TP: On the sunny side of life?: (a review of the conference). “In Sweden’s sun city, Karlstad, Internet researchers from some 30 countries surfed through the cultural specifics of the Web … The tricky causalities – the complex relationship between culture and technology.” The conference site.

Trying to salvage good stuff from this conference (the proceedings are kinda expensive):

Nina Wakeford (university of Surrey, UK) is director of the Incubator for Critical Inquiry into Technology and Ethnography (projects, blog) and did a keynote trying to answer the question “How can the next generation of research deal with experience which is ‘non-normative’ or ‘at the margins’ of ICT development?”.

I’m always conflicted about hardcore ethnographers/researchers. The language many of them use almost guarantees they only speak to themselves. At the same time, they have interesting things to say. Like this: “Early discussions of the internet betray a tendency to celebrate the taking on of other (usually non-normative) identities as a way of describing the capacity of a transformative technology.” Very true.

I’m digging in a bit in the Incite site and blog.