Cyber Anthropology
Menu

cyber anthropology

Between Two Atlases

, , , , , , , , , , , 0

I realize I have gone an awfully long time without posting any meaningful content here. While there are many good reasons for this, and many posts that were started but never published, I shall not go into that now. Suffice to say, my family has been through a lot over the last 4 years so this blog had to take a back burner to far more important fires I had to contend with. That said, I spent the last 8 hours (wow, I just realized what time it was) banging my keyboard to get this brain dump out of my head. I’m a little rusty, so please bear with me as I attempt to put some form to my free flowing thoughts. I apologize ahead of time for the length and the side notes. But hey, this is all straight from my brain to the page. I’m doing inline side notes because otherwise they will make very little sense if you wait until the end.

TL;DR

This post talks about emotions and technology. It talks about humans and AI. It provides insights into my opinions and observations on these topics based on my education, my understanding (which I’m always working toward improving), and my lived experiences. If you find your opinions, observations, understanding, or lived experiences are different from mine, great! Diversity in thought and perspective is the key toward a broader understanding of the human condition.

Note: My content and opinions are a form of my personal self-expression based on my lived experiences, education, and observations, which are in no way representative of my employer(s).

It’s the end of 2024 and as I update my books read challenge to complete my 30 for the year (1), I am amused by the fact that towards the beginning of the year I read Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Dr. Brené Brown and I have finished out the year with Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Dr. Kate Crawford (2). The juxtaposition of these two books defines my non-fiction reading quite well. They are both social scientists that lean in from complementary angles in very different ways. The first is all about uncovering truths about your emotive life and how you relate to the people and your lived experiences through various emotional states. The second uncovers truths behind the advancing technology that is slowly but surely inundating us and its impact both on us and the world that sustains us.

  1. A modest number really, but it’s a stretch goal for me given my full time jobs of leading a design team and parenting 3 children. It’s a little less than 1 book a week and I’m only able to accomplish that through listening at 2.5 time speed to my non-fiction and physically reading everything else. To be honest, I usually have one audio, one e-book, and one physical book going at the same time.
  2. This was one of seven books on AI I read this year but out of all, this and one other (see 3) had the most profound impact on me as it very eloquently put into a single volume many of the things I’ve tried often to share with others on what AI, at this time, really is and how it impacts people and the world around us through many behind the scenes ways.

Why I would recommend these books: Both authors go beyond the façade of their fields and expertise to surface information that lurks deep beneath and tugs at what it means to be human and retain our humanity in the rapidly changing experience that is this 3rd decade of the 21st century.

Why I personally enjoyed their works: They are both backed by research and they’re both written by women. As a woman who is a social scientist as well as a technologist, I find myself at their intersection.

Here are a couple of short descriptions on each.

Atlas of the Heart – Brown delves into the myriad of emotions and related experiences, 150 of them that surfaced in her research and 87 she narrowed that research down to write about, to map out how we move through life via many hues of feelings as we navigate from one moment to the next. Her intent, at least my perception of it, was to provide a guide to being able to find yourself no matter what your emotional state might be and then to find the path navigate forward from where ever you are to wherever you want to go.

Atlas of AI – Crawford explores all of the things that make up Artificial Intelligence determining that it is “…neither artificial nor intelligent … [it] is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications (3)” (Crawford 2021, 8). In my experience, when most people think of AI, it manifests as some sort of mystical black box that performs magic to generate conclusions faster, better, and more accurately than humans ever could. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth (4) and Crawford does her due diligence to show why that is the case.

  1. Another book to read on AI classifications and how they can be not only incredibly biased but also unjust is Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Dr. Joy Buolamwini
  2. Mini rant time: I have always referred to ‘Generative AI’ as ‘Derivative AI’ as algorithms do not generate anything on their own. All of their conclusions are derived from already existing data (usually stolen or biased or coerced or built on faulty origins – some without even knowing the source and many who do not consider consent an issue) that is classified or collected or maintained by exploitive human labor practices. GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out as the saying goes.

If you want to learn more about these books, I highly recommend them. I’ll leave it to their authors to fully inform you on their topics of expertise.

Switching gears now — while the rest of this post is inspired by my latest readings, it doesn’t directly relate to the books themselves. With that said, here’s a few of my hot takes based on my personal observations and experiences concerning AI as a social scientist and technology designer in 2024.

As the head of a design org (5), AI is both intriguing and terrifying. Neither in and of itself, rather, of how it is used and misused – especially considering my chosen field. Many see it as a shortcut, others see it as a necessary evil, and some see it as the death knell of their livelihood. My take is this, if you remove the human element out of design, you lack the ability to understand the human impact as well as the ability to embrace human innovation (6). Computers do not have a cognitive load, a culture, a spoken language, disabilities, emotions, or needs and wants. And, they cannot on their own create something out of nothing.

  1. I am the Senior Director/Head of Design at Blizzard for Battle.net, recently acquired by Xbox (Microsoft).
    • Reminder, thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own and are NOT representative of my employer(s).
  2. Helping humans innovate WITH technology has been one of the many focuses of my career. I was part of the inaugural group who helped pioneer SAP’s Innovation Services in innovation management and was accredited with the SAP Innovation & Advisory Skill granted to those who showed the ability to identify appropriate business models, processes, applications, and data as well as applicable intelligent technologies needed to bring them to life.
    • I worked for SAP Innovation Services in Blockchain where I led the design practice (the discipline rather than a team), helped design blockchain backed systems, and led workshops to help Fortune 500 companies identify where blockchain could be useful for them. This was a similar situation to AI where it seemed every company clamored for the ‘latest and greatest’ tech without fully understanding it. Most companies just needed a database rather than adopting blockchain technology and it was my job to help them understand that even if it meant we were not selling them our blockchain services.
    • I LOVE technology. I am not against technology in any way. That said, I believe technology should by made by humans, for humans, and should work with them rather than strive to replace the human contribution in any way. As the quote goes, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes”. – Johanna Maciejewska

When it comes to things like art, writing, or even product design — if you want to embrace homogeny and “be different just like everyone else” then AI will suit you just fine and before long people will start to recognize how what AI has produced for you is no different than what it has produced for the next person/project/organization. When it all comes from the same source material, be it the data sets or the algorithms (and believe it or not, most reference the same things as it’s very hard and costly to build a large categorized and classified data set) it will all start eventually looking, feeling, acting, and working the same. If you actually care about making something for humans to embrace with their multi-contextual origins, wants, needs, and differing abilities, AND you want to make something for them that is differentiated from all the things that have come before it, humans are integral to the process.

Relating back to the emotional part of this post a bit. The emotional labor involved in protecting my designers, informing them, assuaging their fears, as well as educating and advocating for the human side of all that we do is intensive, but worth it. This is part of the reason why such books have made it on to my TBR (to be read) list and will continue to do so.

As an anthropologist (7) and information scientist (8) who specializes in cyber anthropology and social informatics (where humans and technology intersect) I am especially concerned with the human element, specifically culture, context, consent, and exploitation. Humans are not binary code made up of 1s and 0s and our experiences cannot be distilled down to an algorithm (9). This is where most systems, including a lot of AI, fail a diverse population. As I addressed in my Ph.D. dissertation, systems alone cannot provide everything that humans need to understand or interpret or utilize the world around them. Lived shared experiences are a necessary part of the human condition and one that AI cannot recreate.

  1. During my mixed undergrad degree (anthropology, philosophy, and psychology) in the early 2000s, I did my ethnographic field methods research on the Motivations of Guilded Players in World of Warcraft – where my research was entirely online. This led me to getting my M.S. in Applied Anthropology with a focus on Design and Business where I studied the Fedora Project (the group behind what is monetized as Red Hat Linux) and their online experience for my Masters Thesis in my research on How to Grow, Maintain, and Sustain an Online Open Source Development Community.
    • While I use the term Cyber Anthropology other people have used Digital Anthropology or Digital Ethnography to describe this work. Though I was not the first to do this, I was one of the first to do it in World of Warcaft or MMORPGs in general.
  2. My Ph.D. is in Information Science and my dissertation is An Ethnographic Study of Parental Information Behavior when Assessing Video Game Content for their Children where I researched how American parents did or did not use the ESRB (video game rating system) when making decisions about video game appropriateness. I developed a model of how a parent’s interaction with information on behalf of their children changes as their children age and what to do to develop a healthy relationship with their children and their children’s evolving media interactions over time.
    • Funny enough, many parents in my study wanted to see other humans interact with the content via play-throughs over trusting a system like the ESRB or simply reading reviews. With the advent of sites like Twitch this is much easier to do today than it was when I was researching this topic 2010-2016.
    • Why mention my degrees at all? I mention them for two reasons. 1) As a woman, I find I’m taken a little more seriously when I show that I have credentials in relevant fields, (See book: The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart) and 2) To show that while I embrace technology (I’ve worked in technology all my life) I focus on the human-computer partnership where the two collaborate together for work and play rather than putting humans second or treated as an expendable after thought on the path toward unsustainable profit growth.
  3. This is where Dr. Buolamwini’s book finds its place. Other books to consider are Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Dr. Cathy O’Neil and Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble. These last two are on my 2025 TBR list along with several others.
    • While all of the books I’ve mentioned so far are by women with Ph.D.s, that is not a criteria for being on my TBR list, it just so happens that women with Ph.D.s make up a large majority of the people calling out the industry. I’ll leave it up to you to decide why that might be.

Humans are messy and chaotic and regardless of their perceived similarities, are highly complex and individual beings who all have their own unique wants and needs that are sometimes chaotic and contradictory. This is all part of the human experience, which is why inclusive design, open design, universal design, and accessibility are so important to me as a designer. The very notion of letting an AI design something for humans on its own is the exact opposite of inclusive and open design. Not to mention the fact that accessibility and universality are often second thoughts for most able bodied humans. How do we expect an algorithm to make them a priority?

Given I’m a human who depends on this planet to sustain me, my family, and my loved ones, I’m also highly concerned with the the impact AI has on our environment. Just like how electric cars aren’t truly environmentally conscious choices when you consider where all their parts originate (especially those used to create the lithium batteries) or where they get all the power that charges them — AI also has a way of hiding its huge impacts on the environment. The biggest limitation on the technology behind AI today lies with its dependency on ecologically unsustainable amounts of energy and water to power it. Companies are consuming enormous amounts of these resources putting a strain on the infrastructure that humans depend on to live. The additional human health impact is multilayered from those who work in the mining and smelting side to others having to contend with power hungry data centers in their back yards causing a myriad of illnesses they are powerless to fight against (10).

  1. A few relevant articles on this topic

To put this in perspective, Crawford discusses a paper (11) that calculated the carbon footprint of one natural language processing model (NLP – think ChatGPT) which “produced more than 660,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of five gas-powered cars over their total lifetime (including their manufacturing) or 125 round-trip flights from New York to Beijing” (Crawford pg. 42). Is the cost to our planet worth it to have a conversation with a bot? What about the cost of the exploited human labor that was used to input the data into the NLP so it could work? All of a sudden that “free” AI art or prose isn’t so free after all, is it? As a note to employers, it may not be cost saving to you either as a recent MIT CSAIL study revealed there are economic limits to trying to replace humans (12). Given AI is largely not ecological, environmental, or economical, I have to wonder when the price (monetary and beyond) to create and run it will finally outstrip any perceived future profits companies believe they will glean from it.

  1. Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1355/
  2. https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/rethinking-ais-impact-mit-csail-study-reveals-economic-limits-job-automation

In the end, I’m not trying to be a doomsayer here. I think there can be a time and a place for humans and AI to work together, but that’s the crux of it, working together. Here is why I was inspired to even begin this now way too long blog post. While AI has already started to find a place in the ‘hard’ sciences (13), I think we in the social sciences can also find our place in this ever changing landscape. Especially since even the use of AI in hard sciences can be detrimental if it is based on biased or skewed data sets and there is a lack of awareness on how this might be an issue for under represented populations.

  1. A few hard science examples:

And here’s where we begin to circle back to my previous statement about considering culture, context, consent, and exploitation when it comes to AI systems and how they are built and powered. As an information scientist and cyber anthropologist focused on the intersection of humans and technology, I find that myself and people like me, are in a prime position to be able to elevate the human side of this partnership that has largely been ignored or downgraded as an after thought. Both Dr. Crawford and Dr. Buolamwini point out in their books that content and data without context and consent can lead to technological failures and biases that directly affect people in the general population every day, whether they know it or not. And while I’m a proponent of inclusive and open design, I cannot ignore the fact that this can also cause problems for marginalized people who may be exploited as a means to an end of making a ‘better data set’ which could in turn be used against them. As I always stress to my designers, it is our job to not only think of how the things we design can help all people. It is also our responsibility to fight against ways they can be nefariously used as well.

The field of AI needs us more than it knows. We’ve moved past the time period of being ok with the field moving fast and breaking things to get a product out to market as quickly as possible, as the things moving fast are the depletion of our natural resources and those being broken are people caught on the exploitive labor side or the wrong end of an algorithm. While there may be short term profits for a few, the long term consequences will come for us all. And no, I’m not talking about some sentient robot uprising. I’m talking about ethics and sustainability. I’m talking about the ways not that AI can impact humans, rather the ways that humans can impact AI. While I’ve mentioned quite a few amazing humans above who’ve already had various impacts on AI, they are but a small part of a growing movement (14) that could always use a few more.

  1. A few social science contributions:

Though it may seem like I’m a bit late to this conversation, it’s something that’s been brewing in my mind for more than a decade. My work history includes IBM who acquired the company I worked for in 2013 (4 years after I started), which was the largest privately owned hosting company in the world before the acquisition. We specialized in infrastructure as a service including managing severs in large data centers which is one of the myriad of things I designed the interfaces for. They used our infrastructure as the basis of their cloud computing offering, for which I also designed interfaces and researched uses in its early stages (and I am a rare designer with an OTAA to show for it — IYKYK).

As previously mentioned, I was also a design consultant at SAP in their innovation services utilizing edge technologies (Blockchain, IoT, ML, and more). Thus, I’ve peripherally touched on this throughout the better part of my career. Now that I find myself over a large team of designers working for a company which was recently acquired by yet another large technology corporation, and one that is putting big bets on AI, I find myself squarely at one of these intriguing intersections of people and technology yet again. So, I’m doing what any good researcher does, I’m diving in and consuming everything I can (15).

  1. Books I’ve read this year on AI or related topics:
    • Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows (while not AI specifically, I felt it was related enough to include)
    • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman
    • AI Ethics by Mark Coeckelbergh
    • Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
    • The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Anita A Farahany
    • Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Gary F. Marcus
    • Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini
    • Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sifting through this brain dump. It’s been a while since I’ve been inspired to write something like this and I’m glad I’ve been able to take advantage of my company’s imposed time off to do so.

Now, back to my TBR list.

p.s. The irony is not lost on me that the program I wrote this draft in originally kept trying to get me to use AI to “improve my writing”. For better or worse, this is all human made and no algorithms were involved in its creation.

Championing Remote Research

, , 0

As a cyber anthropologist, I have always been a HUGE champion of remote research. Is it different than in-person? Of course it is. Is that a drawback? Depends on how you look at it.

Being someone who came of age with the Internet (yes – I still spell it with a capital I), I have always been a champion of using it as a tool, especially as a researcher. Does it take a special skillset to be able to connect with people remotely? Yes, of course. Does mean it can’t be done? No, not at all. It takes a hell of a lot of empathy and reflection and ACTIVE LISTENING to make it work, but in my experience, it is well worth it. Just being there, in any shape or form, can make a world of difference sometimes. You might be very impressed with the depth of relationships, connections, and knowledge you can glean through a computer screen if you just give it a chance.

Remote research has been around a while. The work I did for my Bachelors (2006) Masters (2009-2010) and Ph.D. (2015-2016) all incorporated remote research of some sort, which was based on my predecessors from the early 2000s (Christine Hine, for example). I also incorporated it as a part of my work at SoftLayer/IBM (2009-20018), SAP (2018-2019), and my team did so at Hilton (2019-2020). It CAN be done as long as you’re willing and able to give it a try and understand that being able to identify with our fellow humans doesn’t always require physical presence.

You may even be able to delve further researching remotely than you ever could in person simply because communicating via a computer screen provides a comfort to some that they can’t get in any other way. There are a lot of people who prefer to communicate at a distance for one reason or another. Let’s not reject or forget about them because they communicate in a way different from most of society. EMBRACE it and you just might achieve a much deeper connection than you ever would have in a manufactured lab or a corporate workspace.

I know a few researchers who are in unfamiliar territory right now and my advice to them is that they already have the skills they need, they just need to understand how to transfer it to an online context. All people want to do in the world is connect with others (whether they admit it or not). Figure out how to be that conduit, and you can do wonders for everyone from research respondents to co-workers, and friends.

Looking for tips and tricks to make this work? I’m on furlough, so almost always available virtually! Contact me if you need advice, guidance, mentorship, or even just a sounding board. I’m happy to help in any way that I can.

Intercepting Traveler’s Tweets

Intercepting Traveler’s Tweets

, 0

“SOON, FOREIGN VISITORS to the United States will be expected to tell U.S. authorities about their social media accounts.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection wants to start collecting ‘information associated with your online presence’ from travelers from countries eligible for a visa waiver, including much of Europe and a handful of other countries. Earlier this summer, the agency proposed including a field on certain customs forms for ‘provider/platform’ and ‘social media identifier,’ making headlines in the international press. If approved by the Office of Management and Budget, the change could take effect as soon as December.

Privacy groups in recent weeks have pushed back against the idea, saying it could chill online expression and gives DHS and CBP overbroad authority to determine what kind of online activity constitutes a ‘risk to the United States’ or ‘nefarious activity.'”

As a cyber anthropologist who, at times, uses social media for research – I find this highly disturbing. Twitter is turning into /b where nothing anyone says can really be taken seriously these days. This is ill-conceived and lacks critical understanding of the platform and the culture surrounding it.

On being an Anthropologist…

, 2

When responding to an email last night I made the statement, “Anthropologists and our discipline are traditionally misunderstood, which is ironic in that it is our jobs to make others easier to understand.” Followed a few sentence later by, “I identify myself as an anthropologist above all else.”

After I sent my email I then pondered on those two statements. It is very true that our discipline is misunderstood. I have often had to differentiate what I do from what an archeologist does. I have also had to explain that while yes our discipline previously studied far off groups of people in newly discovered areas of the world, that is not what the majority of us do today. That said, I do have to mention that when I specify that I am a “cyber anthropologist” (aka digital anthropologist, technical anthropologist etc) people do tend to perk up and lean in to learn more about what I do.

So here I thought would be the perfect place to really describe what it is I do as an anthropologist, why it’s important, and why I – though I am also a User Experience Designer and am working toward my PhD in Information Science – identify myself as an anthropologist above all else.

What do I, as an anthropologist, do?
So – I’ll preface this with this is what I do as an anthropologist and does not necessarily reflect what everyone else in the discipline does.

The simple answer is I study culture online and online culture.

Well, what does that mean?

Studying Culture Online: I study the way different people from different parts of the world use the Internet and how just having access to it can influence cultures and communities. Examples of this include China’s firewall, South Korea’s Starcraft fans, and how civil unrest across the world unfolds in social media.

Studying Online Culture: To keep it short, I study the way people interact online including their behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Additionally, I analyze their artifacts for trends, memes, and emerging understanding of how the Internet affects people’s lives and how people’s lives affect the Internet. Lastly, I have specified my focus on gamers and developers. However, while those are currently my preferred groups to study, I do branch out into politics, brands, and education.

Why is what I do important?
By understanding those around us we can learn from them and apply the lessons they’ve already overcome to other groups and situations that can benefit from them.

For example:
By understanding how gamers organically develop communities of practice and use open source tools to assist in communicating over geographically dispersed areas in order to successfully support their self-created and self-organized groups both in and out of in-game encounters, we can help businesses learn how to improve their communication techniques for their geographically dispersed teams in our ever increasingly global society. (You can read more about this here.)

Another example from my own work includes:
Understanding the motivation for participation in open source development communities and using that understanding to help motivate others to participate in more volunteer opportunities within their own communities.

While I could go on and on, I think these two examples help illustrate my particular research focus and how it can actually be applied to several different contexts that go far above and beyond the original groups and situations studied to help our economies and communities be more successful.

Why I identify as an anthropologist above all else?
I like to help people.

Yep, it’s as simple as that. In fact, it is that one idea that affects my entire approach to life including my other career and educational choices. This is why I identify as an anthropologist above all of the other identities I have. It completely influences absolutely everything else I do.

As a user experience designer I strive to help the people using the applications I design, the developers developing these applications, and the companies for which these applications are implemented. Yes, what I do goes that far and affects all of those groups. Being an anthropologist helps provided me with this holistic perspective as well as an ability to understand all of these groups in order to find ways to help them in the best way possible. I could not do my job if I didn’t think it was helping others and I have in fact left other jobs because I did not feel that the work I was doing had a positive enough effect on those it touched.

As a PhD student in information science I strive to find ways to make information easier to access, understand, and share. In the end, it’s not about the information itself, but those who use it and how it and the ways it can be used can better the lives of those users. My specific focus within my course of study is human computer interaction. It is the human part of that, that makes all of the difference.

Final Thoughts
So there you go! This is really just a very small glimpse into what I do and why I do it. I am posting it here in hopes of making my discipline a little easier to understand. My intent was to also how the work I do, though it may seem somewhat inconsequential as it focuses on things like gaming, actually can be applied to groups and situations that can have a far reaching impact on our communities and economies.

I love what I do and I am thankful every day that I have an opportunity to do it.

Not quite dead yet…

, 1

It’s only a flesh wound!

I mean, that’s how the last month of the semester should start out right? Biting knees and all that jazz…

*Shout! Shout! Let it all out!* <--- Typed this out while listening to Disturbed over Pandora just now. Live blogging baby! So, back to the task at hand. Why yes, it is the last month of the last semester of my Masters. Though this is in fact the truth, I will not actually be graduating until this summer. Why? Well, my professor and I both agree that my practicum work is just so cool that it deserves a more in depth analysis in order to do it and all of my participants in it justice. This is why I've been talking with a few of you in the Fedora community back and forth for the last month or so and why I'm in IRC almost every day! This is also why I need those interviews back! If you'd rather complete the interviews over IRC than email please ping me! I've already done a few others that way, so I don't mind doing it that way if you're more comfortable with it. :) Additionally, this is why I have not been blogging as much lately. I've been consumed with Atlas.ti - then of course my Windows partition (it only runs on Windows) on my Mac (only machine I have that will run a large enough installation of Windows to install Atlas.ti) crashing and eating my installation / HU with it, which required me to redo EVERYTHING all over again. Now I'm just waiting on the last 2 interviews to come back. This way I can code them and add them to my extended analysis, which is going to be used to verify whether or not I've covered everything in the survey questions I've come up with. If so, well then I should be releasing a survey to everyone soon! If not, well then I'll be filling in the gaps and then submitting another change request to the IRB so I can have permission to send the survey out. It's also why my brain is kinda mushy at the moment. Other things contributing to the mush are my grant writing class, my job where I am the ONLY user interface / user experience designer, and getting setup to start my PhD in the fall (which is a LOT of work!). So really, this is just a plea to those I've already badgered a few times to get back to me with your completed interviews as soon as you can! What's fun about this stage is finding all of the themes that are appearing in the data from the interviews. Fedora, you're an interesting lot of people! Yes, I really do love what I do!

Saturday Morning @ SXSW

, , 0

First stop was a panel on IA sketching, but of course it was at capacity. I really do need to start getting to panels earlier. [Must make opening remarks by Danah Boyd at 2 today!!]

Since I was already on the 4th floor, and it’s quite a trek to get there, I headed over to the Blogger’s Lounge where I met @sarahmworthy. Who when I asked if the free chairs at the table were taken, asked if I was cool enough to join them! Mentioning I was a cyber anthropologist was my ticket in. 😉

Being that I’ll likely get a bit of new traffic to the old blog here due to networking at SXSW, I figured I’d post a link to the podcast I did for last year’s SXSW – an introduction to cyber anthropology.

New visitors will also find that I currently have a lot of posts directed to the Fedora community. You can learn more about my Master’s practicum with Fedora / Red Hat via my short FAQ. Elevator speech: An explorative study on how to maintain, sustain, and grow the Fedora Project open source development community.

Other research new visitors might find interesting includes ethnography of a guild in World of Warcraft (circa 2006), as well as product research for Motorola (ask me for these papers and I’ll be happy to send them to you), and a subject matter expert for Microsoft on how people use the Internet.

I should finish my masters in applied anthropology at UNT this summer and will be starting my PhD in the fall at UNT in Philosophy of Information Science [Human Computer Interaction], for which I’ve been awarded a fellowship for my studies based on my academic performance that covers my full tuition for the next 4 years!

My day job is that of a User Experience Designer for The Planet. Just as a forewarning, nothing I say here has anything to do with the company I work for and they should not be held responsible for the content of this blog as it is solely mine.

On that note – off to the trade show, you can find us in booths 303 and 305!

How to get a number for that which can’t easily be counted

, , 0

During this next part of my research process I will be posting a survey available to all Fedora contributors. Luckily, this part of the participation process requires no signatures! So, those of you who were unable to participate in the interview process* will be able to easily participate in the survey portion as it is completely electronic.

The long and short of surveys is the quantitative statistical analysis that can be performed on them. The purpose of my survey is to help triangulate the data obtained during the qualitative (interview/participant observation) portion of my research against a broader sample that is more representative of the overall community. However, in order to do this properly I need to know how big the current overall community is.

This is where I need your help. I need you, Fedora Project contributors, to help me find ways to get at least an approximate count of currently active and contributing participants that can be verified by some means.  This could be getting the number for how many people own packages in Rawhide or even how many people have edited the wiki in the past 6 months. Being that not everyone owns packages or edits the Wiki, we need ways to count the other contributors as well. Also, there is likely some overlap between several countable contributing groups so we need to keep issues like that under consideration. I understand that it will be difficult to come up with an exact number, so a close approximation will suffice as long as we have ways to support how we got the numbers and they are verifiable.

Not only will we need to ways to get the numbers, but also the people who are able to access that data and get it to me. So, if you come up with an idea but have no knowledge of how to actually get the data in question, feel free to brainstorm on this post with other people! I imagine that by working together we can quickly and easily come up with ways to figure this out. I’ll be hanging out in IRC as always, so feel free to ping me there or email me if you have ideas, questions, or numbers you wish to donate to the cause.

Once we have a number, then I can come up with a quota and will be able to release the survey!

I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for helping me out with this process. 🙂

*If you still want to participate in the interview process and have the ability to return your signature to me electronically (print/scan, fax, xournal, signing with a mouse) then please contact me diana [@] cyber-anthro.com.

Fedora: On Research Design

, , , 5

Research design in anthropology is a tricky thing. It is the part of the process you do before you do anything else, and thus you do before you have any real sense of the situation in which you will be researching and the people with which you will be working. It is the place where you lay down the questions to be answered, setup ways in which you will attempt to answer them, try and anticipate all of the ins and outs of the process as well as all the steps necessary to be taken with all of the stakeholders, which in my case includes my client, my masters committee, and my university IRB.

Then you get into the project and start your research, and only then do you start to realize and understand what you’ve got yourself into and just how many things you didn’t anticipate. So far with this project, being a cyber anthropological based research study (all of the research is being conducted online), my problems have all centered around technology.

My first limitation was understanding the process to get my blog on the Fedora Planet blogroll. With help and some ‘hacking the system’ I got on and while at FUDcon I figured out why it didn’t work in the first place (I wasn’t a part of enough groups!).

Now I am realizing my second limitation, that of requiring a signed piece of paper from all interview participants before each interview can commence. Pen and paper is perhaps one of the oldest forms of communication and technology known to man and yet it is the one thing standing between me an several potential interviews.

This was not a hindrance I anticipated when designing my research study, and it is perhaps not something with which people who are not researching under a university have to deal. However, it is something I now realize is important and am bringing attention to in case there are others embarking on similar research studies with similar IRB limitations that require them to have signed consent forms so they can account for this process in their research design.

Were I to design a similar project in the future under the same IRB limitations, I would ask my IRB to approve an electronic encrypted signature on my consent forms.

Here’s to hoping someone out there can learn from my mistakes!

That all being said, if you have a means for returning a signed document to me electronically and you would like to be interviewed for the Fedora research project, but have yet to contact me please do so soon! All interviews will be wrapped up (as best they can) by Friday!

Fedora: Still looking for Interview Participants!

, , 0

If you would like to participate in the interview portion of the Fedora research project I am current conducting, please visit my informational post on it here!

I need at least 10 more willing participants by the end of next week. The most convenient way of participating for all involved so far has been through email. So if you have a little time and wouldn’t mind answering a few questions about your participation in Fedora via email, please let me know!

If you need alternative means of signing the informed consent documents, please note that you can sign it via a tablet as well as via fax (just email me for the fax number), rather than being restricted to having scan your forms in and send them to me.

Fedora – FLOSS Web Based Survey Tools?

6

After some great suggestions provided by a couple of people on alternative FLOSS tools for conducting interviews online, I thought I would ask the community if there were any preferred web based FLOSS survey tools available?

I’ll be constructing a survey based on the interview results by the middle of February. So, I would like to get started on the construction of it as soon as possible. If you know of any, and especially if you have used any please let me know.

I look forward to your suggestions!

External Validation and the Online World, the means for oversharing – afternoon musings…

, 2

Rather than considering ourselves beautiful because we ‘feel’ beautiful (internal), we require external validation of our beauty. This usually consists of seeing ourselves in a mirror, a photograph, or hearing that we are beautiful as stated by someone external from us. In fact, the closer a person is to us the less weight this statement carries. This not because it is not as true as a more external person’s statement, but because we tend to meld the ideas of those closest to us into our internal dialog and thus they fail to pass the external requirement for validity.

This is the same for possessions, and ideas. All your friends may possess an item or hold to an idea, but the item or idea is only validated when it is also possessed or held to by someone external from your circle.

In contrast are the non-conformist who only hold to feelings, possessions, and ideas when others do not. What they fail to realize though is that external non-validation caries as much weight for them as external validation does for everyone else. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, many non-conformist ideals are eventually conformed to through such external validation. This is not necessarily because these people want to conform to these non-conformist ideals, but that they have to due to the simple fact that these ideals exist. This is turn causes the non-conformist to seek out new ideals even though they are in fact dooming their non-conformity to conformity by this very act.

The ad works for the possessors more than for those that do not yet possess the product as it is an external validation of their purchase. It does the same for those who purposely do NOT possess the product (not those who do not possess it ‘yet’ but those who never want to possess it) as it externally validates their reasons to not possess it. Think of the ‘Mac’ ads for example.

The trick to all of this is that it is entirely turned upside down in the online world. If you can think of it, there is a site for it (rule 34) – thus everything is externally validated in one way or another however it is all done so anonymously now requiring us consider whether that is a true external validation or just an internal one as we sought it out ourselves by the act of being online where it exists for everyone instead of it being voluntarily given to us in the real world where it may or may not exist for us.

Everyone is simultaneous beautiful and ugly as the continuity of the world is displayed before us electronically. And, even though we are alone behind our computer we seek out companionship online in one form or another. The to/with continuum determines whether or not you’ve found an audience or a cohort and in some cases the same people travel up and down this line without a second thought of whether they are being pandered to or communicated with.

Often times we find we are our own audience as we reveal things about ourselves that even we did not know thus becoming our own external validators, something that could not be done in context of the real world. Adding to this is the public external validation of an internal validator online that, because it is public, makes it external where it were private it would be internal. So then we take the word of someone close to us as truer were it spoken in an online environment where other external validators can validate it than we would the same utterance in an internal and personal context even tough it is the same person saying it.

What the online world has done is cause us all require an audience now, if only to validate ourselves in ways we cannot be validated offline. This is why we share things online we would never share in public or even in some cases in private.

I may pick this up again later…

In the meantime – read what oversharing means for a blogger who was paid to blog.

ETA:

“To the young today, however, the dream experience is its own reality, a separate reality: it doesn’t need to be validated by translation into the historical world of sensory experience. It validates itself.

Similarly, they regard media as self-contained environments, having little correspondence with other realities or environments. TV is its own reality, radio its reality, film still another reality.

[…]

The young in particular regard media environments as designs, patterns – what William Blake called “sculptures” – states that have no separate physical existence. We pass temporarily into one or another & when in any one, it seems overpoweringly real & all other states shadowy. We imagine, of course, that any state we are in is physically real. This makes it splendidly attractive. It doesn’t occur to us that only our spirits can enter these realms, and that events experienced there can never be tested against observed reality.

I think this is one reason the young find nothing incongruous about conflicting reports in the press, radio, TV, etc. ” – Edmund Carpenter 1972

So nice when you read something that falls inline with your current thought (hah! external validation!).

Interesting though how the Internet provides a place where this self-contained environment can be observed by an outsider as it is a participatory form of media rather than a passive one such as radio, tv, or film.

One Laptop Per Child Teams up with Microsoft

0

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.

Stigma of the Internet

0

There seems to be a few things that are still taboo to do online. There are three that come directly to mind. First, would be admitting you met your loved one online. Second, to admit that most of your time with your friends is online. Third, that you are going to school in an online program. Unfortunately all of these things apply to me!

I have to admit, that though I did meet my now husband (newly weds as of March 17th of this year) in person in passing at a party just over 5 years ago, it was almost a year later that we started talking and really got to know each other online. I spent more time with him online in the first 3 weeks of our friendship than I did with him in person. Due to my hectic life of being a wife, mother (step), full time student, who works full time I actually spend a lot of time with my friends online (computer or phone). This is either via chatting, or through our blogs, or through gaming in World of Warcraft. As far as school goes, I am always amazed how often I feel I have to justify my being in an online program. I have to specify it is an academic rather than technical program, and I have to state it is for my masters, and lastly I have to mention it is at a respectable college who just happens to be one of the leading traditional colleges in online education.

For some reason all of these things seem to be too personal or too important to be handled in an online environment, thus, making anything that happens online second best to things that take place in a face-to-face environment. However, people seem to enjoy the fact that they can do their banking online, or work from home via a vpn connection, or even keep up with far away family members via photos and video shared online. I find it very interesting that there is a cultural line drawn between these things.

I believe people feel this way because they see the ‘online’ part of it and mark it as only being superficial or without any depth. I suppose if I elaborated to show how I meld my online and offline world this would some how make it better. In my world I bring face-to-face and online together as often as I can. Obviously this worked out for my relationship as we are now married (though due to our schedules we do carry out a lot of our daily conversations online either via text messaging or through messengers). I invite my entire local friends list out with me via my livejournal at least once a month. This usually results in 10-20 people meeting and eating Tex-Mex together at our favorite restaurant. I even invited my Canadian guild leader in WoW to my wedding (she couldn’t make it due us moving up our date and her still being pregnant – but she would of if she could have and had planned to for our original date that was 6 months later) and I talk to guild members via phone and text messaging often. Though I am in an online academic program, I live less than 20 miles away from campus (that’s very close in Texas!) and I participate in as many social gatherings as I can. I will even supplement my online curriculum with electives I take on campus there (it is my alma matter for my undergrad as well).

I am curious to see how attitudes change as a generation who has never known a time without internet access begins to make a single world out of the two most try to keep separate. For me there really is no separation. Why make a distinction? What purpose does that serve? I see the value in f2f and in online relationships – even those that never cross the line from one to the other. In the end, I figure if I can trust my bank to handle my money online and my work trusts me to work online then I should be able to marry the man of my dreams I got to know online and trust my university to handle my education there as well.

I am eagerly awaiting the time when the rest of the world catches up with me.

ETA: (This is a posting I did tonight on my Thought and Praxis -aka theory- class discussion boards on postmodernism anthropology. I added it here because I believe it shares some of the reasons why I view things the way I do.)

For me, I am both a fan of philosophy and Nietzsche as well as a fan of questioning everything including my own reality (a bit of solipsism there) so Postmodernism works for me in that light. Its strength is that it allows everything to be questioned, even those highest of ideals that seem unquestionable (as Nietzsche did with Religion for example).

However, a weakness for me is that in order to be a scientist, while you should have a healthy curiosity, there should be something in yourself to which you question things against. Something you hold to in order to form the foundation of your discovery and point of view. Yes, this makes it subjective, but I feel you can compare objective positions to your own subjectivity in order to come to conclusion that you then share as objectively as possible with the rest of the world. The point of doing this is to allow other people to test these conclusions against their own thus allowing us to question ourselves against ourselves. HOLY BATMAN are we getting circular here! Hopefully you follow, if not just consider me delirious after the first two days at my new job.

Now, Nietzsche would say “Morality is the herd in the individual”, however, I think that culture would fail if there wasn’t some sort of standard of morality people adhered too. Some sort of reality they all subscribed to in order to make it all work. A cultural foundation upon which people are able to question the world around them (ethnocentric perhaps). This reality has to exist both partially inside and outside of them in order for all of them to live and work together. This is where the conflict within myself begins and the weaknesses in postmodernism rear their ugly head for me. As an anthropologist being someone who believes in culture and sees that there are certain glues that hold cultures together, I see the purpose of things like morality, collective/objective realities. However, I understand for myself that this is all within my own subjective context.

Alas, we come back to dualism or what I like to think of as hybridity. The melding of two systems to make my own. I must be in this mode of thought tonight, as this duality was what my cyber-anthro blog post was about as well.

Marketing Interactively!

0

So today was my first day at my new job. This means I’m both wired and exhausted at the same time. I now work for an interactive marketing firm who is just as interested in the social aspects of their work online as they are about their people in-house and the bottom line. I find this wholly fascinating as an anthropologist and as a previous designer/developer turned information architect.

I don’t think I’ve ever come home from a first day of orientation more inspired to make a difference and be great at my job than I did today. Talking about relationship marketing and building communities from an agency standpoint is just amazing to me. The best part is they invite people to be skeptical about it all. I think being skeptical and inspired at the same time drives people to make it all happen. There are so many ways I can see cyber anthropology being applied to different aspects of this company both inside and out that I very excited to get in there and see how I can apply both my education and technical background to my work. Oddly, it’s a company I feel I can help make a difference in and with.

I say oddly because people rarely have that opinion of what is technically referred to as an ad agency.

My goals for this blog!

, , 0

As I stated in my last entry, I am no authority on this subject. I am just very passionate about it and am eager to find any and all information out there relating to it or correlating it with other media studies being done in association with the internet. What I have found in my search for information on cyber anthropology is that everything is very scattered or has become stagnant. I always find myself disappointed when I find a promising link to information and find that it was last updated over 10 years ago.

I have also found that (please correct me if I am wrong) there is no definitive authority on cyber anthropology, no end all be all source where one can find studies pertaining to it or research completed on it. Even pages with lists of journals and such have several links that are out of date or otherwise dead. The goal of this blog is to stay active and at some point compile a compendium of current and past studies, be an instigator for new studies, gain opinions and insight from those who are also interested in it or have some authority in the field while at the same time serve as a place where I can hash out my own thoughts, ideas and opinions. While I don’t necessarily think of myself as a pioneer here, I do hope this blog becomes a kind of torch to keep the study active and current and perhaps light the way for more cohesive and collective study in the field.

One last goal is that I’d like to present all of this in a way that it is interesting to people both in and outside of academia. I want it to be accessible by everyone and applicable by all who can find ways to apply it. I’d like to find ways to translate the stiff college writing and peer reviewed articles to the gamer, blogger, and social-networker, while at the same time providing academia with a link to their thoughts and opinions on what’s being written about them. In addition to that, I would love to be involved in finding ways both academia and its research subjects can apply the research being carried out.

I suppose these are pretty lofty goals and will take lots of time, patience, and tenacity to carry them all out. What would please me most is for this blog to generate a community of gamers, bloggers, social-networkers, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnographers, students, professors, researchers and the like who are all interested in the study and application of cyber anthropology. At the moment, other than starting my new position tomorrow as an information architect and continuing my studies in grad school in applied anthropology, nothing excites me more than looking for ways to make this happen.

What is Cyber Anthropology?

, 0

What is cyber anthropology? A short definition I came up with is the study of online culture and culture online. However, I like to take “online” a step further than just computers connecting to the Internet and instead consider any means of communication that is handled over a network. This can mean what we traditionally call the Internet, as well as things like Xbox live, Playstation online, networking between handhelds, and even the ways you connect through your mobile phone. Anyway you can connect with one or more people in a non face-to-face (f2f) way I consider a means of communicating online. I simply refer the term online culture as a way to encompass all of this. Online culture has its own set of learned beliefs, values, and behaviors, which distinguishes itself from “offline” culture and is why I set online culture apart from studying culture online.

When I refer to studying culture online, I mean studying cultures that exist offline in their online context or in relating to things online. Just a smattering of things I can think off the top of my head that I would be interested in: How do different demographics of people use the Internet? How do people from different cultural backgrounds connect to others and with each other online? How does the introduction of the internet effect developing countries? How does government control effect how the Chinese view the Internet? How does Russia and South Korea handle online piracy and why is it so common there? How do cyber laws affect people in the US as well as all over the globe? What is the culture that surrounds Internet cafes is Japan? How does all of this effect online culture in general? I could go on and on.

My Masters studies being in Applied Anthropology, I am also interested in how to apply studies dealing with the Internet to real life problems. A couple of examples here the application of online gaming as a means of education and a teaching tool to students of foreign language or those with reading and comprehension difficulties, as well as how using mouse and eye tracking software we can make web sites more accessible to people with disabilities or different levels of computer knowledge.

What I love most about the study of things in any online context is how dynamic, fast paced, and ever changing everything is. There is always something new and they run the gamut from humor like lolcats or networking like Twitter. Even if these two things persist in the coming months they will not be the same a year from now as they are today. They will have to evolve to keep up with advances in technology, current events, and the ever-present ever-increasing competition to be viable in the future.

This is somewhat of a relatively new field when it comes to anthropology, but it has been a research topic ethnography since the Internet burst onto the scene. So while online ethnography is not new, I believe the concept of cyber anthropology, especially as I have tried to somewhat define it here, is still emerging. It is something I am very passionate about and I hope that comes through in my writing. I am more a student than an authority on anything I publish here and I welcome any and all input on the ideas I set forth in this blog. So please feel free let me know what you think!

Back To Top