Session 6: Technology, Community & Anthropology

5th Global Conference

Sunday 11th July 2010 – Tuesday 13th July 2010
Mansfield College, Oxford

Swarm, Wikinomics and Design: Anthropological Analysis of Knowledge Interfaces
Michal Derda-Nowakowski
University of Lodz, Poland

The paper analyses problems connected with the anthropological base of content and information channels creation, with the special regard to user acting in new media environment. Author addresses the issues concerning the role of community in creating new types of knowledge. Wikinomics as the base of knowledge construction became a new indicator for construction of economic models. Concepts connected with wikinomics may be traced in XIXth century European science. The fundaments are to be found in discourse of natural sciences and in theory of evolution as well as in biological models of society. The paper concentrates on the model of swarm as productive system of meanings creation, which is present in contemporary design, organic programming, in ‘the long tail’, and in relations between the producers and the active users.

The issues of wikinomics and swarm as a cognitive model are found by the author also in the area of robotics and artificial intelligence. The webness of knowledge and the mode of interaction with interface and social interactions are today among the most explored areas of design. Without hesitation, it is aslo the problem of sociotechnics and potential dominance of certain types of experiences with interface. The control and creation of interactions of the individual and the group activities of wikinomic type are today the object of interests of corporations and governments. New media design becomes a space of argument about the suvereneity of an individual, its role in society and the meaning of freedom. Wikimodel of society and the swarm as a technological model refer to the discourse of natural sciences and use communication solutions present in animal communities. The research in natural sciences and design are redefining more and more the meaning and methods of humanities. Cultural phenomena have to be detemined nowadays by technology.

Mission to Earth: Planetary Proprioception and the Cyber-Sublime
Ksenia Fedorova
Ural State University, National Center for Contemporary Arts, Ekaterinburg, Russia

Indigenous cultures believed that the body and selfhood were co-exstensive with the natural environment. Neuromancer’s cyber-shaman jacks into an expanded virtual body that roams the filaments of the Web as intimately as an unenhanced mind spans its own axons.

Could a cyber-enhanced collective self undertake a “Mission to Earth” by extending proprioception through positive feedback loops to the “skin” of the planet itself? One social art project proposed by the treeplanting charity Green World Campaign involves mass participation in funding the planting of trees on geotagged degraded land in the developing world.

Kiva.org demonstrated that users will reach out and touch poor people in faraway cultures with life-changing microloans, transforming their felt sense of co-extensivity with other selves in whose lives they have cyber-mediated agency. How can that sense of agency and efficacy– which derives in the physiological body through sensory feedback– be constituted by feedback loops from virtual actions whose efficacy is visually perceived in the form of geotagged icons of actual trees appearing on a dynamically changing map?

Our quotidien sense of self is created in part through our constantly altering “mapping” of the environment and our dynamic relationship to our surroundings through proprioceptive feedback. But now our immediate surroundings are the planet itself. Could a new subjective map of the “global body” emerge from the Web-enabled “hive mind” that, through the emergent properties of ever faster interconnective complexity, learns to self-heal and maintain homeostasis?

The experience of “the sublime” involves the decentering, dislocation, and disruption of conventional proprioceptive cues delineating the boundaries of the body, challenging the reliability of ordinary senses for locating one’s subjective and objective “self.”

With our present civilization threatened by possibly terminal environmental crisis, our conventional sense of the body is inadequate for meeting the insults to the global corpus. An intimately felt sense of the sublime is not an aesthetic luxury, but a sine qua non for common survival. Can the transformative potential of the Web be harnessed for more than cyberpetition activism to instantiating verifiable, visible (eventually by satellite eyes) neg-entropic alterations in the body of Nature in which humanity is an integral, wild-card component?

Intelligent Shoes, Smart Teeth and Lunch with Cyborg: Anthropological Reflections on the Change of Communication Paradigm
Anna Maj
Uniwersytet Slaski w Katowicach, Poland

The paper analyses the change of communication paradigm caused by digital technologies, espe-cially networked, mobile and intelligent devices, assistive technologies, supporting communication systems, prostheses and chips. The important questions raised by cyberculture and cyborgisation are discussed and shown here on examples in the context of media anthropology and cultural studies. They concern the nature of biological and artificial intelligence, digital life and death, the problems of perception and cognition in digital environment, ubiquitous and instant interconnectedness (con-nected intelligence and webness), the question and consequences of the process of merging of na-ture and technology, and the convergence of the real and the virtual as well as its incorporation into acting body.

Author’s approach stems from technological determinism but covers as well traditional anthropo-logical analysis. Examples used in the paper are selected from the areas of biomedia, digital and cyborg art, bioengineering, assistive technologies design, human-computer interaction research and anthropological analysis of cybercommunities. Several communication models are proposed in or-der to enable description of cognitive and interaction aspects of new situations of cyborg communi-cation (cyborg-to-cyborg, cyborg-to-objects and human-to-cyborg) as well as situations of ubiqui-tous networked communication.

University of Lodz