I203 – Social and Organizational Issues of Information THE WISDOM OF LONG TAILS 04/23/2008

i203 – Social and Organizational Issues of Information

THE WISDOM OF LONG TAILS

04/23/2008

What Makes All This ‘Anthropological’?

Anthropologists have studied (are studying) it.

The topic areas center around discourse and cultural (re)production.

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The Internet ‘Revolution’ Manuel Castells

The Rise of the Network Society (1996)

The Information Age Trilogy

Fundamental Question: How has the rise of the

networked age changed the nature of our economy, of organizations, of culture?

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Haraway – The Cyborg Manifesto What is the ‘cyborg’?

Human / machine hybrid

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.4

Internet Terminology

What is media?

Focus on practices, not technologies.

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6 http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png

Cultural (Re)Production

Focus on offline spaces, how online space, communities, information technologies are integrated, appropriated.

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The Internet in Trinidad Miller and Slater – The Internet: An

Ethnographic Approch Case study: the internet in Trinidad

The internet provides another way of ‘being Trini’

Diaspora connections The internet only exists, has meaning, in

practice

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Space at BAYCAT:The ‘Creation’ Room

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Space at BAYCAT:The ‘Creation’ Room

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Space at BAYCAT:Private and Public

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Space at BAYCAT:Spaces for Collaboration

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Where’s Community? Focusing on a community, its

boundaries, blurs the diversity of the community and its internal and external interactions.

Communities of Practice – ‘Ecology of Media’

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Communication and Practice Discourse and Communicative Practice “Speech Communities”

On Facebook, e.g.! Harrison White on ‘Switching Talk’

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Distributed Cognition Synergy of individual and artifacts in the

environment Distributed in at least 3 ways:

Across members of a social group Between individual and environment

(coordination) Over time

See: Hutchins, E. (1995) "How a cockpit remembers its speeds". Cognitive Science, 19, 265-288.

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Next Week

‘Crowdsourcing’, Collaboration, and User-Generated Content – Oh my!