Tag Archives: In the Press

Looking at how the news reports on anthropology.

Who Built the Internet? Corporations! (Part 2)

Obama may have gaffed, neoliberal assistant editors at Fox News and the Republican National Committee, exploitatively edited, repurposed, and exaggerated the speech, but it was Wall Street Journal writer L. Gordon Crovitz who mistook the misedits as evidence for US executive branch internet revisionism. Crovitz, ex-publisher of the Journal, ex-executive at Dow Jones, and social media start-up entrepreneur, attacked President Obama’s statement that the internet was funded and engineered by the federal government. “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” he idiosyncratically declared. The crux of Crovitz’s argument was focused on Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPAnet, a US DAPRA project that connected computer networks to computer networks. Taylor, according to Crovitz, stated that this proto-internet, “was not an Internet.” And therefore, most importantly for Crovitz, this meant that President Obama was dead wrong, Taylor, a federal employee at this time did not help to invent the internet. The internet was not made by engineers paid by public but private hands. Crovitz’s twist on the accepted story is that Taylor later made a different internet, ethernet, at Xerox PARC where we worked after DARPA. And it was Ethernet that became the internet. Continue reading →

Peggy R. Sanday: “Why don’t some boys see it as rape?”

Anthropologist Peggy R. Sanday has a new article on CNN that discusses rape and (male) youth culture in regards to the ongoing case in Steubenville, OH.  Here’s an excerpt:

The rape case unraveling in Steubenville, Ohio, brought back memories of my own frightening experience. I didn’t know what was happening that day when the four young men began looking at me differently. I only knew that I had to get away as soon as possible.

In the Steubenville case, a girl who was incapacitated by alcohol purportedly passed out and was allegedly sexually assaulted by two young men on the high school football team while others watched.

What strikes me about the incident is that it demonstrates a split in the boy rape-prone sexual culture. Some young men continue to believe that when a girl gets drunk, staging a sexual spectacle for their mates is part of a night’s fun. They don’t think of it as rape. Some of their buddies, however, disagree. In their transition to manhood, they are able to name rape when they see it.

Read the rest of Sanday’s article here.

The Opportunistic Apocalypse

The third in a guest series about the “Mayan Apocalypse” predicted for Dec. 21, 2012.  The first two posts are here and here.

There are opportunities in the apocalypse.  The end of the world has been commodified.  A few are seriously investing in bunkers, boats, and survival supplies. Tourism is up, not only to Mayan archaeological sites, but also to places like Bugarach, France and Mt. Rtanj, Serbia.  But even those of us on a budget can afford at least a book, a T-shirt or a handbag.

There are opportunities here for academics, too. Many scholars have been quoted in the press lately saying that nothing will happen on Dec 21 , in addition to those who have written comprehensive books and articles discrediting the impending doom. Obviously publishing helps individual careers, and that does not detract from our collective responsibility to debunk ideas that might lead people to physical or financial harm.  But neither can we divorce our work from its larger social implications. Continue reading →

Hathi’s victory is good news for anthropologists (and everyone else)

I was literally doing a little victory dance in my office the other day when twitter lit up with news that HathiTrust has pw0ned the Authors Guild in a recent legal case. The nature of the case was a little arcane, but its worth learning about: basically, several of the largest and most well-libraried universities in the United States got together and had Google digitize their libraries. They then put those digitized collections up on the Internet for the use of the member libraries. If the books were in the public domain, you could download them. If they were still in copyright, you could search the full text of the collection for specific quotes, but that was it. An exception was made for the visually disabled: they could get the full text of the book in a form they could use, since the physical book wasn’t much use to them. The Authors Guild (read: the publishing industry) sued them because given the choice between making money and helping the disabled they chose, you know, making money.

I’ll leave a full analysis to the people who are experts on the case. But what’s so satisfying about the case for me personally is that it establishes an important baseline: publishers can’t sue universities for digitizing content they own. This is “transformative fair use”. The implications are broad because Hathi is, as far as I can tell, angling to push the envelope on these issues. Now that they have a huge body of digital books they can begin to chip away at them, slowly ‘turning on’ more and more books for general use. Right now they have public domain books visible, now they can start looking for ‘orphaned works’ which are out of copyright but nobody has noticed. And they can start looking for copyright holders and say “do you want the world to be able to read the book you labored over? We’ve got it all set up — we just need you to sign on the dotted line so we can flip the switch”. Its an exciting, important, and deeply ethical project. And best of all, it is now clearly, resoundingly legal.

How is this relevant to anthropology specifically? The anthropologist Jason Jackson is one of the key players in the creation of Open Folklore, the project through which folklorists are open-accessing everything they’ve ever done. And their partner? HathiTrust.

Sadly, the American Anthropological Association hasn’t been very involved in this effort. In their attempts to keep their unsustainable business model afloat, they see libraries — and, increasingly, members — as customers and not constituents. Although they have a back catalog of obscure but high-quality monographs and edited volumes, if you want to take a look at them you’ll have to visit their bookstore. I’m not sure how much money they’ll make flogging the Ward Goodenough festschrift (to name just one publication), but apparently its enough to make sure that no one will ever read it.

The Mark Regnerus Controversy & Social Science

This story first took off about a month ago, when UT Austin sociologist Mark Regnerus published the article “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.”  Regnerus also published a piece on Slate.com, in which he asks whether “it makes any difference if your parents are straight or gay.” The goal of the study was to challenge the idea that there are “no differences” between children who are raised by heterosexual parents versus those who are raised by same-sex parents.  Regnerus sums up his overall argument on Slate:

On 25 of 40 different outcomes evaluated, the children of women who’ve had same-sex relationships fare quite differently than those in stable, biologically-intact mom-and-pop families, displaying numbers more comparable to those from heterosexual stepfamilies and single parents. Even after including controls for age, race, gender, and things like being bullied as a youth, or the gay-friendliness of the state in which they live, such respondents were more apt to report being unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, had trouble with the law, report more male and female sex partners, more sexual victimization, and were more likely to reflect negatively on their childhood family life, among other things.

The basic conclusion of the study is that children who are raised by homosexual parents are “different,” and that they have more problems that kids who are raised in two parent same-sex households.  These conclusions have resulted in a storm of media controversy, a flurry of critical responses, and even an investigation into whether or not Regnerus committed ethical violations during this research. Continue reading →

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 1949-2012

Michel-Rolph Trouillot passed away a few days ago on July 5, 2012.  Anthropology Report, edited by Jason Antrosio, has a page dedicated to tributes, memorials, and news about his passing.  Another page on the site has a nice bibliography of Trouillot’s work.  Antrosio has another must-read piece over at Living Anthropologically called The Headline We Should be Reading: Anthropology Changed Everything.  Some very strong points about the current state of affairs in anthropology today.  Antrosio wonders why, for starters, there has been relative silence among the anthropological community about the passing of Trouillot:

My sense is that it has a lot to do with timing–some of the leaders in the American Anthropological Association are attending international conferences but have promised a posting soon. Once the AAA gets the ball rolling, we should see more. So, although I am puzzled by a lack of postings on anthropology blogs–I’ve seen tributes mostly from archaeology, history, and Haitian sources–there will surely be due commemoration in its time. The larger issue is why we don’t read headlines about Trouillot and how anthropology changed everything.

That is the big question.  Why aren’t we reading about the impacts of Trouillot’s life and work in broader media outlets?  Definitely take the time to read that post.  I’m interested to hear what some of you think about this.

Also, if you have any comments, thoughts, or links about this news, please feel free to post them here.

Hat tip: thanks to SM reader CarlosFM for bringing this to my attention.  Much appreciated.

Screw the transit of Venus

I mean who cares. Honestly: it’s completely unconnected to anything that really matters to us. Phenomenologically its one of the most boring experiences one can have, and you can’t even see it without special gear. Am I the only one who thinks the emperor has no clothes on this one?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m amazed and gratified to see there is a culture out there that can invest so much meaning out of so little — I am, after all, an anthropologist. And I only begrudge the astronomers their massive funding a little bit. What really bothers me is the screwed up priorities that make this sort of thing a media spectacle. 

I understand that astronomers are deeply personally committed to goals which most people find incomprehensible and not worthwhile — all academics suffer from this problem. I understand that moving science forward is important and that there is, somewhere, down the road something useful that comes from much of the basic research that astronomers do. And I understand that we need science education that explains to people why this stuff is important and they should continue funding it. 

But often this validation of disciplines like astronomy is made by delegitimizing disciplines like — wait for it — anthropology, which deal with topics which are extremely value relevant to most people. Hiding behind the transit of venus is a glorification of ‘hard science’ which goes hand in hand with the dismissal of the ‘soft’. Riding alongside it is media coverage telling people to spend a portion of their day thinking about the stars rather than whether austerity will actually lead to economic growth.

Anthropology is not like the dream of perfect pure knowledge that so many people aspire to (bench science isn’t either, but that’s another story). We just produce another kind of knowledge about things that matter here, today, and now to people. The transit of Venus will not come again in your lifetime. Neither will your child’s birthday, or the invasion of Iraq. These are the things that have concrete effects on our lives and matter deeply to us. Anthropologists study these moments because they matter — something that other scientists, socialized to pursue more remote goals, somehow look down on us for. I’ll never understand them and, apparently, vice versa.

I admit there’s a fair amount of ressentiment in this post, and maybe the astronomers out there will complain that social issues already get way more coverage than astronomical data. But just think: what if people took the time they spent observing the transit of venus and spent it learning about income inequality in their home town? Or if they learned about a place radically different from their home town? Or if they tried to figure out whether tax cuts do or do not stimulate the economy? Or if they took their photo album off their shelf, sat down with their children, and sharing their family history? 

Social issues get covered widely in the media, it’s true. But social science often does not. And the disciplines that hit closest to home, the ethnographic ones, don’t deserve to be bumbled off the radar by the frickin’ transit of Venus.

Ok I’m done venting. I feel better now. 

Silos of Casino Capitalism

Something called a “silo” kept cropping up in my field research with media reform broadcasters throughout 2012. At the National Conference of Media Reform in 2011 I attended a panel, “Getting Out of the Silo: Editing Video as a Community.” The organizer told me she was “looking to create an intersectional narrative of collaboration” with the panelists. “We are all living in our little silos,” said the general manager of a small television news network explaining how a possible partner rejected his overture for collaboration. Its “the silophication of the company,” said a vice president of a television news network of the process by which internet, television, and marketing divisions were not well-integrated while taking different approaches to the same product.

What is a Silo?

Silophication is most actively theorized by a person who straddles anthropology, global finance, and journalism: Dr. Gillian Tett, a Cambridge trained anthropologist and US managing editor of the Financial Times. Below I build theory through  categorizing Tett’s use of the term silophication in her financial journalism critical of how regulator’s and banker’s silophication led to an absence of information sharing and the presence of a global financial crisis. Continue reading →

When the guiltiest guy in the room, is the room

This one is a shout out to David Weinberger, who I stole the title from.

Is Obama inappropriately receiving credit for killing Osama bin Laden? Given the upcoming presidential election it is a question that might be asked for longer than one news cycle. As someone who tries to keep from plunging his head too deeply into the endless torrent of opinion that is the blogosphere, I have to admit that I haven’t fully probed the variety of answers that people are asking here. But as an anthropologist I do want to comment briefly on what anthropology might have to add to this debate.

Continue reading →

Spike TV & National Geographic: Glorifying Looting

And now for some news on the archaeology and stupid-TV-show-ideas front.  Total #NationalGeographicFAIL and #SpikeTVFail at the same time.  A double whammy of bad ideas.  Several of my archaeology colleagues at the University of Kentucky have been talking about the recent news that Spike TV and National Geographic are planning two new shows that basically glorify outright looting.  Grad students are passing around the link to this online petition: “Stop Spike TV from looting our collective past!”  Archaeologists (and plenty of others) are rightly up in arms about this.  Michael E. Smith over at Publishing Archaeology has a new post that discusses some of the details:

SAA and other groups, such as SHA, have already prepared and sent strong letters condemning both of these programs to the production companies, networks, and others. Copies of the SAA letters can be found on the SAA website (http://bit.ly/w2MHJM, and http://bit.ly/wzT7IA). The letters provide details on why we are so concerned. Up to this point Spike TV has not responded to the public outcry. Leadership of National Geographic, however, has indicated that, while they are unable to stop the showing tomorrow on such short notice, they will place a disclaimer into the show that speaks to laws protecting archaeological and historic sites.

Read the rest of the post.  While I’m not really surprised that Spike TV is doing something like this, the fact that the folks at Nat Geo even considered this is ridiculous.  If you have updates about this, please share in the comments section.  Thanks to the U of Kentucky grad students, Michael, and everyone else for working to get the word out about this issue.  Definitely no time to be passive when it comes to archaeological, historical, and cultural heritage.

Mac McClelland (Mother Jones) on being a “Warehouse Wage Slave”

This is the kind of investigative journalism that I find extremely relevant.  Have you ever bought books or anything else from online distributors?  Ever stopped to really think about how that product you ordered actually makes it to your doorstep so rapidly, and at such a low price?  Journalist Mac McClelland has a new article over at Mother Jones where she does a little digging into the inner-workings and conditions of “Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.” (not the real name of the company), which is a large-scale online distributor.  Her first hand descriptions and experiences remind me of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle–although the jungle she explores isn’t filled with the horrors of meatpacking, it’s congested with long hours, brutal time constraints, low wages, and, well, other strange things that people buy online and want shipped to them as soon as possible (read it to find out).  Here’s a poignant selection where McClelland critically questions the reasons behind these conditions:

As if Amalgamated couldn’t bear to lose a fraction of a percent of profits by employing a few more than the absolute minimum of bodies they have to, or by storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles. But that would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere. Charging for shipping does cause high abandonment rates of online orders, though it’s not clear whether people wouldn’t pay a few bucks for shipping, or a bit more for the products, if they were guaranteed that no low-income workers would be tortured or exploited in the handling of their purchases.

Is it anthropology?  Does that question even matter?  I think there is plenty of relevance here.  The article is worth a read.  But, in regards to anthropology, this article has me wondering whether or not there are anthropologists out there exploring similar issues.  If so, who?  If not, why not?  Another example of a pervasive, everyday issue that anthropologists are in a good position to thoroughly explore.  McClelland’s narrative and discussion is based upon a relatively short stint with the company, and I’d be interested to hear about similar projects, as well as others that are based upon longer-term experience.  Anyway, if any of you Savage Minds out there know of related work, let me know about it in the comments section.  Or, let me know what you think about McClelland’s investigation and article.