An Anthropologist Goes Techno

Kiinnostaako vieraat ja tutut kulttuurit?

2011-11-10T11:05:00.004+02:00

Jos kiinnostaa, niin etnologia voi olla sinun alasi. Katso siis etnologian oppiaineen uusi esittelyvideo, jossa kerrotaan millaista on etnologian opiskelu ja tutkimus ja millaisiin ammatteihin meiltä valmistuu. Tutustu myös Jyväskylän yliopiston Historian ja etnologian laitokseen.

The Korean Thumb Tribe and Other Digital Pioneers

2011-11-09T20:24:00.001+02:00

The Finnish Youth Research Society has just published a book edited by Sonja Kangas and written by her and eight other scholars (including yours truly). The book focuses on the digital lives of the youth in Korea, Japan and Finland, three countries that are among the leading information societies of the world. My exploration on "The Korean Thumb Tribe" relies on both quantitative and qualitative data on young Koreans - a group of whom I had the pleasure of working with to observe the mobile communication patterns in Seoul. Please read the abstract below and enjoy the book which is free for all to read.

DIGITAL PIONEERS
Cultural drivers of future media culture
Sonja Kangas (ed.)

Digital media are central in youngsters' lives, both time-wise and culturally - creating meanings, strengthening relationships and pondering values. Digital activities are gaining a bigger share of youths' everyday life. The Internet provides several ways for them to express themselves, find friends or dating partners and likeminded people. It is a mass medium for everyone, providing the possibility of becoming a celebrity, being politically active, joining international networks, watching television, chatting with friends or just spending time online.

It is a channel for expressing where I am, what I plan to do and what type of information or contacts I am looking for.Ten years ago young communication acrobatics in Japan, South Korea and Finland were sovereign, fearless and experimental pioneers of mobile phones and the Internet. Currently youngster's use of digital media has globally been described as snack size or remix culture in that they combine pieces from here and there, follow several information and communication channels simultaneously and utilize social networks.This book will provide an overview of the online life and values of 15-25 year olds in countries that were pioneers of digital services at the end of 1990s and describe the change that has happened within the past 10 years.

Digital Pioneers looks at social networking among the youngsters, covering a wide spectrum of topics from media use, social networking, trust, and friendships to motivational factors. The book also looks at the development of so-called gaming lifestyle. Japan, South Korea and Finland are no longer far ahead of the rest of the world. But do these pioneer countries of the 1990s still have some special qualities that can generate novel digital cultures in the 21st century? Where will the next generation of online brands develop in 2011.

Finnish Youth Research Society, internet publications 49.
ISBN 978-952-5464-99-3 (PDF). ISSN-L 1799-9219. ISSN 1799-9219.
http://www.nuorisotutkimusseura.fi/julkaisuja/digitalpioneers.pdf

Please see other e-publications of
the Finnish Youth Research Society here.

India Researchers of Finland

2011-11-03T13:57:00.003+02:00

Scholars studying India in Finland are getting organized. I have just started a blog with a list of names, keywords and, hopefully soon, interesting publications and news from the field.

Go see!

See also earlier post about our India workshop.

Perhe ja pokeri

2011-10-30T16:29:00.001+02:00

Mies on puuhastellut jo pari tuntia makuuhuoneen tietokoneella. Hän tulee olohuoneeseen ja istuu vaimonsa viereen, naputtelee sormillaan kyynärnojaan ja tuijottaa television läpi kaukaisuuteen. Vaimo ei uskalla kysyä, kuinka peli on sujunut. Legoilla leikkivä perheen ”haamuveto” puolestaan katsoo miestä miettien, onko tyyppi tuttu telkkarista vai kenties sukua. Kymmenen minuutin kuluttua mies palaa koneelleen. Jos on hyvä ilta, tunnin kuluttua makkarista kuuluu Lordi Greystoken lanseeraama voittohuuto ja seuraavana päivänä vaimo saattaa saada ruusuja. Huonona iltana olohuoneeseen kantautuu vain mutinaa ja huokauksia. Silloin vaimo miettii, eikö tyyppi vain voisi kuluttaa aikaa katsomalla nettipornoa niin kuin muutkin kunnon miehet.

Urban Dictionaryn mukaan perhe on “ryhmä ihmisiä, jotka vihaavat toisiaan ja syövät päivällistä yhdessä”. Samaisen sanakirjan mukaan pokeri on “korttipeli, joka pitää sinut koukussa ja vie säästösi kunnes asut vanhempiesi kellarissa”. Jos uskaltaa selata kansainvälisiä tutkimustietokantoja, huomaa pian, että avainsanoilla “gambling” ja “family” tulee vastaan ikävän paljon tutkimuksia, joiden tiivistelmissä vilahtelee pahalta kalskahtavia termejä kuten “compulsive”, “problem”, “pathological”, “patients” ja “disorder”. Lisäksi tiedetään, että ajan- ja rahankäyttö ovat suomalaisten perheiden merkittävimmät kiistakysymykset. Pokerissa yhdistyvät, hyvin kärjekkäästi, molemmat. Ei hyvältä näytä.

Pokeri.infossa Juha Helppi sanoo: ”Myös perheen tuki on tärkeää ammatin valinnassa.” Tätä lausetta lukuun ottamatta perheen ja pokerin yhteensovittamisesta ei pokeriohjeissa ja -kirjallisuudessa juuri puhuta. Miksipä toisaalta pitäisikään. Eihän Lamborghininkaan ohjekirjassa kerrota millaista naposteltavaa pitää uhmaikäiselle syöttää, etteivät nahkaistuimet tärvelly tai mikä on sopiva nopeus, ettei takapenkillä istuvan anopin uusi permanentti sotkeennu katon ollessa auki.

Jos pokeripalikoiden pyörittely perhetetriksessä tuntuu vaikealta, on vertaistukea sentään löydettävissä. Esimerkiksi Pokerista.netin ”Perhe vai Pokeri?”-keskustelussa sinkkupelaajat miettivät, onko heistä koskaan perheellisiksi, koska työaika on niin vaativa. Perheelliset pelaajat puolestaan pohtivat, laittaisiko voittorahat perheen kuopuksen uuteen polkupyörään vai isompaan näyttöön tai kuinka kumppanin suhtautumisen peliin saisi suotuisammaksi. Tuoreet pokeri-isät ja –äidit ihmettelevät löytyykö mistään muualta kuin yön pimeydestä hetki muutamalle jaolle. Jos lapset ovat pieniä ja tarpeeksi vaativia, ei pokeria voi mitenkään mahduttaa aikatauluun; jos pariskunta riitelee siitä kumpi saa viedä roskat ulos, on turnausajoista neuvottelu utopiaa. Useat pelaajat pohtivat myös sitä, millainen vaikutus satunnaisella häviöputkella on perhe-elämään. Murjottava naama sohvalla kun leviää kuin paha haukotus.

Vaikka pokerin ja perheen yhdistäminen voi vaikuttaa parisuhdeuhkapeliltä, yllättävän monet pelaajat ovat saaneet arjen sujumaan hyvin. Konsteja on monia: jotkut lupaavat puoliskolleen palkkioksi aikaa tai rahaa ja jotkut pelaavat vain silloin, kun sattuvat olemaan talossa yksinään. Toiset sopivat puolison kanssa tarkoista aikatauluista, jolloin minun, sinun ja meidän aika on määritelty jopa vartin tarkkuudella. Useat perheelliset ovat jättäneet turnaukset sikseen ja pelaavat vain käteispelejä, jotta voivat tarpeen vaatiessa erkaantua jälkikasvunsa leikkeihin tai rentoutua tiskien ääressä. Joidenkin pokeri on vähentynyt aivan itsestään, koska leikit lasten ja vähän äidinkin kanssa kiinnostavat vähintään yhtä paljon kuin kortinlätkintä. Jotkut sen sijaan pelaavat enemmän kuin koskaan eikä se haittaa ketään, sillä puoliso ja lapsetkin ovat tyytyväisiä rahantuloon – tai siihen että saavat olla omissa oloissaan.

Joka tapauksessa omaa pelaamista ja perheen suhtautumista siihen kannattaa miettiä. Jos sitä ei ole vielä tullut tehtyä, voi aloittaa pohtimalla vastauksia seuraaviin kysymyksiin. Mitä teet, kun perheen pienin menee all in pamperseihinsa - kippaatko vai katsotko? Jos puolisosi puhuu ”floppisuhteesta”, kommentoiko hän innostuneena peliäsi vai pettyneenä liittoanne? Kumpi vie enemmän aikaasi - Party Poker vai Postimies Pate? Ja tärkein kysymys: osaatko lukea puolisosi tellit ja laittaa koneen kiinni ennen kuin hän menee tilttiin?

Julkaistu: Poker Magazine 4/2011.

Kuvalähteet: Flickr - Christylacy, Changing Hearts Ministries.

The Finnish India Researcher Unite!

2011-10-07T15:41:00.001+03:00

Yesterday Dr. Mari Korpela from University of Tampere and I lead the India Workshop at Finnish Anthropology Conference 2011. Delightfully many India researchers as well as students were there and many interesting presentations (in Finnish) were held. In the future we hope to strengthen our network and build a webiste as well as a discussion group. If there is interest on the matter, we will consider exapanding our group and organizing a workshop on South Asia related research next year.

Below is a short summary about the people who held presentations in the workshop. All abstracts of the conference can be read here.

Dr. Mikko Malkavaara from Diaconia University of Applied Sciences presented his research on Dalits and Christianity.
Dr. Siru Aura from International Solidarity Foundation talked about her research on marital breakdown and the position of divorced or widowed women in India.
Doctoral student Sirpa Rovaniemi from University of Helsinki Development Studies examined the cooperation between foreign and Indian development organizations in the state of Uttarakhand.
Dr. Satu Ranta-Tyrkkö talked about combining social work, theater studies, post-colonial studies and anthropology in her research on a theater group in Orissa.

Dr. Mari Korpela from Department of Social Research at University of Tampere presented her doctoral study on Western women in Varanasi as well as her post-doctoral project on transnational children in Goa.
Prof. Petri Hottola from Department of Geography at University of Oulu presented his on "The Metaspatialities of Intercultural Encounters in India".
Prof. Ajeet N. Mathur from Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad) and Prof. Sari Mattila from Nirma University (Ahmedabad) elaborated on the communication challenges in the relations between Indian and Finnish organizations.
Finally, I talked about my doctoral disseration on Tamil-European relations in South India as well as presented my current project on the cultural meaning of mobile communication in India.

Photos: Ellen Reitman, Paul Hamilton, themanwithsalthair on Flickr.

Leikin ja taistelun paikka: Space Invaderista pelikasinolle

2011-09-30T22:05:00.004+03:00

Viime syksynä imin itseeni Grand Casino Helsingin kiehtovaa ilmapiiriä, jonka ylellisessä interiöörissä onni ja taito taistelivat todennäköisyyksiä vastaan. Yritin muistella milloin olin ensimmäisen kerran käynyt pelikasinolla, mutta mieleeni ilmestynyt madonreikä vei minut kolmisenkymmentä vuotta ajassa taaksepäin. Päädyin itäsuomalaiselle maaseudulle Teboilin kahvilaan, jossa syydin kolikoita Space Invaders -pelin pohjattomaan nieluun ja ajattelin, että maailma olisi täydellinen paikka jos minulla olisi rajaton määrä markanpötköjä.

Teboil oli minulle paikka, josta pääsin pelin luomaan fantasiamaailmaan. Sain toteuttaa ekaluokkalaisen pojan elämän tarkoitusta, örkkien räjäyttelyä laseraseella. Halusin taistella ja leikkiä. Teboil ja Space Invaders olivat myös syy haaveilla työurasta. Jos tienaisin tarpeeksi, voisin joka päivä huoltoasemalta käsin olla sankari ja suojella maapalloamme riveissä lähenevien otusten hyökkäyksiltä. Kun sitten kaksinpelissä näin kaverini nyrkin puristuvan peliohjaimen ympärille vähintään yhtä valkoisina kuin omani, oivalsin että otusten päihittämisen lisäksi sankarin pitää lyödä myös ikätoverinsa.

Kilpailu ja taistelu ovat sisäänkirjoitettuja Homo Sapiensin olemassa oloon. Varsinkin XY-kromosomin kantajat joutuvat ottamaan kantaa tähän arkielämää ohjaavaan impulssiin. Kyseisen olennon onneksi myös leikki on kirjoitettu samaan olemukseen. Ilmiö nimeltään neotenia varmistaa sen, että toisin kuin muilla nisäkkäillä, leikki jatkuu vielä aikuisiällä. Yhteiskuntajärjestyksen kannalta on kuitenkin sopivaa, että leikkimisen ja kilpailuvietin tyydyttämiseksi niille omistetaan paikkoja: jääkiekkostadioneita, nyrkkeilykehiä, mikroautoratoja, biljardihalleja ja pelikasinoita.

Suuresti kunnioitettu peli- ja leikkitutkija Johan Huizinga tosin ajatteli, että toisin kuin muut pelit, kasinoilla tapahtuva rahapelaaminen ei anna mitään yhteiskunnalle eikä kehitä mieltä, vaan kasino on ”valheellisen leikin” paikka. Moralistisesta näkökulmasta kasinon asiakkaat tulevatkin herkästi kategorisoiduksi luokkaan "uhkapelurit", mutta antropologisesta näkökulmasta he ovat pikemminkin erään kulttuurin aktiivisia toimijoita. Antropologi Per Binde on todennut, että kun ihminen astuu pelikasinolle, hän jättää taakseen tavanomaisen maailman ja arki-identiteettinsä liittyäkseen toiseen merkitysjärjestelmään.

Binden mukaan kasinoista onkin usein suurta hyötyä yksilölle. Hän luettelee eri tutkimustuloksia rahapelaamisen positiivista puolista: itseluottamuksen nousu, mielen stimulointi, vapautus arkielämän jännitteistä ja epävarmuuksista, hallittu tila riskinotolle, flow’n kokeminen ja eksistentiaalinen optimismi. Näiden lisäksi pelikasinon yhteisö on "oikeudenmukainen maailma," koska siellä ulkomaailman sosiaaliset statukset ja muut eroavaisuudet ovat epäolennaisia. Tutkimusten mukaan pelikasinoiden rahapelaajat näkevätkin itsensä usein egalitaarisena ryhmänä, joilla on yhteinen intressi: irrottautua, pelata ja kenties voittaa.

Kaikesta kehittävyydestään huolimatta kasino ei ole munkkiluostari tai terapeutin sohva, vaan rahan menettäminen kuuluu oleellisesti sen infrastruktuuriin. Kasinolla pelaavan raha ole tiukasti taskussa. Filosofi Jean Baudrillardin mukaan pelikasinolle tullut tuntee saapuneensa fantasiamaailmaan. Kaikki näyttää epäautenttiselta, kopiolta ja liioittelulta ikään kuin kokija kävelisi unissaan. Kasino ei kuitenkaan ole uni, vaan se ottaa mieluusti varomattoman kävijän rahat pelimerkkejä vastaan. Rationaalisesti pelaaja tietää mitä kasinolla tapahtuu, mutta hänen emootionsa ovat sitä mieltä, että raha on osa "ei-todellista" maailmaa. Siksi rahan menettäminen ei tunnu todelta ja siihen suhtautuu kevyemmin. Tässä mielessä kasino on laskelmoidusti suunniteltu ”arjen nyrjähtämisen paikka” tai eräänlainen liminaalitila.

Liminaalitila on antropologi Victor Turnerin mukaan välivaihe tietystä sosiaalisesta asemasta ja/tai kulttuurisesta tilasta toiseen. Vanhan tilan säännöt ja vaatimukset ovat hetkellisesti lakanneet vaikuttamasta ja muutostilassa oleva yksilö käy läpi prosessin, joka uudistaa hänet ja lopulta integroi takaisin yhteisöön. Liminaalitila on uudistumisen kannalta tärkeä ei-kenenkään maa, jossa tapahtuu symbolinen vapautuminen. Pelitutkimuksen mukaan tämä rituaalinen nahanluominen on mahdollista niin Helsingin Mikonkadulla kuin 1970-luvun itäsuomalaisella Teboililla. Ainakin itse tunnen samanlaisen arjesta irrottavan jännityksen, nollauksen ja sen jälkeisen virkistymisen niin kasinolla kuin taisteltuani alieneiden invaasiota vastaan.

Julkaistu: Poker Magazine 3/2011.

Kuvalähde: Play Online Games -sivusto.

Pokeriaskeetit ja rahan filosofia

2011-08-31T16:17:00.001+03:00

Kyllä kansa tietää, ainakin rahasta. Intialaiset sanovat, että ei ole olemassa niin suurta muuria, jota kullalla lastattu aasi ei voisi ylittää. Venäläiset tietävät, että raha ei tuo onnea, mutta paljon rahaa tuo. Rahalla saa, vaikka kirkossa tapella, kuuluu pohjalaisen suusta.

Itse sanakin kertoo paljon. Money tulee latinan moneresta, joka tarkoittaa varoittamista. Suomessa rahalla tarkoitettiin aikoinaan kuivaa nahkaa, ja kun nykysuomalainen ansaitsee, hän etymologisessa mielessä saattaa jonkun ansaan. Rahan kanssa siis kannattaa varoa nahkaansa, varsinkin kun saksalaisten Geld ja englannin guilt kumpuavat kiehtovasti varhaisgermaanisesta uhria tarkoittavasta sanasta.

Pokerinpelaajia saattaa kiinnostaa Sigmund Freudin näkemys, jonka mukaan raha korvaa lapsuutemme ulosteleikit. Kiinnostava on myös muinaisten atsteekkien ja babylonialaisten käsitys rahasta ulosteena. Atsteekkien mielestä tuo arvokas uloste oli peräisin jumalista, kun taas babylonialaiset ajattelivat sen tulevan helvetin hanuriosastolta.

Myös arkinen raha on aika mystinen juttu. Ensinnäkin suurin osa rahasta sijaitsee nykyään puolijohteissa pelkkinä magneettisina varauksina. Silloinkin kun raha on kolikkona tai setelinä kädessä, sen toiminta tuntuu hullulta. Miksi ihmeessä antamani paperilappu saa Penan korjaamaan autoni takajarrut tai Irman luovuttamaan 400 grammaa sikanautaa? Ja pokeriraha se vasta kummallinen raha onkin. Sama satanen voi olla aloittelijalle jättipotti, mutta mestarille mitätön blindi. On myös aivan eri asia taistella tiensä nollasta sataan kuin pudota siihen hetkessä tonnista.

Raha on mielikuvituksen ruokkima ja yhteisöllisesti jaettu motivaatiojärjestelmä. Usko, luottamus ja lunastus kuuluvat taloudelliseen todellisuuteen, järjestelmän synnyttämistä lupauksista puhumattakaan. Vain harva tekisi täyttä päivää konttorissa pelkkien magneettisten varausten vuoksi. Raha on kuin joulupukki. Se saa kiltit lapset siivoamaan huoneensa ja aikuiset opiskelemaan, tekemään töitä – ja vaikkapa pelaamaan pokeria.

Sanotaan, että kun rahaa on tarpeeksi, sillä ei enää ole merkitystä. Näin ei ole ainakaan pokerikulttuurissa, jossa mestarit kertovat kuinka vähän raha heille merkitsee, mutta toisaalta näyttävät kuinka luksuksessa eletään. Rahaan liittyvä eksessi, liioittelu, onkin oleellinen osa pokerimaailmaa.

Pokerikulttuurin hierarkian ylätaso on kyllästetty rahalla ja megaluokan ylellisyys on niin oleellinen osa arkea, että missä tahansa muussa ympäristössä - paitsi ehkä kolumbialaisen huumeparonin synttärijuhlissa - se olisi yksinkertaisesti mautonta. Kymmenen urheiluautoa omistava pokerimiljonääri ei ole materialisti. Päinvastoin. Materia merkitsee hänelle yhtä paljon kuin vessanpönttöä huuhtelevalle suomalaiselle vesi tarkoittaa juomavettä. Sitä nyt vaan on niin pirusti.

Pokerissa rahan merkitys ei siis suinkaan häviä, vaan se kokee emergenssin. Emergenssissä jonkin asian suuri määrällinen kasvu johtaa asian laadulliseen muutokseen. Rahan emergenssiä voi verrata vaikka juomaveden vastaavaan ilmiöön. Saharan autiomaassa pieni määrä voi pitää ihmisen hengissä, mutta kun vettä tulee tuhansia litroja hanasta, sillä voi pestä auton, kastella nurmikkoa, peltoa tai täyttää uima-altaan. Raha ja vesi joko pitävät hengissä tai niissä voi kylpeä.

Emergentin rahan tärkeä funktio onkin – ostovoiman sijaan – mitata pelaajan välimatkaa pokerikulttuurin kovaan ytimeen. Mitä enemmän rahaa, sitä lähempänä ydintä. Ytimessä voi puolestaan hallita ja edustaa pokerin kulttuurista merkitysjärjestelmää. Niin kuin Vatikaani paaveineen ja kardinaaleineen on katolisen kulttuurin keskus, Las Vegasin suurimmat pöydät edustavat pokerin hegemoniakeskusta. Pelimerkkipinon koolla on siis muutakin kuin taloudellista tai freudilaista väliä: mitä korkeammalle kohti kasinon kattoa se kohoaa, sitä syvemmälle pokerikulttuurin ytimeen se porautuu.

Emergentti raha synnyttää paradoksaalisen askeettisen ylellisyyden kulttuurin. Kun pokerimiljonääri käyttää rahaa häpeilemättä tuhlaillen, hän ei viesti rahanhimostaan, vaan rahan mitättömästä perinteisestä merkityksestä. Tämä näkyy myös siinä, kuinka viileästi mestarit suhtautuvat valtaviin voittoihin ja häviöihin. Esimerkiksi kun Tom Dwan ja Phil Ivey taannoin taistelivat reilun miljoonan dollarin ennätyspotista, monet pokeria taitamattomat katsojat eivät edes tajunneet milloin peli päättyi. Niin cooleina miehet pelasivat televisioidun pokerihistorian suurimman potin. Sellaiseen ei rahanhimoinen materialisti kykene, vaan tarvitaan zeniläinen askeetti. Ja mieluusti kymmenien miljoonien pelikassa.

Julkaistu: Poker Magazine 2/2011.

Kuvalähteet: Mummot kassalla sivustolla TLC. Roope Ankka sivustolla Chicagoist.

The Value of Gambling and Its Research

2011-05-05T08:58:00.001+03:00

Professor Pauliina Raento writes about gambling research in his introduction to our article published in the latest Suomen Antropologi: Journal of Finnish Anthropological Society.

Gambling today is a multi-billion-dollar industry with global influence. It is a prominent part of culture and a major financial contributor to society in Finland and many other countries where governments own, license and regulate gambling enterprises. Most people in Western societies have some experience of gambling, and many buy a lottery ticket, play slot machines, or bet on sports as a regular part of their leisure. Over the past decades the gambling industry has grown massively, due to its entry into new territories, the increased popularity of gambling, and new globally influential innovations, such as televised poker tournaments and online gambling. The political, economic and cultural implications of this change have been notable. Gambling scholarship is on the rise and its foci are broadening especially in the social sciences and cultural studies.

The time is ripe for anthropologists to take a fresh look at gambling. This would have multiple benefits. For one, a look at new, popular forms of gambling would flush out some disciplinary stubbornness regarding topics and approaches. From the past, distant and primitive the emphasis should continue to shift even more strongly toward what is new and happening here and now. The study of online poker, says Jukka Jouhki in this Forum, offers one opportunity to bring anthropologists up to speed with understanding recent technological developments, and cultural forms that have sprung up with them. After all, more people now log on to online gambling sites than to Facebook (Gambling Online Magazine October 26th, 2010). Ethnography, one powerful tool of anthropology, should be expanded to online environments. More stimulating methodological ponderings and innovation will inevitably follow.

Read the whole article here including the following texts:

Raento, Pauliina: The Value of Gambling and Its Research. Introduction.
Jouhki, Jukka: Writing against Culture with Online Poker.
Kinnunen, Jani: The Social Rewards of Online Gambling.
Matilainen, Riitta: Gambling and Consumption. The Hidden Values of Historical Perspectives.

Pokerimestarit eivät hymyile*

2011-03-14T13:25:00.011+02:00

Hymy on Zygomaticus-lihaksen komentama kahdentoista lihaksen ja sopivan mielentilan yhteistyönä tapahtuva hetkellinen ele. Kyse on fyysisesti melko vaatimattomasta tapahtumasta, mutta viestinnällisesti se on tie kantajansa mieleen. Hymy antaa monenlaisille suullisille ja sanattomille viesteille kuorrutuksen eivätkä ilo, empatia, flirtti, myötähäpeä tai sarkasmikaan olisi mitään ilman hymyä.

Pokerimestarit eivät hymyile. Pieni hymy voi kokonaisuuden kannalta olla yhtä suuri asia kuin auton suuntavilkku tai jarruvalo. Se voi kertoa hymyilijästä niin kuin rinnassa välkkyvä tinatähti kertoo Tombstonen asukkaasta tai kiiluva sormus nimettömässä - tai rintataskussa - yökerhoilijasta.

Symbolisesti kysymys on tietenkin erittäin suuresta asiasta, joka kertoo paljon viestijän suhteesta sosiaaliseen kontekstiinsa. Pokeripelissä millimetrin ja sadasosasekunnin verran tahatonta hymyä voi maksaa maltaita ja aiheuttaa pitempiaikaisen murjotusilmeen. Toisin kuin luullaan murjotusilmeeseen tarvitaan onneksi vain yksitoista lihasta. Se on kuitenkin laiha lohtu pokerinaamansa ja pelimerkkinsä menettäneelle pelaajalle.

Pokerimestareiden hymyttömyys on tietenkin osa pelaajien visuaalista taktiikkaa. Ilmeettömyyttä, vakavuutta ja vähäeleisyyttä selitetään usein pokerinaaman tarpeella. Mitä vähemmän itsestään kertoo, sitä vähemmän korteistaan paljastaa. Mutta kulttuurintutkija näkee hymyilemättömyyden säännöissä – ja sen poikkeuksissa – jotain syvempää, joka heijastaa pokerikulttuurin arvomaailmaa.

Pokerin arvomaailma näkyy selvimmin ja ehkäpä liioitelluimmin mainonnassa. Mainontahan on ikään kuin kulttuurin mehutiivistettä, jota laimennetaan arkielämää varten. Pokerimainokset ovat pelin arvojen, tunnelman ja symboliikan tiivistynyt ilmaisutapa.

Vaikka pokerimestarit voivat olla hyvinkin joviaaleja tyyppejä siviilissä, mainoksissa he eivät juuri hymyile. He ovat vakavia tai jopa aggressiivisia. Mainoksessa pokerimestari saa hymyillä ainoastaan, jos tilanne täyttää jonkin kolmesta kriteeristä: pelaaja on juuri voittanut, hänet kuvataan livetilanteessa pelin ulkopuolella tai hänet esitetään selkeästi humoristisena karikatyyrinä, esimerkiksi piirroshahmona. Myös mainosten statistit, jotka eivät pelaa pokeria, saavat hymyillä.

Mitä kauempana kuvattu henkilö on pokerikulttuurin kovasta ytimestä, sitä helpompaa hänen on hymyillä. Vähiten hymyä sallitaan miespuolisen mestarin naamalle, joka on juuri menossa all-in huipputurnauksessa. Eniten valkoisia hampaita saa väläytellä peliä osaamaton kaunotar, jonka tehtävänä on eskorteerata pokerisankaria pelipöydän ulkopuolella.

Pokeri on leikkiä. Siinä on yksi paradoksaalinen syy olla hymyilemättä. Pokeri on myös fyysisesti passiivista toimintaa, jos pelaajan otsalle toisinaan kirpoavaa tuskanhikeä ei lasketa. Lisäksi pokeri tai ainakin nettipokeri on hyvinkin arkista puuhaa, jota voi tehdä kalsareissaan, hillomunkki suussa ja Radio Suomi taustalla soiden. Ehkäpä hymyttömyys ja vakavuus ovat vastaus leikkisyyden, passiivisuuden ja arkisuuden haasteelle: on oltava vakava, jotta voi olla vakavasti otettava. Kuten sosiologi Erwin Goffman on havainnut, valta-asemassa olevat eksperttimiehet eivät voi näyttää tunteitaan.

Yrmeänvakava hymyilemättömyys voi toki olla postmodernia itseironiaa ja leikkisyyttä pelin lomassa. Se voi olla eräänlaista roolipeliä tai osa rituaalia, jolla vakava peli erotetaan arjesta. Niin kuin preerioiden intiaani laittaa sotamaskinsa päälle, asettaa pokeritaistelija hymynsä horisontaaliseksi ja lähtee taisteluun.

Toisaalta jotkut pelaajat menevät selkeästi vastavirtaan ja antavat hampaidensa vilkkua vapaasti. Ja todennäköisesti se kannattaakin, ainakin aloittelijoiden parissa. Kognitiotieteiden kautta pokeria tutkineen Erik Schlichtin mukaan luottamusta herättävä hymy bluffaajan naamalla on tilastollisesti tuottava apuväline. Schlichtin tulokset voisi tiivistää kehotukseen: legoja esiin, niin sinuun luotetaan. Nauraa voi sitten matkalla pankkiin.

*Julkaistu: "Mestarit eivät hymyile", Poker Magazine 1/2011.

Kuvalähteet: Life is Beautiful, Card Player, I-Pedia.

Postmodernin pelimiehen todellisuus

2010-09-29T12:57:00.008+03:00

Kiinnostaako mediaetnografinen pohdinta pokerikulttuurista? Siinä tapauksessa lue allekirjoittaneen kirjoittama Postmodernin pelimiehen todellisuus - Mediaetnografisia huomioita pokerista kulttuurisena ilmiönä. Artikkeli on juuri julkaistu Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirjassa 2010. Alla myös em. artikkelin tiivistelmä ja lista vuosikirjan artikkeleista.

Artikkelin tiivistelmä
Artikkeli perustuu pokerikulttuuria käsittelevän tutkimusprojektin synnyttämiin näkökulmiin ja ilmiön mediaetnograﬁ seen havainnointiin. Artikkelin kohteena on pokerin fenomenologia ja siihen liittyvä kulttuurinen merkitysjärjestelmä netissä ja offline-maailmassa. Postmodernin kulttuurintutkimuksen keskustelun tukemana kirjoituksessa esitellään myös huomioita pokeriin liittyvästä mainonnasta, maskuliinisuudesta ja rahan merkityksestä. Pokerikulttuurin representaatioiden olemassaolon tapaa kommentoidaan viittaamalla muun muassa hyperreaalin käsitteeseen.

Asiasanat: nettipokeri, postmoderni, mediaetnograﬁa, hyperreaali, kulttuurinen merkitysjärjestelmä, mieskuva

Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja 2010: artikkelit

Saara Toivonen ja Olli Sotamaa: Pelaajien näkökulmia pelien digitaaliseen jakeluun. 1-10.
Vili Lehdonvirta ja Juho Hamari: Pelimekaniikat osana ansaintalogiikkaa – Miten pelisuunnittelulla luodaan kysyntää. 11-21.
Katriina Heljakka: Hiljaisen tiedon pelikentällä – Lautapelisuunnittelu vuorovaikutusprosessina. 22-32.
Eetu Paloheimo: Verkkorahapelien vetovoimatekijät. 33-41.
Jani Kinnunen: Leikkisä raha peleissä. 42-57.
Jukka Jouhki: Postmodernin pelimiehen todellisuus – Mediaetnografisia huomioita pokerista kulttuurisena ilmiönä. 58-68.
Arttu Perttula ja Pauliina Tuomi: “Tää oli oikeesti aika jännä!” – Mobiilia moninpeliä julkisella näytöllä. 69-82.
Jaakko Suominen: ”Pieni askel ihmiskunnalle, mutta jättiharppaus tietokoneistetuille roolipeleille” – MikroBitti-lehden peliarvostelut pelaamisen historiatietoisuuden rakentajina 1984–2008. 83-98.

Lue myös julkaisun katsaukset ja kirja-arviot.

Abstract of my article in Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja 2010.
The article is based on views generated by a research project focusing on poker culture as well as on observations made by implementing media ethnographical approach in examining the phenomenon. The article concentrates on the phenomenology and cultural system of meaning of poker in online and oﬄ ine worlds. Supported by discussion within postmodern cultural studies, the article further presents observations of the advertising, masculinity and meaning of money related to poker. Moreover, the mode of existence of the representations of poker culture is commented by referring to the concept of hyperreal, among others. Keywords: online poker, postmodern, media ethnography, hyperreal, cultural system of meaning, male image.

How can anthropology contribute to an understanding of the impact of new digital technologies?

2010-09-20T14:58:00.007+03:00

Conference poster (source)

European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) held its 11th conference in Maynooth, Ireland 24-27th August 2010. One of the sessions was titled Digital Anthropology and described how...

"[...] People's imagination of the digital seems to bifurcate as something that, on the one hand, lies at the keyboard at the tip of their fingers but at the same time appears as an abstraction from traditional analogue modes of representation. This bifurcation is often what makes the digital appear to be either the cause or the solution of impending crises. Often this imagination is fed from science fiction and images of humans losing control of the planet to the new technologies themselves.

This is perhaps the moment when anthropology has to choose how to respond to digital technologies. Whether to demonise them as a form of alienation, to romanticise them as open-source utopias or get to grips with the way they speedily become part of everyday life. [...]"

Here's a list of all the presentations (and author names).

A brief theory of digital anthropology (Miller and Horst)
Digital sound technologies: the renegotiation of music production, consumption and collecting practices (Bowsher)
Phreaker/hacker/troller as trickster (Coleman)
Spimes as material culture: anthropological approaches to (and through) location-aware objects (DeNicola)
Emerging futurities in Muslim southeast Asia: science fantasy, digital development and the urge for moral technology (Barendregt)
Digital dramas, online liminality and the state of creolization in Tanzania (Uimonen)
Phones, foreigners, and the fluctuating digital divide in Southern Mozambique (Archambault)
Culture, conflict and translocal communication: mobile technology and politics in rural West Bengal, India (Tenhunen)
Migration and virtual community 2.0 (Komito)
Hope infrastructure: enacting expectations in bloggers' material practices (Estatella)
Indigenizing digital technologies, imagining cultural futures: Ara Irititja reshapes new media in contemporary Australia (Thorner)

Read all the abstracts here.

On the same site you can find the email address of each presenter.

What is Culture? A fascinating ten-minute definition

2010-09-10T12:59:00.001+03:00

By RusticChivalry1985.

An anthropologist examining online poker

2010-08-27T13:57:00.007+03:00

Talking to Science Journalists
Perhaps because of the strange combination of being a cultural anthropologist studying online poker, I was invited to give a talk to a group of journalists from The Finnish Association of Science Journalists and Editors on an excursion in University of Jyväskylä. I talked about how cultural anthropology can approach online poker as a cultural phenomenon. Below is an edited summary of my talk.

Life is a Gamble

First things first. Every day we invest our resources, money, time or effort in objects, processes, happenings etc. the outcome of which is not sure to us. We might pay 8 € for a movie ticket and regret it afterwards because the film wasn't worth it. We might take time to go for a walk in a park and end up soaking wet because of a downpour and wish we had stayed home watching TV. Then again, we might take a chance and go to a restaurant, pay only a few euros for a meal and think the atmosphere, company and taste of the food were ten times worth the money and the time we paid.

Dice is life (source Psychology Today).

On a larger scale, we might take a leap of faith and get another job, sell the house and go abroad for a year, or meet a girl, get married and have five kids and think it was all worth the trouble - or not. It is all a gamble. And you can get hooked too. You might go overboard with your jogging, eating, painting or work and be satisfied by the return, end up spending all your money and/or time on it and neglet your friends and family. If you are skillful and level-headed enough, you might cope very well with all the elements of chance in your life, estimate the risks, control your time-use and take action accordingly - and end up living an exciting and fulfilling life. If sometimes you end up losing your bet, you might still think it was worth the shot.

In a way life is like poker. Or, poker is a crystallization of the elements of chance and skill and investment and turnout, in life.

New Anthropology

When people think anthropologists are like Indiana Jones I hate to correct them. Dr. Jones is actually an archeologist but archeology and anthropology do have some things in common. Although archeology concentrates on past cultures and societies it usually examines them in some excotic location like anthropology has traditionally done. The object of research of both disciplines also connotes otherness, non-Westernity and certain strangeness - something that is not "Us".

Dr. Indiana Jones (source Hollywood.com).

However, contemporary anthropology is open virtually to all phenomena, new or old, ours or theirs, and fieldwork is increasingly done in one's own native society. The themes that anthropology has always studied, the everyday stuff like marriage, religion, working, pastime, rituals etc., are still studied but extended to include the whole world, not just the remote tribes. I would even dare to say there is no possible thing in the world that couldn't somehow be approached as an object of anthropological research.

"Anthropology can study anything?" my father once asked (perpetuously wondering what an earth I'm doing for work). "Yes, anything," I answered. Then he provokingly asked if going to the toilet, or defecation, could be an object of study in anthropology. I said, actually, it would be a great object of anthropological research. The function is universal but the tradtions vary in different cultures. There are strict rules about when, where or with whom to do it and how to speak about it and what to do with the results. Anthropology is about shared significances, worldviews, actions and norms, or in a word, cultures.

Cultures like online poker.

Approaching Online Poker

The first thing I noticed about online poker research was that it is essentially a problem. At least this is the feeling one gets while browsing through published literature: online poker = addiction = problem. That is what scholars get money for and that is what the media write about and people read about - poker-players as addicts, home-breakers and money-squandering losers. To me it is as strange as it would be to study jogging and focus only on strains or stumbling, or to do research on food and concentrate only on choking accidents, or to approach sex only through venereal diseases. To be fair, not all media does this though. There are all the specialized poker media that endorse poker culture and celebrate its heroes.

Thus it seems like these images are the only ones about poker in media and academia.

Poker champ/addict (sources Miscellaneouspics and Makefive).

I think it is time to get to know the Everyday of online poker and see what happens among the usual, normal people, the over 95 % who are not champions or addicts. I want to know the boring side of poker. For example, a case study of mine about a poker-player and his family certainly revealed refreshingly undramatic things about the game. The main informant, a civil servant with wife and kids, earned a considerable amount of money a month. It helped the family a great deal with rent and other monthly expenditures, and even left some money for a holiday trip - things that weren’t possible without the father's poker hobby. And the father still had time for work, kids and the wife. This is how it usually goes. What a discovery!

I had another very obvious but forbidden observation. My main informant's qualities as a succeful poker player were desirable qualities in other sectors of life as well. Logic, contemplation and self-restrain, just to name a few, didn’t do him harm in work or family life either. All in all, poker was present in the family but in a positive way. Even the wife applauded her husband for doing something fruitful in his pastime. The wife said she only watched television, which never brought the family a penny.

These observations from the case study were welcomed by the media as "exceptional results" and often denigrated by the poker community because the results were too obvious - most people played poker without problems. Obvious or not, poker is a culturally loaded subject and traditional anthropological themes are easily and fruitfully transferred to study it. For example in my research I have distinguished four interrelated M’s — morality, marginality, masculinity and money — that are particularly interesting to an anthropologist.

What is the cultural configuration in which the morality of poker manifests?
What are the sociocultural elements that marginalize poker as a hobby or profession?
What makes online poker representations a hyper masculine venture?
What is the social and symbolic value of money in poker?

Serious pokermen (source PokerBonus).

Everything so far implies that poker research and gambling studies in general need more information about the everyday practices. Is mainstream anthropology up to the challenge? Maybe not for a long time. First the discipline should get to know things like television, then perhaps the Internet and mobile phones. Then, if it is still up to it, online gambling could be studied in anthropology.

Or, one can take a chance and go for a short cut.

From my students: a few taboos and future visions of ethnology

2010-07-12T14:09:00.000+03:00

I had my students for the course Critical Readings of Current Ethnological Research (in Finnish) take a group test where they had to reflect on their views about the discipline*. For example, they had to think of a subject that is too much a taboo to be a topic of ethnological research. The four groups came up with these titles:

The Other Kind of Sex Business: A Case Study about International Zoophilia on an American Farm

Yum-yum without Consent: Interacting with the Dead

The Couriers of Human Trafficking: Their Motives and Moral Views

"Hey, We are Tripping!": The Recreational Use of Acid

Obviously, sex derives all sorts of taboo around the world, especially when we are talking about the "proper" persons/objects/things to have sex with. To have sex with animals or the dead is a parade example of a sexual taboo - which is rarely taken up by researchers. Also, to study the motives and moral views of persons that are seen as morally corrupt is surely a risky business as the researcher might become labeled as "too understanding" of the people he/she studies. Lastly, the use of drugs surely attracts only problem-based research. This is very understandable as we know what kind of problem drug-use can be to a person and the society but surely many people manage with drugs without having a problem with it. But researchers rarely want to talk about it.

Finally, as a special (tongue-in-cheek) question my students had to vision what kind of topics of research the discipline might derive in the future or in the year 2060 to be exact. The students let loose and came up with these titles (one group making up two):

Granny Gangs: Violence as a Means of Participation

Feet on the Ground: People Born in a Space Colony Conceptualizing the Life on Earth through the Nostalgy Discourse of the Immigrant Generation

The Rise and Fall of Ethnology: The Uselesness of Hermeneutics in an Innovation Society

Experiencing Culture in a Mind Transferred into a Machine: Humanism and the Dawn of Transhumanism

My Father is a Robot: The Human Rights of Computers

Now everybody, it's your turn to let your imagination fly!

* In our university ethnology is strongly influenced by cultural anthropology and folklore studies.

A Game of Money, Skill or Threat?

2010-05-17T15:13:00.002+03:00

The annual conference of The Finnish Anthropological Society was held last week (May 11-12). This year's theme was Ideas of Value: Inquiries in Anthropology. The immensely active Finnish Foundation for Gaming Research sponsored one session named The Value of Gambling (Research), including my presentation about moral views about online poker. Professor Pauliina Raento concluded the session by talking about the significance of gambling/gaming research.

The other three presentations were exceedingly interesting. Riitta Matilainen's (Univ. of Helsinki) presentation The Introduction of the Roulette and the Changing Culture in Finland in the 1960s and 1970s described how roulette for Finns was not just a game but a prestigious symbol representing Finland's pursuit of western values. Perpetual Crentsil's (Univ. of Helsinki) The Good, the Bad and the Money explored the gambling cultures of African and Asian immigrants in Finland. Jani Kinnunen's (Univ. of Tampere) The Social Value of Gambling Online could be described a more hardcore sociological or philosophical investigation of online gambling.

All abstracts of the conference can be read here (go to p. 6 for the gambling session abstracts). Below is my abstract for the paper A Game of Money, Skill or Threat? Reflections on the Ethical Discussion Concerning Online Poker in Finland. Check out the presentation slides here.

Finland’s Slot Machine Association (RAY) is a state-run gambling organization that will launch an online poker service for Finns in 2010. This paper describes and analyzes the ethical discussion provoked by an article in Helsingin Sanomat (the leading national newspaper) on the issue, and considers the various moral viewpoints taken of RAY as an online poker service provider, as well as discussing online poker as a wider contemporary phenomenon.

Image sources: Conference logo grabbed from the home page of The Finnish Anthropology Society and the other pic from Daily Mail online version.

VIRTUAL VS. REAL: And never the twain shall meet?

2010-04-19T16:11:00.003+03:00

Virtual is as real as it gets
After reading the texts in the inaugural Virtual Worlds Research (2008) where Mark W. Bell and Ralph Schroeder embarked on defining the concept of a virtual world, I started to think about the connotations of the concept. The first images that came to my mind were things like The Matrix with Neo bending the reality of a virtual world, a flight simulator game I had played once, and Second Life avatars flying through the vast 3D cyberspace. Perhaps the following words visited the tip of my tong: artificial, digital and even fake. They seemed to be followed by perhaps more refined connotations like computer system, community, information technology. Then I looked up the word "virtual".

According to a definition recorded over six hundred years ago, virtual means influencing by physical virtues or capabilities. The Latin word virtus means excellence, potency and efficacy, or literally manliness and manhood. Indeed, our world is often virtual but not only in being excellent or manly. In 1959 the first definition linking virtual to computers was made as it was defined to mean also something that was “not physically existing but made to appear by software.” (See Online Etymology Dictionary.) According to most sources, virtual also “exists in essence or effect though not in actual fact (e.g. WordNet).” In common language virtual is something opposite to real. My view is that everything real is virtual and virtual is as real as it gets.

A Virtual World

Imagine a virtual world where Mary82 is walking across an urban 3D cityscape. She sees the avatar of her old friend Nora84 walking a dog in the distance. The dog has a collar with its name “Burtsie” on it. Mary82 approaches Nora84 and pokes her as a greeting. They chat for a while. Mary82 tells Nora84 about a movie trailer she just saw behind the corner of the DVD shop. She had also just seen the coolest jeans on the window of another shop but didn’t have the credit to buy them. Then they notice John84 joining their chat. He had just come from a real-time community meeting of anthropology students but as he had to go to work, he just petted Nora84’s dog and quit the conversation.

John84, Mary82 and Nora84 are heavy-users of this particular virtual world. A virtual world, following Bell (2008) and Schroeder (2008), is "a spatially based depiction of a persistent virtual environment" and can be "experienced by numerous participants at once". The world they inhabit also offers "an awareness of space, distance and co-existence". According to Bell and Schroeder, the participants communicate and interact with each other and the environment, and form short tem and long term social groups. The world of the aforementioned chatters, however, differs from Second Life, for example, in that its 3D avatars are far more complex. They look almost like the persons behind them and much of the interpersonal communication is auditory, not textual. Moreover, such is the addictiveness of this virtual world that most participants live in it, in some way, all the time. And it happens outside a computer network.

Most of you probably guessed it already. When you replace the nicknames such as Mary82 with real names such as Mary, and use the word “person” or “identity” instead of “avatar” you notice more clearly that I am, of course, talking about the real world. Or, should I say the physical world as a virtual world surely is as real as one gets. Then again, a virtual world must be physical too as, after all, it is made of silicon, wires, copper, fiber, plastic and so forth, all of which are materials of the physical world. So, perhaps I should say I’m talking about the world we live in and interact in person, in our physical bodies without a technological medium, at least some of the time. I mean the world that has the ground I step on when I walk on my real, meat-and-bones feet, a world that is not experienced through computers. To be clear, let’s just say I mean real is the world outside computers.

It seems like “real world” is at least as hard to define as “virtual world.”

We all live in a virtual world

We are, in fact, all living in a virtual world. That is something I as a cultural anthropologist have been more or less studying for the whole of my career. In a way we have always used avatars to communicate and move around in our real world. We have different avatars for different situations, and every day our avatar is dressed, fed, groomed, viewed, shaved and made up a bit differently to represent our personalities or us as individuals.

When, for example, my students see a tall skinny guy with glasses that looks like Jukka the anthropologist, he or she immediately interprets the symbol, that is, my appearance, in a way that connects it to all the qualities he or she has experienced me having. Perhaps I even inform others of my qualities, or call myself as "Dr. Jouhki" (instead of Jukka74), a nick that is supposed to reveal the essence of my personality.

If a virtual world means a world that is artificial, constructed, illusion, imitation and made-up, we don’t need computers. Ee never experience the world per se and we most definitely do not know individuals directly without the representations of their identity (avatars) interfering in the middle.

In addition to the virtuality of our individual identities, we have an image of “our people,” say the nation comprised of people of Finland, having certain qualities, a country that has clear borders and citizens with a certain affinity with each other. Moreover, to apply Stuart Hall (2008), we form temporary or lasting groups, join them and leave them. We use an avatar/identity when meeting our boss and another one for a wedding, and perhaps yet another one when we go out on a date.

But the most important element that makes our real world virtual is that although we imagine the world to be real and authentic it actually is something the myths, traditions and culture have taught us to believe in and something our biochemical and sociocultural configuration leads us to interpret. For most of us, our old technological interface, literacy, connects us with a world we know. Like Benedict Anderson (2006) has so aptly noted, when we read the newspaper we take part in an everyday ritual that reinforces the virtual structures of our world. We take a look at our world through television and reinforce the construction of our imagined world. We think “This is what happens in our world.” And the world exists as we have created it, as we know it to be.

I’m not saying an imagined world is a recent phenomenon or that the world is simply imaginary. Surely there is a world that has geological formations, a biosphere, temperatures, an orbit around the sun, and us people going about our businesses. What I am saying is that the world we experience is a sort of virtual world, a copy or an interpretation of a more real world. And how this virtual world appears to us depends on all kinds of collective and individual bio-cultural-psychological configurations behind it, in our heads.

The world is virtual - so what?

But what does this all have to do with the real virtual worlds, the ones we access through applications of information technology? So what if we don’t live in a world per se but in a virtual system experienced, shared and interpreted by people? Sure you can nitpick and call it virtual too.

Jean Baudrillard (1994) wrote that it is unfortunate that there are places like Disneyland because they make people believe the world outside them is not a fantasy. A concept pair like virtual-real that is used to describe places like Second Life and the physical world connote an unnecessary dichotomy as if the environment created inside computers would be a fake one, or a place like Second Life was somehow unreal. Surely it is as real as and perhaps even more real than the conventional world we are so used to experience. At least we are often more aware of the virtuality of it while we perhaps too often take our world view for granted in the “real” world.

I am not encouraging to omit the word virtual altogether but I do suggest caution in renewing the dichotomy of the real and virtual. In a way, physical reality is only a simulation albeit among all kinds of simulations it is the most significant to us. However, calling a virtual world virtual might lead us to believe the world outside of computer worlds is real as we experience it and a community based on a computer network was somehow less real or even fake.

Literature referred to
Anderson, Benedict 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities, London: Verso.
Baudrillard, Jean 1994 [1985]. Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan press.
Bell, Mark W. 2008. ’Toward a Definition of Virtual Worlds”.’ Virtual Worlds Research, 1 (1). www.jvwresearch.org/v1n1.html
Hall, Stuart 2008: Identiteetti, Tampere: Vastapaino.
Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com
Schroeder, Ralp 2008: ‘Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments.’ Virtual Worlds Research, 1 (1). www.jvwresearch.org/v1n1.html
WordNet, http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

Pic sources
1st pic portraying Second Life avatars from ZDNET, the avatar dog from Newsweek, PhD bear from Monash University merchandise, many faces from Esquire, Disneyland from CheapOAir.com.

Top 100 anthropology blogs

2010-03-16T21:30:00.000+02:00

No matter if you are studying an ancient race of people buried under years' worth of dirt or if you are analyzing the modern culture of New York City or Japan, these anthropology blogs have something to offer you. Enhance your education with these great blogs, or read about sub-topics in related areas within anthropology to see what type of research is occurring there.

That's how OnlineDegrees.net describe the top 100 anthropology blogs they have listed in their blog. Check them out and be amazed by the variety within the discipline!

Top 100 Anthropology Blogs

A Player's Web of Significance

2010-02-26T07:22:00.003+02:00

Below you can read the abstract of my paper to be presented at the 8th International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference in Hong Kong, June 17-21, 2010.

A PLAYER'S WEB OF SIGNIFICANCE:
A MICROETHNOGRAPHICAL STUDY ABOUT ONLINE POKER CULTURE

This paper is about a narrative of an agent in a complex web of significance or, in other words, a person in a culture. The culture in question is online poker and the agent, or the person, is my key informant who is a civil servant, a family man and a semi-professional poker player with whom I will practice participant observation and whose in-depth interviews will bring precious detail in the cultural context. I will attempt to provide a refined (or high in semantic resolution) presentation of how the player negotiates his role in the online and offline cultures, how he relates himself to the stereotypes and hegemonic discourses of poker culture and how he negotiates his virtual space in the physical world. The study is microethnographical in the sense that although it adds to a holistic description of a culture by concentrating on one person's involvement in the culture.

Update May 18, 2010: I had to cancel Hong Kong, so I will propose the final manuscript to be published in Next Generation edition of Fast Capitalism. This is how they describe their policy.

Fast Capitalism is an academic journal with a political intent. We publish reviewed scholarship and essays about the impact of rapid information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st century. We do not pretend an absolute objectivity; the work we publish is written from the vantages of viewpoint. Our authors examine how heretofore distinct social institutions, such as work and family, education and entertainment, have blurred to the point of near identity in an accelerated, post-Fordist stage of capitalism. [Read the rest.]

Current research: about a serious game

2010-02-04T07:56:00.000+02:00

Here's some information on and links to two article mansucript I am proposing to be published. One is titled "A serious game: The imagery of advertisements in Poker Magazine Finland reflecting gender in online poker culture" and it is for International Journal of E-Politics 1 (2). Here's the abstract:

This article analyzes the ways in which gender is represented through an examination of online poker advertisements, specifically the 2009 volume of Poker Magazine Finland. In a typical advertisement, a male poker champion endorses the game in a carefully staged, dark and serious atmosphere connoting a battle-like quality to the game. In advertisements where women or non-professional poker players are portrayed, the mood is less serious. Male poker champions smile in carefully staged advertisements only when they are shown to be winning or when the context is explicitly comical. In analyzing these advertisements, Katharine Frith’s tripartite approach is applied. Inspired by the findings of the analysis, the engendered subculture of online poker and gender in media in general are discussed.

The other one is written in Finnish and is proposed for Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja 2010 (the yearbook of gaming research) in Finland. Its title translates "On the reality of a postmodern gaming man: media-ethnographical notes on poker culture", or in Finnish "Postmodernin pelimiehen todellisuudesta: Mediaetnografisia huomioita pokerikulttuurista". Here's the English summary.

The article is based on the preliminary results of an anthropological research project focusing on poker culture as well as the media ethnographical observations within the project. The project concentrates on the phenomenology of poker in online and offline worlds. Supported by the theories of postmodern cultural studies, the article presents some observations of the advetising, masculinity and meaning of money related to poker. Moreover, the mode of existence of the representations of poker culture are commented by referring to the concept of hyperreal, among others.

Again, all comments are welcomed!

Update on my research: manuscript on poker ethics & chapter on Korean cybernationalism

2009-12-17T13:32:00.002+02:00

A few recent fruits of my academic tree.

'Game of threat and money: Notes on the ethical discussion concerning state-run online poker service in Finland.' Proposed to be published in Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 2 (2). (Under review, please do not quote.)

Abstract: Finland’s Slot Machine Association (RAY) is a state-run gambling organization that will launch an online poker service for Finns in 2010. This article describes and analyzes the ethical discussion provoked by an article in Helsingin Sanomat (the leading national newspaper) on the issue, and considers the various moral viewpoints taken of RAY as an online poker service provider, as well as discussing online poker as a wider contemporary phenomenon.

Please feel free to comment on the manuscript here or by email!

'Dokdo Island Dispute: Korean Reconstruction of History and National Identity in User-Created Content Media.' In Digital Memories: Exploring Critical Issues, edited by Anna Maj & Daniel Riha, published by Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2009, pp. 179-187.

Abstract: Japanese colonization of Korea (1910–1945) had an immense impact on Korean society and culture, and on a symbolical level, on what being Korean means today. The traumas of colonialism are still being widely discussed in Korea and there are certain key discursive nodes stemming from the colonial history that present Korea‟s concerns of contemporary Japan-Korea relations.

One of the discursive nodes is Dokdo (which the Japanese call Takeshima), a small and remote rocky island between the two countries in the East Sea (which the Japanese call the Sea of Japan. Both Japan and Korea lay claim to Dokdo, and both claim a long historical and geographical connection with the islets. In addition to traditional media, both have harnessed the cyberspace to support their cause. As both countries seek support from the international audience, the amount of Dokdo-related websites and online news in English is relatively high. Thus, the issue has turned from a small border dispute to a rhetorical fight between two nationalisms that use historical evidence to buttress their claims. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Koreans represent Dokdo, a disputed island in the sea between South Korea and Japan, to an international audience in user-created content media such as YouTube and Facebook. Moreover, the paper analyzes the ways the dispute is further used to reconstruct the history of South Korea and strengthen the national identity of Koreans. Theoretically, the paper refers to Anthony P. Cohen‟s analysis of the symbolism in community making as well as Benedict Anderson‟s thoughts on nations as imagined communities.

More information about the conference on which the book is based in my earlier post here.

Should Anthropologists Be Embedded with Troops in War?

2009-12-14T20:56:00.002+02:00

"Anthropologists have traditionally had a pretty wonkish reputation, earnestly taking field notes while interviewing a tribal chief or lecturing in some college classroom about the intricacies of indigenous clan-systems. If the Pentagon has its way, though, more anthropologists will exchange their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the front lines. For the past two years, the U.S. military has embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with American troops in order to improve the Army's cultural IQ. But last week the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a report coming out strongly against the program, saying that in both concept and application, it 'can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.'"

Read the rest of the TIME article here.

(Via @janchip from Twitter.)

Mobile technology, gender and development in Africa, India and Bangladesh

2009-12-07T15:15:00.001+02:00

As requested, here is a more detailed description of our forthcoming project I wrote about earlier. It is edited from the main research plan of the project.

Name of project: Mobile technology, gender and development in Africa, India and Bangladesh
Organizing institution: Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä.
Period: 2010-2013
Project Leader: Laura Stark, Professor of Ethnology

Background and significance of the research

One problem shared by the poor in all developing countries is lack of affordable access to relevant information and knowledge services. There is widespread consensus that information and communication technologies (ICTs) present the best solution to this problem, with mobile phones showing particular promise. Mobile phones are more affordable than computers, require less infrastructure, do not require the user to have much technological knowledge or even to be able to read and write, and are easy to carry from place to place. They lend themselves to flexible usage (text, voice and two-way communication), do not require special training, and the costs of connectivity are relatively low. Due to the low cost of labour, mobile phones in developing countries are much cheaper and easier to repair than computers. 3G “smart phones” are presently too expensive for the vast majority of buyers, but phones which avail GPRS and edge technology are already providing affordable access to the Internet in developing countries. Building 3G networks in developing countries will hugely improve the developmental potential of mobile technology.

Currently, services such as G-cash in the Philippines and M-Pesa in Kenya are providing mobile-based financial solutions for persons who may not otherwise have access to a bank. Mobile communications in Africa also offer access to information regarding where demand is highest for agricultural produce or fish, and enable small business owners to better communicate with their customers. By using mobile phones, people are spending less time and money on travel, and they can summon help and financial aid from relatives in times of crisis. Mobile phones are also facilitating the spread of rural health care and services. Ownership of mobile phones practically tripled in developing countries between 2002 and 2006. Secondary markets for used mobile devices, and practices such as phone renting and battery charging services make mobile phones within reach of even the poorest of the poor. Establishing mobile masts is a relatively inexpensive way of serving large and remote rural areas, and it is estimated that by 2010, 90% of the world will be covered by mobile networks (Bhavnani et. al. 2008).

Yet the introduction of new technologies does not itself automatically lead to economic growth and increased well-being. Privatization of teleservices has created the institutional problem of how states, service providers and NGOs can co-operate to provide developmental applications in affordable ways. In Africa, for instance, customer care is inadequate, interconnection charges are high, and operators collude due to lack of government regulations. Persons might own several phones but use them seldom or in a limited manner, rarely taking full advantage of services offered by the mobile platform. Many useful mobile applications have not been implemented on a large scale, and many crucial development issues such as illiteracy and women’s health have been neglected. In both Africa and India, there is also a strong need for services and software in local languages and dialects. Non-literacy is another barrier when text messaging or even punching in numbers to make a phone call.

To maximize the potential benefits of mobile technology solutions, closer attention must be paid to poverty’s dynamics, causes, and consequences. Poverty does not result merely from lack of connectedness to the information society, it is also a result of market restrictions, repressive governments, social injustice, and human exploitation. One of the most serious and far-reaching barriers to the eradication of poverty is gender inequality. Increased gender inequalities, even in the short-run, are having long-term consequences for economic growth and human development (Costa & Silva 2008, 9). Thus it is not surprising that one of the key target objectives of the Millenium Development Goals is the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment (UN General Assembly 2000).

Yet gender inequality has been rarely addressed in mobile solutions for development. The Grameen Village Phone project is one of the few mobile development projects to give special attention to women. Mobile-based services and systems can be a partial solution to poverty alleviation – but whose poverty? Men and women are often poor for different reasons, and what helps men may further jeopardize the well-being of women and girls (Whitehead 2003, 8). In Africa, for instance, women have long been active participants in the traditional economy. Will women remain economically active in the new mobile-powered world, or will men take more control? Will mobiles ultimately narrow or widen the gender opportunity gap? If Internet for the next billion will be different because it will be supported by mobile phones, will women and girls have access to it, and will it benefit their lives? It is now up to the research community to ensure that the Millenium Development Goals involving new ICTs do not conflict with development goals of gender equality and the empowerment of women.

Gender inequality is not only a socio-economic issue but also a cultural one. Attempting to solve it by creating laws and regulations can have little effect when their enforcement is undermined by customs and norms. Such symbolic fields as kinship obligations, honor and shame systems, and costly dowries and ceremonies represent dominant practices and enduring meaning structures which cannot be ignored by the villagers, nor can they be overlooked by stakeholders. This is why it is so important that anthropologists trained in cultural analysis carry out basic empirical research before policies are developed. At the same time, symbolic systems should be seen not merely as constraints but also as sources of agency and new interpretations which motivate the quest for change and development. Taking into consideration the fact that people are not passive “users” of technology but are agents who adapt mobile phone technologies to their own needs, we ask: how does mobile phone use affect gender relations in low income countries? How do gender relations, in turn, affect mobile phone use?

Our project is led by Professor of Ethnology Laura Stark, and includes four anthropologists. Project members will carry out research in India and Bangladesh, as well as 5 countries in Africa: 2 in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania), 2 in West Africa (Cameroon, Ghana), and South Africa. Two of these are Finland’s long-term partners for development (Kenya and Tanzania), and one is a short-term cooperation partner (South Africa). We have chosen these countries because they are among the fastest growing telemarkets in the developing world, and all these states are actively designing ICT policies and encouraging the participation of NGOs and other stakeholders in designing and providing teleservices.

Research areas of the project members overlap with each other in order for findings to be mutually useful not just across the project team, but also to their many NGO cooperation partners. Our first area of concern is women’s health. Crentsil and Tenhunen will examine how NGOs manage and disseminate successful mobile-for-health programs in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa by focusing on which important women's health issues have so far been neglected in mobile application design. Tenhunen will also focus on how mobile development applications can be implemented on a large scale. Crentsil and Tawah will focus on the use of mobile phones in information dissemination and retrieval for HIV/AIDS education, for instance through the grassroots practice of ‘beeping’ a health advice center (hanging up before the call is answered to save money), after which the health worker calls the caller back. Our second area of concern is the costs versus the benefits of mobile usage among the poor, which has been recently debated in mobile development circles. M-banking, for instance, has been hailed as the mobile application which will benefit people in developing countries the most, but research shows that most persons in Sub-Saharan Africa are too poor to save money and do not have earnings easily transferred through banking. Studies have also shown that some people go hungry so they can pay for mobile usage, others must walk 3-7 kilometers 2-3 times per week in order to recharge their mobile batteries and 79% of persons surveyed in rural Tanzania did not agree that mobile phone use reduced poverty (see Diga 2007; Mpogole, Usanga & Tedre 2008). Despite this, people still purchase mobiles, and so consensus on how we should measure “benefits” is changing. Jouhki, Stark and Tawah will examine the economic issues surrounding mobile phone use among rural inhabitants in India (Tamil Nadu), Tanzania (Iringa district), and Cameroon (Bamenda). Their focus will be on the economic and social impact upon women and girls of m-banking, remittances, and costs of money, time and energy.

Professor Laura Stark (Ethnology, U. of Jyväskylä). How the Tanzanian poor define “well-being”: economic costs vs. social benefits of mobile phone use. Stark will visit the I4D research group at Tumaini University in Tanzania, which has already done cost-benefit studies of mobile phone use, to explore the hypothesis that local people may define “benefits” in non-economic terms: the poor use the social networks maintained through telephony to generate financial flows such as remittances or help during a crisis, and denser and more dynamic social networks mean greater security. Stark will theorize the relationship between social networks and time and energy commitment to technology use in order to better design mobile solutions which bring greatest benefits from the perspective of the poor themselves.

Ph.D. Perpetual Crentsil (Anthropology, U. of Helsinki). Mobile telephony and healthcare delivery for women in rural Ghana and South Africa. Crentsil will focus on mobile solutions for improving the healthcare delivery system in Africa and map out mobile technology’s impact health care services provided to women and children among the rural and urban poor. Crentsil’s research will address following questions: how are mobile phones being used to improve reproductive health, the delivery of health information and care services provided to rural women? How are they supporting large-scale management of diseases such as HIV/AIDS and how does this affect women? How can mobile phone applications be put to new uses for improving women’s health? Crentsil will return to her previous fieldwork site in Ghana to work with the Grameen Foundation, which is using mobile applications to assist community health workers for neonatal and maternal health. After that, she will travel to South Africa to examine the role of mobile phones in HIV/AIDS education by focusing on the activities of Cell-Life, an NGO based in Cape Town which uses mobile technologies as a mass information channel. Crentsil’s interest in this study stems from her extensive research on HIV/AIDS and health systems in Africa, which resulted in her doctoral dissertation Death, Ancestors, and HIV/AIDS among the Akan of Ghana. Her findings will be disseminated to NGOs through other project members in Cameroon, Tanzania, India and Bangladesh.

Adjunct Prof., Ph.D. Jukka Jouhki (Ethnology, U. of Jyväskylä). The Meaning of "Nagarpesi": Diffusion, Gendered Use and Cultural Values of Mobile Technology in Rural Tamil Nadu, South India. Jouhki returns to the fieldsite of his dissertation research to focus on how the diffusion of mobile technology is changing the economic and sociocultural dynamics of rural Indian society, particularly with regard to gender and caste in the Villapuram district of Tamil Nadu. He examines economic costs and incentives to mobile use such as remittances, asking: do women and men perceive costs and benefits differently? What mobile applications and practices could increase the benefit to women? He also looks at caste-specific use and grassroots cost-benefit analysis among the very poor. How do untouchables use mobile technology? Where do remittances to them come from and could their flow be made easier? Would mobile banking make a difference? Tamil Nadu is an affluent state of India which has long relied on private enterprise for economic growth and has one of the most active ICT policies in India. As such, it provides an interesting comparison case with Tenhunen’s prior research on rural West Bengal which has been ruled by the Communist party since 1977 and has successfully pioneered a land reform which has led to rapid growth in agricultural growth.

(MA) Sanna Tawah (Ethnology, U. of Jyväskylä). The Market in my Hands: Mobile Phones for Social and Financial Connectivity among “Buyamsellam” women in rural Cameroon. Female small-scale entrepreneurs (“buyamsellam” women) in Bamenda, Cameroon, use mobile phones on a daily basis. They also have savings that they would need to bank, but no formal banking possibilities. Mobile banking has been launched in Cameroon, but is not widely used. Tawah will visit Tanzania to observe the use of the more popular M-Pesa (a mobile banking program for the poor launched in Tanzania in 2007) to compare applications and practices. She will also study technical phone support systems for farmers in Yaounde, Cameroon accessed through free mobile ‘beeping’ to see if the same concept could be applied to AIDS and health education in Bamenda, and to Crentsil’s field sites in Ghana and South Africa.

Adjunct Prof., Ph.D. Sirpa Tenhunen (Anthropology, U. of Helsinki). Social construction of gender sensitive mobile applications. Tenhunen uses her prior fieldwork data on the appropriation of mobile phones from rural India and Kenya to map out neglected development issues that could be tackled with mobile technology. In this project, she will work with NGOs to study potential mobile applications which could benefit women’s health. She will first conduct fieldwork among the applications developers in Nairobi, which has emerged as the hub of mobile application development in Eastern Africa. Tenhunen will collect data in order to examine which issues have been covered and whether development applications address women’s issues. To provide an understanding of the institutional prerequisites for implementing mobile applications on a large scale, she will also carry out a case study on Grameen Phone in Bangladesh, which has been able to successfully offer phone services which empower women. She will finally travel to India to co-operate closely with Dr. Devi Shetty’s Asia Heart Foundation and Narayana Hrudalaya (Bangalore, India) to develop concrete mobile applications for improving rural women’s health. She aims to answer the question of how businesses, state and NGOs can co-operate to successfully produce affordable services. What development issues do designers emphasize and how do they assess the gender impact of their applications? What cooperation is needed in order for NGOs to proceed from pilot cases to putting applications into practice on a large scale? Her findings will be disseminated to the other projects’ NGOs through local workshops.

Objectives

Research objectives. Worldwide, numerous mobile technology-based development projects have appeared in recent years, and the proliferation of conferences, websites, and project reports on mobile development reflect the rapid growth of interest in this area. Yet despite the enthusiasm surrounding this new field, very little long term, in-depth empirical research has yet been carried out, and mobile technology’s impact on development remains severely understudied by Finnish researchers and NGOs. As anthropologists trained in the ethnographic method, we are in a unique position to contribute significantly to the growing international knowledge in this dynamic field with innovation potential for stakeholders. One of our main objectives is for project members to utilize each others’ research and pass this knowledge on to their contact NGOs for future mobile applications.

In terms of theory, our objective is to challenge the paradigms of development theory as well as the “social shaping of technology” approach. In terms of practice, all projects will contribute to developing both gender-sensitive mobile technology applications and “best practices” guidelines. Our researchers start from a careful ethnographic study of mobile phone use in their research locations, and then proceed to developing suggestions for developmental mobile applications in co-operation with NGOs and other stakeholders. We also identify positive and effective grass-roots solutions for empowering women and girls which have already proven successful, and could be applied to other contexts.

Hypotheses. Following the Social Shaping of Technology (SSA) and Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approaches, we reject views of technological determinism and see the impact of a particular technology as deriving not from the design itself but from the struggles and negotiations among interested parties (Pinch & Bijker 1984; Bijker & Pinch 1987; Williams & Edge 1996). Social constructionist approaches view technologies as broad-based systems comprising not merely physical artefacts, devices and infrastructures, but also social and cultural patterns of behaviour, regulatory laws and policies, education and know-how. Seeing technology as a social construct means recognizing that technologies embody gender differences (Litho 2005). Despite the strengths of the social construction of technology theory, it has recently come under reassessment (Hyysalo 2006 and Mackay & Gillespie 1992). The overall theoretical aim of the project is to develop the SCOT theory to further understand how the social shaping of technology is intertwined with culture while leaving space for a technological imagination not completely dictated by it.

We also view issues of gender and development from a holistic anthropological perspective. Researchers have recently focused on three broad areas which are helping us to better understand how gender inequality is tied to poverty. First, it has been recognized that what happens inside the household is crucial. In the 1970s and 1980s, poverty reduction strategies that targeted male household heads erroneously assumed that benefits would ‘trickle down’ to the rest of the household. In the late 1980s, it was recognized that male heads of household tended to distribute resources in ways which disadvantaged women and girls, and even when women generated income outside the home, they did not always retain control over those resources (Kennedy & Cogill 1987).

Second, overwhelming cross-cultural evidence suggests that women in many less developed countries are expected to invest in their families rather than in their own well-being, while men are freer to invest only in themselves. This has been called the feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation (Chant 2006, 2008). Women have primary responsibility for the unpaid care of the family and dependent children, while men withhold earnings or appropriate those of wives to fund fundamentally self-oriented pursuits (Chant 2008, 27). Poor men’s desertion of families is another strategy for escaping the responsibilities of contributing to household consumption (Sen 2008, 7). Poorer working women have coped by sacrificing the education of their daughters who are expected to help their mothers care for the family (Kabeer 2008, 5). Thus poverty is not just about a lack of basic needs, but of opportunities and choices.

Third, it has been recognized that the most disadvantaged population group in developing countries are girls. They bear a heavy burden of work at home, receive less education than boys, are channelled into low paying jobs, vulnerable to exploitation and violence, and are pressured to marry young, sometimes even before the age of 15. M-banking through a private savings accounts accessible through SMS would be one way to improve young women’s access to and control over their own earnings. Girls giving birth in adolescence are at greater risk of mortality, and girls are also at greater risk of infection from HIV and AIDS than boys and young men. As girls enter and move through adolescence, they become increasingly socially isolated, and this isolation only increases after they marry (Mathur, Greene & Malhotra 2003). Social isolation carries not only risks of remaining uneducated and illiterate, but also of rape and HIV infection. Health education could be set up through text messaging to mobile phones to reach girls who are socially isolated. The well-being of girls is important not only from a human rights’ standpoint, but also because girls grow up to be mothers, and therefore play a key role in the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

Although material poverty has received the most attention in development research since the 1970s, gender inequality is not just a matter of income and nutritional intake. A more promising approach acknowledges the multi-dimensional nature of gender disadvantage: lack of access to education, marriage customs and age at marriage, violence against women, norms regarding work and responsibility, inheritance and property rights, equal access to housing, control over resources such as land and water, distribution and consumption of resources within the household, and the socio-economic impact of health problems and HIV/AIDS. We seek to contribute to development theory by looking at how all these factors impact each other, and how rapidly disseminating mobile technologies are implicated.

It is only through holistic gender analysis that mobile technologies can fulfil their enormous potential for improving the lives of women and girls in low income countries. Sirpa Tenhunen has already shown how mobile technology has produced benefits for women in rural India. Just a decade ago, women could be facing food scarcity, or be mistreated in their husband’s house for years before the news reached their parents. Now, phones are helping women in rural India to keep in touch with relatives, and since natal families continue to be the major source of help for married women, girls pay attention to whether there is a mobile phone in the house or neighborhood of a potential suitor (Tenhunen 2008, 531)

Mobile phones also carry great promise for alleviating health-related problems, since poverty is both a cause and consequence of illness. Poverty means less access to health services, and women in particular have less access than men. Health services utilizing mobile technologies could help women receive the assistance they need. Illness, in turn, leads to poverty when people are forced to sell their assets in order to get treatment. The possibility of obtaining affordable health care and guidance through mobile services before the illness gets worse could save huge numbers of people from poverty.

Justification for how the proposed research ties in with this call and its objectives. The proposed project is directly connected to the themes of the call: we examine the current impact and future potential of mobile phone technologies in low income countries for the eradication of extreme poverty and the increasing of economic, social and cultural interaction through more accessible communication. We analyze the gender implications of mobile development solutions in order to ensure their promotion of equality and human rights.

In Britain the wifi owners are punished for users' sins

2009-12-01T13:58:00.008+02:00

The ethics of digital communication are still incredibly strange at times, or what do you think about this case reported by ZDNet UK a few days ago?

Pub 'fined £8k' for Wi-Fi copyright infringement

David Meyer ZDNet UK

Published: 27 Nov 2009 18:03 GMT

A pub owner has been fined £8,000 because someone unlawfully downloaded copyrighted material over their open Wi-Fi hotspot, according to the managing director of hotspot provider The Cloud.
Graham Cove told ZDNet UK on Friday he believes the case to be the first of its kind in the UK. However, he would not identify the pub concerned, because its owner — a pubco that is a client of The Cloud's — had not yet given their permission for the case to be publicised.

Read the rest of the article here.

The ZDNet article via Tietokone (in Finnish).
Pic from Rolling Prairie Library System "Teaching Internet Ethics to Teens" seminar notice page .

Information about our next project on mobile technology, gender and development

2009-11-30T13:15:00.000+02:00

The Academy of Finland has decided to fund our next four-year ICTD oriented research project lead by prof. Laura Stark and concentrating on mobile technology in developing countries of South Asia and Africa. As anthropologists and ethnologists are involved in the project culturally interesting issues such as power and gender will be emphasized along with interrelated areas like economic development and health.

I personally will start working on my part of the project in a year or so and focus on mobile technology in rural Tamil Nadu, South India. The area is familiar to me through my PhD research.

Read more about the project in the University of Jyväskylä news bulletin (in Finnish) here.

Three Videos Every Digi-Anthropologist Should Enjoy Watching

2009-11-24T16:05:00.001+02:00

Amber Case is a consultant and a PhD student of "cyborg anthropology". In this video from Gnomedex 9, a "Tech Conference of Inspiration and Influence" in Seattle earlier this fall, she talks about prosthetic culture.

In the next one Pranav Mistry from MIT Media Lab presents many tools like his SixthSense device that he has designed to bridge the physical and the digital worlds more "naturally". The video is from TED Talks which has lots of other interesting videos

In the third video Gentry Underwood, a social software designer and strategist for IDEO, talks about the challenges of the awkward Web 2.0 design and the emerging world of social interaction design. The video is from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York earlier this year.

The Anthropology of Homo Digitalis and His Tribes

2009-11-03T10:12:00.005+02:00

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

2009-10-30T12:16:00.012+02:00

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

2009-10-14T11:23:00.003+03:00

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

2009-09-29T15:56:00.001+03:00

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

2009-06-04T10:50:00.006+03:00

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

2009-06-02T14:24:00.011+03:00

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

2009-05-27T04:19:00.002+03:00

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

2009-05-18T16:21:00.020+03:00

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

2009-05-12T14:58:00.010+03:00

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

2009-05-07T14:27:00.003+03:00

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

2009-04-24T03:43:00.004+03:00

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

2009-04-13T19:35:00.006+03:00

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?

2009-04-08T13:16:00.029+03:00

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.

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: 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

2009-03-27T11:20:00.023+02:00

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

2009-03-26T13:17:00.021+02:00

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.

Going for Digital Memories

2009-03-11T13:57:00.009+02:00

I will spend next week in Salzburg and attend Digital Memories conference. My paper titled "Dokdo Island Dispute: Korean Reconstruction of History and National Identity in User-Created Content Media" will introduce Korean cybernationalism, or, the way new user-created media such as YouTube are used for nationalist purposes. I will present my paper at Session 7: National Identity and Memory in the Digital Age on Thursday, March 19, 2009.

There are plenty of interesting conference papers available here. A few of them caught my eye:

Michal Derda-Nowakowski: Computerlore – Netlore – Folklore. Web as Etnographic Field Research.

Lois Hamill: Second Life as a Medium for Virtual Memorialization.

Daniel Riha: Biography as an Interactive 3-D Documentary. [Read abstract here.]

Maria Lakka: Digital Media Technologies and the Configuration of Experience. [Read abstract here.]

Other papers include titles such as "The Global Unconscious and Globalised Memories in the Digital Age", "Can New Technologies Shape Metamemory?", "Memi, Building an Extension of Memory", "Rewriting Literary Past in Digital Age", "Digital Memories of High-Tech Tourists and Travelling Media". Check them out here.

Copy Right or Wrong - The Pirate Bay Case and Mind Games

2009-03-05T16:45:00.002+02:00

The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website that tracks BitTorrents. It has to do with sharing files.

A traditional model of file sharing has Mr. X downloading a file from a server. If many people are after the same file, the server must have a bigger capacity.

A BitTorrent is a protocol that makes sharing files faster and lighter, and it works like this:

Mr. X wants a file likeavirgin.mp3. He goes to a website that tracks BitTorrents. He enters "Like a Virgin" in the search box and gets a list of the available torrents. He clicks one of them and starts to download likeavirgin.mp3 simultaneously from numerous individual sources. While downloading the file he automatically starts to share it with other users too.

In The Pirate Bay everyone can upload and download torrent files. In other words, Mr. X can inform the website about a link that leads to his file likeavirgin.mp3. Other people may inform the website about the same file too. Hence, one link (torrent) in The Pirate Bay may lead to many similar files. In a way The Pirate Bay is a directory of links to individual files. The website per se does not produce any files other than the torrents. No copyrighted material exists in the website's server.

Media companies such as Sony and Warner Bros. have sued The Pirate Bay for copyright theft. Or, to be more exact (as the BBC reports) the owners of the website are accused of "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws" and the movie, music and video games industry are seeking for compensation (10.6 million euros) "in damages and interest for losses incurred from tens of millions of illegal downloads facilitated by the site." The Bay people, on the other hand, say it's like being sued for making cars that can go faster than the speed limit.

The court case seems to be about two ethical issues. The more obvious is about copyright and the other is about responsibility. It seems like both parties agree on the definition of copyright being "a form of intellectual property which gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation." No one thinks Mr. X is allowed to upload or download likeavirgin.mp3.

The big question is whether The Pirate Bay is responsible for publishing a directory of links of which some lead to likeavirgin.mp3 in Mr. X's, Y's and Z's personal computers and, thus, to copyrighted material.

Hard to decide?
Let's try mind games.

Imagine a library with some of its clientele photo-copying some books and thus infringing copyright. Then imagine a book publisher suing the library for aiding violation of copyright. Who do you think would win the case? Would you rather recommend the publisher to sue the copyists instead of the library?

If you would still prefer suing the library, let's go further in the mind game.

Imagine a building just like a library but with the exception of there being no books in the building. Imagine Mr. X. going into the building and asking the librarian if he knew where to find Jonathan Zitrain's The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It. The librarian would take a look at a list and give Mr. X. the address of Mr. Y. who has the book. Then Mr. X. would go to Mr. Y. and photocopy the book - and infringe copyright.

Would you still charge the library?
You would?
OK then.

Imagine the same library without the books and without the librarian. The only thing that the library would contain would be a notice board where people could post their addresses and the titles of text they possess, whether they be self-written poems, theses, shopping-lists, jokes or copyrighted books. Then imagine Mr. X. going to the notice board and finding the address of Mr. Y. with Zitrain's book.

You could still think the library is the one to blame. And that would be perfectly sound. Perhaps a lot of your judgement would depend on the answers to these questions:

How many of the texts listed in the notice board are copyrighted?
Is the library aware of the potential copyright infringement enabled by their notice board?
Is the library making money out of it?
Is the sole purpose of the library to aid copyright infringement?

Or you could as easily make up different kind of questions leading to the opposite moral judgment. You could ask...

Is the library itself making copies of copyrighted material?

...and answer no, it is not - and call the case closed.

Eventually copyright is a cultural phenomenon par excellence. It has always been an intriguing ethical issue and the digital age makes it even more so. It seems like the rapid progress of digital technologies makes it very hard for strict copyright to exist. Especially if the counter-sharing technologies and the law-making processes are not able to keep up with the development.

Imagine the year 2050. Will we laugh at the ancient practice of having to pay for likeavirgin.mp3 as all possible public digital data is accessible free by anyone or will the digital pirates be the last outlaws of the world hunted down by the all-seeing media industry/police force complex?

Pic sources: The two modes of file transfer from Bruce’s Journal, the pirate bay symbol from P2P ON!, the library from Southeastern Illinois College, "Captain Copyright" from http://media.canada.com/canwest/143/, Communication from Equalitec.

East Asian Media Culture in Facebook

2009-02-23T15:31:00.005+02:00

The Facebook is not only about cheerful chat with lost and found friends or groups with witty names anymore as the academic world has begun to infiltrate the service. Many researchers, including me, have already linked their texts in Facebook and many professors are using it as a course site.

I was reminded about this when I cyber-bumped into one of South Korea's leading media culture scholars, Professor Kim Shin Dong (Hallym University, S. Korea / Sciences Po, France) opening his course site about East Asian Media Culture in Facebook. Knowing Kim's work I'm betting it will be interesting.

Pic above (originally from Newsweek) appears at Prof. Kim's FB course site.

Video conferencing becoming more popular due to recession

2009-02-18T09:02:00.027+02:00

According to Wikipedia a video conference

is a set of interactive telecommunication technologies which allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously. It has also been called visual collaboration and is a type of groupware. It differs from videophone in that it is designed to serve a conference rather than individuals.

For various reasons such as intimacy and cost the videophone function on the cell phone has not become that popular whereas two-way video calls (e.g. Skype) over the Internet have. To have a group of people discussing matters over a video conference used to be more like a nice idea but because of narrow bandwidth and poor applications it was not widely implemented.

The meatspace is still considered as the locus authenticus for important discussion and decision-making but thanks to the recession and developing technology, cyberspace is becoming more attractive as the place to meet. Many organizations are already using applications such as ConnectPro but for a more natural experience with a bigger group you have to spend big bucks.

This morning, the radio news reported how the development of technology has made conferencing easy and smooth. Plus it saves money, time and environment. The head of communication of Telia-Sonera, a Finno-Swedish company, talked about the new telepresence system that, although being a very expensive one (a few hundred K in euros), had earned back the costs of its implementation in about 7 months. Over 500 trips between Helsinki and Stockholm were replaced by a video conference. During the first year a whopping 550.000 € was saved in flight tickets alone.

However, there are some prerequisites to the comfortable and "natural" use of video conference. The two conference rooms have to be equally furnished and have similar acoustics so that the illusion of presence is not shattered by the medium. Also, the screens have to be high definition and present the participants in real size. I would also add that the two conferencing parties would have to have relatively long tradition of cooperation so that the lack of intimacy would be compensated by the established familiarity of the parties. Or, the subject matter should not be of such importance that it would require deep involvement and interpreting subtle expressions of the participants. In other words, the users should be more or less old acquaintances or they should discuss less important day-to-day matters.

Although the new technology is cost-effective, the cost is also a problem as only big multinational companies can invest in high quality videoconferencing. Another choice, as also mentioned in the news report, is to rent the equipment.

In Finland, Technopolis, a company providing "optimal environment for high tech companies," is renting their conference rooms in eight cities. One hour of video conferencing costs 150 to 500 euros depending on the size of the conference space. Sound expensive? Obviously it depends on whether you are calling your mom to show your new pair of pants or having two armies of lawyers in two different continents discuss a million-dollar business deal. Here you can even calculate the cost-effectiveness of video conferencing yourself.

It's quite obvious to predict that the use of high-quality video conference applications will become cheaper and more wide-spread in the future and thus two-way meetings will be more commonly held virtually. The concept of the technology is quite simple and easy to implement.

What about more massive conferences where hundreds of people go around forming smaller groups and where individuals meet each other? How could the technology solve the problem of including vast spaces and mobile people? Today, the narrow bandwidth is the problem and that's why the closest thing is a more "artificial" conference space such as Second Life with more restricted data environment and simplified symbolic presentations of participants (avatars).

Perhaps in the future the terabyte-scale bandwidths, 3D-modelling techniques and high-precision GPSs will give me a chance to take part in a conference and have a close-to-meatspace experience of a conference in, say, Seoul just by walking around in my office in Jyväskylä, Finland.

Pic sources (from top down): Skype, History of the Button, Technopolis, Cisco.

Lecture on u-Korea

2009-02-11T20:36:00.003+02:00

For the participants of Transnational Asian Media Cultures at University of Tampere, here are the slides of today's lecture.

Update on my research: Dokdo Island dispute and Korean mobile youth

2009-02-03T11:51:00.009+02:00

Here's some stuff I've been working on lately.

Dokdo Island Dispute: Korean Reconstruction of History and National Identity in User-Created Content Media.

A paper for Digital Memories Conference, 17-19 March, Salzburg. Introduces the Dokdo Island dispute and its representation in cyberspace by Koreans. Discusses nation-building and revision of history in user-cretead content media.
Introduces the Dokdo Island dispute and its representation in cyberspace by Koreans. Discusses nation-building and revision of history in user-cretead content media.

Read the paper.

A Modern Fetish: The Value of the Mobile Phone in South Korean Youth Culture

A paper to be presented for IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, 17 – 23 June 2009, Algarve.
Based on observational data produced by a group of communication students at Seoul National University and presents the students’ observations on mobile phone use in the public and urban context of Seoul area as well as the students’ personal reflections on the subject. The paper further discusses the mobile phone as a an element contemporary modern society.
An extended version of this paper including quantitative data on Korean youth and their new media use will appear in my chapter 'Keeping in Touch: Notes on the Mobile Communication Culture of Korean Youth' in Sonja Kangas' (ed.): Communication Acrobatics.

Check out the draft sent for review.

In April I will also attend 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2009) to get to know the latest trends and players in ICT in Doha, Qatar.

Cyborg cockroach

2009-01-26T11:38:00.009+02:00

New Scientist reported on the developments of insect cybernetics, namely the new and improved model of a cyborg cockroach.

"PITY future cyborg insects. As if being remotely controlled by a human isn't bad enough, their every movement may be harnessed to power the electronics that hijack their bodies. This could also extend the length of their enslavement, since the microchips had previously relied on tiny batteries with short lifespans.

Engineers have been attempting to gain control of insects' bodies for some time, to act as discreet spies or to take advantage of their advanced sense of smell to detect chemicals or explosives.

To do this, researchers implant electrical stimulators that zap certain nerves or brain cells, triggering an impulse that makes the insect move in a desired direction. This process can be controlled by a preprogrammed chip or by remote control (NewScientist, 6 March 2008, p 40)." Read the rest.

Add a GPS, some RFID and/or 3G technology and a video camera on the thing and multiply it to a few hundred tiny cyborgs using crowd intelligence and we'll have one efficient spy machine similar to the spider robot of Minority Report but half organic. If the cockroaches get really smart we might have one interesting YouTube channel.

Read also Digitoday discussing the article (in Finnish). 1st pic orig. from Foureyesjokeshop.com, appearing in James Sherwood's article Nintendo Wii said to 'attract cockroaches' in Register Hardware news. 2nd pic from BotJunkie (screen capture from the movie Minority Report).

Anthropology Going (even more) Digital

2009-01-20T15:50:00.012+02:00

Traditionally cultural anthropology has been about studying distant tribes and low-tech societies outside the Euro-American realm. It took a while until anthropology dared to stay at home and found that there are interesting objects of research also in the scholar's own society.

It took even more time for anthropology to engage in studying the everyday interaction of people and technology. Nowadays, the essential role of digital technologies in global culture is slowly being accepted as a proper subject within the discipline. In my view it should already be part and parcel of anthropology.

Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University is a pioneer in digitally oriented cultural anthropology. His view of and approach to modern anthropology was finally recognized when he was awarded the professor of the year 2008 title by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (Wired Magazine discovered him first though when Wesch was given the Rave Award in 2007.) Hopefully Wesch's example will further encourage anthropologists to probe the interesting realm of digital culture.

Check out Prof. Wesch's channel on YouTube and his Digital Ethnography blog. Here's one of the videos that earned the professor the Rave Award.

Pic from Kansan State Univ.

Update on Virtual Church for Kids

2009-01-19T10:44:00.013+02:00

My colleague Olli mailed me an update for the virtual church for kids post from last week.

According to Helsingin Sanomat (HS) the chat area of Lastenkirkko ("Children's Church") had to be closed down right after the service had started because of anti-religious and ill-mannered discussion. The virtual church itself has already attracted lots of discussion and debate. Even the number of comments to HS's report added up to 384 this morning.

What a perfect example of the pros and cons of Internet as an open forum for discussion.

Just a thought: would it be an interesting experiment if a religious virtual world would be open for any kind of development - Hindu temples, atheist information booths (with Richard Dawkins' avatar), new age spiritualists, newborn Christian preachers and even Satanists. Then an avatar could browse through all sorts of virtual religions and decide for itself. Click and be saved!

Pic: "Blake Wake Visits Pixel Jesus in a Cave" by Dean Terry in Flickr.

Virtual Church for Kids

2009-01-13T15:13:00.018+02:00

Reading Digitoday a few days ago, I noticed how the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Finland is trying to reach kids in cyberspace by launching a new Flash-based virtual world called Lastenkirkko ("Children's Church").

Like in Habbo, "the hangout for teens", in Lastenkirkko kids can create their own avatar, dress it up and chat away with friends. The church is open for kids' chatter only from 3 to 5 pm when the moderator is present. On other times kids are only allowed to use smileys to communicate with each other.

A juvenile Cyber-Christian can also listen to the stories of Bible, read prayers or just play games. Kids can also have their avatar blessed at the altar, play the organ or visit the grave yard.

Lastekirkko is a laudable move from the Church. It hints towards religion becoming less serious and conservative. Moreover, it is yet another interesting sign of the cultural dynamics of digital age. Virtual worlds are not seen merely as games or something unreal anymore but places of real and useful societal action. It seems like even the most conservative organizations have to have a virtual world entity nowadays. Or maybe the Church has started taking advice from Big Tobacco and catching them while they're young?

But when are the cyborg priests coming?

Pics: the virtual altar from Lastenkirkko, Futurama's robot priest from Futurama and Religion.

Video eyeware and the evolution of audiovisual entertainment tech

2009-01-09T12:48:00.020+02:00

Tietokone magazine reported on consumer electronics news among which video glasses caught my eye, so to speak. Sony's executive Howard Stinger and Tom Hanks presented the company's new gadgetry, including video eyewear. Tietokone readers pointed out that although the report seems to claim otherwise, Sony isn't really the first one to present such equipment. Video glasses have been around for some years now and are sold online (see e.g. Verkkokauppa store in Finland and Zeiss' page).

Hanks, Stinger and videogoggles (pic source here).

Sony's video goggles got me thinking about the not so fresh innovation of Sony Walkman (released 1979), or the "Ear Patch Stereos" as they were literally called in Finland. What a technocultural innovation they were! Music that you could take with you and listen to just by yourself! One should remember that hundred years ago music was mainly a collective thing to do. Actually, since the beginning of music itself, people have gathered together to do music - sing together around the fire, in working groups, sorrowful mourning parties, or, more lately in history, gathered together to enoy professional live music performance, and so on.

Then came the record player which better enabled the production of music. The song could now be refined, remade, patched together from separate sections to form a piece best reflecting the vision of its maker (singer, player, song-writer, producer). One could enjoy music without knowing how to sing or having someone to sing for them. One could just listen to records or radio at home with closest friends. With headphones one could enjoy the records by the record player just by oneself.

Finally, Sony Walkman was invented and you could take the music with you where ever you went, and be isolated from your surroundings while being mobile....

...and listen to the music a billion dollar industry had meticulously produced to suit your taste and cultural niche.

The evolution of music tech has developed from enhancing group cohesion to individual isolation. It is one of the many common denominators of a group of individuals sharing same sort of cultural, social and esthetic values. Perhaps nowadays one listens to MP3s in isolation but still feeling connected to peers.

Video glasses are another interesting step in the technological evolution. Now that we have appliances like Nintendo Wii or the like, it won't be long when we can enjoy a walk in the park with friends and not get out of the bed or the couch. We can be physically more isolated but virtually more social and collective.

Imagine a bit more distant future, when gadgets like the Walkman (MP3-player) or video goggles become so tiny that they fit inside your eye and ear. Or, to a lot more scifi here, are implanted in your brain. Then virtual would become real (if it isn't already) and physical something as irrelevant as atoms and molecules of a DVD disc of TV screen are today in enjoying a movie.

Pic sources: Sony Walkman from Erlingsi's Flickr page, gramophone from Design Boom, the future eye implant from Übergizmo.

Game PhDs will be produced in Tampere, Finland

2008-12-30T17:15:00.004+02:00

According to Tietokone magazine (30 Dec 08), University of Tampere will develop the research and teaching of new media and information technology by fusing two departments (information and hypermedia) into one Department of Information Research and Interactive Media.

The key areas of the new department will be information search and acquisition, game research, social media, information practices in learning and knowledge management of organizations. The master's program of hypermedia was established last autumn but now the game researchers can study right up to PhD.

What a great step for game research - a field that in my opinion is one of the most dynamic and fascinating ones in contemporary new media research.

Lecture: to be a citizen in u-Korea

2008-12-18T14:24:00.004+02:00

Yesterday I gave a lecture for the Master's Program of Civil Society Studies at University of Jyväskylä. I talked about the role of the citizen in the South Korean ubiquitous society vision. See the slides here.

Brief points of the lecture:

Korea is a country of Big Projects: u-Korea is one of them
Technonationalism helps to create a positive spiral of enthusiasm to clear the path towards u-Korea
u-Korea vision is TOTAL, meaning that, at least in rhetoric, it changing the whole society in a revolutionary way
The emotional value and anthropomorphization of technology are unique to the Korean vision
Ethical discussion of the issues of intimacy, control and surveillance in u-Korea is almost non-existent - perhaps because Koreans see more value in the application of new technologies than fear the dangers of it

Humanity+ looking for a leader

2008-12-12T14:30:00.011+02:00

Humanity + or the organization formerly known as World Transhumanist Association is looking for an executive director. The association "advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities" and supports "the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives." In other words, they are after the cyborgization of humans. Which to me is just fine and exceedingly interesting as a technocultural phenomenon. In the end, their mission doesn't appear to be essentially different from, say, modern medicine or the visions for mobile communication technology.

It seems to me though that the transhumanists (also called posthumanists) have attracted somewhat negative publicity or at least they haven't always been taken so seriously (see e.g. article in Slate). Perhaps that's why they have changed the name of their association. My hunch is that people not familiar with the association see the prefix trans in transhumanism and think it has something to do with sex change or something else transgressive and crossing borders, which of course many people abhor. In addition to the uncomfortable connotations of the prefix, maybe transhumanists are seen as people who want to turn humans into robots or something else "unnatural".

Anyhow, my thumbs are up for the ventures of transhumanists and, despite the danger of making fun of Human+ association and their fascinating agenda, I would still like to present my picks for the job as the next director in charge of expanding human capacities with technology.

Picture sources: the cartoon picture by Mark Stamaty at Slate Magazine; Arnold Schwarzennegger's Terminator at Spiral Focus; Futurama's Bender at Pop Artuk; R2D2 and Kenny Bakes (the actor inside the droid) at Star Wars Movies; Al Gore at BBC News.

Korean Ubiquitous Society Vision: abstract and lecture

2008-12-12T13:52:00.009+02:00

I finished the abstract for Culture Abound. It's titled Ubiquitous Society City - Korean Future Vision of Humans and Technology in the Urban Space. Like I discussed earlier, in the final article (deadline in May 2009) I will discuss the Korean ubiquitous society vision and the interrelation between humans and technology in an urban context in it.

Next I will do a little preparing for my lecture next week. The theme of the lecture is related to the abstract as I will talk about the role of a citizen in u-Korea. (More about my lecturing schedule.)

A rough rough draft on future Korean school ready, next on u-city

2008-12-10T15:38:00.004+02:00

I have just sent a rough draft of my manuscript on Korean ubiquitous society vision and the role of education in it to the editor and will wait for feedback. As always, I'm suffering from the acute syndrome of not having done enough but feeling happy about getting rid of the job for a while. Fortunately, I have until the end of January to make changes after hearing from the ed.

Next I will probably write an abstract to Culture Unbound, a new journal that has a special issue of The City coming up. I think I will try writing something about the city as the primus locus in the vision of ubiquitous society.

Synergy is the keyword when writing articles. One foundation of data carries a long way.

Crashing laptops, infodemics and disconnections

2008-12-08T11:06:00.012+02:00

My laptop just crashed and the PC service of our university couldn't rescue all the gigabytes of data that vanished in the air. Fortunately I have taken backup copies of most important files, so it was not a catastrophe. The service guy told me I'm among the lucky 7 % who as suspicious enough not to trust their laptops.

The curious thing is that part of me is relieved. Although I lost a lot of valuable information, like interesting articles, links, pictures and video, I'm kind of happy it's not there anymore. I will probably have to re-do many things like search for the lost articles but I will do it ad hoc, bit by bit as I come across the need for a particular piece of information.

It's old news that we live in a sea of information. Or data. Or knowledge. Whatever we want to call it, the amount of it we possess and store in our lives (in computers or filter and manage online) has grown exponentially. The problem is to get the real thing, to pick up the essential info and the significant stuff from the hurly burly.

To a techno anthropologist this brings forth a great object of research titled All the Information You Have to Deal with. An ethnography into personal data management would ask questions like how you deal with the data, what is significant information, what is fun, what is personal, what is shared (with whom). Feel free to steal the idea. Although it seems like somebody is already teaching a course about it in Indiana.

In my opinion, too much data in one's life is a sign of infodemics. However, I came across some news (read here too) about the government of S. Korea and their definition of infodemics. Like most governments of the world, Korea is worrying about its citizens being exposed to the the wrong kind of information, the stuff that gives you false conceptions of the government. This phenomenon they call infodemics, a sort of pandemic form of disinformation.

An example of infodemics was the Korean online/offline protest movement against US imported beef. The protesters feared mad cow disease but to the government it was all about anti governmental disinformation. To save the citizens from infodemics in the future the government is working on a new Cyber Defamation Law.

Tangential to my laptop crashing and infodemics is Jan Chipchase's article about opting out. Chipchase discusses how he doesn't want to be constantly located and updated in someone's network. In today's tech society he and many other people enjoy going to the pub around the corner where they are simply not in reach, and they "make a conscious effort to disconnect." Who knows, perhaps the word disconnect will be synonymous to holiday in the future - although for many today it still means little less than social disaster.

From scifi to Korean future school

2008-12-01T16:48:00.007+02:00

I don't read or watch much of it these days but still I'm a solid fan of science fiction. By scifi I don't mean so much the fantasy oriented stuff like Star Wars or The Fifth Element although they are fun to watch. To me, the real scifi is the hardcore genre represented by Contact (written by Carl Sagan) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (by Arthur C. Clarke).

In my opinion HC scifi is related to anthropology as lots of scifi literature deals with interesting sociocultural configurations albeit in an imagined location (in another planet) and/or in another time (usually the future). I also tend to get a lot of ideas and inspiration from scifi that helps me in my research. Or, could help me if I got around to develop the ideas and make them materialize on paper.

The last piece I read was Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (by Philip K. Dick, filmed as Blade Runner) that described a future society with androids used in the colonization of distant planets. That kind of future might not be so far ahead. Take a look at the BigDog robomule developed for the military by Boston Dynamics or read about the Robot Code of Ethics that is being drawn up by the S. Korean government to prevent the human abuse of robots - and vice versa.

To get to the initial point that prompted me to write this... as I posted before, I'm in the middle of writing a chapter about the school of future in Korea. In other words I'm trying to figure out what going to school will be like in 30 t0 50 years from now in Korea. Today I watched a video about Cyber Home Learning System developed in Korea. In addition to enhancing the quality of public education, the system was (and is being) built to cut down private tutoring expenses and reduce education gap.

It is widely known that Koreans are big spenders on private tutoring, and private teaching makes up a big proportion of education in general, which makes most learning in Korea to be somewhat an elite hobby. No money means half the teaching. However, the Cyber Home Learning System is meant to alleviate the problem as it is (and will be) cheaper to get the software and use the system than to pay for private tutoring.

A student would access the system at home and study by him/herself. This fits the general Korean vision of future education, emphasizing individualization and domestication of learning (see an article about it). Whether this is a desirable path or not is beside the point here. In my opinion it is just another step towards the future network society where a significantly larger proportion of our lives happens on the net. It will surely change our culture and our experience of being social - as it has already. Such interesting times for an anthropologist!

Together with the development of nanotechnology, implant hardware, virtual software, massive "googleization", cybernetics etc. the future life of a online human will be so different that contemporary scifi and transhuman visions might turn out to be hopelessly lame and conservative. Uploading, sharing and downloading consciousnesses, copy-pasting them into cybernetic organisms, creating "googles of consciousness" may be only a prelude to a way more scifi future. The sweet thing is that we have no idea.

Today, I imagined a Korean elementary school pupil of the future, hooked into a learning software in his room, downloading data about the world into his mind, meeting his friends online and perhaps a few times a month or a year actually doing something with them in "meatspace" instead of cyberspace. What will "really meeting" someone mean in the future, when almost everything is online, when we meet our friends in the future facebooks and twitters, interact with people mostly virtually. Surely this is not a new question and others also have thought if "meatspace" dates will be considered as primitive, suspicious, conservative and even less authentic.

However, the future school of Korea, the kid in his home learning center, reminded me of Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun published in 1957. In the novel there is a planet called Solaria where people are virtually hermits and don't meet each other physically. Even the idea of meeting someone face-to-face is considered as repulsive or disrupting intimacy. However, the Solarians do spend their social time chatting with the hologram representations of their friends. And when the Solarians are young, the are allowed to interact with other kids in meatspace but are given a designated location of solitude when they reach a certain age. In their own quarters they spend their time learning, working, interacting with friends in holograms and being served by robots - and panicking if they happen to really meet someone.

Asimov was pretty witty already 50 years ago.

IBM predicting the future

2008-12-01T15:16:00.004+02:00

Digitoday reported on IBM revealing five great innovations of the near future. I surfed to IBM's report published in November 25 and read about the innovations "That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years" and change the way we will "work, live and play."

The Fab 5 are:

Solar energy panels (or, film) so thin (and cheap) you can paint or print them almost everywhere.
Everyday gene analysis that will help you (and your doc) tune your habits according to your physiological strengths and weaknesses. All this for less than 200 USD.
Talking to the web and it will talk to you, so you don't have to read/write. IBM says voice recognition tech is getting better and will become hugely popular soon, especially in the developing countries -and perhaps among people too busy to type.
Digital shopping assistant helping you in the fitting room and connecting you to your social network for fashion advice.
A memorizer to record, store and analyze the "details of everyday life". It's a smart gadget with videocam and mic that will "record conversations and activities. The information collected will be automatically stored and analyzed on a personal computer."

Needless to say, solar energy is surely a smart move but as for the gene analysis innovation sparked some discussion at Digitoday as some wondered whether insurance companies and potential employers would start requiring genetic evaluations of their clients/employees. As one commentor said, it brings in mind the movie Gattaca, a dystopian view of the future when citizens are classified according to their genetics. Then again, if it can help people to live a healthier life...

The voice-orientation of IT applications is an interesting path and, from a techno-anthropologist's view, would probably bring about fascinating changes to how people relate to computers.

The digital shopping assistant didn't strike me as a huge innovation although it would be nice to have someone reliable to virtually warn me against the cool Hawaii shirt I'm about to buy. But to include it in top 5 innovation of the future is exaggeration.

A memorizer would come in handy if it was handy. If it was tiny, almost invisible and could really filter out the irrelevant data from the relevant (which I can't do) and presented it to me neatly on my PC, laptop or cell phone, then maybe I would buy one. The hackers would have loads of fun too hooking into people's memorizers.

Read the whole IBM press release here and the Digitoday article here (in Finnish).

Weekend work

2008-11-28T17:25:00.005+02:00

Now back to home to enjoy the weekend with the family. As for work, I will try to avoid it although for a technologically oriented cultural anthropologist, it's everywhere. Hopefully the maximum for me will be to read a book about robot I bought the other day. It's light enough and has a lot of pictures!

Future lectures

2008-11-28T17:04:00.004+02:00

Here's my updated schedule for lecturing:

December 17th: "The Role of the Citizen in the Korean Ubiquitous Society Vision" as a part of The World of Civil Societies lecture series at University of Jyväskylä Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
Feb-Mar, 2009: "Suomalaisuuden myytit ja symboliikka: kansakunnan kulttuurista tarkastelua [= The Myths and Symbolism of Finnishness: Cultural Analysis of a Nation]," lecture series at University of Tampere School of Modern Languages and Translation Studies
February 11th, 2009: "Korean Media Culture" as a part of the Transnational Asian Media Cultures lecture series of University of Tampere Department of Journalism and Mass Communication

Plus I'm the examiner of Indian Studies (part of Intercultural Studies) at the University of Jyväskylä Department of Communication and Language and Communication in East and Southeast Asia by the Finnish National University Network for East and Southeast Asian Studies.

What's up in my research?

2008-11-28T16:04:00.006+02:00

Hello Blogosphere!

As this is my first post in this blog, I will go on to tell about my current research activities. As a sidenote I'm happy to say that working as a post-doctoral researcher in my department has been surprisingly research-oriented. I have had enough time to concentrate on research, excluding odd cases as a lecturer.

At the moment I am working on a book chapter about the future of school in Korean ubiquitous society (read abstract here). South Korea is one of the leading IT societies of the world and has firm plans to create u-Korea, and education is, obviously, an essential part of that vision. I'm not so much writing about the tech stuff or about teaching methods per se as trying to imagine a future Neo-Confucian Korean society filled with technology and how the combination would affect the culture or the whole meaning of teaching/education.

I'm almost done with the draft and will post it here for potential comments on December 10th at the latest. Roberto Muffoletto, the editor of the volume (going with the name Breaking the Classroom Walls), has given the writers the liberty to use their imagination, so I'm glad to do something a little bit different from strict academic writing.

After exploring future Korea I'm hoping to have the time to write a manuscript for the new Journal of Global Mass Communication special issue: Media, globalization and the postcolony. I'm not exactly sure what I will write about, but I think it will have something to do with the symbolism of Japan and Korea relations, involving the rhetoric describing the colonial past.

After the New Year I will sort of continue on the same theme and start typing away a conference paper (see abstract) focusing on Dokdo, a small island in the East Sea or Sea of Japan. The Korean ownership of the island is disputed by Japan which has caused a lot of political turmoil and exchange of spicy rhetoric between the media and governments of the two countries. My plan is to study how Dokdo is used in Korean cyberspace to reconstruct Korean history and national identity for international audience.

As for the plans for spring 2009, I'm hoping to write about ubiquitous society visions, global trends in new media and, time willing, co-edit a volume about Korean new media. I'm also waiting to see my article (co-authored with Marika Paaso) titled "Finns Making Sense of Korean Hierarchy" published in the Journal of Migration and Society and a chapter titled "Keeping in Touch" (about Korean youth and their mobile comm. culture) in an edited volume published by Finnish Youth Research Society.

You can see a selected compilation of my published research here.