All Tomorrow's Cultures

(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 bec...

An interesting, collaborative project . . . the sceptical futuryst: Participatory cli-fi: the Making of FutureCoast

[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 p...

This piece of mine came out in a collection of essays on California science fiction: http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-networked-frontier/ I've always found him good to think with--his recent stuff, especially, which has this thoughtful open-endedness that I find particularly inviting.  An odd parallel: Le Guin's work is similarly trending towards ambiguity. 

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story " The Man of the Crowd " by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), first printed in 1923 (from Wikimedia Commons) Edgar Allan Poe’s story fragment, “The Man of the Crowd” (published in 1840 when Poe was living between Baltimore, Richmond and Philadelphia), begins with the narrator peering out onto a London street from a café, making observations about passersby: typologies of urban dwellers (“the tribe of clerks,” the “race of swell pick-pockets”), divisions of the population into age, gender, race and ethnicity.   Finally, though, his gaze alights on an enigmatic character that eludes easy classification: “decrepit” and “feeble,” yet “he rushed with an activity I could not have dreamed of seeing in one so aged”; “without apparent aim,” yet characterized by “blood thirstiness” and armed with a “dagger”.   Seduced by these paradoxical attributes, Poe’s narrator follows the man until sunrise, without, though, gaining any insight into t...

At the moment I write this, a creeping group think has saturated both higher education (The Chronicle of Higher Education), and popular media (New York Times, Huffington Post, etc.).  It's that moment when public debate constricts to a terrifying one-dimensionality--when all manner of unwarranted assumptions attain hegemony and become the scaffolding for etiolated prognostications.  And, in this case, where we enter a time-warp and return to the 1980s.    Take, for example, an April 30 article from the front page of the New York Times , "Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden". Here, the President of San Jose State University, Mohammad Qayoumi, discusses his enthusiastic adoption of MOOC modules from MIT: "Traditional teaching will be disappearing in five to seven years, he predicts, as more professors come to realize that lectures are not the best route to student engagement, and cash-strapped universities continue to seek cheaper instruction" (A1)...

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...