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Anonymity is like a rare earth metal. These rare elements are an absolutely necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive, but the amount needed is a mere hard-to-measure trace. In larger does these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Take cadmium. Essential for life in very minute amounts; toxic in any significant amount. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishing small doses, it's good for the system by enabling the occasional whistleblower, confessional, or persecuted dissent in a tyrannical regime. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system, even a half-rotten system. I believe anonymity is essential. It is vital to a healthy society and market. Without the option of anonymity I believe a society would be less than optimal. Indeed I would fight vigorously to keep the option of being anonymous as an essential part of any society. It is both humane and wise. At the same time I think there can be too much anonymity at work. When it becomes a default option it poisons the community -- like a rare-earth metal. My argument is not against anonymity but against too much of it.

What do I mean by anonymity? An untraceable, unaccountable, undistinguishable agent. Someone who engages in an activity cloaked in the identity of the tag "anonymous." I do not mean a vegetable vendor in a market whose name you do not know, because that person is both distinguishable and potentially traceable.  I mean people who post using anonymous as a habit.

INTRODUCTORY TEXTS FOR COURSE Boellstorff. T. Coming of Age in Second life (Princeton 2008) Cameron, F. & Kenderdine, S., Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse (MIT 2007) Horst, H. and Miller, D. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Berg 2006) Kalay, Y.E. et al, New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2008) Ito. M et. al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. (MIT Press: forthcoming Kelty, C. Two Bits: the cultural significance of free software. (Duke 2008) Macdonald, S. & Basu, P., ExhiBition Experiments (Blackwell 2007) Miller, D. and Slater, D. The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (Berg 2001) Parry, R., Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (Routledge, 2007) Tilley, C., Keane,W. Kuchler,S. Rowlands, M. Spyer, P. Handbook of Material Culture.(Sage 2006) Were, G. 'Out of touch? digital technologies, ethnographic objects and sensory orders'. In Chatterjee, H. (ed.) Touch in Museums (Berg 2008)

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

I've posted a few video entries on my blog, but it's a lot of work, and the bandwidth usage is a bit scary.

JM: I keep my real name to myself because my family, friends and work didn't know and I guess the whole thing about a different name is that it's not about me, it's about how it makes people feel and think. I used to say to my friends, "I'm just one man! What can I do?!" I did feel that I was looking for something that was a little bit more than what's out there, I had to do something.

The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.

trend toward sharing lecture material online

what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components

The next iteration of Flash, Flash Professional MX 2004, solved those issues. Instead of embedding video into the Flash timeline, developers and designers could stream video from a web server.

the FLV format became an output format for all of the major video editing applications, including QuickTime.

In 2004 Flash Video was still a bit of a novelty