Biocultural Informatics: Doing Anthropology of Genetics In Vivo and In Silico
Deborah Heath, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Lewis and Clark College, Portland OR 97219 USA, heath@lclark.edu

The Human Genome Project has coincided with and contributed to the explosive growth in information technologies at the cusp between the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Among its technical offspring is the new field of bioinformatics. Genetics is now studied both in vivo, in the "wet lab," and in silico, in the "dry lab," or at the keyboard. Meanwhile, lay health advocates have become increasingly adept at putting the internet and the biomedical databases to use in expanding their own embodied knowledges. Tracking genetics and genomics anthropologically during the past decade has required an agile ethnographic practice, in order to provide a map of the cultural contexts of knowledge production in this rapidly changing field of inquiry. Doing anthropology of genetics both in vivo and in silico requires a readiness to hyperlink between diverse fieldsites--lab, clinic, lay advocacy groups, both on-line and off-line-- and between a wide array of human and nonhuman interlocutors.

Inside the bubble: Community, meaning and deep play at the intersection of Wall Street and Cyberspace
Melvin Pollner, Department of Sociology, UCLA

A large and growing number of the US population are invested in the stock >market and involved with the internet. The two domains--Wall Street and Cyberspace-- intersect at web sites devoted to personal finances, many of which include bulletin board forums for the discussion of individual stocks. The sites and boards at the Investment/Internet (I/I) intersection are capillaries for the diffusion of the "culture of capitalism," important nodes in the corporate/market nexus, and consequential sources of advice for everyday economic decisions. I use my experiences with a high-profile site and board to examine how participants create the resources for a sense of community, making sense of market chaos and framing financial gain in emotionally-laden moral terms. The communal, cognitive and emotional attractions of the board contributed to (what in retrospect was formulated as) the "irrational exuberance" of investors. The intense reflexivity of the I/I intersection has implications for the analysis of "virtual society." Although claims from within and about cyberspace may be inflated -"cyberbole"- the very claims deflate the value of conventional conceptual perspectives.

Friends on the net: neither/nor
Jonathan Rée (Middlesex University)

In circles where people like to depress themselves with speculations about the Crisis of the Present Age, the net is now a favourite topic of conversation. The twin evils of massification and atomisation that were once attributed to industrialisation, or electrification, are now blamed on the net. In this context it is not surprising that Hubert Dreyfus has recently looked back to the 1840s and to discover in Kierkegaard a pioneering prophet of cyberdoom. (“Kierkegaard on the Information Highway”, February 2000.) I think this is all wrong. In the first place, it vastly underestimates the forms of social interaction that are possible on the net, especially with email. (Cf . Patricia Wallace, The Psychology of the Internet, Cambridge University Press, 1999) Secondly, it is based on a systematic misconception of the problem of social isolation, because it fails to recognise that solitude can be a mode of sociability rather than a negation of it. And thirdly, for what it is worth, it gets Kierkegaard wrong too. Subjectivity and individuality as Kierkegaard understood them through his theory of “indirect communication” are precisely what the net can nurture.

Abstraction and decontextualisation: an anthropological comment
Marilyn Strathern, Dept of of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 3RF

One question running through the Virtual Society? programme is to do with over-enthuiastic claims, as well as over-dire warnings, made in the name of virtual technologies. The social anthropologist can draw in a comparative perspective.

If ideas about virtual systems have raced ahead of their actualisation, then it has to be other ideas and other systems, ones already in place, that speed them on their way. Certain well established processes of 'abstraction' and decontextualisation' are suggestive here. They fuel both positive and negative reactions. It is relevant to comment that while abstraction may be regarded as taking content out of human interactions, it is also integral to the imagination of social relations; and while observers seek to restore context as an aid to interpretation, the capacity to cross domains is integral to social understanding.

These thoughts will be rendered concrete through comparative material, ffd. This will include material drawn from practices of audit, particularly in higher education. Here ICT carries a heavy symbolic role, but is otherwise ancillary to procedures which have a long history in financial accounting and management. At the same time, if auditees now appear to have become a new kind of consumer, then what is added -- and what is taken away -- by thinking of them as virtual consumers?