Fictional character creation is a useful tool in creating an intriguing narrative that captures attention, especially since the character can be easily adapted to fit different digital spaces, such as Video, Microblogging, and Image sharing sites. Media diversity  is also useful in building and unifying online communities that access with media in separate channels.

Creating a consistent brand all through many all social sites one of the best ways to maximize the value of a character or brand campaign.

Ryan Summers and I created a presentation on how to track users across various social media sites using mostly free tools. It was given at Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland, Oregon.

History

A few weeks before the MITX awards ceremony, ISITE Design created a short video called “El Consultador” as an introduction to other agencies.

The El Consultador campaign generated diverse social data. This created issues with tracking data from multiple social media sites across problems with social media is that these is no singular way to gather and rank all of the data over time. Tools like Radian6 and Trucast are in use by larger agencies and businesses, but there exist an increasing amount of free tools for data visualization and engagement reporting that are available online.

This Powerpoint was made for an audible presentation. I collaborated with Ryan Summers of ISITE design on it and presented it at Web Analytics Wednesday. I will attempt to explain the results/processes in a textual manner here.

Profiles Created for the El Consultador Campaign

We used analytic data from Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and Twitter to determine the most successful aspects of the campaign.

On Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/2309025

On YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz6jt_aSFg0

On Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/elconsultador/
(Workers at ISITE design superimposed the Consultador face onto a variety of characters in pop culture).

On Twitter:
http://twitter.com/elconsultador

——

Key Performance Indicators

We determined a number of Key Performance Indicators of the social media campaign.

-Direct awareness of ISITE design agency
-3rd part mentions
-Social media followers (number of Twitter followers, comments on YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr).
-Direct communication

YouTube Reports

We used YouTube reports to track the engagement with the video campaign.

Data tracked included:

-Age Demograpics
-Gender Demograpics
-Discovery Sources
-Timeline Trends

The campaign was viewed predominately by 26-45 year old males and mostly during and around the date of the MITX awards. This is the demographic it was aimed at.

Vimeo Stats

Vimeo is a high-quality Video sharing site with a limited but very engaged traffic demographic. We used Vimeo data to find more about who engaged with the campaign and compared it to YouTube data.

Flickr Reports

Flickr has a reporting tool for image views over time for every image. The data can be accessed with a premium Flickr account. We used this data to determine the most viewed (strongest/most impactful) pictures associated with El Consutador on the El Consultador account, and which images should be associated with the campaign on other sites (if future campaigns needed to be implemented).

Google Analytics

We used data from Google Analytics for the page on which El Consultador existed on the ISISTE Webpage. Data was tracked from the “El Consultator” and “MITX” keywords. New visitors and direct traffic were also analyzed.

Social Nodes

The campaign was picked up by three prominent bloggers, including Chris Brogan, Davaid Armano (VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass), and C.C. Chapman (Prominent figure in the community of podcasting, new media, cofounder of the Advanced Guard, a marketing company which focuses on utilizing social media and other emerging technologies).

Blogs linking to the campaigns were not found via inlink searches in Yahoo! Site Explorer, but with an intelligence feed created in Yahoo! Pipes (see below)

Tracking Overall Data

Custom intelligence feeds are useful for checking overall propagation of data. Yahoo! Pipes provides a free custom way to aggregate data across Google blog search, Google news, Technorati, Flickr, and Twitter.

———

Data Visualization and Tracking for Twitter

I presented an extended set of tools and data visualization methods for Twitter. Links for all of them are here:

Reports/Demographic Research:
Summize
http://tweetstats.com/

TweetVolume
http://tweetvolume.com/

Twitter Mobile (vs. Twitter in browser)
http://m.twitter.com/home

Neoformix Twitter Stream Graphs
http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterStreamGraphs/view.php (I provided a live demo of this).

Twitter Stream Graphs are a simple way to rsearch keyword volume associated with a brand or campaign. Neoformix also tracks keywords over time, meaning that one can see when a certain keyword became popular.
——–

Future Suggestions:
More Flickr photos could be linked to all of the other accounts, such as Flickr, Youtube, and Vimeo. Linking together social media campaigns in a more robust fashion will affect CTR’s by making the campaign spreadable across various demographic profiles and types of social media users.

——-

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who studies new media and the relationship between humans and computers. She enjoys data visualization (click for more info on conference tracking), search engine optimization (ask), and how marketing works in the online ecosystem.

She graduated from Lewis & Clark College in May 2008 with a degree in Sociology/Anthropology and wrote her thesis on cell phones and the effect of technology on cultural constructions of space and privacy.

You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, or drop her an E-mail at caseorganic[at]gmai[dot]com. She’s spoken at various conferences including MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3, Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conferece, Ignite Portland, and Ignite Boulder.

She also blogs at Nerdabout.com and http://www.blog.makerlab.org, a Portland new media incubator. She founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and technology. She is also involved with building and studying electronics with DorkbotPDX.

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.

———–

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.

A lot of times we wait around for technology to just “appear” like we see in films. But if we continue to do that, nothing will get built. Thankfully, people are out there filling in the gaps.

There’s a set of a new sign language for controlling movement from a distance. Very intuitive and simple to learn. Especially with the rewards of being able to move things across the room without touching them.

The rest of this post is over at the CyborgCamp.com Blog, as it relates directly to the event.

Gesture Recognition Demo at the MIT Media Lab with Jamie Zigelbaum.

—————

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who also posts over at the Makerlab Blog, which is something you might enjoy reading if you enjoyed reading the post above. It’s about more experimental tech and activities related to pushing the limits of art and technology. If not, you can always follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

In 1893 Sociologist Emile Durkheim posited that small, young societies were mechanical in nature, but as they grew in size they began to become more and more organic [1. Distinction appears in Durkheim's 1893 work The Division of Labour in Society. Mechanical and Organic solidarity are ways in which social solidarity is fostered.]. Industry has changed dramatically since the industrial revolution; it has transformed from the dark and heavy stuff of the great machines to the light materials that are stainless steel and microfiber and carbon nanotube. This trend has allowed products, ideas, to be lighter as well. In reality, they have been lifted so much that they are beginning to resemble organic structures.

The Bloodstream

Highway systems resemble blood vessels, and tiny roads mere capillaries. Trucks carry proteins in and out of the cells of cities, and road teams repair broken road structures. The whole of the human system is becoming increasingly connected and interdependent. With the addition of airplanes and the Internet, society is reaching a mature phase: one of organic development, flow, and function.

What does this mean for the future? Specifically, business, ideas, search engine marketing, travel, employment? It means that differing sorts of humans are beginning to evolve, or specialize. These different sorts of specialists will become so through technology and expertise. The global traveler that is no longer tied to space will be the equivalent of a worker bee flying the best flower, trying to get the best pollen to sustain the world hive. This pollen is idea. On a more populated level, this specialist represents the neural impulse: the fastest and lightest form of actor in this new actor network of technosocial beings.

There is the heavy and the light. These two dichotomies will rule the social darwinism of the future. The companies with too much heaviness in them will fail, because the most successful companies/people/ideas will be able to float above the rest (by floating I mean less clicks to get to action, and decreasing the repetition of similar tasks so that more time is spent on meaningful action, the aggregation of relevant, individualized data) and by the rest I imply the ground layer that is indeterminate mass culture. If advertising was compiled and pasted into 20 languages at a time and broadcast all of the world, it meant that everyone would wear Levi’s and drink Coca-Cola. There is no longer a singular message of consumption.

Supersaturation has nowhere to go except crystallization and overflow. Everything that was mass before has become personal now. Consumers, understanding that they’re not unique snowflakes, want to be unique snowflakes. Consumers, empty of social relations and legitimate social definition points, are seeking what they can in order to differentiate themselves from others.

Those ideas that float are like balloons for undifferentiated sheep consumers, and they will attach to those unique moments for as long as they can, provided they provide something different.

On Traffic

I don’t drive very often, but when I do, I think of traffic as a bloodstream.

On one occurrence, I was driving on Interstate 5 in Denver, Colorado. I was playing Jazz music at the time. It was a sort of impromptu piece that had nothing in it to suggest an unpassionate collective of machines racing in unison down pavement. They were a liquid stream. They were a river. The lifeblood of the city. All moving forward, forward, forward — bringing life to other areas of the ecosystem. Strangely shaped pieces of metal that float by at high speeds, somehow constrained to staying within tiny lines.

But I was not. I was objectively examining how strange it was to be in this rushing stream of vehicles. I was also tired and unused to Denver traffic. Everything was reduced to plain speed, and I wanted to experience reality in an uncompressed space. I was used to walking; used to Portland.

But I knew I had to synch up.

I remembered reading an article on drivers listening to techno music sped up while on the Autobahn, while other music slowed their driving patterns. I realized that I could test it out right then.

So I turned on the music.

Immediately I began to blend in and synch up with the movement of the vehicles around me. My vehicle became just another blood cell in the circulatory system, inching froward with every beat. It was organic and mechanical at once. I lived Durkheim’s mechanical systems analogy through choosing mechanical systems to orient myself into an organic technological flow. It seems the wrong way around. If the traffic were more organic, I could’ve used Jazz.

(Side note: I wanted to provide a groundwork for applying a sociological concept to streaming media online — it is the same as traffic/blood cells, but on a different scale. There will be a post on that later, but I don’t want to give the whole thing away without making one think first).

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Antrhopologist 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).

People are searching for things all the time on the web. If you’re a blogger looking to write good content, it is a good idea to get out there on the net to find what people are searching for. There are a few tools for doing this, but I wanted to isolate one of them and play with it for a minute.

@marknunney posted a link on Twitter about a “new tool from Wordtracker for content ideas”, so I clicked over to the site and read the following:

“People often type complete questions into search engines: if you find these questions and answer them, you could get some great search traffic”.

Below it was a box for entering in a word, so I tried a few words out. The results were amusing enough for me to want to share them. Further analysis follows.

Results for Life

I found the results for the word ‘life’ to be what one might expect. Right now, people are wondering about life insurance. However, the ‘color of life in ancient egypt’ is something that is phrased in such as strange way that it could warrant further research — especially since it was looked up 156 times. At #6, ‘what is the meaning of life’ is asked. I guess life insurance and ‘how time of my life was chosen for american idol’ were more important.

My personal favorite is #13 — ‘how to summon a real life dragon’. I bet if someone were to write a post on that, they’d get lots of hits. Maybe lots of Diggs too. I’m not sure how I’d go about researching that one. It’s probably better than trying to write a post on #8 — ‘how to ruin someone’s life’.

Results for E-mail

How does E-mail work? Apparently people are asking this question. But there is an important trend happening elsewhere in these question results. That would be the address of one (or rather two) ‘cole sprouse’. They happen to be identical twins, and are, according to the Cole Sprouse Wikipedia article, “known for their roles in the film Big Daddy…and for portraying the title characters on Disney Channel sitcoms”. Good luck finding their E-mail address, as well as the address of Prince Harry, Zac Efron and Jamie Spears.

But you can write about how to E-mail pictures, or #9’s ‘who invented E-mail’. That one actually seems particulary interesting. The narrative histories of everyday things are always a joy to read about.

Results for Business

‘How to write a business plan?’ Can’t one just download a template from Microsoft Word or something? That question is really a broad one. It depends on what kind of business one wishes to start. #3’s ‘how to start a cell phone business’ is pretty good. #10’s ‘what is the best business opportunity’ is a really intense question that cannot totally be answered. #11’s ‘how to start a web design business’ is actually very answerable by a variety of sources such as Design Float and Smashing Magazine.

#8’s ‘how to start a business with no money’ is interesting. I think it’s never been easier — and more difficult. It’s probably time that’s the big issue. Taking a lot of time really works. A cell phone business might manifest as an online reseller of cell phone accessories.

Results for Google

I was confused by these search results. I didn’t think they’d be this broad, or this ill-informed. Are Google founders Larry and Sergey that obscure? I wonder what sources Wordtracker is using for its search queries.

It might also be interesting to create a post on the founders of Google just to see what happened to it. I’m sure Wikipedia and Google have this question answered already.

Results for Yahoo

I queried Yahoo! just to see what would happen. Very similar to Google’s results, except there was a question of what Yahoo stood for. I’m actually wondering that myself right now (goes off to find the answer).

The answer as to what Yahoo! stands for comes from About.com’s ‘Internet for Beginners’. The answer is that “Yahoo! (spelled with an exclamation mark) is short for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. Apparently, “The original name: “David’s and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, was appropriate, but not exactly catchy“. You can read the rest of Paul Gil’s Yahoo! article for the whole story.

Results for Money

The search results for money really surprised me. I had no idea that so many people wanted to know about ‘what presidents are on money’. I wonder what demographic asks this question the most. Is it youth? Is it due to a bet? Is it a homework assignment? Perhaps it is to clarify the use of slang words.

#2 and #3’s ‘how much money does it cost to open a bar’, and ‘how can kids make money’ are interesting. I’m wondering if more kids than parents searched for that phrase and if there a way to tell. As for #2, a lot of people seem to dream of owning and running their own bars.

I thought that #7’s ‘how to make money’ would be higher up on the results than that, but apparently the presidents on money trumps that. It’s also a much easier niche to write for than the seedy ‘how to make money’ post. #8 and #9’s ‘millionaires who give money to help’, and ‘millionaires who give free money’ make a lot of sense. Those questions make me wonder how many millionaires out there actually give money out to strangers who ask for it over the Internet. Generally, processes and charities are involved. Darn! Perhaps Google or a blogger will write about another way?

Results for Puppy

Puppies. They’re somewhat irresistible. So irresistible that a lot of people question just how large they’re going to get, apparently. It would be useful to make a site that gave information on how large any breed of puppy was going to grow. It would be complete with a puppy weight calculator, to answer question #3 as well. One would simply have to enter in the breed and the age of the puppy and the Internet robots would do the rest. Hooray for calculators.

I wonder how many new pet owners typed in #7 after watching their new puppy pee on their freshly installed carpet? Is there any way to tell? Perhaps they should’ve just stuck to drawing a puppy instead of owning one, like those who searched for #4’s ‘how to draw a puppy’.

Results for Read

This was wild. I did not expect to get results on horoscopes, tarot cards or reading palms. I’m not sure what I expected originally, but it wasn’t this. I thought people liked books more than daily horoscopes. My college experience has given me some explaination for these results. Everyone in my dorm was obsessed with reading their horoscopes to each other. Some of them even printed out astrological charts. I didn’t participate.

But result #6 makes a lot of sense in this respect. Aside from horoscopes, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is one of those books that’s assigned to the majority of school districts across the United States. I’m assuming a lot of kids didn’t want to purchase the book, lent it to someone else, forgot it at home or at school, or were looking for a quick way to read a chapter before an annoying quiz after lunch or homeroom period.

Results for RSS

What *is* RSS? Oh man. It is probably the greatest thing since the last iteration of really cool stuff that people enjoyed. It allows the quick and easy access of content without having to browse for it. I recommend watching RSS in Plain English instead of searching for RSS in Google. It’s an extremely short video by the Common Craft show. Totally sweetopian.

Hmm…#13’s ‘how do i find my twitter rss fed url’ is curious. Not only is fed spelled incorrectly, it is searched for 7 times. I’m sure there’s a great tutorial on this out there somewhere. …Or is there? I suppose that’ for random people to find out.

Results for SEO

These were not surprising. ‘What does seo stand for?’ Search engine optimization, of course. How does one ‘become a certified seo?’ Well gee whiz, that’s a hard one. Probably from showing it on your own site, and the sites of your clients. And by not selling links from bad sites. Also, by educating people thoughly about your techniques.

‘How to set up seo?’ Go through a standard checklist on your website, checking for alt tags, title tags, a sitemap, ect. I like the free Website Grader from HubSpot for a really quick website check and grade.

Results for Six

I wondered about numbers next, so I checked out an the number six. Purely arbitrary (by arbichance? arbitration?). I was amused to find such a long phrase at the top of the question results. ‘The six basic fears and how to eliminate them’. That is totally a book by Sharry Harris. #2’s ‘what are the six terms of geography’ totally sounds like a query taken directly from a homework assignment.

#3’s ‘what are the six parts in a business letter’ has reminded me to re-examine my business letters for the correct number of parts. Perhaps I can do that while developing a six pack while using Six Sigma techniques.

Results for Twitter

‘What is Twitter?’ Ahh…if only there were an easy way to explain that. ‘How to use twitter’ is even more complicated. See, it is the emptiness of a vessel that gives it use-value, and Twitter is an empty vessel. The question of ‘What are you doing’ is never fully answered. Thus, how to use Twitter is like telling someone how to use a vase. The emptiness gives it many uses, whereas a tutorial can only give a finite amount of use-cases.

Finding the Twitter RSS feed URL is another matter. Simply scroll down to the bottom left corner of your Twitter page and click on RSS. Or you can right click to ‘copy the address’ to place it elsewhere with ease.

Results for Unicorn

So Unicorns are very important to the state of the world. They give us a fantastic antithesis with which to view things. I assumed that I would get different results because of this mindset, but I did not. The number one search for unicorn relates to finding free Unicorn pictures to color. That is a total let-down.

I guess people are interested in drawing Unicorns, though. Perhaps they’ll make some awesome viral Unicorn videos when they get older. Like Charlie the Unicorn.

Final Verdict

WordTracker’s new tool is pretty fun, but I’m not sure how terribly useful it really is. I think you’re the judge for that.

————-

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

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

I wanted to write about this before, but I had to wait until everything was secured and verified.

In September, Steve Gehlen invited me to speak about Cyborg Anthropology at Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference on September 5th of this year. The conference was a refreshing and entertaining look at where entertainment, art, culture, business, and social media are going. The keynote was Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium.

After Inverge, Joshua and I compared theorists and research, and had a great time socializing along with all of the other conference attendees and speakers. A month later, Joshua informed me of a conference at MIT called the Futures of Entertainment, and wondered if I would be interested in being on a panel on social media. He said that my analysis and understanding of both the academic and corporate world would provide a useful bridge between two separate fields.

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape. This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium’s new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow. Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia and world building, comics and commerce, social media and spreadability, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

I very carefully prepared two forms of submission — one on Cyborg Anthropology from the academic perspective, and another from the business perspective.

However, I feel that what I am doing pales in comparison to the accomplishments of those whom I will be participating with. I am both honored and overwhelmed by this opportunity. I hope to be able to add value to some aspect of the conference.

I’ll be participating on the social media panel, which is described as follows:

“Moving lives online, creating conversations across geography, connecting with consumers - how is social media defining the current entertainment landscape? As people not only put more content online, but conduct more of their daily lives in networked spaces and via social networking sites, how are social media influencing how we think of audiences? Video-sharing platforms have changed how we think of production and distribution, and Facebook gifts point to the value of virtual properties, how are these sites enabling other processes of production or distribution practices. Spaces where commercial and community purposes intertwine, what are the implications for privacy, content management, and identity construction of social media? How have they impacted notions of civic engagement?”

Conference Attendees

Kim Moses - Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer, Lost, Medium, Yochai Benkler - Harvard Law School, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press), John Caldwell - UCLA, Production Culture (Duke University Press), Henry Jenkins - MIT, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), Alex McDowell - Production Designer, The Watchmen, Kevin Slavin - Area/Code, Sabrina Caluori - Director, Marketing and Promotions, HBO Online, Grant McCracken - Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (Indiana University Press), Donald K Ranvaud - Buena Onda Films, Amanda Lotz - University of Michigan, The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press), Gail De Kosknik - UC Berkeley, How to Save Soap Opera: Histories and Futures of an Iconic Genre, Joe Marchese - socialvibe.com, Amber Case - Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant, Hazelnut Consulting, Mauricio Mota - New Content (Brazil), Alisa Perren - Georgia State University, The Media Industry Studies Book (Blackwell Publishing)….more.

Steve Gehlen, Paige Saez (on a grant from PNCA) and Kris Krug will be flying out to join me at the conference. In case you’re in the area too, the conference information is as follows:

MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3

Friday, Nov 21 8:30a to Saturday, Nov 22 8:30a
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): Wong Auditorium, Cambridge, MA

Thanks

A great big thank you to everyone in the Portland Tech community for being supportive and welcoming of interdisciplinary thought. Special thanks to Joshua Green and Steve Gehlen.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

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