This morning I got back to an article that has been on and off my work-plate for a year now, one that I have to turn in to a discussant for my 4S panel as well for an edited collection of articles on the intersection between art, activism, and biopoltics.

Part of my efforts meant attacking a virtual “stack” of articles and one of them was one of best journalistic articles I have read in a long time. Exceedingly clear prose is combined with good references, hard numbers and just the right amount of passionate verve to make reading actually fun and not just another nameless, faceless cog in the academic research wheel. The article mentioned a couple of interesting studies that while sadly not linked from the article (but I am going to take that was an editorial and not authorial decision), they were pretty much cake to find by doing a little poking and prodding on the Internet.

So for example, one of them was published on PLoS Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature and stands pretty strongly on its own right. But what is even better are the long list of citations (many with links) that would otherwise be frankly, a *total* time consuming bitch to find like the correspondence between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies:

# Food and Drug Administration Division of Drug Marketing Advertising and Communications (1997) Effexor warning letter. Rockville (Maryland): Food and Drug Administration. Available: http://www.fda.gov/cder/warn/june97/effexor.pdf. Accessed 14 October 2005.

Total gems given to you right there on a silver plate. That is what I love about Internet based research…

On the other hand, this extreme access is not always so peachy. The amount of data now available can be experienced as a totally mind-numbing, frightening, chaotic infolanche (as one of my old adivsors liked to call it), which translates into a lot of academic “hunting and gathering” not to mention all the sorting, sifting, cataloging, and then of course trying to remember what the heck you have just amassed in the first place, even with the aid of tags and all

I am not sure if things have gotten easier or harder because this is all I personally know but what I do know is that there are times when I just love the hunt, losing myself for hours, following links, gathering articles, enlivened, exicted about research and there are others when the woolly mammoth of infomartion gets the better of me.

Joe Reagle who is thick in dissertation writing on wikipedia, has written a very thoughtful note on how he is handling his citations. Given that so many of them are from online source snad thus more like moving targes than the steady, bound book and journal article, they require different conventions.

Does the world of open source/ software experience a disproportionately higher number of internal memo leaks than other fields of endeavor or is it that I am just watching more closely?

The word on the streets (in my comments really) is that Epiphany may be the future of reliable web browsing so I will have to check it out. I also got an excited email today about a firefox plug-in that is for the (academic) gods: zotero… It looks pretty nifty and handy but since I don’t even use a bibliographic program like End Notes, at least I am not missing out on huge functionality, which reminds me, does anyone have opinions on good GUI free software bibliography programs ?

It is a little weird to read Planet Debian and find a post about a place, adventure, ship that was also once my reality and home. This is the 2nd free software-head I know to have lived on that ship (I don’t count myself as I was pretty oblivious to the world of computing back then). It definitely fuels my desire to sail away again, and even try to do so with all geek-crew. Just need to find a ship and quite a bit of funding.

Mozilla/Firefox in a lot of ways was/is the poster child of free software… I mean do you know how many times I was talking to a certain non-technologically-inclined-person who claimed to not know a thing about open source, and then after I asked what browser they were using and when they said Mozilla, I would let them in on the dirty little secret that they were, in fact, in its very bosom, cradled in and by the rhythm of freedom. And they would gleefully respond with some excited variation of “I had NO idea and I love it… those tabs, those plug ins, that speed….blah blah.” I just loved inducing that reaction.

But for me my love affair with Firefox is officially over. For many years it was a happy, fulfilling relationship but lately, the little red fox has let me down, acting way too erratic, crashing during those inopportune moments, like when opening a pdf, which would cause the whole apparatus to come crashing down, and all those lovely open tabs, with all that information, would be gone in an instant.

For the last 4 months, every time this disdainful event occurred, I would just bemoan and bitch a lot, especially on IRC. Part of me was a loyalist but a bigger part of me was just very very very lazy. With all my bookmarks, with my tool bar, with all my passwords configured JUST RIGHT, I felt enduring the crashes and loss of data was worth it. But no more (admittedly my IRC compatriots were sick of hearing me complain and pretty much demanded that I change).

So now I am going to “rediscover the web” but with Galeon. It is up and running and I have transfered a good chunk of my settings over and over the course of the next few weeks I will make the transition. So far so good though there is work to be done, to be sure, to make Galeon into my new love(ly), web browser.

There are some good comments on the Borsook piece, that rightly point out that the silences to speak of failure were perhaps more of a function of the moment she was doing the research (it just was too early to uncover it) and not necessarily due to a deep culture of shame that permeates high powered Silicon Valley executives (though I like the idea of the later for some reason )

Josh Greenburg also provided a link to the The dotcom archive, which collects the stories of that time period. Really, we are in the age of the archive, aren’t we? Stilt it seems more than ever worth exploring what silences are built into these archives, especially since everything appears to be so accessible and transparent.

This discussion also raises the interesting point, however, of the importance of time and distance to assess the significance of economic trends, new technologies etc. Recently I did a few media interviews with Canadian journalists on the impact of new technologies on political campaigns and advertising. While I have some thoughts on it and it is possible (and important) to think about these topics, my initial reaction is to be highly qualified and cautious because things are too emergent to really say anything firm. I want to tell them, “so give me a call back in like.. 5 years and I may have something to say…”

It is like one of my advisers at University of Chicago said, now that we have pervasive Internet shopping, it is now the perfect time to really understand the significance of the mall… And by unearthing objects of the past, it will help us ground understandings of the present.

After about 6 months of initial research in the Bay Area, I had to make a choice over the future direction of my more directed fieldwork. Would my project be on Silicon Valley, its religious fervor for the exuberant technology start-up, with the geek entrepreneur (probably with some affiliation with Standford) at its center stage, or would it be more broadly about free software and the culture of geekdom? I chose the later, for various reasons, but I think I wanted to write a dissertation that did not bleed with cynicism but instead flowed and flowered with a lot more joy than could have been possible if I had stayed within the grasp of the start-up and the venture capitalist.

That said, I learned a lot about SV, took a lot of notes, and read most anything I could get my hands on whether the work of San Jose Anthropologist,Jan English-Lueck or published in magazines like Mother Jones, Harpers, and even the National Geographic. One of the luminaries that writes about SV from a cultural perspective is Paulina Borsook. And she is fine writer who admittedly has ticked me of on occasion (to be precise because she collapsed too much of geek culture into that of the specific SV world in Cyberselfish, which at the time I found almost personally offensive, probably more than it should have).

Today I just came across a short, older but very illuminating piece of hers “The Disappeared of Silicon Valley (or why I couldn’t write that piece)” which is as much about the limits of historical representation in general as it specifically about the failings of start-ups in SV at the end of the recent boom and bust cycle.

So her goal was simple enough: To find people involved in starting new high-tech whose companies had died.. and to find them to get a more visceral and cultural window into this experience. But it was a near to impossible task. Despite her impeccable record with confidentiality and a far flung social network, she could not get anyone talk about these ostensible “failures.”

There has been a good amount of writing on the limits of historical representation because the archive or what comes to be the archive is a function of power and it is usually the powerless who are left out, as the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot has so eloquently shown. But while it is true that some CEO of a dethroned corporation may be “powerless” in some sense of the word, it is not what we associate with the word.

But in fact, the power of stigma of failure in a region that magnifies an already well-develiped cultural fetish of success (especially, I imagine, among male graduates, of places like Stanford Buisiness School), is enormous, so much so, that it seems one can only write about the experience, as Barsook has done so well, through the reality of a lack, through silence.

Joey Hess from Debian has come up with a pretty nifty analysis of thread patterns in email. This is a great example of the geek technique to transform what seems like chaos (and can surely be experienced as such) into something more categorical, segmentable, and thus manageable.

There are not many non-profit pharmaceutical organizations. In fact there is only one but now that they have recently announced that India approved a drug, Paromomycin IM Injection, to cure Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL), that they developed, it is more likely there will still be at least one, and perhaps more of these in the future.