amateur anthropologist

xirdalium Posted on by

William Gibson
… and he ↵said it again. Here’s an excerpt from a recent round of ↑Q&A with William Gibson:
 

Question: On more philosophical and complicated themes. You are an artist, a creator, but more: you are through your writing an influencer, a shaper of technology, of society itself. Does that scare you?
Answer: I don’t actually buy that, the mighty thunderer and shaper of technology thing. I think I’m more of an interpreter of technologies, an amateur anthropologist. I’m a sort of Victorian weekend naturalist of technology, who somehow found a way to make a living doing that (and a bunch of other things at the same time).
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cybermind

xirdalium Posted on by
↑MARSHALL, JONATHAN PAUL. 2007. Living on cybermind: Categories, communication, and control. New York: Peter Lang.
 

Cybermind is an Internet mailing list, originally founded in 1994 to discuss the issues and problems of living online. It proved exceptionally fertile and is still going strong thirteen years later.
 
    This book is an ethnographic investigation which follows Cybermind members in their daily lives on the List, and explores the ways they look at the world, argue, relate online life to offline life, use gender, and build community. Perhaps the most comprehensive history of an Internet group ever published, it includes detailed analyses using List members’ own words and commentary, and develops a unique theory of the relationship between culture, the problems of communication, and the ongoing processes of categorisation. Living on Cybermind illustrates how behaviour is affected by the organisation of communication, and how people deal with the paradoxes involved in resolving ambiguity and truth in a situation in which presence is always on the verge of slipping away.

At the moment I am writing a review of Marshall’s book— the German anthropological journal “↑Anthropos“ has asked me for it, and the deadline dawns. It is a more than worthwhile read for everybody interested in online groups/milieus/scenes and in doing according fieldwork, I have to say.

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kaizo mario world

xirdalium Posted on by

impossibly hard variant of super mario world
 

This is to humble every single speedrunner, trickjumper, DeFRaGger, or first-person-shooter virtuoso/elitist who ever dared to badmouth about 2D jump’n’run sidescrollers and the supposed lack of skill involved in playing them.
 


 

The “kaizo” (“hack” or “mod”) of Super Mario World shown in the video was created by T. Takemoto. For the movie he made his friend R. Kiba play his creation. Obviously Kiba possesses god-like skill, but still Takemoto’s level’s are more than a challenge for him. The dramaturgy of the movie is only digestable for the real oldskool aficionados, I confess—but still I find the pace set right in order not to get boring. There are more of Takemoto’s levels on YouTube, and even a second installment. So, if you haven’t got enough yet, plus a whole day to waste, search for ’em ;-)

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interview with a doomed marine

xirdalium Posted on by

Again those little mosaic-tiles keep falling in place—and the timing is perfect. Just some days ago ↑John Postill confirmed via email that a paper I proposed for the ↑11th biennial conference of the ↑European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) has been accepted for the media anthropology network’s workshop ↑The Rewards of Media. Just one day before gamescares published an ↑interview with Peter Papadopoulos, Remedy’s community manager. Pete is an old friend of mine from the glorious days of Max-Payne modding. Within the online-scene he is better known as ADM, short for “a doomed marine,” of course an allusion to the protagonist of the Doom-series. Have an excerpt from the interview:
 

It’s a bit of a long story so I’ll try and shorten it as much as I can but it goes back to when I was a regular in the Max Payne community. […] It’s also worth pointing out that the Max Payne community was a great booster for many peoples careers with several members now working at studios such as EA/Dice, Gearbox, Crytek and of course Remedy.

And here is the abstract of my paper called “modding’s rewards”:
 

Within the transnational technoludic online communities of practice—among which I am doing persistent thick participation since 2002—informal mutual tutelage and training is a core practice. In the case of ‘game modding’ this may well amount to ‘postindustrial unwaged labour.’ But there is another, less negative interpretation. First, the online-communal practices enable the members to live their personal conglomerations of ambiences, sentiments, aesthetics, and narrative content, built from a lifetime of digesting popular culture, and of assimilating its modes of representation into their own conceptions of life. Second, since I presented ‘my online tribe’ at the 2006 workshop of the media anthropology network, more than half of the core-group has crossed the blurry border to professionalism and works in exactly the jobs they envisioned during the early times of the community. By expanding Henry Jenkins’s notion of co-creative media I will collapse this twofoldness of rewards, mythopoeic and economic, into one.
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