Great News! The next CyborgCamp will be in early May of 2010. That means its time to start planning!

This meeting is everyone’s chance to brainstorm on location ideas, sponsors and speakers. What kinds of topics are of interest to you? How has the idea of Cyborg evolved over the last year? What new kinds of technologies have arrived on the scene?

We’ll discuss volunteers and the wiki too. Come along, especially if you helped make CyborgCamp PDX ‘08 so excellent in the first place. Bring snacks and drinks to share with others.

This planning meeting will most likely be followed by general networking and fun at a local haunt.

RSVP on Upcoming.org

Where:

AboutUs.org

107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
Portland Oregon 97214
United States

When:

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 from 7–9pm

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What is CyborgCamp?

CyborgCamp is an unconference about the future of the relationship between humans and technology. We’ll discuss topics such as social media, design, code, inventions, web 2.0, twitter, the future of communication, cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

CyborgCamp’s aim is to have many communication channels, such as Twitter, Flickr, UstreamTV, Video and Audio recordings and live chats displayed on the screen.
Why May 2010? In March 2010, CyborgCamp will make its way to Brazil and back before landing again in Portland, Oregon for its second year.

—

Questions? Contact Amber Case @caseorganic or MJ @mama_j.

You can also follow @cyborgcamp on Twitter for updates.

On July 8th, the Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO) hosted Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research at Jive Software (CHIFOO’s new location). Marshall’s presentation, titled Reading and Collaboration in a Digital Age: or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Screen, was a mental tour de force that reexamined assumptions of how we read, annotate, and look at text.

Approximately 60 people were in attendance, and the audience and speaker discussion was lively and relevant. There was never a dull moment or boring segment. I sat there furiously trying to capture every piece, as you will see evidenced below.

A Short History of eBooks

Marshall: I know lots of you are thinking, “what does reading have to do with collaboration?”.

eBooks have really been around for a long time, since around the 1980’s. The first generation was really about hypermedia and multimedia. Kind of the excitement of having these things on the screen, to be able to do things that you couldn’t do before. Peruses was a site about ancient Greece — the reason people loved it was that you were able to look up words in Greek and have them available immediately.

Generation 2 had P-books, or portable books. This turned out to be a bad name. There were multiple jokes about it. There was even a Zippy comic that made fun of it.

The comic shows Zippy and his friend flying through the city on the back of a book. Zippy’s friend says, “I head that the E-book trend never really took off, sales of the things are tanking.” and zippy says, E-books will never replace P-Book!”.

There’s some more text discussing the comparative values of books over electronic media, and the cartoon ends with Zippy saying, “E-books are spineless”.

Marshall: I think there’s a real sort of cultural anxiety about the end of books, and the death of text. And there was also skepticism about reading on computers, Like Sven Birkerts, Richard Harper, who wrote about how paperless offices didn’t work. There were also people in library science who said that these things wouldn’t work out well eighteen.

Marshall brings out a slide of an old cell phone displaying a partial sentence from Moby Dick on its tiny, pixilated screen.

Marshall: For many people, their worst fear was of having to read something on a cell phone while being trapped in the airport.

But there is no reason to laugh about this anymore because people in Japan are actually reading and writing novels on cell phones.

In Family Circus…by the way….does anyone think Family Circus is funny? I think they must have some hidden message or something , and that’s why people keep publishing them.

Audience: I have some friends who carefully cut out Family Circus every day…and then replace the captions with something else. Then they’re funny.

A Family Circus comic shows up on the screen. The kid is talking to his mother. “I’m never going to start reading eBooks,” he says, “it’s too hard to curl up with a monitor”.

And one last point was from Clifford Lynch in the battle to define the future of the book in the digital world. He said, “Try to think of eBooks as personal libraries instead of books” First Monday, 2001. “>First Monday 2001.

Generation 3 - 2006-2008

By the time Generation 3 happened, the generations were getting closer and closer together (as they say in future shock).

In this generation, we asked ourselves, will eBooks somehow renew the social side of reading?

Why was it so hard to see what’s coming?

Reason 1: Changes aren’t always in technology.

There was a very famous article written by Vannevar Bush about a system he called a Memex (portmanteau of “memory extender”). It’s heralded as the introduction to the hyperlink, that you could go from one place to another and record that hyperlink.

“The advanced arithmetic machines of the future…will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions form a whole roomful of girls armed with simple keyboard punches and will deliver sheets of complicated results every few minutes”. - Vannevar Bush in As We May Think, 1945.

I took typing class too, on those big clunky computers. And there were no boys in the class. You weren’t a boy in my class unless you were in drag.

An audience member nods.  “Were you in drag?” Marshall asks.

“Depends,” he responds, “what year was that again?”

Why is it hard to answer this question?

Answer: Because it is often difficult to see the whole cost/benefit analysis side of the picture, like this panel I cut out from the back of a box of Shredded Wheat that says,

“Dear NABISCO Shredded Wheat Users”.

Reason 3: Reading is Invisible

“Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter so common that at first glance, it seems there is nothing to say about it. ”
Tzvetan Todorov, quoted by Nicholas Howe in The Ethnography of Reading.

Marshall: I’m kind of a feral Ethnographer. Sarah has worked with me and knows that I like to have principles.

I was sitting there on the airplane and I was sitting there watching this man read his magazine. There he was, reading this magazine. I thought I was so discreet. And at some point he got up and went to the restroom.

And he looked over at me and said, “you stole my magazine”. and I said, “I did not!” and he said, “Let me look in your briefcase”. And so reading is invisible. And it’s very dangerous to watch people read. And people think it’s creepy!

But in this talk I’m trying to summarize 15 years of studies on cooperation, and reading tech, to really find out what reading is. So you’ll have to bear with me as I tease out a definition.

I starting looking at intelligence analysts - how people gathered and collected things, and then how people annotated things, and found that they aren’t quite the scholarly things people see in the margins, and then looked at it in law offices and law school. Those also who came in and talked to the Vice President and President and briefed them every morning. And I actually got to be there when President Bush got the Osama bin Laden briefing.

I went to work at Microsoft and looked a Microsoft reader, and then I looked at shared annotations, and then how people clipped things out of magazines and how they read. So we looked at reading in some detail. Then I worked with some people t Microsoft at the New York Times Reader application. Does anyone have one of those?

One audience member raised his hand.

Well then, it was a tremendous success! The photos in it are really nice. You don’t really notice how nice the photos are in the Times until you view them in that reader.

Then she showed a photos of a guy sitting on the subway reading a newspaper seated next to a guy who was sitting there with a tremendous cathode ray tube monitor and keyboard on his lap, the computer unit on the ground underneath his feet. It was making fun of Reading, of course.

How Do Most People Think About Reading?

We think it’s private, individual, stationary and passive. We think it’s something as immersive, and sometimes soggy (she shows a picture of a guy reading a newspaper in the bathtub).

But what we found instead was that reading is mobile. That’s why reading on a screen was so dismal at first, because nobody wanted want to carry around a screen with them everywhere. Because reading was so mobile. What we found at first was that mobility overwhelmed many things at first.

“If I’m going home to Colorado, I have to be really sure I’m going to read something if I’m going to bring it. Otherwise, why should I bring it [if it's large, heavy]. [The Pocket PC] is small, it’s handy.”. Quote from a college student talking about a Pocket PC with his course texts.

Marshall: Note that he actually didn’t end up reading his coursework on over the break.

So reading is mobile, material, passive.

In The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction, Geoffrey Nunberg of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford University said this about eBooks:

“Reading what people have had to say about the future of knowledge in an electronic world, you sometimes have the picture of somebody holding all the books in the library by their spines and shaking them until the sentences fall out loose in space” (Representations 24, Spring, 1993). Also in Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds., Future Libraries, University of California Press, 1994.

“You get this little screen, so you get no sense of even how long the work is…but you have 600 pages, which means what? No one knows. So I definitely don’t see it as a literary experience”. An English Lit Grad student talking about reading on the Jordana Pocket PC.

(Note from Amber Case: This is what I continually think about when I encounter a computer, because no matter how much data I stuff into it, it never gets heavier. A book weighs the same as a leaflet – nothing).

Marshall: Navigation is fundamental to the material of paper.

“Something else that I think I sometimes do when reading an article: I’ll be like, ‘boy this has been going on a long time, and sometimes I’ll even flip ahead and think, how many more pages do I have? And if it’s going to end on this page, then I may just read it. But if I see it’s three more pages, the…I may just either give up. Or just go into scan mode, where I just flip, you know, see what grabs my attention”

Marshall: Reading has a basic physicality.

(Note from Amber Case: Here, the materiality allows scanning, weight, and thickness).

“I usually read in one of the chairs in the living room. That’s partly because I don’t have a desk in here. The chairs are very comfortable. There’s a occasionally much too comfortable, that’s why I have blankets around every chair in the house, so I can always be prepared to go to sleep.” - An English Lit major talking about where she reads.

Then Marshall shows a quote from the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.

“I can’t read this without a French accent,” she says, “else I can’t get away with it. Does anyone have a French accent?”.

No one in the a audience had one.

“The compact disc,” says Baudrilliard, “It doesn’t wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying. It’s as through you’d never used it. So it’s as through you iddn’t exist. IF things dont’ get old anymore, then that’s because it’s you who are dead”. Jean Baudrilliard, Cool Memories II.

Marshall: Maybe you don’t want the pristine copy - you want the one that is like the one you first bought in the 70’s. The one that is used. The one that is well read.

You think about how interact with books online - you don’t have to think about that with a paper book. You don’t have to think about how to annotate.

Audience: The medium of the book is to have it be as transparent as possible. But when you have these different mediums that have types of media placed, you can’t read them anymore. You’re inhibited by the medium. You notice it.

We’ll get back to that later - I have a big rant about that too.

People interact with text far more than they own up to. People don’t remember making the annotations, they idealize them, they make far more than they actually remember. And when you show someone their annotations from a few days back, they don’t know what many of the annotations were referring to.

Audience Member: Have you ever heard of the book as a sacred object? Because I’m a librarian and I can’t annotate a book. I buy one copy for me and another to annotate.

Marshall: And what about the Ebook? Do you value the Ebook?

Audience Member: There’s nothing sacred about an Ebook because it doesn’t have a material embodiment. And I know I’m not going to pass it along to anyone else.

Marshall: Not unless you violate the DRM you won’t!

Audience Member: Is that sacredness of the book genetic, do you think?

Audience Member: Well I don’t know.

Librarian: Well, I was one of those, “Matchbox car collectors, a ‘never open the package’ kind of person.

Audience: What about the notes taken by college students?

Marshall shows the image of a page that’s been completely highlighted.

Like this? Or some people carefully save all of their college notes and them look at them later, or think they will look at them later. Or value them highly, but never look at them.

Literally, though, this highlighting goes on for pages. If you find that at the beginning of a math book, it means that the person’s going to drop the class.

Audience: I could never buy a book that was already annotated, because I’d go through the book and be like, “that’s not worthy of being annotated! or that section is not important enough to be highlighted!”.

Audience: Can you tell me the context of this study? How it was formed? Where you got the information?

Marshall: I’m smushing together many years of research here, but I can tell you about a few experiments.

For instance, for the highlighting, annotation one, I staged myself in the Stanford bookstore and pretended that I worked there, and I stayed there 2-3 weeks, looking through 1000’s of textbooks, watching people buy used and new textbooks, eavesdropping on whether or not they would buy what kind of book, and interviewed them about f they would by

And a lot of them would look through books to see what had been outlined before they decided on purchasing them.

This was a study I did a dozen or so years ago. It was one of the first studies I did, and it was just to get an idea of what people did when they purchased textbooks.

Audience: Did you ever find out the answer, “why did you highlight this entire text? Like why so much?

Marshall: Well, I think it happens in instances where there’s really complex information placed in front of someone who doesn’t understand it. The highlighting becomes more of a tracing of general attention. Sometimes it is from multiple readings.

In Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book, there’s a whole section on active learning. Sometimes I see those results. One time I saw a book with multiple different colors and I found a student who said, “Oh, I do that!”. I asked why, and she said, “Oh, I just change colors when I get bored”. Evidence of why it is important to ask.

Annotations May Quickly Lose Their Value or Be Forgotten

“Some of them are absolutely ridiculous and I can’t believe that I actually wrote this in pen in the book. Some of them are - I have no idea what I’m talking about. Some of them are really interesting, and it’s something I’ve forgotten. It just depends on the notes….when I did Milton, we were doing the epithets about Satan or something, so I underlined all of them. And when I was going back through it, I’m like “what on Earth!?” A grad student talks about annotations she made as an undergrad.

Marshall: The reason I found out about the subconscious stuff is that I’d go back with them through their notes a week after they’d done it and ask them about it, the notes, the diagrams, and some of them would say, “I’m sure it had some meaning at the time”. So annotations have more meaning than we think.

Reading is Interrupted and Variable

I think this is at the root of “what is reading”. It’s not this image of a little girl in the window seat and she’s totally engrossed in a book, uninterrupted.

“We do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as ‘boring’) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote…” - Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text.

Marshall: Reading is not a single, undistracted stream of concentration. Has anyone read all the words of Proust, or War and Peace?

Audience member: Yes. But it was not normal circumstances.

Marshall: Right, most of the time, reading is fragmented.

Turning a Page as a Complex of Lightweight Navigational Acts

A series of actions: Constance is reading the first page of a review, but halfway through the article she turns the page halfway over, so she can see the next article while still reading the first one.

She looks at the cartoon before she goes to the next page because she thinks it’s funny.

She goes through the next page, which looks like a lengthy review, looks at the ads, because the likes to look at the ads.

She successfully flips over the magazine so that she can read the next article.

She changes the orientation of her hands so that she can comfortably read again.

I have so many videos of people moving their hands to their face or moving them when they’re

I’m going to claim that reading is social. Not that it is intensely individual, as many people may think.

“It is also worth noting that solitary reading always was, and still is, inherently social: how we read is ultimately determined by social convention and community membership”. -David Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age

Marshall: Now I’m going to bring up our old friend, the CSCW matrix.

When, Where, same time, different time, Same place, different place. It’s been around so long that I couldn’t figure out how to source it.

Audience: Stands for Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

In the upper left: reading together, same time, same place.

We were watching students read on the web and we seated each one in front of a computer. We just told them to ‘go and browse the web’. And very quickly they had organized themselves in twos or threes around the computers instead of individually exploring the web alone.

And then we did studies with an early Web TV, and I thought, “ ‘ho hum!’ big deal, the Web on your TV!”

But then I watched as one kid was messing around with the Web TV, and another kid joined him. Before long, they were negotiating about where to go next on the web.

And then there were situations designed to read socially, like reading groups.

One of the things I noticed is how people stayed together while reading together. One of the problems with some books is that people go to the used bookstore and buy different editions, and people all have to align in class on the same class. They’re all different ways people use to get to the same page. Chapters, indexes, page numbers, ect. What we noticed is that people can be productively engaged in the discussion but not actually on the same page. This sort of things people would get punished for.

Audience: Was it established why it was important to be on the same page? Reading together: on-the-spot research enhancing discussion or digression?

Marshall: Well, we did some studies where there would be a line in the reading like “Did they really hang dogs a witches?” This was an interesting quote so all the kids reading on their pocket PC’s began to look it up. Some teachers found it to be good, and others a distraction.

But a problem with sharing reading materials occurs when one tries to share them electronically, especially with a Kindle.

Audience: You can share books on a Kindle!

Marshall: Even DRM ones?

Audience: You can share them if they’re in the public domain.

But that’s not the same as sharing a book. The problem is that you have to have an ID or account to share that data. You can’t just pass it to the next person, like you would with an analog book. You can’t share the data itself, or annotations, or things you’ve torn out.

Speaking of tearing out data; we all have experienced this. Tearing out data makes us this of our mothers, our mothers or brothers or sisters, tearing something out and mailing it to us.

H3>A Few Questions About Sharing Encountered Information

How important/ubiquitous is the information? Do people cut out things to annoy people?

It’s kind of like, you buy a magazine because of the things you might find in there. But you don’t know what’s going to be in there.

Audience: I now look at people’s Twitter feeds to see what I should look at.

At this point, @brampitoyo said (on Twitter) “@caseorganic Twitter is made for sharing artifacts encountered everywhere else. RT is one of the forms.”

Marshall: What are some of the reasons people share?

1. Sharing for mutual awareness.

2. At work, in customer-focused jobs.

3. At home, keeping up with friends and family
short of a way to keep in synch.

4. Sharing to educate or raise consciousness. Valued by sender — perhaps not by receiver.
Mostly occurred for personal topics/home

Audience: I was thinking with Twitter how funny it is, how the more boring Twitter users just send out links, and we don’t get to know them as person.

Audience: Well, I like those people!

5. Sharing to strengthen social ties
“I’m thinking of you”
“We have common concerns”
“We have the same sense of humor”.

Audience: Or sometimes you’re sharing to make people think you’re smart

Yes, we just notice it because it’s so obnoxious, but it’s rally not that prevalent. Just sharing knowledge to show off.

Audience; Or sharing to “hint”, like “I’m thinking about getting a camera”.

P2, a high school student, receives links to online article from her dad sometimes as often as 2 or 3 times a day. She usually reads he article son the screen and doesn’t keep them. For example her dad recently sent her an article from the NY Times. “Sending these articles is nice. I don’t know how we started doing it, but it feels nice to know people are thinking about you. It’s our way of keeping in touch.

Marshall: Here’s an example of sharing to educate.

P15 has a pre-adolescent son has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high functioning autism. The mother found an article on educating children with Asperger’s syndrome and photocopied the “really good” article from Time. Then she told the her son’s teacher that she should read it.

The Social Role of Sharing: Myth Busting

All four participants in our study shared information. None of them dominated in sharing the inormation, and none of them were the single sharers of information.

This busts the idea of people setting themselves up as “information brokers’ not many people just
send out completely, or one-way. Everyone sends out a few links.

Audience: There are some people on Twitter who Retweet. I don’t really like that.

Audience: Tell them!

Marshall: I’m worried about you and Twitter. We should talk later.

Audience: I work alone, so it’s my water cooler that I check every few hours.

Marshall: Still, I think you’re spending too much time on it.

It’s more complicated than that!

Riox looked at why people share or don’t share data.

Do I have the recipients email address at hand?
What will it look like?
Will this seem impersonal?
Will the Email look like spam?
(Riox, 2000).

Form is important.

A technological solution for sharing should:

-Present a sense of layout and article boundaries.
-Allow the sender to limit or expand scope or context (compare sending a photo plus text vs. part of text).

Modes of Sharing are Important

“My plan is to actually give a hardcopy of an article from nature to him and talk to him about it, rather than just put it in his inbox because he’d kind of wonder where it came from or why he was getting it. And I’d rather say, hey, I saw this online and it’s pretty interesting. Check it out”.

Because he wants to get this higher into another person’s attention instead of the low attention the recipient might give the article should he receive it through a digital source.

“I have come to view margins as a literary commons with grazing room from everyone - the more, the merrier”. - Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris : Confessions of a Common Reader, London : Penguin Books, 1998.

Of course, sharing annotations is more complicated than it looks.

See, for example, Shipman et al., ECDL 2003.

I was working at Microsoft Research and a guy on my team said, “wouldn’t it be cool if the annotations you wrote would be sent to the author of the book?” and I said, “No! I’d be dead!”.

But, I thought, is there a way to take multiple highlighting, annotations of multiple copies of the same book and see commonalities between them, in order to deduct the most useful pieces of text — a sort of wisdom of crowds sort of boil-down?

Annotations in the Aggregate

Consensus is significantly more common than predicted by strict probabilistic calculations of overlap.

Annotators converge on important text that is different than the text that the authors and publisher designate as important.

Annotation; collective effects. If you had dozens and dozens of books, could you use a ‘wisdom of crowds approach to zoom in on something that was important? Something that many different people underlined across all of the books? Some essential passage?

Audience: The Folksonomy of Cliffnotes? Is that what you’re getting at?

Marshall: Maybe… Kind of.

Audience: Or like a Wiki?

Collaboration and reading technologies; What of displays - are we thinking enough about “looking on” or shared focus?

How do social expectations interact with restrictions introduced by Digital Rights Management?

Which collaboration architectures will work for people using the same collections (i.e…annotation, reading rooms, bookmark servers)?

Are there new modes of collaboration enabled by digital devices?

Collaborators:

XLibris studies: Morgan price, Bill Schilit, and Gene Golovchinsky at FXPAL.

About Cathy Marshall

Cathy Marshall is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley; she has knocked around in both the product and research divisions at Microsoft. Cathy has long worked in the disciplinary interstices of computer science, information science, and the humanities, with occasional collaborations in the arts and the sciences. She was a long-time member of the research staff at Xerox PARC and is an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. Cathy won the ACM Hypertext conference’s best paper award in 1998 and 1999, and the best paper award at the IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 1998 and 2008. She has delivered keynotes at WWW, Hypertext, Usenix FAST, CNI, VALA, ACH-ALLC, and a variety of other CS and LIS venues.
MS Reader study:
Contact info: http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall

cathymr [at] Microsoft [dot] com.

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist studying the effects of technology on the way humans think, communicate, and act. She can be reached at caseorganic [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter @caseorganic.

This morning I met with Brooks Gilley, Partner and Managing Director of 52ltd Portland’s only locally owned and operated full-service staffing resource for the creative industry. We had a great discussion on how marketing is changing, and how some companies really ‘get it’, or at least attempt to experiment with this strange new medium, while others are left behind.

We were meeting to talk about a creative event that will be occuring on May 27th at Univeristy of Oregon’s White Stag Building in downtown Portland. The event will feature four panelists from fields ranging from advertising, social media and sociology/anthropology. I’ll be on a panel discussing cyborg anthropology, new media frameworks, and changes in marketing in the digital era.

Panelists

I’ll be speaking with a variety of others, including an executive from Crispin Porter + Bogusky (the agency that worked on the infamous Facebook Burger King Whopper Sacrifice campaign).

Other panelists will include the Directory of Interactive Media for the Portland Trailblazers (whose community engagement strategy has been quite impressive), as well the possibility of a professor of Sociology from Portalnd State University, but I am unsure of his name yet. All told, the event should be a great chance for all of us to share different perspectives and strategies with each other and an audience of creatives, freelancers, and marketers.

More Information

I’ll post more details as the event nears, but it should begin at around 6:15 Pm at the White Stag Building on NW Couch street. There will be ample time for networking, so if you’re excited to meet new people, come on out. It is a free event too, so you’ve got nothing to lose. Check the 52ltd website for details as May 27th approaches, and if you’re looking to hire a creative or looking for a creative gig, consider making an appointment with them.

If you have any questions you’d like us to cover on the panel, feel free to E-mail me at caseorganic [at] gmail [dot] com, or simply reply to me at @caseorganic on Twitter.

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I am excited to announce that I will be speaking at Portland’s WebVisions Conference 2009. After missing the event last year to a scheduling conflict, I am honored to be able to not only attend, but present as well. I have quite a bit of time to present, so I am already writing my speech. If it is not a 100% completely useful speech, then at the very least it will contain some interesting images.

An Introduction to Cyborg Anthropology in One Hour and Fifteen Minutes

I’ll be presenting An Introduction to Cyborg Anthropology on Friday, May 22 2009 - 1:15 pm to 2:30 pm

How we interact with machines and technology in many ways defines who we are. Cyborg Anthropology is a lens with which to understand what’s happening to us in a world mediated by dynamic objects, processes, and change.

An entire set of new social roles have developed around the use of technology. Erving Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” relates directly to this. In this world, the concepts of physics are even more prevalent. The shape of space makes people move, and flow of people shapes space. A profile is another extension of connection and etiquette that can be optimized or used poorly.

The speech will cover the effects of space/time compression on the co-creation of value in online systems. Information architecture and interface design will be discussed.

Webvision Speakers

I’m extremely honored to be a part of the Webvisions lineup, which includes the following incredible people and speakers.

Keynote Speakers

Mark Frauenfelder – Boingboing.net

Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the Boingboing.net, what Technorati calls the world’s most popular blog. A former editor at Wired, Mark has written for numerous publications and is the author of four books, including The Computer, an illustrated history of computers and Rule the Web, a guide to online tricks and tips. His next book, The World in Your Hands, will be published in 2009.  more

Jared Spool – User Interface Engineering

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering (UIE) into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.   more

Peat Bakke

Peat Bakke is a web developer and world traveller with a keen interest in how the Internet is shaping the global economy. He presented at Ignite Portland II on finding beauty in abandoned places.  more

Leah Buley – Adaptive Path

Leah Buley is an Experience Designer for Adaptive Path. She speaks and writes about methods for making user experience design more successful inside of business organizations.  more

DL Byron – Textura Design

An author, entrepreneur, inventor, and a designer, Byron consults with Textura Design’s clients about blogging and social media. He publishes Bike Hugger, a blog about bike culture and will ride his bike all over Portland while in town.
more

Amber Case – Hazelnut Tech Talk

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who studies new media and the relationship between humans and computers.  more

Dawn Foster

Dawn provides consulting services for building online communities through social media technologies including forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and more. She is the author of the Fast Wonder Blog and is working on a book about community.  more

Vanessa Fox – Nine by Blue.com

Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search.    more

Justin Garrity – WebTrends

Justin is the new User Experience director at WebTrends. His mandate is to focus on user centered design, refined data visualization, and narrative context driven workflow.  more

Jason Grigsby – Cloud Four

Jason Grigsby was one of the project leads on the Obama iPhone Application and helped design the user inferface for the Wall Street Journal’s Blackberry application. He founded and organizes Mobile Portland, a local mobile development user group.    more

Molly Holzschlag – Molly.com

Molly works to define and create effective organizational standards and best practices for thousands of developers and designers working the Web via 35 books, countless articles, conference workshops, sessions and keynotes and a consulting practice.  more

Kevin Hoyt – Adobe, Inc.

Kevin Hoyt is a platform evangelist with Adobe Systems, Inc. Passionate about engaging user experiences as he is, you’ll most often find him meeting with customers, speaking at conferences, or just enjoying the chance to share ideas and brainstorm.  more

John Keith – Cloud Four

John Keith is Co-Founder and President of Cloud Four. He has been a professional software developer for 25 years, fully half of which have been spent developing web-based software and services.  more

Raymond King – About Us

Ray has worked at four startups and enjoys the technical and business challenges that go along with birthing totally new ideas.   more

Eric T. Peterson – Web Analytics Demystified

Eric has worked in web analytics since the late 1990’s in a variety of roles including practitioner, consultant, and analyst for several market-leading companies. He is the author of three best-selling books on the subject, Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks, and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators, as well as one of the most popular web analytics bloggers at www.webanalyticsdemystified.com.   more

David Recordon

David Recordon is Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, the largest independent blogging company in the world. Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID.  more

Christopher Schmitt – Heat Visions

An award-winning Web designer who has been working with the Web since 1993, Christopher is the founder of Heat Vision, a new media publishing and design firm.  more

Bill Scott – Netflix

Bill is the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix where he guides the UI Engineering team’s efforts to continue Netflix’s excellence in user experience, improve client performance and refactor the presentation tier to use the latest best practices for both the DHTML layer as well as the Java tier layer.  more

Tyler Sticka

Tyler Sticka is a designer, artist, speaker and educator specializing in identity-driven new media. His clients include small businesses, marketing agencies, open source developers and larger names such as Nike, Synnex and Providence Health.  more

Armin Vit – UnderConsideration

Born and raised in Mexico City, Armin is a graphic designer and writer now living in Brooklyn, New York. He has written for AIGA’s VOICE, Emigre, Eye, Creative Review, HOW, and STEP magazines, among others.  more

Dave Yewman – Elevator Speech.com

A former newspaper reporter and columnist, Dave has conducted media and presentation training sessions for thousands of executives at numerous companies, including Adidas, Craigslist, Digg, eHarmony, K-Swiss, Microsoft, Avenue A Razorfish, Reebok, and Vignette.  more

About Amber Case

Amber Case explores data visualization, search engine optimization, and how marketing works in the online ecosystem. She’s spoken at various conferences including MIT’s Futures of Entertainment, Inverge, Ignite Portland, and Ignite Boulder. She graduated from Lewis & Clark College in May 2008 with a degree in Sociology/Anthropology and wrote her thesis on cell phones and the effect of technology on cultural constructions of space and privacy. She writes for Discovery Channel’s Nerdabout.com. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

While doing research for my thesis on cell phones, I came across a report prepared by Anthropologist Sadie Plant called “On the Mobile”. It was extremely well written, and very enjoyable to read. [You can download a .pdf of it from Motorola here] But recently, I found this video of another lecture on cell phones at MIT.

In the past, people lived in zones: you live at home, do other stuff at work, or while traveling. That’s changing now. Things are continuous. There’s no difference between work, home and travel. You want to have the same things with you. We believe people don’t live in categories anymore. As we’re moving around, we want seamless transitions to occur in life.

We’re living as low tech cyborgs now. It is only going to get more interesting in the future.

I’m posting this video to get everyone into the mindset for CyborgCamp this weekend [Dec 6th, 2008 at Cubespace from 9-6 Pm [Get a Ticket] [Preparty at Vidoop, 8:30 Pm Dec 5th, 2008 [RSVP] ]. The world around us is changing, but I’ll let Padmasree Warrior, now CTO at Cisco (and @padmarsee on Twitter [thanks, @nelking] tell you her story:

Nancy King / nelking

Warrior describes how thousands of Motorola engineers are trying to create a transparent network so that individuals can take their music, video, pictures —virtually any kind of data with them — wherever they go. “Mobile devices have become the remote control for life. Let us do things we have not thought about before,” says Warrior. For 75 years, Motorola has specialized in what Warrior describes as “preemptive innovation.” This means not just enabling new ways to communicate (for example, creating the two-way radio and cell phone), but giving customers new reasons to communicate. Within technological view are cars that can download information about a driver’s preferences, from seat height to mirror settings, and homes that can broadcast a favorite radio show from room to room, so the listener misses nothing.

Thanks to MITWorld for the video.
April 27, 2004
Running Time: 46:22

About the Speaker

Padmasree Warrior
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer,
Motorola Incorporated

Padmasree Warrior has worked at Motorola since 1984. She currently leads a global team of 4,600 technologists, guiding creative research from innovation through the first stages of marketing. She also serves as a technology advisor to the office of the chairman and to the board’s technology and design steering committee.

Before assuming her current role in January 2003, Warrior was corporate vice president and general manager of Motorola’s energy systems group. Warrior was corporate vice president and chief technology officer for Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector. She was appointed vice president in 1999 and was elected a corporate officer in 2000.

Warrior received an M.S. degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India.

Warrior served on the Texas Governor’s Council for Digital Economy, and is a member of the Texas Higher Education Board review panel. She was one of six women nationwide selected to receive the “Women Elevating Science and Technology” award from Working Woman magazine in 2001. She also is a director of Ferro Corporation.

———–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, see also the Makerlab blog, as well as coverage of local Portland tech events at Nerdabout.com.

I just got back from MIT, where I spoke at a conference called the Futures of Entertainment 3. It was put on by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and the Convergence Culture Consortium. A great big shout-out to Joshua Green for organizing and inviting me to the conference. He rocks at putting together an excellent show for the brain.

Cambridge was Fascinating

The people are interesting (especially those at the Media Lab) and everyone at MIT is up to something. It was nice to meet MIT and non-MIT students as they converged on this event. Alex McDowell was probably my favorite person there. He and I joked about all sorts of things, and I showed him a bit about using Twitter. Cool things about Alex: he’s coordinating a robotic opera, he has worked on Minority Report (the tech vision for it), and Fight Club, and is currently working on the adaptation of Watchman for the screen.

On par with Alex was Henry Jenkins, who told me a lot about speaking in front of people (including using PowerPoint slides as memory palaces for storing ideas (so that one doesn’t need to use scripts). I also asked him about his Twitter account and how he manages all of it. He said that he doesn’t, and when I asked him why, he told me that his Twitter account was a fan one. I was floored. Jenkins said that he doesn’t even know how to tweet, but that he loved using search.twitter.com to look up what was being said about him online. Much amusement.

Later on, I met Kevin Slavin of Area Code. He does a lot of integrated real life games and is fantastically interesting. On the last night of the conference, he talked to me about some architects who are making fake hermit shells from recycled plastic because hermit crabs are running out of homes due to greedy beachcombers seeking serendipitous seaside souvenirs.

A lot happened. A ton was learned. I wrote a bunch about it for the Discovery Channel’s Nerdabout Blog, all of which I’m linking too here. Since the posts look better in their natural environment, I’ll provide a brief summary here before directing you over there for more detailed reviews.

———–

Henry Jenkins - Notes on Understanding Convergence Culture

Henry Jenkins of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium begin with a slide that said, “If it doesn’t spread — it’s dead!” and then a picture of a Dr. Seuss-like creature with the words: “Amazed I was, it made such sense. And it was at so little expense! No press release, no ad campaign. Those days are gone, the rules have changed!” And thus began MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3.

What is the magical black box that all data will flow through? We see various images of what media might flow through. There’s the iPhone, the computer — the Mp3 Player.

Choice in New Media

“We are selectively choosing what media to pass on. There is a rational way in which we pass media along.”

Convergence as Culture

I’m talking about Convergence as a cultural rather than a technological process .We now live in world where every story, image, sound, idea band, and relationship which will play itself out across all possible media platforms. We have to understand the social context in which media is shared, because, “convergence is in our social interactions with each other — not necessarily in technological devices”.

Read the rest of the event review at Nerdabout.
————-

Consumption, Value and Worth - Panel Discussion at MIT

Notes from the panel on Consumption, Value and Worth at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3.
Where does value come from in the evolving media landscape?

Comsumption, Value, Worth Panel (#FOE3)

Anne White (VP Programming & Creative, PRN by Thompson): “We had a discussion of Web 2.0 in the context of retail media — but found it difficult to define. So we looked back at Web 1.0 first. We thought of a sign that told people about deals — and then decided that Web 2.0 was about creating a two way street — about contribution to media and an interaction with media”.

Anita Elberse (Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School): “When we look at the very first ads on TV, they looked very much like print ads. Maybe 2.0 is our path is the same”. We’re still making things that look like TV on the Internet - not yet fully understanding the capabilities of the networked world.

Rishi Dean (VP Product Strategy, Visible Measures): “It’s about moving from a broadcast media into a more participatory media. But it’s less about defining Web 2.0 but harnessing those dynamics — and how to leverage those dynamics. The whole concept of losing control is where Web 1.0 is afraid of”.

So 2.0 is taking advantage of fluidity and using it to get a message out.

Renee Richardson (Harvard Business School): “There is that fear of loss of control — but this is not a bad thing”.

Rishi is developing a way to understand how to measure visitor dynamics and the effects of social media. It is a way of understanding audiences (the company is called Visible Measures).

( more >>).

————-

Making Audiences Matter - MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Panel

Panel members:

Kim Moses (Executive Producer, Ghost Whisperer), Vu Nguyen (VP of Business Development, Crunchyroll.com), Gail De Kosnik (UC Berkeley, Strategies for a Digital Age), Kevin Slavin (Area Code), and Joshua Green (Moderator: MIT Convergence Culture Consortium).

Audiences today are not merely audiences — they are creators. And they think of themselves as such. How can audiences can be thought as participants — or fellow workers - in industry? Who is the audience for contemporary media? ( more >>).

————

I’ll be posting more notes in the future. However, I’m still trying to rest up before Thanksgiving and the preparation for CyborgCamp, which is December 6th, 2008 at CubeSpace. More about these topics will invariably be discussed there. See you soon!

————
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

My attempts at writing about the subject of Cyborg Anthropology have always resulted in long texts. This attempt is no exception.

Definition

Cyborg Anthropology is a set of mental models that can be applied to the examination of the interaction between humans and comptuers, and how the capabilities of our bodies are extended when they are uploaded into hypertext.

Invisible Robots

The traditional manifestation of robots is vastly different from the real robots we interact with in our everyday lives. The traditional robots that are locked in the collective consciousness of the general public range from behemoth, terrorizing giants that destroy cities — to smaller, equally intense characters (such as the Terminator). Now we have little robots everywhere, giving us our search results and our mail.

One of the questions that Cyborg Anthropology has a real power to approach is the question of what our lives will look like in the future.

Currently, we are duplicating ourselves every time we or others associate a page or profile with our identity. Projections of ourselves are capable of accessing and being accessed by multiple individuals at a time. The extension of ourselves into the online space is transforming our social interactions into relational, dynamic social profiles.

What is Cyborg Anthropology? When did it come about?

Cyborg Anthropology was officially founded when Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit and Sarah Williams presented a paper titled “Cyborg Anthropology” at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco.

Paper Excerpts

“Cyborg anthropology offers new metaphors to both academic and popular theorizing for comprehending the different ways that sciences and technologies work in our lives-metaphors that start with our complicity in many of the processes we wish were otherwise”

“Cyborg anthropology is interested in the construction of science and tech-nology as cultural phenomena. It explores the heterogeneous strategies and mechanisms through which members of technical communities produce these cultural forms that appear to lack culture, for example, scientific knowledge that is objective and neutral, the product of only empirical observation and logical reasoning.

“Cyborg anthropology is interested in how people construct discourse about science and technology in order to make these meaningful in their lives. Thus, cyborg anthropology helps us to realize that we are all scientists.

“That is, by reconstructing scientific knowledge in new contexts, including across na-tional and cultural boundaries, we all do science. Since the practice of “doing science” is no longer reserved for scientists, studying science becomes both more amenable to ethnographic investigation and more important as a topic of research” (Downey, 265-266).

Cyborg Anthropology Author(s): Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit, Sarah Williams Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 2, Anthropologies of the Body, (May, 1995), pp. 264-269 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: Link to JSTOR Article.

A Cyborg Curriculum

Since I made my thesis on Cell Phones and Cyborg Anthropology available online, I’ve been contacted by numerous professors wishing to compare notes and course curriculum for educating their students on the field of Digital Anthropology.

It is due to these requests that I’ve decided to create a reudimentary list of questions and resources that may aid the beginning professor in his or her course preperation. In a world of open source technologies, it is important to , it is I’ve If you are a professor tasked with the job of bringing new ways of thinking into your classroom, this may be a valuable resource to you. Please feel free to alert me of any additional items you’ve used in your courses. Or, if you are a student of Cyborg Anthropology, please let me know what articles and books you’ve been assigned.

Potential Drawbacks of a Technosocial Future

A recent conversation with Todd Kenefsky, board member of Legion of Tech, brought up some interesting points on the future of human-computer interaction. “As a species we tend to test the borders and boundaries of what we can do”, he began, “and if we go too far we get smacked backwards. Maybe with cyborg technology — going too far would have far greater repercussions. Maybe we could get terminal viruses that wipe out the human race”.

He made a good point. Cyberspace and reality do not exist exclusively — the online space is influences offline places, and the offline the online.

We are still detached from actually touching and interacting with data. We still cannot touch the data of the Internet with our own hands. We are still forced to input data into interfaces via keyboards, trackpads, and mice. We cannot access data ubiquitously, and RSS is limited to global RSS systems.

We cannot yet continuously update our location and subscribe to data relative to the needs of our immediate environment. We still have boundaries between the ecosystem of the Internet and the ecosystems of our own bodies.

But we are making progress. We can walk while communicating with others around the world, and sounds from elsewhere travel across long distances to get to our ears via iPod. We have blogs, Wikis, and microblogging services like Twitter.

Discussion Questions

Let us think of electronic devices as objects, and then those objects in a system of greater objects.

Online there are temporary autonomous zones — fluid spaces that come and go. Objects placed there can change meanings quickly. Personalities, social engagements, and power capabilities change. Objects change their value based on their environment, or the system around them which acts on them as objects. Objects change meanings once placed in different systems.

Consider the system in which the object exists.

• What kind of a system is the object a part of?
• How is the object birthed?
• How is the system that the object is birthed in different from the eventual system it inhabits?
• How is the birth of a tree and its eventual location different from that of a child?
• A piece of clothing?
• A piece of data?
• What systems exist inside the object?
• What about complex objects with multiple systems?
• How can these systems be visualized across time and space?

Systemic Friction

Online, friction is less prevalent than offline. Iterations, or software releases can happen more quickly than the equivalent revolutions in real life. In the analog sphere, interactions based on growth in response to systems happen at a slower rate. A tree is constantly in co-production with its environment. What the tree does influences the system, which in turn influences the tree. The network of trees acting together influences a wider system.

Interfaces

Maureen McHugh wrote that “soon, perhaps, it will be impossible to tell where human ends and machines begin”.

How is the digital accessed? How are different environments accessed? What separates them? How do the qualities of these separations affect the experience of the environment? How can the digital and the analog be intersected in non-traditional ways? Are there spaces that the analog and the digital blur?

Constructions of Mobility and Capability Online

Let us, for a moment, consider the construction of mobility in online communities. What makes a powerful/respected user on a social network? Each type of space allows a different creation of power.

Social Networks as Bases of Social Interaction

Different individuals are using different social networks as bases. The social network base they use influences how they communicate with others in real life. The shape of the digital affects the shape of the social.

Digitally:

• On Facebook, identity and value is constructed through image, wall posts, addins, and updates.
• On Flickr, identity and value is related to interest and topic. It is also indexible and searchable.
• On Linkedin, power is constructed through history, recommendations, and connections, and sharing data/experience. It is the ‘emptiest’ vessel of many of the social networks available, and thus it can share data in the largest variety of ways.
• On Twitter, power is constructed through text, retweeting, link exchange, content, avatars, background images and followers.
• On Myspace, power is constructed through music, pictures, blog posts, and wall posts.

Culturally:
What types of cultural constructs allow objects to take on different values? How can a system of representation (the Disney store, the end aisles in a shopping market vs. the inner rows) bring power to an object? How does the ‘psychology of space’ make people act in a different way than they would place?

Excerpts:
“The…area of study is a broad critique of the adequacy of “anthropos” as the subject and object of anthropology. In this respect, cyborg anthropology poses a serious challenge to the human-centered foundations of anthropological discourse. The term “cyborg anthropology” is an oxymoron that draws attention to the human-centered presuppositions of anthropological discourse by posing the challenge of alternative formulations. While the skin-bound individual, autonomous bearer of identity and agency, theoretically without gender, race, class, region, or time, has served usefully and productively as the subject of cul- ture and of cultural accounts, alternate accounts of history and subjectivity are also possible” (Downey, 2).

“The autonomy of individuals has already been called into question by post- structuralist and posthumanist critiques. Cyborg anthropology explores a new alternative by examining the argument that human subjects and subjectivity are crucially as much a function of machines, machine relations, and information transfers as they are machine producers and operators. From this perspective, science and technology affect society through the fashioning of selves rather than as external forces. For example, the establishment of anthropological sub-jects and subjectivities has depended upon boats, trains, planes, typewriters, cameras, telegraphs, and so on” (Downey, 4).

“How the positioning of technologies has defined the boundaries of “the field” as well as the positioning of anthropologists within it has been a notable silence in ethnographic writing. It is increasingly clear that human agency serves in the world today as but one contributor to activities that are growing in scope, that are complex and di-verse, and yet are interconnected. The extent of such interconnectedness has been made plain both by the decline of challenges to capitalist hegemony and by the empowerment of information technologies, the latter through the combined agencies of computer and communications technologies” (Downey, 4).

“A crucial first step in blurring the human-centered boundaries of anthropo-logical discourse is to grant membership to the cyborg image in theorizing, that is, to follow in our writing the ways that human agents routinely produce both themselves and their machines as part human and part machine. How are we to write, for example, without using human-centered language? And if writing is a co-production of human and machine, then who is the “we” that writes?” (Downey, 5).

-Downey, Gary Lee “After Culture” Reflections on the Apparition of Anthropology in Artificial Life, a Science of Simulation.

The Relational Self

The psychologist Kenneth Gergen suggests that “we may be entering a new era of self-conception. In this era the self is redefined as no longer an essence in itself, but relational” (1991:146). “The concept of the individual self,” he continues, “ceases to be intelligible. At this point one is prepared for the new reality of relationship. Relationships make possible the concept of the self. Previous possessions of the individual self—autobiography, emotions, and morality—become possessions of relationships” (p. 170) in the New Superorganic (468).

As Lucy Suchman has put it, “humans and artifacts are mutually constituted. . . Agency—and associated accountabilities—reside neither in us nor in our artifacts, but in our intraactions” (in Hanson, The New Superorganic, 469).

The increasingly intimate connections between humans and nonhuman entities such as prosthetic devices and machines (especially computers) and our growing dependence on them are resulting in a similar kind of splicing that transforms us into cyborgs: new kinds of beings partly organic and partly mechanical. Far from the stable, clearly defined, and bounded units that populate the traditional worldview, cyborgs are hybrid, indeterminate, and ambiguous (Haraway 1991; Dumit and Davis-Floyd 1998:1) in (Hanson, the New Superorganic, 469).

“In Melanesia, aboriginal Australia, and elsewhere, the person is defined as much by position in a network of social relations as by individual traits” (Strathern and Stewart 1988, Wagner 1991, Myers 1986) (in Hanson, the New Superorganic, 468).

David Gunkel holds that communication, which “involves multiple individuals and is often mediated by
electronic or other technological devices, has always been the province of recombinant cyborgs” (2000:340).

In Hanson, “. . . Borg subjects float, suspended between points of objectivity, being constituted and reconstituted in different configurations in relation to the discursive arrangement of the occasion” (Hanson, 345).

Similarly, Mark Poster perceives that, “in the shift from written to electronically mediated
communication a change in the subject from “an agent centered in rational/imaginary autonomy” to one
that is “decentered, dispersed, and multiplied in continuous instability” (1990:6). For example, the notion of the unique author is fading as technological developments such as word processing and hypertext make it easy to modify written texts. These blur distinctions between original author and readers, who are coming to be seen as jointly exercising the role of author (Poster 1990:114–15; 2001:91–94; Landow 1997:90), in Hanson, the New Superorganic, 469.

Source

“The New Superorganic” Current Anthropology Volume 45, Number 4, August–October 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

“…Today’s children readily think of digital entities as alive and are comfortable with indeterminate
boundaries between organism and machine” (Turkle, 1998).

Profiles of Cyborg Anthropologists

I’ve had numerous people ask me how many Cyborg Anthropologists there were in the world. I’ve generally given the answer of seven, but there are actually quite a bit more than that. From Donna Haraway’s seminal article, A Manifesto for Cyborgs, to Manfred Clyne’s coining of the term ‘Cyborg’, the following people have be closely involved with Cyborg Anthropology since its inception.

Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Seminars at the Initiative on Technology and Self led to three edited collections, all to be published by the MIT Press, on the relationships between things and thinking. The first volume, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, was published in Fall 2007. The second volume, Falling For Science: Objects in Mind, will appear in Spring 2008. The third volume, The Inner History of Devices, will follow in Fall 2008. Professor Turkle is currently completing a book on robots and the human spirit based on the Initiative’s 10-year research program on relational artifacts.

Sharon Traweek

Associate professor in the History Department at UCLA; on the faculty of the Anthropology Department at Rice University and the Program in Anthropology & Archeology and to the Program in Science, Technology, & Society at MIT. Has held visiting faculty positions at the Mt Holyoke Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, the Anthropology Department at the University of California at San Diego, and the Program in Values, Technology, Science, and Society at Stanford University. Received my Ph.D. in 1982 from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Lucien Taylor

Assistant professor of visual and environmental studies and of anthropology and director of the Media Anthropology Laboratory. Teaches “Sensory Ethnography”, a collaboration between the departments of Anthropology and Visual and Environmental Studies. The course began last spring semester as students with varying degrees of artistic experience and ethnographic training met to learn video and audio production techniques, as well as to experience and discuss existing work in nonfiction media.

Allucquere Rosanne Stone

Academic theorist, artist, and performer, currently Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) and the New Media Initiative in the department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Concurrently she is Wolfgang Kohler Professor of Media and Performance at the European Graduate School EGS, senior artist at the Banff Centre, and Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Stone pursued successful multiple careers in film, music, experimental neurology, writing, engineering, and computer programming.

Paul Rabinow

Professor of Anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley), Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), and Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He is perhaps most famous for his widely influential commentary and expertise on the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

His major works include Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (2007); Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (2003); Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (1996), Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (1993); French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (1989); The Foucault Reader (1984), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983) (with H. Dreyfus); Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977 & 2007).

Constance Penley

Professor of Film & Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Co-Director of the Center for Film, Television and New Media

Professor Penley’s major areas of research interest are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies. Her most recent work includes NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender (ed. with Treichler and Cartwright). Her collaborative art projects include “MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee” and “Biospheria: An Environmental Opera,” on which she was co-librettist.

Deborah Heath

Associate Professor
Sociology/Anthropology
Lewis & Clark College

Also my Thesis advisor.
Collaborated on Cyborgs & Citadels Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies

Donna Haraway

Currently a professor and chair of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is the author of Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (1976), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse (1997), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), and When Species Meet (2008).

Deborah Gordon

Presented the original paper on Cyborg Anthropology at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in 1992.

Manfred Clynes

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism (i.e., an organism that has both artificial and natural systems). The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space.[1] D. S. Halacy’s Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman in 1965 featured an introduction by Manfred Clynes, who wrote of a “new frontier” that was “not merely space, but more profoundly the relationship between ‘inner space’ to ‘outer space’ -a bridge…between mind and matter.”[2] The cyborg is often seen today merely as an organism that has enhanced abilities due to technology,[3] but this perhaps oversimplifies the category of feedback.

Gary Lee Downey

Center for the Study of Science in Society
Virginia Tech

Joseph Dumit

Program in the History of Consciousness
University of California at Santa Cruz
Also presented the original paper on Cyborg Anthropology at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in 1992.

Sarah Williams

Women’s Studies
Also presented the original paper on Cyborg Anthropology at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in 1992.

Resources

The following is a list of resources that I’ve found useful to my study of Cyborg Anthropology. They’ll be reviewed individually at some point in the future.

Augé, Marc 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso.

Bauman, Zygmunt 2000 Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Beck, Ulrich 1995 Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society.

Benedikt, Michael, ed. 1991 Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. de Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol 1998 The Practice of Everyday Life.

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. NY: Penguin, 1982.

Best, Kellner, “Deluze & Guattari, Schizos, Nomas, Rhizomes,” pp.76109.

Durkheim, Emile, ed. 1951 Suicide, a Study in Sociology. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

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Haraway, Donna, Jorge Hankamer, and Gary Lease 1999 Between Nature & Culture Cyborgs, Simians, Dogs, Genes & Us.

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Weiser, Mark 1993 Ubiquitous Computing. Computer 26(10).

During my last semester of college, I became obsessed with the idea that I would be able to somehow put my degree in sociology/anthropology to work in the real world. When I stumbled upon search engine optimization, I was elated. When I learned that Cyborg Anthropology applied there as well, I was even more excited. And when Todd Mintz encouraged me to write my first blog post ever on the SEM PDX blog, I was so nervous that I didn’t leave my friends house for 4 hours while I composed it.

Perfectionism was a difficult thing to get over. I gradually realized that I had to allow myself to suck in order to get anywhere. At Weiden+Kennedy, there’s a massive art piece on the wall that says “Fail Harder”. I knew I had to fail harder than ever before. Oakhazelnut.com was the silliest name for a website I could think of, and the early WordPress template I used was ugly, heavy and clunky. But I kept on it.

I also realized that I wasn’t going to have a community anymore when I graduated from college, so I searched hard for one in Portland. I attended meetups relating to pretty much everything until I found Legion of Tech and Beer and Blog. Some of the first people I ever met were Reid Beals, Bram Pitoyo, Dawn Foster and Rick Turoczy. It was the beginning of an exciting and busy journey into the heart of the tech scene. But it didn’t take long to get oriented. Everyone was filled with zest for their ideas, and it spread quickly to me. I began to take small risks and write more.

Up until now, I’ve been putting in 110 hour weeks trying to do anthropological studies, blogging (which as anyone who blogs knows — is much more difficult than it looks), attending events, and learning more about seo and Yahoo! Pipes. My learning curve is strange, so it has been a long process. I’ve been given great support from people who really know what they are doing. Focused, brilliant, fascinating people.

Now that I am blogging, writing and consulting full-time, I feel like I’ve been thrown directly into the open arms of the tech community. There’s more time for coffeeshops, events, and research now. I’m excited to be able to see more faces.

It was great to be able to walk into the local Backspace coffeeshop and get high fives from all of the great people there. Bram Pitoyo said, “welcome to the life of a Freelancer”. I wholeheartedly embrace it.

My last job was excellent, and I took it after graduating from college in May so that I would be able to learn a bunch of new skills. I learned so many new things I was ready to explode. Drupal was fun, E-mail marketing was great, and new seo tools were awesome. I look forward to how that company does in the future. It’s doing very well and has an excellent business model I was excited to learn more about.

Now I have time for CyborgCamp, MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Conference, Makerlab, Ignite Portland, Refresh Portland, blogging for the Discovery Channel at Nerdabout, AboutUs.org, Dorkbot, search engine optimization, Beer and Blog and of course, Cyborg Anthropology.

Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for the Discovery Channel write-up on Read Write Web. Marshall has been a tremendous help to me. In addition to showing me things like Skitch, he’s lent advice and support to me on numerous occasions.

I want to thank everyone in the Portland Tech community, but there are infinite people to thank. Perhaps I can thank an entire directory of great Tweeple at once (via AboutUs.org Portland Tech Twitter).

I think that’s about it. I am a little speechless at the support I’ve been given, and I can’t wait to share it with a wider audience.

Sincerely,

@caseorganic

The History of the Future was a big coffee-table book, and thus it sat on my family’s coffee-table for six years or so before it succumbed to a number of popular science and Wired magazines that forced it to a retirement on the bookshelf. What made the book extraordinary is that it contained within its pages a vast tome of images of what people in the 19th century conceived the year 2000 to be like. Among the premonitions was an image of a woman in a dark factory that sat on a sort of throne with a metal device on the top of her head. At her feet lay a long conveyor-belt of newborns stretching into infinity, as factory workers packaged them and sent them off in trucks.

Other, less radical images were much closer to the reality we have today. One showcased a man sitting in a comfortable chair looking up at a projection of some dancers on his living room wall. The caption went something like, “with the help of phono-vision, you can finally enjoy the pleasures of the can-can from the comfort of your own home”. This was a prediction made in 1888, or something like that, so I’ll call it impressive. Others had moon villages, and dystopic robots lacerating poor human victims.
I was eight years old when the book was shelved out of my memory, when the year 2000 arrived, I was older. Fourteen! To celebrate, I dusted off The History of the Future again and was able to read it this time instead of merely looking at the pictures. It inspired me to take all sorts of other books from different time periods and compare their contents to today’s technological results. If The History of the Future compared the 19th century to the 20th, then I wanted to compare the 60’s to the 00’s, or even the 80’s. What patterns might I find? What forgotten utopic visions, or dyspeptic nihilisms might I run into?

Searching for the right books wasn’t difficult. I’d watched the data of the public library  move more and more to the computer, and thus as time went on, the bookstacks began to collect dust. I began to recognize a 60’s book from a 70’s or 80’s and so on.

Books from the 60’s were the best. They were so optimistic and projectionary. They were always set Arial font with bolded Arial for titles, as if the world were simple, and so was solving problems. Pictures were generally black and while, but every once in a while, you’d run across a book with a greyscale streaked with a monotone yellow or pink or shocking blue. Books with more somber subjects resembled green computer screens.

Comments and Excerpts from Urban Structure, 1968. Paul Elek. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.

The Interfaces (Page 76-77).

“An interface may be described as a common boundary between two systems. The interface between transportation systems is the most neglected element that the passenger is force to tolerate. The attitude of transportation system operators seems to be, ‘leave the driving to us but how you get aboard and where you go when you get off is your problem’. Improvement in the attraction and holding of riders is needed more than anything else except frequent service.”

“The one ability that ninety-nine out of a hundred of the human race has that makes mass transit possible is that ability to walk. Why do we attempt to eliminate it as if it were unnatural? We seen to accept the walking required to use vertical transportation in buildings. We walk from our car or bus into the building, walk to the escalator, something even walk on it as it moves up, walk to the elevator, walk in, walk out, and walk to our desk. Why do we accept this? Because we are always moving towards our destination. The only wait is for the elevator and this is very short, and the interfaces are convenient, comfortable and pleasant, as much so as the building itself. Similar qualities of environment can be had in horizontal transportation.”

“Let us assume you live in suburbia, 25 miles from the centre of the town. You own two cars. Five minutes in one direction is the entrance to the freeway. Five minutes in another direction is the station for the suburban rapid transit. The freeway is belted around the town centre, requiring you to use the streets to reach the parking garage a block from your office building. The suburban rapid transit station is 12 minutes’ walk from your office building but connects directly with the CBD distributor which has a station in your parking garage. Let us compare the trip:

By Automobile

-Drive to freeway
-5 minutes
-25 miles on freeway
-15 miles at 60 mph 15
-6 miles at 45 mph
-4 miles at 15 mph 16 (on good morning - no bad weather -no accidents or breakdowns -no Christmas season rush, ect.)
-0.5 miles downtown at 9 mph 3.5
-Parking, elevator trip and walk to office building 3.5

Total Travel Time: 51 minutes

By auto and mass transit:

-Drive to station 5 minutes
-Park and walk to platform 1
-Average wait time (5 minute headway) 2.5
-25 miles on train at average speed of 50 mph 30
(all weather - all seasons)
-Transfer to distributor 1.5
(1 minute headway and change level)
-Distributor trip time at average 3
-Speed of 12 mph
-Change level and walk to office building

Total Travel Time: 45 minutes

If you use the building described above your drive-in trip requires the following interface changes and walking:

-Walk to garage
-Change into car
-Change out of car
-Walk to parking garage elevator
-Change into elevator
-Change out of elevator
-Walk to office building
-Change on to escalator
-Change off of escalator
-Walk to elevator
-Change on to elevator
-Change out of elevator
-Walk to office

Total 5 walks and 8 interface changes

If you take the transit:

-Walk to garage
-Change into car
-Change out of car
-Walk to train platform
-Change into train
-Change out of train
-Walk to escalator
-Change on to escalator
-Change off escalator
-Walk to distributor system
-Change into distributor
-Change out of distributor
-Walk to escalator
-Change on to escalator
-Change off escalator
-Walk to office building
-Change on to escalator
-Change off escalator
-Walk to elevator
-Change into elevator
-Change out of elevator
-Walk to office

Total 8 walks and 14 interface changes

The point is that our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them

.

-Several things must be done. Transit service must be improved to eliminate waiting times for all practical purposes at all hours.

-Interference interchanges must be fast, convenient, comfortable, without undue effort in a controlled environment.

The interface between two systems is a meter of performance to the passenger. And its performance depends on the expertness of the plan and its execution as well as the performance of the two systems which share it.

Other pages:

“The car as an extension of the foot instead of the car as a satellite part of the home: or the tendency for appliances to impose their presence as against the psychological need for ‘cosy’ or ‘friendly’ objects” (127).

(A Note here: that I’ve seen online in development of objects, and that is the tendency for objects in the lower class to be not be benign companions, and those for creative culturals to be designed to be companions; to be benign. The same is with vehicles. As a vehicle ages, it becomes less of a friend to it’s driver, and more of a liability. It needs to be replaced, because it turns against its owner.

In this way, technology is not man’s best friend, but man’s worst double-edged pet. It is a beautiful toy one minute, and next year is a shameful disgrace that no longer works. How easily this happens to the machine and the product! How more and more quickly these things turn on us!

We could make maps of ‘the psychology of space’ onto a shaped, gridded blob:

-”Social Zone”
-”Interchange Zone”
-”Quiet Zone”
-”Bed Capsule”

“A whole entirety of architectural plans that include electric vehicle tracks and future projections for robot implementation within the household. Text in overlays on the grid-work and planning of the new buildings” (131).

“Car expands to become place”, “floor can be re-formed instantly”, “private enclosures by now are also tunable” (1988).

Likelihoods….1990+ “Enclosures free-up”, “environment can be simulated - seen but not really there”, “demarcation between one persons domain and another becomes more pliable”.

So I feel like modular living is a very interesting concept to imagine.

Page 133 hosts an essay called ‘Drive-In Housing’, “A Proposition by David Greene and Michael Webb. In the first paragraph, the house is described in such a way, that “it can also be a mobile room which can plug itself into a drive-in bank and become extra floor area of that bank” (133).

This is back in 1968, before the widespread adoption of the Internet, of course, but that was my immediate thought when I read the above sentence. just this morning I accessed my bank account from the comfort of my room. The interface I used was the computer, and my transaction went as such:

Digitally:

-Walk to desk
-Remove chair
-Sit down
-Pull out laptop from drawer
-Turn on laptop
-Wait for laptop to load
-Click on ‘firefox’ internet client
-Enter username and password for college student network
-Enter bank address online
-Type in username and password for banking website
-Check account balances
-Click on transfer balances
-Enter in the account to transfer money from
-Enter the amount
-Transfer the amount
-Confirmation screen
-Log out of the website
-Close internet browser window
-Close laptop
-Remove self from chair

Non-digitally:

-Walk to bus stop
-Enter bus
-Leave bus
-Walk one block to bank
-Open bank door
-Wait in line for teller
-Greet teller
-Slide bank card to verify identity
-Ask teller to transfer money
-Wait
-Take receipt
-Walk one block to bus stop
-Enter bus
-Leave bus
-Walk back to dorm

In the first one, my computer did act as a modular interface that allowed my location to meld with the bank’s location. The act of drive-in housing that Greene and Webb talk about has been achieved by the Internet, and whose actual mechanical rumblings probably would look very similar to a mechanized real-life version of drive-in housing, were they to be mapped out.

Greene and Webb then go on to point out two intrinsic parts of architectural space. The inner space would be that of the “service unit, where space is at a premium, stuffed to the lid with the mechanics of the kitchen, the chancel, office or cinema serving Hamburgers, God, money or films to a lavishly planned and styled up consumer space; a restaurant, name, banking hall or auditorium. But this consumer space is, of course, made up of a series of mobile human containers - cars” (Elek, 133).

“In a drive-in home, the volume at any moment is directly proportional to the number of people in it; when the family is away at the seaside the house consists only of folded-up storage units; during a party as many as 30 mobile containers might gather around a unit to form a big space.”

Now, coming from the side of the intellectual, this is a very innovative and surprising view. But coming from the side of the common man, this is a very Arkansas model - the mobile home and mobile lifestyle. I am not suggesting that the entire state functions in this way, but I was told by a friend who lived there for a while that the lowest strata of Arkansas residents would move their mobile homes around in this way; not for parties, but for marriage. The trailer of the son or daughter’s partner would join the housing collective and form one big unit.

Besides, this model is used in order to gain entertainment from the Internet or the television. The resident does not have to move at all, and the hidden 4th dimensional magic does the shifting. Life could get confusing with all of that Tetris, like having to wait in line for the bank. If you brought part of your house with you, and all of the mobile bank ports were already filled, you’d block the street with your vehicle. If not, you’d wait in the mobile unit parking lot and take up space, just like regular cars do, but if your living space was lavish you’d probably take up more space than a car would.

And, if you were away at the seaside, what would prevent some lunatic from running away with your folded up house? Could you fold up your house and put it inside the rest of your house?

What if you had a dinner party and one of your guests had a terribly messy house, or a terrible cat that snuck into your section One could write a tragically amusing story about a mobile dinner party gone wrong, especially if one of the guests decided too long, like a month, and the host house had no way of detaching them. An if a mother-in-law showed up for a weekend, not only she would arrive, but her house too! Although if you met someone at a bar you wouldn’t have to invite them over to your place, because they’d already be there.

Of course the article is somewhat of a joke, because the authors go on to dissect their opening paragraph and go on to things or a more wild character.

Architecture is fun. This was my experiment with it.

——-

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

The Ignite Portland 4 lineup is in.

As Josh Bancroft said, “Man, that was TOUGH. We received over 50 talk ideas for Ignite Portland 4. The vast majority of them were really, really good. But we only have room for 13 talks on stage at the Bagdad (plus the traditional “What is Ignite?” talk)”.

Josh also wanted to give a HUGE “Thank You!” to everyone who submitted a talk that wasn’t chosen, pointing out that, “Your talk ideas made the competition fierce, and that competition means that the talks that were chosen are the cream of the crop. Even if you didn’t get picked, submit your talk idea next time - don’t lose heart! :-)”

Here are the 14 talks that will make up Ignite Portland 4. Follow the links to read the speaker’s description of their talk:

• What is Ignite? - Josh Bancroft
• Five Things Portland Can Learn From Kentucky in Five Minutes - Jeff Hardison
• A Short Introduction to Cyborg Anthropology - Amber Case
• Spirituality in Community: It’s not just for religion anymore - David Kominsky
• How to Bluff Your Way Through Life or a 5 Minute Presentation - Cami Kaos
• Cooking with the Seasons: The Garanimals Method - Katherine Gray
• Dating Rules for the Actual World - Alexis Rehrmann
• Story as Bloodsport: Battling to craft narrative - Melissa Lion
• How To Make People Think You’re a Portlander - Without Actually Living in the State of Oregon - Carolynn Duncan
• 7 One-Night Stands with a Baseball Fan - Nova Newcomer
• Divided We Win: 5 Reasons Why FOX News is Saving Our Media and Democracy - Abraham Hyatt
• Juice Up any Conversation or Presentation with 5 Impressive-Sounding Theories that Apply to EVERYTHING - Eric Anderson
• How to get people to do what you want them to do… - Betsy Richter
• 10 Karaoke Commandments - Alex Williams

The talks that are going to light up the stage at the Bagdad Theater on Thursday, November 13. Speakers, get working on your talks (the deadline to turn in your slides should have been in the acceptance email you received). Everyone else, stay tuned for information on tickets to come to Ignite Portland 4 - they’ll be free, as always - and get ready to be blown away at IP4!