Week 4 Synthesis – Seen and Not Seen

Reviving a habit from IDEL and having theme songs as the Cyberculture playlist is now complied. This is my inspiration for the cybernetic maracatu. Anyway.

Seen and not seen. What is visible and what is not? The fundamental debate in early digital ethnography seemed to be whether communities and communication could happen when other people could not be seen. What would we do without embodied social cues? Through the development of text speak and avatars online communication found a way to be seen.

My own visual artefact was seen by a few people but not by many. The importance of timeliness even in asynchronous communication there. Maybe it will have a long tail.

I enjoyed the Lister (2009) reading on the political economy of the internet. In a way political economy is taking what is not seen in our daily lives and making it seen. I intend to do a post on the political economy of drumeo next week. I am interested in the way capitalist base has shaped the superstructure of drumeo as a media. I particularly want to consider why it isn’t structured like Wikipedia (e.g. free, open source, editable, etc) and what consequences stem from that.

A lot of my work is not seen this week as I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Although this can be traced in my notes section. Again a reminder that like anthropology, a lifestream can only be a partial snapshot of a social activity. It’s important to ask what data is getting captured and what isn’t.

Two final things, my first netography post was about what members of the drumeo community were not seen on a shared map. Finally, I managed to fit references to a course reading, Magrite and Mission of Burma in one tweet. Confusing the object with the representation is basically confusing what is seen and what is not seen.