Monday, March 26, 2012

This Weeks @DigitalNibbles: Cyborg Anthropology with Amber Case

I'll admit it, one of the best parts of doing the Digital Nibbles podcast series is getting to meet new and interesting folks. A lot of the these people are brought to the show via my co-host @techallyson a.k.a Allyson Klein who also moonlights as a Marketing Director at Intel. (j/k)

Our upcoming show on Wednesday is going to be a great one with featuring a Amber Case who is a self described Cyborg Anthropologist.. what? Yes, someone who studies Cyberanthropology, What is that you ask? Well, I had no idea either so I went to the "trusty" Wikipedia page which stated it as.

"a subbranch of sociocultural anthropology that deals with cybernetic systems, the culturally informed interrelationships between human beings and technologies. These interrelationships include the attempts to fuse technological artifacts with human and other biological organisms, with human society, and with the culturally shaped environment."

Professionally Amber is a co-founder of a startup in PDX (Portland) called Geoloqi that has developed a mobile geolocation and geo-fencing API that is really quite cool, but even more interesting is what and how she describes herelf as a "cyber anthropologist."  She has spoken at TED, as well as written about the subject in Wired, Forbes, TNW and TIME and recently spoke at SXSW.

She describes Cyborg Anthropology as: someone who "looks at how humans and non human objects interact with each other, and how that changes culture. So, for instance, we have these things in our pockets that cry, and we have to pick them up and soothe them back to sleep, and then we have to feed them every night by plugging them into the wall, right? And at no other time in history have we had these really strange non human devices that we take care of as if they are real. And we're very dependent upon them. So that's one of the aspects that I'm studying, the idea of mobile technology and its effect on people's relationships. Another thing is the idea of extending into the second self online, through an avatar. So studying how people interact with each other through these little technosocial interactions, versus just the analog interactions, is another aspect of cyborg anthropology."

You can finder more info on her at Twitter, Linked-In, and at her blog or tune into the Digital Nibbles Podcast this wednesday at 6pm Eastern / 3pm Pacific.

#DigitalNibbles Podcast Sponsored by Intel

If you would like to be a guest on the show, please get in touch.

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