Skip to main content

Community and Voyeurism

A couple of months ago a wrote about virtual communities, and mentioned a working moms bulletin board. My visits there are infrequent at best, and while I have been known to post, it is not often. But I recently realized that when I do navigate there, I am reading other people's problems...and while it is not exactly entertainment, but there is a bit of "thank goodness I don't have issues like these" going through my head. And a desire to read on to know the details behind these stories. I will also admit that this realization will probably make my visits to this bulletin board less frequent than they already are.

At the same time, I have a belief (based in my anthropological background, I like to say) that gossip is a natural part of human existence. Maybe that is what celebrities are good for--so we can gossip about people who aren't our friends, family, and co-workers. Maybe there is evolutionary advantage in gossip, as some argue, in the thought that knowing what the rest of your tribe is up to keeps you all safe and out of danger.

But in the end, I guess I will have to fess up to being a bit of a voyeur in the virtual world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Storytelling

A couple of years ago I organized a conference session on storytelling as a means to communicate anthropological findings in non-academic environments. Storytelling is central to anthropology as a discipline—not only do we all study some aspect of human story, the stories of the cultures we study are key to our understanding of them. Stories become mechanisms for collaboration and change, as well as carriers of history. But we don’t always stop to think about the stories we tell, even though anthropologists regularly use storytelling as a communication device. In order to be relevant in settings dominated by non-anthropologists, we must not only pass on the data we have gathered, but convey its importance and convince decision makers in business, design, development, public policy, environment, and a myriad of other fields. Constructing these stories involves editing and carefully choosing what to relay to our audience. Delivering the stories involves performance on many scal...
6 comments
Read more

Kids Day and India

Last Friday was bring your kid to work day at Pitney Bowes. It's all very fun, begins with breakfast and a magic show, followed by tours for the older kids, then a big outdoor picnic. I was a tour stop, "Let's Travel to India." They put the kids in groups by age, since some of the stops are better for older or younger ones...I ended up with groups ranging from about 8-13 years old. It was fun but exhausting. I figured the point was more fun than educational, so pretty much I set up a slide show to talk about the fact that we invent stuff by understanding how people live and work, and asking what they knew about India. Answers: lots of people, cows...Showed them pics of cellphones, malls and offices and lots of things that look pretty similar in India as in the US, then pictures of things that look different. Fun to see their reactions. They all noticed the Subway in the mall, and they all recognized the well in the village and understood what it was for and that...
6 comments
Read more

Flat World

One of the next books on my list is Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century . Friedman is a columnist with the New York Times who spent a lot of time last year in Bangalore. I read his columns while he was there, and some excerpts from the book. His overall thesis seems to be that since there are intelligent, skilled people throughout the world, and broadband has made global interconnectedness real, the skills needed to do almost any work can be found anywhere, and employed from anywhere. There is a message for those of us in the US about education and skill training, but I also think there are some exciting possibilities. Rather than worry about how jobs might go overseas, I like thinking about how we work collaboratively with colleagues around the world. For the last year, I have been working on a project with Dina Mehta of Explore Research and Consultancy in India. The flatness of the world has enabled my company to conduct a long term resear...
3 comments
Read more