Platypus

CASTAC Panels at AAA 2015 in Denver

 Jordan Kraemer  November 18, 2015

We at the CASTAC Blog are very excited about many panels and events at this week’s Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Nov. 18-22 in Denver, CO. We’ve collected talks and panels of particular interest to CASTAC Blog readers attending the meetings. Hope to see you there, and don’t forget to attend our business meeting! There will be food! Jordan Kraemer, Editor Jenny Carlson and Nick Seaver, CASTAC Co-chairs Wednesday, Nov. 18 Wednesday, 12:00 PM-1:45 PM 2-0175 TESTING AS WORLD-MAKING Richard W Rottenburg, Uli Beisel, Sandra Calkins and Stacey A Langwick Wednesday, 2:00 PM-3:45 PM 2-0290 , 2-0460 ANTICIPATING FAMILIAR/STRANGE ENVIRONMENTS: THE SOCIAL LIVES OF SCIENTIFIC PREDICTIONS – PART I | PART II Sophie Laura Haines, Sophie Laura Haines, Renzo Taddei and Susan Crate Wednesday, November 18, 2015: 4:00 PM-5:45 PM 2-0505 ANTHROPOLOGIES OF DATA Nick Seaver, Elizabeth A Rodwell, Orit Halpern (discussant), Shreeharsh Kelkar, Anna Jabloner, Alison Cool (read more...)

Forsythe Prize Author Sharon Kaufman on Ordinary Medicine

 Sharon Kaufman  November 17, 2015

I am delighted to be the recipient of the honorable mention, Diane Forsythe Prize for Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives and Where to Draw the Line (Duke University Press 2015). The book is an ethnography of the invisible social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that have made once extraordinary therapies seem ordinary and necessary. Medicine’s ability to prolong wanted life through both low-tech and high-tech interventions is a positive development in many respects. Yet the socio-medical imperative to employ death-defying techniques now exists in an ever-aging society in which private industry churns out greater numbers of interventions than ever before; in which no age or cost limits exist for insurance reimbursement of those procedures; in which many older persons, their families and their health providers must consider whether additional treatment will bring with it pain and suffering; and in which saying ‘no’ to new technologies seems somehow suspect or ethically wrong. These features of American society and health care organization have spurred our lively national conversation about whether staving off death is always the best thing to do. And, those features have created the quandary, experienced by millions, of where to draw the line between ‘enough’ and ‘too much’ treatment. (read more...)

CASTAC.org has a new look!

 Nick Seaver  November 13, 2015

You may have noticed something’s different: we’ve done some remodeling of the CASTAC website. We’ve got a brand new design and our blog has a new name: Platypus. The new design brings together our blog and homepage all under one roof and makes things a little easier to manage on the back-end. CASTAC continues to grow, taking on new members and new projects, and this new design should make it easier for all of you to follow along. Angela VandenBroek, our intrepid webmaster, took the reins on the redesign, using her considerable WordPress expertise. (She’s also working on an ethnography of Swedish web developers, so stay tuned for that!) The new design is fully responsive, so it will work on any screen size, and it’s touch-friendly, so you can browse away on your glass slab of choice. We’ve also added a few features to enhance readability: if you click on the option (read more...)

On the Relevance of a $5.9B Videogame Industry Deal

 Casey O'Donnell  November 5, 2015

I spend an inordinate amount of time watching the news, blogs, and social media that swirls around what can at best be vaguely called “the videogame industry.” There are multiple industries, markets, cultures, interests and to pretend that it is a kind of unified monolithic industry doesn’t really seem to fit much an more (if it ever did). Yet, many CASTAC readers and authors are interested in structure. Why do particular socio-cultural-political-economic formations persist remains an important question that seems to cut across the interests of CASTAC readers. For context, Activision, one of the already largest videogame publishers, announced on Tuesday their acquisition of King, a developer and publisher of popular web-based and mobile-based “free to play” (F2P) games. To put this in context: The giant company’s acquisition of King is the biggest merger in gaming since the combination of Activision and Blizzard in a nearly $19 billion deal in 2007, and it cements the new publisher as one of the biggest players in every gaming platform—home consoles like the PlayStation 4, PC online games like World of Warcraft, and mobile. (read more...)

Biella Coleman, 2015 Forsythe Prize Winner, on IRC, Anonymous, and Wild Publics

 Gabriella Coleman  October 30, 2015

It is truly an honor to join the cast of previous Diana Forsythe Prize winners and honorable mentions. In this blog post I decided to consider briefly a topic left unexplored in Hacker Hoaxer Whistleblower Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous that may be of interest to scholars working at the intersection of anthropology, media studies, and science and technology studies: the type of public Anonymous enacts with a lens directed at the communication infrastructure—Internet Relay Chat (IRC)—that helps sustain it. In many regards, IRC is one of the core communication technologies that helps support what Chris Kelty has elegantly defined as a recursive public: “a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public” (2008:3). His work addresses various features of this public but one of the most important concerns how hackers have the knowledge—and by extension the power and ability—to build and maintain the technological spaces, whether it is IRC or mailing lists, that are partly, or fully, independent from the institutions where hackers and geeks otherwise labor. Image: “You call it piracy” by Anonymous – Operation Payback IRC channel. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. (read more...)

Announcing the Winners of the 2015 Forsythe Prize!

 Jordan Kraemer  October 27, 2015

Today we have a special post from the 2015 Forsythe Prize Committee announcing two scholars recognized in this year’s competition. The Diana Forsythe Prize was created in 1998 to celebrate the best book or series of published articles in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. The prize is awarded annually at the AAA meeting by a committee consisting of one representative from the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) and two from the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC). It is supported by the General Anthropology Division (GAD) and Bern Shen. Winner, 2015 Diana Forsythe Prize Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014) is a powerful ethnography of the making and remaking of networked computational infrastructures and their animating publics and politics. Taking a multi-method anthropological approach to understanding the unruly online collective known as Anonymous, Coleman creatively continues Diana Forsythe’s legacy of getting underneath the cultural logics motivating projects of computational representation and culture. In her unique ethnographic exploration, she tracks affiliated participants across virtual and physical spaces, providing a rich and highly intricate understanding of the labyrinthine worlds that her hacker-activist subjects occupy. (read more...)

From Cave to Rave: What Digital Technologies and Social Media Could Mean for Paleoanthropology

 Todd Hanson  October 20, 2015

A month ago, global science news was abuzz with the addition of a new ancestor to our human family. The revelation of the discovery and recovery by paleoanthropologists of more than 1,500 hominid bones belonging to the new genus Homo naledi from a South African cave was momentous. And while the discovery may be of interest to CASTAC Blog readers simply as anthropological news, what I think makes it particularly germane to our ongoing colloquy is how the research was planned and conducted and how news of the discovery was disseminated by digital means. From FaceBook to Twitter, from digital imaging to scientific visualization, and from National Geographic to eLife, the pervasive use of digital technologies and social media in the project made possible the acceleration of an extraordinary scientific discovery that is already challenging established paleoanthropology dogma. The tale of how Homo naledi went from cave to rave is intriguing, but the story behind the story, of how the digital practices the researchers used stand to become the modus operandi for future projects, is even more so. (read more...)