Has outsourcing legal work been around for awhile, or did I just miss the spam in previous years?

.. Due to this technological explosion, persons residing in two parts of the globe can interact with each other easily. Before this technological explosion, only industrial establishments were able to take advantage of cheap and qualified labor force available in other parts of the globe. The widespread use of internet has made it possible for organizations engaged in service sector to hire and outsource the work to countries where qualified labor force is available at internationally competitive rate.

India is the leading destination for outsourcing. India has gained a competitive edge as an outsourcing hub for a number of reasons, including the widespread use of English and availability of large pool of professionals at internationally competitive rate. Outsourcing to India gives overseas attorneys the clear competitive advantage over other legal service firms in terms of cost, quality and turnaround time.

Most companies of Europe and America routinely outsource their back-end business process operations like data entry and handling, payroll management, accounting and book-keeping, processing of tax returns and insurance claims, ticketing, legal research coding and organizing of documents for major litigation cases, transcription (medical and legal).

The stack is shorter. I started the week with a long series of articles on new media technologies and as I have turned each page, I have learned a great deal. I wish I could blog about them all but because there are still some left, not to mention other things to attend to, my time is limited. But I would do a great disservice if I did not mention one that blew me away, both for its content and its eloquence. Kris Cohen, a Ph.D student at U of C, published a short but rich piece entitled What does the photoblog want?

There is a lot more there than a mere 19 pages may first seem to suggest. I have the feeling I will go back to it again to mull over the different strains he ties together in a coherent and enticing knot. Today what spoke to me most strongly was his demonstration of how technologies can work in concert not only in ways unexpected, but in way that produce a dense (and surprising) matrix of personal desire and motivation. Among other things, he shows how a piece of technology, the camera, can acquire a whole new life and trajectory when it is animated within the context of another technology, the photoblog:

One function of the photoblog, its practitioners say, is to provide motivation for taking photos. The photoblog provides structure for photographs, gives them something to do, compels their production via the motivating external abstractions of a project. This makes the photoblogger answerable not to her own (some- times unreliable) self, but to her blog and its audiences, however hypothetical these are, however unknown.

What I mean is: the photoblog is both what photoblogger want (a record of their everyday lives and idiosyncratic vision) and the means for achieving it (that is, the desire to achieve it).

In union with photography, the photoblog functions as a verb: motivating, justifying. In union with photographs, the photoblog functions as a noun: collection, site.

Moroever, if the photoblog refigures the act of taking pictures, of the very stuff of desire and motivation, this piece also show us how this new practice of photoblogging alters the very nature of the Real, of what it may mean to record our daily lives, everyday:

Notice not just how Ed’s desires begin to articulate an interestingly recon?gured photography, but how his technological fantasy is also a fantasy about his life. He wants to proliferate photography so that it becomes less distinct from his life in general. An in?nite expansion of
photography in this way would effect an in?nite regression as well: being everywhere, photography would also be nowhere.

The list of things I want/need/should (or should not) blog about are piling high and they range from the insignificant though unbelievable footage of an octopus gorging on a shark, to a long bit on the “Tale of A Tub” workshop that I attended last week at Rutgers (an amazing book).

But all of this will have to wait as my plate is overflowing. But, before I forget, I would like to point out for those who work on psychiatry, gloablization and medicine, or for those who just want to read what looks like a promising STS-Anthro ethnography, Andrew Lakoff’s book
Pharmaceutical Reason has finally been released! I have been wanting to sink my teeth in for a while now and I am sure it will be a tasty read.

Andrew Lakoff argues that a new ‘pharmaceutical’ way of thinking about and acting upon mental disorder will reshape the field of psychiatry. Drawing from a comprehensive ethnography of psychiatric practice in Argentina (a country which boasts the most psychoanalysts per capita in the world), Lakoff looks at new ways of understanding and intervening in human behavior. He charts the globalization of pharmacology, particularily the global impact of US psychiatry and US models of illness, and further illustrates the clashes, conflicts, alliances and reformulations that take place when psychoanalytic and psychopharmacological models of illness and cure meet.

It is strange to think that one decision can so dramatically change the course of one’s history, one’s life.

For me, when I was 17, I decided to live on this ship , the R/V Heraclitus, and I think the more important of decision, in terms of impact on my life, was not that I went but that I left after a year.

At the time, it was extraordinarily hard to leave. Life was good and rich, 80 feet and all. Within the constraint of having to show up every morning for work at 8 am, of rarely being able to “leave” the boat, of having only 10 people to interact with consistently, of being pretty darn poor, of living in tiny quarters, there was an expansive cloak of freedom. Part of it was, as my friend put it, “freedom from choice.” Part of it was that life on the sea, with a small group of people, is really so interesting enough that it grabs not only one’s attention, but one’s soul and for a very long time. Part of it was the vastness of the ocean, for it is a liquid land ripe for constant exploration.

I left because if I did not, then years later, I would have to foot the entire bill for college and that was just too large of a bill and school was too important to me. So one sunny day, I walked off the red deck in Belize and since have not really sailed much (if at all??) in my life. I made a promise that one day I would live on a boat again, perhaps even do an ethnography of sea people by living and traveling on a sailing boat, as that I think, has yet to be done. Who knows if that will ever be but today, when I was visiting the R/V Heraclitus site, which I do from time to time, to see where the lovely barge is at, and to catch a glimpse of my former life, I was surprised to see they have a short video of the ship and wow, watching it was, of course, a serious trip down memory lane.

It has been almost 14 years since I left and I have not seen such images since. Many of the objects are the same (the chairs on the deck, the huge silver bin containers in the meeting room, the imposing helm) and there were even some folks I still knew… It was truly wonderful to see the rough black cement, the deep wood of the library, the built environment that somehow, floats a top a vast territory, carrying a motely crew to physical places at the same time that such travels are always an internal movement, the self, transforming, minutely but surely.

Where you or it goes is never down a straight path, but more circular, more mysterious. Heraclitus, of course, says it best:

The world, an entity out of everything, was created by neither Gods or men, but was, is and will be eternally living fire, regularly becoming ignited and regularly becoming extinguished.

My buddies over at decoding liberation recently participated in a video conference to discuss thier paper–An ethical assessment of free software licensing schemes–which produced some interesting blog debate. Worth checking out if you are interested in the nitty-gritty links between licensing and ethical standards.

Here are two good pieces that address the broader ethical implications and political consequences of nanotech and open source:

Revolution in a Box: the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology also has a good discussion on whether open source is feasible for nanotech production, and how it may provide for a more or less ethical brakes in nanotech.

Convergence brings together various luminaries, academics, and acitivists who participate in various social movements, that while distinct, all concern the law of intellectual propert. Here these folks provide us with some thoughts on some of the broader implications of open source in shifitng the global politics of IP. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago, at the CCA we had the pleasure of having a guest speaker: David Post. A law professor (and so much more if you read his bio) from Temple University, he writes on issues related to freedom and cyberspace. He is now working on a book, tentatively titled Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (check out some sections here. )

As he explained, the book uses a Jeffersonian framework (apparently Jefferson was quite interested in how to make the republican nation “scale” and he used the natural world as his guide), to think about the nature of the Internet and questions of scaling. At some point during our discussion, he referred to Jefferson as “the patron saint of hackers.” I, of course, got incredibly exicted when he said that (mostly because it was so right on and so darn eloquent too), but also because it captures how liberal ideals, live on, in radically different contexts. Of course most hackers and geeks have not read Notes on the state of Viriginia (Jefferson’s only book) nor do most house a small corner candlelight shrine of Jefferson atop of their Linux box (though perhaps they should).

But some of his most well known ideas, continue to have salience (you know, the famous, That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. “)

The fact that Jefferson acts a potent present-day icon demonstrates one example of how long-standing liberal values become practically articulated and revisioned. Of course they change, and the reasons for which TJ may act as a signpost often has more to do with present day conditions, than those of the past, but his example, and his ghost existence all over the web, is one way to think of both the cultural life of liberalism as well as the continuities, as well as transformations, with liberalism of times past.

Greg Lastowka , another fellow at the CCA, is also interested in cyberlaw, freedom, and all that good jazz and he recently passed along an article, Would Jefferson have googled? reporting on a speech by U of Michigan president Sue C. where she argues for the importance of Google Print.

All of this talk of liberalism and culture, reminds me that I should post a class syllabus I have recently developed “The Cultural Life of Liberalism” that is a first attempt to broaden the ways in which anthropologists approach liberalism as a cultural formation (outside of questions of multiculturalism, which has been covered quite exquisitely). Hopefully it will be up in the next few days and I can receive some feeback.

After Culture (warning, link to journal directs you to microsoft.com but the journal looks interesting, nonetheless).

Description
Papers are sought for the inaugural volume of a new peer-reviewed journal, “After Culture: Emergent Anthropologies.” The first issue is planned for release in September 2006, and thereafter will be published semiannually (in March and September) and made available free through the internet (URL forthcoming). We are currently seeking article manuscripts which focus on the interactions between nature, culture and society, or are in the general thematic areas of science and technology studies or critical studies of medical knowledge and practice. Contributors are encouraged to employ any form of rigorous theoretical and methodological approach, not limited to ethnography, historiography and textual analysis.

update: the link now works