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My goals for this blog!

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As I stated in my last entry, I am no authority on this subject. I am just very passionate about it and am eager to find any and all information out there relating to it or correlating it with other media studies being done in association with the internet. What I have found in my search for information on cyber anthropology is that everything is very scattered or has become stagnant. I always find myself disappointed when I find a promising link to information and find that it was last updated over 10 years ago.

I have also found that (please correct me if I am wrong) there is no definitive authority on cyber anthropology, no end all be all source where one can find studies pertaining to it or research completed on it. Even pages with lists of journals and such have several links that are out of date or otherwise dead. The goal of this blog is to stay active and at some point compile a compendium of current and past studies, be an instigator for new studies, gain opinions and insight from those who are also interested in it or have some authority in the field while at the same time serve as a place where I can hash out my own thoughts, ideas and opinions. While I don’t necessarily think of myself as a pioneer here, I do hope this blog becomes a kind of torch to keep the study active and current and perhaps light the way for more cohesive and collective study in the field.

One last goal is that I’d like to present all of this in a way that it is interesting to people both in and outside of academia. I want it to be accessible by everyone and applicable by all who can find ways to apply it. I’d like to find ways to translate the stiff college writing and peer reviewed articles to the gamer, blogger, and social-networker, while at the same time providing academia with a link to their thoughts and opinions on what’s being written about them. In addition to that, I would love to be involved in finding ways both academia and its research subjects can apply the research being carried out.

I suppose these are pretty lofty goals and will take lots of time, patience, and tenacity to carry them all out. What would please me most is for this blog to generate a community of gamers, bloggers, social-networkers, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnographers, students, professors, researchers and the like who are all interested in the study and application of cyber anthropology. At the moment, other than starting my new position tomorrow as an information architect and continuing my studies in grad school in applied anthropology, nothing excites me more than looking for ways to make this happen.

What is Cyber Anthropology?

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What is cyber anthropology? A short definition I came up with is the study of online culture and culture online. However, I like to take “online” a step further than just computers connecting to the Internet and instead consider any means of communication that is handled over a network. This can mean what we traditionally call the Internet, as well as things like Xbox live, Playstation online, networking between handhelds, and even the ways you connect through your mobile phone. Anyway you can connect with one or more people in a non face-to-face (f2f) way I consider a means of communicating online. I simply refer the term online culture as a way to encompass all of this. Online culture has its own set of learned beliefs, values, and behaviors, which distinguishes itself from “offline” culture and is why I set online culture apart from studying culture online.

When I refer to studying culture online, I mean studying cultures that exist offline in their online context or in relating to things online. Just a smattering of things I can think off the top of my head that I would be interested in: How do different demographics of people use the Internet? How do people from different cultural backgrounds connect to others and with each other online? How does the introduction of the internet effect developing countries? How does government control effect how the Chinese view the Internet? How does Russia and South Korea handle online piracy and why is it so common there? How do cyber laws affect people in the US as well as all over the globe? What is the culture that surrounds Internet cafes is Japan? How does all of this effect online culture in general? I could go on and on.

My Masters studies being in Applied Anthropology, I am also interested in how to apply studies dealing with the Internet to real life problems. A couple of examples here the application of online gaming as a means of education and a teaching tool to students of foreign language or those with reading and comprehension difficulties, as well as how using mouse and eye tracking software we can make web sites more accessible to people with disabilities or different levels of computer knowledge.

What I love most about the study of things in any online context is how dynamic, fast paced, and ever changing everything is. There is always something new and they run the gamut from humor like lolcats or networking like Twitter. Even if these two things persist in the coming months they will not be the same a year from now as they are today. They will have to evolve to keep up with advances in technology, current events, and the ever-present ever-increasing competition to be viable in the future.

This is somewhat of a relatively new field when it comes to anthropology, but it has been a research topic ethnography since the Internet burst onto the scene. So while online ethnography is not new, I believe the concept of cyber anthropology, especially as I have tried to somewhat define it here, is still emerging. It is something I am very passionate about and I hope that comes through in my writing. I am more a student than an authority on anything I publish here and I welcome any and all input on the ideas I set forth in this blog. So please feel free let me know what you think!

A Recycled Experiment

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Do you like my theme? Feel free to download it and use it on your own WordPress site. By doing so you agree to participate in Recycled Research. Curious yet? I chose this theme for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I like the way you can customize it as it comes with different layouts and skins built in. Secondly, I love the idea behind this research.

By navigating on this site you are sending back data on how you use it via your mouse coordinates. From an anthropological stand point I’m interested in the fact that it shows how users use the tools provided to them. I think it would be fascinating to take different demographics of people, sit them all in front of a site using this software and see how each group differs. By adding participant observation to this utility, we will not only get a real readout of what is happening on the site, but also quantitative data on what else is grabbing the users attention, what their thoughts are, and how they use the physical tools provided to them as they interact with the virtual tools on the screen. All of this put together can assist interaction designers in making a highly valuable user experience.

This information can not only be used to make a well designed site, but also allows designers to design sites to meet the needs for all levels of users. In the future, sites could change over time to better suit your user level and habits allowing you a more customized user experience. The benefit here is especially evident when it comes to accessibility. For example, if someone has a hard time seeing things and thus misses a button each time they go to click on it because it is too small, then the code behind the site can make the button larger or move it a little to one side or the other based on that particular habit.

Imagine a site that allows you to teach it instead of it expecting to have to teach you!

The best part of this research experiment you can participate via a learning license and the data is freely available to the public!

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