The Wisdom of Long Tails
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Presentation Transcript
The Wisdom of Long Tails i203 – Social and Organizational Issues of Information 04/23/2008
What Makes All This ‘Anthropological’? • Anthropologists have studied (are studying) it. • The topic areas center around discourse and cultural (re)production. 2
The Internet ‘Revolution’ • Manuel Castells • The Rise of the Network Society (1996) • The Information Age Trilogy • Fundamental Question: • How has the rise of the networked age changed the nature of our economy, of organizations, of culture? 3
Haraway – The Cyborg Manifesto • What is the ‘cyborg’? • Human / machine hybrid Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. 4
Internet Terminology • What is media? • Focus on practices, not technologies. 5
Cultural (Re)Production • Focus on offline spaces, how online space, communities, information technologies are integrated, appropriated. 7
The Internet in Trinidad • Miller and Slater – The Internet: An Ethnographic Approch • Case study: the internet in Trinidad • The internet provides another way of ‘being Trini’ • Diaspora connections • The internet only exists, has meaning, in practice 8
Where’s Community? • Focusing on a community, its boundaries, blurs the diversity of the community and its internal and external interactions. • Communities of Practice – ‘Ecology of Media’ 13
Communication and Practice • Discourse and Communicative Practice • “Speech Communities” • On Facebook, e.g.! • Harrison White on ‘Switching Talk’ 14
Distributed Cognition • Synergy of individual and artifacts in the environment • Distributed in at least 3 ways: • Across members of a social group • Between individual and environment (coordination) • Over time See: Hutchins, E. (1995) "How a cockpit remembers its speeds". Cognitive Science, 19, 265-288. 15
Next Week • ‘Crowdsourcing’, Collaboration, and User-Generated Content – Oh my!