Another example of a controversy around surveillance practices. Adam Molina at Soundguys “Headphones are collecting too much personal data”. He seems to balance some of the conveniences that surveillance capitalist apps bring, but he is dismayed when he doesn’t see how his headphones tracking his music could benefit him=
On the flip side, I don’t know what I get in return for letting my headphones know what I’m listening to. Furthermore, I can’t think of a single reason why a pair of workout earbuds need access to someone’s menstrual history. We should just call it what it is because, at that point, it doesn’t feel like a transaction anymore. It’s just spying.
Melissa Vogel and Adam Gamwell at Anthropology News write about the value of anthropology to business and how this value can be articulated in language a business understands.
As anthropologists, our approach to human insights research and analysis offers businesses a unique way to understand patterns of behavior and meaning making that differs from quantitative data analysis. For example, ethnography of tech industry consumer needs conducted by anthropologists, who use cross-cultural knowledge, cultural relativism, and a holistic approach, will offer businesses a way to understand consumer needs that is not often present in a management-, psychology-, or even sociology-based perspective. These insights then allow businesses to provide better products and services.
Read the full article here.
Very moving song by the Elias String Quartet, “Lament for Mulroy”.
With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic I have spent most I my time at home, working and away from friends and family. I therefore have had to significantly make use of video chat for work meetings and meeting loved ones. In an article on Vox, Adam Clark Estes writes about the history of this technology and how these changes are shaping our lives and the technology itself:
(…) hosting a party with a video chat component certainly sounds less weird today than it would have six months ago. If it was already evident that videoconferencing had become a mainstay of many offices, that it could be a prominent part of our social lives is a new idea to me. That explains my initial surprise when the folks from Microsoft Teams started telling me how their workplace software had taken on new roles, like social networking, in many users’ lives. In other words, the pandemic has fundamentally changed our relationship with these tools and with digital spaces generally.
The article further delves in the changes made to the technology to make more pleasant to use. Read the full article here.
In this talk David Graeber gives a good overview of his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”:
Prof. Ron Anderson writes at The Society Pages about the importance of thrust during the Covid-19 pandemic. He gives an overview of different types of social thrust that have been theorised by classical sociologists and how their insights may apply to our current situation.
As the pandemic continues to disrupt society, we will see more clearly how the social forces of trust and solidarity influence peoples’ beliefs, attitudes and social relationships. Probably we will see even more clearly how the erosion and absence of trust leaves us fewer and fewer options. Despite the growth in size and complexity of societies today, trust resides at the center of our understanding of social life. No wonder the notion of trust helps us understand life during the pandemic.
Read the full article here.