The latest buzz word on the internet is “Web 2.0,” referring to a whole host of technologies which both make it possible to replace your desktop applications with web-based services (e.g. <a href=http://www.gmail.com/”>Gmail), and those which enable new social services capable of tapping into the collective wisdom of the web (e.g. Newsvine).
But where to look for anthropology articles that discuss this phenomenon? I’m sure our readers might have a few interesting suggestions, but the simple truth is that anthropology publishing can’t keep pace with the changes in technology. Articles and books I’ve looked at which were published in the last few years are based on research from nearly five years ago, and still talk about USENET, MUDs and how neat it is that you can design your own web page.
When I was in graduate school the hot word was “hypermedia.” Peter Biella’s classic piece from 1993, “Beyond Ethnographic Film: Hypermedia and Scholarship” is still making the rounds. Peter’s piece was ahead of its time. Just about every DVD we buy now is full of additional material, including alternative soundtracks, interviews, and even documents related to the film, but they still aren’t linked together as coherently as Peter imagined, or conceived of in projects like his Yanomamö Interactive: The Ax Fight On CD-ROM. And that’s my point: I think the immense amount of work it takes to create a truly complete hypermedia world for a single text is beyond the resources of any single anthropologist or academic publisher, not to mention even major film studios eager to add value to your Star Ward DVD box set.
As I discussed in my Folksonomy paper, Web 2.0 technologies offer a way around these limitations by removing the burden of authorial omnipotence. No longer does an anthropologist need to personally collect and link every possible piece of related data in order to create a fully immersive hypermedia world. Instead, it should be possible to lay down a framework which to which informants, other academics, and the general public can constantly add new information, allowing the work to grow in the same way that Wikipedia does.
Of course, everything old is new again. I have yet to look at Michael Wesch’s hypermedia project: Nekalimin.net.
listed by the Cardiff School of Social Sciences Hypermedia and Qualitative Research Project as “by far and away the most interesting web-mounted hypermedia ethnography to date.”
But one of the reasons I haven’t seen it is that the site is password protected. I keep meaning to write and ask for the password, but forgetting. The reason for password protecting the document is the same as reason Karen Nakamura doesn’t use a Creative Commons license for her photographs: protecting the rights of their informants.
Here we run into a limitation of Web 2.0 concepts for anthropology. How can we tap into the collective wisdom of the web if our professional ethics require us to restrict access and authorial control?
I don’t have any easy answers for this, but I do think that Anthropologists need to start thinking about how they can move beyond Hypermedia. I also think we need to find ways of speeding up the time between research and publication so that anthropological accounts of emerging technologies aren’t out of date by the time they go to print.
I ran across this article on Web 2.0 by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling recently, that you ought to read for the heck of it, if you haven’t already:
http://www.viridiandesign.org/2006/03/viridian-note-00459-emerging.html
I’ve been contemplating Wikipedia a lot lately, and it seems to me that anthropologists, whether we like it or not, are going to have to turn over the control of some things. I’m not entirely comfortable about it, myself, because most of the interaction I’ve had with Wikipedia has been over stuff somebody has plagiarized from me. But it strikes me that to make advances in any given science, you have to let other folks comment on and grow your ideas. It may be analogous to the recent copyright fights over whatdoyacallit, when people use riffs of old music in new ways. The result of such an open source structure of any kind, using someone else’s original concept and building on it into a different direction, is what the Internet is all about. The hyper-privileging of academically-trained anthropologists is going to be harder to justify in the future.
I’m hoping we can find a way to be inclusive in a clever, blended way (rather than ceding complete control which is scary to me personally). But that’s today. I’ll probably feel differently tomorrow.
Passwords, fie on ’em.
Kris
Though the Wikipedia model is certainly one way to go for building a body of ethnographic work, I see more evidence all the time that’s also deeply problematic. Even for open-minded folks, dealing with a purely democratic institution where everyone has roughly the same amount of power requires a giant refiguring of the rules of exchange. Take, for example, the recent hubbub over some Senators’ staffers editing pages. I think it’s interesting that the response to this has been to question the ethics of these few contributors, instead of to laud the fact that they were outnumbered a million to one by people who could just as easily revert their changes.
Another example: a friend of mine was recently in a dispute about a Wikipedia article on a particular open voting method. The author of the method, unwilling to compromise and unable to convince his critics by logic, intellect, or threat, sort of ‘ran home to mama’ and decided to write long letters to the deans of the schools of two of the participants in the debate, asking for them to intervene. Unable to grasp the new power structure that Wikipedia provided he reverted to one he was more familiar with, hoping, I guess, that it would relieve him of the burden of proving himself or dealing with an alternative point of view.
So removing ‘authorial omnipotence’ is a double-edged sword. Maybe that’s not news to anyone. But I think it’s fair to say that the balance of attention goes towards talking about how amazing and collaborative and democratic (i.e. Web 2.0-y) a Wikipedia-like model is, and not enough towards its challenges. I don’t imagine anthropologists, as enlightened as we are () would find ourselves above those troubles.
I seriously doubt the Wright brothers envisioned the space shuttle when they set up shop testing flying machines. I also doubt 19th century automobile inventors imagined Mars rovers.
Although the “Web 2.0” buzzword is dead, the central ideas will influence internet development for some time. Like any new technology, there’s good and bad applications. When the audience is ready, the platform and technology will appear. Those who don’t adapt are left behind. Applying newer technology to calcified systems takes creativity, imagination, invention, and open mindeness.
You Know You’re Web 2.0 When…
-You can easily comment on, or preferably, actually change the content that you find on a Web site.
-You can label your information with tags and use them to find that information again.
-Your Web page doesn’t reload even once as you get a whole lotta work done.
-You are actively aware of other users’ recent activity on a site.
-It’s possible for you to easily share with others the information you’re contributing on the Web site.
-You can syndicate your information on a Web site elsewhere on the Internet through a feed like RSS or Atom.
-You can pick and choose the pieces of a Web site that you like and then add that functionality to your own site.
-There are easy ways to find out what content is the most popular or interesting at the moment.
-You heard about a new Web site because a friend enthusiastically recommended it to you out of the blue.
-There happens to be a mind boggling amount information and a lot of people on a site, yet it seems easy to find what you want and communicate with others.
-Everything you ever added to a given Web site can be removed easily at your whim.
-The Web site actively encourages you to share and reuse its information and its services with others. And it even provides a license to do so.
From http://web2.wsj2.com/you_know_youre_web_20_when.htm
Derived from Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog: http://web2.wsj2.com/
Savage Minders:
Interesting post about our shortcomings of the lack of both publishing and researching cyberspace. On the publication side, the political economy of web publishing discourages us from using a Web 2.0 type approach to our work — when wiki’s count for tenure, then more anthropologists would use this media. As for the researching side, there are a lot of us doing research on cyberspace — I’ve written a piece myself, and I have lots of colleagues that are working on various aspects of cyberspace (one of the most interesting ones that I can think of is a colleague that is looking at secondlife.com). People have done cyber-fieldwork on such issues as matchmaking on the internet (Nicole Constable), diaspora ethnicity, and religion (Daniel Miller) for example. But you’re right overall — more work on cyberspace needs to get out there!
Fuji,
My point was not that work isn’t being done on cyberspace, but that by the time it is published, the nature of cyberspace has changed so much that the work is more interesting as history than ethnography. Of course, this might be true of any anthropological subject in a rapidly changing world, but the problem is that when one is teaching new technology in a course, one wants articles that discuss what is happening now, not what happened 5 years ago.
Now, in those sciences where they need access to the latest publications, such as medicine, one can easily access online databases of unpublished research. Publishing in this way does not preclude publication in academic journals, and allows faster dissemination of new ideas.
I confused the issue by combining this point with a discussion of hypermedia as an example of what I see as outdated paradigms for anthropological publication online. Instead, I should have probably talked about PubMed and saved my discussion of Hypermedia for another post…