↑Gamer br [46:50min | .avi | 147.3MB] by Pedro Bayeux and Flavio Soares  is a Brazilian documentary about the game scene around here. It gives voice to gamers, producers, lanhouse owners, journalists, psychologists, anthropologists, politicians, government representatives and game enthusiasts about questions as professional gaming, market, ‘addiction’, piracy, policies of incentive, censorship and the so discussed ‘violence’ in games. [my emphasis] And finally it builds up to a very sensible discussion of ‘the virtual’. All in all I take Gamer br to be a kind of ethnological documentary. Just for the flavor, here are some snippets from the English … Continue reading →

kulturwissenschaftliche technikforschung and cyberanthropology    Since quite a time [the first entry is dated 25 May 2005] there is a weblog called ↑Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung published by the ↑Institut für Volkskunde of Hamburg University. The blog’s ↑about is quite enlightening, but unfortunately in German only. The about’s main arguments are culled from the ↑startpage of the Forschungskolleg Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung‘s website. There’s an English version, too, and I take the liberty to quote from it extensively, especially as I second every argument given:  […] “Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung” deals with the question of how—that is, in which ways and with which consequences—, but also … Continue reading →

Call it vanity, utilitarian pragmatism, idealism, or anything in-between—the full spectrum is ready to be used for your judgement. Via the ↑Anthropological fields and subfields section of ↑Wikipedia’s article on anthropology I stumbled over the article ↑Cyber anthropology, which then only consisted of one sentence: “Cyber Anthropology is supposedly a field of Anthropology dealing primarily with computers in human society.”—but the article already had a horrific history of revisions and changes. Once it read: “Cyber Anthropology is different from the other fields of Anthropology because it has to do with the finding and searching of information using computers, rather than … Continue reading →