Papers by Michael Fischer
The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods, 2008
The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, ... more The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.
Social Science Computer Review, 2012
The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users ar... more The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record.
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2013
ABSTRACT In this article we explore how multiplexed networked individuated communications are cre... more ABSTRACT In this article we explore how multiplexed networked individuated communications are creating new contexts for human behavior within communities, particularly noting the shift from synchronous to asynchronous communication as an adaptation.
Anthropology in Action, 2006
Displacement following natural disasters brings about both short-and longterm issues that urban p... more Displacement following natural disasters brings about both short-and longterm issues that urban planners must address. While we recognize that many (though not all) aspects of the short-term plans may not require extensive anthropological insights, the long-term plans, on the contrary, do. We suggest in this article that one of the most important contributions anthropologists can make is producing formal models of indigenous knowledge systems (which are derived from underlying cultural systems) and identifying the ways in which such systems are communicated. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach which borrows from developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and multi-agent modelling (MAM), we argue that many of the tools that such disciplines have produced can serve an important role in long-range planning for the coexistence of disparate communities if they are adequately informed by anthropological understandings of the communities involved. We briefly outline the anthropology of communication and the culture concept before turning our attention to something that AI and MAM researchers have dubbed ontologies to suggest that it is possible to model cultural systems in dynamic ways that enable sociocultural models of communities which are simultaneously resilient and robust. We give a concrete example of such a cultural system (izzat or 'honour' in South Asia) and demonstrate what an ontology of such a system might look like.
2013 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS): Social Implications of Wearable Computing and Augmediated Reality in Everyday Life, 2013
The notion that computers are somehow separate from our lives is misleading and ignores the level... more The notion that computers are somehow separate from our lives is misleading and ignores the level of integration that has emerged. Most of the processes that dispense, load, and deliver the supplies that sustain cosmopolitan life are impacted by some form of computer in one way or another. The systems created when networks of computers intersect with networks of people are shaping our current cultural environment and the way that we exist in the world. This phenomena has created multiple types of interactions that are hybrids between humans and machines and at present, the balance of human behavior towards other humans is impacted by processes in business and elsewhere that have an over arching governance based on machines. This limits human agency and impacts understanding, service and privacy rights for humans. Further, these processes increasingly depend on greater and greater quantities of what had previously been considered personal information, often scraped from online processes people do not anticipate, yielding an often revealing portrait of themselves. Also, a poorly configured paradigm has created a culture where, when systems are required for big business, people more often alter their behavior to suit machines and work with them, rather than the other way around, and that this has eroded conceptions of agency. We explore the use of Thing Theory to implement a partial means of implementing mutual surveillance between management and workers to increase human agency while developing more adaptive and efficient business processes.
This paper is an anthropological perspective on the impact of Dual, Mixed Reality and 'PolySocial... more This paper is an anthropological perspective on the impact of Dual, Mixed Reality and 'PolySocial Reality' (PoSR) on Location Awareness and other applications in Smart Environments. We intend to initiate a friendly interdisciplinary discussion on the interaction aspects and cultural implications surrounding these new forms of integrated technologies. Anthropologists examine human group behavior in the context of culture. Because the LAMDa workshop is addressing 'group behavior,' we will contribute to the workshop with our understanding of humans, culture and group behavior and to learn from others what type of group behavior is expected as new technologies and their subsequent experiences are created for human use. When we discuss human group behavior, we refer to the definition of a social group: a collection of humans who repeatedly interact within a system. Humans can, and do switch context between environments and blend traces of one into the other in a socially unconscious manner often seemingly simultaneously. We propose that the cultures and behaviors of humans are increasingly actively permeating Internet and networkbased applications, as well as those that are geolocal. With the future Internet of things, Dual Reality and Mixed Reality, the opportunity for humans to extend their own blended reality, as well as to create new ones is unfolding. That said, because humans interact within groups, the multiplexing of their mutual blended realities rapidly creates a PoSR. Sorting out the relationships between realities as well as between synchronous and asynchronous time and geolocal space can create a condition where realities are simultaneous and the idea of 'x' can be perceived as equaling 'not x.' We explore this new type of interoperability between virtual and physical, ideational and material, representations and objects and culture.
Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at Austin. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 1... more Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at Austin. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-165).
Engineering Societies in the Agents World VI, 2006
Intelligent agents embedded in cultural processes demonstrate remarkable powers of creation, tran... more Intelligent agents embedded in cultural processes demonstrate remarkable powers of creation, transformation, stability and regulation. As G.P. Murdock said in his 1971 Huxley Lecture, culture and social structure are not divine law within which individuals simply satisfy their assigned objectives and then die. Culture gives agents the power to hyper-adapt: not only can they achieve local minima and maxima, they modify or create the conditions for adaptation. Culture transcends material and behavioural contexts. Cultural solutions are instantiated in material and behavioural terms, but are based in large part on 'invented' symbolic constructions of the interaction space and its elements. Although the level of 'intelligence' required to enact culture is relatively high, agents that enact culture create conditions to which other, less intelligent, agents will also adapt. A little culture goes a long way. We will consider culture design criteria and how these can be represented in agent-based models and how culture-based solutions might contribute to our global management of knowledge.
Current Anthropology, 1987
Having read the recent note by Rada and Nigel Dyson-Hudson (CA 27: 530-3I), we would like to supp... more Having read the recent note by Rada and Nigel Dyson-Hudson (CA 27: 530-3I), we would like to support heir attempts to encourage others to use computers in the field, to share our own experiences, and to correct what might be a misapprehension in the minds of some ...
Contemporary South Asia, 2006
eScholarship University of California, May 21, 2014
The claim that extant terminologies are optimal solutions in a space of all possible terminologie... more The claim that extant terminologies are optimal solutions in a space of all possible terminologies depends on invalidly assuming any partition of a set of genealogical relations is a possible kinship terminology. Instead, kinship terminologies have a particular type of logical/formal structure that is generative with categories providing for classification that is reciprocal. As a consequence, all terminologies, extant or hypothetical, are optimal solutions in the sense this term is used in the claim made about kinship terminologies.
Cultural Anthropology, 2008
Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge, 1986
We give a simple, yet very general definition for distributed protocols. We then define notions o... more We give a simple, yet very general definition for distributed protocols. We then define notions of knowledge and common knowledge appropriate for these protocols. We study how changes in the states of knowledge relate to more standard notions of computation. We find that by restricting our formulas to certain sets of global states we can realize different, appropriate definitions of knowledge with fundamentally different properties.
Cybernetics and Systems, 2004
Much anthropological interest in methods derived from the natural sciences has been motivated by ... more Much anthropological interest in methods derived from the natural sciences has been motivated by a search for tools with which to describe ethnographic settings in more 'rigorous' terms. These have generally failed, and these failures are due to implicit conventions in anthropology regarding what to observe and how. I suggest that natural science methods were developed as a result of a process which aimed to solve problems that are generally different from those social scientists pursue and that social scientists need to take the underlying ideas and rebuild them for their own purposes if they want to import them. Likewise, most qualitative anthropologists are also guilty of inappropriate borrowing, in particular in their importation of postmodern philosophy from literary criticism rather than adapting these ideas from the source in a manner more suited to the discipline. I examine some the conditions that would be necessary to integrate the various fractions of the anthropological community within a flexible but common framework. I conclude that anthropology must include a major qualitative perspective, and in response to this suggest that if we are to formalise our study we must adopt some new conventions. These include a broadening of analysis from causal to include interpretive reasoning within a common framework, the addition of deontic operators to our basic formal framework, an emphasis on declarative semantics over procedural semantics, and end by briefly describing some speculative work using Information Theory as a basis for quantitatively evaluating qualitative descriptions, models and analysis.
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Papers by Michael Fischer