All Tomorrow's Cultures

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 Anderson has famously concluded, “numbers speak for themselves.”...

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 ...

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...

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...

(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...