Just before COVID-19, I discovered that my website of over 20 years was hacked. It’s taken me some time to get it back up and running, but it’s missing a lot of content that I had added over the years.
Anthropology
Where I’ve been for the past five years
A student explained to me earlier why she uses Dropbox instead of Google. She told me “Google knows enough about me – they don’t need to also see my files.” She proudly pointed to her monitor, where a piece of paper covered the webcam lens: “They don’t need to know everything about me.”
This student had taken a digital studies course DIG 211: Surveillance Culture, and understood all the ways in which our use of the internet (and of ‘free’ apps, in particular) serves as a powerful source of data: for whom, we don’t really know, but the student was clear about her disdain for “The Corporations.”
I’ve been meaning to dig deeper into my own location history in Google Maps (whether your location history is on or off), ever since I discovered that my daily life consists of a triangle – home, office, cafeteria, sometimes a grocery store; during my youngest son’s high school soccer season, my triangle includes various high schools in Mecklenburg County.
Fortunately, Lifehacker wrote about an online tool that allows you to create a heat map of your Google Location History (her map looked more exciting than mine). My first data point in location history doesn’t appear until October 2013, so the map above is essentially for the last five years.
What does the map above tell me? I’ve spent time in two places – US and China.
![US Heatmap](https://web.archive.org/web/20210413140816im_/https://lozada.davidson.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/heatmap-2-1024x682.png)
Zooming into the various locations in the US, I see that almost all the places I’ve been to are colleges or universities, academic conferences, or family. My takeaway is that this is similar to the message of my daily triangle – I go to places for work or family.
![China Heatmap, past five years](https://web.archive.org/web/20210413140816im_/https://lozada.davidson.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/heatmap-3-1024x682.png)
Zooming into China, it gets a little better. I spend most of my time in Shanghai or other fieldsites in China, but at least it shows that I took a vacation (with my family) to Taiwan.
The interactive Location History Visualizer can be a big timesuck – it allows you to drill down to specific locations, so you can see more specifics about particular places – addresses where you’ve stayed overnight (since there are more of these datapoints, assuming you didn’t forget your phone somewhere), roads that you’ve traveled.
So now Google knows what I already knew – I don’t get out much. Capitalize on that.
Digital Persona Non Grata
I see myself as an early adopter (or maybe an innovator, according to Everett Rogers), ever since I bought my first DEC Rainbow 100 using CP/M-86 in 1984 and a modem that I would put the handset into to connect to the VAX computer in Mallinckrodt (the Chemistry building at Harvard). I think my first website was published in 1993, and I published an early article on listserv activism in 1999 or so. I’ve always believed in maintaining some kind of digital presence, and have tried to think critically about my own cyborg subjectivity since reading Donna Haraway’s classic manifesto and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (and other cyberpunk).
However, after reflecting more about my digital persona for the DIGPINS workshop, I believe that I’m really not a digital native, but more of a digital immigrant (we get the job done). To think more about what I do digitally, workshop members were supposed to do a VR mapping exercise, a task that I resisted because I don’t like drawing by hand.
![](https://web.archive.org/web/20210413140816im_/https://lozada.davidson.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Fuji-Visitor-Residence-Map.png)
Instead of this reflective exercise, my first instinct was to find out what my digital presence was, at least according to the Big G. To do this, I opened an incognito browser in chrome and searched “Fuji Lozada.”
![](https://web.archive.org/web/20210413140816im_/https://lozada.davidson.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/fuji-search-1024x819.png)
Many of the links I found were expected – my official Davidson page shows up first, followed by my personal page, and then of course the RateMyProfessors.com page. I found pages that I had forgotten that I’ve set up (e.g., medium.com, researchgate.com) as well as citations that I had not set up (e.g. religionlink.com). I even found old boxscores from college lacrosse games that I had refereed many years ago! Since Laurian Bowles is also part of this workshop, I repeated the search for her, for comparison:
![](https://web.archive.org/web/20210413140816im_/https://lozada.davidson.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/bowles-search-1024x819.png)
What immediately jumped out was how my incognito search for her featured her Twitter posts, while my public Facebook page was listed for me. I am not as active on Twitter as Laurian, and she doesn’t use Facebook at all – and Google immediately recognized that! In fact, I’m not too social on social media in general.
So I kept going with the analysis of my digital persona, and used R to scrape the top 50 listings for an incognito search of “Fuji Lozada.” (While I could have just cut-and-paste the results, I’ve been playing with different types of webscraping.) You can see the results here. I didn’t have time to do more analysis, but the next thing I would do is perhaps increase the number of search results and do some coding to see what the Big G thinks my digital persona is.
So while I enjoyed reading about the benefits and challenges of our digital persona, as Pasquini writes, I’m less worried about the context collapse that Michael Wesch writes about (who at one time was the number one video on YouTube) than what in China is called the “human flesh search engine” (人肉搜索, sometimes compared to doxing), where internet/social media vigilantes can destroy lives and reputations, create chaos and confusion – sometimes just for the laughs. I was reminded of this issue through a NYT magazine article, ‘When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy‘ – it’s well worth the read. I’m not taking a stance on ‘power posing’ or p-hacking (that would take much more space), but the relevant point of this story for the DIGPINS workshop is that this took place because of digital technologies and social media. Without TED talks, an obscure social psychology journal article may not have taken disciplinary arguments into popular discourse; without listservs, email, and web sites like Data Colada and Slate, methodological critiques would not have resulted in such personal trauma. Need I say #Gamergate?
And the article in the late 1990s on flaming that I didn’t write (which has since been better done by Gabriella Coleman) further reinforces how I use my digital persona – although the V/R mapping doesn’t show it as well, much of what I do is largely for work. Given the space, I think the icons would be more widely spaced apart, with the personal digital tools like flickr and instagram being located more to the left, perhaps “renting” resident, while my institutional digital tools like vimeo, WeChat, and Facebook/Twitter leaning more towards “homeowner” resident. I also wasn’t quite sure if digital tools like Dropbox, Google Drive, Wunderlist, or WordPress (not WordPress.com) count as digital tools creating a digital persona, but I added those to the map anyway because they are tools that I more regularly use.
Life-Long Learning Locker
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or do they?
Many of us academics are struggling with what to do with the internet, in our teaching, learning, and research. There are many resources out there, in terms of organizations that push academic frontiers for open source journals, new methods of teaching and research, and proponents and opponents of MOOC‘s, OER‘s, LMS‘s, and other acronyms. Here’s another educational buzzword for you – lifelong learning, or even better – the lifelong learning locker.
The L4 would be an adaptive learning management system. The purpose of this system would be to select educational content based on individual learning styles and observed learning behaviors. Unlike other learning systems with a similar goal, this system will be customizable and adaptive—becoming uniquely personalized and tailored for the user. This learning system will be the optimal teaching interface, by adapting to the user’s individual learning style, interests, and current skill level in that subject.
The National Academies Press (NAP), publishers of the proceedings above, is itself a good resource for lifelong learning since everything is free (electronic copies, that is). NAP publishes reports from the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council – what people in the social sciences call a GONGO (government-organized non-governmental organization). (Here’s a link to the entry in wikipedia, another lifelong learning resource).
For lifelong learning to be attainable and widespread, the knowledge produced by academia must be accessible – open to people who are searching for it. This is the goal of many academic groups that promote “open access” – the capability to read journals and books that are many times produced with the unpaid labor of academics.
Subscriptions limit access to scientific knowledge. And when careers are made and tenures earned by publishing in prestigious journals, then sharing datasets, collaborating with other scientists, and crowdsourcing difficult problems are all disincentivized. Following 17th century practices, open science advocates insist, limits the progress of science in the 21st.
From Why is Science Behind a Paywall (gizmodo.com)
While open access is laudable, open methods are even more critical for lifelong learning. Here is where another ‘open’ is vital – open source software.
In later posts, I will overview a number of open methods that students of all kinds can explore. In the meanwhile, here are a number of links that say more about open access and open methods.
- The Digital Anthropology Group (DANG), an interest group within the American Anthropological Association.
- Open access, scholarship, and digital anthropology (Daniel Miller).
Hidden values in the social sciences
As anyone who has taken at least my introduction to anthropology (and most probably any introduction to anthropology), the idea that there are hidden agendas or ideologies in social scientific analysis is not novel. In my class, we read Stephen J. Gould’s fascinating account of the early physical anthropologists to explore how subjective biases enter into seemingly objective research. It’s easy to see this problem in turn-of-the-century brain size measurer’s. It’s a lot harder to see, though, in contemporary studies that use a tremendous amount of mathematics and statistical manipulation, especially when our exposure (and attention span) is limited to the quick sound bite of new media.
I’m sure it’s still difficult for our representatives in congress to evaluate the pronouncements of academics who seek to promote a particular course of action, despite their more lengthy exposure during committee meetings and hearings – events that are accompanied by reams of text that a sane, busy person probably cannot properly fully digest.
![Comic from PhD Commics on the differences between the humanities and social sciences](https://web.archive.org/web/20200929213940im_/https://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd090307s.gif)
In the New York Times, Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt overviews the different ways in which “value judgments masquerade as science.” Here’s a quick take on some of the points that he makes:
The predicament of economics and all other social sciences consists in their failure to acknowledge honestly their value orientation in their pathetic and inauthentic pretension to emulate the natural sciences they presume to be value free.
Actually, this is a quote by Kim and Yoon in another publication that Reinhardt cites, but I like it. Since I am not an economist, I was unfamiliar with what he cites as a major assumption used by economists in establishing the social value of a particular economic decision – the Kaldor Hicks criterion. Reinhardt writes:
By the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, a public policy is judged to enhance economic efficiency and overall social welfare — and therefore is to be recommended by economists to decision-makers — if those who gain from the policy could potentially bribe those who lose from it into accepting it and still be better off (Kaldor), or those who lose from it were unable to bribe the gainers into forgoing the policy (Hicks). That the bribe was not paid merely underscores the point.
This appetizer of economic theory is quite intriguing, and as a social scientist who needs to talk to economists, I need to explore this some more. In this sense, economists are ahead of anthropologists (Kaldor/Hicks is from the 1930s). While we anthropologists have dealt extensively with issues of subjectivity and objectivity in our field-based research, we haven’t does as much trying to lay out particular, detailed structures that embed our values in our analysis. Instead, we try to cling to the black box of “cultural relativity.” I know that as a field we have been struggling with this issue, and have explored in more macro and philosophical terms the epistemological problems of the anthropological approach, but perhaps, like the economists, we need to risk laying out particular models that shape our thinking.
Lessons from a Royal Enfield
David Relin, the author of Three Cups of Tea, recently cited his Royal Enfield motorcycle as a source of inspiration for his efforts in writing about issues of social justice.
When Relin graduated from college, his parents gave him a life-changing gift–a ticket to any place in the world. He wanted to explore a world as opposite the US as could be, and imagined that world was India. It was a good decision, Relins says. But he followed it with a horrible one. He bought an old motorcycle, a Royal Enfield Bullet. “That bike was more like a couch than a motorcycle. It mostly just sat. It broke down constantly. Getting around with it was like trying to lug a couch.”
Soon, a pattern developed. Relin would ride his Royal Bullet until it broke down. When it did, it seemed there was always someone around willing to help him. The poorer people of India were remarkably friendly to this strange American. They often invited him into their homes, fed him and helped him fix the bike. “With a piece of tape or wire, they’d get the bike running again.”
While it’s not just motorcycles that stimulate the symbolic imaginary, there is something to the intricate practices connected to riding that provide a vivid and tangible manifestation of deeper philosophical and moral issues. I think it’s a shame that maintenance of mainstream motorcycles are increasingly placed beyond the skills and toolsets of riders, which is why I love my Royal Enfield Bullet and my Peirspeed Sachs MadAss. In his article on Relin, David Blasco reminds us of the old adage about Royal Enfields: “Turning Men into Mechanics since 1898.”