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.

Weekly Reflection Post for 10/27 Class

First, I’d like to apologize for being a tad late on my post for this week.  I literally just got back to my apartment five minutes ago from my interviews in New York.

In the remainder of her The Breakup 2.0, Ilana Gershon continues discussing the differing media ideologies of different parties using social media and what cultural significance these differences have.  I thought her discussion of Isabella and her ex-wife was especially interesting.  Gershon discusses how what was important about this scenario was the media used, not necessarily the message being mediated.  For example, the ex-wife doesn’t respond to Isabella’s emails but has no problem immediately responding to Isabella’s texts.  That is because of the media ideologies they established in their relationship; text is impersonal and limited so it is ok even after the breakup but email allows for more heartfelt and deeper feelings and desires to be expressed and so cross the boundary that the ex-wife has.

In the first section of Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff focuses on the why and how of his ethnographic exploration of Second Life.  He emphasized the fact that he was using traditional methods to explore a new realm of culture (even the title harkens back to Margaret Meade).  He also commented a lot on Second Life’s status as a virtual world.  He argued that Second Life is as real as the “real” world in many ways, including the variety of social interactions that occur.  He makes a very convincing argument here, showing how any social construct can be interpreted as “virtual” yet still be a real realm of culture.

My observations in New York

I’ve been in New York City area for medical school interviews since Sunday morning and don’t get back until Tuesday night.  Today, I had to take the subway from Columbia to the bus, the bus to the train, the train out of the city, and a cab from the train station to New York Medical College.  I just kept thinking how dependent New Yorkers are on their public transportation technology.  If all this technology stopped for just one day, New York would cease to function and would need months if not years to recover from this disaster, much like what would happen if it snowed in San Diego.  For New Yorkers, these technologies are vital part of their everyday lives and the entire culture of New York revolves around these technologies.  This dependence on transportation technology is by no means restricted to New York City; I could not live in San Diego without a car.  However, transportation technology has a unique place in culture in New York City.

Weekly Reflection Post for 10/20 Class

In E. Gabriella Coleman’s “Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media,” the author surveys different approaches and particular areas of interest of many ethnographic works relating to digital media.  What I found most interesting from this survey was her discussion of the duality of digital media.  On page 493, Coleman talks about how both sides of any political discussion can be found in digital media and points to an example of Iranian protests.  It is interesting how, as Coleman says, “social media tools can simultaneously support grass-roots political mobilizations as well as government surveillance and human rights violations.”  It seems that although social media have provided new forums for individuality and freedom, they are also forums for oppression and conformity just like all other social forums in the entirety of human history.

Ilana Gershon, in her The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media, examines how social media affects modern relationship, focusing especially on the end of relationships.  The most pervasive theme of the first two chapters is the idea that everybody has different media ideologies and that these media ideologies are established through both use of social media and communication with peers about social media.  For me, this seemed to highlight an interesting quality about the new social media; these forms of social interaction were not constricted to their primary online location and instead diffused out into everyday normal interactions.  In that way social media becomes more than what it appears on the surface and makes interactions using social media that much more influential.  That is why many people view Facebook relationship status as the most “official” representation of that relationship.  Once the relationship is on Facebook everybody knows and it becomes gossip fodder for the entirety of its existence.

How I use Facebook

Given the theme of this week’s class, I’m going to provide some insight on how mainly use Facebook.  When I first got Facebook in 2007, I intended to use it as a way to easily stay in touch with high school friends.  However, it quickly became a tool primarily used to “stalk” friends and friends of friends.  This especially became true once the news feed had been added.  So this is a step by step way that I use Facebook on an everyday (probably more hourly than daily) basis.

1. Log on

2. Check notifications (pictures, wall posts etc.)

3. Read messages (or not since most of my messages are simply from student groups/events that I am not particularly interested in)

4. Check events (this step has serious social implications—I never say not attending.  If I am not attending I always either say maybe if I want to support the person hosting the event or I simply don’t respond.  I always feel like it is too inconsiderate to outright say no unless I have a legitimate conflict)

5. Read the entire news feed and click on those things that I find most interesting so that I can get more information and maybe stalk the profiles of people relating to that thing

On a less regular note, when going through my pictures I always untag photos that portray me in a bad light (for instance me surrounded by copious amounts of alcohol at a party) in case medical school admissions committees ever examine my profile.  When it comes to relationship status, which is most relevant to this week’s readings, I don’t have one even though I have been in a relationship for a year and a half.  That information is too personal and I don’t feel the need to broadcast that to every friend of a friend.  However, before I was in a relationship I did have single on my profile, so if somebody was a very dedicated stalker and read my wall all the way until March 2009 then they could figure something out.  If anyone is interested in how I choose my profile picture, look at my post on 9/12/10.

Weekly Reflection Post for 10/13 Class

In “The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing,” Deborah Bolnick et al examine the limitations and problems of direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry tests.  At first, their discussion of these tests reminds me of Sarah Wagner’s ethnography on Bosnia in that technology is being used to return a sense of ancestry to a person and to recapture a history stolen by time or some heinous act like genocide or slavery.  Bolnick et al go on to show why these tests are unreliable at best and divisive at worst and to urge scientific experts to be more vocal about the issues surrounding these ancestry tests.

Charles Rotimi, in his article “Genetic Ancestry Tracing and the African Identity: A Double-Edged Sword?” analyzes the possible affects of ancestry testing on African Americans who lost their ancestral identities due to slavery.  He views the subject from a personal perspective since his wife and kids have lost their heritage in such a way.  Rotimi emphasizes that these tests can give African Americans a sense of “belonging,” a feeling that is very important and shapes all relationships and interactions a person has.  However, Rotimi explains that this sense of belonging is a double edged sword since it is hard to identify ethnic groups in Africa due to high rates of migration.  He also explained that the results of these tests could be more divisive than inclusive, since many ethnic groups in Africa are currently or have recently clashed.  What I found most interesting in his article was his discussion of whether genetics or cultural activities are a better indication of inclusion in a group.  For many who seek to belong somewhere with these tests, they may find themselves even more excluded since they cannot relate to the culture that is their ancestry—they are too far removed.

In her article “‘Race’ and the Construction of Human Identity,” Audrey Smedley investigates the history of racial identities.  She shows how race as cultural invention was not present until the colonization of the Americas.  She goes on to show how this social construct affects contemporary culture, focusing especially on how it has maintained the marginalization of the urban black youth.  What struck me the most from this article was how race in its modern sense has been a source of identity, a place to belong in a way.

In Duana Fullwiley’s “The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Human Difference in Pharmacogenetics,” the author examines the genetic bases of race from their perspective of two research projects: Coriell and SOPHIE.  These projects are trying to find a genetic basis for race by analyzing specific SNPs.  What I found most intriguing about these studies was how they approached the study.  The researchers seemed to separate the subjects before testing their DNA and then only chose genetic markers that aligned with their prefabricated demarcations of race.  Also, many SNPs that were “identified” as racial markers were inconsistent between studies.  This goes to show that race as a cultural construct is present even in the supposedly unbiased field of science.

Kimberly Tallbear, in her “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe,” discusses how the idea of blood has become very important to Native American tribes.  What I found most relevant to our class was the discussion of the Kinnewick Man.  In this instance, DNA technology was used to assign race/tribal identity to the remains of a man.  In doing so scientists undermined the tribal oral histories of many tribes.

Wash U Apple Commercial

When I walked past the library this weekend, the scene I saw inside reminded me of an Apple commercial.  At the table at the southwestern most corner of the first floor sat three people, all of whom were multitasking using two or more apple products.  The first student was typing on his Macbook while listening to his iPod nano.  A second was reading the paper on his iPad while listening to music on his iPhone.  The third, the ultimate Apple multitasker, sat typing on his Macbook Pro while texting on his iPhone and reading his notes on his iPad.  It seems that our university has developed a technological culture that revolves around Apple, as do many universities around the country.  However, considering that PCs are still a more popular computer, it is interesting how common Apple computers are in education.  I don’t know if it is because Apple products are good for educational purposes or that, since Apple products are relatively expensive, they are reserved for those who can afford them (who are often more highly educated).

Weekly Reflection Post for 10/6 Class

The final eight chapters of Adriana Petryna’s Life Exposed focus on the citizens of Ukraine and the social systems that have risen up after the Chernobyl disaster.  She investigates the idea of “illness as work,” saying that the social and government systems that have surrounded the Chernobyl victims in Ukraine have facilitated a world where it is more beneficial to be too sick to work than to be able bodied.  She goes on to examine the idea of biological citizenship, where people are defined in terms of their status of suffering and specific disabilities.  The term “biological citizen” seems to imply that these people need to be treated as biological entities, meaning that their most important value is the illnesses they have both in terms of maintaining their livelihood and n terms of offering chances for biological and medical research.  She also reflects on how Chernobyl has changed the local medical knowledge of Ukrainians.  What I found most interesting from this section was how uneducated, poor farmers became well versed in medical terminology showing how need facilitates knowledge.

From the study of cultures of science and technology, I found the section of Petryna’s ethnography dealing with illness as work and the status of sufferers to be the most noteworthy.  On page 78, Petryna describes a meeting of the Chernobyl minister with mothers of children with thyroid cancer.  During that meeting, a woman began crying about her situation but, when told to “promise to put [her] emotions aside” she immediately goes into a seemingly well rehearsed speech about her family members in very bureaucratic terms.  This seemed to me to show just how important the relative status of sufferers and suffering was to the Ukrainians; this makes sense considering that suffering was often the primary source of income for such families.  I also found a comment made by Maria Ivanivna on page 91 to be especially interesting.  She said that, upon achieving level three disability, she “had the right not to work” in a manner that caused Petryna to describe this right as an “achieved status.”  This exemplifies the idea that being ill is in many ways a benefit, providing an individual or family with a social and governmental “status” that guarantees them a certain amount of economic security.

I need the internet!

So yesterday I wrote a fake myth for my Greek Mythology class.  The entire time, I needed to keep my computer open so that I could look up Greek words and other real myths concerning what I was writing.  And I realized, I don’t understand how the world functioned before the internet.  I know this is a big statement but think, in order to write a fake myth I needed information from 5 different web sites.  Before the internet, I would have needed to go to the library and spend hours looking up these random pieces of information.  Instead, I simply sat on my bed and found everything I needed in less than 5 minutes.  Now think of it on a larger scale.  War can now be conducted over the internet; policies can be made instantly from across the world.  The internet is one of the most important advancements of the modern world.

Weekly Reflection Post for 9/29 Class

In the first two chapters or her ethnographic study, Life Exposed, Adriana Petryna explores the political and scientific response to the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl.  She examines how the soviet government tried to downplay the scale of the disaster, saying that this only served to exacerbate the damage down by the radiation exposure.  She also examines the Ukrainian response to Chernobyl after becoming and independent state.  In Ukraine, she shows, a new culture has developed around the “suffering” who are in part supported by government welfare programs.  What strikes me as the most interesting aspect of the culture is that one’s level of suffering is proportional to one’s status within the culture and to one’s ability to access welfare.  People are essentially rewarded for suffering more, causing people to feel the need to exaggerate their medical problems in order to support their families.  This culture has also produced a backlash, where medical experts often claim that their syndromes are caused by something akin to panic disorder, meaning that their suffering is mostly psychological.

What I found most interesting from this section of the ethnography was Petryna’s discussion of the collaboration of American and Soviet medical experts (pgs. 45-47).  This discussion reminded me of the idea that the scientific laboratory encompasses everything and everyone presented in Bruno Latour in his “Give me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World.”  The American scientists were “uninterested in long-term assessments of the health impact of Chernobyl;” instead they treated the crisis as a scientific experiment, and forced across their research motives on the medical treatment of the ARS (acute radiation sickness) cohort.  This discussion also showed how science is seen as a cold and technical practice.  This is best summarized when Petryna says: “From this point of view, causes of death associated with the disaster except bone marrow failure became scientifically insignificant.”

This may be helpful...

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html

This is an article about a WHO report on the enormity of Chernobyl released in 2005.  I thought it could be a nice reference for the international response to the disaster and how it compares to the Soviet and Ukrainian responses.

Reflection on Readings for class on 9/22/10

In the second half of her ethnography on the use of DNA technology to identify the “missing” of Srebrenica, Sarah Wagner focuses first on the use of antemortem data in then identification process, then on the communal properties of the burial ceremonies for identified remains, and finally about the evolution in status Bosnian scientists with the ICMP have experienced.

The relationship between antemortem and postmortem data is especially interesting.  DNA evidence is not enough to identify skeletal remains, personal evidence such as old injuries or possessions found on the remains must corroborate the DNA evidence.  This often seems to be as much for the families of the identified as it is for the sake of identification; family members need tangible evidence that they can understand to fully trust the identification.  For someone not trained in science, it is difficult to say “these bones match what my husband’s bones should be on the molecular level, so these must be his bones.”  It is much more intuitive for the family members of the Srebrenica missing to say “they say these bones seem to be my husband’s, and I can see the tooth he chipped when my ring fell in the stew one day and there is the patch I sewed on his pants the day before he went missing and…”  The families need this tangible evidence to relate these cold, hard DNA-based facts and the unrecognizable remains to the man they once knew.  This need for antemortem data is also interesting because it establishes a limit for technology.  DNA-based technology can only do so much, after which more archaic forms of identification such as questionnaires and medical history must be used.

With regard to the burials at Potocari, it is intriguing that most of the families choose to participate in the communal burial instead of performing separate personal burials.  When the Serbs stripped the Bosniaks of any form of traditional identification, they forced the Bosniaks into a mass label that compounded their lack of individual identity.  However, by choosing to have communal burials, the Bosniaks are not only returning identity to the missing, but claiming the communal identity of the missing for their own.  In a way, they are removing any sign of control the Serbs had over the identity of the missing.  Control seems to be a powerful theme in this section of the ethnography.  By allowing the families to choose how the missing will be buried, the ICMP is giving control of the remains and all it entails back to the families, returning what the Serbs stole.

The fact that the Bosnian scientists have become experts in the field of DNA based identification is especially significant to this class.  It shows that current cultures of science and technologies are always changing.  When first starting out, the ICMP needed to call on help from the United States to make any progress; at one point they even outsourced all DNA work to the US.  However, within a few years the Bosnians experts were called on the help the United States and others around the world.  This shows how in a culture that honors and desires advancement and progress as much as the cultures of science and technology, the relative social order is constantly fluctuating as progress comes from different people.

The Generational Gap in Technology

My parents just discovered Skype.  Of course, they immediately wanted to talk to me over Skype since I am essentially the only person they know who has Skype.  They were very impressed and amazed by being able to video chat over the internet.  This reminded me of the generational gap we talked about last class, where our generation is inured to new technology because it has been so much a part of our lives since before we can remember.  My parents are in their 60s and didn’t even own color TVs when they were children, so the idea of instant face-to-face communication is very advanced for them.  I just thought this was an interesting example of how old news to us can be novel to people removed from the technological era we live in.

Weekly Reflection Post for 9/15 Class

Sarah Wagner’s To Know Where He Lies attempts to consolidate and explain how science is intimately involved with such emotionally charged subjects such as genocide and missing loved ones.  Two aspects of To Know Where He Lies were especially interesting for me.  The first, and the more pervasive of the two, is the juxtaposition of cold, hard facts with personal stories and memories from the Wagner or people she interviewed.  This is especially evident when Wagner uses Bosnian words; for instance on pages 68-69 Wagner systematically and factually describes the goals and circumstances of different Srebrenica advocacy groups (including the Women of Srebrenica) and then switches to a small reminiscence of conversations with a leader of the Women of Srebrenica and how she would spend time with her “sipping coffee out of a fildjan.”  Wagner also frequently used the terms nestali and nije dosao when describing the missing peoples, placing cultural meaning into what would otherwise be lists of disturbing but faceless facts.  By doing this, Wagner takes away much of the distant, scientific feeling of her research and creates a relatable and cultural façade over her facts.  This mimics what happened in Bosnia, where at first technology dehumanized the bodies through secondary mass graves and then DNA technology works to reattach personhood to skeletal remains.  This is especially relevant to this class since Wagner is essentially taking something from the world of science and technology, research, and stripping it of what makes it scientific so that it can be accessible to cultures outside of science and technology, including the Bosniaks about whom it is written.

The second aspect comes from a moment in chapter one where Wagner describes a scene from a play based on the violence in Srebrenica.  On pages 36-37, she provides the scene about a family’s response to Srebrenica being a UN safe area which includes a father character with very little knowledge of science and technology putting blind trust in technology.  This provides an interesting example of how people outside any culture of science and technology view those who belong to cultures with extensive access to and knowledge of science and technology.  Essentially, this man believes that all wrongs can be fixed with this mysterious technology and that, since the technology is on his side, he is invincible to attack.  This view represents a unique culture of science and technology—the culture created by exclusion from science and technology.

Michael Lynch and Sheila Jasanoff’s “Contested Identities: Science, Law and Forensic Practice” details the use of DNA identification technology such as Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) or Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphisms (RFLPs) in criminal trials, specifically the O.J. Simpson trial due to its large presence in the mainstream media.  The most interesting part of this article is that it shows how reluctant the criminal justice system is when it comes to using new forensic technology.  In both the Castro and the Simpson case, judges and juries were unwilling to trust this new form of data.  This was not limited to the judicial system, but also included the public and even the scientific experts, who were divided on both the cases.  This seems to underline a seemingly inherent distrust people have for technology—people would much rather put their trust in another human capable of reasoning for himself than to trust blindly in minuscule molecule or a computer program, especially when it involves such important aspects of life like law and order.

Facebook Profile Pictures

This may be more relevant later in the semester, but this just popped in my head and I thought it would be worthwhile to the class at some point.

So today, the first item on my newsfeed on Facebook was that 26 of my friends had changed their profile picture. This isn’t that big a number, but considering these news stories pop up every day or so, we, the people of Facebook, change our profile picture way more than necessary. This got me thinking, why do we feel the need to change this picture so many times? We don’t change other, far more official pictures of ourselves nearly as often; in the three years I have had Facebook I have had 30 profile pictures, but in the five years I have had a driver’s license I haven’t changed the picture a single time. The same holds true for me passport, my school I.D. card and essentially every representation of me not on the internet. So why do we change our profile pictures so often? It’s not because we change appearances. I certainly didn’t change much between September 1st and October 1st in 2007, but I had five different profile pictures in that time span. I think we change our pictures so often because of a merit system. We want to reward important memories, happy moments, or simply a really good hair day and we do so by allowing pictures of these worthy moments to be our representation to our network of friends, family, and peers. Moments that are especially important to us stay up for longer, until enough time has passed that its import has faded and pictures from a recent important event inspire us to recognize a new moment. A photo from my last world championships in November, 2008 remained my picture until June, 2009 because it represented one of the most important moments of my life. Often, the moments that inspire us are nostalgic rather than new. For instance, the photo that replaced the world championship photo was a year old photo of me and some friends, a change inspired by the fact that I was home for the summer and missed my closest friends from school. The reason we feel the need to update this picture is the social aspect of Facebook. We want to show everyone what moments are important to us, and the profile picture is a quick way of keeping those closest to us updated in our life. They say a picture says a thousand words, but on Facebook a picture says those thousand words to the thousand people closest to you, allowing us to easily express ourselves to everyone who cares.

Weekly Reflection Post for 9/8 Class

“What is a Laboratory?” by Karin Knorr-Cetina


Knorr-Cetina argues that the laboratory is more than just a place to do science but functions as a site of reconfiguration and reordering of social contexts. Moreover, she argues that the laboratory and experimentation are separate units. She provides ample evidence on how laboratories offer the ability to alter social contexts, most explicitly through her discussion of a psychoanalyst’s office. However, she doesn’t distinguish how a laboratory acting as a place to reorganize social context is any different than a laboratory acting as a place to do science. This, I believe, is the major flaw in her argument. She does make her point about laboratories and experiments being separable. This is most obviously shown through her discussion of astronomy, which is analyzed in a laboratory but is not an experimental science.

Overall, Knorr-Cetina shows the similarity of many different scientific communities. Many of these communities seem to use similar constructs of laboratories and experiments; these constructs seem to be cultural indoctrinations placed on these communities and hint at their common origins.



“Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics” by Sharon Traweek


The argument that Traweek explicitly states she is making is that the community of particle physics is an almost exclusively male community. However, she also makes implicit arguments about how the evolution of particle physicists mirrors that of heroes and how the culture of particle physicists is greatly shaped by the fear of obsolescence.

She provides compelling evidence for her implicit arguments. She explicitly relates the undergraduate student to heroes through her commentary on textbooks and relates the graduate student to a hero with the story of “rescuing” information. She then implicitly shows the need for post-docs to be a charismatic and talented hero so that they can out compete their fellow post-docs; this competition continues through the group leader story until reaching the statesman story, which seems to be the stage of victory for a hero where the hero is honored and wields political power. She demonstrates the importance of avoiding obsolescence for a physicist by showing the high rate of failure and the incessant need to anticipate the future to stay current.

However, Traweek does not do a very good job supporting her gender argument. She ignores the role of gender, with a few exceptions, until the end of the article, and then relies on stereotypes to make her point. This served to severely weaken her argument about why the particle physics field is male dominated.

The five tales, on a whole, say a lot about what a competitive environment the physics community is. It also shows how competition from all over the world has driven physicists to strive to be heroes to outshine their competitors. Lastly, it provides an interesting example of an anthropological study of a community based on the modern ideas of science and technology.


“Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World” by Bruno Latour


Through the story of Pasteur’s work with anthrax in cows and eventual creation of the first artificial vaccine, Latour argues that there is no “outside” the laboratory and that there is no difference between “micro” and “macro” levels, meaning that there is no separation of the ordinary work in a lab and the contextualization of results that come from that work. Latour shows that in order for Pasteur to approach the anthrax problem scientifically, he must treat the farms “outside” his laboratory as extensions of his laboratory; in other words the world is transformed into a network of laboratory so that nothing exists “outside” of a laboratory. Also, by using his commentary on how Pasteur maintained social interest in his work, Latour shows how Pasteur’s work on a “micro” level resulted in his results on a “macro” level. This effectively makes these two levels inseparable and continuous.

The most interesting aspect of Latour’s narrative about Pasteur was how it contextualized the laboratory with the rest of the world. Latour characterized the laboratory as a political entity that had motivations and strategies for success. This contrasts with the established view of science as objective. Latour shows how scientists and laboratories are as much a part of the larger economic and intellectual society as any other community and are subject to the same biases, needs, and motivations. Lastly, this article provides a nice context for Latour’s study of a scientist at his lab bench; this article provides the larger, subjective context to what seemed to be a secluded, objective world.

This is awfully meta of me...

I am a fairly private person, so this blog is very strange for me.  Therefore, I decided to be a little meta and make my first blog post about my first blog.

I have facebook, but I rarely update my status and have very little information about my self.  However, I decided to leave this blog open to anyone and everyone, probably because I feel a sort of anonymity connected with it.  It's refreshing to put my thoughts out in the universe from the comfort of own room where nobody I'm close with will ever see it or connect it with me.  I can see why people like blogging; it's a way of expressing oneself in a very open way while still maintaining a sense of privacy.  On the other hand, it seems to be another forum for judgement even if it does have veiled anonymity.  I still haven't decided which is more powerful: the freedom of expression without repercussion or the exposure to criticism from people with equal anonymity.

It's not much, but that is my initial impression of blogging.