From now you can reach this weblog also from the home page of our institute. Just in case you can't remember the URL of this weblog (which of course is unlikely if you came here ...) but (which is just more unlikely) could remember the URL of the institute.

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An Interdisciplinary Research Project at the Freie Universität Berlin is researching "China’s Internet Policy between Technological Development and Political Reaction". Monolog

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The Institute for European Cultural Anthropology in Vienna is doing a research project and exhibition about "Doing Nothing". They were thinking also about doing nothing in the Internet. Not much to read, but a short introduction about "Doing Nothing" in the Net at their website. Via Monolog

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Now, this is some kind of strange idea, so don't read on, if you are in a hurry: Darryl Macer, a New Zealand Professor, researching in Japan, want's to build a database of the ideas of the world. Of ALL ideas, to note. "By understanding which ideas are specific to certain cultures and which ones are universal, policy-makers can make more informed decisions about such agreements, Macer said.[...] For example, while most fundamentalist Christians in the United States oppose all forms of cloning, some Hindus in India might believe cloning research is perfectly ethical. Macer believes that creating a database of the ideas that form the basis of these beliefs will help international policy-makers understand the complex mix of viewpoints at hand.", writes Wired.

Now, taken this idea seriously, this would at least mean full employment for all cultural anthropologists in the world :-)

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The Göttinger Digitalisierungs Zentrum has a huge archive of scanned travel literature from all over the world, but especially for North America. You can find there a lot of anthropologically interesting material in different languages about cultural contacts between indigenous people and all kinds of travellers. A well known example could be Las Casas report about the Destroying of the Indian Population (from 1552) and a not so well known example Balduin Möllhausens Journal of a Journey from Mississippi to the coast of the south seas (1858). Via Netbib

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The probably most important technocultural magazine of the internet, Wired, has a cluster of articles about Science and Religion in their actual monthly magazine (which you can buy also as printed issue). The main statement seems to be, that in our society religion and science aren't antipodal anymore. I didn't read it yet, but I think I have to. If the most important technocultural magazine is approaching religion, it's definitely important. There's already heavy discussion in other parts of the net.

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I found an interesting article about a serie of books from australia. The historian Keith Windschuttle want's to take a deeper look at the deadly confrontations between australian aborigines and the white imigrants. The first book, "The Fabrication of Aboriginal History", now has been published. It's goal is to disprove the thesis of the genocide of aborigines by the white man. This seems to be a new fashion. Recently some scientists showed, that the indigenous population of America was already ill and declining, shortly before columbus came. Is there anyone knowing more about australia who can classify this article/book?

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Howard Rheingold, an early cyberspace guru, published his new book "Smart Mobs" one month ago. Since this time there's discussion on the web (and gladly also at the e_thnology-course in our institute) if the web is going wireless. Rheingold predicts, that the next revolution is the communication from everywhere at every time. There's some kind of introduction to the book at the online magazine edge. Then there's a interview with Rheingold about his book at Well.com, also an intellectual online magazine. Finally I stumbled across this Review at Mindjack.com, a magazine about internet culture. BTW, I don't think that there will be a revolution, simply because western society is not a mobile society. Who is not mobile doesn't need to go wireless. But I didn't read the book - so maybe I took him wrong here.

And last but not least: There is a possibility of going wireless in a special way, as Argentina is currently showing. Maybe Germany will also take this special way. We can forget about Rheingold then ...

A early technological prophecy And a last one: If we talk about technological predictions we have always to keep in mind, that a lot of former predicitions didn't come true. One of the funniest things predicting a wonderful future of a technological world is this movie (free download) from the world fair 1962, which was sponsored by AT&T. There is a permanently smiling couple which shows stunning futuristic features like the oven which you can switch off by telephone (this one is still predicted today, by the way). But some of the early ICT-Features predicted in the movie really came true, like "push button phoning".

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The Mapuche Language Page presented by Jennifer E. Arnold from Standford University provides all-around information about the MAPUDUNGUN - the indigineous language spoken by approximately one million Mapuche in Chile and Argentina today. Provides features as Overview, Mapuche Names, Toponomía Indígena, Glosario Mapudungun - Espanol, Linguistic Bibliography and the Stanford Mapuche Bibliography.

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I found an interesting paper about this topic from Nicola Döring, Ilmenau Technological University, Germany. The abstract says: "The paper presents the personal home page as a new object of sociological, psychological, linguistic, and communication studies research. It shows how theories of identity, self-presentation and computer-mediated communication are being applied to personal home pages. The paper is the first systematic review of about thirty personal home page studies. (...) The paper ends by suggesting some possible directions for future research." Via Monolog.antville.org, a interesting weblog from a Volkskunde/folklore-student

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In our course "e-thnology" at our institute we sometimes talk about the future of the internet, and last week someone asked, if there isn't the danger, that the very popular search engine Google is going to have the monopoly to decide which knowledge is found. Imagine, the web would be only one company, which decides what to publish on the web. Google exactly does that, some could say. Because, what isn't found, practically does'nt exist. In the last month this has been discussed also in the internet: Does search engine's power threaten Web's independence? It's natural, that there is some concern. A lot of formerly powerful search engines disappeared in the last years (The Search Engine Graveyard). A website called Google-Watch is already online only to complain about Googles Monopoly. Not very serious, to add. My thoughts: I don't believe this hype of a "danger". The dangerous things of monopolies is not that they rule the market by perfection of their product. The trouble is always, if they rule the market by blocking alternatives, like Microsoft in the "Browser War". If they rule the market once, they can lower the quality of the product without having commercial loss. But if there are alternatives, any lowering of quality would be the end. We had that with IBM more than ten years ago. Working in the search engine segment for four years now as a side job, I can clearly say: There are A LOT of alternatives, just waiting for Google to implode by its own weight. This is maybe the good thing of the net: As its most important ressource is the idea, things can change very fast. Look at this little search engine called Gigablast: Only people in the scene know it. It's a one-man-project. It's not commercial. Don't you think, that if Google will abuse its monopoly, search engines like this are already waiting to serve the masses, to get in the buisiness? Related reading:Telepolis and Washington Post wrote about the fact, that students forget about other possbilities of information research besides Google - libraries for example.

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