All Tomorrow's Cultures

The Spatial Practice of Online Social Networks What are the relationships between the city and the social media used in the city?  I assume that social media have had an impact on the ways we relate to the city.  This, after all, was one the goals in utilizing Twitter in #Occupy protests—to organize people in space.  During those protests, social media helped evoke alternatives to hegemonic spaces structured by capital flows.   On the other hand, I also assume that social media is shaped by historic and contemporary urban practice—by flanerie, by different systems of mobility, by contemporaneous technologies such as books, newspapers, earphones, and by the history of media in the city. But how do we understand this give and take?  Many of the analyses of Twitter in the city have been variations on Big Data: that is, work has tended to answer questions about large-scale movements of ideas and discourse.  In the process, many of the small questions...

My colleague, Matthew Durington, and I have just finished our final iteration of a 4-year collaborative project,  Anthropology By the Wire .   From the outset, we sought to produce YouTube Video from this year’s Anthropology By the Wire, “Clean and Green Superheroes”. Photo courtesy Samuel Collins counter-narratives to David Simon’s “The Wire,” alternative representations that contest urban imaginaries of Baltimore premised on crime and drugs.  Through collaborative productions shared through social media, we have tried to challenge the directionality of these representational regimes by making local media disseminated on YouTube, Tumblr and Flickr. But what we have realized is that the urban imaginary (as  LiPuma and Koelbe describe it), is constituted not only by representations of urban circulation, but the imagination of the circulation of those representations of circulation (and it may be circulations all the way down).  In other words, it ...

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...