All Tomorrow's Cultures

  What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center , I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the era of AI, and the workarounds they've come up with. The advent of publicly available generative AI platforms was not something people in my field (anthropology) or other faculty in the social sciences and humanities were clamoring for. And yet here we are. This has led to many responses: anguish, certainly, but also ways of incorporating--or at east channeling--the usage of generative AI in the classroom. But what about faculty outside of my university? I used NodeXL to download Reddit data from the "/Professors" subreddit using the keyword "AI." This generated records of about 2500 users posting, commenting or replying for a total of 7000 contributions to the debate. I then grouped the data in clusters of similar postings, and abstracted the top words from each group as indicated by "up-vote" (which fu...

By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754 I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It's the successful colonization of the two minutes between stations--just one among many in regimented lives that have become moments to produce and consume.  Will capitalism ever run out of space to subsume into its extractivist logic? Zeno's paradox of motion describes the impossibility of ever arriving; there is always infinitely divisible space remaining: first 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8. Mathematically, this isn't a paradox at all, but, really, capitalism depends on Zeno's chicanery. There's always a fraction left to exploit. And this goes in both directions. We're used to thinking about capitalism as an expansive system, constantly locating new sources of profit, but it also goes down, to the molecular level and beyond. Finally, capitalism turns to the between.   For Bandak and Janeja (2...

      You’ll see them in film, k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys ( 골목길 ), old restaurants with peeling wallpaper, protagonists drowning their sorrows in tent bars ( 포장마차 ). Sometimes these images are deployed for critical purpose: e.g., the 반지하 (semi-basement) that the Kim family lives in the 2019 film “Parasite.” And sometimes for nostalgia–with multiple documentaries and websites on the “last urban moon village” ( 마지막 달동네 ) of a Korean city. But this is not the Seoul–nor the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea)--that most people inhabit. Over the last 50 years, urban life in South Korea has been transformed in many ways, with successive waves of state-sponsored gentrification that has culminated with “New Town” developments of block upon block of orderly apartment complexes with mall-like commercial strips between them (Chen et al 2019; Song et al 2019). Here, Korea parallels (and anticipates) urban development e...

Today (April 26, 2024), our book, "Multimodal Methods in Anthropology" is released into the world. Here's a song I've created for the moment using Udio, a text-to-song Generative AI model: https://www.udio.com/songs/m5HMHSZ2exSgEWE7f8AaAr And here's a code for a discount on this book from our publisher, Routledge Books:

From the conclusion to my contribution on " Social Media " in Wiley's "The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology:" Anthropologists are still coming to terms with social media and its impact on every level of our lives.  No matter what new SNS platforms develop, though, it is certain that social media will continue to be a source of controversy in the field. The reasons for controversy may vary, but they will all pivot on the essential liminality of social media. By definition, it occupies spaces between worlds: between people, between online and offline, between official and unofficial, between private and public, between resistance and accommodation, between horizontality and verticality. For all of these reasons, anthropologists are unlikely to be entirely comfortable with the social media they and their interlocutors utilize, whatever new platforms may develop in the future. But that discomfort can also be a source of strength, one that can help to h...

Last July I was using R to do some social network analysis of Instagram tags.  After lots of package downloads, App Developer’s applications, etc., I couldn’t get it to work, only to discover that Instagram had changed its policy the months before.  Like many social media platforms, Instagram had restricted access to data through its API (Application Programming Interface).  For some, this could be welcome news—after all, third party developers having untrammeled access weakens privacy and serves to expose more and more of our lives to commodification. But this isn’t the whole story.  Just because I (a researcher at a mid-tier state university) was having trouble gaining access doesn’t mean that large corporations were having trouble, or the National Security Agency, or Instagram itself.  Rather, what we’ve seen with the rise of Big Data as a research object is the progressive commodification of social media.  The social network analysis that began as a...

There are many interesting formations that might be called networked phenomena.  Homophily and the tendency towards triad closure.  Scott Feld's Rule (I'm more likely to make friends with someone who has more friends than me).   Cascading behaviors (i.e., virality).  Small world phenomena (those 6 degrees of separation).  In all, a series of social forms that complicate typical binarisms like individual v. group. Instead, these behaviors are simply networked--explicable through linked nodes.  In other words, not an 'individual'; but not an amorphous, superstructural group.  These have all kinds of implications for social action, cognition, identity and feeling.  As Sampson (2012) writes, Decision are not, as such, embedded in people, or in the voluntary exchanges with others, but in the very networks to which they connect.  It is, like this, the network relation that leads the way. (168) But what happens when more and more of our p...

One of the community groups we work with has a book out.  Another has just won a major victory for environmental justice.  A third is looking for new staff.  Another has posted an incredible collection of photos from the Baltimore Uprising.  My responses?  Depending on the social media platform, “Like”; “Retweet”; “Share”; “Follow”.  Perhaps those aren’t even “responses”.  I haven’t done anything—I haven’t even moved from my chair!  Even J.G Frazer had to get up to pick up another tome of hermetic folklore.  But I would be remiss not to engage in this slacktivism .  Not only remiss, I would be endangering our relationship to our Baltimore interlocutors.  Public anthropology takes many forms—including advocate, gadfly and cultural critic.  What about zombie? The digital, networked world in which we live has enabled unparalleled access to the tools of content creation.  All of us can make a movie, write a novel, publ...

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...

Moving Across Scale and Platform in Seoul Walker, Rider, Smartphone Talker In Ryu Shin’s 2014  Seoul Arcade Project,  the author, in the persona of the “walker” (구보), explores Seoul through Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” focusing on the phantasmagoria of Korean capitalism and spectacle over the course of a day’s travel from Gangnam to Gangbuk and back again.  That said, there are some significant differences between Ryu’s project and Benjamin’s, notably in the presence of two technologies altogether absent from Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece: the smart phone and the subway. More than just communication and travel, Ryu’s subway and smartphone combination fuels his narrator’s journey across multiple forms of transit to Seoul’s diverse spaces.  Here, the project is a renewed call for analyses of urban mobility systems, but not only that—it’s a call to look into the ways urban practice involves this assemblage of movement, technology and communication.  Th...