Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Anthropologists studying corporate informatics

The Economist has an article on corporations hiring anthropologists to study their digital information ecologies.

NO ONE asks to see Steve Barnett's pith helmet anymore, which he views as a sign that the natives are now comfortable with his presence. Indeed, they appear to accept Dr Barnett, a pioneering business anthropologist, as one of their own—something that now holds true for corporate anthropologists in general. It was certainly not the case in 1979, the year Dr Barnett left academia to set up as an anthropological marketing-consultant. It was still not true in the late 1980s, when Xerox asked one of its resident anthropologists, Jeanette Blomberg, to don a pith helmet for a corporate photo.

A neat put-down:

when he was informed that IBM Research had hired Ms Blomberg as its first anthropologist in December 2002, Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future exclaimed, “Just now? How embarrassing.”

(via National Academies)

Zefrank rips on social networks

Zefrank rips on social networks. Very funny. Embedded video.

Alistair Cooke, RIP

Alistair Cooke has died. You probably remember him for hosting Masterpiece Theater, but you should really know him for his superb weekly Letter from America. Such fine writing: clear prose, excellent storytelling, a rich sense of history. His columns digressed and wandered beautifully, moving from associations to memories, always ultimately knitted together thematically.

Suspected vampire gets the treatment in Romania

Citizens of a Romanian village take care of a suspected vampire.

"What did we do?" pleaded Flora Marinescu, Petre's sister and the wife of the man accused of re-killing him. "If they're right, he was already dead. If we're right, we killed a vampire and saved three lives. ... Is that so wrong?"

Yes, according to the Romanian State Police. Its view, expressed by Constantin Ghindeano, the chief agent for the region, is that vampires aren't real, and dead bodies in graves aren't to be dug out and killed again, even by relatives.

(thanks to Gabor Por)

Mysterious grave invades Norfolk cemetery

A new grave appeared in a Norfolk cemetery, mysteriously.

The most bizarre investigation of his 15-year career began after a resident of Caister, near Yarmouth, reported that a strange grave had appeared in the village cemetery.

One day there was just an area of grass, the next a small, new plot had appeared with stone edgings, white gravel chippings, a rose bush in the middle and four small shrubs at the corners.

A pet, you say? No bones were found. But it has been "lovingly tended." A new art form? Situationist Goths?

(thanks to Bob Watson)

Gibson, Pattern Recognition: notes on 9-11, uncanny

More thoughts on William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I posted about this, once, a while back, and some comments followed. I've also set up a wiki for my notes and your comments.

9-11: this is very much a September 11th novel, and unsurpassed in creative work, I think. The attack apepars without fanfare, described minimally, yet with careful attention to the psychology and language of catastrophe. The event breaks through the text quietly, without flags, as in the glimpse in Tokyo (125), in media, or in the sudden, associative memory of a PATH train (232, appropriately being disinterred). The subsequent war on terror slides away from the novel, which is a weakness when we reach the Russian scenes, where Chechens should have played a larger presence, at least rhetorically.

Haunted Spaces: the novel offers another instance of the uncanny and cyberspace. The footage is haunting, strange, and its cult following appropriately cryptic and obsessed. More powerfully, the uncanny is in the form of Cayce's mom, who is focused on electronic voice phenomena (EVP) (115, first sign). We know she named her daughter after Edgar Cayce, so we expect (rightly) that there will be prophecy* - and how better to describe Cayce's ability to foresee the fate of logos? There's a cheery nature to this, or a positive one, as Cayce refuses to fall into mysticism, and ultimately finds the ordering patterns in footage and London. Like the classic Gothic explique (cf Ann Radcliffe, also Scooby Doo), the heroine shuns mystery to use reason to find her way out. And we get a string of heroes, both emasculated and macho, none of which enters the romantic circuit until the very last chapter. There is something conservative in the ultimate structure of this form, as Gothicists have pointed out.
*(Apophenia (also 115) is the limit to this prophetic power, and appears, fairly conservatively, via Cayce's father (226-227).)

Cyberpunk now: Gibson has backdated cyberpunk in his writing, as our world has caught up. The intense cosmopolitan rhetoric of novels like Neuromancer is toned down, and now sociologically accurate. This is a proximate mapping, not because this is fiction, but because Gibson can't escape his bibliography, and, as Macherey reminds us, the attempt to map fiction precisely onto the conditions of its production makes that separation more evident.

New Lessig book out, and downloadable

Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, is out in print at last. It's also downloadable as a big pdf and bitrorrent: Lessig putting his money where his mouth is.

Memorium: visualize the dead in cyberspace

Memorium lets you visualize spirits of the dead, which interact socially, a bit like EyeBees. It's a lovely thing, and, like Frankenstein's monster, a student project by one Kael, who might also be Mikael Damant Sirois.

(thanks to John Schott)

Fonts by corporate logo

Fast Company is featuring a font set, consisting entirely of letters from corporate logos:

Suspense writer Webs up

Australian suspense author Matthew Reilly is publishing his latest via the Web, in a sign of the internet capitulating the history of information. Hover Car Racer will appear in serial form with cliffhangers, like a Victorian novel.

(thanks to Jim!)