Peter Anders, Anthropic Cyberspace “Th…

Peter Anders, Anthropic Cyberspace

“The decoupling of information from its context affects fundamental notions of place and presence, of identity and community. The effectiveness of an electronic medium depends on the specificity of the expression. A written note will translate more readily into email than will verbal speech. This is because spoken communication is attended by inflections and emphasis that text lacks. Gestures closely coupled with our bodies differ from those that produce artifacts like faxes or images. Much of our electronic media necessarily reduce bodily gestures to low-bandwidth images. What results is an artifact distinct from its source. This media artifact is merely a sim- ulation-a crude double of the source” (415).

Source:
Anthropic Cyberspace: Defining Electronic Space from First Principles
Author(s): Peter Anders
Source: Leonardo, Vol. 34, No. 5, Ninth New York Digital Salon (2001), pp. 409-416
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577233
Accessed: 03/09/2009 02:46

Anthropic Cyberspace Defining Electronic…

Anthropic Cyberspace Defining Electronic Space from First Principles

Here, I’d like to closely examine this following passage:

EXCERPT:
“An electronic drawing may be printed out physically, but, unlike a physical drawing, it may be simultane- ously accessed by a remote design team. Cyberspace offers a way-station between individual thought and the public world of physical artifacts. Since it is occupied solely by symbols, it lacks the immediacy of materiality. Yet, because of its symbolic nature, it helps us by retaining the artifacts and flexibility of the creative process” (Anders, 414).

But there are severe limitations to working in cyberspace. A computer monitor can only hold, at most, one or two sheets fully viewable of paper on the screen at a time. Though it may seem convenient, there is much lost in tangibility. Though most objects, large and small, can be accessed through cyberspace, they can usually only be seen in 2 dimensions. There was a paper written on this once. It concerned a number of archivists digitizing a late artist’s entire body of work into the computer. They felt they were compressing the resolution of the experience of the object as they did it. They felt it was insincere and not an accurate representation of the artist’s work.

And I must agree here. It is difficult to digitize an object without considering the interface in which is has been placed. There have been some digital successes in terms of placing photography online, but it is an entirely new architectural situation.

See Days With My Father: http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/

ource:
Anthropic Cyberspace: Defining Electronic Space from First Principles
Author(s): Peter Anders
Source: Leonardo, Vol. 34, No. 5, Ninth New York Digital Salon (2001), pp. 409-416
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577233
Accessed: 03/09/2009 02:46

Anthropic Cyberspace Defining Electronic…

Anthropic Cyberspace Defining Electronic Space from First Principles

EXCERPT:
“1. Space is a mental construct that conditions our relationship with the world. We use space to manage sensory and cog- nitive phenomena (Fig. 1). The emulation of space-cyberspace-is the spatial refer- ence evoked in electronic media. These media extend us beyond our bodies and locality, and so affect our model of the world and our relationship to it” (Anders, 410).

“The electronic extension of our senses grafts new perceptions onto a prior con- struct, the mental map of our spatial context. The higher the dimensional quality of such extensions, the easier it is to assimi- late them into our conventional under- standing of space. We notice this in our engagement with high-resolution graphics versus text or other low-resolution images”

“Ease of assimilation gives the concept of cyberspace its popular appeal. Popular media images of cyberspace show it to be a deep, multidimensional environment, devoid of gravity and material conse- quence. It is the space accessed through computer media, the modern counterpart of Alice’s looking glass”.

This is not true. Space has gravity. It looks like neural networks.

“But cyberspace predates computer graphics. The telephone gives its users the illusion of being in the same room, momentarily collapsing the space between them. Hanging up the receiver restores the space to its normal dimensions”.

Ah, my favorite analogy of the cell phone. The time space compressor. I wrote my thesis about this – the cell phone as a worm home, compressing time and space. When I wrote it, I didn’t realize that it had been written about many times before. Shows the lameness of my research capabilities at that time. I think that everyone looks back on their thesis and feel similarly. At the end of the thesis, I think

“Whether space is evoked passively-as on the phone-or deliberately, through constructed environments, users’ interac- tions in space have important social and psychological consequences. Social spaces, the traditional realm of architecture, affect the behaviors of their occupants [3].”

“We see this in the reciprocal relation- ship between architecture and the activity it houses. Behavior appropriate in a bar, for instance, is unacceptable in a church. Environments temper the actions of their occupants. For this reason, cyberspace not only extends our personal space but also our social environment. This has already begun to affect cultural and social relationships in fundamental ways.”

…

“2. The body both senses and measures the world, forming its subjective center and the foundation of thought. The body is the bridge between ourselves and the world. Our worldview relies as much on the body’s senses as it does upon the environment itself” (Anders, 410).

…

“Bodily sensation is our measure of things-it gives us our sense of scale and propriety. We come so much to expect some sensations that they become transparent to us: the pressure on our feet as we walk, sunlight overhead, the horizon uniting earth with sky. Denying these expectations causes discomfort and anxiety, for they assure us that the world is right” (Anders, 410).

In the digital world, our sensations have been replaced by bouncing dock icons on the Mac, E-mail notifications and pings. These notices help us feel alive in the digital environment. The digital environment is living. It provides users with stimulus and that stimulus is social interaction. Socialization, in its digital form, comes in buzzes, bursts, short songs in the form of ringtones, and numerical messages (5 missed calls, 2 text messages, 2 new Facebook messages, 2943 new E-mails). Commenting on a Facebook wall replaces a comment in real life, but unlike a short quip in conversation.

“We use tools to extend these gestures beyond the bounds of our bodies” (Anders, 411).

And hence the foundation of cyborg anthropology. The hammer as the extension of the fist, and the knife the extension of the tooth. Instead of evolving these features internally, which would take millions of years to evolve as a part of the body, can simply be evolved outside of the body and be attached to the body at will. One’s hand does not always have to be a hammer. The hammer can be exchanged for a multiplicity of external objects—a multiplicity of appendages. And the computer is the extension of the mind. The eye and ear. Increasingly, the body. The outer appearance. The history of the self. The online photo album.

Source:
Anthropic Cyberspace: Defining Electronic Space from First Principles
Author(s): Peter Anders
Source: Leonardo, Vol. 34, No. 5, Ninth New York Digital Salon (2001), pp. 409-416
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577233
Accessed: 03/09/2009 02:46

Towards a Phenomenology of the Concrete …

Towards a Phenomenology of the Concrete Megastructure

This is a paper which considers the effects of a large concrete structure on space, perception and the construction of the postmodern self. It is an important paper because it deals with the architecture of reality and everyday experience, and the idea of the body as it is constructed in relation to manufactured environments.

Why is architectural theory important for digital anthropologists to study? This is a question that is simply answered. The experience of the everyday is dissolving into machines. These machines are being lived in. Digital architectures like Facebook and Twitter must be looked at through the lens of architects, because they are architecture. Users are accessing dimensions inside dimensions, buildings inside buildings – shells within shells. There are new layers of architecture appearing. The mobile layer augments our everyday architectural experience by giving us place and wayfinding, and the laptop layer allows a great mobility in accessing digital architecture.

And of course, all digital experience is accessed through interface. In the same way that a window is an interface between inside and outside, a screen, laptop or button is an interface between one piece of content and another, the life and death of a digital thing, the on and the off, the potentiality of everything and locked data. Omniscience and Omnipotence, or the mundane and un-enhanced.

—

EXCERPT:
“Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995) highlighted the importance of Levi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis of the role of the individual house building in certain societies as the acknowledged embodiment and objectification of a specific form of social organization.

They draw out the fundamental connection between the physical structure and the social and cultural structure in the domestic architecture of such societies, such that the house should be understood as an extension of the person …

“House, body and mind are in continuous interaction … the house is a prime agent of ‘socialization’. Through habit and inhabiting, each person builds up a practical mastery of the fundamental schemes of their culture. (Carsten and Hugh-Jones, 1995)” (Melhuish, 10).

—

It is very important to go back and real the papers on the creation of identity in virtual reality from the 1980s. These papers were written during a time period when the future of human experience was predicted to be a virtual one – one with goggles or virtual, 3d worlds. The closest globally accessible virtual world is Second Life, but it is still accessed through a flat, 2 dimensional interface. The best application of these papers, very often aptly named, “the creation of identity in virtual identity” is to spaces of identity extension like Facebook.

Source:
Towards a Phenomenology of the Concrete Megastructure
Space and Perception at the Brunswick Centre, London
Clare Melhuish
Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, UK

It is not an information addiction, it i…

It is not an information addiction, it is an input addiction. The more input one has, the more input one needs. The industrial society made food simple to procure, and the information society has made entertainment simple.

Periods of silence. Of inaction. Of imperfection. These have become less tolerable. There an increasing desire for the “perfect experience”. One planned out for its perfection beforehand. Example – the idea of finding the “perfect place to eat” through external community recommenders such as Yelp. Trying to find the best restaurant before setting out. Not letting experience have a chance. Not talking to those around them who share similar interests, but looking for quantitate ratings online.

Information to future predict an experience. Always looking forward. Planning, planning, planning. Using community data to ensure planning. Using the path others have already taken, and the clues they have left behind.

This sounds familiar. The mobile phones are the cells that make up a vast hive of bees. Each site is is a flower that is found in the field, and each rating is how much pollen the flower has. Everyone has become a worker bee who voluntarily rates their experience and leaves a trail for others to follow. We are all these creatures now.

Apocalypse in your In-Box: End-Times Com…

Apocalypse in your In-Box: End-Times Communication on the Internet

This is a great little paper on early Internet communities and the spread of religious things online. I say religious things because if I go into much more detail, this post might be more interesting, warranting you future notice of it. Instead, you ought to read to the end of this post and become excited by the potentiality of the complete article.

—

EXCERPT:
“To help get a handle on multiple individuals involved in multiple discourses simultaneously over great geographical spaces and in different media, I use my concept of “influence community.” The individuals who are influenced by a single data source comprise an influence community. Although discourse communities are necessarily also influence commu- nities, the reverse is not also true.

Influence sources, like the books of Hal Lindsey or the television shows of Jack Van Impe, project communication unilaterally. In themselves, unilateral influences produce no debate. Viewers cannot argue with a television set-or with a megalomaniacal cult leader for that matter. Still, unless the televangelist or television producers are themselves dogmatists, their communicative choices are also affected by the discourse communities in which they are involved. All the television producers and e-mailers involved in millennial influence communities are also simultaneously involved in any number of other divergent commu- nities, and all of these influences serve as sources of data” (Howard, 303).

—

Source:
Apocalypse in Your In-Box: End-Times Communication on the Internet
Author(s): Robert Glenn Howard
Source: Western Folklore, Vol. 56, No. 3/4 (Summer – Autumn, 1997), pp. 295-315
Published by: Western States Folklore Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1500281
Accessed: 03/09/2009 02:53

A cyber-ethnographic foray into GR&T int…

A Cyber-ethnographic Foray into Internet Photo Blogs

—

EXCERPT:

“As ethnographers we find Internet cyber-culture(s) and social networking using
advancing communication technologies to be provocative and relatively unexplored
ethnographic topics. As Romani studies scholars we seek out research applications
relevant to our specific interest in culture change among Gypsies (Romanies) and
Travelers in the United States (GR&T peoples).

“As cyber-ethnographers using a ‘data dredging’ methodology we explore Internet cyber-subcultures comprised of youthful GR&T peoples. We describe GR&T adaptive and creative uses of some interfacing new mass communications technologies; for example, photo cell phones, the Internet and personalized web logs. GR&T adolescents using these technologies construct self-ascribed identities and ascribe identities to others via their online Internet communications.

They also reveal their values and material cultures. GR&T ‘self-narratives’ encountered in their photo-blog guest books comprise a distinctive written argot. From these online data sources we isolate and discuss specific themes, and a theoretical implication”.

—

Sounds like a good paper, huh? Romani Gypsies and cyber-ethnography. You should read it, because if you’ve gotten this far, how could you *not* be an anthropologist? It is obvious.

About:
David J. Nemeth is Professor of Geography and Planning at University of Toledo, Bancroft
Street, Toledo, OH 43614–3390, USA. Email: david.nemeth@utoledo.edu
Rena C. Gropper is Professor Emerita in Anthropology, City University of New York, and
independent consultant in the practice of health anthropology. Mailing address: Ms. Rena C.
Gropper, 6507 110th St., Forest Hills, NY 11375–1423, USA. Email: renagropper@yahoo.com

Source:
Romani Studies 5, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2008), 39–70 issn 1528–0748

Cultural Production in a Digital Age EX…

Cultural Production in a Digital Age

—

EXCERPT:
“If you are like most contemporary American social scientists (in 2005), you are probably reading this volume of the Annals online, or you have downloaded it from a local network and printed this article from your personal com puter. You would not have been able to find these pages in a digital library in 1995, or even in 2000, and so you would have traveled to the periodicals section of a university library to get them. If the journal was not there, you might have been able to borrow it from another institu tion, waiting days or weeks for it to arrive”.

—

The great part about this is that you’re reading an excerpt of this on a microblog written by the alternate identity of an established Internet persona as a digital cultural experiment – so you’re getting it even faster than you would’ve, had you decided to wade through copious amounts of data on a closed, anthropological research engine. In fact, you’re able to access this article now by the tags attached to this post.

So I am posting this with supremely reflexively recursive irony, so that I can get on with my life and stop reading these articles on paper with no where to share or put them.

Also, to entertain the search engine robots – to keep them employed and busy. The majority of those who access this blog will be robot-shaped. Can they be loved more than humans? Have they become replacements of human neurons?

Source:
Introduction: Cultural Production in a Digital Age
Author(s): Eric Klinenberg and Claudio Benzecry
Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 597, Cultural
Production in a Digital Age (Jan., 2005), pp. 6-18
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political
and Social Science
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25046058
Accessed: 03/09/2009 02:51

Waterbeds. This is a subject I would lik…

Waterbeds. This is a subject I would like to talk about.

A bit of history:

The “…waterbed was invented in the early 1800s by the Scottish physician Neil Arnott. Dr Arnott’s Hydrostatic Bed was devised to prevent bedsores in invalids, and comprised a bath of water with a covering of rubber-impregnated canvas, on which lighter bedding was placed. Arnott did not patent it, permitting anyone to construct a bed to this design”. [1][2]

Okay. So the waterbed was invented for invalids. I’ll never be able to look at a waterbed the same again. Also, if the waterbed was so good at preventing bedsores, why is it not used in nursing homes where bedsores are rampant? How ill-placed.

But lets look further back. According to eHow Contributing Writer S. L. Johnson,

“Waterbeds have been around for centuries. According to the British Waterbed Association, the notion of a waterbed dates back 3000 years to Persia with the use of goatskin water bags for sleeping”. [3]

That sounds a lot better. Except waterbeds today are made of vinyl, which is toxic [4]. Thankfully they’re not made of transparent vinyl. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is pretty lame. There are a number of people who enjoy sleeping on this kind of material every night.

Sources:
1. An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy , Webster & Parkes, Harper & Brothers, NY, 1855 Google Books
2. Dr. Arnott’s Hydrostatic Bed, London Medical and Surgical Journal, Volume II, 1833 Google Books
3. “Waterbed Facts” eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_5218742_waterbed.html
4. Wikipedia – Polyvinyl Chloride http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride#Phthalate_plasticizers

It is the purpose of this paper to unrav…

The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality

—

The machines of the body was industry. The machines of the mind are information.
This is not a new concept. A book is virtual reality, except that one cannot make one’s identity through a book – or affect the structure of a book by one’s identity.

A book can shape one’s identity in one way, and the consumption of a book means more books of that genre have the ability to grow. The virtual reality of a book is very strong. It allows one to love the virtual textual construction of a character more than a real life neighbor next door.

EXCERPT:
“It is the purpose of this paper to unravel the nature of embodied experience in virtual reality (VR). In other words, how is it that while we are physically sitting in a room at a computer terminal we can also be phe- nomenally embodied in virtual representations? In order for VR to be an embodied experience, we need to understand both sensorial issues i.e., to what extent the broad sensorium needs to be encapsulated in virtual reality experiences; and morphological issues, i.e., in what ways the plasticity of body boundaries are implicated in embodied virtual encounters”.

—

Source:
The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality
Author(s): Craig D. Murray and Judith Sixsmith
Source: Ethos, Vol. 27, No. 3, Body, Self, and Technology (Sep., 1999), pp. 315-343
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/640592
Accessed: 03/09/2009 02:53