. To my other critics who will say that Escoabr has something interesting to say, I will respond, Adolf Hitler said many interesting things, and I am not joking. Good bye Arturo Escobar and Cyberia.
In Virtual Ethnography Christine Hine makes a number of important points in defence on virtual ethnography:
Explaining traditional ethnography: “Cultures are studies in their natural state, rather than as disturbed by survey techniques or experimental scenarios” (p. 42).
“The problem with an ethnographic approach to the Internet encompass both how it is to be constituted as an ethnographic object and how that object is to be authentically known” (p. 43).
‘The ethnography will always have to meet a different standard of authenticity to that prevailing in interactions in the filed: the ethnography is ultimately produced and evaluated in an academic setting” (p.50).
She interprets the Internet activity as “text.” In that context: “texts shoul be seen as ethnographic material which tells us about the understating which authors have of the reality which they inhabit” (p. 51).
She argues against holistic approach in favour of multi-dimensional p. 59 and quotes Marcus who suggests “a range of strategies for ethnographers to construct fields in the absence of bounded sites, including the following of people, things, metaphors, narrative, biographers and conflicts” (p. 61).
In Virtual Ethnography Christine Hine makes a number of important points in defence on virtual ethnography:
Explaining traditional ethnography: “Cultures are studies in their natural state, rather than as disturbed by survey techniques or experimental scenarios” (p. 42).
“The problem with an ethnographic approach to the Internet encompass both how it is to be constituted as an ethnographic object and how that object is to be authentically known” (p. 43).
‘The ethnography will always have to meet a different standard of authenticity to that prevailing in interactions in the filed: the ethnography is ultimately produced and evaluated in an academic setting” (p.50).
She interprets the Internet activity as “text.” In that context: “texts shoul be seen as ethnographic material which tells us about the understating which authors have of the reality which they inhabit” (p. 51).
She argues against holistic approach in favour of multi-dimensional p. 59 and quotes Marcus who suggests “a range of strategies for ethnographers to construct fields in the absence of bounded sites, including the following of people, things, metaphors, narrative, biographers and conflicts” (p. 61).
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