Poor Data, Rich Data, Big Data, Chief

Over the past 2 years, Big Data has worked its way into public consciousness, courtesy of widespread news exposure and a series of popular books by Big Data scientists with hyperbolic evocations of the analytic power of their methods.  There seems to be nothing that Big Data cannot do: predict health and wellness, illuminate culture change, stop poverty, foil terrorists.  And, of course, tighten the noose of Foucauldian surveillance from governments and corporations.  But what all of these accounts promise (or threaten) is a transparent window onto truth: our social lives, behaviors, hopes and dreams all rendered transparent through the analysis of vast datasets.

Visualization of all editing activity by user. Image courtesy Fernanda B. Viégas and wikicommons

Many qualitative researchers—including anthropologists—have sounded an alarm over this drive to datafictaion, where, as Chris Andersonhas famously concluded, “numbers speak for themselves.”  If Data Scientists can tell us what everyone is doing and what everything is thinking, what need is there for 60 in-depth interviews and two years of participant observation?  As Tricia Wang asks, “What are ethnographers to do when our research is seen as insignificant?”  What are we to do, in other words, when community relationships that we painstakingly elucidate over months of field research can be scraped from social media in a few minutes?

For Wang, the answer is to engage Big Data—and to make ethnographic research relevant in a world of hyper quantification.  Dana Boyd and Kate Crawford (2012) make some of the same points, additionally going on the offensive by exploring the assumptions underlying the drive to Big Data.  Do numbers really speak for themselves?  And does having all the data mean that you have privileged access to all the facts?

But these questions should be familiar to cultural anthropologists; we are no strangers to Big Data.  While we haven’t generally dealt with millions of data points, the hyperbolic claims of Big Data echo the hubris of anthropology in its contact with small societies.  By looking back on these earlier methodologies, we might reconceptualize Big Data as another chapter in what Walter Mignolo has called the “enduring enchantment” of modernity.

In 1898, Alfred Hort Haddon and his team (which included Charles Seligman and W.H.R. Rivers) set out on an expedition to the Torres Strait islands off the coast of New Guinea.  With broad goals for their field surveys, including salvage anthropology, experimental psychology, linguistics and physical anthropology, the team quickly amassed huge amounts of filed data—enough for 6 huge volumes.  Along with these compendia, the team additionally developed novel methodologies, with W.H.R Rivers’s “genealogical method” being the best remembered (as well as the most excoriated).

In order to compensate for his ignorance of native languages, and for the shallowness of the expedition’s contact, Rivers began asking people (in pidgin English and through interpreters) for the names of their “father,” “mother,” “husband,” “wife,” etc.—never mind that these terms were a priori mired in his British, middle-class assumptions about filiation and descent.  Surprised by the impressive, genealogical memories of his informants, he was able to generate vast amounts of “data” using this ham-fisted approach, including “complete” records for some the islands the Torres Straits team surveyed.  From that data, he was able to generate numerous insights into marriage, naming practices, fertility, “totemistic systems,” and even history and culture change.  In other words, without engaging people in real conversations about their lives, and without actually observing islander life, Rivers believed he could apprehend the “whole” of Torres Strait culture and society through applications of his “concrete” method.

The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry by W. H. R. Rivers, 1910. Image courtesy the Sociological Review

Big Data starts from any of the same assumptions.  Without direct windows onto people themselves, Big Data scientists harvest proxy data from the residue of our complex lives in information society.  Do you want to know if people are getting sick?  You could ask people—and observe their behavior—but you could also (as with Google Flu Trends) compile search data on symptoms.  Or do you want to know about the mobility of people in cities?  You could interview people and follow them are their daily round, or you could, as Barabasi and his team did, analyze the billing records from 100,000 cell phone users in order to generate maps of movements over a 6-moth period.

Is it specious to compare huge datasets from Google with Rivers’s collected genealogies?  Both proceed from the same assumptions about the whole.  After all, anthropological research on small populations of people living in putative isolation on islands was premised on the assumption that one could collect and understand everything about a simple society.  Big Data builds a similar edifice upon massive computing power and the integration of networks.  For Google, flu trends provides a window onto vectors of illness because it collects the whole of Google search data—an island, as it were, secured by a near-monopoly over Internet traffic.   In addition, the problems of the genealogical methods are the problems of proxy data in general.  Massive data can be collected, analyzed  and correlated, but what do these data describe?  When Rivers asks the Torres Strait islanders who their “proper” father is, how useful are those data?  And if he’s managed to solicit genealogies out to five generations, what insights might he derive from these facts?

Of course, big data scientists debate the suitability of data proxies—but it would be a mistake to assume that we have nothing to add to that argument.  Moreover, anthropologists have a long history of questioning the synecdochic fallacy.  Is kinship the foundation for society?  Can we understand the whole of society by considering key institutions like kinship, subsistence and exchange?  And what does it mean to understand the “whole” to begin with?   These are ultimately the questions to pose Big Data: if I collect all of the tweets (as the Library of Congressis doing), can I now understand how people live in the city?  Or how they relate to other people?  Or is there always some destabilizing meaning that lies between these hundreds of terabytes?

Most of all, we can utilize our own experiences to reflect on Big Data as a technological imaginary.  Why do we think it’s desirable to collect all of the data?  What do we imagine the truth of the whole to be?

Previously published in: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2014/06/20/poor-data-rich-data-big-data-chief/

Latent City

A couple of decades ago, social network analysis was a fairly recondite branch of sociology and anthropology applying mathematical matrices to social relationships.  And then there was Facebook.  With the widespread adoption of social networking sites (SNS), several things happened.  First, these social networks utilized the same graph theory and matrices that social network analysis had applied to social relations.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networking services are analyzing your social network data constantly, mining your information for friend recommendations (and to better sell you to advertisers).  Second, courtesy of the enormous popularity of SNS, we now initiate and maintain social relations based on those same matrices.  In other words, from an abstract representation of social relations, social network theory becomes generative of actual social relations; we relate to each other according to matrix logics of tie strength and degree centrality—a neat inversion of the usual relationship between empirical observation and theoretical interpretation.

And so, social network analysis can be said to have a profound impact on social lives.  But does it end there?  In South Korea (where I do fieldwork), social networking sites are overwhelming utilized through smart phones; people tweet or Facebook from their mobile devices.  As with any SNS platform, this means that people are making (and re-making) social connections with each other, but it also means that people are connecting to place in complex ways.  Even if gelocation is disabled, these social media still have this embodied dimension—they’re not just tweets, but tweets in a particular place at a particular time.

Image courtesy Michael Najjar and wikicommons

But more than this: just as theories and methods for social network analysis can be said to structure our social lives through SNS, so the city itself can be said to be re-forged according to social networking logic.  For example, one of the most useful concepts in social network analysis is tie-strength and particularly the distinction between strong ties and weak ties.  Our daily round builds strong ties with places around us, ties that are reinforced through multiplex relationships to place as the embodiment and practice of social life, memory and bodily hexis.  On the other hand, we also form numerous weak ties with places and neighborhoods that lie on the interstices of our daily round.  Less places we know then places we know of, weak ties to place form the connective tissue between islands of strong ties in the city.

With the advent of gelocational apps, social networking sites have become very good at showing our tie-strength to place.  Foursquare, for example, rewards strong ties (and renders them visible) through granting users “mayorship” over places they frequent.  In addition, it encourages the exploitation of weak ties through the assignation of badges for checking in a new place.

However: social networking sites are also useful in rendering latent ties.  Haythornthwaite (2002) defines a latent tie as one “for which a connection is available technically but that has not yet been activated by social interaction” (289).  Social media generate vast clouds of low-density relationships: thousands of friends with weak or entirely absent connections to us and to each other.  And yet, these ties aren’t entirely useless; they can be activated through circumstance and initiative—e.g., a sudden move to a new city stimulates you to mine your social contacts for advice.  In this, social networking sites like Facebook are latent tie machines, enabling users to construct reservoirs of potential relations that can be maintained nearly indefinitely with little effort.

Could the same be true of our socially networked relationship to urban spaces?  In other words, do social media construct latent ties to geography?  In many ways, we are already tied to place in networked ways.  Network theorists have long looked at structural equivalence of actors in a network: people in similar positions not only have similar roles, but similar relationships to others vis-à-vis that position in a network.  For example, professors may not know each other, but they tend to have the same sorts of connections (in terms of directionality, tie strength, etc.) as other professors.   In a similar ways, our identities involve multiple, structural relationships to space, especially through race, gender and class.  Indeed, these are generally over-determined relationships in U.S. cities, leading to hyper-segregation by race and class.

But social media suggest other latencies.  Let’s say that you’ve become involved with the Baltimore & Maryland Workers Assembly in your support for an increased minimum wage.  You go to their Facebook page to find out information about their May Day rally in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor (Peoples Power Assembly)—and perhaps you post up your own memorable photo or video clip from the event.  Now, you have a latent connection to a few hundred other people who have posted or liked the page—not even a weak tie, but something that could develop into one if you followed up on these latent relationships.  In the same way, the page facilitates spatial latencies—in this case, to other rallies for worker’s rights, both in Baltimore, and beyond (Washington, D.C., Detroit, etc.).  You may never contact the other people affiliated (however tenuously) with the Baltimore & Maryland Workers Assembly.  Similarly, you may never attend future rallies in Baltimore or Washington, D.C.  But those spaces nevertheless carry a certain latency—a networked signification that could become activated when, say, minimum wage legislation again comes up in Maryland’s Assembly.

Multiply these latencies over and over again through diverse social media, and the city looks less like a series of physical spaces than a charged field through which we move, each structure or square a potential connection or action that precedes our conscious decisions to move or act.  And while this offers new possibilities for knowledge and practice, it also seems to confirm Orwellian fears of a surveillance state that is prepared to exploit this data in order to limit our movements: a latent city that connects to us with infinite filaments of power and politics.

Previous published in Anthropology News.  

Anthropology, Fieldwork and the Third Man

I watched Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (1949) again last week, and I was again reminded what a perfect parable the film is for the ethnographic encounter.  It begins with Holly Martins’ arrival in post-war Vienna.  He’s a dime-store novelist who’s been invited by his school friend, Harry Lime, for a visit—but Harry’s been run over by a car and killed.  And yet, Holly is suspicious, and begins to pursue leads that take him through the fractured landscape of postwar Vienna, through different zones controlled by Allied forces, and ultimately face-to-face with Harry Lime himself, a decidedly not-dead black market trader in doctored penicillin.  And all this to the crazy virtuosity of Anton Karas’s zither score.

View from the first level of the Eiffel Tower. Photo courtesy wikicommons

Where’s the ethnography?  Certainly, there’s a resemblance in Holly’s awkward confusion to that of anthropologist entering the field—he’s perpetually flummoxed and frustrated, always asking  “What did he say?,” and running down shadowed streets shot at discombobulating camera angles.  And post-war Vienna is an eerie harbinger for today’s neoliberal order, a city of glitz and ruins divided into different “zones of exception,” each governed by different powers with their own understandings of law.

But it’s the idea of the third itself that I find most anthropological.  In a literal sense, the eponymous “third man” is Harry Lime—the man who was at the scene of the faked car accident and who holds the key to the mystery.  However, there are lots of “thirds” in this film, each offering a conflicting interpretive frame for Harry Lime’s life and purported death.  Is Harry Lime a ruthless black marketer?  Is he a devoted boyfriend?  A loyal companion?

Here’s where “The Third Man” looks like a noir-thriller version of Plato’s Parmenides, where the “Third Man” (in Aristotle’s interpretation), is the “ideal” form that starts off a chain of infinite regress in an endless search for ideal forms that cannot be subsumed back into the “class” of men.    Like Plato’s ideal form, the truth of Harry Lime seems to continuously recede from Holly, until the only choice (for Graham Greene, anyway) is to end the inquiry with gunshots.

There was a time when anthropology went the way of this philosophical chestnut, deferring the ultimate meaning of the ethnographic encounter and in the process marveling at the hall of mirrors it itself had constructed.   When we follow this logic, the Geertzian anthropologist reading over the shoulder of the native can never be the final interpretation of culture; there’s always someone reading over the anthropologist’s shoulder, and someone visible behind that shoulder (an institution, a theory, a context).

But there’s another “third” here, the third that lies outside of a closed dyad of these ideological constructions of anthropologist and field.  Following Michel Serres’s “Le troisième homme,” this third interrupts the stable and static meanings.  It is the noise that upsets and re-orders the hegemonic, that introduces not only new meanings, but new frames that cascade into new understandings.

Image courtesy Tsutoma Takasu

Here, it’s the moment of interruption itself that is powerful—and generative of powerful truths.  When Holly sees Harry Lime briefly illuminated in the shadows, it completely re-orders his interpretation of events: from a murder mystery to a cover-up, from outrage over his friend’s death, to a confirmation of his friend’s nefarious deeds.   That “third man” jolts Holly Martins to an entirely different interpretative frame: what starts as a murder investigation becomes an indictment of war profiteering.

This is the kind of interruption we look for in anthropology: when first impressions are confounded and complicated.  The moment a “third” enters into a neat correspondence and turns it upside down.   To put it another way, only novice ethnographers believe that the truths they discover in the first phase of fieldwork will survive into their completed ethnography.  At first, we may resist the insistence of that outside noise: it is difficult to jettison assumptions we (or our dissertation committees) may hold dear.  But, eventually, we’re going to listen.

I always think about the strange figure of the taxi driver: a stock figure in contemporary ethnographies.  Fleeting, chance encounters with these oftentimes enigmatic, knowledgeable people signal a turning point in our understandings, a sign-post that guides ethnographers along a different path: anthropologists literally driven down the road not taken.

Another example: last month in Anthropology News, Jennifer Carroll wrote movingly of the “Ethnographic of the Unexpected” in Kyiv.  Walking past political activism in Independence Square every day meant that, after a while, she could not ignore the noise of protest, even if she was in Ukraine for an entirely different reason.  But eventually, she succumbs to that third; political protest ends up being her field site after all.

Of course, this is very different in other disciplines; I can hardy imagine a similar epiphany in the hard sciences.  While letting in what Serres calls the “prosopeia of noise” might be a defining characteristic of ethnography, physicists (for example) may agonize over where exactly to “cut” their data, to separate the disjecta of noise from the “real” data they can publish.  Doing otherwise would mean going back to the drawing board and beginning again.

And here’s where we’re like Holly—looking into the enigmatic shadows of a kaleidoscope modernity for a third that will challenge our understandings of events and re-frame them in ways we’ve not anticipated.  Not, however, in some infinite regress of unstable meaning, but as the moral necessity of engaging complex lives.

First published in Anthropology News.  

Mind the Gap—Technology and the Multiplication of Space/Time

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 19th 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 linear equation.  These are not new insights for ethnographers who are steeped in what Bergson called “duration.”  On the other hand, as Fabian pointed out long ago in his Time and the Other (1982), these insights into temporal relativism often came at a cost, imprisoning “the Other” in bubbles of time/space that made anthropology’s interlocutors even more vulnerable to power and manipulation.

But when applied to the city’s spaces, anthropology anticipates many of the insights and critiques of Henri Lefebvre and others, namely that capitalism seeks to impose ideologies of homogeneity on the city’s diverse rhythms, practices of space and time which, paradoxically, capitalism generates through highly differentiated productions of commodified spaces, work schedules and mobilities.  For Lefebvre, recovering the “rhythms” of our actual lives is antidote to this ideological reduction.

Within these interstices of space/time lie new possibilities for challenging hegemony.  On the other hand, each juncture suggests new possibilities for commodification and profit, with differences in the production of time and space exploited through arbitrage strategies that commodity them.

Nowhere has this been truer than in the development of mobile computing and social media.  On the one hand, our mobile handsets promise homogenous instantaneity, where physical presence is just a phase embedded in a spectrum of virtual presences, and every corner and relationship is reduced to a node in a web of commodified information.   On the other, these ubiquitous technologies generate countless fractures and interstices in space/time, with each technology generating absences and lacunae right alongside transparency and surveillance.  Far from complete homogeneity, social media makes our urban perambulations more like a lattice of Wi-Fi coverage—with people moving in, out and between charged fields in ways that multiply connection, continuity and ubiquity, but that simultaneously construct their opposite: disconnection, discontinuity and schism.

There are numerous, well-known examples.  In 2012, Facebook forced all of its accounts into its “timeline”—a chronology of your posts that scrolls down your screen.  At the same time, it introduced gaps in that chronology: the time before your Facebook account, or the times when you’ve been less active on the social network.  Foursquare users “check in” at different intervals with their status and location, but the social media simultaneously introduces gaps and inconsistencies before or after “check-ins”.

Some of these discontinuities may tease out the ghosts of alternative possibilities.  After having been accused and harassed for months by the FBI, the artist and University of Maryland professor Hasan Elahi began his own “sousveillance,” calling the FBI before his trips abroad and updating his whereabouts constantly on his website/art installation, “Tracking Transience.”   There are (reportedly) more than 20,000 photos on his site—an eloquent protest against a government obsessed with the surveillance of ordinary people.  But there is also an element of “intransigence” here as well, for each photograph is simultaneously the creation of an infinite number of movements and practices that are off-frame—the spaces and times between the photographs that proliferate despite the Orwellian state.

Of course, these rifts in time/space are more often ambiguous in their ultimate significance.  I think of driving around last week in Baltimore in a friend’s car with GPS.  We follow its deadpan directions through West Baltimore and then suddenly balk when it prompts us to drive through the parking lot of a strip-mall.  Did this lead me to critique of the commercialization of public space?  Does the GPS help me to question the legitimacy of the strip mall to interrupt the maximum efficiency of our route?  I remember feeling annoyed, but also wondering if I shouldn’t stop and buy something.

But that isn’t atypical.  Space/time discontinuities are routinely exploited by an advanced capitalism forever expanding into new frontiers of accumulation.  A few months ago, a big box store in Seoul (HomePlus), installed  virtual shopping along the walls of the subway station at Seonreung Station, allowing commuters to use their smartphone to click onto pictures of groceries that get delivered to their homes that evening.  The success of the virtual store depends not on the homogenization of different temporalities, but on their exploitation.  By moving into the space of competing urban rhythms: work, commuting, shopping, delivery, HomePlus seeks to colonize the temporal fragments that mark the borders of one type of mobility and another.

Undoubtedly, we will see more of this.  While the promise of ubiquitous, mobile computing is the perfect synchronization of our digital and material lives, the exact opposite is also true, with each mobile technology delivering disconnection and rupture right alongside promises of transparency and connection.  There are also reasons to hope that an anthropology sensitive to time and space practices as generative of difference and heterogeneity will continue to use these gaps in order to evoke critical topologies, but it must do so nimbly.  By the time we step in, disruptive time/space may have been already (re)colonized as productive time/space.

[published previously in Anthropology News]

You Ruined My Game

(previously published in Anthropology News)

As the brief, terrifying passion for MOOCs slowly dissipates, your university administrators may be casting around for some other technologically enhanced pedagogy.  Might I suggest gamification?  It’s not a new idea, by any means—people have been applying game-based mechanics to learning for some time, but its latest incarnation focuses on online games, from single player to collaborative, multiplayer experiences.

Of course, there’s a good deal of potential for gamification to follow on other technologically-driven changes in university teaching—ie, towards another wave of expropriation as public universities “partner” with private capital in order to undermine the autonomy of faculty.  But I believe there’s subversive potential here for anthropology.

A screenshot of Manic Digger image courtesy Pierre Rudloff and wikicommons

I’ve been thinking a lot about games and subversion recently, mostly because my children have entered their online gaming stage of child development, and are spending inordinate amounts of time either playing Minecraft or watching other people play Minecraft on screencast videos uploaded on YouTube.

Among the innumerable screen captures with stammering, preteen voice-overs, there are other, less innocent uploads that chronicle the efforts of teams of tricksters to trap, harass and prank other players.  This “griefing” runs the gamut from facile to sadistic—and if you play in any multiplayer environment, you’ll certainly have encountered behavior like that.

And while some of this simply looks like cyber bullying, I have begun to think of it in terms of anthropological approaches to gamification.  The true subversion of griefing is not that various pranksters refuse to play by the consensual rules of a multiplayer environment (although there are many, ham-fisted examples of this), it’s that the victims of their pranks believe that they’re playing one game, when in reality they’re part of other gaming logics of which they know nothing.  The humor (if it is that) lies in the victim’s realization that the game they thought they were playing is no longer possible and has been overturned

One of Gregory Bateson’s most interesting contributions was his theory of the “double bind,” the logical and discursive forms that trap victims in a vicious feedback loop where their behavior is castigated no matter what they do.  He initially theorized that double binds would precipitate schizophrenia, but later in his career began to explore the potential of double binds to stimulate creativity.  In particular, in Bateson’s theory of learning, “learning how to learn” (what Bateson later calls “Learning II”) can settle into a self-affirming cycle where positive or negative stimuli both serve to bolster a particular representation of the world.  The only way out of this would be to undermine the contexts of that understanding themselves—to move beyond rewarding or punishing behaviors and actions to calling into question not only what we might mean by reward or punish but the entire system of thinking upon which that logic rests.

In an anthropological approach to gamification, what might we be trying to subvert?  There are several: that play is competitive, composed of winners and losers,  that the environment around us needs to be exploited for personal gain, that winning and losing can be quantified as points.  Games that people play reinforce (and reinforce again) dominant understandings of people and the world, not only in terms of the politics of representation (e.g., depictions of gender in games), but at much deeper levels of game play.

For the last twenty years, people have been developing a whole species of pedagogical games (or serious games) that seek to unmask these dominant assumptions, and by confronting players with a double bind precipitate a critical understanding of the world.   For example, “Spent” (developed by an ad agency for the Urban Ministries of Durham) challenges players to survive economic hardship.  But there are no winners, really; even if you win, you end up with a couple of dollars left over at the end of the month and the challenge to survive begins again.  The message: if you are un- or underemployed and lack a place to live, you simply do not have the ability in contemporary society to pull yourself up.

Serious games like this can have a laudable impact on understanding, but anthropology, perhaps, can push critique even further, past the subversion of the game to undermining what we even mean by a game.  Something very much like the Situationist dérive, with its deliberate subversion of walking and living in the city by acts of randomness and deliberate refusal.   The idea that you might be walking in Paris following the dictates of social class and capitalist accumulation while the people walking alongside you follow the improbable logic of the dérive is profoundly unsettling and defamiliarizing.  That is, the game you thought you were in turns out to be a different game altogether.  Even various guerilla performances (like the No Pants Subway Ride) still fall short of questioning the city as primarily a growth machine.

Anthropology has long defined itself along a vector of cultural critique, although this has meant various things at various times, from a mild cultural relativism to a more piercing unmasking of the exploitation at the heart of processes of globalization.  With gamification, anthropology has an additional opportunity: to ruin someone’s game.

the sceptical futuryst: Participatory cli-fi: the Making of FutureCoast

An interesting, collaborative project . . .





the sceptical futuryst: Participatory cli-fi: the Making of FutureCoast

Ghost Anthropologies and Other Spectral Possibilities

[Cross-posted from my column on Anthropology News]

As I write this, magazines, newspapers and blog sites around the world proffer their predictions for 2014.  Many of these are predictably banal; other prognostications are realistically pessimistic; many come from journalists, some from our social science colleagues.  But they are still predictions—extrapolations from present conditions into a future that is always a continuation of the past.  On the other hand, anthropology is conspicuously silent on the subject of 2014.  But what would we say?  Anthropological data seem utterly unsuited to annual prediction; the people and events we describe don’t fall along a linear path where the future can be neatly plotted like the price of gasoline.

1797 Phantasmagoria from Etienne-Gaspard Roberston. Image courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

And yet, it would be difficult to find a discipline more concerned with the future.  The 2013 annual meeting was a case in point; stimulated by the theme “Future Publics,” a record 573 papers dropped references to the future in their paper titles or metadata.  But with a couple of exceptions, these were not predictions.  Instead, they were acknowledgements of precarity, admonitions that conditions were in motion, and that culture was about unexpected emergence.  Perhaps this betrayed a general nervousness about our own future fates.  For most of us, the university of 2014 is not looking much like the university of our undergraduate years, and one can hardly avoid some reflexivity in the 2013 theme. What would our future be?

What many of us in cultural anthropology hope is that the future will be different—that it will give us critical alternatives to the problems we see now, that it will open up different possibilities for human freedom.   Yet, no 2014 predictions in journals or newspapers I’ve seen suggest much in the way of difference.  In fact, they really don’t suggest any critical future at all.  They are futures defined by degree: more or less unemployment, more or less consumption, more or less of the same.  On the other hand, I would argue that the future work implicit in this year’s Annual Meeting is the possibility of alternative futures; the hope here, asKim Fortun has written, is “to articulate something that could not be said, could not be brought together before.”

Allow me to suggest that the appropriate metaphor for this approach to anthropological futures is “ghost anthropologies”.  By this, I mean anthropology inflected by two, related technologies.  First, something very much like the idea of phantasmagoria—those magic lantern shows that projected ghostly images around 19th century parlors.  For Walter Benjamin, these spectral entertainments are the master symbol for the mystifications of bourgeois ideologies that suffuse reality with media and spectacle.  Living with these ideological ghosts makes it difficult to interrogate the present and say something new about the future—to achieve the“critical distance” from the present .  At the same time, the technology of the phantasmagoria represents the possibility for critical transformation; humans make these ghosts, after all.

This is exactly the state we are in right now with efforts to create what my co-author Matthew Durington and I are calling a “networked anthropology”.  All around us social life is suffused with highly instrumental social networks upon which we commodify ourselves with our media productions.  I am (literally) working for Facebook, for Google+, each time I lavish my leisure minutes embellishing their corporate sites.   And yet, through these same social networking sites, we may come to realize and question our commodified connectedness in ways that may ultimately upend the logic of the neo-liberal.  But what would this critical anthropology look like?  Here, the future becomes murky.  Can we imagine a networked ethnography that critiques social media even as it engages it?  Perhaps we can only evoke it.

eFluor Nanocrystals under UV-excitation. Photo courtesy of Travis Jennings and Wikicommons

But the idea of evocation seems overly poetic—as if we could only artfully hint at alternatives.  But I would suggest a second possibility, this one drawn from a more recent technology: “ghost imaging”—a technique that draws on quantum mechanics to describe unknown objects using entangled photons.  The detectors do not see the object; instead, the entangled photons allow scientists to image the object they cannot see.  That is, that object can be visible even though we have never seen it, through photons that are paired with the photons that did hit the object.

In other words, we see the ghost, but the object is real.  To carry the analogy, the goal here is to describe and document social and cultural alternatives that lie outside of ideologically loaded discourse.  The moment we turn to the language of Web 2.0 to describe our engagements with social media, we enter the realm of commodified user content.  The future, such as it is, is already set—a linear projection off of the status quo.  However, even within this society of the spectacle, there are emancipatory possibilities—even if they lie beyond the reach of our critical discourse.  So we grapple with other ways of describing.  But we’re still describing something; the real that we can’t articulate.

Over the course of 2014, “Ghost anthropologies” will look into other sites where these spectral investigations are taking place, where we engage both the mystifications and emancipatory potentials of phantasmagoria.  That will include areas of science and technology studies, but also other possibilities, as anthropologists (and others) strive to describe the indescribable.