Research | Platypus

What’s Up in the Cloud(s)?

 Casey O'Donnell  July 16, 2013

In May, Adobe prompted me reflect on the “Cloud.” Adobe announced that it’s widely used “Creative Suite,” which includes things like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and many other software products would be transitioning to a subscription-based, web-based and cloud-based product, the “Creative Cloud.” My first (and clearly cynical) thought was, “Well, at least I don’t have to install their bloated software anymore or have Acrobat update every other day.” At the same time, the reality of what that would mean for people who use these products for their jobs, encouraged me to consider it further. It also prompted me to return to a 2008 discussion between Richard Stallman and Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian. I should also disaggregate the cloud infrastructure from products that deliver their services via the cloud. These are often conflated in accounts of the trend. The cloud infrastructure is/are computers and the networks that connect them and them to (read more...)

Twitter Hashtags, Emotion and The Resonance of Social Protest

 Veronica Barassi  June 25, 2013

There is something strikingly similar between the events taking place in Turkey and in Brazil. It is the momentum, intensity and force of these uprisings. It is the connection between profoundly context specific roots of social unrest and broader global political issues. In this post I want to focus on the issue of social media technologies. This is not to propose yet again a techno-deterministic analysis on social media and social protest. In fact, as argued elsewhere, in the understanding of the relationship between Web 2.0 technologies and social movements it is of fundamental importance that we move beyond techno-deterministic analyses that emphasize pervasiveness, agency and change (Barassi, 2012, Barassi and Treré, 2012, Barassi, 2013). What I want to do in this post is to consider the events in Turkey and Brazil by raising some points on the connection between social media, collective emotion and transnational resonance. In order to (read more...)

Off the Grid in the Modern World

 Phillip Vannini  June 18, 2013

Power is an interesting word. For most social scientists “power” stands for authority, control, sovereignty, economic capital, military-industrial hegemony, social stratification, and similar ideas. But power—especially in everyday usage—is synonymous with something seemingly more immediate, proximate, and concrete. Thus we may commonly talk of “engine power” that allows us to drive faster, of “physical power” that enables us to jump higher, or of “domestic power” that permits us to live comfortable, connected, and convenient lives. What is truly interesting about this is that the dictionary definition of power—the ability or capacity to act—refers to all of the above, an idea that only a handful of scholars have capitalized upon. It’s an irremediably cloudy, intermittently soggy day on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. But not even an unexpectedly miserable stretch of bad late spring weather can cast a wet blanket over the elation in the air. It’s the last interview—with informants number (read more...)

Is the Captain Crazy? Am I In Charge?

 Charlotte Linde  May 27, 2013

Probably everyone reading this has had the experience of receiving a command or an instruction from a legitimate authority that elicits the response: “Are they out of their minds?” If it is a bureaucratic authority, like the IRS, reflection suggests that there is no “they” to have a mind that they could be out of. This kind of authority is the result of a code of rules that is not monitored for consistency, and there may be no one who is charged with determining whether the application of a particular rule makes sense. This is the authority of the faceless “They”. But there is the even more frightening situation in which one’s manager issues an order which makes no sense, or which appears to be operating in a different universe. (As a linguist, I note the existence of a lexical item for one particular style of managerial insanity: the “bring (read more...)

American Fans of Japanese Popular Culture as Foreign-Identity Consumers

 Rebecca Carlson  May 14, 2013

Internet technologies are only the most recent form to provide consumers access to global images and narratives. But virtual spaces (from simple message boards to fully rendered worlds like Second Life), afford individuals the opportunity not just to watch, learn, and communicate about other people and places, but also to go so far as to assume aspects of those identities. Of course, Internet technologies not only collapse geographic space, they can also blur the physical distinctions of voice and body typically used to categorize people as different from each other. This idea has been well discussed in terms of gender, age or disability, where degrees of anonymity, or the mutability of physical presence, of online communications allows users to craft versions of themselves that may appear to have little connection to their own “real” attributes. In avatar-driven virtual worlds like Second Life, ethnicity doesn’t predetermine appearance (of course, it is (read more...)

Performing Technical Affiliation

 Patricia G. Lange  May 9, 2013

As I conclude a semester teaching anthropology of technology, one of my favorite themes has to do with how people perform affiliations to technologies, as well as related beliefs, practices, and values. In that spirit, I’d like to repost here, on The CASTAC Blog, a brief summary of some themes I’ve developed and worked with in order to understand the relationship between technology and identity. This post was originally written for Savage Minds, but I’d like to re-post it here to continue the conversation among folks directly researching issues of anthropology and technology. As always, comments welcome! *** There’s a new sociological variable in town, one which I call performing technical affiliation. Technically speaking, it is not a new way of thinking about identity. For many years, perhaps millennia, people have enacted aspects of identity by interacting with and through technologized objects, forms of knowledge and related practices and values. (read more...)

Findings From The Asthma Files

 Ali Kenner  April 30, 2013

It’s been nearly four years since The Asthma Files (TAF) really took off (as a collaborative ethnographic project housed on an object-oriented platform). In that time our work has included system design and development, data collection, and lots of project coordination. All of this continues today; we’ve learned that the work of designing and building a digital archive is ongoing. By “we” I mean our “Installation Crew”, a collective of social scientists who have met almost every week for years. We’ve also had scores of students, graduate and undergraduates at a number of institutions, use TAF in their courses, through independent studies, and as a space to think through dissertations. In a highly distributed, long-term, ethnographic project like TAF, we’ve derived a number of modest findings from particular sites and studies; the trick is to make sense of the patterned mosaic emerging over time, which is challenging since the very (read more...)