Friday in 1994

You don’t need to be a fan of the series 24 to get the joke here.

I watched it and it immediately made me think that there is a kind of ethnographic method here, perhaps a class assignment: take a familiar case from the contemporary setting and explore it by setting it back 15 years. Change everything you can think of, what stays the same and what makes a difference? Could be a useful way to pick apart the difference technology makes. Or perhaps not, since as EB White says: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog; nobody learns anything and the frog dies of it.”

Christopher Kelty does anthropological and historical research on science and technology, free and open source software, intellectual property and open access, the history of software, and the ethics and politics of nanotechnology. He also teaches classes about all of these things. From 2001 to 2008 he was assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University, in Houston, TX. He know teaches at UCLA and splits his time between the Information Studies department, the Anthropology Department and the Center for Society and Genetics.