Indonesian Cyberactivists and #OccupyWallStreet
On October 17th, 2011 Anita Rachman of the Jakarta Globe published an article with the headline “Occupy Jakarta? We Might if We Knew We Were Being Invited.” In the article, Rachman suggests that the...
View ArticleOccupying Facebook
In “Occupy Online: Facebook and the Spread of Occupy Wall Street,” Caren & Gaby (2011) propose that “Facebook is potentially less relevant to the Occupy movement than to other movements, and is...
View ArticleIndonesian cyberactivists and Occupy Wall Street
An article about my initial research on the Indonesian Occupy movement has been published in Critical Quarterly. The abstract (and article for those with access) is available here: Oman-Reagan, Michael...
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Images and Metaphors of Occupy: On the Year Anniversary
Reading the online news today, I found mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) anniversary using images and metaphors to frame Occupy as unstable and barely intact. Media reporting...
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After Dark: Where have the screensavers gone?
I got my first personal computer in 1994. I just started as a freshman at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon (Steve Jobs’ alma mater) and the school was an all Mac campus as part of the Apple...
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Untie Our Hands: An Alien Tort Claims Act Campaign
A web site has appeared at untieourhands.com lobbying on behalf of Shell Oil Company in the Kiobel V. Royal Dutch Petrolium (Shell) case. The site uses the slogan “Untie Our Hands” as a rallying cry to...
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Maps in iOS 6 vs. Android: Where IS the Washington Monument?
On Apple tech blogs, tumblr, and now in a recent article in the New York times, iPhone users are bemoaning the failure of Apple’s new maps application that replaced Google Maps in the iOS 6 update (and...
View ArticleProjectWestWind: Hacktivist Statement on Education
Hacktivists Team Ghost Shell have accessed over fity university servers and released data on pastebin.com. The data release was not a pure invasion of privacy or act of data mining for identity theft,...
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Anthropology in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”
Anthropologists who like Sci-Fi often list Stargate and Star Trek as among their favorite television series. In my view some of the finest Anthropology focused episodes can be found in the seven...
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Android Theater & The Uncanny Valley
Last night, during the ‘blizzard,’ I went to the Japan Society to see the first play featuring an android actor. The Seinendan Theater Company and Osaka University Robot Theater Project are currently...
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Challenging the Idea that Space and Time are Fundamental Constituents of Nature
A recent article in Quanta Magazine, which has been circulating around the internet through social media, reviews recent challenges to the idea that space and time are “fundamental components of...
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Cyber-Techniques of the Body & the “Looq”
At the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in Chicago, I presented a paper in the panel “Bridging Digital and Physical Publics: Digital Anthropologist’s current engagements with 21st...
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The Social Life of Plants, In Space
With almost 39,000 followers, NASA Astronaut Mike Hopkins has an active social community on Twitter. He posts photos from the International Space Station, where he currently lives. The images in his...
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Word of the Year “Because X”
The American Dialect Society voted yesterday on their latest word of the year. It is: Because X, as in “Why? Because Linguistics.” 20 years ago the word(s) of the year (a tie) were: cyber and morph....
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The Goldilocks Theory
“It’s a world not too big, not too small. It’s just right.” -Stu Spath, Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company I frequently come across the ‘Goldilocks’ analogy in popular reporting on space science....
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Xenolinguistics, SETI, and Pre-Colonial Anthropology
I just finished re-reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1976) in an old well-read family copy with the same cover illustration as the original first edition. The book, part of what...
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Two Approaches to ‘Space Junk': “Cultural Heritage of Space...
NASA has an Orbital Debris Program Office dedicated to the question of space debris. The featured image for this post comes from this office, and is an image of debris in LEO. LEO “stands for low Earth...
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Obama and Space Settlement: 2015 SOTU
I wonder if this is the first mention of space settlement in a US president’s State of the Union address? “I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that unleash new jobs —...
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Open MIND: 39 papers on mind, consciousness, and cognition
I came across this collection of papers and responses on the mind, edited by Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer M. Windt, via a twitter post by Andreas Roepstorff, Professor at Aarhus University. From the...
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Telexploration, OnSight, and HoloLens “on” Mars
With the announcement of the Microsoft HoloLens project, it’s become clear that NASA is working with Microsoft on developing this technology for use in “telexploration.” Jeff Norris, who works for...
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