Our panel was selected to be podcast.  The podcast audio is available here.

My contribution to the book will be titled, “Through a Screen, Darkly: On Remote, Collaborative Fieldwork in the Digital Age.”

Harvard University, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Luncheon Series (RSVP required). February 12th. 12:30pm. 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor – this talk was recorded, view it here or read Ethan Zuckerman’s recap.

Stanford University, Africa Table. February 20. 12:00pm. Encina Hall West, Room 202.

Pitzer College, Munroe Center for Social Inquiry. Series on Examining THE CITY: Issues of Sustainability, Social Stratification, Democratic Public Spheres, Privatization, Cosmopolitanism and the Arts. February 26th. 4:15 pm, George C.S. Benson Auditorium

One published for the Cyborgology Group Blog (part of the Society Pages, also home of the famed Sociological Images group blog)
[Book Review] Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana, by David Banks

Another published for a local newspaper, the Commercial Dispatch, Columbus & Starkville, Mississippi!
How They Use the Internet in Ghana, by Rob Hardy ]]> http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~jenna/?feed=rss2&p=545 0 http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~jenna/?p=521 http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~jenna/?p=521#comments Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:41:15 +0000 admin http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~jenna/?p=521 Continue reading →]]> The first review of my new book, by Kevin Donovan who says several very insightful things that I’m pleased to think my book in some way inspired, such as:

“This dominant reductionist approach defines certain values, practices and technologies as “the Internet”, and ignores many others, especially the concrete ways in which it is experienced everyday, such as by the youth in Ghana’s internet cafes. Of course, shorthand is useful, and endless precision is both tedious and implausible. But perhaps to really understand “the Internet” we need to forget it as a unified “it” altogether, something that exists within a context and can be used for good or bad. This instrumentalist conception too often prompts the wrong questions and obfuscates differences and changes. Indeed, the important and interesting questions related to “the Internet” are almost invariably the ones where it isn’t a unified whole, but rather messy and fractured, in ongoing relationship with people.”

One related item, on “exclusionary online subcultures” see this blog post where a Ugandan journalist who criticizes Google’s chrome browser and supports IE is ridiculed and dismissed by reddit commenters. An example of insularity and ethnocentrism in online communities.

Sourcemap is a project based out of the MIT Media Lab for documenting and publicizing the global supply chains of manufactured goods. With a slight bit of repurposing, I found it to be a potentially useful presentation tool for multi-sited ethnographies in the mode of “following the object.” Case in point, my source map of the distribution of secondhand computers arriving from the US and Europe to Ghana. This source map doesn’t just document their arrival into Ghana, but also the path they take in country from the port, to the shops where they are sold, the Internet cafes where they are used, and eventually to the scrap metal yards where valuable metals are extracted, and the waste dump where what is left is deposited. Source map allows you to attach text and photos (from Flickr) to points on the map and to the links between. As a presentation tool for multi-sited ethnographies this helps to break away from the linearity of prose, linking images and descriptions and giving a stronger spatial sense of phenomena that is so geographically vast in scope that it is otherwise hard to get a good grasp of its coherence and continuity.