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 (Figure 5.1). 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 (DII-IA-I, sección 10 del SNTE 1983) 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. 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.
