Platypus

Medicine Disoriented

 Amanda Quan  August 15, 2024

Once a week, I get to play doctor. Setting aside the endless anki cards and slide decks familiar to all medical students in their preclinical training, I turn instead to my patient interview skills and exam maneuvers as I enter the Kanbar Center. Located on the lower floor of the UCSF campus library behind an unassuming door, the Kanbar Center opens into a large simulation center where we hone our clinical skills with the help of standardized patients. Inside, the quiet, carpet-lined hallways of our library give way to a busy assemblage of medical cabinets, recliners, assorted supplies, and sterile rooms outlined by equipment-adorned walls. This signals our official entry into The Clinic. Against this backdrop, my peers and I don our white coats and adjust our stethoscopes before stepping into the simulation. (read more...)

The Cloud is Too Loud: Spotlighting the Voices of Community Activists from the Data Center Capital of the World

 Madelyn Zander  August 13, 2024

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What does it mean to speak about the cloud? While the term tends to conjure images of fluffy white objects, the cloud in technological terms is a complex physical infrastructure that comprises hundreds of thousands of servers distributed around the globe that provide on-demand access to data storage and computing resources over the internet. The problem with describing this physical infrastructure as the cloud is that it abstracts away the data centers, subsea fiber optic cables, copper lines, and networked devices that enable our digital interactions, as well as the consequences that the expansion of this infrastructure poses to people and to the environment. Scholars of infrastructure have written about the cloud’s incredible energy and water consumption to power and cool servers, as well as its massive carbon footprint (Carruth 2014; Edwards et al. 2024; Hogan 2018; Johnson 2023). However, less attention has been given to the cloud’s auditory presence, a problem of growing concern for people who live alongside cloud infrastructure. In this post, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork that began in 2021 with community activists in Northern Virginia, a place known as the “data center capital of the world,” to bring the cloud’s emerging sound pollution problem into focus. (read more...)

Challenging Normalized Surveillance: “Birds on the Wire” Surveillance in Mexico

 Mariel Garcia-Montes  August 6, 2024

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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In Mexican slang, “hay pájaros en el alambre” (there are birds on the wire), is an expression used to imply that a private conversation is at risk of being intentionally overheard. Birds on the wire can mean anything from one’s auntie overhearing a conversation from the other room, to a phone being wiretapped at long range by a state agency. In everyday parlance, this phrase does a lot of work to signal a broader awareness and cultural acceptance of surveillance. If, in conversation, someone is reminded of the birds on the wire, they are expected to beware—not for the birds to go away. Perhaps the statement produces a chilling effect of sorts, rather than an expectation of privacy. (read more...)

Questioning the Market: How Does the South Korean “Camming” (Beot-bang) Market Grow?

 Yuna Hwang  August 1, 2024

한국어 번역문은 여기에 있습니다.

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With the development of digital technologies, online spaces have transformed many aspects of individuals’ lives by creating infrastructures that allow various actors to freely access these spaces anytime, anywhere. The realm of sexual desire and transactions has also expanded and transformed through the mediation of digital technologies. Sanders et al. (2018) propose categorizing various aspects of these sexual transactions as “internet-based sex work,” distinguishing between the use of the internet to promote or mediate sexual services as direct sex work, and sexual activity that occurs online or in a virtual environment as indirect sex work (Sanders et al., 2018: 15). This type of sexual work, known in English as “webcamming” or “camming,” is a typical form of indirect sex work, where sexual services are traded via digital devices without physical contact. The platforms that mediate this work are considered the new marketplaces for sexual transactions (Jones, 2020: 3; Henry and Farvid, 2017: 119). (read more...)

Trolling: Breaking Rules, Poking Fun, or Just Outright Harassment?

 Chu May Paing  July 30, 2024

ဤဆောင်းပါးကို မြန်မာဘာသာနှင့်လည်းဖတ်ရှုနိုင်ပါသည်။

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“I am not reading all of that, but fuck Chu May Paing. What a fraud.” I didn’t see the comment on Facebook when it was first posted. I only found out a day after, through a friend of mine who shared a screenshot of the comment with me over a direct message. I will refer to the troll by a generic pseudonym of “John.” As ballsy of a troll as he was to leave such an inflammatory comment about me using his full real name, John was still not brave enough to leave it directly under one of my posts; he had left it under someone else’s post who mentioned my writing. I recognized John’s name right away when I saw the screenshot. John is a cishet white man in his late 30s or early 40s doing a PhD in anthropology with a focus on my home country Burma at an institution located on the Pacific Coast of the United States. As a frequent writer of irritating comments on Burmese users’ posts that create unnecessary disruptions in online discussions of Burma, John is notorious as an annoying online troll. He might be better known as a troll than a “scholar.” The Internet is John’s playground. Burmese people are his target. And trolling on Facebook seems to be how he soothes his boredom. (read more...)

Digital Anthropology of the Senses: Connecting Technology and Culture Through the Sensory World

 Adriana Moreno  July 23, 2024

Este contenido también está disponible en español

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With the ubiquity of the Internet and the overwhelming number of screens that mediate our daily practices, the predominance of the image in daily life is indisputable. The image’s omnipresence has guided countless academic works focused on the visual. For example, visual studies and specialties such as visual anthropology highlight the ethnographic value of images, which, analog or digital alike, have become powerful vehicles for the construction of knowledge (Zirión, 2015; Gómez Cruz, 2012). However, given the predominance of the visual, we have neglected research regarding other senses; this gap widens even more if we consider its intersection with digital studies. (read more...)

Cards and Codes: Spirituality and Magic in the (Bio)technological Era

 PEDRO DE MEDEIROS  July 11, 2024

Este conteúdo também está disponível em Português.

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This is not a scientific or technological project, but perhaps it is a project about science and technology. My proposal is to create a magical tool, a tarot deck, that provokes thought about how mystical and religious elements permeate the advancement of science and technology, especially in the field of biotechnology, and are in constant confluence with all aspects surrounding it: academia, startups, investors, and the like. (read more...)

The Many Modes of Ethnography

 Rebecca Carlson  July 3, 2024

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Download the transcript for this episode. This podcast episode talks to three anthropologists, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Rine Vieth, and Kara White, scholars working in three different parts of the world who use multimodal methods in their teaching and research. It is not a history of multimodal methods, or even a really detailed review of them; instead, it is a consideration of some of the issues they raise or resolve for ethnography. Whatever Tim Ingold has or hasn’t said about ethnography, he inadvertently offered what I think is the most compelling definition when he wrote: It is where we, “join with things in their passage through time, going along together with them, working with them, and suffering with them” (24, 2020). I’m tweaking the first part of this sentence to make it work here, as he’s actually describing the Latin prefix co- and his idea of “the gathering,” but it works for (read more...)