According to this experiment, it’s easier to identify sexual orientation in female faces than in male faces. Not sure I totally buy it, but I found the methodology intriguing to say the least.
“In April 2002, I participated in a conference on Tibet and the Cold War at Harvard University featuring distinguished scholars of China, India, and Tibet. The conference was a perfect fit with my research on Tibet and the CIA and was fantastic in many ways, until it wasn’t. Around 100 Tibetans attended the two-day conference. These were regular community members of all ages, college students and older people, whole families even, and they outnumbered the “academic” audience… Then on Day Two controversy arose when a member of the audience asked a question of the panelists. The audience member was Adam Yauch and his question was relatively simple. Why, he wanted to know, did the Chinese care so much about Tibet. “I know why Tibet is an emotional issue for Tibetans,” he said, “but why is Tibet such an emotional issue for the Chinese?” Before anyone on the panel could reply, one of the conference organizers—a Harvard professor—stood up and said forcefully that this was an “academicconference” and that “emotional” questions would not be entertained…this incident has bothered me for a long time. Dismissing individuals who turn to us as experts for answers to their questions is not right. We have multiple spaces where academics can and do speak privately amongst ourselves, and these are important spaces. But we need also to speak publicly. We need to create and embrace occasions to speak directly with communities interested in our research. We need to do this even if it feels uncomfortable; we need to do it especially if it feelsuncomfortable…”
[Emphasis Mine]
Via Savage Minds
![Anthropology of this Century, a new Anthropology Journal. As far as I can tell, all of the articles are available online. Adam Fish over at Savage Minds, a fantastic group blog about Anthropology, posted an interview with Charles Stafford, the professor behind the new journal.
Of the posted interview questions, I found this question and its subsquent response the most intriguing:
“AF [Adam Fish]: Its a simple one but one of the affordances that internet publishing has over hardcopy publishing is the capacity for fast dialogic commentary and the modeling of a virtual public sphere. As one of the moderators of this blog Savage Minds, I understand the work entailed in moderating commentary but I still find it a necessary component of online writing. Considering this, why don’t you allow comments on the articles?
CS [Charles Stafford]: The question you ask is one that I anticipated. Not only does AOTC not have serious interactivity (e.g. readers’ forums etc.), we don’t even have a letters page! This may seem odd for an online open access journal. But if people want to respond to our articles my advice is that they should stop – think carefully – and then publish a response elsewhere, either on a blog (such as yours), or in an article, or a book. The instant response is in some ways antithetical to scholarship. I’m not a big fan of it, except in the context of research seminars, such as the anthropology seminar we hold on Friday mornings at the LSE. There I can be extremely critical of someone’s ideas but this is followed by us having a drink together, and then lunch, which obviously transforms the whole interaction.”
Emphasis mine.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3mufdXa9F1qb9ouno1_500.png)
Anthropology of this Century, a new Anthropology Journal. As far as I can tell, all of the articles are available online. Adam Fish over at Savage Minds, a fantastic group blog about Anthropology, posted an interview with Charles Stafford, the professor behind the new journal.
Of the posted interview questions, I found this question and its subsquent response the most intriguing:
“AF [Adam Fish]: Its a simple one but one of the affordances that internet publishing has over hardcopy publishing is the capacity for fast dialogic commentary and the modeling of a virtual public sphere. As one of the moderators of this blog Savage Minds, I understand the work entailed in moderating commentary but I still find it a necessary component of online writing. Considering this, why don’t you allow comments on the articles?
CS [Charles Stafford]: The question you ask is one that I anticipated. Not only does AOTC not have serious interactivity (e.g. readers’ forums etc.), we don’t even have a letters page! This may seem odd for an online open access journal. But if people want to respond to our articles my advice is that they should stop – think carefully – and then publish a response elsewhere, either on a blog (such as yours), or in an article, or a book. The instant response is in some ways antithetical to scholarship. I’m not a big fan of it, except in the context of research seminars, such as the anthropology seminar we hold on Friday mornings at the LSE. There I can be extremely critical of someone’s ideas but this is followed by us having a drink together, and then lunch, which obviously transforms the whole interaction.”
Emphasis mine.
“
Futurist John Smart, president and founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, recalled an insight of economist Simon Kuznets about evolution of technology effects known as the Kuznets curve: “First-generation tech usually causes ‘net negative’ social effects; second-generation ‘net neutral’ effects; by the third generation of tech—once the tech is smart enough, and we’ve got the interface right, and it begins to reinforce the best behaviors—we finally get to ‘net positive’ effects,” he noted. “We’ll be early into conversational interface and agent technologies by 2020, so kids will begin to be seriously intelligently augmented by the internet. There will be many persistent drawbacks however [so the effect at this point will be net neutral]. The biggest problem from a personal-development perspective will be motivating people to work to be more self-actualized, productive, and civic than their parents were. They’ll be more willing than ever to relax and remain distracted by entertainments amid accelerating technical productivity.
“As machine intelligence advances,” Smart explained, “the first response of humans is to offload their intelligence and motivation to the machines. That’s a dehumanizing, first-generation response. Only the later, third-generation educational systems will correct for this.”
”From Pew’s Study “Millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives”
In a survey about the future of the internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020. They said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
The long-form responses to the questions are worth reading and considering. Or if you are particularly nerdy, get your smartest friends together to drink and talk about the survey questions, responses and implications. Tell them to turn off their smartphones.
“I opened the folder on mascaras with a level of excitement I have never personally experienced from applying mascara.”
Already, we are being inundated with stories about the how social media will shape the 2012 campaigns (and how Facebook may, or may not, transform the Presidency itself). Two facts, however, limit the potential role social media will, ultimately, play in the 2012 election: 1.) Young people are heavy users of social media, but are unlikely to vote. 2.) Older folks are likely to vote, but are much less involved in social media. Thus, the reality is that social media is best at reaching those least likely votes. In its 2008 post-election analysis, Pew found that while 72% of Americans 18-29 year of age were using the Internet for political activities or information gathering (and 49% used social-networking sites for these purposes), only 22% of Americans 65+ years of age engaged in such activities on the Internet (and a mere 2% did so on social media).
Michael Gallope, a musician (electric organ) and scholar (Ph.D. student) at the NYU Humanities Initiative, developed digrams to present his dissertation research. His work stems from his interest in music and an Adorno-inflected understanding of cultural criticism.
Diagrams to explain Adorno !?!They’re as cumbersome as one would expect but at least Gallope was trying something new.
Via The Society Pages
“This is work in progress, the focus being on methodology, more precisely on how social media have been researched so far.”
Via John Postill’s “Media/Anthropology” blog
Some very good stuff on this list.
Insight: The more you talk about yourself on Twitter, the more your follower count decreases. Finally, some numbers to back up what most of us already knew.
Via Dan Zarrella
Note: Dan Zarrella’s research on social media is fantastic because, unlike other ‘social media experts,’ Zarrella bases his insights off of empirical evidence not esoteric speculation.
In ethnographic research, one is in a constant cycle of asking, collecting, recording, and analyzing. Over time, questions and units of analysis become more refined until the ethnographer is ready to leave or runs out of money.
The student author of this observation deserves an A.
“In terms of internet research, multi-sited ethnography – in particular Marcus’s tracking strategy of “following the thing,” can provide a methodological approach that accounts for the role of material objects (technologies, artifacts, media) in describing social processes that are constituted in and articulated through sociotechnical practices. Conventionally, ethnographic research has concentrated primarily on the role of human actors in meaning-making processes. While documents and artifacts have certainly been part of ethnographic projects, those objects have often been examined as the product, and not a co-producer of, culture. The result is that technology often plays a limited role in understanding social practices, a point Bruno Latour makes arguing that technical objects are the “missing masses” in social science (1992).”
Walker, Dana M. (2010) The Location of Digital Ethnography, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (via dan3)
(via dan3)
I’m looking for different open-access journals that address social sciences and/or new media. So far, folks have sent me the following:
List Curated By danah boyd
![My day has been made!
I was asked to write a blog post for the Edelman Digital blog (Employer) about digital research. I used the post as an opportunity to call out the work of five digital researchers and ethnographers whose work I find valuable and insightful.
The post went live yesterday and I’ve been floored by the great feedback it has received. More importantly, I’ve been really touched by the humility of some of the researchers on the list. These people don’t have to acknowledge the list or even say thanks, but they did and it makes me respect them even more.
[Disclosure: boyd works at Microsoft’s research facility in Boston. Microsoft is an Edelman Client]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcwyjviJPm1qb9ouno1_500.png)
My day has been made!
I was asked to write a blog post for the Edelman Digital blog (Employer) about digital research. I used the post as an opportunity to call out the work of five digital researchers and ethnographers whose work I find valuable and insightful.
The post went live yesterday and I’ve been floored by the great feedback it has received. More importantly, I’ve been really touched by the humility of some of the researchers on the list. These people don’t have to acknowledge the list or even say thanks, but they did and it makes me respect them even more.
[Disclosure: boyd works at Microsoft’s research facility in Boston. Microsoft is an Edelman Client]
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Modern & Im/material Things
I'm Christina Dennaoui. Sometimes I wax philosophical on culture in the digital age. I have an interest in social media, cultural studies, electronic music, critical theory, middle eastern politics, ethnographic research and digital anthropology. I make beats. I drink bourbon. I'm a nice lady, so you should talk to me.
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