Tag Archives: Technology

Let Freedom Ring from your Navigation Toolbar!

I feel compelled to blog this: a browser for black people. Mostly it’s because when I tried to download it the captcha program made me enter the words “reveled Empire.” (!) But also because, as someone putatively an expert on open source and culture, I was a bit (okay very) surprised that it exists, and doubly so that it’s serious. Two things: 1) yea open source! anyone can download Firefox and create their own “Browser for X people.” As anthropologists we could make browsers for our peoples. Except that my peoples made the browser in the first place, so y’all will have to go on without me. 2) Do we need further confirmation that race is now simply a demographic marketing category, and that anyone who feels it is actually an identity has confused consumption profiles with values?

I’m off to make a browser for cynics. or maybe one for black panthers, which strikes me as something we might need more right about now.

TicTOCs

TicTOCs is a new service which aims to be a one-stop shop for Journal Table of Contents updates, either via e-mail or RSS. They have a very extensive list of anthropology journals.

(via KMLawson on Twitter)

Media Anthropology and Pedagogy

Anand Pandian, assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins, shared the site for his Fall Semester undergrad course on The Anthropology of Media. The syllabus is comprehensive and tight. Students were asked to do a semester project on some aspect of the media, and the range of projects runs the gamut from the predictable (facebook) to the intriguing (Industrial Mix Tape: Baltimore’s Diverse Music Scene) to the kitchy (The Indian Chuck Norris).

I asked him why the projects look the way they do (I was thinking, what’s up with the 1990s web vernacular aesthetic?). The answer is illuminating, because it reflects how challenging it is to do a class like this and make students focus on the anthropology and not on the media. I don’t believe that this generation is any more digitally equipped than the last, and I hate it when journalists assume that it is (as they frequently do, given the number of requests I get to do interviews about how new media are causing children to evolve into large-thumbed, ADHD-addled, hacker-loving codemonkeys). In reality, some students have mad skillz, others have none. Focusing a class (of 50+ students) on the issues and asking them to produce a “new media” project that does not automatically activate different creative skills is challenging, so I was surprised by what Pandian’s class web site looked like. Of course, some students wanted to break out of the constraints (which results in some internal-link bizareness in some cases) I think it’s a measure of success, and it demonstrates one way to produce comparability in this medium.

Of course, one way to really get students thinking about the effects of media is to have them explore all the challenges, ins and outs of media production, but then the trade-off is that you risk running a course in web-production, rather than one in anthropology. In any case, an excellent case of experimentation.

Why is there no official EC fatwa in Egypt?

Now in the last post on the topic, I mentioned that EC website that Princeton runs, http://ec.princeton.edu. There’s an NGO in Cambridge, MA called Ibis Reproductive Health that got a grant to make EC information and educational materials available in Arabic. A significant chunk of that grant was dedicated to creating an Arabic language version of the EC website. At Ibis, Angel Foster led this project and I took on the job of putting up the Arabic text that she created (with translator Aida Rouhana) online.

These days it’s not that hard to do websites in Arabic, but six years ago, it was a real puzzle. I couldn’t find any Arabic language plug-ins for DreamWeaver or FrontPage, so as I cut and pasted the Arabic text into the HTML programs, it wouldn’t display the Arabic properly, so it was really hard to do the links on specific words. The Arabic phrase for emergency contraception, which looks like this in Arabic:

منع الحمل الطارئ

looks like this in HTML code:

منع الحمل الطارئ

So I just had to muck around, highlighting different phrases, counting off letters or doing searches for strings of HTML code like that above, putting in links and then seeing where the links showed up in the Arabic texts, and then shifting the links around accordingly. It was a stupidly slow process. There was probably a better way to do it, but I wasn’t able to figure it out, so I slogged through the slow way.

Translation vs adaptation
I’m getting off the topic. Angel had decided that we couldn’t simply translate the existing website into Arabic. It had to be adapted to fit the social and cultural context of the Arabic speaking world and meet users’ needs. So, for example, she decided to include specific questions in the FAQs section on the interpretation and acceptability of EC in Orthodox Christianity and in Islamic jurisprudence. We hunted around for any fatwas on EC, both in published compendia of fatawa as well as in online databases, but we couldn’t find any. In fact, in the past 5 years, I have only found 1 fatwa on EC in an one of the many online fatwa databases.

That’s where interest in this Egypt research project came from. What did it mean that there were no fatwas on EC? Either it meant that EC wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen and was so totally unknown that nobody was asking about its status in Islam – hard to believe since there were dedicated products available in several Middle Eastern countries (including Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon) – OR it meant that EC was just wholly uncontroversial and subsumed under jurisprudential discussions about pre-coital hormonal contraceptives. Continue reading →

New Reproductive Health Technologies in Egypt

Thanks to Kerim and Savage Minds for inviting me to contribute. I thought I’d write something about a new research project I’ve recently started on new and emerging reproductive health technologies in Egypt. This project looks at Egyptian interpretations of four technologies: emergency contraception, medication abortion, hymenoplasty, and erectile dysfunction drugs.

Some interesting paradoxes to contemplate:

  • Why are there at least a dozen local brands of sildenafil available from Egyptian pharmacies, and “Viagra sandwiches” or “Viagra soup” is on the menu at almost every restaurant that specializes in seafood, but there is only one brand of emergency contraceptive pill in Egypt, which is sold by an NGO because it’s not considered commercially viable enough for the mainstream pharmaceutical companies to bother with it?

The tap in the bathroom of the apartment where I stay when I’m doing research in Egypt. My roommate and I have often wondered where these came from. Was it a marketing campaign by Pfizer during the era when they weren’t allowed to engage in direct-to-consumer advertising for their product? Or did some sink manufacturer just think it would be cool to put Viagra on the handles?

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Who needs TAs anyway?

At the AAA this year I heard a lot of stories about the economic downturn, including hiring freezes and schools which have fired all their adjunct faculty. Many schools are also cutting back on TAs. What this means is larger sections with less personal attention from faculty. One way to handle this might be to create some innovative teaching methods, like those which got Mike Wesch the 2008 Best US Professor of the Year award, but why change if you don’t have to? A much better approach is to automate what you already do, as University of Missouri-Columbia sociology professor Ed Brent did.

Browsing Facebook this morning I saw an advertisement for Brent’s SAGrader service which is touted as the “the only completely instructor-directed automated essay grader that assesses the actual content of student writing and then compares it to instructor-specified criteria.”

SAGrader works by scanning data for keywords, phrases and various terms selected by the instructor. The program examines each essay, making sure content and terms expected by the instructor were included and appropriately used in the assignment. Students submit their essays online using a Web browser, immediately receiving scores and comments about their work.

Now if only I can get a version that reads Chinese…

UPDATE: More here:

In Brent’s class, sophomore Brady Didion submitted drafts of his papers numerous times to ensure his final version included everything the computer wanted.

“What you’re learning, really, is how to cheat the program,” he said.

The end of the connoisseur?

I enjoyed Rex’s post about anthropology as connoisseurship, and have been thinking about it a lot. Then today, during the Remixing Anthropology session, Eric Kansa talked about how centralized search services, like Google, are eroding the power and authority of traditional information service providers. He used the tourism industry as an example, highlighting how efforts to control the staging of local culture are undermined by web 2.0 technologies, but I also saw this as a threat to the role of the anthropologist as connoisseur.

Anthropologists traditionally deployed their authority as connoisseurs to shape and contextualize the context within which “we” learned about and encountered “other” cultures. Hell, we even had a role defining how people learned about and encountered anthropological knowledge. But now that carefully cultivated connoisseurship is becoming less and less important as Google algorithms and Web 2.0 recommendation engines become the primary gateways. Sure, to the extent that anthropologists are indexed in Google their authority is still important, but the first hit for a topic might be a corporate site who understand better how to game the system with search engine optimization (SEO).

Of course, it might not be a bad thing if a website run by an indigenous community can outrank anthropologists on google. There is something democratizing about the shift, which allows the producers of culture to outrank the connoisseurs. But, as Eric pointed out, there is something disturbing about the fact that these algorithms are a black box whose rules are determined by a corporate monopoly. How’s wikia search coming along?

Teh Savage Minds Awards Ceremony

With less than a week to go until the start of the AAA, and no time to properly pull this off, I hereby announce that we will be annoucing the winners of the 1st annual Savage Minds Awarding of teh Excellents Contest on Saturday evening at 6pm in the lobby of the Hilton. ( We’ll also make sure to announce where the party is at that point). Which means it’s time to VOTE!!!

I will be there with a bell and a whistle, or some other noise maker like a cute little girl, to draw attention to my stupid antics, at which point I will announcingly annouce the nominees and winners in three categories:

1) Most Excellent Anthropology Blog (Vote Here)
2) Most Excellent Open Access Journal in Anthropology(Vote Here)
3) Most Excellent Uncategorizable Digital Thing-a-ma-job for Anthropology (Vote Here)

As you will have noticed, the category I wanted to award something to–that of best OA article is gone. I will instead recite an impromtu Eulogy for the absense of Open Access research in our discipline. Or maybe not.

Prizes will range from signed and numbered copies of print-outs of Savage Minds posts (suitable for Framing!) to cases of Artic Man Deoderant to valuable caches of cowrie shells and dried beans.

A NOTE on the voting: I decided to use Mako Hill’s awesome Selectricity Tool. It allows you to calculate the vote in all kinds of ways so we can conceivably have many winners depending on how we count ! What better way to encourage cultural relativism! Go and Vote! Tell your friends.
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“those without agency have sentimentality and vice versa”

There is a vivid article in this month’s Technology Review by the unlikely contributor Jonathan Franzen, called “I just called to say I love you“. It starts out as a screed against the destruction of public life by mobile phone conversations, and is made readable only by his painful awareness of just how hard it is to conduct a screed against the destruction of public life without sounding like a nag, an old fogey or a conservative technophobe. It then veers into a description of the thing Franzen hates most about this destructive capacity—the repeated and thoughtlessly uttered “I love you” which it is now impossible not to hear constantly ejaculated by those near you, talking to their putatively loved ones in tones too shrill and hectoring to ignore. Then the article gets worse—or better, depending on your reading—by locating part of the transition in 9/11 and the ways in which televised images create a form of collective trauma that is somehow (i didn’t quite get this) related to the cell phone and the nature of public declarations of love. Finally, Franzen turns to his own father and mother and their differing declarations of love (in person by his mother, and in writing by his father), which connects in the end to the danger represented by the cell phone. Continue reading →

Transhumanism vs. Anthropology

In my ongoing quixotic attempt to highlight places where anthropology should be and isn’t, I thought I would bring up the issue of transhumanism, once more with feeling.
Over the years of being a participant-observer amongst geeks, I’ve repeatedly found myself amongst transhumanists. I’ve even written about it a bit, though only as a kind of limit case for certain understandings of history. The only good scholarly work on transhumanism I know of is by Richard Doyle (which is to be distinguished from scholarly work BY transhumanists, which is actually remarkably common if you cast a wide net). I’m a bit gun-shy from trying to engage experimental philosophers, but I’ve often wondered why there is so little interest from anthropologists in this brand of scientific-cum-theological thinking—or vice versa. It seems to me that crap like Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near is pretty bad press for this group—worse in any case than Ted William’s freezing his head, which is just the kind of creepy shit the press loves. There are a lot of interesting variations on transhumanism, from your basic immortality by downloading consciousness onto silicon, to more probable concerns with alteration of the human body through drugs, surgery, or bionic additions. This is just to say that like any ism, it’s pretty hard to pin down.

So I was happy to see that a publication I had never heard of before— “The Global Spiral: A Publication of the Metanexis Institute”— has published a series of articles by scholars in science studies, philosophy and literature (Andy Pickering, Don Ihde, Katherine Hayles and others) about transhumanism (volume 9, Issue 3). Unfortunately, they are all pretty un-anthropological in their approach, preferring to criticize transhumanism rather than engage it. I know why… extreme versions of transhumanism can be pretty unctuous, raising specters of race-purity, eugenics, bad technological determinism etc. However, I for one am pretty surprised by the continued growth of this “movement” (what makes it a movement?) and lately, I’ve started to think that it might well move into a more mainstream light as there are people like Nick Bostrom (an Oxford Ph.D.) and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies gaining attention and authority… Wait a minute, ethics and emerging technologies? Isn’t that what I study?!? Quick, freeze my head!
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Free Software and Free Services

I don’t usually write here about this kind of issue, but things are slow, obviously (and it’s something I care a lot about). The lessons of Free Software are important ones, but they are also lessons from an era when everyone installed software on their own personal computer. Each new user needed a copy of Microsoft Word, or an audio/video editing program. But today, we live in an era of increasingly common “software services” or web applications–ranging from Web 2.0 services like flickr or de.licio.us to Google’s attempt to own your desktop with web-based versions of every application you used to buy (Google Docs and so on). What does Free Software mean in this context, when one company owns the servers via which thousands or millions of people access their software?

The answer has been hard to formulate, and has been one of the key struggles around the creation of the GNU GPL version 3 (and it’s variant, the AGPL)— the most commonly used free software license (the history of which is in chapter 6 of my book). Now a group of people associated with the Free Software Foundation have finally started to organize and evangelize around this issue. Autonomo.us is a group of Free Software activists who have penned a “Franklin Street Statement” that tries to get at some of the principles people might employ to bring the lessons of Free Software from the PC era to the web apps world.

Why does this matter for anthropologists? Well for one thing, we talk a lot on this blog about all the cool tools that anthropologists might use to make their work more effective. Whether that’s Google Maps mash-ups or collaborative editing via Google docs, they all raise an important issue: who owns your data? Ask any longtime “anthropology and computing” person about data formats and you’ll get an earful of spew about incompatibilities, mouldering data tapes and belly-up businesses whose applications are no longer supported and probably lost to the mists of time. Free Software is one possible way to deal with this threat to your data. It’s not a panacea, of course, but it’s important both technically and politically— free software means free data formats and the legal and practical ability to salvage your data and applications from obscurity. But it also means a commitment to freedom of a different kind: freedom to innovate the tools we use. I don’t bother with Atlas Ti or any other proprietary coding tool for exactly these reasons: I don’t own my data format, I don’t have the right to change it, I can’t add extensions and share them with my peers and so forth. The same thing is set to happen with most web-based applications, and it’s important not only for developers to think carefully about how software services enhance rather than limit freedom, but for users as well to consider these issues.

I’d like to see anthropologists being a lot more technically innovative—but it comes with a risk. The ease of use that is valued in Google docs comes with the risk that Google will slowly lock down the freedom it currently provides. The same thing is clearly also true at the level of our publishing infrastructure–whether that is Wiley-Blackwell’s secret corporate content managing borg matrix, or our once beloved AnthroSource, which is itself set to be “re-designed” (and I’ll bet my farm the “re-designers” have none of the principles of Autonomo.us in mind). It’s something worth thinking about.

Around the Web

Montgomery McFate’s Nom de Plume: The secret is out. When she is not doing for embedded anthropology what Anita Bryant did for orange juice, Montgomery McFate is busy writing lusty blog entries of military men on her site I Luv a Man in Uniform. In a statement to Wired’s Blog, McFate wrote that she can not affirm nor deny that she is Pentagon Diva, the author of the blog who describes herself in the About Me section:

Hey girls, remember TeenBeat? Remember when you thought Andy Gibb and the Bay City Rollers were just the hottest boys in the world? Go on, don’t be ashamed – you can admit it! Now that we’re all grown up, our tastes have changed – no more foppish, self-indulgent rock stars for us! Since there are so many studly guys in uniform slinging rifles these days, what better way to show our appreciation than a little fan site dedicated to men in uniform? As the Gang of Four once sang, “The girls — they love to see you shoot!”

Eww. Although Marc Tyrrell at In Harmonium emphasizes that Pentagon Diva and I Luv a Man … is essentially a big joke, Maximillian Forte at Open Anthropology suggests that the joke isn’t all that funny.

And so it begins… Wired and Culture Matters reported that the Pentagon has officially released a call for proposal submissions for Project Minerva.

Culture on the Move: Sandra Rubia Silva, a Brazilian PhD student, posted this piece at Material World on her proposal to research cell phone usage in the South of Brazil.

Really, Really Cold War: So cold it happened in the Ice Age. (Ouch, bad joke.) ABC News reports on recent findings out of University of Missouri-Columbia that there was a prehistoric arms escalation of arrowhead technology. The projecting of current events into the archaeological record and then using them as an example to illuminate our world might best be illustrated by, well, ABC’s illustration of arrowhead evolution.

ABC arms race

New Journal: Kerim passed along a recent announcement for (con)textos, a new PhD student journal in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Barcelona. Enjoy!

The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life

While the title of Tom Boellstorff’s book draws analogies with Margaret Mead, I think the book would have been better titled The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life. Having expressed some of my concerns with the book in a previous post, I’d like to take a moment to talk more about what I liked most about the book: the way in which he presents the kinds of discourse and self-presentation strategies Goffman so famously analyzed in “everyday life.” By thinking about the differences/similarities between the two we can learn something important about what it means to function as a virtual human.

Take gender, for instance. As Boellstorff points out, the Second Life software doesn’t allow gender to be left undefined, although that could be a possibility if the developers chose to change it. As such it seems to recreate the sex/gender dichotomy which exists in real life. Even allowing for virtual gender play where male avatars dress in woman’s clothing. And while the gender of the real world player is unknown, Boellstorff points to one survey showing that only 10-15 percent of residents switch gender on a regular basis. Yet even this small amount is enough to cause problems for attempts to create an all-female space, since it would only be possible to limit the space to female avatars, the real-world gender of users being undetermined. Judith Butler tells us that sex is as culturally determined as gender, but in Second Life this seems to be true in a more fundamental way.

Another example is that of “alts” which are alternative avatars which express another side of the user’s personality, or serve to create anonymity. It is possible to wear a disguise in real life, but much easier to do so in a world where “nobody knows you are a dog.” The ease with which people might switch alts, and the choices they make about who to reveal these alts to gives them a degree of freedom over personhood not possible in real life.

But the part I found most interesting was the discussion of how people handle gaps caused by events which challenged the fiction of Second Life. These could be due to faults in the software (bugs or performance issues), or by real world interruptions (someone goes to the door while still logged in in second life). In the real world we have interruptions and distractions we have to deal with as well, such as when we answer a cell phone or need to pick our nose. But what is interesting about virtual reality is that we lack many of the cues and strategies we rely upon in the real world.

Decades of experience have developed some new strategies. For instance one could type “brb” to mean “be right back”, but if caused by a computer lag or a sudden interruption we may not have the time to do so. The result is an avatar who is “afk” or “away from keyboard” – still there, but not responding to what is happening in Second Life. It seems SL residents are not above playing the same kinds of practical jokes college students might play on a roommate who is passed out on the couch, such as drawing on the zombie avatar. Pranks aside, however, it seems that the strength of Boellstorff’s approach is his ability to describe such situations in a way that makes us better understand the nature of online personhood.

That virtual worlds allow us to experience life at a second remove from the habitus of our real world selves is also the joke in this clever Onion news story:

Ethnography of the Virtual

I just finished reading Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography, Coming of Age in Second Life, which I first learned about on Anthropologi.info last year. I have to admit coming to this book with a certain degree of antipathy towards its subject. It always seemed to me that playing Second Life was much more cumbersome, time consuming, and less entertaining than reading the real estate or personals sections on Craig’s List. Indeed, Boellstoroff’s book confirms my conviction that Second Life is mostly about real estate, with a little relationship stuff thrown in for good measure.

If Boellstoroff never really convinced me that I should care about Second Life, it is because he doesn’t even try. His argument is that whether we care about virtual worlds or not, they are here to stay, so we’d better try our best to understand them. And, what better way than ethnography? Indeed, Boellstoroff has given us a very competent, thoughtful, and well written, ethnography of one such virtual world. And this is perhaps the most interesting thing about the book – it is an ethnography of a virtual world.

Here’s Boellstoroff discussing his method:

It might seem controversial to claim one can conduct research entirely inside a virtual world, since persons in them spend most of their time in the actual world and because virtual worlds reference and respond to the actual world in many ways. However, as I discuss in chapter 3, studying virtual worlds “in their own terms” is not only feasible but crucial to developing research methods that keep up with the realities of technological change. Most virtual worlds now have tens of thousands of participants, if not more, and the vast majority interact only in the virtual world. The forms of social action and meaning-making that take place do so within the virtual world, and there is a dire need for methods and theories that take this into account.

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