Taking 'Yahoos' Seriously: new media and the platform shift in cultural heritage
An e-article for Visual Anthropology Review 24(2)
Key Words
digital heritage | Teotihuacan | Yahoo! | media economy | archaeological imaginary | new media | information society | web >2.0 |
Abstract
This paper looks at the convergence of new media and archaeology, specifically cultural heritage. It begins from the premise that the usage of new media is already prevalent outside of the academy, and that this usage directly involves cultural heritage in creating an archaeological imagination. As a thread to the paper’s discussion of this intersection of new media and archaeology, I begin from the ‘cutting edge’ example of Yahoo!’s recent ‘media bundling’ project of creating a time-capsule of the human condition to be transmitted from the UNESCO World Heritage of Teotihuacan, Mexico where I currently work.
Building upon the specifics of how this new media mogul operationalized new media functionality beyond hyper-text, or e-text, at a cultural heritage site, I look at the salient components of what this emerging technology is (a ‘platform shift’) and how it parallels the emerging push in archaeology to open heritage management to greater public involvement (a ‘paradigm shift’). I chart the field of new media studies, drawing out the general implications for how this technology pervasively and powerfully influences societies utilizing it (a ‘transcoding’), and how this ‘computer culture’ alters how scholarship itself operates. This discussion centers upon several defining capabilities: customization of information, the re-tooling of this information for disparate and individualized goals, and the ease of quickly transmitting and sharing such information through the bandwidth of the internet. In practical consequence, these functionalities enable new media to be mutable and combinable. For cultural activity, ‘Users’ comes to define this mixed role of information generation and distribution.
With this emerging centrality of media users in new media, or a ‘mixing logic’, mapped out, I consider its role at a project I have undertaken at Teotihuacan. I discuss how the project’s wiki, a particular and defining type of new media technology, integrates the parallel concerns of this platform shift with archaeology’s paradigm shift. I conclude by suggesting that other critical issues in archaeology, such as the need to create and maintain digital databases and the granting of restrictive, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR’s) over the material of the discipline, may be cheaply and productively worked through by using such wikis.
A World Heritage site always attracts a lot of attention. Such archaeological sites are viewed to materially represent irreplaceable ‘heritage’ on a global scale and are defined and protected through the United Nations’s UNESCO declarations (eg. UNESCO 1988). Teotihuacan, Mexico is no exception (Video 1). Replete with two monumental pyramids (the Pyramid of the Sun being the 3rd largest Pyramidal structure in the world) set amidst the ruins of a once densely populated, urbanized city (the first of its kind in Mesoamerica), “Teotihuacan”, or the “place where the gods were born” as the Aztec later identified it, has attracted, both historically and contemporaneously, a broad range of interests.
Video 1
As most of us may personally attest to in visiting these world monuments, such interests run the gamut from the archaeological
to new age spiritualism.
Figure 3.0/Video 2)
video 2
Indeed, because of its material complexity Teotihuacan has historically been the venue for both groundbreaking archaeological projects (Millon 1964) and celestial celebrations. Similar to other prominent archaeological sites around the world (eg. Bender 1998, Carmichael 1994, Castañeda 1996, Hodder 2004), Teotihuacan looms large in 'new age' or spiritual practices and references (Webmoor forthcoming). Unfortunately, aside from a few anthropologists or social archaeologists, inadequate attention has been paid to these sites as material networks for popular culture. This is especially surprising at Teotihuacan, given that it has been a cornerstone of 'myth building' from prehispanic pilgrimages and oracles to 20th-century identity politics and continuing today (Boone 2000, Ruiz 1997, Vasconcelos 1925). Working at Teotihuacan, I often heard the phrase ‘yahoos’ being used to refer to the unsanctioned, occult practitioners who regularly gather at the site for rituals.
Enter , the billion dollar, international internet company based in the Silicon Valley of California. To celebrate the media giant’s 15th anniversary, Yahoo! announced that it would create a ‘time capsule’ to gather together a snap shot of contemporary human life. Beginning last October 10th, the search firm began collecting text, audio-visual and video contributions from any and all interested parties worldwide – estimated in analogue terms to represent about 5 million books worth of data (OCRegister 2006). Contributions were amassed on Yahoo!'s servers through remote uploading via the internet. Like the YouTube phenomenon, where "broadcasting yourself" has become a generational movement, the ease of uploading digital media from any networked location effected a pastiche of global sampling of local, often intimate, content. E-text poems, sound bytes of nature or birthday parties, mp3 songs, video clips of happy events, images of loved ones and so on. Contributors catalogued their submissions under various general themes appropriate to the capsule's digital record of human heritage - love, family, beauty, happiness, sorrow, faith, etc. Once sorted and archived, Yahoo! hired an internet artist to 'mashup', or mix all of the content using a dynamic, Flash program interface.
Through the end of October 2006, interested visitors or contributors could read/watch/listen to the collected content stored on Yahoo!s servers through this internet interface, as well as easily add their own with a mouse-click. But the server life of digital information is as yet uncertain. Indeed, a recent study warns there is not enough storage space for the estimated 161 billion gigabytes of digital information produced in 2006 (Wired 2006). Within archaeology, a discipline keen on preservation of and for the longterm, the server-life of digitized primary data, excavation reports, artifact collections and publications recently figured in a National Science Foundation funded symposium (Kintigh 2006). Theoretically, digital information, as mathmatized code, is impervious to media degradation (Manovich 2001:27-30). Initial enthusiasm for the 'digital turn' from old media to new media celebrated the possibility of endless replication without corruption (Chun and Keenan 2006). Binary code as a discreet and parsable 'language' can be endlessly 'uttered' without alteration (Manovich 2001: 51). This in contrast to analogue media, say ethnographic text, photographs, stratigraphic profiles, maps, or artifact drawings, which inexorably degrade as their celluloid or (even) acid-free paper media-carriers wear and age. And indeed the widespread emergence of digital media - whether digitization of analogue media into code via scanning or digital-original media as with digital cameras and video - does present a greater degree of media longevity. The line of a map may wear away, be torn off, bleed into shades of grey when wet; and with reproduction and publication, the tonal and continuous quality of analogue information (the edges of the printed line or chemical emulsions of photographic celluloid for example) makes especially vulnerable information conveyed in analogue to corruption. But digital information is discreet and quantified so that reproduction of a work becomes replication of numbers (viz. Benjamin 1970). In practical terms, however, this coding of digital information makes digital media beholden to computers; all new media, encompassing digital forms of older media, are nothing if not for computerization. That is, they require, at some point in their creation, rendering or display, computer assisted manipulation (Monovich 2001). Most often, this information permanently resides in digital databases on computer servers. We might say that computers are the ineliminable collaborators, or creative prostheses, for scholars, technicians and artists of the digital age. As a practical consequence, the fate of digital media is the fate of computers and their programs; and the fate of digital media stored on servers, for instance the fate of the digital heritage collected by Yahoo!, is the fate of server longevity. The bytes making up images, sound clips, video, or statistics must be 'back-uped' in case of crashes, migrated to new servers as technology upgrades, and protected from corruption-inducing spam robots. Moreover, digital media must still be 'lossy compressed' in order to accelerate their upload and retrieval across bandwidth connections linking remote servers. All of these factors pose issues of degradation and information loss.
So for Yahoo!, the server version of the time-capsule was to be only one component of the project. A ‘hard copy’ of the time capsule was buried on the Sunnyvale, California grounds of the corporate offices. But, in keeping with the ethos of ‘digital democracy’ inherent in the conception and content of the time capsule project, the company wanted to laser the digitized information in real-time as a public, physical event at a prominent locale. Where was this media-bundling to be beamed into space? You saw it coming. This Yahoo! chose the top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.
If the convergence of archaeology, high-tech corporations and 'lasering' sounds like a throwback to a 1970's science fiction plot, the inspiration for such an undertaking can't be far off. Following in the original steps of the affable ‘yahoo’ Carl Sagan, this digital time capsule was made in hopes of communicating to digitally attuned extraterrestrials the diversity of life and culture on earth. As a spokesperson for Yahoo! stated: the purpose was to join the "past and present with the universe's potential future by sharing today's culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away" (Subzeroblue 2006). The reasoning for there choice of Teotihuacan was as follows: “We have this incredible ancient site and from that site we can project contemporary content," Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo!'s editor in chief, told Reuters. For those working in heritage management, the notion of popular culture utilizing the archaeological imaginary for consecration of events and beliefs offers little surprise. Archaeology historically derives from antiquarian popular engagements (Schnapp 1996) and, willingly or not, enervates the contemporary buzz at heritage sites. It is only the acknowledgment of this mutual relationship, fostering non-antagonistic consideration of all those participating in the archaeological imaginary (Bender 1998), that is relatively novel. "What is new", as Srinivasan continues, "is the ability to capture this information in such scale" (CNN 2006, my emphasis).
Yahoo!'s announcement to transmit the time capsule from Teotihuacan added more fodder for commentators in the ‘blogosphere’. Indeed, events transpired so quickly that only the news blogs seemed capable of updating the rapid developments. While the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), the Mexican government’s cultural heritage managers, initially granted permission for the time capsule project, they announced just two weeks before the digital gala that permission to go ahead was rescinded. A representative of INAH told Yahoo! that “we are the guardians of the heritage of Mexico. . .” and the event “posed technical and operational problems that might damage Teotihuacan” (C/Net News.com 2006). It was determined that the laser installation on the pyramid, combined with the real-time web-cast of the event’s participants gathered at the site, would pose adverse effects to the archaeological structure. The message was: not one more ‘yahoo’ at Teotihuacan - even if this one might bring international publicity and an estimated millions in potential pesos as revenue for the Valley of Teotihuacan and its businesses 1.
Yahoo!, undaunted by the denial and determined to dig-in its digital data at a historical location, looked elsewhere. With less than a couple of weeks to go, and with bloggers typekeying their suggestions and coverage, an alternate venue of antiquity was selected. Happening at the end of last year (October 25-27th, 2006), the digitized media of the time capsule was beamed into space from Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico; considered to be one of the oldest, continuously inhabited dwellings in North America.
With the same simple technology used to create the capsule, the digital web-casts of the live, two day event may still be accessed online at Yahoo!'s video archives. It was not an insignificant, techy-only event either: an estimated 2.5 million people from over 200 nations watched and participated in this “electronic anthropology archive” (marketwire 2006). Not to mention the several thousand additional tech gamers who's avatars attended the parallel, real-time 'mixed-reality' event in the alter-world gaming environment of Secondlife. To augment participation even further, Yahoo! accepted digital media contributions for the physical capsule for several weeks afterward at their capsule website.
Jerry Yang, co-founder and 'Chief Yahoo!' draws out the salient points about new media I want to lead from in this vignette about Yahoo!’s development of the collaborative digital archive as a memory practice par excellence: “In just a few short weeks, thousands of people around the world have uploaded memories and ideas they want to preserve, creating an important anthropological collection that documents this moment in time.” (Webpronews 2006). Unsurprisingly, I think there is an important trend-setting agenda that this hugely successful new media mogul is leading. Specifically, it is a media movement which transcends popular culture and academic practices. And it is directly relevant, perhaps now more than ever, for archaeology. This is the utilization and diffusion of new media that is rapidly reconfiguring the old media infrastructure of ‘Web 1.0’ with what has been loosely described as ‘Web 2.0.’
To be sure, this has become a buzzword. Indeed, technological turnover happens rapidly. And the public recognition of Web 2.0 may already portend the advent of 'Web 3.0' 2. But what is key is that it entails a ‘platform-shift’ which has valences with and facilitates the paradigm shift occurring in archaeology at world heritage sites such as Teotihuacan. What these shifts entail in both senses is the democratization of participation. Just as archaeology is confronting an 'external mandate' to integrate public involvement in archaeological practice from research design, to resource interpretation, evaluation and representation 3, so too Web 2.0 is hard-wired by new media to operate via non-hierarchical networks of individuals and technologies collaboratively determining both form and content of what’s on-line.
Two quick examples should help clarify what this involves. Compare an encyclopedia, either an analog Britannica or Britannica on-line, to Wikipedia. The first selects entries from experts, edits and publishes the results. Form and content are set. This in distinction to wikipedia that relies upon radical trust in allowing anyone with internet access to post new entries and edit existing entries. The content organically grows; even the form of the ‘skin’ of information in wikipedia may be modified. The first offers a product, the second a service. Additionally, allowing for the costs of being online, the first costs; the second is free. This leads to the second example of the distinction. Software products or packages (such as Microsoft or Adobe) offer entire informational frameworks (literally what information may hang together) to operate within – and at a cost. The parameters are set for how users may engage with information – indeed, monopolizing how users may engage with information set the stage for the infamous battling software ‘actors’ and their lawsuits of the 1990’s. As opposed to these market share products, ‘open source software’ involves individuals generating freely distributed software services catering to specific needs. For the ‘open source initiative’ manifesto, open source software should allow (amongst other stipulations) modification and free re-distribution, must not restrict who software is distributed to or how it is applied (eg. business applications versus genetic research applications), must not restrict use of other software or be specific to particular software interfaces, and licensing agreements must extend to all redistributions (OSSI 2006). So to bring it back to Yahoo!, Yahoo! offers services not a software product – principally it offers searching and server hosting services. And the company’s time capsule exemplifies the ethos of this Web 2.0 digital democracy. The capsule was participatory media in a reinforcing sense: the media used allowed for rapid, inclusive and distributed participation – size constraints and shipping costs would not have allowed for the physical accumulation of equivalent analogue information; and this widespread participation co-created a media rich manifestation of ‘the human condition’ – again not possible, even for the intrepid Carl Sagan, to assemble in analogue. In its particular form as digital heritage, the Yahoo! time capsule manifests much more of the experiential human condition for future generations to un-forget the past – and hopefully turn a sympathetic eye(s)? and/or ear(s)? of Sagan’s extraterrestrials.
This is not simply a quirky juxtaposition of academic and technological trends either. As postprocessual and critically reflexive archaeologists convincingly contextualized the practice of the discipline within a larger cultural sensibility, the how, what and why of archaeology cannot be insulated from informing socio-economic, political and ideological values and structures (Leone et al. 1987, Shanks and Tilley 1992, Trigger 1984). A few of these contextualizing arguments paid reference to technology as a component of these rubrics (such as the Fordist production-line, deeply capitalist values of efficiency and control resonant in the discipline's uptake of positivist epistemology, Shanks and Tilley 1992:49,62). What I want to suggest is that technology, specifically high-tech, increasingly constitutes such a pervasive and powerful influence on society - a transcoding, in Manovich's (2001) language, of computer culture onto all other facets of life - not to mention on how scholarship itself operates, that it ought to receive undivided attention. New Media matters.
New media studies has begun to chart such ramifications of emerging technology for cultural activity. As may be expected for a new, transdisciplinary field - an arena of inquiry crossing academic, private, artistic and popular activities - what constitutes new media is far from agreed upon. New media is not simply synonymous with digital media. Most new media theorists (Bolter and Grusin 1999, Chun and Keenan 2006, Fogg 2003, Manovich 2001, Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003) in fact highlight the historical continuity of representational media from Alberti's Renaissance perspectival drawing to Daguerre's daguerrotypes of the 1830's, the Lumierre brothers's Cinématographie in the 1890's to the emergence of computing with IBM and Alan Turing's calculating machines of the nineteen teens and 1930's. But what these theorists emphasize with "new" or emerging media coined in the 1960's is a combination of computerization and connectivity (Chun and Keenan 2006:1, Manovich 2001:27-48). "Digital" may be thought of as a short hand or operational descriptor for how new media works. As already mentioned, digital information is various media - image, sound, text - rendered into mathematical code which can be easily manipulated by computers and quickly transmitted from computer to computer via the connectivity of the internet. In practical consequence, this means that media is now mutable and combinable. Dissimilar to previous photography, cinema or music, the media machine of the computer can quickly alter and/or combine - to reversion - simply by applying algorithms to the code. This allows a great deal of customization and re-tooling for disparate and individualized goals. Additionally, unlike old media, broken down into code new media may be easily and quickly transmitted and shared across the cyber highway of the internet - or the outer-reaches of interplanetary space in Yahoo!'s laser.
Together, these qualities of computerization and connectivity allow for the phenomenon of the interconnected-information society we live, play and work in. We are media immersed. New media 'computer culture' transcodes into everyday personal, social and professional existence. More than ever before, we are multitaskers because of new media functionality: we send emails, post comments on a blog or e-text, google information or view google maps and write an article in Word all the while switching application windows on our computer. Yet much like critical archaeologists dis-embedding our context of archaeological production for us to examine in the light of day, much that is new for working with new media is taken for granted. Considered through a more conventional political economy lens, the media-machine of computers inter-connected via Web 2.0 platforms moves us, whether as academics doing scholar.google searches, or children doing "cut and paste" of web material for a classroom project, beyond being 'producers' or 'consumers'. The new logic of the media economy has us doing consumption-production (near) simultaneously through the interface of the web. So we use the information service of Wikipedia; but we inevitably troll a bit due to the hyperlinking until we find an entry we might even contribute to. Users comes to define this mixed role for engaging with new media.
According to new media guru Howard Rheingold, the 'hardware' of increasing global connectivity combined with the 'software' enabling of individualized control over content and form heralds a new "social revolution" of radical participation (Rheingold 2002). It is what allowed Yahoo! to host and laser its global digital heritage. Unlike economic or political revolutions, this 'soft revolution' is information-driven. Users increasingly participate in and control the global internet archive of information. More and more embedded in how we routinely operate to access information, socialize, or synaesthetically experience through video and sound, the internet as medium may finally be actualized as McCluhan's (1964) 'extension of man'. Thought of as a social, perceptual and cognitive prosthesis, some media theorists such as Pierre Levy (1997) see, through the user-content focus of new media and Web 2.0, the future emergence of a universal, "collective intelligence" of the neural-net. Filling out a Habermasian ideal speech situation with technologically-grafted 'speech', Levy's idealism of real-time, universal democracy echoes much of the Californian tech-utopianism. Whether new media will ultimately matter that much is disputable. Perhaps Yahoo!'s new media time capsule will be tragically 'unreadable' as a bit of antiquated 'old media' when it is finally re-opened. Yet the ramifications of new media, of a 'read and write' culture, for society at large cannot be doubted. For academics in general, and archaeologists in particular, dealing with a public demanding more 'user permissions', what will be the face of the new (v.2.0) interface?
The 'window' as information interface has been ubiquitous from the Renaissance's Alberti to Microsoft, and Web 2.0 will not change this main frame of engagement (Friedberg 2006, though see note 2). Sharing its technological trajectory with developments in early 20th century cinema and current digital video (Monovich 2001: 287-92), new media interfaces will increasingly converge with digital video, particularly in the capacity as mobile and web-connected personal multi-media devices. Like with early cinematic experiments challenging the confining dimensions of the screen, a productive usage in archaeology of this trend of media convergence in single, multi-platform devices (Jenkins 2004) will be to, if not to remove the framed interface of information, 'open' the frame by locating it within live, synaesthetic environments as prosthetic, information tools (Webmoor 2005, Witmore 2004). Such new technological apparatuses will further develop the model of the computer screen as interactive window. Part visual display, part control panel, the computer screen will increase its interactivity with new media technologies.
Given that, you need look no further than the 'window' you are already viewing to see one of these new Web 2.0 interfaces. This wiki is a type of 'social software' which characterizes the platforms of Web 2.0. Social software denotes any software platform that operates via computer-mediated communication and which foster community formation. As such, the term may be applied to familiar, 'older media' such as e-mail, electronic mailing lists, and instant messaging (IM). However, it typically corresponds to the new media platforms which have moved from these one-to-one and one-to-many forms of electronic communication to more open and democratized, many-to-many mediums such as blogs and particularly wikis. A wiki, meaning 'quick web', differs from Web 1.0 web pages in several key ways we might expect given an understanding of the user model of new media. Indeed, while the hyperlinking intra- and inter-structuring of traditional web pages (allowing Deleuze and Guattarian 'rhyzomatic' engagements) launched much discussion concerning the liberation of readers from closed and controlled narratives in a manner paralleling post-modern and historiography manifestos (eg. Haraway 2003, White 1973), the differences between 'static' web pages and wikis compelled one theorist of media to update a book on hypertext with a re-edition on 'hypertext 2.0' (Landow 1997[1992]). While there are a bewildering variety, all share several key functionalities that underscore the many-to-many and 'quick' descriptors. Based upon 'plain-text', 'mark-up language' approximating the word processing text more familiar to non-programmers, as opposed to more technical programming languages (such as HTML typically used for websites), a wiki facilitates direct and personal control over what is displayed in a wiki. This greater interactivity includes both open posting of commentary and open editing by users (as opposed to blogs). Looking at the window of this wiki, the functions of 'post a comment', 'attach file', 'edit this page', 'new page' or 'add an image' allow users to not simply view what web designers have coded in html, but to contribute their own textual, sound or video content. With open editing, users may also place their own hyperlinks, and so augment the sphere of possible connections with personally relevant sources of information or content. A wiki administrator, generally the individual or group who created the wiki or the host running the servers, may tailor this interactive functionality by requiring passwords to edit, view pages and/or post comments, but the latent technical capacity to allow 'radical participation' remains. Finally, all of these modifications of form and content of a wiki, unlike most security protocol blogs, happens in real-time. Wikis accelerate participation in and responsitivity to the online global information archive (the world wide web).
But this new digital technology and infrastructure is no informational or political panacea 4. Much is collected but still much still slips by. If Yahoo!'s laser had launched from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, what would have been rendered of the local human condition – of those watching the laser show from the surrounding pueblos? Unfortunately very little. The content of the time capsule still remained largely confined to a few nations in Europe, North America and East Asia. This has been quite common for the history of Teotihuacan and other sites of the public imagination. The material is valued for anchoring memory practice. For instance, Yahoo! could quite have easily lasered its capsule from the apex of the Luxor pyramid in Las Vegas – which was in fact suggested. But there was a felt need to convey longevity; perhaps because the past is nostalgically viewed as the antithesis to the media-driven acceleration of the present. Local denizens, however, are generally seen only as informants for archaeological narratives; or more often than not, seen as dissonance for archaeology producing its un-forgetting of these places. Yet these sites do not exist in ‘media ecology’ vacuums.
As Yahoo! demonstrated, the capacity to manifest more, to not let slip by in the digital sieve, is widely and cheaply available for archaeologists. At Teotihuacan I began a project in collaboration with INAH and the five local pueblos to bring forward much more of the heritage, much more of the memory, of this mainstay of the archaeological imaginary. My attempt has been to collaboratively build from the ground-up an ethnography of the various associations between residents of the valley and the material of the site. Initial interviews with several spokespersons – with INAH supervisors, local mayors and traditional elders – allowed me to formulate a series of questionnaires with questions that these individuals believed would get at the most critical associations of locals-and-site. After randomly collecting more than 460, 7-page questionnaires, I could identify key associations that normally are missed by archaeologists: particularly associations built around spiritual, economic and identity formation engagements. As material came in, it was all placed upon a wiki hosted on a server at Stanford, but easily accessible in the expanding internet cafes in 3 of the 5 pueblos.
While I still invariably serve as form and content manager of the project, all material is stored as a digital archive on the wiki and may be commented upon in ‘real time’, or as the formulation, collection and write-up occurs. Like the contributions to Yahoo!’s project, the digital technology of the Teotihuacan Project increases functionality in three key ways: 1) richer media capture – eg. audio and video, as well as digitized text and images 2) greater collaboration – both in determining content and in commentary 3) distributed and accessible retrieval – though visits to local internet cafes are necessary. Furthermore, as a wiki - as 'quick web' - it accelerates all three of these functionalities.
Thinking in terms of new media, this project wiki retains the functionality a traditional HTML web page. While text based with hyperlinking, streaming audio and video may also be incorporated for richer, experiential information. Archives of data, such as of the original questionnaires and statistical information, may easily be stored. And customization of the site, while more limited than with html coding and Flash programs popular with web sites, is also possible. As new media the wiki is, however, more malleable. It is a 'liquid text', rapidly accommodating changes and additions and translucent in operation. Rather than requiring training in html code and intervening web design software, such as Dreamweaver or Update, all design changes, content additions or hyperlink addendums to the wiki occur directly at the web browser interface. The wiki collapses the distinction between editable background files on servers and the 'projection' of such data on the visible web. Neither 'off-line' work in desktop applications, nor server permissions and file transfer programs are required. Collectively, the trade-off in design customization and display features of Web 1.0 web sites for bare bones markup language in Web 2.0 platforms affords greater interactivity of a window of a wiki on the web. Viewing images, reading text, or clicking a hyperlink, podcast or video icon are all there. But now there is the customization and participation available on a personal level through the post a comment, edit this page, or add an image features. A wiki moves us from viewing the web to engaging with it as we would our own desktop computer.
In addition to the ease of use and heightened interactivity, the most appealing attributes of wikis are that they are distributed free as open source, are easily installed on institutional or private servers, or even personal computers with internet connection, and no technical expertise is required to manage them. In effect: desktop publishing of rich, collaborative and personalizable content with global distribution. While a form-fit medium for collaborative projects in archaeology, allowing unprecedented participation in the archaeological process, the question remains whether wikis will work 5. The proliferation of social software in China, the middle-east and India, with an estimated world wide creation of a blog every half-second, does not translate directly to uptake in international archaeological projects. There remain cultural, technological, and generational divides. At Teotihuacan, there is dire interest for greater public participation in and control over archaeology, but there remains hesitancy to make transparently public what are often personally held convictions in a highly politicized climate. Nonetheless, with new media rapidly expanding world wide, the interactivity of Web 2.0 will become more of a commonplace feature and initial reluctance may give way to the enabled 'radical participation' of the next social revolution.
Media(Works) and the New Cultural Heritage Logic of Mixing
Some in archaeology are concerned with the enabling of 'yahoos' through new media. These discussions narrowly focus upon the rise of the ecademy, or the electronic publishing by a growing number of academic journals and the rise of personal or collaborative blogs dedicated to scholarly topics (Chippindale 1997, Richards 2006). In large part, this was an issue already present with Web 1.0. Adopted early, online journals moved to meet the new (inter)face of scholarship - the computer. The concern, however, is with 'unsanctioned' desktop publishing. The common complaint with this type of 'broadcasting', often with greater readership due to universal distribution and unrestricted, free access via the web, is the lack of professional peer review and editorial control. While valid concerns, the underlying issue is fundamentally information management and the threat to the economy of traditional publication. Mitigating the uneasy relationship between the establishment of traditional publication and the rapidity of e-publication is the effort to incorporate blogs into most major newspapers (the BBC, for instance). Indeed, the lag time involved in breaking stories in even daily newspapers encourages these publications to 'farm' online blogs for the most current events and emerging issues in the grassroots, popular sphere. But information management may be the real preoccupation for academics. The ease or rapid publication with new media results in an excess of information available on the internet. Like newspapers, to stay 'cutting edge' it will become necessary to search through this expanding and multifarious online archive. This is why searching becomes the preoccupying function of Web 2.0, contributing to the success of media moguls like Yahoo! and Google developing robust search services.
The ramifications of new media and the platform shift to user enabling are much broader than e-publication. For archaeology the rise of digital databases of information and the logic of mixing as the new model of cultural activity become the matters of new media concern. As I stated before, such user enabled functionality is not simply the take-up of the shift to Web 2.0 principles and technologies. There is profound symmetry between the logic of new media work and archaeological practice. For the discipline there is a dire need of digitizing databases and for co-creating cultural heritage (UNESCO 2001, Kintigh 2006, Nicholas and Bannister 2004, Smith 2004, Vogt-O’Connor 2000). The first need involves preserving and, most importantly, providing longevity for access to archaeological information. The second is the move to incorporate the ‘external mandates’ from non-archaeological groups to participate in archaeology’s memory practices; and, most critically, is the way forward to mitigate against such groups foreclosing access to archaeological information under the nascent application of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR’s). Wikis are an ideal software platform to service both of these needs. Like the Yahoo! time capsule, wikis enable the collaborative manifestation of a wide range of information. They even track, or archive, this process of co-creation. Secondly, they provide an easy user-interface with search capabilities for creating digital databases. And importantly, such databases and their wide array of information are easily accessible. Together, these functionalities should obviate the need to apply IPR’s on the part of local and indigenous groups to archaeological information. Collaboratively made from the ‘ground-up’, the extension of IPR’s to the products of archaeological practice would fall more properly under non-restrictive Creative Commons type of licensing, rather than restrictive Copyright, Patent or Trademark. Accessing global content on the internet archive, easily mixing this digital information to suit particular, local purposes, and broadcasting such re-mixed cultural productions to be shared, retrieved and re-mixed again characterizes the new logic of digital, human heritage use. To be sure, these are a host of complex issues to be sorted out. The legality of mixing cultural productions is a contentious and as yet nebulous feature of the digital age (Lessig 2004). I am not suggesting wikis or other new media on their own will serve as the be-all to end-all. But these very issues have already been confronted and creative solutions are already being worked out in the private, technology sector.
So rather than parochially insisting upon archaeologically derived solutions to archaeological problems, the discipline ought to take part in the encompassing, trans-disciplinarian sensibility which extends from the Silicon Valley to the Teotihuacan Valley. When we think of manifesting the past, archaeology should indeed take the ‘Yahoos’ of the world seriously.
1. Yet what Yahoo! was not aware of was the current furor over international corporations stepping into the local Mexican valley and disrupting the economies and traditional lifeways of the five adjacent pueblos. Wal-Mart had just muscled economic leverage at the national level to open a store within the protected boundary of the site – just 2km from the Pyramid of the Sun. Protests, riots, hunger fasts and vandalism had upstaged the archaeological site and its pyramids for the entirety of the end of 2004. And INAH (and other government officials) had been branded by heritage-minded Mexicans as a traitor in selling itself out to the interests of transnational corporations (TeotihuaWalmart slideshow). Damage was in fact done to subsurface structures in the process of laying the foundation for the superstore. This time INAH had to stick to the letter of the law (INAH 1983 DII-IA-I, sección 10 del SNTE) and avoid local ire, particularly as these statutes are currently being rewritten to incorporate wider societal input (INAH 2005). While a brief montage of the web-like politics encapsulating archaeology at Teotihuacan, the short of it: politics of manifesting and managing the past go all the way to bedrock.
2. While augmenting individual's participation (through contribution to the content and form of the internet) Web 2.0 is still largely confined to a participatory interface of 2-dimensions. An internet user, positioned before the archetypal 'window' of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the computer monitor, may view 3-dimensional material imbedded in the window, but nonetheless remains outside of and at a distance from the media environment (a concrete example is the act of viewing the video below). Indeed, some have argued that in this respect, new media perpetuates the very old Renaissance perspectival ideal view-through-a-frame (Friedberg 2006). Immersive, Virtual Reality (VR) challenges this participation-as-a-viewer interface, but require (as of now) both prohibitively expensive technological apparatuses to accomplish the effect and immense bandwidth capacity for this these environments to be transmitted to remote users. But developing out of military and gaming technologies, the online virtual world of SecondLife approaches the future of immersive participation through the internet. VRML, or such near-immersive, 3-dimensional internet mediums, is already provoking new media artists and archaeologists to experiment with on-line, 3-dimensional archives. For a reflective consideration of the possible uses and ramifications of these imaginatively inexact 'SecondaryWorlds' see video 3 from an early experiment by new media artist Lynn Hershmann and the Metamedia/Humanities Labs at Stanford for the L2 Presence Project. For the most complete and earliest archaeological re-creational sites in SecondndLife visit Roma, video 4, and its archaeological excavation for secondlifers. With rumors of Google purchasing SecondLife, the stage may be set for the development of a new, Web 3.0 where interface may be via our online avatars walking into virtual banks, perusing university library shelves, sitting in virtual cinemas, and even exploring archaeological sites.
video 3
video 4
3. I term the 'external mandate' to include both the mounting insistence by indigenous communities for more control over archaeological research with their defined material culture, as well as the growth of professional organization codes of ethics to accommodate these non-disciplinarian requests. The former, figuring prominently in the United States with the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, Public Law 101-601) of 1990, often carry legally binding prescriptions as well as punitive measures to ensure consultation. The latter, such as the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) principles of professional responsibility and code of ethics, the International Council of Monuments (ICOMOS) statement of ethics, the European Association of Archaeologists's (EAA) code of practice, the Institute of Field Archaeologists's (IFA) code, or the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists, Inc. (AACAI) ethics, encourage consultation and integration of indigenous and local stakeholder concerns in archaeological practice. Cumulatively, there has been a pronounced change over the past decade in how heritage management is conducted.
4. Indeed, a dystopic vision of Web 2.0 cautions the embrace of digital idealism. ‘Intellipedia’, or a wiki utilized by the various intelligence collecting agencies of the US government, has just gone into operation as the elusive solution to the current administrations efforts to accelerate information gathering and sharing under an integrated Homeland Security (San Francisco Chronicle, November 1, 2006). For a recent discussion specific to anthropological concerns, see Kelty and Marcus (2007).
5. A quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness of wikis as collaborative tools in pedagogical settings and heritage management is currently underway through a joint study by archaeologists at Göteborg University, Sweden and Stanford University.
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The Metamedia Lab at the Archaeology Center, Stanford University consistently maintains an 'intellectual buzz' which cannot be underestimated as a source for inspiration, ideas, technologies and refinements. For this, thanks go to Michael Shanks and Chris Witmore, as well as Ian Hodder for critical discussions of larger relevance to archaeological practice. My appreciation also goes to the Critical Studies in New Media Workshop, the Sawyer-Mellon Visualizing Knowledge Seminar and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) session in San Jose organized by Mike Wesch and Shelly Errington where many of these ideas were first aired.
