technology | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Have Mobile Phones In the Classroom Reached Their Calculator Moment?

February 9, 2015 by Museum Fatigue

Last week, while reviewing our class syllabus on the first day, I made a decision to do a little experiment. Rather than make the announcement that mobile phones should be turned off during class, I did the opposite. I told my visual anthropology class that unrestricted use of mobile phones in class would be allowed this semester. Allowing all students to use their devices freely at all times seems very counterintuitive. In fact, even now I am concerned that in […]

Categories: Education, Higher Education, Teaching, Technology • Tags: calculator, classroom experience, iPhone, mobile phone, technology, TI-35

A Practical Science of the Singular

January 19, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This morning I finally finished The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking. I don’t have time to write a commentary, but did want to post some choice quotes from the short essay at the end by de Certeau reflecting on the study of everyday life, “A Practical Science of the Singular.” In the short essay his emphasis on culture as everyday human practice and creativity is clear—much of it a summary of points he made in the […]

Categories: Books, Consumption, Everyday Life, Photo Essays, Quotes • Tags: communication, culture, Luce Giard, Michel de Certeau, orality, practice, technology, The Practice of Everyday Life

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“A Cuisine of Gestures and Words”

January 16, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“…communication is a cuisine of gestures and words, of ideas and information, with its recipes and its subtleties, its auxiliary instruments and its neighboring effects, its distortions and its failures. It is false to believe henceforth that electronic and computerized objects will do away with the activity of users. From the hi-fi stereo to the VCR, the diffusion of these devices multiplies ruses and provokes the inventiveness of users…and, thus become producers of their own little “cultural industry…In turn, this […]

Categories: Quotes, Technology • Tags: communication, Michel de Certeau, technology, The Practice of Everyday Life

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The Facebook Database Must Be Fed

May 23, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Most people around at the dawn of the public Internet might remember the brief period when important webpage addresses circulated by word of mouth, in emails among friends, and were even published in books. Back in 1994, for example, I remember buying a telephone book-sized tome hundreds of pages thick, packed with URLs broken down by type. I’d look in the book’s index, find what I wanted, and then type the unwieldy URL into the browser. Viola! Then came search engines— Yahoo!, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves!, Google and […]

Categories: Discipline, Internet, Random Reflections, Surveillance • Tags: Database, digital double, Facebook, internet, social web, technology

Tom Skype’s Sensitive Words: A Trove of Keywords for Contemporary China

March 10, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

In China, pretty much everyone knows that the Internet is heavily policed. The people know. The government knows the people know. The people know the government knows the people know. In fact, the “open secret” of the Great Firewall is surely an important part of the way censorship works in China. Precisely because people know Internet censorship exists, the party-state benefits from the efficiency of self-policing as a means of control rather than relying exclusively on external enforcement in real […]

Categories: China, Discipline, Internet, Language, Scripts, Surveillance • Tags: censorship, internet, language, sensitive words, Skype, technology, 敏感词

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An Apple is an Apple, Except When It’s a Sign of Satan

November 12, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

As an anthropology professor who regularly teaches classes dealing with material culture and issues of representation, every semester we discuss the ways that humans ascribe meanings to objects—reading them in the terms of the preexisting cultural categories they bring with them. In the context of museums Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (2000) describes these groups as “interpretive communities.” I like this phrase because it foregrounds the fact that interpretation is never entirely individual—but is informed by sociocultural context. It also emphasizes that there is never […]

Categories: Discipline, Everyday Things, iPad, Mythologies • Tags: Apple Computer, Fundamentalism, Religion, satan, technology

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iPad Apps For the Digital Professor

May 23, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Since getting my first iPad on the day it was released two years ago, I have enjoyed the challenge of experimenting with it in new ways—seeing how I can use it effectively in my daily work and professional life. This has involved trying lots of apps and removing lots of apps to see which ones stick around to become useful. It has also meant experimenting with the iPad in class or to document class work. Along the way I have […]

Categories: How To, iPad, Teaching • Tags: fieldwork, iPad, productivity, teaching, technology