Around the Web: Web Edition

I gave up Facebook for Lent, but perhaps a more fitting penance would have been to actually write a column a week for Savage Minds. Though I haven’t done a good job of staying on top of Around the Web, I have been saving links for weeks now. This week its all about the interwebs. To the linx!

Best of Media/Anthropology:

The digital family

  • Material World explores the intertwining of family relationships and digital practices.
  • Apophenia is a great blog about social media, youth and parenting.

Social media and social change

  • We’ve heard about the role of Twitter and Facebook in the Middle East rebellions, has anyone seen anything connecting social media to the disaster in Japan?
  • Indigenous youths in Taiwanare using social media to make their voices heard.
  • Anthropology in Practice reports on tweeting from the homeless. And gamer site Kotaku reports on a video game designed to teach you about living in poverty.

The internet and religion

Cultural diversity online

Whither anthropology in the digital age?

  • Daniel Lende, in a wide ranging post about the “science” debate in anthropology and the recent response, published in Nature, from Adam Kuper and Johnathan Marks offers up a vision of anthropology: major changes to traditions of the dissemination of knowledge – open access and blogging.
  • Ethnografix has an appreciation of Lende’s post and offers an interesting idea too: how about a online anthropology publication modeled after literary magazine The Sun?
  • Another model might be First Monday, a peer-reviewed online journal about the internet (h/t Material World).
  • For more interesting ideas check out this recent Wednesday Round Up from Neuroanthropology which has a neat section heading on online anthropology.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email your links to mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson is Project Cataloger at The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and currently working on a CLIR ‘hidden collections’ grant to describe the museum’s collection of early 20th Century photography. He has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and a Masters in information science from the University of Tennessee.

2 thoughts on “Around the Web: Web Edition

  1. Concerning social media and the catastrophy in Japan; my own experience (I live in Tokyo) was that they mattered a lot.
    For several hours (over 5 in my case) after the quake(s) neither cell phone calls nor SMS:s or cell phone specific email would go through. However, smartphone data service was never interrupted. Thus I could not call my girlfriend or any other person to check if they were allright, but I could post/read updates on facebook and other SNS:s (and there were lots of updates), and also email my workplace.

    A quick review of news reports on SNS use in Japanese media reflects that in addition to being used as a way to contact ones relation immediately after the quake, SNS:s, especially twitter, have been used by both private individuals and officials at all institutional level as a way to spread information. Judging by quotes in news reports, this has been especially important for the diffusion of detailed information about the situation in smaller localities that are passed by by traditional media. For example some municipalities use twitter feeds as one way to inform resident about the availability of water, rations etc.
    The use of groups (facebook et al.) and tags (twitter) has also enabled individuals away from their home towns to throw very specific question out into the ether, and then get relevant responses by users in that locality.

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