My cyberian tribe’s limbo has been enlarged by the emergence of the new website ↑AlanWAKECentral.com … Style and usability looks very much like ↑AlanWAKE.Net [wtf?] Anyway, I immediately registered and am one of the earliest members now ;-) via entry at AlanWAKE.Net … Continue reading
↑Edward Castronova, who rose to fame with his ↑Virtual worlds: A first hand account of market and society on the cyberian frontier (↵Castronova 2001—see also ↵Castronova 2003 and ↑terra nova) has written his first full-length monograph [↑Overview]: ↑CASTRONOVA, EDWARD. 2005. Synthetic worlds: the business and culture of online games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. via entry at digital genres … Continue reading
↑Mizuko Ito [↵keitai-scholar and sister of blogosphere-legend ↑Joi Ito] introduces us to ↑Otaku Media Literacy—if one would replace ‘anime otaku’ by ‘gamemodders’ and add one or two adjustments, her text still would be ‘the truth’. Here’s an excerpt: ↑[…] Overseas anime otaku—fans of Japanese anime—represent an emergent form of media literacy that, though still marginal, is becoming increasingly pervasive among a rising generation. Anime otaku are media connoisseurs, activist prosumers who seek out esoteric content from a far away land and organize their social lives around viewing, interpreting, and remixing these media works. Otaku translate and subtitle all major anime … Continue reading
Yesterday night Stephen Hawking—being on promotion tour for his new book—was guest at a late night show on German national TV. I watched some ten minutes of the show and the way Professor Hawking was presented decidedly reminded me of ↑Professor [Charles] X[avier], the founder / mentor / leader of the ↑X-Men. Then this morning I took my usual stroll to the tramway station. Close to the station there’s an array of newspaper vending boxes placed on the sidewalk, every box prominently displaying today’s frontpage. The frontpage of Germany’s largest tabloid “Bild” [Picture] today is filled with a blue-marble … Continue reading
Nice article on speedruns at SpOn: ↑Speedrun: Spiel auf Zeit [in German. As usual with issues like that, the Wikipedia-entry ↑Speedrun is more comprehensive.] Goes well with ↵speed runs, ↵piling up, and ↵appropriation by mastership. via entry at hinterding … Continue reading
The ↑2005 installment of the biannual Conference of the German Anthropological Association (GAA aka DGV) is over and I am well back in Munich. My ↵cyberanthropology workshop now is history—it went well, and from all I heard till now it was very well received, too [Or is it my intimidating personality that no one dares to tell me negative criticism?.] A big Thank You! to everybody who presented a paper in the workshop, and also thanks very much! to everybody who sat in the audience. I enjoyed the interesting questions and the lively discussions very much. My apologies to everybody … Continue reading
The Japanese term for mobile phone, keitai (roughly translated as “something you carry with you”), evokes not technical capability or freedom of movement but intimacy and portability, defining a personal accessory that allows constant social connection. Japan’s enthusiastic engagement with mobile technology has become—along with anime, manga, and sushi—part of its trendsetting popular culture. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian, the first book-length English-language treatment of mobile communication use in Japan, covers the transformation of keitai from business tool to personal device for communication and play. The essays in this groundbreaking collection document the emergence, incorporation, and domestication of mobile communications … Continue reading
↑Frauke Lehmann, who will give a ↵presentation at my ↵cyberanthropology workshop, has put her M.A.-thesis (↵Lehmann 2004a) online under a CC-licence. The thesis is called ↑Entwickler Freier Software als soziale Formation [in German | .pdf | 873KB] and an English-language derivate of it (↵Lehmann 2004b) has been published at ↑First Monday: ↑FLOSS developers as a social formation. Here’s the abstract: Developers of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) are often referred to as a community or as a scene. But so far this seems mostly just a rough expression. This paper takes a closer look at FLOSS developers and their … Continue reading