While doing research for my thesis on cell phones, I came across a report prepared by Anthropologist Sadie Plant called “On the Mobile”. It was extremely well written, and very enjoyable to read. [You can download a .pdf of it from Motorola here] But recently, I found this video of another lecture on cell phones at MIT.

In the past, people lived in zones: you live at home, do other stuff at work, or while traveling. That’s changing now. Things are continuous. There’s no difference between work, home and travel. You want to have the same things with you. We believe people don’t live in categories anymore. As we’re moving around, we want seamless transitions to occur in life.

We’re living as low tech cyborgs now. It is only going to get more interesting in the future.

I’m posting this video to get everyone into the mindset for CyborgCamp this weekend [Dec 6th, 2008 at Cubespace from 9-6 Pm [Get a Ticket] [Preparty at Vidoop, 8:30 Pm Dec 5th, 2008 [RSVP] ]. The world around us is changing, but I’ll let Padmasree Warrior, now CTO at Cisco (and @padmarsee on Twitter [thanks, @nelking] tell you her story:

Nancy King / nelking

Warrior describes how thousands of Motorola engineers are trying to create a transparent network so that individuals can take their music, video, pictures —virtually any kind of data with them — wherever they go. “Mobile devices have become the remote control for life. Let us do things we have not thought about before,” says Warrior. For 75 years, Motorola has specialized in what Warrior describes as “preemptive innovation.” This means not just enabling new ways to communicate (for example, creating the two-way radio and cell phone), but giving customers new reasons to communicate. Within technological view are cars that can download information about a driver’s preferences, from seat height to mirror settings, and homes that can broadcast a favorite radio show from room to room, so the listener misses nothing.

Thanks to MITWorld for the video.
April 27, 2004
Running Time: 46:22

About the Speaker

Padmasree Warrior
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer,
Motorola Incorporated

Padmasree Warrior has worked at Motorola since 1984. She currently leads a global team of 4,600 technologists, guiding creative research from innovation through the first stages of marketing. She also serves as a technology advisor to the office of the chairman and to the board’s technology and design steering committee.

Before assuming her current role in January 2003, Warrior was corporate vice president and general manager of Motorola’s energy systems group. Warrior was corporate vice president and chief technology officer for Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector. She was appointed vice president in 1999 and was elected a corporate officer in 2000.

Warrior received an M.S. degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India.

Warrior served on the Texas Governor’s Council for Digital Economy, and is a member of the Texas Higher Education Board review panel. She was one of six women nationwide selected to receive the “Women Elevating Science and Technology” award from Working Woman magazine in 2001. She also is a director of Ferro Corporation.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, see also the Makerlab blog, as well as coverage of local Portland tech events at Nerdabout.com.

I just got back from MIT, where I spoke at a conference called the Futures of Entertainment 3. It was put on by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and the Convergence Culture Consortium. A great big shout-out to Joshua Green for organizing and inviting me to the conference. He rocks at putting together an excellent show for the brain.

Cambridge was Fascinating

The people are interesting (especially those at the Media Lab) and everyone at MIT is up to something. It was nice to meet MIT and non-MIT students as they converged on this event. Alex McDowell was probably my favorite person there. He and I joked about all sorts of things, and I showed him a bit about using Twitter. Cool things about Alex: he’s coordinating a robotic opera, he has worked on Minority Report (the tech vision for it), and Fight Club, and is currently working on the adaptation of Watchman for the screen.

On par with Alex was Henry Jenkins, who told me a lot about speaking in front of people (including using PowerPoint slides as memory palaces for storing ideas (so that one doesn’t need to use scripts). I also asked him about his Twitter account and how he manages all of it. He said that he doesn’t, and when I asked him why, he told me that his Twitter account was a fan one. I was floored. Jenkins said that he doesn’t even know how to tweet, but that he loved using search.twitter.com to look up what was being said about him online. Much amusement.

Later on, I met Kevin Slavin of Area Code. He does a lot of integrated real life games and is fantastically interesting. On the last night of the conference, he talked to me about some architects who are making fake hermit shells from recycled plastic because hermit crabs are running out of homes due to greedy beachcombers seeking serendipitous seaside souvenirs.

A lot happened. A ton was learned. I wrote a bunch about it for the Discovery Channel’s Nerdabout Blog, all of which I’m linking too here. Since the posts look better in their natural environment, I’ll provide a brief summary here before directing you over there for more detailed reviews.

———–

Henry Jenkins - Notes on Understanding Convergence Culture

Henry Jenkins of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium begin with a slide that said, “If it doesn’t spread — it’s dead!” and then a picture of a Dr. Seuss-like creature with the words: “Amazed I was, it made such sense. And it was at so little expense! No press release, no ad campaign. Those days are gone, the rules have changed!” And thus began MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3.

What is the magical black box that all data will flow through? We see various images of what media might flow through. There’s the iPhone, the computer — the Mp3 Player.

Choice in New Media

“We are selectively choosing what media to pass on. There is a rational way in which we pass media along.”

Convergence as Culture

I’m talking about Convergence as a cultural rather than a technological process .We now live in world where every story, image, sound, idea band, and relationship which will play itself out across all possible media platforms. We have to understand the social context in which media is shared, because, “convergence is in our social interactions with each other — not necessarily in technological devices”.

Read the rest of the event review at Nerdabout.
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Consumption, Value and Worth - Panel Discussion at MIT

Notes from the panel on Consumption, Value and Worth at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3.
Where does value come from in the evolving media landscape?

Comsumption, Value, Worth Panel (#FOE3)

Anne White (VP Programming & Creative, PRN by Thompson): “We had a discussion of Web 2.0 in the context of retail media — but found it difficult to define. So we looked back at Web 1.0 first. We thought of a sign that told people about deals — and then decided that Web 2.0 was about creating a two way street — about contribution to media and an interaction with media”.

Anita Elberse (Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School): “When we look at the very first ads on TV, they looked very much like print ads. Maybe 2.0 is our path is the same”. We’re still making things that look like TV on the Internet - not yet fully understanding the capabilities of the networked world.

Rishi Dean (VP Product Strategy, Visible Measures): “It’s about moving from a broadcast media into a more participatory media. But it’s less about defining Web 2.0 but harnessing those dynamics — and how to leverage those dynamics. The whole concept of losing control is where Web 1.0 is afraid of”.

So 2.0 is taking advantage of fluidity and using it to get a message out.

Renee Richardson (Harvard Business School): “There is that fear of loss of control — but this is not a bad thing”.

Rishi is developing a way to understand how to measure visitor dynamics and the effects of social media. It is a way of understanding audiences (the company is called Visible Measures).

( more >>).

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Making Audiences Matter - MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Panel

Panel members:

Kim Moses (Executive Producer, Ghost Whisperer), Vu Nguyen (VP of Business Development, Crunchyroll.com), Gail De Kosnik (UC Berkeley, Strategies for a Digital Age), Kevin Slavin (Area Code), and Joshua Green (Moderator: MIT Convergence Culture Consortium).

Audiences today are not merely audiences — they are creators. And they think of themselves as such. How can audiences can be thought as participants — or fellow workers - in industry? Who is the audience for contemporary media? ( more >>).

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I’ll be posting more notes in the future. However, I’m still trying to rest up before Thanksgiving and the preparation for CyborgCamp, which is December 6th, 2008 at CubeSpace. More about these topics will invariably be discussed there. See you soon!

————
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

My attempts at writing about the subject of Cyborg Anthropology have always resulted in long texts. This attempt is no exception.

Definition

Cyborg Anthropology is a set of mental models that can be applied to the examination of the interaction between humans and comptuers, and how the capabilities of our bodies are extended when they are uploaded into hypertext.

Invisible Robots

The traditional manifestation of robots is vastly different from the real robots we interact with in our everyday lives. The traditional robots that are locked in the collective consciousness of the general public range from behemoth, terrorizing giants that destroy cities — to smaller, equally intense characters (such as the Terminator). Now we have little robots everywhere, giving us our search results and our mail.

One of the questions that Cyborg Anthropology has a real power to approach is the question of what our lives will look like in the future.

Currently, we are duplicating ourselves every time we or others associate a page or profile with our identity. Projections of ourselves are capable of accessing and being accessed by multiple individuals at a time. The extension of ourselves into the online space is transforming our social interactions into relational, dynamic social profiles.

What is Cyborg Anthropology? When did it come about?

Cyborg Anthropology was officially founded when Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit and Sarah Williams presented a paper titled “Cyborg Anthropology” at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco.

Paper Excerpts

“Cyborg anthropology offers new metaphors to both academic and popular theorizing for comprehending the different ways that sciences and technologies work in our lives-metaphors that start with our complicity in many of the processes we wish were otherwise”

“Cyborg anthropology is interested in the construction of science and tech-nology as cultural phenomena. It explores the heterogeneous strategies and mechanisms through which members of technical communities produce these cultural forms that appear to lack culture, for example, scientific knowledge that is objective and neutral, the product of only empirical observation and logical reasoning.

“Cyborg anthropology is interested in how people construct discourse about science and technology in order to make these meaningful in their lives. Thus, cyborg anthropology helps us to realize that we are all scientists.

“That is, by reconstructing scientific knowledge in new contexts, including across na-tional and cultural boundaries, we all do science. Since the practice of “doing science” is no longer reserved for scientists, studying science becomes both more amenable to ethnographic investigation and more important as a topic of research” (Downey, 265-266).

Cyborg Anthropology Author(s): Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit, Sarah Williams Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 2, Anthropologies of the Body, (May, 1995), pp. 264-269 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: Link to JSTOR Article.

A Cyborg Curriculum

Since I made my thesis on Cell Phones and Cyborg Anthropology available online, I’ve been contacted by numerous professors wishing to compare notes and course curriculum for educating their students on the field of Digital Anthropology.

It is due to these requests that I’ve decided to create a reudimentary list of questions and resources that may aid the beginning professor in his or her course preperation. In a world of open source technologies, it is important to , it is I’ve If you are a professor tasked with the job of bringing new ways of thinking into your classroom, this may be a valuable resource to you. Please feel free to alert me of any additional items you’ve used in your courses. Or, if you are a student of Cyborg Anthropology, please let me know what articles and books you’ve been assigned.

Potential Drawbacks of a Technosocial Future

A recent conversation with Todd Kenefsky, board member of Legion of Tech, brought up some interesting points on the future of human-computer interaction. “As a species we tend to test the borders and boundaries of what we can do”, he began, “and if we go too far we get smacked backwards. Maybe with cyborg technology — going too far would have far greater repercussions. Maybe we could get terminal viruses that wipe out the human race”.

He made a good point. Cyberspace and reality do not exist exclusively — the online space is influences offline places, and the offline the online.

We are still detached from actually touching and interacting with data. We still cannot touch the data of the Internet with our own hands. We are still forced to input data into interfaces via keyboards, trackpads, and mice. We cannot access data ubiquitously, and RSS is limited to global RSS systems.

We cannot yet continuously update our location and subscribe to data relative to the needs of our immediate environment. We still have boundaries between the ecosystem of the Internet and the ecosystems of our own bodies.

But we are making progress. We can walk while communicating with others around the world, and sounds from elsewhere travel across long distances to get to our ears via iPod. We have blogs, Wikis, and microblogging services like Twitter.

Discussion Questions

Let us think of electronic devices as objects, and then those objects in a system of greater objects.

Online there are temporary autonomous zones — fluid spaces that come and go. Objects placed there can change meanings quickly. Personalities, social engagements, and power capabilities change. Objects change their value based on their environment, or the system around them which acts on them as objects. Objects change meanings once placed in different systems.

Consider the system in which the object exists.

• What kind of a system is the object a part of?
• How is the object birthed?
• How is the system that the object is birthed in different from the eventual system it inhabits?
• How is the birth of a tree and its eventual location different from that of a child?
• A piece of clothing?
• A piece of data?
• What systems exist inside the object?
• What about complex objects with multiple systems?
• How can these systems be visualized across time and space?

Systemic Friction

Online, friction is less prevalent than offline. Iterations, or software releases can happen more quickly than the equivalent revolutions in real life. In the analog sphere, interactions based on growth in response to systems happen at a slower rate. A tree is constantly in co-production with its environment. What the tree does influences the system, which in turn influences the tree. The network of trees acting together influences a wider system.

Interfaces

Maureen McHugh wrote that “soon, perhaps, it will be impossible to tell where human ends and machines begin”.

How is the digital accessed? How are different environments accessed? What separates them? How do the qualities of these separations affect the experience of the environment? How can the digital and the analog be intersected in non-traditional ways? Are there spaces that the analog and the digital blur?

Constructions of Mobility and Capability Online

Let us, for a moment, consider the construction of mobility in online communities. What makes a powerful/respected user on a social network? Each type of space allows a different creation of power.

Social Networks as Bases of Social Interaction

Different individuals are using different social networks as bases. The social network base they use influences how they communicate with others in real life. The shape of the digital affects the shape of the social.

Digitally:

• On Facebook, identity and value is constructed through image, wall posts, addins, and updates.
• On Flickr, identity and value is related to interest and topic. It is also indexible and searchable.
• On Linkedin, power is constructed through history, recommendations, and connections, and sharing data/experience. It is the ‘emptiest’ vessel of many of the social networks available, and thus it can share data in the largest variety of ways.
• On Twitter, power is constructed through text, retweeting, link exchange, content, avatars, background images and followers.
• On Myspace, power is constructed through music, pictures, blog posts, and wall posts.

Culturally:
What types of cultural constructs allow objects to take on different values? How can a system of representation (the Disney store, the end aisles in a shopping market vs. the inner rows) bring power to an object? How does the ‘psychology of space’ make people act in a different way than they would place?

Excerpts:
“The…area of study is a broad critique of the adequacy of “anthropos” as the subject and object of anthropology. In this respect, cyborg anthropology poses a serious challenge to the human-centered foundations of anthropological discourse. The term “cyborg anthropology” is an oxymoron that draws attention to the human-centered presuppositions of anthropological discourse by posing the challenge of alternative formulations. While the skin-bound individual, autonomous bearer of identity and agency, theoretically without gender, race, class, region, or time, has served usefully and productively as the subject of cul- ture and of cultural accounts, alternate accounts of history and subjectivity are also possible” (Downey, 2).

“The autonomy of individuals has already been called into question by post- structuralist and posthumanist critiques. Cyborg anthropology explores a new alternative by examining the argument that human subjects and subjectivity are crucially as much a function of machines, machine relations, and information transfers as they are machine producers and operators. From this perspective, science and technology affect society through the fashioning of selves rather than as external forces. For example, the establishment of anthropological sub-jects and subjectivities has depended upon boats, trains, planes, typewriters, cameras, telegraphs, and so on” (Downey, 4).

“How the positioning of technologies has defined the boundaries of “the field” as well as the positioning of anthropologists within it has been a notable silence in ethnographic writing. It is increasingly clear that human agency serves in the world today as but one contributor to activities that are growing in scope, that are complex and di-verse, and yet are interconnected. The extent of such interconnectedness has been made plain both by the decline of challenges to capitalist hegemony and by the empowerment of information technologies, the latter through the combined agencies of computer and communications technologies” (Downey, 4).

“A crucial first step in blurring the human-centered boundaries of anthropo-logical discourse is to grant membership to the cyborg image in theorizing, that is, to follow in our writing the ways that human agents routinely produce both themselves and their machines as part human and part machine. How are we to write, for example, without using human-centered language? And if writing is a co-production of human and machine, then who is the “we” that writes?” (Downey, 5).

-Downey, Gary Lee “After Culture” Reflections on the Apparition of Anthropology in Artificial Life, a Science of Simulation.

The Relational Self

The psychologist Kenneth Gergen suggests that “we may be entering a new era of self-conception. In this era the self is redefined as no longer an essence in itself, but relational” (1991:146). “The concept of the individual self,” he continues, “ceases to be intelligible. At this point one is prepared for the new reality of relationship. Relationships make possible the concept of the self. Previous possessions of the individual self—autobiography, emotions, and morality—become possessions of relationships” (p. 170) in the New Superorganic (468).

As Lucy Suchman has put it, “humans and artifacts are mutually constituted. . . Agency—and associated accountabilities—reside neither in us nor in our artifacts, but in our intraactions” (in Hanson, The New Superorganic, 469).

The increasingly intimate connections between humans and nonhuman entities such as prosthetic devices and machines (especially computers) and our growing dependence on them are resulting in a similar kind of splicing that transforms us into cyborgs: new kinds of beings partly organic and partly mechanical. Far from the stable, clearly defined, and bounded units that populate the traditional worldview, cyborgs are hybrid, indeterminate, and ambiguous (Haraway 1991; Dumit and Davis-Floyd 1998:1) in (Hanson, the New Superorganic, 469).

“In Melanesia, aboriginal Australia, and elsewhere, the person is defined as much by position in a network of social relations as by individual traits” (Strathern and Stewart 1988, Wagner 1991, Myers 1986) (in Hanson, the New Superorganic, 468).

David Gunkel holds that communication, which “involves multiple individuals and is often mediated by
electronic or other technological devices, has always been the province of recombinant cyborgs” (2000:340).

In Hanson, “. . . Borg subjects float, suspended between points of objectivity, being constituted and reconstituted in different configurations in relation to the discursive arrangement of the occasion” (Hanson, 345).

Similarly, Mark Poster perceives that, “in the shift from written to electronically mediated
communication a change in the subject from “an agent centered in rational/imaginary autonomy” to one
that is “decentered, dispersed, and multiplied in continuous instability” (1990:6). For example, the notion of the unique author is fading as technological developments such as word processing and hypertext make it easy to modify written texts. These blur distinctions between original author and readers, who are coming to be seen as jointly exercising the role of author (Poster 1990:114–15; 2001:91–94; Landow 1997:90), in Hanson, the New Superorganic, 469.

Source

“The New Superorganic” Current Anthropology Volume 45, Number 4, August–October 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

“…Today’s children readily think of digital entities as alive and are comfortable with indeterminate
boundaries between organism and machine” (Turkle, 1998).

Profiles of Cyborg Anthropologists

I’ve had numerous people ask me how many Cyborg Anthropologists there were in the world. I’ve generally given the answer of seven, but there are actually quite a bit more than that. From Donna Haraway’s seminal article, A Manifesto for Cyborgs, to Manfred Clyne’s coining of the term ‘Cyborg’, the following people have be closely involved with Cyborg Anthropology since its inception.

Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Seminars at the Initiative on Technology and Self led to three edited collections, all to be published by the MIT Press, on the relationships between things and thinking. The first volume, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, was published in Fall 2007. The second volume, Falling For Science: Objects in Mind, will appear in Spring 2008. The third volume, The Inner History of Devices, will follow in Fall 2008. Professor Turkle is currently completing a book on robots and the human spirit based on the Initiative’s 10-year research program on relational artifacts.

Sharon Traweek

Associate professor in the History Department at UCLA; on the faculty of the Anthropology Department at Rice University and the Program in Anthropology & Archeology and to the Program in Science, Technology, & Society at MIT. Has held visiting faculty positions at the Mt Holyoke Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, the Anthropology Department at the University of California at San Diego, and the Program in Values, Technology, Science, and Society at Stanford University. Received my Ph.D. in 1982 from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Lucien Taylor

Assistant professor of visual and environmental studies and of anthropology and director of the Media Anthropology Laboratory. Teaches “Sensory Ethnography”, a collaboration between the departments of Anthropology and Visual and Environmental Studies. The course began last spring semester as students with varying degrees of artistic experience and ethnographic training met to learn video and audio production techniques, as well as to experience and discuss existing work in nonfiction media.

Allucquere Rosanne Stone

Academic theorist, artist, and performer, currently Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) and the New Media Initiative in the department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Concurrently she is Wolfgang Kohler Professor of Media and Performance at the European Graduate School EGS, senior artist at the Banff Centre, and Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Stone pursued successful multiple careers in film, music, experimental neurology, writing, engineering, and computer programming.

Paul Rabinow

Professor of Anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley), Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), and Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He is perhaps most famous for his widely influential commentary and expertise on the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

His major works include Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (2007); Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (2003); Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (1996), Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (1993); French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (1989); The Foucault Reader (1984), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983) (with H. Dreyfus); Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977 & 2007).

Constance Penley

Professor of Film & Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Co-Director of the Center for Film, Television and New Media

Professor Penley’s major areas of research interest are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies. Her most recent work includes NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender (ed. with Treichler and Cartwright). Her collaborative art projects include “MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee” and “Biospheria: An Environmental Opera,” on which she was co-librettist.

Deborah Heath

Associate Professor
Sociology/Anthropology
Lewis & Clark College

Also my Thesis advisor.
Collaborated on Cyborgs & Citadels Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies

Donna Haraway

Currently a professor and chair of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is the author of Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (1976), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse (1997), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), and When Species Meet (2008).

Deborah Gordon

Presented the original paper on Cyborg Anthropology at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in 1992.

Manfred Clynes

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism (i.e., an organism that has both artificial and natural systems). The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space.[1] D. S. Halacy’s Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman in 1965 featured an introduction by Manfred Clynes, who wrote of a “new frontier” that was “not merely space, but more profoundly the relationship between ‘inner space’ to ‘outer space’ -a bridge…between mind and matter.”[2] The cyborg is often seen today merely as an organism that has enhanced abilities due to technology,[3] but this perhaps oversimplifies the category of feedback.

Gary Lee Downey

Center for the Study of Science in Society
Virginia Tech

Joseph Dumit

Program in the History of Consciousness
University of California at Santa Cruz
Also presented the original paper on Cyborg Anthropology at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in 1992.

Sarah Williams

Women’s Studies
Also presented the original paper on Cyborg Anthropology at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in 1992.

Resources

The following is a list of resources that I’ve found useful to my study of Cyborg Anthropology. They’ll be reviewed individually at some point in the future.

Augé, Marc 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso.

Bauman, Zygmunt 2000 Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Beck, Ulrich 1995 Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society.

Benedikt, Michael, ed. 1991 Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. de Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol 1998 The Practice of Everyday Life.

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. NY: Penguin, 1982.

Best, Kellner, “Deluze & Guattari, Schizos, Nomas, Rhizomes,” pp.76109.

Durkheim, Emile, ed. 1951 Suicide, a Study in Sociology. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

Goffman, Erving 1982 Interaction Ritual : Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. 1st Pantheon Books ed. New York: Pantheon Books.

Goffman, Erving 1963 Behavior in Public Places; Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. [New York]: Free Press of Glencoe.

Gray, Chris, ed. 1995 The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge.

Haraway, Donna 1987 Donna Haraway Reads National Geographic. Video.

Haraway, Donna, Jorge Hankamer, and Gary Lease 1999 Between Nature & Culture Cyborgs, Simians, Dogs, Genes & Us.

Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller 2006 The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. New York: Berg.

Ito, Mizuko 2004 A New Set of Social Rules for a Newly Wireless Society. Japan Media Review 2(4).

Latour, Bruno 2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moore, Gordon E. 1965 Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits. Electronics Magazine.

Oulasvirta, Antti, Sakari Tamminen, Virpi Roto, and Jaana Kuorelahti 2005 Interaction in 4-Second Bursts: The Fragmented Nature of Attentional Resources in Mobile HCI.

Plant, Sadie 2004 On the Mobile; the Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life . Motorola.

Poster, Mark, “Consumption and Digital Commodities In the Everyday,” Cultural Studies. 18, 2/3 March/May 2004, pp. 409-423.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 1986 The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Sennet, Richard 1978 Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. .

Turner, Victor 1967 The Forest of Symbols; Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Weiser, Mark 1993 Ubiquitous Computing. Computer 26(10).

During my last semester of college, I became obsessed with the idea that I would be able to somehow put my degree in sociology/anthropology to work in the real world. When I stumbled upon search engine optimization, I was elated. When I learned that Cyborg Anthropology applied there as well, I was even more excited. And when Todd Mintz encouraged me to write my first blog post ever on the SEM PDX blog, I was so nervous that I didn’t leave my friends house for 4 hours while I composed it.

Perfectionism was a difficult thing to get over. I gradually realized that I had to allow myself to suck in order to get anywhere. At Weiden+Kennedy, there’s a massive art piece on the wall that says “Fail Harder”. I knew I had to fail harder than ever before. Oakhazelnut.com was the silliest name for a website I could think of, and the early WordPress template I used was ugly, heavy and clunky. But I kept on it.

I also realized that I wasn’t going to have a community anymore when I graduated from college, so I searched hard for one in Portland. I attended meetups relating to pretty much everything until I found Legion of Tech and Beer and Blog. Some of the first people I ever met were Reid Beals, Bram Pitoyo, Dawn Foster and Rick Turoczy. It was the beginning of an exciting and busy journey into the heart of the tech scene. But it didn’t take long to get oriented. Everyone was filled with zest for their ideas, and it spread quickly to me. I began to take small risks and write more.

Up until now, I’ve been putting in 110 hour weeks trying to do anthropological studies, blogging (which as anyone who blogs knows — is much more difficult than it looks), attending events, and learning more about seo and Yahoo! Pipes. My learning curve is strange, so it has been a long process. I’ve been given great support from people who really know what they are doing. Focused, brilliant, fascinating people.

Now that I am blogging, writing and consulting full-time, I feel like I’ve been thrown directly into the open arms of the tech community. There’s more time for coffeeshops, events, and research now. I’m excited to be able to see more faces.

It was great to be able to walk into the local Backspace coffeeshop and get high fives from all of the great people there. Bram Pitoyo said, “welcome to the life of a Freelancer”. I wholeheartedly embrace it.

My last job was excellent, and I took it after graduating from college in May so that I would be able to learn a bunch of new skills. I learned so many new things I was ready to explode. Drupal was fun, E-mail marketing was great, and new seo tools were awesome. I look forward to how that company does in the future. It’s doing very well and has an excellent business model I was excited to learn more about.

Now I have time for CyborgCamp, MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Conference, Makerlab, Ignite Portland, Refresh Portland, blogging for the Discovery Channel at Nerdabout, AboutUs.org, Dorkbot, search engine optimization, Beer and Blog and of course, Cyborg Anthropology.

Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for the Discovery Channel write-up on Read Write Web. Marshall has been a tremendous help to me. In addition to showing me things like Skitch, he’s lent advice and support to me on numerous occasions.

I want to thank everyone in the Portland Tech community, but there are infinite people to thank. Perhaps I can thank an entire directory of great Tweeple at once (via AboutUs.org Portland Tech Twitter).

I think that’s about it. I am a little speechless at the support I’ve been given, and I can’t wait to share it with a wider audience.

Sincerely,

@caseorganic

The History of the Future was a big coffee-table book, and thus it sat on my family’s coffee-table for six years or so before it succumbed to a number of popular science and Wired magazines that forced it to a retirement on the bookshelf. What made the book extraordinary is that it contained within its pages a vast tome of images of what people in the 19th century conceived the year 2000 to be like. Among the premonitions was an image of a woman in a dark factory that sat on a sort of throne with a metal device on the top of her head. At her feet lay a long conveyor-belt of newborns stretching into infinity, as factory workers packaged them and sent them off in trucks.

Other, less radical images were much closer to the reality we have today. One showcased a man sitting in a comfortable chair looking up at a projection of some dancers on his living room wall. The caption went something like, “with the help of phono-vision, you can finally enjoy the pleasures of the can-can from the comfort of your own home”. This was a prediction made in 1888, or something like that, so I’ll call it impressive. Others had moon villages, and dystopic robots lacerating poor human victims.
I was eight years old when the book was shelved out of my memory, when the year 2000 arrived, I was older. Fourteen! To celebrate, I dusted off The History of the Future again and was able to read it this time instead of merely looking at the pictures. It inspired me to take all sorts of other books from different time periods and compare their contents to today’s technological results. If The History of the Future compared the 19th century to the 20th, then I wanted to compare the 60’s to the 00’s, or even the 80’s. What patterns might I find? What forgotten utopic visions, or dyspeptic nihilisms might I run into?

Searching for the right books wasn’t difficult. I’d watched the data of the public library  move more and more to the computer, and thus as time went on, the bookstacks began to collect dust. I began to recognize a 60’s book from a 70’s or 80’s and so on.

Books from the 60’s were the best. They were so optimistic and projectionary. They were always set Arial font with bolded Arial for titles, as if the world were simple, and so was solving problems. Pictures were generally black and while, but every once in a while, you’d run across a book with a greyscale streaked with a monotone yellow or pink or shocking blue. Books with more somber subjects resembled green computer screens.

Comments and Excerpts from Urban Structure, 1968. Paul Elek. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.

The Interfaces (Page 76-77).

“An interface may be described as a common boundary between two systems. The interface between transportation systems is the most neglected element that the passenger is force to tolerate. The attitude of transportation system operators seems to be, ‘leave the driving to us but how you get aboard and where you go when you get off is your problem’. Improvement in the attraction and holding of riders is needed more than anything else except frequent service.”

“The one ability that ninety-nine out of a hundred of the human race has that makes mass transit possible is that ability to walk. Why do we attempt to eliminate it as if it were unnatural? We seen to accept the walking required to use vertical transportation in buildings. We walk from our car or bus into the building, walk to the escalator, something even walk on it as it moves up, walk to the elevator, walk in, walk out, and walk to our desk. Why do we accept this? Because we are always moving towards our destination. The only wait is for the elevator and this is very short, and the interfaces are convenient, comfortable and pleasant, as much so as the building itself. Similar qualities of environment can be had in horizontal transportation.”

“Let us assume you live in suburbia, 25 miles from the centre of the town. You own two cars. Five minutes in one direction is the entrance to the freeway. Five minutes in another direction is the station for the suburban rapid transit. The freeway is belted around the town centre, requiring you to use the streets to reach the parking garage a block from your office building. The suburban rapid transit station is 12 minutes’ walk from your office building but connects directly with the CBD distributor which has a station in your parking garage. Let us compare the trip:

By Automobile

-Drive to freeway
-5 minutes
-25 miles on freeway
-15 miles at 60 mph 15
-6 miles at 45 mph
-4 miles at 15 mph 16 (on good morning - no bad weather -no accidents or breakdowns -no Christmas season rush, ect.)
-0.5 miles downtown at 9 mph 3.5
-Parking, elevator trip and walk to office building 3.5

Total Travel Time: 51 minutes

By auto and mass transit:

-Drive to station 5 minutes
-Park and walk to platform 1
-Average wait time (5 minute headway) 2.5
-25 miles on train at average speed of 50 mph 30
(all weather - all seasons)
-Transfer to distributor 1.5
(1 minute headway and change level)
-Distributor trip time at average 3
-Speed of 12 mph
-Change level and walk to office building

Total Travel Time: 45 minutes

If you use the building described above your drive-in trip requires the following interface changes and walking:

-Walk to garage
-Change into car
-Change out of car
-Walk to parking garage elevator
-Change into elevator
-Change out of elevator
-Walk to office building
-Change on to escalator
-Change off of escalator
-Walk to elevator
-Change on to elevator
-Change out of elevator
-Walk to office

Total 5 walks and 8 interface changes

If you take the transit:

-Walk to garage
-Change into car
-Change out of car
-Walk to train platform
-Change into train
-Change out of train
-Walk to escalator
-Change on to escalator
-Change off escalator
-Walk to distributor system
-Change into distributor
-Change out of distributor
-Walk to escalator
-Change on to escalator
-Change off escalator
-Walk to office building
-Change on to escalator
-Change off escalator
-Walk to elevator
-Change into elevator
-Change out of elevator
-Walk to office

Total 8 walks and 14 interface changes

The point is that our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them

.

-Several things must be done. Transit service must be improved to eliminate waiting times for all practical purposes at all hours.

-Interference interchanges must be fast, convenient, comfortable, without undue effort in a controlled environment.

The interface between two systems is a meter of performance to the passenger. And its performance depends on the expertness of the plan and its execution as well as the performance of the two systems which share it.

Other pages:

“The car as an extension of the foot instead of the car as a satellite part of the home: or the tendency for appliances to impose their presence as against the psychological need for ‘cosy’ or ‘friendly’ objects” (127).

(A Note here: that I’ve seen online in development of objects, and that is the tendency for objects in the lower class to be not be benign companions, and those for creative culturals to be designed to be companions; to be benign. The same is with vehicles. As a vehicle ages, it becomes less of a friend to it’s driver, and more of a liability. It needs to be replaced, because it turns against its owner.

In this way, technology is not man’s best friend, but man’s worst double-edged pet. It is a beautiful toy one minute, and next year is a shameful disgrace that no longer works. How easily this happens to the machine and the product! How more and more quickly these things turn on us!

We could make maps of ‘the psychology of space’ onto a shaped, gridded blob:

-”Social Zone”
-”Interchange Zone”
-”Quiet Zone”
-”Bed Capsule”

“A whole entirety of architectural plans that include electric vehicle tracks and future projections for robot implementation within the household. Text in overlays on the grid-work and planning of the new buildings” (131).

“Car expands to become place”, “floor can be re-formed instantly”, “private enclosures by now are also tunable” (1988).

Likelihoods….1990+ “Enclosures free-up”, “environment can be simulated - seen but not really there”, “demarcation between one persons domain and another becomes more pliable”.

So I feel like modular living is a very interesting concept to imagine.

Page 133 hosts an essay called ‘Drive-In Housing’, “A Proposition by David Greene and Michael Webb. In the first paragraph, the house is described in such a way, that “it can also be a mobile room which can plug itself into a drive-in bank and become extra floor area of that bank” (133).

This is back in 1968, before the widespread adoption of the Internet, of course, but that was my immediate thought when I read the above sentence. just this morning I accessed my bank account from the comfort of my room. The interface I used was the computer, and my transaction went as such:

Digitally:

-Walk to desk
-Remove chair
-Sit down
-Pull out laptop from drawer
-Turn on laptop
-Wait for laptop to load
-Click on ‘firefox’ internet client
-Enter username and password for college student network
-Enter bank address online
-Type in username and password for banking website
-Check account balances
-Click on transfer balances
-Enter in the account to transfer money from
-Enter the amount
-Transfer the amount
-Confirmation screen
-Log out of the website
-Close internet browser window
-Close laptop
-Remove self from chair

Non-digitally:

-Walk to bus stop
-Enter bus
-Leave bus
-Walk one block to bank
-Open bank door
-Wait in line for teller
-Greet teller
-Slide bank card to verify identity
-Ask teller to transfer money
-Wait
-Take receipt
-Walk one block to bus stop
-Enter bus
-Leave bus
-Walk back to dorm

In the first one, my computer did act as a modular interface that allowed my location to meld with the bank’s location. The act of drive-in housing that Greene and Webb talk about has been achieved by the Internet, and whose actual mechanical rumblings probably would look very similar to a mechanized real-life version of drive-in housing, were they to be mapped out.

Greene and Webb then go on to point out two intrinsic parts of architectural space. The inner space would be that of the “service unit, where space is at a premium, stuffed to the lid with the mechanics of the kitchen, the chancel, office or cinema serving Hamburgers, God, money or films to a lavishly planned and styled up consumer space; a restaurant, name, banking hall or auditorium. But this consumer space is, of course, made up of a series of mobile human containers - cars” (Elek, 133).

“In a drive-in home, the volume at any moment is directly proportional to the number of people in it; when the family is away at the seaside the house consists only of folded-up storage units; during a party as many as 30 mobile containers might gather around a unit to form a big space.”

Now, coming from the side of the intellectual, this is a very innovative and surprising view. But coming from the side of the common man, this is a very Arkansas model - the mobile home and mobile lifestyle. I am not suggesting that the entire state functions in this way, but I was told by a friend who lived there for a while that the lowest strata of Arkansas residents would move their mobile homes around in this way; not for parties, but for marriage. The trailer of the son or daughter’s partner would join the housing collective and form one big unit.

Besides, this model is used in order to gain entertainment from the Internet or the television. The resident does not have to move at all, and the hidden 4th dimensional magic does the shifting. Life could get confusing with all of that Tetris, like having to wait in line for the bank. If you brought part of your house with you, and all of the mobile bank ports were already filled, you’d block the street with your vehicle. If not, you’d wait in the mobile unit parking lot and take up space, just like regular cars do, but if your living space was lavish you’d probably take up more space than a car would.

And, if you were away at the seaside, what would prevent some lunatic from running away with your folded up house? Could you fold up your house and put it inside the rest of your house?

What if you had a dinner party and one of your guests had a terribly messy house, or a terrible cat that snuck into your section One could write a tragically amusing story about a mobile dinner party gone wrong, especially if one of the guests decided too long, like a month, and the host house had no way of detaching them. An if a mother-in-law showed up for a weekend, not only she would arrive, but her house too! Although if you met someone at a bar you wouldn’t have to invite them over to your place, because they’d already be there.

Of course the article is somewhat of a joke, because the authors go on to dissect their opening paragraph and go on to things or a more wild character.

Architecture is fun. This was my experiment with it.

——-

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

The Ignite Portland 4 lineup is in.

As Josh Bancroft said, “Man, that was TOUGH. We received over 50 talk ideas for Ignite Portland 4. The vast majority of them were really, really good. But we only have room for 13 talks on stage at the Bagdad (plus the traditional “What is Ignite?” talk)”.

Josh also wanted to give a HUGE “Thank You!” to everyone who submitted a talk that wasn’t chosen, pointing out that, “Your talk ideas made the competition fierce, and that competition means that the talks that were chosen are the cream of the crop. Even if you didn’t get picked, submit your talk idea next time - don’t lose heart! :-)”

Here are the 14 talks that will make up Ignite Portland 4. Follow the links to read the speaker’s description of their talk:

• What is Ignite? - Josh Bancroft
• Five Things Portland Can Learn From Kentucky in Five Minutes - Jeff Hardison
• A Short Introduction to Cyborg Anthropology - Amber Case
• Spirituality in Community: It’s not just for religion anymore - David Kominsky
• How to Bluff Your Way Through Life or a 5 Minute Presentation - Cami Kaos
• Cooking with the Seasons: The Garanimals Method - Katherine Gray
• Dating Rules for the Actual World - Alexis Rehrmann
• Story as Bloodsport: Battling to craft narrative - Melissa Lion
• How To Make People Think You’re a Portlander - Without Actually Living in the State of Oregon - Carolynn Duncan
• 7 One-Night Stands with a Baseball Fan - Nova Newcomer
• Divided We Win: 5 Reasons Why FOX News is Saving Our Media and Democracy - Abraham Hyatt
• Juice Up any Conversation or Presentation with 5 Impressive-Sounding Theories that Apply to EVERYTHING - Eric Anderson
• How to get people to do what you want them to do… - Betsy Richter
• 10 Karaoke Commandments - Alex Williams

The talks that are going to light up the stage at the Bagdad Theater on Thursday, November 13. Speakers, get working on your talks (the deadline to turn in your slides should have been in the acceptance email you received). Everyone else, stay tuned for information on tickets to come to Ignite Portland 4 - they’ll be free, as always - and get ready to be blown away at IP4!

This is the PowerPoint of a lightning talk given by Amber Case (@caseorganic) at Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference in Portland, Oregon on Sept 4+5th. NOTE: This was a 10-minute compressed presentation. From Telephone to Tweetup: an Abbreviated History of Technology and Social Exchange.

Some Theory Behind the Subject

The invention of the telephone ushered in an era of ‘on-demand’ social connection. These conversations were freeing, but were still limited to location and time. As communication technology matured, telephones became detached from their cords and were allowed to travel with their users.This detachment from location allowed conversation to happen in more times and more places. As the amount of time and space between nodes of connection decreased, the intersection of rapid news methods such as blogging, mobile technology, and chatrooms begin to merge. This convergence allowed dramatic increases in the ability to rapidly convey information to others. Instead of engaging with one person at a time, many are now capable of talking at once. No where is this more prevalent than on Twitter. It has found ways to connect communities, stave off suburban isolation, and warn of earthquakes before medical help can access them. The distance between individual and community will continue to decrease, and those products and services which decrease the amount of time and space it takes to create an action will be the most successful. Actions and devices will become lighter and lighter, and the social will continue to become more and more mobile. The convergence of various technologies will result in rapid learning and communication never imagined before. For details on the original event, look at the SlideShare Link.

Slideshow transcript

Slide 1: Every bullet point in this presentation is less than 140 characters.

Slide 2: This is because the text of these slides will also be broadcasted on Twitter at the time of this speech.

Slide 3: In this way, the speech can live in two places at once.

Slide 4: To one audience here at Inverge.

Slide 5: And also to 600+ followers on Twitter. [@Inverge] [#Inverge]

Slide 6: You can follow @caseorganic to see it in action.

Slide 7: [this is a waiting period because the Internet connection here is probably slow] @caseorganic

Slide 8: Hello.

Slide 9: My Name is Amber Case.

Slide 10: I am a Cyborg Anthropologist.

Slide 11: I study the symbiotic relationship between humans and computers…

Slide 12: And the psychology of space that is created by online environments.

Slide 13: Or, how the online experience is “ experienced” .

Slide 14: In Anthropology, one could call this a Digital Phenomenology

Slide 15: …

Slide 16: We live in a community that increasingly transcends time and space.

Slide 17: It is our relationship with technology that allows us extended capabilities.

Slide 18: Right now, search engines and people are interacting with your social profiles and websites.

Slide 19: While you aren’ t there.

Slide 20: And with social networking sites like Twitter, you can watch many conversations at once.

Slide 21: …

Slide 22: Consider Letter Writing, the first Internet.

Slide 23: The message to response ratio was very slow, but it was social.

Slide 24: Enter the Telephone.

Slide 25: Thus began the era of ‘ On Demand’ social communication.

Slide 26: This made the world very small.

Slide 27: You could stand on one side of the world, whisper something, and be heard on the other.

Slide 28: But to those who had never experienced a telephone, the device was as foreign as the Internet once was in 1993.

Slide 29: The fact that a human could speak into a machine and hear a voice on the other side gave the appearance of schizophrenia.

Slide 30: Over time, the strangeness of the new dissolved into formal society and the landline telephone started to get along with humans.

Slide 31: Those living in suburban communities were less capable of reaching actual members of society on a daily basis.

Slide 32: …and the telephone allowed them an escape from the isolation of industrial modernity.

Slide 33: But the telephone was limited by the length of its cord and its proximity to a phone jack.

Slide 34: So along came the cordless phone.

Slide 35: It was free! {yay!}

Slide 36: …to run around the house…

Slide 37: So then the Cell Phone arrived on the scene. {take that!}

Slide 38: While it was the least rooted to place,

Slide 39: The Cell Phone did not offer information transparency.

Slide 40: It only allowed one conversation at a time (excluding 3-way).

Slide 41: Cell Phone + Text allowed decentralized message access and multiple recipients, but limited message transparency.

Slide 42: Then Twitter happened.

Slide 43: It was not rooted to place and time.

Slide 44: It allowed multiple communication channels and recipients.

Slide 45: Users were praised for contribution and helpfulness to those in their network.

Slide 46: Why does it work?

Slide 47: Twitter is a centralized technosocial hybrid that asks a single question that can never be fully answered.

Slide 48: …

Slide 49: What

Slide 50: Are

Slide 51: You

Slide 52: Doing?

Slide 53: The question is asked by all, to all. Socialization is aided by machine.

Slide 54: The time and space it takes to absorb and disperse information is compressed.

Slide 55: Twitter takes advantage of the 4th Dimensionality of the Internet.

Slide 56: [Analog] [Demonstration]

Slide 57: Lets look at some Architectural Theory

Slide 58: “ Our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them.\”

Slide 59: “ It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them.\”

Slide 60: “ Interference interchanges must be fast, convenient, comfortable, without undue effort in a controlled environment.”

Slide 61: The General Theory of Relativity

Slide 62: The shape of space makes people more, and people create the shape of space.

Slide 63: The Analog World is full of Friction

Slide 64: The level of Friction in the Digital world has far less.

Slide 65: Online, we are capable of innovating in a frictionless atmosphere.

Slide 66: There are dangers to this.

Slide 67: Frictionless development becomes cancerous if not restrained.

Slide 68: Too many features/innovations reduce overall value.

Slide 69: LIKE FACEBOOK.

Slide 70: Now, lets talk about highways.

Slide 71: Highways are giant projects requiring high levels of funding and cooperation.

Slide 72: To dig up a highway and move it costs millions of dollars.

Slide 73: But rerouting a path online takes a few minutes with a 301 redirect.

Slide 74: People, when compressed, can do more in less time and less space.

Slide 75: Actions flow to spaces with reduced activation energy and barriers to entry.

Slide 76: Humans and Technology Co-create each other through an Actor/Network of technosocial interaction.

Slide 77: “ In the search for itself and an affectionate sociality, it easily gets lost in the jungle of the self…”

Slide 78: “ Someone who is poking around in the fog of his of his or her own self is no longer capable of noticing that this isolation,

Slide 79: “ This ’solitary-confinement of the ego’ is a mass sentence. [Ulrich Beck, 40 in Bauman’ s Liquid Modernity 2000:37]”

Slide 80: [So Technosocial Interaction is about Transcending the silos of Mental Isolation]

Slide 81: Hello

Slide 82: The key to the semantic web is to always reduce the steps in user action.

Slide 83: Twitter engages the user in ways that do not decay.

Slide 86: See SlideShare for image

Slide 87: See Slideshare for image

Slide 88: Husband on Google Street View

Slide 89: Old map

Slide 90: See Slideshare for image.

Slide 92: @caseorganic On Social Sites Everywhere Thesis: “Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement” Available @:oakhazelnut.com

———-
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthopologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can contact her by E-mail at caseorganic at gmail.com, or on Twitter @caseorganic.

The date’s been set. Due to scheduling conflicts (including the event being really close to Thanksgiving) CyborgCamp Portland will be held on December 6th, 2008, at Portland’s CubeSpace, which is at 622 SE Grand Ave Portland, Oregon 97214

You can RSVP for CyborgCamp on Upcoming if you’d like to attend, but note that the formal registration will begin in a few weeks. If you follow @cyborgcamp or @caseorganic on Twitter, you’ll know when you can officially register for the event. If you don’t use Twitter, you can E-mail caseorganic at gmail.com and I’ll personally let you know when official registration is open. There will also be a link from the Upcoming page, so check back in a few weeks.

CyborgCamp is a conversation about the future of technology, and how humans fit in.

Want to help out? You can do it in 4 different ways!

1. Sponsor. E-mail Nate Angell at ixmati at gmail.com or Twitter @xolotl. See the sponsors page.
2. Blog, Tweet, write and broadcast the event (before, during and after.) See the Marketing Page Email Amber Case at caseorganic at gmail.com or Twitter @caseorganic
   

3. Volunteer before, during and after the event. Email Bram Pitoyo at brampitoyo at gmail.com or Twitter @brampitoyo We need 3 more volunteers for the morning set-up (7 Am) and take down (6-7Pm).

4. Attend. RSVP on Upcoming.org (Note that RSVP does not guarantee you a space if you’re not paid for register).

What to Expect at the Conference:

One room will be devoted to keynote sessions on various aspects of the cyborg (technological, health, spiritual, communication, humanity, etc.), and the other three rooms of the conference will be unconferences, done BarCamp-style

Who should come?

This is an educational mindsharing and networking event that encourages high-level interdisciplinary interaction.

Classrooms, individuals and businesses are encouraged to attend the event remotely. It will be livestreamed through multiple channels and will be archived and tagged for future viewing. Details on remote conference access will be available a week before the conference begins.

Tags

Flickr Tag: cyborgcamp

Twitter: @cyborgcamp or #cyborgcamp

All other social media: cyborgcamp

See you there!

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Troy Harlan, wherein we talked about information gathering, filtering and consuming (naturally,) human factors, trilobites, reading at 2,000 words per minute, INTP’s, striving for objectivity, The Black Swan, hunches, and why it’s better to “have no map at all than have the wrong map”—all recorded on the road from St. Johns to downtown Portland.

Historical Perspective

When I was six, my mom felt it necessary for me to read the books that she read when she was little. One week, we headed to the Powell’s books of West - the Tattered Cover Book Store in downtown Denver, Colorado. A few hours later, we were on our way home with a stack of 14 books with interesting titles and covers.

Which 14 books were these? The Oz Books of course. It turns out that besides the Wizard of Oz, author L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) authored 13 sequels to the original favorite…mostly due to letters from his adoring fans. When he died in the early 1900’s, his illustrator took over the writing process from him, and wrote an additional number of books. I never read those. I was a stalwart L. Frank Baum fan and left it at that.

My mother had hardback illustrated originals of all of the Oz books when she was growing up. However, she only had one left when I was ready to read them. This was the fourth book, called Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. It was falling apart from its bindings, but it was the first one I read. It was also one of the last books on my parent’s shelves that I read. They knew they had to do something or I’d keep reading the 1960 World Book Encyclopedias and have a brain full of interesting but obsolete knowledge.

Hence, the entire Oz Series was purchased in one night. Most of them were cheaper paperback versions of the original hardcover editions. I soon found out that this allowed greater portability.

Literary Devouring

The next 4 months of the photo album were nothing but pictures of me reading the Oz books in  windowsills, treetops, cupboards, swingsets, the breakfast table and a number of restaurants, car trips, and hotel rooms.

I think this period of time might have influenced my future self quite a bit. You see, the Oz Books were full of alternate realities, cultures, and societies, and showed how a core group of characters interacted with them. There were flat headed people, Wheelers (creatures with shopping cart wheels for feet), people cut out of paper, talking hens, and even the H.M. Woggle Bug, T.E. (H.M. stands for Highly Magnified, and T.E. for Thoroughly Educated) who I did not like very much as a character, but admired for his ability to make knowledge pills that one could swallow in order to educate oneself.

Sociology!

The Oz Books added a distinct layer to my thinking process, and made it even more difficult to go to sleep at night. Before I went to Preschool, my dad thought it was important to teach me how to build model rockets, solder LEDs into circuit boards, and understand the laws of physics, gravity and wormholes.

So already I was up all night thinking about time and space compression, the fourth dimension, and new forms of technology, I had the bizarre cultural explorations of the Oz characters to add to this. This is probably what led me to read the first five pages of my book on sociology in college before grinning wildly and running to the admin office to declare a concentration in sociology/anthropology.

Portland is the Land of Oz

When I first moved to Portland 3.5 years ago, I discovered that it resembled the Land of Oz quite a bit. Portland is very green, much like the Emerald City, Compared to Wyoming (where I lived for four years before moving out West), Portland is a fantastic place where anything can happen at any time. paradise.

Quadrants in the Land of Oz

The Land of Oz does not just consist of the Emerald City — it has four quadrants that surround it. There’s the Munchkin Country, the Quadling Country, the Wikie Country and the Gillikin Country. Each one has a different flavor and type of inhabitant. And when you really think about it, Portland has similar quadrants. And Portland has a bunch of different characters too.

Treating Portland as Oz

So maybe I’m Dorthy, or a Sociologist or Anthropologist or something like that, but I begin exploring the different sections of Portland the moment I realized that it resembled the Land of Oz. Now that I’ve finished college, I’ve decided to live in each quadrant of Portland for a few months in order to check out the all of the awesome inhabitants that exist around here. I lived in SW at the beginning of the summer, then moved SE for a month, and now I’m living in NE, right off of Killingsworth and Rodney Ave. It is my favorite place so far. I live in an enormously ancient house, and I can ride the Max into town every morning. Compare that to SW, where only cars can survive.

What’s Next?

I’m considering St. John’s for a little while, but NW will probably be end my tour of Portland. There will be a lot to write up after the tour is finished, so I’ll need a small place with a table and close proximity to downtown. So that’s about it. I’m sure I’ll be able to hang out with some amazing people out here in NE for the time being…and might even stay here for a longer period of time than I previously planned. Kerry Finsand, Derrek Wayne, Katherine Gray and many other Tweeple live out here. I’ll have to watch Shizzow.

If you live in the area, please let me know, and we can meet up at some point! If you know of any great places to eat or coffeeshops in the area, please let me know as well. It’s the most exciting quadrants I’ve experienced so far.