i203 – Social and Organizational Issues of Information THE WISDOM OF LONG TAILS 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

Internet Terminology  What is media?  Focus on practices, not technologies. 5

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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

Space at BAYCAT: The ‘Creation’ Room 9

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Space at BAYCAT: Private and Public 11

Space at BAYCAT: Spaces for Collaboration 12

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,

Next Week  ‘Crowdsourcing’, Collaboration, and User- Generated Content – Oh my!