Cyber Anthropology Study of Online Culture, and Culture Online.

Nice - seems a test I came up with the last semester for an ongoing social program is playing out as Microsoft is now teaming up with the OLPC group.

-- One of the tests I purposed to see if the US release would work:

Lastly, one of the things mentioned in the article that I am interested in is whether or not with this US release the laptops will get more support in the development company through new useful software. This would be a longitudinal study where I would assess the current amount of programs available for the platform then after the US release takes off keep track of new program releases over two years. If it holds up to Moore’s law, it will be successful if the amount of programs available doubles over those two years.

It's exciting to see things like this even if I just came up with the idea for a class paper.

At the end of my quantitative methods class this semester my professor listed out these points as what we are now capable of doing from an anthropological perspective. I found it helpful and think others would to!

Selling what you’ve just learned : (What you can do with this course- my own list)

• community/ organizational needs assessment
• "intervention" evaluation/ assessment with case-control studies
• product / program evaluation
• survey construction, evaluation, and implementation
• behavioral data analysis/ discover meaningful patterns within data
• construct culturally appropriate sampling frames
• exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory research design
• apply cultural knowledge to enhance study validity and reliability
• integrate quantitative-qualitative methods
• analysis of culture as an element of problem solving/ decision-making
• apply a "holistic" perspective to system-wide detail
• construct exploratory, explanatory, and descriptive research designs
• approximate longitudinal studies in cross-sectional design
• community empowerment/ advocacy/ action research
• apply methodological and theoretical toolkits to discover and explain behavior

After sleeping on it and waking up to some good points made by a reader, I have reevaluated my proposal (which is due as a part of my midterm today) to narrow down the focus and make it more doable within the amount of time I have both in the semester as well as in real life to get it done.

Midterm question: Write on your proposal for a term project utilizing theories and experience.

My Answer: Theoretically I intend to take a structuralism approach to symbolic/interpretative anthropology to uncover the underlying structure of how people view the Internet in politically symbolic terms. Also, to understand how people give meaning to the cyber-political world around them as well as how they then express this meaning through their own cultural symbols within online communities. To do this I propose to do a short quantitative and qualitative study investigating how people view the Internet in politically symbolic terms, what meaning they give those terms, and how they use those terms within the online communities they participate in.

This is my proposal for my final presentation of Thought and Praxis II in my Applied Anthropology Masters program at University of North Texas:

I propose to find out whether or not the Internet has an influence on voters through access to information on new sites such as CNN, Fox News, BBC, NYTimes Online, Salon etc as well as access to other voters in public communities such as YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Livejournal, MySpace and Facebook etc. I will also seek to establish a demographic and socioeconomic status of those that feel the Internet is an influencer versus those who do not find it to be so. For those that do not find it to be so, I will seek to find what predominate media forms influence them and why they do not utilize the Internet for this information. Theoretically I intend to take a structuralism approach to symbolic/interpretative anthropology to uncover the underlying structure of how people view the Internet in politically symbolic terms. Also, to understand how people give meaning to the cyber-political world around them as well as how they then express this meaning through their own cultural symbols within these online communities.

Now let's see if I can pull it off! No better day to start than today - being the Texas Primaries!

Because there is so much going on and I'm super busy these days this will be just a quick rundown of the top three things on my list of interesting happenings.

• First is the really neat mashup between Google and Twitter for Super Tuesday, go check it out.
• Second is the Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google exchange going on.
• Third are the Internet outages affecting India and the toll it's taking on business there.

Here are two articles I've read recently that I found to be very interesting. First is Wired's Students On How Social Networking Is Transforming Politics, second is a post that was made to Tera Nova on the governance of cyber worlds.

If you've seen anything else interesting as of late please pass it my way!

The following is part of a report on the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of the general public on seasonal, avian, and pandemic flu. This report is based on 24 interviews and 12 focus groups held across the united states by students of University of North Texas. I personally conducted 2 interviews and 1 focus group for this project.

My particular portion of the report featured below focuses on the research question: What are the reasons why and ways in which the general population seeks out health information regarding seasonal, avian, and a possible pandemic flu, and which sources are considered most trusted?

Information Seeking

In order to determine why and how people sought information concerning the flu, we asked participants whether or not they sought information and how they did so for each flu type. We then probed further by asking why or why not. The percentage of responses decreased from 100% for seasonal flu to 92% for bird flu to 75% for pandemic flu. In those cases where people did not respond, it was because they had absolutely no knowledge of the flu in question and thus were not questioned further, or because they failed to respond with a direct answer due to their lack of knowledge.

Reasons why respondents chose to seek out information on all three flus was not clear, as no single pattern emerged from the data collected. The responses we received ranged from family members being sick, causing participants to seek out information to self-born curiosity to information gained through participants’ work environments. The most common reasons why people did not seek out information was either lack of concern, particularly on seasonal flu, or not having enough knowledge about the flus, in this case avian and pandemic, to perceive a need to seek out information. However, several participants ... Tagged as research | No Comments » | Continue

So, how do you bring together groups of like minded individuals in to create a mini social network within a larger one? Easy, you get someone like Jeremiah Owyang to make a post on twitter linking back to his blog on how conversations have moved to twitter then asking for a microblog roll via comments. This results in an explosion of twitter friendings going back and forth across the microblog-o-sphere giving everyone the ability to tap into and expand the social networking community that has developed within the twitter social network.

To see how one person could trigger such a movement and that so many different individuals with interests that range from academics to PR to social media can find each other because they all have 1 particular friend in common is astounding. Since about 10 this morning I have gained 24 followers and promptly followed them all back. I will continue to track the resulting friendings from this one action as well as anything new I learn from these new fritters and see how far out this reverberates. If there are others interested in doing the same or sharing some of the results of this new wave of friendings, please comment! I love doing collaborative work, especially online.

p.s. you can find me on twitter here!

I have been participating in Nablopomo all month through this blog and I have to say, while it was a huge motivator, I am grateful this month has now come to a close. It was an interesting experience to keep up with a non-personal blog on a daily basis and quite a change of pace as I've kept up with my personal blog for almost 7 years now. I got nothing for doing this, other than the personal satisfaction that I was able to keep up with something for 30 straight days through starting a new job, the hardest month yet of grad school, and having had started the month behind because of my honeymoon in the middle of October.

I learned a few things along the way:

1. My blackberry won't post to word press and this makes me sad.
2. I'm never satisfied with just posting about a single news story, I have found that my curiosity tends to get the best of me and thus I end up researching it for at least half an hour to an hour before I even begin my post, which caused my time I had to devote to this to be up to 2 hours a night.
3. My friends who have kept up with my Livejournal for years did not keep up with this one at all. Tells me I should continue to keep this topic separate from my regular LJ postings!
4. I posted a lot less to LJ this month as a result of this and everything else going on.
5. I posted a lot less to Twitter as well.
6. I was excited to learn that at least two people read this blog as that is exactly how many comments I got on it.
7. Unlike LJ, it did not bother me one bit that I didn't have a ... Tagged as social networking | No Comments » | Continue

Seems ABC has picked up the story focusing on the lady behind the hoax in the case. The Smoking Gun has the police report Lori Drew filed. There has also been a blog or two that has popped up since the case first broke national headlines. The first titled, "Megan Meier had it coming" assumes to tell the tale of someone who personally knew Megan as she tries to "set the record straight". It now has 881 comments and counting. Slate has a pretty good rendition of what has gone down so far. And, to borrow a bit from them (since they posted exactly what I was going to post) - "Last week Dardenne Prairie aldermen passed a resolution making cyberstalking a misdemeanor within the city limits."

Lastly for those who are as intrigued as I am with cyber-law, within the Resolution PDF they mention a US Department of Justice report on Cyber Stalking from 1999 which makes for an interesting read. I shall have to make it my hobby during the holiday break to look up more federal reports and articles on cyber issues. If I wasn't already enamored with my major I might think about becoming a cyber law expert and possibly even going to law school because I truly enjoying learning about it all. If only I didn't have to work! Then perhaps I'd have enough time in my life to educate myself and seek higher education in all the things that interest me!