See also, Information for Authors
From, the Society for Applied Anthropology Newsletter
Vol, 10, No. 4
REPORT FROM THE HO EDITOR
By Jeffrey Longhofer
<jxl102@po.cwru.edu>
Associate Editor and HO Webmaster
Case Western Reserve University
On October 29, the Net turned 30. And though it started as a Government-financed network, Arpanet, for the military and universities, today it has more than 200 million users around the world. Only months after the first synapses fired, the nodes increased geometrically, first from two, connecting UCLA with Stanford, then to four, connecting these with the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. The rest is history. The aim was to encourage Defense Department researchers at universities to share computer power; the result was a vast public access system of communication and information.
Originally built and supported by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Internet today links doctors to patients, businesses to consumers, students to teachers, libraries to patrons, politicians to constituencies, revolutionaries to the masses, the public sphere to the private, and the domestic sphere to the commercial and public spheres. It drives stock markets and global financial transactions. For many it represents the democratization of information. For others it is a daily nuisance of information over-load, an intrusion into privacy, a dangerous form of exclusion, a source for moral panic and hysteria, commodity fetishism, or personal addiction; and for some it is a insidious form of labor exploitation.
We now have a second generation of the Net, Internet2, reinvented for university use. The cost to universities is high, and though for now the National Science Foundation is helping with the bills (universities pay from $500,000 to $1 million per year), that support is expected to disappear early in the next century. Internet2, with a much larger bandwidth, promises to deliver data to the desktop at 10 megabits per second -- 200 times faster than a modem with the capacity for 56,000 bits per second. And MCI has recently offered a comparable technology, vBNS+. Among other things, Intenet2 promises an advanced form of virtual reality, or tele-immersion, where users at multiple sites will interact in real time, in shared simulated environments.
Though it is not clear to me where Ye Ole Editor, Donald Stull (possibly a crypto-Luddite), stands on the network, this Associate Editor saw the future in the warp and weft of the Web and insisted that HO take the plunge. Together, the computer, with its associated technologies, and the Net along with its new social relations have transformed the ways we access, code, read, process, store, and convey information.
For the world of publishing, scholarly and otherwise, the Net has been revolutionary. Paper and binding costs, not to mention environmental costs, will soon make manuscript modes of presentation obsolete. With the natural and physical sciences leading the way, we will very soon live in a world where the printed manuscript will go the way of the slide rule -- nostalgically mentioned but obsolete.
Some of us are still catching up with technology (see recent studies showing the techno-generation gap, especially for those nearing or over 45) and others, myself included, believe that the use of all technologies must be forced to a much higher level of reflexivity; that is, we must constantly evaluate the developers, marketers, designers and the end-users of the technologies to determine how they are used and to what ends. For it is clear that the information superhighway is not dominated by benevolent forces.
David Rothkopf, former Clinton Administration Deputy Secretary of Commerce (now with Kissinger Associates, a consulting company run by Henry Kissinger), writes "for the United States, a central objective of the Information Age foreign policy must be to win the battle of the worlds’ information flows, dominating the airwaves as Great Britain once ruled the seas"(see, Foreign Policy, 107, Summer 1997, pages 39-49). In his recent book, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System, Dan Schiller offers new areas for research and reflection:
The networks that collectively comprise cyberspace were originally created at the behest of government agencies, corporate military contractors, and allied educational institutions. However, over the past decade or so, many of these cooperating networks have begun to serve end-users located principally in and around corporations. This shift in end-users suggests that the underlying logic of the Internet is also being transformed. As it comes under the sway of an expansionary market logic, the Internet is catalyzing an epochal political-economic transition toward what I call digital capitalism -- and toward changes that, for much of the population, are unpropitious. (Schiller 1999:xvi-xvii) The opportunity for applied anthropological research on emerging digital capitalism is limitless.
The social sciences, especially psychology, are making progress toward electronic publication, user-friendly access to databases, and the development of efficient search engines. Anthropology is far behind. Have you tried using Eureka recently? And the humanities have a very long way to go.
To be or not to be on the Net is not the question for Human Organization. We’re on the Net, increasingly, and we are attempting to effectively use the technology to assure that applied anthropology and social science flows to the benefit of authors, subscribers (institutional and individual), readers (subscribers and readers are not always the same), students, researchers, agencies, NGOs, and other more diverse constituencies. We should, as applied social scientists, set a goal achieved long ago by the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine: though the public is not likely to come to us, we must go to them. And so they did. With a vengeance they exploited the media, representing authors, professional societies, medicine, and research, to the broader public and public officials.
Foremost, the Net for HO should function to move information quickly to those who can most benefit. Toward that goal, we have recently introduced several innovations. Following the lead from JAMA and NEJM, each quarter we are selecting articles that have an immediate and compelling public interest. For these articles we are sending press releases, e-mail and hardcopy, and posting a précis and press release on our Web site. Though this first foray has produced only modest results (the author of our first quarterly feature was interviewed by the Voice of America), we will intensify these efforts during the upcoming year. And we are seeking advice from our readers on how best to reach the press. If you can be of help, or want to volunteer, please send e-mail to< jxL102@po.cwru.edu>.
We are also sending to agencies and NGOs current and forthcoming tables of contents and abstracts with special emphasis given to their concerns. As well, we are writing each abstract as a separate HTML page so that search engines work effectively to connect readers and researchers to authors, research, HO, the SfAA and the WEB. Also, we send to readers, at their request (though they must first answer an online survey), the current and forthcoming tables of contents and abstracts; we will now send, only two months after posting the option, more than 100 to non-subscribing members and agencies. And I am exchanging daily e-mail with readers, researchers, and applied scientists from around the world.
Finally, on our WEB site <http://www.sfaa.net/ho/> you can browse through HO abstracts, Volumes 53-58, 1994-1999, submit rejoinders, online book reviews and commentaries, read the précis of the most recent quarterly feature article, contact the editors and editorial board, link to a subscription form, and read the complete HO guide to authors. If you have ideas for HO WEB development, please let us know.
By Jeffrey Longhofer
<jxl102@po.cwru.edu>
Associate Editor and HO Webmaster
Case Western Reserve University
