The World’s Biggest Table?

I just ran into a site called www.droppingknowledge.org which will be sponsoring a giant ’round table’ conference in Berlin in September, bringing together 112 of the “world’s biggest thinkers” to answer pressing questions facing people today. It’s a groovy site with a cool graphical sensibility, though, upon my cursory review of the site and its projects, it seems rather utopian. Like other internet initiatives, it raises the question: What will the social effects of massive connectivity and ease of information distribution be? One thing is for sure, these people think size matters. They are building the “world’s biggest table” and the site seems quite fond of elaborating just what a massive project they are putting together.

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.