I wrote my thesis on the application of Cyborg Anthropology to Cell Phone use. Since then, I’ve had numerous requests to download it.

It is due to these requests that I’ve made it downloadable from this site. The title of it is Cell Phones and its Technosocial Sites of Engagement. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via E-mail or via @caseorganic on Twitter.

Abstract

“This paper provides examination of the effects of widespread mobile telephony on the social and spatial relations of individuals in the postmodern state. This is the realm of Cyborg Anthropology, which, according to co-developer Donna Haraway, “explores the production of humanness through machines” (Gray 1993:342). The widespread adoption of the cell phone has morphed five aspects that Zygmunt Bauman (2000) considered to be the basis of share human life: emancipation, individuality, time/space, community, and work. Changes to individuality and community can be described through an analysis of the constructions of public and private space.When the public sphere becomes completely private the social sphere will become public again, but the field of interaction will be global instead of local. The conclusions gathered from an analysis of these spaces will be used to show how cell phones have changed the construction time/space and emancipation of the human in the postmodern state. This paper discusses the effects of mobile telephony on emancipation, individuality, time/space and community through the theoretical lenses of Erving Goffman, Victor Turner, Marc Augé, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour.”

Thesis Excerpt

“The airport terminal is a sign of mass transit in the modern age. It is a place that is by its very nature liminal, because it is neither ‘here nor there’ and serves as a transition point from visitors that just came from ‘here’, and are going to ‘there’. “If a place can be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (Augé, 1995:77-78). The airport terminal is a place that is not concerned with identity or the historical or the relational, and thus Marc Augé would call it a non-space. An airport is a non-place that has tangible weight and space, but the cell phone’s space is compressed and unseen. If the space in which the cell phone exists is a place, then where does that place lie? If the cell phone’s technosocial manifestation lies on the realm of the unseen, the auditory extra-terrain, it would stand to reason that in Marc Augé’s perspective, the cell phone exists as a non-place. However, the cell phone, while not seen, can be heard, and the cell phone’s technosocial manifestation concerns a real social connection that, while neither ‘here nor there’, has historical and relational aspects. The cell phone, in providing a link to the historical and relational aspects of a social existence, also provides a link to identity. The auditory realm of the cell phone is a place.

Table of Contents

I. Abstract

II. Introduction

III. The Actor Network and the Technosocial Hybrid

IV. Constructions of Liminality

1. ‘Put that Dog on Hold!’ Canine Companions and RCF

V. Constructions of the Public and the Private

1. The Landscape of the Landline

2. Face-Saving and Cell Phone Use

3. Privacy and Boundary Maintenance

4. Negotiating Temporary Private Space

VI. Place and Non-Place

1. Time/Space Compression

2. Auditory Space as a Place

3. Connecting in Non-Places

VII. The Technosocial Womb

1. The Allure of the Mobile Auditory Place

2. Face Maintenance and Personal Ethnomethodologies

VIII. Conclusions on Cell Phones and Modernity IX. References

About the Author

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant based out of Portland, Oregon. Her current speaking venture is at Inverge, the Interactive Convergence Conference.

On Sept. 4+5 an interdisciplinary thought-leader event will hit Portland. The name of the Conference is Inverge: The Interactive Convergence.

What is Inverge?

An interdisciplinary event that focuses on the convergence of media platforms, of virtual + physical, content + advertising, and corporate content + consumer-generated content.

The presentations are high-level, informative and conceptual, pointing the way toward the future and facilitating advanced professional development.

How does it work?

Inverge brings presenters and attendees together from a variety of professions and disciplines to explore changes and opportunities presented by the increasing digitization of media, the democratization of distribution and the proliferation of connectivity into new areas.

Cyborg Anthropology

As a Cyborg Anthropologist, I am very interested in this conference. I’ve been studying convergence culture for as long as I can remember. It is one of the most unique and challenging subjects that has ever struck humanity.

Steve Gehlen, Inverge organizer and founder of the Internet Strategy Forum invited me to speak at the event. I’ll be presenting a lighting talk on Friday, September 5th at 1Pm.

A Ten Minute History of Technological Compression

From Telephone to Tweetup: an abbreviated history of technology and social exchange.

Presentation Summary

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.

Other Presentation Topics

Portland’s Scott Kveton, Chairman, OpenID Foundation, VP of Open Platforms, Vidoop.

You can view the rest of the featured speakers on the Inverge Website.

Joshua Green, Research Manager, Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT.

Renny Gleeson, Global Director of Digital Strategies, Wieden+Kennedy.

Registration

If you haven’t already, you can still Register for Inverge.

All Inverge 2008 paid registrants will receive a complimentary copy of the JupiterResearch report entitled Media Trends: Understanding Change Catalysts, published earlier this year. This represents a $1,500 value. If you happen to be a company, this report will probably be very useful to you.

——–

Thanks for reading Hazelnut Tech Talk! If you’re interested in continuing the conversation, feel free to comment on this post. You can follow me online through @caseorganic or E-mail.

A cyborg (shorthand for “cybernetic organism”) is a symbiotic fusion of human and machine.

Humans have always developed technologies to help them survive and thrive, but in recent decades the rapid escalation and intensification of the human-technology interface have exceeded anything heretofore known. From satellite communications to genetic engineering, high technologies have penetrated and permeated the human and natural realms.

The Augmentation of Biological and Mental Landscapes

Indeed, so profoundly are humans altering their biological and physical landscapes that some have openly suggested that the proper object of anthropological study should be cyborgs rather than humans, for, as Donna Haraway says, we are all cyborgs now”.

Time and Space Compression

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.

CyborgCamp

Amber Case is a founder of CyborgCamp, which will be held in Portland, Oregon on Nov. 22, 2008. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

Speaking

She recently spoke at Portland’s Interactive Convergence Conference on “From Telephone to Tweetup: An abbreviated history of technology and social exchange“.

Download

You can download her thesis on Cell Phones and Cyborg Anthropology here. It is titled “Cell Phones and their Technosocial Sites of Engagement”.

What is Cyborg Anthropology?

I’m writing this at Gnomedex, because I realized that a lot of people are interested in Cyborg Anthropology, but somehow it doesn’t compress well into 140 characters. Darn, this non-portable data! Thanks to Kris Krug for tweeting about it. He’s a fantastic photographer.

What I do

I study the symbiotic relationship between humans and computers, and the psychology of space that is created by online environments.

My dad is an inventor, and a computer enthusiast. So I’ve been chilling with computers and wacky things since I was born. My dad had a laboratory. I used to. Then social media happened. The ‘field’ of anthropology suddenly arrived at my fingertips. Google Analytics, RSS feeds, audio recording and Twitter have vastly enhanced my ability to understand the effects that computers have had on humans and vice versal.

History of Cyborg Anthropology

Cyborg Anthropology was declared as an actual sub-subject of the Anthropology of Science at a conference in 1993. I discovered it two years ago, and realized that I’ve been doing Cyborg Anthropology my entire life.

How Many Cyborg Anthropologists are There?

There’s probably 4 or 5. I can only name two –> Donna Haraway, the founder, and Deborah Heath, my thesis advisor. I wrote my thesis on “Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Being”. It was really fun. Lots of Supermodernism in there.

Your Mind on Anthropology

Anthropology is cool, because once you learn it your mind begins to function in There’s too much, really. Much more than 140 characters. There is a lot of applying systems theory to demographics and looking at influencers. There is a lot of mapping social networks and understanding how information is exchanged.

Cyborg Anthropology is the Reason I’m at Gnomedex

I wanted to study Gnomedex because it is an awesome event and boatloads of data is exchanged here. Thus, I E-mailed Chris Pirillo about my research, and he sent me a ticket. That was extremely kind of him. I love conferences and networking.

Applying Anthropology to Product Development

The distance between developers and consumers is shrinking. Everyone at Gnomedex knows this. But the distance between profiles and responses is also changing. It’s becoming faster! The time and space it takes to exchange information is becoming super-small, and super rapid!

Now what?

I’ll be speaking at Inverge, a conference in Portland, Oregon (that’s where I am from) about space time compression. That’s really what the conference is about. People from Wieden Kennedy will be there, as well as MIT. Hooray! Hopefully this will help. You see, I just graduated from college, so I am new to the world. I just spent the last 3.5 years of my life studying, without looking up or spreading out. Thanks for being interested in this strange (and increasingly normal) subject.

Applied Anthropology

With Anthropology, I end up looking products as fruit (ripe or not) — and people don’t like packaging that isn’t ripe. Cyborg Anthropology is very easily applied to usability studies (don’t make users excessivly tab or click!, ect.).

Plus, you get funky stuff like “Google is a picky eater, make yourself delicious” (applied to search engine optimization.

Apology

I wrote this really quickly. My internet access is pretty limited. I apologize for spelling mistakes or errors. Please E-mail me at caseorganic@gmail.com if you need more information. Consider visiting Portland and I’ll introduce you to the tech scene. I’ll be giving a lightning talk on the History of the Cell Phone at 1:00Pm on September 5th, 2008 at Inverge.

You can also follow me on Twitter at @caseorganic.

Urban Grind North West is, I think, the predominate manufacturer of Twitter synchronicities in PDX” - Jeremy Wilkin, via Twitter.

An amazing discussion happened today between a number of Tweeple, namely Gabriel (@sirgabe) and @jerwilkins of Tinderbox Creative. Of course, @brampitoyo was there, and @donpdonp & @pdxflaneur also stopped by. Also, @xtalwiese was there for a bit (but had to leave for Psychology class in the middle).

I wish I could have typed more about what was said during this encounter, but it was too loud at Urban Grind to use a tape recorder. The following is a brief recap.

A Discussion Begins

The conversation started with various subjects, business cards were exchanged, and favorite websites were visited and recommended. But quickly the conversation turned towards the future of technology. A bit of Cyborg Anthropology was discussed (as @jerwilkins knows a classmate of mine who took Cyborg Anthropology a year before me), which morphed into a discussion of the new physical and sensory boundaries Internet access has given humans.

Amber: With a cell phone, the capability of your ear has been expanded thousands of miles. With a computer, your hands can take you to Japan and back in seconds. With the profiles you’ve created, you can literally be in 400 places at once, while others interact with the pieces of yourself you’ve saved different times and spaces.

Bram: What is that called? Omniscience.

Amber: Omniscience, Omnipotence. There is such a great extension of the self/senses occuring!

A Short History of the Telephone

Amber: There was a lot of controversy when the first phone came out. Some people couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that one would enjoy going into a closed room to talk at the walls. To disembody a voice, the essence of one’s character, and pipe it through a device, seemed literally insane!

Then came the cordless telephone. There’s a story behind this one. Innovation comes in amusing ways.

I met the grandson of the inventor of the cordless telephone at an SEO conference in February. He told me that his grandfather was sitting in a comfortable chair while watching television when the phone rang.

He said that he didn’t want to make the effort to get up and answer it. (In reality, he was a WWII veteran and had lower back pains from his time in the military). George Sweigert actually used a part from his washing machine for the invention, and in doing so created the cordless telephone to releive the efforts of the handicapped (more on this on the Wikipedia article on George Sweigert).

And with the arrival of the mobile phone on the scene, speech suddenly became mobile. The ability to talk in virtually any segment of time and space became available (provided reception existed).

The Rise of Mobile Communities

And now, communities also becoming untethered from time and space. As time and space compress, so does the amount of space it takes to represent community. People are coming back into social interaction from the formerly fragmented, private world of the suburbs. The current economy simply cannot withstand the amount of luxury and waste an expanded and separated social reality takes to run smoothly. I was reading a book at the Library of Congress on Urban Development that had a diagram of the back and forth flows a city makes when it expands to suburbs and then contracts back into itself. It’s a natural cycle, and we’re seeing a move back in with the help of mobile technologies and mobile communities.

With Twitter, it’s like having a mobile social group on hand at all times. Little friends in the palm of your hand or on your screen. An entire community that goes with you, wherever you are. A lot of people can Tweet with friends and family and stay connected across vast distances while at conferences. Formerly the speed of E-mail and Letters did not afford a level of real-time response that signifies belonging to a community.

Technology as a Mediating Vector

Jeremy: Technology I’m curious about the effects of these mediating vectors.
The cell phone instantly appearing, and then the fact that suddenly every has this amnesia about living before the cell phone’s existence.

The Emotive Epoch

Gabriel brought up the concept of the “Emotive Epoch”.

“Have you heard of it?” he asked us. “It’s a set of Emotional Hotkeys. You can send hot keys to any sort of emotional brain signal you sent out. You can use these to control games.”

Amber: Cool, so if you get really angry in Photoshop, a new file could be created!

Gabriel: (laughs) Yeah, it might be a little tricky for applications that aren’t games.

Jeremy: Using EEG readings and biofeedback mechanisms as interfaces is really starting to blur physical and mental boundaries.

Gabriel: There’s also The Audeo. It’s a voice box for people with Lou Gehrig’s Disease that helps people create queries via thought and then spits them back out as text to speech.

In the tests, they had people thinking a question in their minds, and then getting the feedback as text to speech in their headphones.

It’s incredible. Imagine thinking a search query to Google and then getting the response back in speech.

Jeremy: Yeah, (pauses) …”thanks Wikipedia!”

Amber: It’s interesting that these technologies are emerging because of a human pain. The fact that there is now a lot of money pouring into charities that support research to eliminate/solve human pain and suffering.

Jeremy: It’s kind of like Buddhism, really. Suffering is almost a vehicle of expansion.

In the beginning we start with the idea that something is inherently something that it should not be, and we ask ourselves, “how do we make it something that should be?

That plays really well into the hands of technology.

Amber: And in the Tao, there’s the concept of oneness and wholeness. Humans have always had this idea that they are separate from others, especially in suburban areas, where space is privatized, and personal vehicles abound. And there’s the moment when a child first recognizes the image in the mirror as a reflection, or an ‘other’, or of the mother as ‘other’.

Jeremy: The concept of ‘I’, instead of the idea that we’re all just extensions of this same basic thing.

The saddest thing is the words I, Me, Mine, like “this is the space that is me”.

Gabriel: There’s this norm that exists in identifying things by boundaries, but the box is just in our minds and we don’t realize that this box is inside out.

Jeremy: I think transcendence is about dissolving this box.

Gabriel: Then perhaps technology is a vehicle — we persue transcendence through technology.

Amber: What we’re experiencing right now is like a replica of the industrial revolution. The beginning of the 20th century saw massive amount of patent filings and new technological developments. It also saw the carving up of minor roads and the construction of massive buildings and highways.

Today we’re seeing all sorts of patents are being filed, but they’re being filed for ideas — for intellectual property. All sorts of new roads and buildings are being built, but they’re being built online. The difference is that tearing up a highway to make a redirect in the past cost millions of dollars and many months.

Now the time and space it takes to reroute traffic can be done by the simple implementation of a 301 Redirect, and this probably takes the relative equivalent of $20 of time and skill to pull off.

Jeremy: So then these redirects are protocols — symbolic protocols, of a more literal construction of highways. Data highways.

Amber: Yes. We’re becoming a more organic society as this happens. Traffic can adapt to changing conditions, and roads can change to accommodate new locations. The shape of space makes users move, and the direction and number of users shape space.

Sociologist Emelie Durkheim said that as a society matures, the whole of it changes from a mechanical state to an organic one. Things begin to flow more smoothly.

Cell Phones as Biological Cells

Amber: A cell in the human body has a phospholipid bilayer that keeps things out while keeping the important cellular organelles within its center. At the core lies the DNA of the cell, while the more temporary RNA that the cell uses to duplicate information has more mobility, especially in times of the protein manufacturing that goes on inside the cell.

In computing, the DNA is equivalent to hard drive memory, and the RNA the Random Access Memory, as RAM is more temporary memory. But there’s also the channel protein, which lets information in and out of a cell (on a cell phone this would be the imput keys), and the identification protein, which allows the ID of the cell phone to relay to cell phone towers. So cell phones really function like cells. The macro and the micro are self similar. We’re a self-similar universe.

Jeremy: Everything is based on organic data. Lots of machines are based on things that only animals can do. Airplanes, helicopters, ect.

——–

A Brief Note on E-mail and Twitter

Amber: In biochemistry, chemical reactions are helped along by catalyst. It takes a certian amount of activation energy for a chemical reaction to occur, and if there is not enough activation energy, the reactor halts and never happens.

The activation energy to author an E-mail is often higher for the user than a short tweet in Twitter, and thus a user, once acclimatized to the Tweet-space, will find that the profile to interaction ratio is higher than one’s E-mail list. The reduction of time and space that exists in the world of Twitter acts as a catalyst for greater communication.

Greater communication leads to smoother and more enjoyable conversations in real time and space, as Twitter members are used to conversing quickly about a number of things. Bram Pitoyo and I also noticed that everyone we meet from Twitter is highly involved with a particular interest, be it a company or a project or talent.

15 Megabytes of Fame

One of my coworkers told me that social media was no longer about having 15 minutes of fame, but having 15 megabytes of fame. And those 15 megabytes can be unevently distributed across many sites and times.

Next time there will be a better portrait of the discussion. I am slowly practicing towards an adequate representation of events.

The world of marketing is experiencing a great transition into the digital realm. It’s been digitally created and shared, but now the user can come into a new experience online. The digital self (the mental removed from the digital), already compressed for maximum download speed, can change places in digital more quickly than ever before.

The mind online is reached more easily by ads, and the distance from the monitor to the user is many times closer than that of a television. It is this distance alone that makes a difference. An active user of the Internet can easily run out of energy and be attracted to information sources that need the least input (youtube). Admist the medley of choices, it is easier for the user to have the choice made for him. On Youtube, this is done by others. On Facebook, social history is written automatically, the only input being clicks from the user.

If we go back to the General Theory of Relativity and apply it to social space, we can see that the shape of space makes people move, and the gravity of the social shapes space. Thus, people have social gravity, and when they congregate, more people are drawn in by this social gravitational field. Sometimes people from blurred areas can experience this social gravity field and congregate on an event from different idea economies. For instance, a Linux programmer can be drawn into the same Youtube video clip as a law student and a fry cook. I consider areas of great social masses to approximate black holes. Widely adopted products are black holes of attention, with event horizons of being “keeping up with the Joneses”. The event horizon of the event can be relational in real life or in digital life. A link can be provided by a friend online, (via a blog, instant message, or e-mail). A piece of hardware can be envied and researched outside of digital space, or the digital space can be used to learn about and purchase the device.

A friend of mine who is an engineering student and electronic musician coined the the term “if I just try a little harder” syndrome to explain what is affecting the hyper-modernized individual. They try a diet, and it fails, and then they tell themselves they will try even harder. “If I were just to try a little harder” on a photo, or an essay. Of course, trying hard is a future event, or a past event. It is a self-referential event that, because of its detached reflection, can never manifest in the present moment.

Media is creating forced creativity by putting digital cameras in the hands of individuals. Forced creativity makes people increasingly digitize their lives because media takes up space, and people like to share digitized bits of their lives. By allowing consumers to upload images, a panopticon of creativity is formed.
Talent is not encouraged to develop except in small groups like Photoshop competition forums or networked groups.

The group development aspect of the net intrigues me. It is because I’ve noticed that ‘expert groups’ are forming that I decided to research one for my independent study, which I’ve titled SOAN 490 - Corporate Power and Information

I found SEM PDX, an online society of Internet Marketers and Businesspeople who were concerned with studying and making use of social networking sites, search optimization techniques, and better ways to reach greater numbers of Internet users. In essence, they were a group of information architects and space time compressors. Everything has become a competition, or death. Those who run on breaking ice behind them. And all consumers (and producers) are holding themselves up to increasingly one dimensional standards of beauty and success.

My experiment was to check out how websites advertise themselves — how companies are forcing these sorts of organic connections — how they are widening event horizions to approach guaranteed consumer purchasing habits (and thus limit their marketing costs and liabilities). Mental real estate is easily acquired and redistributed in the digital world. With real estate also untethered, space and time of the mind are what matter.

 

 Hazelnut Tech Talk Episode 1 [32:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (339)

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

Our first episode will discuss the concepts of Supermodernism, Non-Space and Cyborg Anthropology.

Click to Subscribe

Oakhazelnut.com is getting a voice to tell some stories with.

Bram Pitoyo (if you don’t know of him, make sure to check out Link En Fuego) and I are working on a series of tech talks that touch on what’s going on in the Portland Tech Scene. We’re creating this podcast series to better show off the amazing ideas and people of Portland to the rest of the world. We’re also doing this because we love talking to people and getting to know how they’ve created such amazing ideas, networks, and projects.

Podcasts take time and effort, but we’d like to be able to release one every week, with a different person or idea as the main subject. If you’re interested in participating in one of the podcasts, please contact Bram or I at hello@oakhazelnut.com or brampitoyo@gmail.com. Or, simply message us on Twitter. I’m @caseorganic, and Bram is @brampitoyo.

See you soon!

Twitterers may enjoy Tweetvolume for it’s ability to graphically display the search volumes of up to five terms at once.

While this is an interesting concept, it does not show when and where the posts were created. Neither does it provide data on what users have posted what.
My vote still goes to Addictomatic, because of the sheer volume and choice of search results.

When I type in ‘Anthropology’, I get results from 16+ sites, including Twitter (where, who, when), Youtube, Flickr, Technorati, Google Blog Search, Delicious Tags, Ask.com News, ect.

Conclusion: Tweetvolume is useful for volume comparison of terms in one space, while Addictomatic is more encompassing. However, neither provide dates of data, and thus do not provide “to the second” updates useful for creating a catchy targeted post. And, since they both do really different things, I may be comparing apples and oranges.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Christopher Alexander. Really widely applicable philosophy. Every architecture student is taught this, but hey are taught that it is very difficult to put these concepts into play, because it contradicts the institutional structures of architecture, because architects plan places beforehand in a very modular way.

Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander, an architect and author, coined the term pattern language. He used it to refer to common problems of civil and architectural design, from how cities should be laid out to where windows should be placed in a room. The idea was initially popularized in his book A Pattern Language.

Alexander’s book The Timeless Way of Building describes what he means by pattern language and how it applies to the design and construction of buildings and towns. However, the system has been used in many fields of design, from designing computer programs to designing a classroom curriculum.

The Oregon Experiment - his third book.