TMA The Modern Anthropolist
Discover What’s Inside
Cover
•Digital Anthropologist takes a look at
teen’s social media behavior
•Professor visits unchartered territory •Cyborgs take over field of Anthropology creating “superhumans” June 2014 • Themodernanthropologist.com
TMA The Modern Anthropolist
Discover What’s Inside Cover • Eli Shukron explores archeological
findings at his home in Jordan
•Professor visits unchartered territory •Cyborgs take over field of Anthropology creating “superhumans”
March 2014 • Themodernanthropologist.com
TMA The Modern Anthropolist
Discover What’s Inside Cover •Medical Anthropologists finds fault in ObamaCare •Yale Professor tells of research in Andes •Explore the Amazon with today’s archaeologists
September 2014 • Themodernanthropologist.com
32 Costoms and Costumes Anthropologist studies the Hmong people’s cultural appearance
24 Cyborg Take Over anthropologist studies connections between humans and technology
51 Skull Scratcher
Professor spends spare time digging up ancient bones
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Hot off the Press Boellstorff, an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, applies the methods and theories of his field to a virtual world accessible only through a computer screen. This world, called Second Life, is owned by Linden Lab, a company that charges roughly $15 a month to “live” there and to buy virtual land. Boellstorff spent two years participating in Second Life and reports back as the trained observer that he is. We read about a fascinating, and to many of us mystifying, world. How do people make actual money in this virtual society? (They do.) How do they make friends with other avatars? The reader unfamiliar with such sites learns a lot not least, all sorts of cool jargon: people in Second Life, for example, say objects are “rezzing” into existence, a verb that traces its origin to the 1982 movie Tron. The jargon of the author’s own field is another matter: the reader wearies of specialized terminology and hairsplitting definitions. The title recalls Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. One wishes this anthropologist had a little more of Mead’s flair, but the book is worth the hurdles its scholarly bent sometimes imposes.How do people make actual money in this virtual society? (They do.) How do they make friends with other avatars? The reader unfamiliar with such sites learns a lot not least, all sorts of cool jargon: people in Second Life, for example, say objects are “rezzing” into existence, a verb that traces its origin to the 1982 movie Tron. The jargon of the author’s own field is another matter: the reader wearies of terminology and hairsplitting definitions. The title recalls Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. One wishes this anthropologist had a little more of Mead’s flair, but the book is worth the hurdles its scholarly imposes. Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love- possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. Coming of Age in Second Life is the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way. anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups. -Editor and Chief Dave Smith Themodernanthropologist.com
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Cyborgs are By Sarah Greufe
Technology creates supermans... Everyone that uses technology is a superhuman. Cyborg anthropology is the study of the interaction between humans and technology, and how technology affects culture. Mobile technology allows one to stand almost anywhere in the world, whisper something, and be heard elsewhere. These devices that live in our pockets need to be fed every night require our frequent attention. In only a few years these devices have become stitched into the fabric of our everyday lives. Phones offer us respite from the boredom of waiting in lines, but they also inhibit us when they run out of batteries. I’m fascinated with mobile devices for another reason -- they are a bundle of sensors that we walk around with every day. That sensor data can be used to do very interesting things, such as automatically turn on the lights in your house when you get home, or turn the lights off when you leave. In traditional anthropology, somebody goes to another country, says: “How fascinating these people are! How interesting their tools and their culture are.� 24 Themodernanthropologist.com
Taking Over
A leader in the field, British scientist Kevin Warwick worked on Project Cyborg, an experiment that involved embedding a computer chip into his arm that could control doors, lights, heaters, and more. He has worked with anthropolist Amber Case on Cyborg production.
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When I was little, I was very interested in technology, science and mathematics. I grew up in the ‘80s, but read my dad’s copy of 1960 World Book Encyclopedia. My favorite entry was on the modern computer. The machine filled an entire gymnasium and was used for military.
person. The origin of the word cyborg was from a 1960 paper on space travel, where it was used to describe the placement of external devices and clothing on a human to make them fit for space travel. For thousands and thousands of years, everything has been a physical modification of self. It has helped us to extend our physical selves, go faster, hit things harder, and there’s been a limit on that. But now what we’re looking at is not an extension of the physical self, but an extension of the mental self.
Everyone that uses technology is a superhuman. As I grew up, I saw technology transition towards being used in everyday life. The only problem was that technology was still a pain in the neck to use. Most systems had too many menus and buttons. During my freshman year of college, I was introduced to the field of cyborg anthropology -- the study of humanity and technology. What I really liked about cyborg anthropology is that it crossed multiple fields of study. In academia, you can learn a lot about a certain field, but know nothing about another. Technology is so intertwined with humanity at this point that it takes multiple fields to understand both tools and people. A cyborg is simply someone who interacts with technology. The technology can be a physical or a mental extension, and doesn’t need to be implanted in the
extension of the mental self. And because of that, we’re able to travel faster and communicate differently through the use of technology. life that’s been altered by technology. Everyone that uses technology is a superhuman. It’s not so strange anymore because it’s the norm -- most everyone else around us is also a superhuman. The only time we notice it is when our devices run out of power. We’re all super humans until our devices lose energy.A cyborg is not Terminator or Robocop, but the experience of everyday life that’s been altered. Amber Case hangs out of a moving bus in New York City. She is the leading anthropoloist researching Cyborgs.
And because of that, we’re able to travel faster and communicate differently through the use technology. A cyborg is not Terminator or Robocop, but the experience of everyday But now what we’re looking at is not an extension of the physical self, but an
Everyone that uses technology is a superhuman. It’s not so strange anymore. Most everyone else around us is also a superhuman. The only time we notice it is when our devices run out. of power. We all lose energy everyday. Themodernanthropologist.com
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The Virtual in
By: Sarah Greufe Kaileigh Kurtin
Yahoo and Intel. Each year she spends a few months “in the field,” playing Margaret Mead to America’s youth by studying how they use
Sometimes I feel like my job is Captain Obvious . . . says danah boyd, sitting cross-legged and shoeless in a neon-green chair at Microsoft Research’s office overlooking a frozen Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. Her snow boots kicked off, the petite 33-year-old expert on the Internet and youth is wearing a loose tan sweater, dangly silver jewelry and a trademark fuzzy hat that resembles the ears of a white Pomeranian puppy. That lower-case spelling of her name? Not a typo. She had it legally changed after graduating with a computer science degree from Brown in 2000, because of “political irritation at the importance of capitalization.” Roll your eyes and LOL, but boyd is a highly sought-after ethnographer– Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is an instant message buddy–who has helped tech companies shape online products and privacy policies aimed at youth. Her résumé includes stints at Friendster, Google, 48
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technology. In 2009 boyd was the first to reveal how educated whites and Asians were fleeing the social media site MySpace in favor of Facebook. She doesn’t buy the conventional view that the Internet is a dramatic cultural game-changer;
Boyd does her daily check-in on a 2001 flip phone.
our Reality we’re simply finding digital ways to replicate offline behavior. “The issues we have with technology are rarely about the technologies themselves,” she says. At the moment she’s finishing a book for publication in 2012 that debunks myths about teens and social media. (Myth number five: Kids don’t care about privacy.) Mark Zuckerberg might want to pick up a copy. “He’s whip-smart, but we fundamentally disagree on certain philosophical ideas about the world,” says boyd–namely, privacy. (Zuckerberg declined to comment.) “Her name is always brought up, almost reverentially, in tech circles,” says Sarahjane Sacchetti, communications head at question-andanswer site Formspring. “Because of her teen focus groups, she understands how young people use the Internet and talks about it in a thoughtful, reasonable way.” Boyd, who has a doctorate in information studies from Berkeley, gained attention early in her career when she took on Sherry Turkle, the noted MIT psychologist and
Internet social guru. Turkle viewed the Internet as a great equalizer, where users could reconstruct their gender and identity to suit their fancy. Boyd responded that race and class come in digital versions. Turkle turned dystopian with her new book, Alone Together, which decries machines’ disrupting human relationships. Boyd takes issue again. “Technology simply mirrors and magnifies all sorts of things we see in everyday life–and that’s good, bad and ugly,” she says, pointing to the societal obsession with cyberbullying. “Bullying’s not worse today.
That’s not to say that everything is obvious with youth online. When teenagers were being cyberbullied anonymously on Formspring — “Don’t you hate Kristen?” or “Why are you such a slut?” — boyd took a look. She determined from Formspring sign-in data that some of the vicious questions were written by the teen under attack. Boyd speculated that it was a cry for attention.get friends to rally to her defense. She called the practice “digital self-harm.”Boyd’s job at Microsoft Research is similar to what she’s done. 49 Themodernanthropologist.com 22
Teen Users
32% 45% 55% 50
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to an academic’s. She gets bonuses based on the visibility of her writings or through winning awards. She can pursue what she likes, and for one month every year she takes an e-mail sabbatical, during which she not only ignores all e-mail but also deletes it. If you want to see boyd angry, mention Zuckerberg’s statement that “privacy is no longer a social norm.” The two have been on each other’s instant message chat lists since 2004, when Zuckerberg took her out for coffee for her insights from studying Friendster’s users. People go to great lengths to protect their privacy, she says, pointing to a teen she met who, instead of logging out of Facebook after a session, deactivates her account. Boyd believes online privacy needs attention from Congress–”Facebook is a social utility; utilities get regulated”–but that it requires subtlety. A law to protect privacy of children under 13, for example, has failed because kids just lie about their ages. “People are responding to structural conditions on the Internet in very reasonable, rational ways,” says boyd. “My job is to uncover it and make sense of it in a way that makes you go, ‘Duh.’” Boyd’s job at Microsoft Research is similar. to an academic’s. She gets bonuses based on the visibility of her writings or through winning awards.
She can pursue what she likes, and for one month every year she takes an e-mail sabbatical, during which she not only ignores all e-mail but also deletes it. If you want to see boyd angry, mention Zuckerberg’s statement that “privacy is no longer a social norm.” The two have been on each other’s instant message chat lists since 2004, when Zuckerberg took her out for coffee for her insights from studying Friendster’s users. People go to great lengths to protect their privacy, she says, pointing to a teen she met who, instead of logging out of Facebook after a session, deactivates her account.
privacy is no longer a social norm Boyd believes online privacy needs attention from Congress–”Facebook is a social utility; utilities get regulated”– but that it requires subtlety. A law to protect privacy of children under 13, for example, has failed because kids just lie about their ages. “People are responding to structural conditions on the Internet in very reasonable, rational ways,” says boyd. “My job is to uncover it and make sense of it in a way that makes you go, ‘Duh.’” A law to protect privacy of children under 13, for example, has failed because kids just lie about their ages.
Technology simply mirrors and magnifies all sorts of things we see in everyday life, and that's good, bad and ugly.
In 2008, I completed my PhD at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley. My dissertation research was funded as a part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Initiative on New Media and Learning. My research was supervised by a most astonishing committee: Mimi Ito, Annalee Saxenian, Cori Hayden, and Jenna Burrell. My beloved PhD advisor Peter Lyman - lost his battle with brain cancer in July 2007. I miss him dreadfully. I did my Master’s Degree at the MIT Media Lab’s Sociable Media
Group with Judith Donath (supervised also by Henry Jenkins and Genevieve Bell). My master’s thesis focused on how people manage their presentation of self in relation to social contextual information in online environments. As an undergraduate, I studied computer science at Brown University, advised by Andy van Dam. My undergrad thesis focused on how prioritization of depth cues is dependent on levels of sex hormones in the body and how this affects engagement with virtual reality. Outside of academia, I have worked at various
non-profits and corporations. For five years, I worked at V-Day, an organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. I helped build an online community to support activists around the world and I continue to do volunteer work for them. For a complete bio, click here. On the web, I’m known for two things: maintaining an Ani DiFranco lyrics site and blogging prolifically. Personally, I love music, dancing, politics, reading, and all things fuzzy.
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Boyd has observed that teens actually do care more about privacy but they also crave “access to public spaces,” which have been denied to them in the real-world because of adult concerns about physical safety. “Teens want access to publics to see and be seen, to socialize, and to feel as if they have the freedoms to explore a world beyond the heavily constrained one shaped by parents and school,” she wrote in the book’s final chapter. Yet, she wrote, “The teens that I met genuinely care about their privacy, but how they understand and enact it may not immediately resonate or appear logical to adults. When teens— and, for that matter, most adults— seek privacy, they do so in relation to those who hold power over them.” And, for kids, the holders of that power are often schools and parents. For us adults, it could be the government. Boyd talks a lot about context and how what teens post online is sometimes misunderstood by adults 52
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who have no clue as to how it fits into the context of a larger conversation. Like adults, most teens generally understand time and place. What they might post on a social networking profile aimed at their friends might be different than what they might say to parents, teachers and other adults. But that’ not unique to kids. What adult friends say to each other when they hang out is likely to be a lot different than what they might say at business meetings. I sure wouldn’t want any of my former bosses or even some relatives overhearing what I may have said to buddies on camping trips, for example. Boyd dedicates an entire chapter to bullying and helps demystify the notion that we are seeing an epidemic of it. “Network technologies complicate how people understand bullying,” she wrote. “While many adults use bullying to mean every form of youth meanness and cruelty, teenagers use.”
Turning Our
Upside
Lives
Boyd checks her messages on her phone with her husband Frank in Boston.
Boyd has observed that teens actually do care more about privacy but they also crave “access to public spaces,” which have been denied to them in the real-world because of adult concerns about physical safety. “Teens want access to publics to see and be seen, to socialize, and to feel as if they have the freedoms to explore a world beyond the heavily constrained one shaped by parents and school,” she wrote in the book’s final chapter. Yet, she wrote, “The teens that I met genuinely care about their privacy, but how they understand and enact it may not immediately resonate or appear logical to adults. When teens— and, for that matter, most adults— seek privacy, they do so in relation to those who hold power over them.” And, for kids, the holders of that power are often schools and parents. For us adults, it could be the government. Boyd talks a lot about context and how what teens post online is sometimes misunderstood by adults
who have no clue as to how it fits into the context of a larger conversation. Like adults, most teens generally understand time and place. What they might post on a social networking profile aimed at their friends might be different than what they might say to parents, teachers and other adults. But that’ not unique to kids. What adult friends say to each other when they hang out is likely to be a lot different than what they might say at business meetings. I sure wouldn’t want any of my former bosses or even some relatives overhearing what I may have said to buddies on camping trips, for example. Boyd dedicates an entire chapter to bullying and helps demystify the notion that we are seeing an epidemic of it. “Network technologies complicate how people understand bullying,” she wrote. “While many adults use bullying to mean every form of youth meanness and cruelty, teenagers use.”
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