CyberAnthropology

by Steve Mizrach (aka Seeker1)

CyberAnthropology is the study of humans in virtual communities and networked

environments.

CyberAnthropology recognizes that the new 'virtual' communities are no longer defined by
geographic or even semiotic (ethnic/religious/linguistic) boundaries. Instead, communities
are being constructed in cyberspace on the basis of common affiliative interests,
transcending boundaries of class, nation, race, gender, and language. Even as old systems of
social organization are imploding, the various 'virtual communities' are growing. (cf. Howard
Rheingold.) This parallels the way in which on the global scene civil society is reclaiming
social space from both the public and private sectors - how the NGO (nongovernmental
organization) is continuing to check the power of the nation-state and the multinational
corporation.

CyberAnthropology draws upon Donna Haraway's concepts of cyborg anthropology, to

examine the technological reconstruction of the human being.

In her book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women , Donna Haraway deals with the curious links
between humans, animals, and machines. She notes that at the same time animal language
and ethology research is revealing a fundamental kinship between humans and their primate
cousins, humans are busy technologically reconstructing themselves to isolate themselves
from the 'merely' biological forms of life on the planet. This is an ongoing project, she notes,
which goes back to the earliest forms of manipulation of the features of the body, and only
continues today with the use of prosthetics, implants, and genetic engineering. The desire to
improve upon what nature has 'dealt' the human body goes back to the origins of culture
itself.

CyberAnthropology prepares the ethnographer to deal with a wider category of

"human beings," which someday may encompass androids and artificial intelligences
as well.

Many AI researchers (perhaps overtly optimistic ones, like Marvin Minsky) feel it is not very
long before an AI passes the Turing Test - perhaps 25 years or so - and can fool a human
being into thinking it is also human. One of the definitions in anthropology of what makes
people human is the ability to exchange symbolic information with our peers. Also, the
ability to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next, which neural networks may
soon be able to do. Once machines have this capability as well, are they not fair game for
ethnography as well? Should anthropology not prepare for the day when its object of
knowledge encompasses siliconware as well as wetware?

CyberAnthropology looks at the human being as a digital-analog information

transceiver, not a LaMettrie style steam-driven machine.

Ever since the Enlightenment philosopher LaMettrie, it has been fashionable to think of
humans as machines. However, in the industrial age, the machine metaphor to which they
appealed was that of the steam-driven, gear-cranking, smoke-belching engine. Today, in our
post-McLuhan electronic age, we know that humans do more than just transform fuel (food)
into energy (work.) They also absorb and transceive units of information - memes. If genes
are the coding for the physical body of the human, then we can think of memes as the
'programming' for the biocomputer we call the brain. The study of the propagation of memes
- which is accelerating in our time due to the explosion of the noosphere and the new
communications technologies - is called memetics, coined by biologist Richard Dawkins.

CyberAnthropology is a place to examine the uniting of the past and the future - the
movement of "modern primitives" and the new "technoshamanism."

Why at this apex point in human history, according to our various socioevolutionary
theories, are we rushing once more to embrace the cast-off 'primitive'? Why are "modern
primitives" once again reinventing ways to mark, inscribe, and incise the body? Why is it
that the fastest-growing areas in cyberspace are MUDs (multi-user dungeons) where people
can become wizards and fight dragons? Why is it that some of the heaviest users of the
Matrix are neo-pagans, Wiccans, Magickians, and other occultists? Why are "raves" bringing
us back to Levy-Bruhl's earliest phase of human consciousness - the participation mystique?
How is the Net helping to create a new "oral" culture of folklore? These are some of the
questions CyberAnthropology seeks to answer.

CyberAnthropology deals with the computer as a reflection of Self.

In Sherry Turkle's classic work on children relating to computers in education, The Second
Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, she found that one of the things the computer served
as was a reflection or mirror of the self. Children ended up describing the things they did
using the ways the computer performed. Certainly, the recent applications of the computer,
in such areas as artificial life, virtual reality, natural language applications, "fuzzy logic,"
modelling of chaos theory, and especially cognitive science, have forced us to return to
perennial issues of epistemology, identity, and philosophy. The study of consciousness, once
a backwater of psychology driven out by no-nonsense behaviorism, is making a serious
comeback. Douglas Hofstadter, for example, discusses the peculiar reflexive (recursive)
properties of logic in both the computer and the human mind, and the curious contortions to
which they lead.

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