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Made by
Frank Verner Grøn
Martin Smidt Kristensen
Peter Hejlesen
Toke Jeberg
Anthropology of cyberspace
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The anthropology of and in cyberspace or cyberanthropology is a minor subbranch of sociocultural anthropology that deals with cybernetic systems, the culturally informed interrelationships between human beings and technologies. These interrelationships include the attempts to fuse technological artifacts with human and other biological organisms, with human society, and with the culturally shaped environment. In the wake of recent discourses growing around metaphors like globalization and information age/information society especially Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) move into cyber anthropology's focus. The complex 'human beings, anthropologists and ICTs' unfolds its relevance for sociocultural anthropology inside the following three main sectors: ICTs as tools for sociocultural anthropologists both in teaching and research. The spectrum reaches from using a personal computer as a typewriter, using and/or generating online-databases and -catalogues, communicating with colleagues and peers via Internet-services, to keeping in touch with informants online, and the theory-based generation of new forms of representation for anthropological knowledge. The latter should especially profit by the 'writing culture' debate and visual anthropology. ICTs in the field. The sociocultural anthropological observation, analysis and interpretation of the consequences of the introduction of ICTs into specific societies and/or groups. (It has to be emphasized that this comprises the whole world, and not "just those" in the traditional field of the discipline, but does not exclude "them" as well.) Concepts like 'cultural appropriation of technology' and 'ethnography of work' seem to be indispensable for this task. 'Cyberspace' as field. The sociocultural anthropological observation, analysis and interpretation of the sociocultural phenomena springing up and taking place in the interactive 'space' ('cyberspace') generated by (computer-) mediated communication (CMC), the Internet-infrastructure and ICTs at large. This comprises national and transnational online-groups, but also movements like e.g. 'Open Source' and the according societal, economical, and juridical issues and problems. To which degree the three sectors become mutually influential or even inseparable, depends on the specific research projects, the involved methods and the specific desiderata of understanding.