Many thanks to Ethnos editors Nils Bubandt and Mark Graham for a thoroughly encouraging peer review process which immensely improved the paper.  I am also indebted to Alberto Barrionuevo, who has kindly given me permission to reprint his photo “Sea Battle of the Software Patents at the European Parliament,” (CC) 2005-07-05, Alberto Barrionuevo, license Creative Commons BY-SA Spain 3.0.  This photo effectively captures the political imagery engaged in disputes over software patents in the European Union.  So when my article was accepted for publication, I started looking for the author in order to secure permission for reprinting the photo with the text of my article.  In the two months of e-mailing that ensued, I discovered that the photo had been archived, published, (re)named, (re)contextualized, and edited on various websites, including:

• An editorial entitled “Victory in the European Parliament” by Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, then-president of FFII France.  The photo was attributed to Gustavo Broos and entitled “David and Goliath.”
• FFII gallery of online photos, which was since been re-done and the old URL does not work any more.  As of 2006, when I checked this website the last time, the photo was also attributed to Gustavo Broos and named “David and Goliath / giant, goliath, behemoth, monster: someone or something that is abnormally large and powerful.”  Gustavo said that he remembered coming up with this name, but he was not the author of the photo.
• newer FFII gallery site credits the photo to Alberto Barrionuevo and gives no title for the photo.
• Alberto Barrionuevo on his website offers a “web ready version” of the photo which, as he pointed out in an e-mail, has been edited to remove the cable which appears in the front plan of the original image.

Eventually I decided to use the image from the FFII gallery website (which does contain the cable) and add Alberto’s title and the terms of his license (CC BY-SA Spain 3.0).

Thanks to numerous free software activists whom I contacted along the way in my attempt to reconcile the multiple tracks of activist archiving, editing and repurposing the photo as documentary evidence with publisher’s demand of finding the single author who could give the reprint permission in conventional copyright terms.

My sources will be drawn from a wide range of online forums frequented by cats, giant oversized rabbits, tiny chicks that have just been hatched, rows of ducklings, and sneezing pandas.  I have arranged a Skype interview with a slow loris in 2 weeks, who is the moderator of a forum targeted specifically to animals whose brief fame has faded.

I will also analyze the total ecological footprint of ‘surprised kitty,’ taking into account the server and client hardware, electricity usage, and long-term health effects of repeated viewings.

– by Harvey Nailbiter

This panel examines how anthropological theory and methods can critically engage with people’s daily lives as they increasingly encompass diverse online platforms. Early ethnographic research about the internet emphasized that existing cultural categories and practices loomed large both in understandings of cyberspace and in imaginings of its transformative potential. These studies of online forms of sociality, modes of interaction, and representations highlight a range of practices, technologies, and assumptions that were deployed in cyberspace. Building on such research, this panel focuses on the means by which research participants, as well as researchers, have strategically constructed disjunctures and connections between their online and offline experiences. At a moment when digital commitments are expanding far beyond email and websites, this panel critically considers how online ethnographic work resituates the anthropological project.

The panel includes four presenters and two discussants who have conducted ethnographic research online among diverse populations. Four of these contributors approached online communities as an explicit component of research; three were originally interested in other questions but realized digital connections and disconnections were of fundamental importance. This range of research design enables us to examine how online lives might be fundamentally impacting anthropological research, whether it explicitly concerns the internet or not. The focus on strategic connections and disconnections also allows us to reflect on anthropologists’ commitments to engage multiple publics. For instance, what are the ethical demands of referencing writing posted online, when research participants’ aspirations and reflexive practices explicitly counter anthropological commitments to assuring confidentiality? Should such writing be represented as the pseudonymous words of an informant, or as the credited writing of another expert?

The panelists highlight the diversity and the politics of online commitments. For Americans who travel to China to seek experimental medical care, online health discussion forums have enabled new forms of sociality and tactics of mobilization that both transcend and reinforce lines of social cleavage. In France, romantic partners of software activists have created their own online platforms, in which their personal accounts redefine activist identities and terms of engagement by foregrounding gender and sexuality. For Japanese Americans who return-migrate to Japan, online communities have produced and strengthened networks in Japan, creating new formations of diaspora and ethnicity. In Japan, divorce support groups are coded explicitly as “online” communities, even if many meetings occur in person. In all of these situations, being online matters deeply to the people involved. We discuss how anthropological approaches can account for such strategic commitments to the virtual, the possibilities offered by ethnographic fieldwork to trace such online mediations, and the implications of pursuing them.

Other participants will be Priscilla Song (chair), Ayako Takamori, Allison Alexy (co-organizer), Ilana Gershon, and Nicole Constable.

Our panel is scheduled for Wednesday, December 2, 2009, starting at 8 p.m. in the Room 413 at the Downtown Philadelphia Marriott. We are planning a special journal issue on this topic and would love some provocative questions from the audience!

These exciting details notwithstanding, the Welcome notice is timely: in ten days, I am traveling to Zurich for the conference “Shaping Europe in a Globalized World? Protest Movements and the Rise of a Transnational Civil Society, ” organized by the Department of German, Zurich University. I am giving a talk on the panel about computer-based protest. My paper, based on my ethnographic fieldwork and media research in 2004-05, will analyze the campaign against software patents in the European Union.