xirdalium

nextgen anthropology jobs

The following excerpts are from a 24 August 2009 ↑press release by Gartner, Inc., a consultancy company focussed on 'information technology research and advisory [�],' on their report called 'Social science meets technology in next-generation jobs':

As individuals and organizations progress in their adoption and leverage of the Web, new work streams and needs will arise, resulting in companies utilizing social sciences to fill next-generation technology jobs [�].

The sprawling use of consumer technology is spurring the demand for new skills in the workplace. Gartner said that during the next five years, consumer adoption of technology will accelerate as individuals and groups become more comfortable and adept at using it to manage their family, social, and business relationships. At the same time, organizations will struggle to keep pace as they integrate rapidly changing behaviors and technology into an already established business culture and infrastructure. [...] With the volume and diversity of content generated, posted and modified on the Web, there is a rising need for information anthropologists who trace the origin, history, and evolution of Web content. Their objectives range from providing the history of content or information to spotting fraudulent or modified images, audio and texts. Information anthropologists may therefore contribute to legal analysis or to processes where intellectual property or information quality and integrity are at risk. [italics emphasis mine]

� and what exactly was it, what I am preaching since about six years? Huh? Actually, I am far from being the prophet—a comment on ↑the story at eweek starts: 'Way to finally wake up and smell the coffee, Gartner. I've been using anthropological interviewing techniques to understand the hows and whys (especially organizational culture) for over two decades now. Techniques I learned going out into the field with my mother (Ph.D.) in anthropology. I also know for a fact that several enterprises have used anthropologist and others in the behavioral sciences in product development, and that factoid dates back to at least the early '90's (1991 as I recall). [�]'

initially via email from John Postill—tnx

40

Since about 100,000 years there is something called 'human culture' on Earth. It is save to assume that every single human being having lived since has now and then glanced up to the moon in the skies. But it is just 40 years ago from today that human beings walked on moon's surface. In the face of that and in spite of all the crap happening every day on our planet, imagine in what kind of phantastic and special times we are living.

life and live

In a way '↑Second Life' (SL) is the online analogon to a social club of sorts—"↑Quake Live" (QL) in turn emulates a boxing gym, or any other sports club centred around a competitive pastime. In the end both of course are social institutions, but differ in terms of qualities, differ in culture.

american ties

Did you ever notice that Timothy Price—in Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho'—during the cab ride on page five wears a 'Ralph Lauren silk tie,' and, after having stepped out of the cab, 'straightens his Versace tie' on page eight?

nimportequi

R�mi Gaillard, or: Sapeck is back

This I simply had to repost—already because of the tiny astronauts appearing in my header pics. Beyond that ↑R�mi Gaillard in my opinion simply is ingenious. in the ↑video section of his website ↑nimportequi.com there is a plethora of hilarialities. My favourites at the moment are 'Rocky is back,' and 'Foot 2008,' not to forget 'Put it where you want it,' 'Decathlon,' and ... well, every single piece is a gem.
Over here in Germany we have some so-called comedians on private TV-stations whom the broadcasters' marketing people credit with 'breaking all taboos.' More often than not this reduces itself to harrassing people in public space, which is most of the time hardly funny, but embarassing ... for the 'comedians,' not for the people.
R�mi 'harasses' people in public space, too—and I love it, when the French police comes into play—, but what sets him far apart is the fact, that his pieces are intelligent to the core. If you have seen Stallone's 'Rocky,' then watch R�mi's take on it, and you'll get what I mean.
Besides the category 'funny movies,' there is another one, the '↑impostor movies.' In this genre R�mi also is perticularly sucessful, up to mingling himself amongst the players of the winning team of the 2002 French football cup. After the game R�mi celebrates with the players on the field, is congratulated by then president of France Jacques Chirac, and finally is interviewed as a player by a TV-journalist, autographs a football, and all.
All in all R�mi is in perfection tradition of the art group the ↑Incoherents, including the prince of pranksters, Eug�ne 'Sapeck' Bataille, who were on the road during the late 19th century.
Thanks a lot, KerLeone, for finding this.

via entry at mosaikum

two bits

KELTY, CHRISTOPHER M. 2008. ↑Two bits: The cultural significance of free software. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mandatory.

top 100 anthropology blogs

... and some reminiscences of the world's first anthropological weblog

It doesn�t matter if you�re studying capuchins in South America or the social interactions in American college bars, there is a blogger out there who shares your interests. University students, academics, professors and those who just love anthropology have helped to create a great assortment of online discourse about the field. We�ve compiled a ↑list of 100 that are definitely worth a read.

The list compiled by Christina Laun definitely is worth a read, especially as it is structured and commented. What strikes me the most is how much 'the world has changed' since ↑KerLeone and me started out with the ↑Ethno::log—which, as of this very moment, is online for 2714 days. 'Weblog,' let alone 'blog,' were all but household words back then, nobody knew what the heck we were talking about. The original plan was to not just have the Ethno::log hosted on the university server, but to set up a complete weblog server there—for all social sciences and humanities in our house—, using the ↑antville software. It took us countless e-mails, phone calls, and lengthy face-to-face conversations to explain what we wanted to do to the university's guardians of the IT-infrastructure. Finally we succeeded, and the 'steering committee' I took in a flush ... once it held one of its rare meetings. Then the domain giantville.lmu.de indeed was created. The name was a strike of genius—at the same time reminiscent of Sir Isaac Newton's famous saying 'We are standing on the shoulders of giants ...,' pointing to the fabulous software which should be used, starting with an abbreviation of 'Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute' [Institutes of social sciences and humanities], containing the contrast beween ants and giants, and being generally catchy. Alas, the software never got installed. The whole project fell prey to the slowly grinding mills of bureaucracy, and to the fact of the IT staff being chronically overworked, to say the least. The domain lay idle for quite a while, then vanished. To be honest, we also had lost interest, once we realized how tedious and futile it is to explain a 'vision' to an institution of that size. And we had lost a lot of time and nerve. A lot.

KerLeone then quickly managed to get space within original antville, and there the Ethno::log saw the light of day, and still is there today. From start on it was planned to be an open weblog—everybody who registers can post content, and in English, although early on even a ↑French posting dropped in. Nevertheless for a long span of time KerLeone and me virtually were the only contributors. We thought English was the barrier for our German-native-speaker students and colleagues, so we decided to allow any language. But the Ethno::log never took off the way we had envisioned—at least in my opinion. It spawned a lot of interest in weblogs within anthropology, for sure. If I get the story right, the now famous, and fabulous, ↑anthropologi.info was inspired by the Ethno::log, and KerLeone pointed Lorenz to using weblog-software instead of static html-pages. But our presumptuous dream was that the Ethno::log should develope into the gravitational center of anthropology online, or at least within the blogosphere [lol] ... this now is ↑Savage Minds, I guess.

Yesterday Christina put online her list of the top 100 anthropology blogs—and the Ethno::log ain't among them. Actually, it can not be, because nowadays it sports German content almost exclusively. But today it is true, that for virtually every anthropologically graspable topic or issue, 'there is a blogger out there who shares your interests.' Ain't that great?

Hell, we were pioneers ;-)

100 the turk

manuscript-day 209 of 100

The history of mechanical calculators is far more outbranching, and the whole story is important for understanding, that what a computer does and is based on, is mathematics, and mathematics only. The devices presented so far—from the 'Antikythera Mechanism' to Hahn's calculator—are of tremendous importance for humankind in general, as history then shows. Accordingly they fascinate the elite-circle of scientists of their times. But they harbour no direct meaning for those not 'in-the-know,' because in the end, they can 'just' calculate, 'nothing more.' They are not programable and thus can not combine their calculation powers in order to cope with tasks beyond reckoning—tasks which can be grasped and understood by people who are not astronomers, mathematicians, or savants in general. Tasks which can gain meaning in everybody's quotidian life. Like, say, playing a game.
Astoundingly enough, four years before Hahn presents the first working calculator mastering elementary arithmetic, and 67 years before the first design for a programable machine, an apparatus, which seems to do exactly that, appears. In 1770 Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804) presents the 'Automaton Chess Player' at Sch�nbrunn Palace, Vienna, and impresses Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (1717-1780). The machine consists of a table-high wooden cabinet with a chessboard on top, plus the head and torso of an antropomorphic puppet dressed up like a byzantine nobleman. Hence it quickly becomes known as 'The Turk.' Before every performance, von Kempelen opens the doors of the cabinet, showing off an intricate clockwork mechanism inside. Then he announces, that The Turk is ready for a challenger. The machine not only proofs that it can perform the knight's tour, but although shows to be a particularly strong chess player. During his 80-year career of being displayed in Europe and America it flawlessly defeats a plethora of players—among them so prominent opponents like Napol�on Bonaparte (1769-1821) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)—until it is destroyed in a fire in 1854. Alas, The Turk is a hoax. A fine one, indeed, but a hoax nevertheless.
In fact not some ingenious clockwork mechanics 'play' chess, but expert chessplayers hidden inside the 'machine,' controlling the movements of the puppet. (Levitt 2000, Standage 2002) The Turk is not equipped with artificial intelligence, rather it is a mechanical medium relaying interaction between human beings. When inside The Turk nobody knows that you are a grandmaster.
The sentence is equally true for the doings of a French chess master called Mouret in the 1820s in London, for Charles A. Hopper's 'Ajeeb,' sometimes dubbed 'The Egyptian,' first presented in 1868, and 'Mephisto', invented by prosthesis maker Charles Gumpel in 1878. All those 'machines' are imitations of The Turk—Mephisto at least partially being powered by electricity. Ajeeb is the most succesful of the epigonal lot, touring Europe and America for 60 years. Rumour has it, that from 1894 to 1904 it is operated by US-American high-calibre grandmaster Harry Nelson Pillsbury (1872-1906). Only some years later the first real machine, that indeed can play chess, appears. But before this can happen, another inventor's work is needed, which happened while the faux chess automatons toured the world.

alienist

manuscript-day 208 of 100

'Prior to the twentieth century, persons suffering from mental illness were thought to be "alienated," not only from the rest of society but from their own true natures. Those experts who studied mental pathologies were therefore known as alienists,' historian and writer Caleb Carr clarifies in a preliminary note to his 1994 thriller novel. In 'The Alienist' Laszlo Kreizler, psychiatrist, hunts down a serial killer—the story taking place in a hardly gaslit New York City of the year 1896. Not only Theodore Roosevelt makes a cameo appearance, but also Franz Boas, American anthropology's founding father of German descent. Boas being in the novel, like the many references to the works of psychologist and philosopher William James, is not mere decoration instilling the flavour of the period, but a decisive instrument of marking an intellectual transition. The transition from labelling the 'alien' as hopelessly lost and to be treated accordingly—because it surely is dangerous, to the notion, that the 'other,' even the pathological!, can be understood. Matchingly Stevie Taggart, the narrator of 'The Angel of Darkness,' the sequel to 'The Alienist,' relays, 'that Nature's domain includes every form of what society calls "unnatural" behavior; that in fact, just as Dr. Kreizler always has said, there's nothing truly natural or unnatural under the sun.' (Carr 1999 [1997]: 10)

out of the dark

eldredge variant

To my eyes ↵the 'Eldredge' is an absolute beauty, but the solution Jeffrey Eldredge chose for the final move does not exactly leave us with a 'knot' in the technical sense of the term. He simply tucks what is left of the narrow end of the tie away under the collar and the loop the tie forms around the neck. That way we depend on the pressure the loop around the neck exerts on the collar for the whole structure not to come apart. To improve this situation I added two 'through-the-loop' movements to Jeffrey's invention. Translated to Fink-Mao notation, my 'Eldredge' variant reads like this:

Ri Co Li Ro Li Co Ri Lo TCi Ro Ci Lo TCi

'T' means 'lead the narrow end through the loop you just made,' the exact same meaning Thomas Fink and Yong Mao had in mind, when they introduced the 'T' to their notation. There is no space between 'T' and 'Ci,' because it is one move— make sure that you go 'through' and really 'center in' before pulling the loop closed, else disaster is imminent. It requires a bit of concentration and inner quietude to tie, but once done you will have a luscious triangular knot of silk under your chin, which can not disintegrate. Due to the optimal symmetry Jeffrey's sequence supplies, the finished knot is open to being sculpted to perfect shape. I found it enough for me to go with both thumbs under the knot, to put all the other fingertips on top of the knot, and to slightly press the knot flat.

Now, the two added moves mirror the pattern visible atop the knot. Due to the asymmetry of the visible structures on the front of the knot, starting with the wide blade to the right or to the left, no more is negligible and may even gain sartorial meaning. The most common pattern found on ties are diagonal stripes. The historical background of the stripes is a thing in itself—for now only so much: In Europe it is common, that the stripes, when looked upon from the front, run from the lower left, to the upper right. Given that we are used to read from the left to the right, the stripes are pointing upwards. In the United States of America, to the contrary, the stripes usually point downwards—no metaphorical allusion to politics or even economics intended.

The orientation of the structure on the 'Eldredge' is dominated by the upper most diagonally running edge of the tie's fabric. If it is pointing upwards or downwards depends on how you start tieing the knot—with the wide blade to the right, or to the left, and on your choice between the original 'Eldredge' and my variant of it with the two through-the-loop moves added. No matter if you wear New-World or Old-World style diagonal stripes, in both cases you have to decide if you want the diagonal on your 'Eldredge' follow suit, or counter. Decision made, you have to choose the according procedure of tieing the knot.

Jeffrey's subterfuge of tucking the tip of the narrow end away under the collar frees you from any worries about the narrow end showing. Granted, there is the philosophy, that a tie has to be able to move freely. I agree—to a certain degree—in respect to the wide blade. Nevertheless some people are of the opinion, that the narrow end should be free, too. But then again every decent tie has a 'lead' on its back, a small sewn-on horizontal loop meant for sticking the narrow end of the tie through it, so it won't get visible by accident. From this I deduce, that it is sartorial consensus, that the narrow end should stay hidden. Now to the wide blade.

Due to the 'Eldredge' being of the largest order of magnitude possible with a regular tie, and due to it being an almost perfect equilateral triangle, the tie's wide blade blossoming out of the sharp vertex pointing downwards, a broad tie—maybe even a 'kipper' of 1970s fame—is mandatory for achieving æsthetical proportions. You may object, that kipper ties are out of fashion, but a 1950s narrow tie, like they recently seem to have come back to fashion, emerging from the voluminous 'Eldredge' just looks plainly ridiculous. I just can say, remember Lord Whimsy's dictum: 'Fashion is for those who have yet to understand style.'

the eldredge

It is uncanny, the development is still unfolding. After I learned about the inverse tie knots, invented by edeity, and clearly transcending Fink & Mao's 85 ways, I made some calculations—of course by means of the formulas devised by Fink & Mao, and spent a thought or two on the matter. The original 'Edeity' knot and the 'Hen Tie' are of size 11, comprising 4 center moves. Formula (15) (Fink & Mao 2000: 115) teaches us, that there are 80 knots within this class. Edeity's ingenious idea to wind the narrow end around the tie's wide blade, instead of the standard procedure the other way round, made possible size 11 knots, and showed the way to a lot more knots. In theory you can tie every regular knot inversely, which would double Fink & Mao's 85. But only inverse knots with odd size are acceptable. If you tie knots of sizes 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. inversely, then the seam of the tie would either be on the front of the wide blade, or on the outside of the knot. The former is plainly unacceptable, the latter might be a matter of debate. Because of this, inverse knots of sizes 10 and 12 are not feasible. 13 again would be possible, but back then (see ↵merovingian ties and ↵more merovingian ties) I deemed them to be impossible with a tie of regular length, hence I dismissed the thought. Well, Jeffrey Eldredge dared it:

In the movie Jeffrey does not follow the convention of having the wide blade to the right, seen from the wearer's point of view. Hence you can take the video as what you would see in the mirror when tieing. Accordingly I mirrored Jeffrey's moves for the Fink-Mao notation. Here is 'The Eldredge:'

Ri Co Li Ro Li Co Ri Lo Ci Ro Ci Lo Ci [T]

The knot is of size 13 and comprises 5 center moves—this class contains 240 knots. 'The Eldredge' is of optimal symmetry 0, and balance 2. The optimal balance achievable in this class would be 1, but I am not yet sure, if—due to the visible inverted-V structures characterizing the inverse knots—this parameter of æsthetics is applicable here. The 'T' for the final through-movement I put in square brackets, because Jeffrey actually does not do it. Instead he tucks away the tip of the tie's narrow end under the collar. There is not much left of it anyway. Fink & Mao added the subscript suffix 'on' for 'Onassis' to the Lo Ri Lo Ri Co T Ri Co variant of the Four-in-hand, worn by the late Greek shipping tycoon. So, in the future I might substitute the [T] by an 'E,' or 'ET' for 'Eldredge tuckaway.'

So, now you know about 'The Eldredge,' to my knowledge the latest in hitches worn around the neck. But stay tuned, as I still have something up my sleeve, maybe 'the last of the tie knots' ...

sartorial discretion

'No, no, no—by God, no. Please don't,' he says, touching my hands with his, preventing me from doing, what I was about to do. He says it in a low voice, stepping in front of me and close, shielding me from the eyes of everybody in the large room who occasionally might look into our direction.
Surprised I am glancing up. There is earnestness in his face, but no from-top-down stance, nothing educational whatsoever. He is with me, completely on my side. Hence he stepped into the others' line of sight—to spare me, his client, from any potential embarrassment. But he also seems slightly hurt within.
'Never—never close all buttons of a jacket,' he says, shooing my hands away from the lowest button.
'With three buttons on a jacket, like yours here, usually only the middle one is closed. You can close the top button, too—this is left to your sartorial discretion.'
Facial expression tells that he is pondering this alternative. Then a short sideways nod of the head, accompanied by an equally brief and positive smirk, both synchronized with a slow and friendly blink, signals approval. The idea of a closed top-button on me found grace in his mental eye.
'But never close the bottom one. Please.'
The tall man taking care of me is fifty something and has spent a lifetime with ↑men's suits of clothes. That my sacrilegious intention had caused him bodily pain would be saying too much. But it was on the brink of it, for sure. My request simply is against his internalised cosmology.
'I didn't know. Why is that so,' I ask. Not flabbergasted, but off balance.
'Will you accompany me to the mirror, please?'
He leads me in front of a wide floor-to-ceiling mirror, then asks me to inspect the jacket's fit, and to especially scrutinise its tapered sides.
'Now please do close the third button.'
I comply. The exceptional circumstances—tutelage of a neophyte in front of a mirror—for the time being allows to brake the cultural prescription.
'See? Suddenly there are tucks, running diagonally from the pits of your arms, down to the wrongly closed button. You are forcing the jacket against its cut, ruining the drape. The last button isn't meant for closing.'
I like learning and understanding things, especially via oral tradition, so I smile on him. He smiles back with glee and I realise that I am tapping into a full-fledged culture of its own.

grand theft childhood

Finally ...

KUTNER, LAWRENCE AND CHERYL K. OLSEN. 2008. ↑Grand theft childhood: The surprising truth about violent video games and what parents can do. New York: Simon & Schuster.

The book is a straightforward and clear scientific elaboration of, and argument for, what ihatesheep ↵brought to the point in 2006: 'If playing GTA is all it takes for your child to go out and murder prostitutes, then there are far, far bigger problems that you probably need to address.'

running chrome

There is a new browser around—the beta version of ↑Google Chrome was released yesterday. It is damn fast, I have to say. And there is a ↑comic book about it.

car on earth

Believe it, or not, but I found ↵my own car on ↑Google Earth, the successor to ↵World Wind, which nobody seems to know anymore.

vulcano by hP

Just a minute ago I received the latest e-mail newsletter from the ↑CGSociety. The top news in it is, that the CGSociety adopted '↑Game-Artist.net, the game artist�s web portal. Now there will be even more game-art eye-candy for the industry, under the CGSociety mantle. Drop by and check out Game-Artist today. For those already there, welcome!' Immediately I went to the forums, headed down to the work-in-progress (WIP) section—within all forums of that kind the most interesting department to me—and clicked on the top thread, ↑Crysis Map ~ Operation Codename: Vulcano. Droolingly staring on the gorgeous screenshots I thought, 'this reminds me of the '↑Max Payne 2' (MP2) mod ↵Mission:Impossible—New Dawn. Hell, how much the game-engine capabilities have changed since those days.' Next I looked on the name of the creator of this fabulous looking ↵Crysis-map ... it is my old friend from the Max-Payne community ↑H�lder 'hP' Pinto! Congrats—u r da man↑!!!!!1111oneoneeleven Plus, he ↑turned pro, too! Even more congrats!

more merovingian ties

After having published ↵merovingian ties—beyond the 85 knots of Fink and Mao, I started to contact some of the involved protagonists. ↑Lord Whimsy was the first to answer and confirmed a suspicion of mine. To my question on how he discovered the knot, Whimsy answered: 'If memory serves, I found a few sources online (I believe it was a pdf file somewhere). After some failed attempts of my own, I finally figured it out.' So, it seems that Whimsy got hold of the same tutorial by edeity, ↑published at zgeek, with which Henry Hu started out. Like Henry, Whimsy, too, did not get to grips with the scarce information of the tutorial, and—again like Henry—created his own solution. Now it is on me, to correct an error I made. The sequence in ↑Henry's original Hen Tie video tutorial is not the same as in Lord Whimsy's '↓The Merovingian' tutorial.

Henry Hu's original Hen Tie:
Ri Co Ri Lo Ci Ro Li Co Li Ro Ci T

Lord Whimsy's Merovingian:
Ri Co Ri Lo Ci Lo Ri Co Ri Lo Ci T

The detection of this difference once more proofs the usefulness of the (R, C, L) notation from the ↑Fink-Mao taxonomy.

Henry Hu already replied, too—and even more so. First he confirmed what I had written, and then posted a ↑video response at YouTube, again showing off how to knot the Hen Tie (that is the official spelling, by the way), this time using a special tie, customized by himself. Investigation of the whole matter continues—stay tuned.

P.S.: I love the life-feeling of the video, especially the interruption caused by Henry's cell phone—in my opinion the /baywatch-gesture is one of the most valuable pieces of content within '↑Second Life' (SL).

anthropology coming of age

welcome to the 21st century

Since quite a time ↵I was eagerly awaiting '↑Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human' by ↑Tom Boellstorff—it just arrived with yesterday's snail-mail, so I had not yet the chance to read Tom's book from front to back cover. Until now I only read chapter 1 'Subject and scope,' plus a dozen or so random paragraphs from throughout the book. Hence I am not yet qualified to deliver a review, instead I will jot down just some thoughts.

Although '↑Second Life' (SL) is not the focus of my own work, what I saw so far of Tom's text again instilled that somewhat ambivalent feeling. To make it clear from start on: I am very much with what Tom wrote. My ambivalence stems from oscillating between the poles 'Gosh, if only I had been faster!' and 'Yes! I am on the right tracks.' So much on my personal reception of 'Coming of age.'

Others had been faster—at least when it comes to reading the book ;-)—and it already triggered some discussion within that part of the anthropological community which is visible online. At ↑Savage Minds there are two reviews: '↓Ethnography of the Virtual' by Kerim Friedman, and '↓More on Coming of Age in Second Life' by Alex Golub, plus a follow-up, again by Kerim: '↑The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life'. In the wake of those quite a number of comments spawned, including in-depth replies by Tom Boellstorff. Furthermore the topic is currently debated on the medianthro mailing-list—Tom replies in there, too. No matter the stance of any single anthropologist towards SL, online phenomena in general, or Tom's book in particular, the issues have forcefully reached anthropology, are no more spat upon, but are seriously discussed within the discipline—anthropology is coming of age in the 21st century. Maybe not exactly as he envisioned, but what Arturo Escobar encouraged in his seminal article (↵1994) finally arrives ... Tom's book did and does quite something for that.

Every anthropologist who in the future wants to talk or write about SL, or non-↑MMORPG 'online persistent state worlds' in general, has to read 'Coming of Age.' In my view there is a trinity of absolute-must books on the topic, all of which were published this year:

↑AU, WAGNER JAMES. 2008. The making of Second Life: Notes from the new world. New York: HarperCollins.

↑BOELLSTORFF, TOM. 2008. Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press.

↑MEADOWS, MARK STEPHEN. 2008. I, avatar: The culture and consequences of having a second life. Berkeley: New Riders.

'The making of Second Life' strives to achieve for the understanding of SL, what ↑David Kushner's 'Masters of Doom' (↵2004 [2003]) did for ↑first-person shooter computer games—although, in my opinion, Au's book does not reach the heights of Kushner's. Despite Au once being—as SL's 'embedded journalist'—on Linden Lab's payroll, his book is far from hailing mumbo-jumbo of the marketing kind. Instead it furnishes in-depth understanding of SL's history and background.

Mark Stephen Meadows is an early adoptor in the ranks of ↵John Perry Barlow and ↑Howard Rheingold. 'I, avatar' is outstandingly designed—Meadows is a portrait artist and author by profession—and from all physical books on the topic does by far the most justice to SL in terms of visual representation. In terms of content, it until today is the best I read on the issue of 'the avatar,' which Meadows does not restrict to the graphical representation of the user-controlled agent in SL. He understands it as a term for all kinds of online manifestation of a human individual's personality. For example, in his book he also deals with interaction at YouTube—absolutely enlightening. The book as a whole qualifies as 'experimental ethnography,' a genre so much asked for since the times of 'Writing culture.'