The Anthropology of Homo Digitalis and His Tribes

EXAMINING TYPES OF DIGITAL USER CULTURES

University of Kent and TalkTalk the British telecommunications provider joined forces to conduct what Prof. David Zeitlyn (Kent U.) calls "the first digital anthropology report". According to him the researchers aimed "to go beyond traditional research methods and get a true understanding of how technology fits into people’s lives, by looking at people’s attitudes and behaviours to technology and communications more generally." The purpose of the report, according to Charles Dunstone the CEO of TalkTalk, was to "find out what homo digitalis really looks like." To do this researchers were sent into people's homes around the UK to interview people about and observe them using digital technology. "An anthropology expert" analyzed the findings and found homo digitalis divided into six tribes according to their patterns of usage and modes of behavior.

Prof. Zeitlyn describes how the project found out that "homo digitalis actually existed in a range of guises, as if in different stages of evolution. We found six distinct 'clusters' of consumers, which we called our Six Tribes." Although ethnographic method was first applied, it served as a foundation for the main method, a quantitative survey completed by ca. 2000 consumers. Below you can read more about the six user groups.

THE SIX TRIBES

1. Digital extroverts (9 %). They are using converged devices such as BlackBerries or iPhones and they demand ubiquitous, fast connections. The take the internet for granted and update their online profiles as a daily routine. Most of them are under 34, male and earn more than the national average. See the video of a tribesman below.

2. Timid technophobes (23 %). Their phones are not that smart and they are not that affected my technology. They have limited internet skills which are used only when really needed. They prefer pen and paper over email and like to meet people face-to-face rather than on the internet. They don't trust digital information as its flooding the cyberspace. Tweeting or blogging is for people who have too much time, the think. They are mostly over 55, male and earn less than average. (Read here about Doris the technophobe.)

3. Social secretaries (13 %). They are usually women in their mid 40s, earning around the average. They are busy with work, family and social life which leaves them little time for latest gadgets - unless they are quite easy to use and have social applications. Click below for video.

4. First lifers (12 %). They are mostly male and have average income, but that's the only valid generalization, and this tribes seems to be the most difficult to define. They use even less email than the technophobes. They like to live outdoors and would "rather surf than surf the internet." They are neither for or against internet and mobile tech, they just happen to use it if it's useful. For example, they might like the music, video and online gaming on the net but don't care about how it all works or where the information comes. (A first lifer James talks about his digital world here.)

5. E-ager beavers (29 %). They are by far the largest tribe. They use new media quite heavily although they are not so important for their social life or work. They have average income and perhaps the main things separating them from Digital extroverts are that they are more likely to download than upload, have less confidence about or drive for the new technology to get involved more deeply. (Read also about Andy describing his beaverish ways).

6. Web boomers (8 %). They want the information about health, hobbies, history and news from the comfort of their home. Library has been replaced by the internet as their main source of information and entertainment. They are mostly male, over 55 and have average income. The are a bit conservative in using their trusted internet sites and have a lot of free time which they want to spend efficiently. They browse the internet to read reviews on products before purchasing them but they still prefer landline over online in keeping in touch with friends. A web boomer video here:

A PREDICTION: DIGITAL REFUSENIKS
The report also attempted to estimate how human-technology relations will evolve in the next two decades and predicted, among other things, that a digital elite will emerge and people's success in life will be more determined by their "willingness to embrace technology" than by their social class. On the other hand, it wouldn't matter that much because technology would be quite ubiquitous, embedded and thus not easily avoided. However, the report predicted that there will be a major motivation change among those who are not using the internet. Today, most of the "digitally excluded" are not using digital networks because of their low income, poor skills or lack of equipment. However, in the future the group of "digital refuseniks" or digital Luddites will emerge and take a moral stance against the internet. They could use new technologies but rebel against their pervasiveness and worry about a control society.


Which tribe are you? Take the quiz and find out!
Read the full report: Digital Anthropology Report 2009: The Six Tribes of Homo Digitalis. Watch also the video introduction to the report by TalkTalk. Read also: Keith Hart's and Lorenz's post about the report here and here.

Thanks for the hint about the report: the tweeting Daniel O'Maley.

Video clips provided by TalkTalk.

The Great Finnish Beer Floating Tradition and the Digital Crime that Enabled it

Can I allow people to plan illegal actions in my blog? Could I be accused of organizing the action? Is the site owner responsible for whatever people plan or say within website? These are few of the many ethical questions of digital age. Here's one example.

There is a curious unofficial festival every summer in Vantaa, Finland. In Finnish it is called Kaljakellunta - "Beer Floating" It is about people drinking beer while floating down the river on various kinds of crafts such as rafts, small boats, inner tube tires and even sofas. As a YouTube user described it, it is "funny and idiotic at the same time."

According to Wikipedia the tradition was started by a dozed young Finns in 1997, and since then the number of floating Finns has doubled every year since. In 2000, a special Internet site was established for the Float but in 2005 the original innovators withdraw from organizing the event because of the littering problem caused by too many beer-drinkers on the river.

In 2007 almost 400 floaters took part in the festivities and although no accidents have ever occurred the authorities have been concerned about the security as well as the amount of littering. For the 2008 event over 1200 Facebook users had registered as participants to Beer Floating although there were rumors about the event being cancelled. The authorities had asked the Internet site to be closed before the event and suggested that people stay away from the festivities. This didn't stop committed beer-drinkers from floating down the river once more.


Last summer the festival was arranged again, without the designated Internet site. This was enough for the authorities. According to Helsingin Sanomat the Vantaa District Court is about decide on whether or not the website owners could be held responsible for breaking the law concerning public meetings. They have not informed the police about the event, which would not get permission from police anyway.

The prosecutor sees that the two men who used to operate the Internet site on which Beer Floating was discussed and planned should be charged. According to the accused no-one had ever actually organized the Beer Floating but participants had found their way to the event through informal channels and many different Internet forums including theirs.

This ethical problem seems to have something in common with the Pirate Bay case (see my earlier post). Should the domain owner be held responsible of actions or discussion that might lead to unlawful action outside of the site? If, for example, two commentors of my blog would discuss where and when to steal a bike or go shop-lifting, should I be held responsible? Maybe not but what if my blog was built for that particular purpose - to have people plan their illegal actions?

Whatever the "right" answer is, it is surely floating on the intersection of the always fluid mainstream and cross-currents that define our values. Perhaps right and wrong, lawfulness, responsibility and moral become even more contested and negotiated when they are faced with the new digital world where the norms of the analogue are not always directly applicable. I don't envy the law-makers.

Pics from PixBait.com article titled Kaljakellunta also known as Beer Floating.

See also Demonstration for the Beer Floating in Facebook (in Finnish) and Beer Floating clip in YouTube (and another one by Luomu Vision).

Virginity through technology

In Helsingin Sanomat today, a Finnish author/columnist Riku Korhonen discussed news about Egyptian lawmakers wanting to ban a recent biotechnological innovation, the fake hymens made by a Chinese company Gigimo. New York Post (5 October 2009) describes the product:

The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $30. It is intended to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins - culturally important in a conservative Middle East where sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. The product leaks a blood-like substance when inserted and broken.

Riku Korhonen is not sure what to think of this "innocence manufactured in Far East." He sees the bodies of the women relying on the product as a battle ground where Western sexual liberalism and traditional religious moral code collide with the production lines of the ascending East Asia. In the product, Korhonen thinks, the animal instincts of humans are combined with a technocratic ability to solve problems.

The fake hymen is a great example of a technological innovation with a high load of cultural meaning. How much the product is improving women's rights is another thing. Perhaps it is good that women in male-hegemonic cultures are now more able to have premarital sex and quietly rebel against the traditional moral system. On the other hand, perhaps using the product is in a Foucauldian way reinforcing male domination as women are accepting the men's rules of sexuality by circumventing them.

Then again, to set the phenomenon in a larger context, there is nothing new under the sun. People around the world have been and are using all sorts of technologies from small things like going to the gym, using make-up and shaving to more radical operations like cosmetic surgery to make themselves more desirable to the opposite (or same) sex. What's a bag of protein in that complex web of sexual culture?

Picture source: Artificial Virginity Hymen sold by Gigimo.

Participation Culture, Creativity, and Social Change

I happened to come across the 10-minute YouTube version of the inaugural lecture of David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster and the author of Media, Gender and Identity (among other things). Professors of the world, more stuff like this please!

For more information about Prof. Gauntlett's work, see e.g. Wikipedia. Also check out his complete list of publications.

Anthropological Explanation for the Financial Crisis

The "Innovation Guru" of BusinessWeek, Bruce Nussbaum discusses the cultural side of the financial crisis. His idea is that the conceptual leap from "gambling" to "gaming" in describing the phenomenon of risking money was essential. Check out the video (3 min 34 sec) here!

South Korea: Towards a Ubiquitous Mediascape

Last week I finished a manuscript to appear in Turo Uskali's (ed.) forthcoming volume titled Media Futures. The text is sort of summarizing piece of my Korean Media Culture research project (2006-2009) funded by Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. If you're interested enough to read the manuscript please feel free to comment!

The Anthropology of Online Poker: A Research Plan

Last week I posted about my future project concerning the culture of online poker, and promised to tell more about my plans. So, here is a summary of my research plan.

I'm interested in four themes of online poker culture, and the hegemonic discourses within it. The themes are 1. the players, 2. the advertising, 3. the counterforces and, finally (not really a theme) 4. a holistic ethnography.

1. The players of online poker
In studying the players I am interested in to what extent the players feel unity with other members of the online poker community and how they uphold this unity. Moreover, I am interested on how the players negotiate their playing to fit their personal historical narrative. I assume the players form a subculture that has to be adapted to each one's personal microculture. On the other hand, the players have to negotiate the status and the position of the game in the wider system of cultural meaning. How exactly this happens is something I'm going to find out.

To study the players I will interview 10 to 20 Finnish poker players, pros and amateurs. In addition to interviews about the meaning of online poker, I will practice participant observation which, in this limited sense, will mean observing players at their gaming interface and asking them to explain the flow of the game and the significances they see in the process.

2. Online poker advertising
The online poker ads seem to appeal to masculinity, sexuality, excitement and the promise of luxury. My purpose is to analyze the hegemonic discourse in advertising and reconstruct the image of an authentic poker-player in that discourse. For this I will go through various poker sites and magazines.

3. Counterforces of online poker
Online poker has evoked a lot of resistance in the media. Especially the well-being of young players is often worried after. It seems like it is characteristic to the resistance to represent players as in jeopardy and constantly on the verge of personal devastation. Thus, I want to analyze the discussion about online poker and find out about the rhetoric and the discursive means the opponents of online poker use to strengthen their arguments.

4. Holistic ethnography of online poker.
Finally, I will attempt a holistic ethnography which means a descriptive account of different infra- and superstructural elements of online poker culture/society. For this I will draw on the results of the previous three themes as well as the popular and academic literature and websites on the subject. Briefly put, I will try to write a straight and informative general description of online poker culture.

If you have anything to comment or suggest

feel absolutely free to post a comment or email me!

Pic sources: Bronislaw Malinowski here, poker table here.

The Anthropology of Online Poker: A Polemical Prelude

Nothing can substitute the experience of the game, the psychological eye for the game and the ability to manipulate the opponents. Instead of hesitating and contemplating whether or not to dare, it is extremely important to just jump straight into the game.


"This is how you start playing online poker", From Nettipokeri.info,
(transl. from Finnish by JJ)

Online poker is a game for the young men living in the world dedicated to experience. As a cultural phenomenon it is an interesting mix of cyberspace, hard work, economics and nomadic culture. It is against and for protestant ethics. It is a Darwinist trip. It is about the Baudrillardian hyperreal and the everyday personal Realpolitik. It is a game that is work and pleasure, where men battle over glory.

The folklore of online poker has its geniuses, foxes and plain losers. Big players move big money for a living and luxury. Small players play to smuggle a little excitement in to the Everyday. The advertisement draws on and renews the heroics and the discourse of Man of the Game, not ignoring sex appeal. To play bravely in a dynamic and exciting environment keeps one's masculinity alive.

On the borderline of poker culture there is the counter-discourse using moral panic to limit the reckless of the cyberspace, to tame the characters shifting around the liminal spaces of welfare state, going against traditional values of work, responsibility and family.

From these polemical grounds I will start my next research project next fall, studying online poker culture with the tools of anthropology and funded by the Finnish Foundation for Gaming Research. I will write more about my research plan a bit later.


Pic above is an ad of Full Tilt Poker at Poker Magazines news site, the pic below is from Full Tilt Poker site.

Notes on ICTD2009 conference

The 3-day conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2009) at Carnegie Mellon University, Doha, Qatar was an intensive package full of, well, information and communication.

As I've written before, ICTD is a new and vast field in the making and it seems like the only thing its scholars, practitioners and observers agree on is that it is a field that focuses on the relationship between technology and the communities of developing countries.

In Doha, scholars of economics, sociology, anthropology as well as engineers, NGO representatives and civil servants all defined their work as ICTD. Not surprisingly, the definition, purpose, visions and rules of ICTD became a common topic in Doha. "What is ICTD?" was a hard question to answer, particularly when someone else asked you "What is development?"

The lovely organized chaos within the field just makes the whole constellation more interesting. The fact is that whatever the definition of ICTD is, it doesn't stop people from doing important research, grass root work and policy planning. The dangerous thing for many, it seems, is businesses using ICTD as a label to improve their sales. For many, that's just fine too. If people benefit, there's no beef.

But what does "benefit" mean? That's actually a question that was asked many times. How to evaluate ICTD's impact? What is good ICTD? The basic challenge of ICTD seems to be to come up with a good ICTD innovation. And, further, to measure the success of an innovation. Finally, if there is a successful innovation, how to make it work somewhere else.

For a Finnish-language conference report (8 p.) of ICTD2009, click here.

Yasukuni, Japan and Korea: A Paper

Tomorrow I will join the Asian Political Thought seminar organized by Prof. Pekka Korhonen of Political Science at University of Jyväskylä. I will present a short paper about an exceedingly interesting phenomenon loaded with symbolism and nationalism. It's the Yasukuni Shrine issue and I will discuss how it is presented in Korean online media. Here's an excerpt for a prelude:

Korea was occupied for 35 years by the Japanese Empire, from1910-45. It is a history that still defines what it means to be Korean. On August 15th of 2006, the Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi visited Yasukuni Jinja, a shrine in Tokyo dedicated to the souls of soldiers who had given their lives for the Emperor. The year marked the 61st anniversary of Japan’s surrender and Korea’s liberation in World War II, and Koizumi was the first prime minister in twenty years to visit Yasukuni on that particular day. The visit sparked strong reactions in Korean media and, created a related stir Korea’s political sphere. Indeed, Koizumi’s move prompted the South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun to postpone his visits to Japan for a year.

In the Korean media sphere, Koizumi’s Yasukuni visit re-animated the figure of Japan as it existed during World War II. For Koreans, what may have been a small step for the Japanese Prime Minister, was seen as a trampling over of the Korean nation, and signified Japanese disregard to Korea’s past suffering. In this paper I briefly present and discuss some of the Korean reactions to the Yasukuni Shrine issue in 2006. I consider how Korean online media represented the case to its foreign, English-speaking audiences and through that process, constructed and renewed a Korean national identity.

Read the whole paper here. For a longer version in Finnish, see this link. All comments are welcome!

22 Why Questions about the Web

Ever wonder why you can do certain things on the Internet but not something else? Or, why the web is like it is although it could be different/better - or could it?

Alexander van Elsas is a new media blogger and the CEO of Glubble, an online activity center for families. In his blog post, Alexander has asked 22 questions about the web under six different categories, which are:

1) Networks and destinations
2) Personality and identity
3) Data
4) Privacy
5) Business models
6) Behavior.

Some of Alexander's questions are rhetorical, some very easy to answer and some have no meaningful answer. Nevertheless the questions per se seem to tell us a lot about the web as a new way of being and about people's attitudes towards it.

My favorite questions on the list of 22:

5. Why am I forced to be fragmented across the web, instead of having one presence that can connect anywhere?

7. What is or defines my online identity? Am I my profile, my interactions, my data?

11. Can data lead to demand, or does it only take care of supply?

20. Why would we want to have thousands of friends and interact everywhere?

22. Why do we spend more and more time online while real life passes by so quickly?

See the rest of the questions here. (One commenter even had his staff answer the questions. Check them out!)

Pic of Alexander van Elsas from his blog.

Prelude to ICTD2009 Conference - Defining the Discipline

A group of researchers and I are planning a project on the use of mobile communication technology in several developing countries - my site being Tamil Nadu, India, where I used to do ethnography for my PhD dissertation.

Our project could be defined as belonging to the field of ICTD or Information and Communication Technologies and Development. As one might guess, it is a broad field concerning developing countries and the use of new technologies in them. To get to know more about the field, I will be attending ICTD2009 next week in Doha, Qatar.

There's another abbreviation, ICT4D, that has more or less the same kind of meaning than ICTD but perhaps with a slightly different orientation. In his blog post ICT4D, ICTD, or what? Chris Coward discusses the definition of the discipline.

Chris says ICT4D usually connotes "the application of (primarily digital) ICT to interventions that have an explicit developmental goal such as health, education, government transparency" etc. and it has a tendency to ignore conventional development goals or research about all kinds of non-developmental uses of ICT in the developing world context.

For example, according to Chris his colleague's paper about depictions of computers in Indian cinema proposed for ICTD2009 was critiqued for not fitting in the discipline. To Chris this is regrettable as,

"it is incredibly relevant to understand how the computer has become a symbol of aspiration within a society, how that symbol has changed over time, is the computer used for good or ill, what effect this has on people’s views of technology’s promise or pitfalls, and so on."

Chris goes on to compare ICT4D with ICTD which has a broader scope not excluding more research on how ICT is used in developing countries. ICTD doesn't necessarily have to have a developmental goal.

In defining the discipline that focuses on ICT in developing countries there is also the problem of defining "development" and, as Chris says, the need to discuss the meaning of lumping "countries into developing or developed buckets". Also, there's the big question of whether ICTD is a field at all, and if so, what should it be eventually called. Chris says he will take these issues up in an ICTD Curriculum Workshop at Doha. I'm sure there will be at least one interesting discussion at ICTD2009!

Pic sources: Indian monk with cell phone from W3C; ICTD2009 logo from the conference website; book cover of ICT4D: Information and Communication Technology for Development from Cambridge catalogue.

Could a Robot Replace an Anthropologist?

LiveScience (2 April 2009) reported about Adam the Robot Scientist of Abersystwythin University succeeding in creating and confirming a scientific hypothesis without human intervention. Adam predicted that in baker's yeast there are certain genes for specific enzymes encouraging biochemical reactions. The robot then ran experiments in its laboratory to test the hypothesis and analyzed the results.

Ross King & colleague with Adam.

Although hypothesis-producing robots are an "age-old" invention (since 2004), Adam is special because it can handle independent and automatized laboratory work. According to the computer scientist Ross King, in the future robots will become more widely applied as assistants in the routines and less-interesting tasks of laboratory scientists.

Now when do we anthropologists get our hypothesis-producing robots?! I would love to co-write an article with iMalinowski or Android Appadurai. Or, to get back on Earth, if a cyborg anthropologist is a tall order, it would definitely be interesting to use a robot in the field of, say, urban ethnography.


I can easily imagine an interactive robot such as the ones wondering around Incheon Airport, South Korea (see pic left) programmed to do participant-observation and interview people in a public space. Obviously, serious scrutiny of the method would be required but if low-cost and discreet robots were to be produced in the future, I'd see no problem in hiring a few. It would be fun too!



However, if robot-ethnographers are yet to take over, there is fortunately a lot of mixing between anthropologists and robots going on already. Many anthropologists such as Jennifer Robertson (Univ. of Michigan) and Kathleen Richardson (Univ. of Cambridge) are studying the human-robot interaction with fascinating results. It's definitely one of the major fields of anthropology's future!

So, if for now I can't enjoy the help of an ethnographer-robot I can at least study the emerging field of humans mingling with robots.

Read the LiveScience article on Adam here. See also the Mbnet article on the same in Finnish. Pic sources : Ross King & Adam + Dr. X from Abersystwythin University; Limitations of the Robot Scientist from Robot Scientist; Robot at Incheon Airport by Jukka Jouhki; Robertson with Asimo from antropologi.info (article orig. from The Daily Texan).

Paleo-Future or the Futures of the Past

Microsoft Office Labs has produced a montage video about what information technology will be like in 2019. In my opinion it's a neat and inspiring video but like any vision of the future, it has little to do with what the world will actually be like. The future just sort of shies away from most predictions, and the visions end up telling more about the contemporary world than the future.

Reading the the comments discussing the MOL video at iStartedsomething I myself started to rekindle my long lost idea of doing research on the past futures. Or the futures of the past. Then I came across Tim R. Mortiss' blog with some links to websites and blogs discussing the theme.

Paleo-Future is a blog that takes "a look into the future that never was". Paleo-future as a concept means a historical look at the visions of the future. The blog has plenty of interesting material on its subject. Here's a few pictures (click for hyperlink to original post) of how the future was imagined in the past.

"Going to the Opera in the Year 2000" (1882) - Of course on the all too non-existent flying cars!

"Everyman's Folding Auto" (1939) - Not yet, but we do have the folding bike though.

"Game Parlor in the Future" (1982) - Pretty perceptive story actually!

"Tomorrow's Kitchen" (1943) - No pots and pans anymore!

"The Future of the Helicopter" (1955) - Handy, eh?

Other interesting posts in the blog include: Postcards Show the Year 2000 (circa 1900), Collier's Illustrated Future of 2001 (1901) and Movies to be Produced in Every Home (1925). Check them out!

You can also browse through Daily Motion for paleofuturistic video clips. See, for example, The Electronic home (late 1980s) commercial with "computer-television" controlled with a joystick and "computerized yellow pages". The video is produced by a telephone company and they predict that information services through the "computer-television" will be as natural as driving a car in the future. Not bad, eh?

Or check out Magic Highway, a clip where an American vision of traveling by motorcar is presented in 1958. In The Future is Now (1955) electronic photography, video telephone and electronic music synthesizer are visioned.

And where's my jetpack already?! See the Jetpack Dreams trailer of a book by Mac Montandon (see also the Pale-Future post about it).

"How would you feel if those futurescapes of fifty years ago materialized today?" asks William Gibson. Read his essay at American.Heritage.com.

Pic sources as sited by Paleo-Future blog: Lithograph by Albert Robida in La vie électrique; The November 26, 1939 issue of San Antonio Light; a 1982 issue of Electronic Games magazine; the April 30, 1955 issue of Pacific Stars and Stripes (Tokyo, Japan). More about Microsoft Office Lab's future visions here.

Random notes from Salzburg

The Digital Memories conference (Salzburg) is over. Here are some of my scattered notes about new and old ideas discussed during or evoked by all the interesting presentations.

Anna Reading talked about the global unconscious and globalized memories. During her presentation someone mentioned that it's funny how before people were afraid of forgetting important things but nowadays people worry about some entity remembering everything they do.

There was also discussion about how to define connectivity? We are being told we live in a connected world. But exactly how much mobile phone or internet use does it require? How many hours or how many connections? Or how much speed? For being connected, is it enough to use the cell phone every now and then for a phone call and an sms or is heavy-user multimedia attitude needed? Does one have to practically live online in order to earn the right to be called "connected"?

One of the concepts that stuck to my mind was relocalized memory. It means the situations where a population of a nation/group migrates away from "home land" and redefines or recircumscribes the collective identity which is then imported back to the "home land" to reconstruct and reinforce the imagined community. This, at least, is my interpretation of the concept. This has happened in the case of N. Ireland: the Irish migrated to USA, re-interpreted Irishness and produced an image which was then taken as a model by the people N. Ireland.

In my view, something like relocalization has happened to phenomena like Hinduism in the 19th century (exported to the West & imported back to India), Zen Buddhism in the 1960s (Japan --> US --> Japan) and many other globalized cultural elements that, in the source location, have been redefined according to a more hegemonic model.

After Anna's presentation there was also discussion about premediation (cf. Foucault's discursive archive) which was a new one for me, meaning media producing contents that will give us guidelines on how to react to a future event.

Andrew Hoskins mentioned T. H. Eriksen's idea of vertical stacking of information which happens, according to Eriksen, when

"growing amounts of information are distributed at growing speed" and "it becomes increasingly difficult to create narratives, orders, development sequences. The fragments threaten to become hegemonic. This has consequences for the ways we relate both to knowledge, work and lifestyle in a wide sense. Cause and effect, internal organic growth, maturity and experience are under heavy pressure in this situation." (p. 45 of Eriksen's Globalization: The Key Concepts.)

Alberto Sá from Minho University, Portugal, mentioned a concept I found very interesting. Alberto used the concept of semantic resolution and I immediately thought it could be heuristically used in, say, cultural anthropology describing the different levels of understanding of foreign people. Imagine, for example, a Finn trying to make sense of the Russian culture. If the Finn has low semantic resolution he sees Russians as all-the-same monolithic entity without any heterogeneity. But when the semantic resolution grows you are able to see more "cultural pixels" and thus detect nuances in the object of your gaze.

Owen Kelly's side note was also interesting: when people complain about new technologies weakening the mental capacities of humans, it's good to remember Socrates and how he talked about the alphabet causing forgetfulness and ignorance in people. In addition to this, Owen wondered about how to define memory and what exactly is the unit of memory. What ever it is, memory is something that happens in the present, not in the past. Remembering is like making path from the present to the imagined past. It's not about bringing some past issue alive but more like recreating past in the present.

Olivier Nyirubugara's presentation on hyperlinking made me realize how political hyperlinking actually is. Think about it - it's actually quite a powerful micro-political tool. If you have a popular website or you are a specialist of a field with a blog, by producing or not producing links you are communicating values and appreciations.

Finally,Jeff Rothenberg was quoted:

Digital information lasts forever or five years

- which ever comes first.

Pic sources: top pic from New Media, pic below from The Boston Channel.