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

See you there!

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. MIT’s 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.

The speakers and audience will be a mixed industry and academic crowd, and the diverse topics grouped together will give the conference both broad coverage of the new media and entertainment space and deep engagement across industries and disciplinary boundaries. 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 properties, franchising and world building, comics and commerce, social and spreadable media, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

The conference is on the 21th and 22nd of November at MIT. It works around a talk-show style model with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. Over the last two years this produced great, thorough treatments of the subject matter, getting industry and academic speakers together but avoiding product pitches. For a sense of what to expect, you can check out the site from last year’s event.

This will be the third conference of this kind.

Confirmed speakers for this year’s conference include: Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman), Alex McDowell (Production Designer, The Watchmen), Kevin Slavin (Area/Code), Donald K Ranvaud (Buena Onda Films), Amber Case (Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant), Mauricio Mota (New Content [Brazil]), Alisa Perren (George State University), Amanda Lotz (University of Michigan), Sharon Ross (Columbia College Chicago), Nancy Baym (University of Kansas), Alice Marwick (New York University), Vu Nguyen (VP of Business Development, crunchyroll.com) with more to come.

Thanks to Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium for hooking me up with this excellent opportunity!

Traditionally…

The traditional form of Anthropological study is stereotyped by outings to third world countries to study “the anthropological other”. However, I find it more challenging to study what’s happening to us as a series of technosocial a world mediated by dynamic objects, processes, and change. I first used cyborg anthropology to create an analysis of Facebook, as I was one of the first adopters of the platform. I later wrote my thesis on mobile telephony and the future of communication.

Donna Haraway, Deborah Heath and Robert Goldman

I was first introduced to cyborg anthropology by Deborah Heath, a friend of Donna Haraway’s. She was my professor and thesis advisor at Lewis & Clark college. I was also introduced to the concept of Light/Liquid Modernity by Robert Goldman, a sociology professor who specialized in advertising and sign culture. These two professors introduced me to a set of theories that I took immediately to my analysis of the real world. With Bob I studied traditional advertising from the 19th century, and afterwards,  advertising and business through postmodern theory.

The Digital Field Journal

I kept a digital journal during my last year of college that stored snapshots of the Internet. I used this platform to capture data over time in order to understand trends and patterns that worked their way into
conclusions. I also began to visit local businesses and network with corporate groups. Along the way, I began to realize that companies were fighting to understand social media and online presence through processes such as search engine optimization. Most of the marketers and company owners had extremely sophisticated profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I learned to embrace social networks from 30-50 year olds rather than from my peers. The methods of dispersing, collecting, and attracting people to data
and experience were completely new to me. I had only studied it from the context of an digital field journal before.

I realized very quickly that the qualitative and quantitative methods of anthropology were a perfect fit for cyberspace. These tools could be used to analyze the methods by which humans seek out and produce information in cyberspace. They could easily be used to improve and criticize interface design, user flows, data management, resource optimization, and the phenomenology of the online experience.

I used this new knowledge to secure a job in search engine marketing for a small startup company. This part time job guarantees a standard of living while I compile my research on the compression of time and space online, and the types of businesses that can survive in the digital jungle.

Conducting Research in Zero Gravity, Zero Friction Environment

The research is different than any I’ve ever done before. It is both simple and difficult with respect to traditional research. First, data collection is no problem. Humans are leaving a sort of geological history of themselves with every action they create online. Data management is becoming a series of lists, where things are new to old, or “most viewed” to “least viewed”. Old information sinks to the bottom of the data pile, but sometimes is dug up by future visitors, or data Paleontologists. Neglected or stale data is ignored and quickly buried by successive layers of data with a faster refresh rate. This is evident on Twitter, RSS readers, Facebook, YouTube and almost any new media platform in existence. It is also true on search engines like Google and Yahoo. Google Analytics can be easily used to track conversion rates and page views.

Some Limitations of Data Management

But data management needs certain tools or it becomes overwhelming. My own foray into social media caused me to rely on new tools to understand and soft through all of the data my profile and conversations was generating. I realized recently that this is PR 2.0. I now help companies understand and expand their online presence through intelligence feeds created through Yahoo! Pipes. The Yahoo! Pipe application I use takes relevant data from one site and relevant data from another and collects it into a single data feed. In this way, streams of relevant data can be created, instead of sorting through endless amounts of information that does not directly relate to one or one’s goals.

Another question comes up when this subject is accessed — the question of value and how it is created online. I’m studying the different patterns and ways value can be created online, and the natural systems that these values mirror.

The Construction of Value in an Age of Instant Duplication

For instance, what makes one link on Twitter is more valuable that another? What makes one’s Tweets are seen by thousands of people, while another’s Tweets are seen by 15. This is post-art in the age of mechanical reproduction. This is a world in which everything is infinitely reproducible. Disney’s Club Penguin has successfully harnessed this by implementing artificial scarcity in a controlled, secure environment. A
cyberspace within a cyberspace with its own rules. Facebook took another route. It’s story closely mirrors that of an early gold rush. The construction of value within that environment was tumorous. Too many of the
same application reduced the value of each application to near-zero levels.

Add Twitter

I chose Twitter as a social media platform of choice because it offers a sort of ‘omnipresence in the wired’ that other websites don’t. Twitter’s data is constantly flowing, while the text of most webpages and even blogs are still caught up in silos and behind opaque walls. This is where liquid modernity comes into play. Old industry is heavy and takes a long time to move. Light industry works best in frictionless environments. RSS feeds make data dynamic and accessible. Every page on a site can be a front door to content without the time liability that an extra click creates for a user trying to find the correct content. Networks that shorten the distance between content an action while reducing unnecessary and awkward interface transitions are generally more successful online than those that do not. To quote a student of Donna Haraway’s:

To ‘go virtual’ is to free the self from the weight of the flesh incarcerated by ‘heavy modernity’. Cyber Ethnologist Sandy Stone discusses the theoretical benefits of joining virtual communities:

Electronic virtual communities represent flexible, lively, and practical
adaptations to the real circumstances that confront persons seeking
community in what Haraway (1987) refers to as ‘the mythic time called
the late twentieth century.” They are part of a range of innovative
solutions to the drive for sociality—a drive that can be frequently thwarted
by the geographical and cultural realities of cities increasingly structured
according to the needs of powerful economic interests rather than in ways
that encourage and facilitate habitation and social interaction in the urban
context (Benedikt in Cyberspace, First Steps 1991: 111).

At a long dinner table, the person at the head of the table is physically distant from the person at the other end of the table. But online, everyone at the table can be the same distance apart. A 301 redirect can easily change an entire highway of traffic from one website location to another, while the brick and mortar manifestation of this concept involves bulldozers, urban planners, and millions of dollars.

There’s also the development of online communities as a recolonization of public space. As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractility (Augé Non-Places: An Introduction to a Theory of Supermodernity 1995:94). Non-places are the sources of modern anomie. In Emelie Durkheim’s perspective, a malnourished public sphere deprives individuals of real social connections. In the face of this anomie, technosocial relationships mediated through the cell phone or social network allows an organic social network. Through the subject and the technology combined, the subject can become an Actor on the larger actor network (Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory). If the human spends time in a non-place, then the addition of a non-place accessed through the social group tears through the solitary contractuality characterized by the non-place. Both the place and the non-place can exist at once, because in the supermodern perspective all dichotomies blur into one another. The world is full of non-places and strangers. An airport is has nothing to do with history, identity, or relation. It is a liminal place – a space between spaces. It is the same with a highway or a supermarket.

Regaining Community After Isolation

The isolated human in the non-place seeks to reconnect with those in proximity, but cannot. The isolated human can either turn to an music comfort object such an ipod to regain a sense of place, or a network of
others sharing that same alienated strangeness.

What emerges from the fading social norms is naked, frightened, aggressive ego in search of love and help. In the search for itself and an affectionate sociality, it easily gets lost in the jungle of the self…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, this ’solitary-confinement of the ego’ is a mass sentence. [Ulrich Beck, 40 in Bauman's Liquid Modernity 2000:37].

Twitter allows the “everyday” to be discussed, and thus it reopens the public sphere to discussion. But, modern information, or ‘light information’ is only accessible by hybrids (those whose social landscapes are mediated by technological exchange), or those who are capable of liminally transforming into technosocial hybrids or ‘light industrial’ objects. It is not enough to simply liminally transition. The online self is becoming omniscient and omnipresent. Each network allows one to digitize different elements of one’s
lived reality of ‘everydayness’.

Post-Isolation, Social Rules Begin to Reappear

An entire set of new social roles have developed around the use of technology. Erving Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” relates directly to this. A profile Is another extension of connection and
etiquette that can be optimized or used poorly. In a reputation economy, companies are breaking down into social constructs as well. The days of billboard approximation are dissolving into one-on-one company/customer communications where the user co-creates the psychology of the online space just as much as the creator. In this world, the concepts of physics are even more prevalent. The shape of space makes people move, and flow of people shapes space.

Entering into a network by becoming part cyborg creates the ability for the subject to augment social and physical capabilities. The cell phone allows people to be more omniscient and omnipresent. Technology allows one to transcend more readily the confines of the flesh-burdened human body. Information stored on the computer can be seen as accessed by many at once, allowing copies of a person’s essence to
be present in many places at once.

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

What part of us connects to others when we use a cell phone? If the cell phone is the carrying device for our auditory avatars, are we still fully human when we use it? Online, when we use Twitter, are we living more fully and quickly than we ever could in real life? I think so. When I sit at long table with twenty seats, I can’t communicate with twenty people at once, but online, everyone is the same distance away, if I choose them to be. Also, I don’t have to worry if there’s a rude guest sitting across from me. I can silence that person with a short click of a button. Spam be gone.

Not that I’m suggesting that dinner parties be replaced by Twitter conversations, by any means. Rather, I’m suggesting that Twitter is a way to filter through and find a bunch of gems across space and time that one can really interface really well with in real life. Twitter also adds another dimension onto life — this sort of backchannel rapid communication. That way, when you have a dinner party full of Twitter people, you can all feel like you’ve known each other for a lot longer than you really have. And maybe not have to worry about the spammers.

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can find her on Twitter @caseorganic, or may contact her via E-mail at caseorganic at gmail.com.

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.

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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.