Weekly Reflection Post for 12/1 Class

In his When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico, Cori Hayden explores the social effects of bioprospecting, specifically a bioprospecting effort in Mexico by a United States group referred to as the UNAM-Arizona prospecting agreement.  Hayden begins by setting up the following ethnography, paying particular attention to how it is an ethnography of science.  He goes on to demonstrate how bioprospecting represents a unique conflux of intellectual property rights, local knowledge, and modern-day entrepreneurship.  Hayden next explores some of the more controversial and interesting aspects of the UNAM-Arizona prospecting agreement.  For example, he examines how market collection strategy undermines the relationship between intellectual property rights and local knowledge.  Hayden then continues by examining how the local knowledge is transformed into scientific knowledge and back again, in other words translating between vernacular and pharmaceutical knowledge constructs.

One interesting discussion that this ethnography brings forward is how the globalized intellectual property rights interact with local knowledge.  Intellectual property rights, especially on a global scale, are a novel invention that became necessary due to the explosion of scientific and technological knowledge in the last century.  Bioprospecting, on some level, seems to be trying to integrate ancient, local knowledge into this novel idea of intellectual property rights.  What implications does this have?  What are the ethical considerations that must be made and do they outweigh the potential gain?  Is there actual a potential gain, considering no tangible product has emerged from bioprospecting?  All these questions stem from the conflux between global intellectual property and local constructs of knowledge.

Connected at Thanksgiving

I spent Thanksgiving with my grandmother and her new husband’s family.  While I was there I had no internet access whatsoever for my computer.  However, I was still able to stay fully connected.  I don’t just mean via phone calls and texting.  I checked Facebook and my email accounts several times a day and was able to keep up with several of my friends who are currently in Portugal without any internet access either.  How?  By using 3G phones.  In this era of 3G (and soon to be 4G), it is very difficult to not be connected.  Every year, our society becomes more connected, leading to a faster paced world where everyone expects immediate responses.

Cowboys and Aliens

I went to the midnight showing of Harry Potter 7 Thursday night at the Esquire.  It was really good!  There were also lots of previews, 6 to be exact (although supposedly the Moolah only had 2 previews and there were different).  One of these movies really stuck out to me—Steven Spielberg’s Cowboys and Aliens.  The preview starts out as a normal western, but a couple minutes in there’s, well, an alien attack.  I think this could be an interesting example of the battle between technology and no technology.  This theme has been a common theme in movies for some time now, most recently in Avatar.  This seems to get at the heart of how many people view technology as taking over the world.  It will be interesting to see how Spielberg treats the idea of advanced technology.

Weekly Reflection Post for 11/10 Class

Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection of short stories, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, explores different science fiction worlds with a very anthropological focus.  She also seems to focus on two core fundamentals of any society, family units and sexual relations.  Although each story in itself is very interesting and thought provoking, what struck me as most intriguing was how she presents each new world or society and how that world relates to ours.

Firstly, Le Guin never sets a back-story; each short story throws the reader right in the middle of a society by using unfamiliar words and values.  For example, in “Coming of Age in Karhide,” Le Guin speaks of kemmer nonchalantly and it is up to the reader to figure out what kemmer actually is.  This makes these worlds seem more real.  In the real world there would be no back-story, people would just exist within the confines of that world.

Secondly, each world seems to be radically different from ours on the surface, but on a deeper level is revealed to be loosely based on an aspect from our world.  The Karhide story seemed to be based on human sexuality and raw emotion linked to it.  The Ki’O society highlights the importance of the family unit in all aspects of everyday life.  The world of Eleven-Soro exaggerates the difference between men and women and the roles they are meant to play.  This connection to the real world is fundamental to virtual worlds.  Virtual worlds are created in this world and so, on some level, have a thematic connection to this world whether the creator intended so or not.

dark play or stories for boys

I just got back from a play that my roommate was in.  It was called dark play or stories for boys” and portrayed the idea of the virtual world in a very interesting and visual way.  The play revolves around a young boy who creates “games” so to speak online by creating different personas and interacting with people in a very real way.  His personas range from his normal personality to a horny 17-year-old exchange student with bad English and a sexually abusive stepfather.  What I found interesting about the play was how the online chat room conversations were portrayed.  It was obvious that these conversations were entirely mediated, but every part of them was acted out by the actors as if this mediation didn’t exist.  When one character got angry, he would slap the other even though the scene is essentially set in cyberspace.  This reminded me of Boellstorff’s discussion of place online.  Although their interactions were mediated they were very real and emotional.  In the end, this virtual reality was very real, especially for the characters involved.

Weekly Reflection Post for 11/3 Class

The final two parts of Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography Coming of Age in Second Life focus on the culture and relationships of people in Second Life and also on the economic quality of Second Life.  There is way too much information to cover, so I want to focus on a couple interesting ideas Boellstorff brought up.  Boellstorff’s discussion of gender really highlights what sets a virtual community apart from an actual community.  Gender in the actual world is essentially binary.  Gender in Second Life is binary but fluid.  An avatar can change gender at will, or become a genderless animal or even a ball of light.  This allows people participating in Second Life greater freedom to explore new experiences or act out repressed feelings.  Another interesting aspect of his discussion of gender is how irrelevant a person’s real life gender is for understanding their gender in Second Life.  In Second Life, every interaction is done via the assumed gender, so that is how the person is defined despite years of living the actual world a different gender and operating everyday life as a specific gender.

The second part of Boellstorff’s ethnography that I want to discuss is his section on love and relationships.  What I found interesting about these relationships was how they seemed to interact with the real world and simultaneously be completely separated from real life.  On one hand, there are virtual world relationships that completely transition into real world relationships.  On the other hand, there are virtual world relationships between people who have completely separate and healthy relationships in the real life.  This begs the question of what this means to both relationships.  Does the Second Life relationship constitute an affair (or maybe the real world relationship is an affair from the second life relationship)?  Does one relationship mean more than the other to the person in both relationships?  These are loaded topics, but are also very interesting topics.

SL Amsterdam

When I arrived at Amsterdam (the SL recreation of the famous European capital), everything was gray.  As I wait for the region to load (or to rez as is the SL jargon I believe), I don’t know what to expect, having never been to Amsterdam.  In a minute, I found myself on a quaint street looking at the stars with bright street lights on one side and bright stores on the other.  I can easily imagine that this is Amsterdam at night and that I have just instantly traveled there.

Then I proceed to toggle the daylight settings to dawn, something that I cannot do in real life (although I now find myself imagining the limitless possibilities).  And I also notice that the street is very completely empty except for me, even the train passing on my left has no passengers and no conductor.  Then I enter the nearest building on the left, a casino-like establishments and I see others for the first time here.  However, when I approach them I discover that they are “robots” that are just scripts intended in aiding me in gambling my Linden Dollars.

In the end, I am struck by how realistic certain elements of SL are, and how eerily different they are at the same time.  At any one time, I could watch the sun set over Amsterdam while a person sitting on the same bench as me could enjoy a midday meal.