All Tomorrow's Cultures

(I participated in a workshop organized by two anthropologists studying SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Claire Webb and Michael Oman-Reagan.  The topic called for us to think broadly about the future in relation to SETI.  My own contribution revolves around the SETI/METI divide and the question of time.) As Pioneer crafts hurtle off into interstellar space with their plaques celebrating Eurocentric, heteronormative humanity atop a school-child’s depiction of the solar system, people have inevitably thought of better things they could have sent to the stars.   These have been the subject of numerous discussions and Kickstarter campaigns.   But all of these concerns and alternative plans reflect on one of the chief obstacles to communication with ETI—coevalness.   SETI doesn’t take place in coeval timespace; even signals to (or from) nearby systems (e.g., Proxima Centauri) take a few light years to reach there.   Their past is our p...

As Twitter continues to flounder as a business, many have tendered their advice for the struggling company.  On the other hand, people at Twitter have responded by introducing what appear (to some) to be "innovations" that are already shared by multiple, social media .  All this has prompted me to think about my own fascination with the platform.  Even though I've blogged here many times about Twitter's relationship to physical and social space, I find myself most often thinking about Twitter's time effects.  Like other social media, part of the allure of Twitter is the way it allows users to manipulate space--i.e., using social media to "be there" even when you're very far away.  But time is also a resource that people manipulate through their social media.  While some social media emphasize the present (or the "expanded present" ),  other platforms allow for other, sometimes subtle, temporalities.  This powerful combination of space an...

Sitting on my desk is a book that I page through when I have a moment: Quantum City .  It’s not something I’m going to assign in classes—it’s really a manifesto, with quantum  looking a bit like a brand-name than a serious application of quantum mechanics to urban planning.  But it reminds me how important anthropology has been to thinking about space and time as an indivisible whole embedded in everyday life. Frame from the film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov. Photo courtesy wikicommons If we think of 19 th  century anthropology as the effort to produce time and space as a classificatory grid into which we might slot cultural alterity, then the twentieth century suggested a fairly successful effort to challenge that orthodoxy through a cultural relativism that also occasionally included space/time relativity, the idea, in other words, that space and time form a folded topology in social and cultural life rather than distinct variables in a li...

Tesco's HomePlus virtual shopping in Seoul Along the walls of Seonreung Subway Station (선릉역) in Seoul, Tesco HomePlus (a popular shopping chain with corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom) has put up photographs of 500 commonly ordered products in a style similar to their display on the shelves of a physical HomePlus.  Subway passengers can scan accompanying QR codes with their smart phones; the products will be delivered to their homes that evening. Yes, yes--this is certainly convenient and suggests the degree to which Seoul is well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous computing city (or u-city)--and well ahead of cities in the United States.  But this also offers a more complex view of the occasionally simplistic logic behind the u-city.  When we look at cities and their built environments, we can identify what John Urry calls different "mobilities" that bring together people and objects in different spatio-temporal configurations: riding the subway v...