Let NaBloPoMo begin…

National Blog Posting Month … posting every day for a month.  Every day.  EeGad.

New beginnings

The blogging hiatus is over.  After finishing the Anth213 class in June I put my studies on hold for a few months (without much in the way of signposting here) while I moved to Switzerland with my partner.  Taking some time off seemed like a good idea – the countdown clock to the finishline would be put on hold, I could have a few months to focus on learning a new language, and I could even fit in a trip to see my new niece.

The problem is now that I’ve come back to the project I don’t remember exactly what I was doing.  My proposal is out of date, my reading has veered off into other directions, and my online contacts, well, some of them aren’t even online anymore. I even forgot the password to my blog.  I’m not exactly starting over, but I’ve definitely been retracing my steps the past couple of weeks…and I’m still not sure exactly where they are leading.  Ok, so I lost my sense of direction during the break – it could have been worse.  I could have lost my luggage.

In other news, Lorenz has a quick summary of the Digital Anthropology Report, a study focussed on how British people use the internet.

The whole report by Talk Talk, a British communication company is here.

Reason for distraction

This is a sticky post – scroll down for the most recent post.

This blog hasn’t been getting much of my attention lately.   I’ve been given my first chance to lecture for an actual classs – it’s an anthropology class on Ritual in the Modern World, so I’ve been a bit distracted with writing lectures and grading.  I’ll be returning my attention to this blog when the semester winds down.  The Anth class has been doing an incredible job of blogging about their readings and their research along the way – this is the first experience with blogging most of the students have had.  You can follow us on www.netvibes.com/anth213 and on the blog I started for the course – RitualBlogging.

Blog personality?

Less surprising than being told that my blog was written by a man, but still creepy is Typealyzer.  It personality types your blog, Myers-Briggs style.  Mine was INTP, The Thinkers:

“The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.”

I’m with Alex in wondering how they got that from my blog.

Adam Reed wrote an article in 2005, ‘My Blog Is Me’, where he explains that blogging, unlike other forms of text production, is an activity that is “explicitly concerned with substituting texts for persons.”  Apparently this isn’t the case for Typealyzer–it states “writing style on a blog may have little or nothing to do with a person´s self-perceived personality.”  True in my case–I’m not INTP, but I know that some of my personality seeps into this blog.  So, it’s not ‘My blog is me’, but ‘My blog is an extension of a part of me’ which, in spite of the title, is what Reed describes throughout the article.  The more qualified title isn’t quite as catchy, though.

Work referred to in post:

Reed, Adam 2005 ‘My Blog Is Me’: Texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and Anthropology).  Ethnos 70(2):220-242.

My virtual neighbourhood

Google’s street view just came out in New Zealand.  I spent far too much time wandering the streets of my neighbourhood, spinning 360degrees—nothing very exciting to see, really.  I haven’t come across any of the unfortunate or weird scenes that have been reported when street view has been launched in other locales.  There is one thing that is noticeable through its absence–where is Blanket Man?  I walk by him at least twice a day regardless of the weather.  Yet I can’t find him on street view.

I wrote here about the distinction between virtual worlds and the actual world, and how the distinction between the two is primarily methodological.  If there is any sort of boundary between the two, it is a very fluid and permeable one.  I’ve looked at plenty of cities via google’s street view, but it is a different experience to see your own city and your own street captured and recreated online.  My actual world became virtual… OK, not a virtual world, but a virtual representation of my everyday world.  That notion of having a boundary at all eroded a bit more for me today.

Endnote spurned

Maybe I’ve been shoe-gazing or was just late to the rally.  It took me a while to notice the calls to boycott Endnote specifically and Thomson Reuters products more generally, but now I’m hearing them loud and clear. In varying tones of disgust and disappointment they are here here here & here.

The good news on the subject is that Dan Cohen, one of the fellows behind Zotero, still has the time to attend conferences in spite of a lawsuit nipping at his heels.  If James Grimmelmann is correct, then perhaps Cohen and his fellows at the Center for New Media and History won’t have much to worry about.  However, according to Michael Feldstein the lawsuit might have some merit.  The crucial issue revolves around Endnote’s styles and the way they can be imported by Zotero.  At this point I get lost on the details, not really understanding the ins and outs of programing code, etc.  Something that did grab my attention was an update on DLTJ.  The Thomson Reuters quote is in the first paragraph, followed by the DLTJ comment:

Following that link to Endnote export styles [link] you end up on a page containing the following words: “EndNote output styles are provided solely for use by licensed owners of EndNote and with the EndNote product.”

What’s interesting is the fact that this sentence was recently (within the last 8 months) added to the site. The January 13th snapshot of that page in the Wayback Machine doesn’t have that sentence. I wonder when it was added. In both cases (the current page and the Wayback Machine snapshot), the note at the bottom says “This page was last modified on: November 4, 2005″ — I would disagree.

Ooh, I like a good conspiracy.  I don’t like playing dirty though.  Either way, this is just one tiny detail. The bigger issue is what is at stake in terms of the kind of scholarship academics are able to pursue online and the methods that are available to them in this pursuit.

Or as Catriona at Circulating Library writes,

“And in the case of EndNote as opposed to Zotero, it’s dangerous to allow a commercially driven company to determine not only what type of bibliographical tool suits academics but also whether or not those tools should be used to foster collegiality.”

That sums it up nicely.

BOOM fest blunders & the impact of ‘No Impact Man’

I had high hopes for the BOOM festival, especially after pouring over the website. I arrived at the festival intrigued by the idea that 30,000 people can live together sustainably for one week. I left the festival feeling a bit deflated. I had a great time, but the sustainable living didn’t quite pan out.

BOOM has a decade-long history as a music festival and has been moving towards recreating itself as a sustainable festival year by year during this time. It has also moved beyond being just a music festival. The focus this year was on harmony, consciousness raising and education, and it probably goes without saying, some consciousness altering. I think, despite all the efforts of the organisers, its history as a psy-trance festival overshadowed its efforts at reincarnating itself as part of the broader sustainability movement.

The website highlights some of their sustainability initiatives like the composting toilets, recycling vegetable oil to run the generators, and collecting waste water.

The entire week was premised on the idea of creating a sustainable village, a temporary city that could be erected and then removed without leaving a mark on the environment. This is the ideal picture the website paints. What actually happened was that people got too fucked up to use the toilets correctly, left their litter all over the grounds, and let chemical soaps leach into the soil when they bathed at the water taps.

This brings me to the point of this post: the chasm between the ideal and the actual, and the ways online and offline efforts relate to each other to bridge this chasm. My research focuses on blogging about sustainability, and looks at the relationship between text and the world. That’s very vague, I know. But my experience with the BOOM website, and then the festival itself raises questions about the ways text operates differently on websites and blogs.

I’m thinking specifically of a few posts on No Impact Man’s blog. He blogged about a less than ideal encounter he recently had with a New York Senator. No Impact Man was biking and the Senator was driving. You can imagine where this story is heading: car nearly squashes biker, biker informs car of his life flashing before his eyes, driver gives biker the finger and a few curt words as a parting gift.

No Impact Man writes an open letter to the Senator and posts it on his blog, asking the readers to call the Senator’s office to request a meeting with No Impact Man to discuss safer streets for cyclists. The campaign is a success. It only takes the Senator one day to agree to a meeting, and his office has to call No Impact Man to request that the phone calls are curtailed.

Three days later, No Impact Man has discovered that many of the people who rang the Senator’s office were nasty to the secretary. His post is inquisitive and remarks on the effects peoples’ words have on the world.

Today, No Impact Man has posted a question: why did the story about the Senator resonate so strongly with people that it made them take action. According to him, the post went viral: “Twenty thousand visitors read the post that day, many sites reposted it, and over 100 blogs linked to it. Most importantly, 100s of people from across the country and even the world phoned Senator Klein’s office to support my request for a meeting.”

No Impact Man’s text, his initial blog post, told a simple story that got enveloped by a larger tale, one that (at current count) spans across four blog posts and hundreds of comments by readers. His question in the most recent post, Why?, echoes my questions about blogging. What is it about the texts that appear on blogs that resonates with people and keeps them reading, and what do they take with them into their daily lives?

The fundamentals of blogging, which I am just beginning to appreciate, are implicated in this.  It is the participatory level, and the ability to be present in the same virtual space at different times which distinguish blogging from other forms of text creation. But it is also the combination of a specific technology, the internet, with this specific form of text creation that makes it so compelling and effective. And yet, this method of creating text and presenting it to the doesn’t have the same effect from a website. BOOM’s focus on sustainability didn’t translate into sustainable festival-goers. No Impact Man’s blog post did translate into a meeting with the NY Senator.

While websites and blogs exist in a virtual space, they refer to events that take place in the actual world. For websites like BOOM the gap between this virtual space and the actual world (I should say that I’m using these terms as a shorthand, not that I believe these are two entirely separate spheres of existence) seems to mirror the gap between the ideal and the actual. The opposite seems true for blogs like No Impact Man. It manages to bring notions of the ideal (safe NYC streets for cyclists) and the actual (near death experiences) together in a space that interpenetrates the virtual and actual worlds.

The gap between the ideal and the actual is a disjuncture that everyone experiences, and anthropology has a long history of discussing it, especially in terms of conducting fieldwork. I guess this post is just the first step in getting my head around what this disjuncture means in terms of my fieldwork.

Bad bad blogger

I’ve been a bad bad blogger.  I’ve taken a holiday and been slow to return.  In hindsight, I should have started this blog after my holiday.  Then there wouldn’t have been this awkward gap.  Anyway, I was in Portugal for a sustainable music festival, BOOM (more on that experience tomorrow), and then visited some friends in Holland, and now I’m back and tying up loose ends in my proposal.

I am starting the fieldwork period tomorrow, which means lots of time spent on my blog and other blogs. I’m looking forward to it, albeit in a strange way.  I am a bit confused about how to create a presence online, so that is what I’ll be working on first.  Right now I’m sending out requests to sustainability bloggers to participate in my research.  No Impact Man has graciously agreed already.  Thanks!

PS:  Its OneWebDay.  Be active, or at the very least visit the site.  I’ve spent the day getting people to check out new blogs, but also spreading the word about one of my favourites, Citizen Reporter.  Check it out.

Seeing what condition my condition is in

I’m presenting a seminar to my faculty tomorrow, and this image from Jessica Hagy’s site has, very helpfully, made me laugh.