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Who are the Influencers?

Elizabeth Rodwell November 10, 2015

It’s not a new idea, but the term “influencer” likely has not crossed the desks of those outside the world of marketing and advertising. On the surface, it’s a relatively straightforward concept: some individuals have more of an audience online than others. Among these, some have a knack for recommending products or services that are then purchased by others. For anthropologists and media researchers, the concept of an influencer recalls Bourdieu’s theory of social capital, and is a contemporary example of the kinds of influence addressed in social and actor/network theory (see here and also here). Attempting to understand the social uses of technology without considering monetization and the role of commerce is to ignore one of the strongest forces driving interpersonal dynamics online. Therefore, my intention here is to argue for both the relevance of “influencers” as an emerging concept, but also to highlight the ways in which it extends historical advertising concepts. (read more...)

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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...)

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Graphic of an ipod with a skull and cross bones on it. Below it states You call it privacy. We call it freedom. Anonymous never forgets. Anonymous never forgives.

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...)

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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...)

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Unarticulated bones of Homo maledi laid out in order on a black table.

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...)

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Teaching the Anthropology of Outer Space

Lisa Messeri October 13, 2015

I think I’ve been most surprised by how effectively exploring anthropology in the context of space has educated me on anthropology in general. Having never taken a prior anthropology class, I think learning about it (and consequently, us) through a specific topic, such as space anthropology, has been a great way to learn. This is the kind of student endorsement that makes a professor’s heart sing. A few weeks ago, I asked students in my “Anthropology of Outer Space” class to provide me with some feedback on what “surprised” them most about this class. I did this to confirm a hunch that as much as the students were excited about outer space, they were becoming equally excited about anthropology. Sure enough, a third of the anthropology of outer space class said that what surprised them most was their interest in and the relevance of anthropology both for understanding human culture in general and science in specific. The class, I should note, is being taught at the University of Virginia, and cross-listed between the School of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences. With two exceptions, the students are majoring in STEM fields. For many of the engineering students, this is their first humanities/social science class in college; for most every other student, their first anthropology class. (read more...)

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Destination: You

Yuliya Grinberg October 6, 2015

On a recent trip to California I took the train down to San Jose to visit the Tech Museum of Innovation where a new exhibit focused on wearable technology and data—Body Metrics—had just been unveiled. I study the proliferation of digital self-tracking, a phenomenon made increasingly widespread by the popularity of sensor technology and wearable devices (think Apple Watch, Fitbit wristbands, or OMsignal shirts) that generate data about one’s self. In my research I pay particular attention to the way these new technologies of knowledge are shifting the way we think about and view our bodies so I was keen to see the way the museum expressed the relationship between data and bodies. My visit would become haunted, however, by another display of the body—the Body Worlds exhibit—that I had seen months earlier in New York City. Considered alongside one another, the two exhibits say a lot about the way we commonly conceptualize personal data. (read more...)

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Announcing the 2015 CASTAC Junior-Senior Mentor Program at AAA!

Elizabeth Reddy October 5, 2015

Now Recruiting for CASTAC Junior-Senior Mentor Program at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the AAA CASTAC, the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, seeks to support the professional development of scholars in the anthropology of science and technology. To this end, we are pleased to announce our second Junior-Senior Mentor Program for the 2015 AAA Annual Meeting in Denver. We invite faculty and researchers at all levels and career trajectories to participate in our mentorship program. CASTAC will match mentors and mentees according to overlapping research interests and facilitate their initial contact. Participants will then arrange a time to meet during the conference.  Meetings may last about an hour, potentially touching upon a range of topics such as funding, professionalization, job preparation, and new directions in STS and anthropology. As CASTAC members can attest from participating in this and similar programs at other conferences, mentorship is an (read more...)

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