KELTY, 2005
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Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
Christopher M. Kelty
Links to Relevant CA Essay Lists: Diaspora, Migration, Transnationalism; Experts, Expertise, and Expert Knowledge; Legal Anthropology; Media Studies; Narrative, Discourse, and Rhetoric; Science and Technology Studies (STS)
**This essay is part of The Digital Form Curated Collection**
In the May 2005 issue of Cultural Anthropology, Christopher Kelty examines how a shared social imaginary of the Internet creates and mobilizes “people who write software and deal regularly with the underlying protocols of the Internet (i.e. geeks)” into a recursive public. While geeks are geographically dispersed in locales as far flung as Boston, Berlin, and Bangalore, they are united by a shared concerned over the “technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association.”
With the Internet as their playground, geeks are constantly building and rebuilding the very infrastructure that allows them to associate. Through coding and argumentation-by-technology, where technical objects such as programs and code become forms of speech, they seek to propagate shared values of openness, freedom and technological inevitability in order to maintain their existence, which is contingent upon the possibility of being addressed as a public. Kelty shows how the Internet becomes more than a space where people assemble; it becomes a site of intense political contest.
Cultural Anthropology has published essays on the epistemological and cultural politics of information and digital technology. These essays include Gabriella Coleman's "Code Is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest Among Free and Open Source Software Developers" (2009), Brian Keith Axel's "Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication" (2008), and René T.A. Lysloff's “Musical Community on the Internet: an On-line Ethnography” (2003). Also see "Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies," a conversation in Cultural Anthropology amongst open access advocates.
Cultural Anthropology has also published essays on media and publics. See Victoria Bernal's "Eritrea Goes Global: Reflections on Nationalism in a Transnational Era" (2004) and Diane M. Nelson's “Maya Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala” (1996).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher M. Kelty is an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has a joint appointment in the Center for Society and Genetics, the department of Information Studies and the Department of Anthropology.
LINKS FROM THE ESSAY
Udhay Shankar N's personal webpage
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Internet Engineering Task Force
The Recording Industry Association of America
QUESTIONS FOR CLASSROOM DISCUSSION
1. How do geeks conceptualize technology? In what ways does their conceptualization differ from your own understanding of technology?
2. Kelty describes geeks as a 'recursive public'; do you think the formation of recursive public is specific to the digital age? Why or why not?
3. How does Kelty differentiate between the public sphere and a social imaginary? What role do geeks have in the formation of these two social/discursive bodies? How are geeks different from other publics, and how might they challenge us to rethink the characteristics of a social imaginary?
4. What are some of the competing epistemologies of the Internet? In what ways do geeks' understandings of technology challenge the "folklore" of the Internet?
5. In what ways is code different from speech? How are these differences made culturally meaningful?
6. How might geeks' understanding of technology as discourse inform the way anthropologists conceptualize the relationship between form and content? How might such an ideology complicate the claim that discourse is immaterial?
RELATED READINGS
Anderson, Benedict
1991 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Routledge.
Doyle, Richard
2003 Wetwares: Experiments in Post-Vital Living. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Escobar, Arturo
1994 Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture. Current Anthropology 35(3):211-231.
Galloway, Alexander
2004 Protocol, or How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Habermas, Jürgen
1989 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno
1987 Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Lessig, Lawrence
1999 Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.
Taylor, Charles
2004 Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.
Warner, Michael
2002 Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
IMAGE CREDITS
Web Page: http://www.opensource.org/
Code Sample: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion_(computer_science)
