Homo floresiensis: The Impact of Information Sharing

In 2003, an international team of paleoanthropologists & archaeologists discovered seemingly human "hobbit" sized subfossil remains on Flores island in Indonesia. The team that made the discovery claims that the remains of these individuals represent a heretofore unseen species of hominid and has been named Homo floresiensis. Ever since the Hobbit of Flores first graced the headlines in 2003, it has continued to make frequent appearances in news media and journals because its status as a new species is oft contested. This debate over its status as a species continues to be an on-going one because there is limited access to the remains. To date, only members of the original research team and selct outside experts have had access to the bones. All information pertaining to the find has been released by the aforementioned individuals in their published papers and journal articles. This lack of information sharing is a detriment to the scientific community. As the case of the H. floresiensis demonstrates, it continues to produce papers based on idle speculation and recycled information, reinterpreted(often incorrectly).

Recently, the saga of the Hobbit continued through the publication of a paper by Australian scientists Peter Obendorf, John Oxnard & Ben Kefford in the Proceeding of the Royal Society B(Biological Sciences). The article's title succintly summarizes the contents of the paper: "Are the small human-like fossils found on Flores human endemic cretins?" It challenges the attribution of species status to the find in Flores. They state that these remains are those of Homo sapiens suffering from severe congential hypothyrodism which, they claim, explains the oddities in form that the bones exhibit. Their hypothesis is hinged on the size of the sella turcica(aka pituitary fossa, where the pituitary gland rests) which they state was enlarged, a symptom of hypothyroidism. The evidence they used to determine the size of the sella turcica comes from a 2D screen capture of a blurry 3D CT scan captured from a BBC Horizon show called "The Mystery of the human hobbit," similar to the graphic above.

This paper has produced quite the negative reaction in the anthropological community and has translated into a significant amount of press in newspapers, journals and blogs. Mainly, Obendorf et al. have been criticized for unsound methodolgy, statements not backed by tangible information and usage of incorrect data. Peter Brown, a member of the original research team has critiqued the paper for "being complete nonsense...without a glimmer of factual support." Regarding the sella turcica, specifically, Brown stated that the area is "very poorly preserved and not capable of meaningful measurement." Colin Groves, a biological anthropologist recounted to the press "...I warned him [Peter Obendorf] that he would be simply laughed to scorn if he produced what is mainly idle speculation."

Obendorf et al.'s paper is idle speculation. It is not science. Science is a system of acquiring knowledge based off of observation, deduction and measurable, replicable results. Seeing as how the measurement of the sella turcica was taken from a warped and blurry computer simulated image of the area as exhibited on a TV show, I would daresay that this is not a scientifically valid measurement and that they are wrong in their estimation of the size of the pituitary fossa(sella turcica). At the end of the day, their argument is mainly wishful thinking around what could be. Had Obendorf et al. actually been given access to an endocast or another accurate representation of that area, then their measurement of the sella turcica would be demonstrably more accurate. But, then again, that's the issue: lack of access.

Obendorf et al. have been unfairly criticized for writing this paper without ever having handled the remains. It is not that they did not want access to them, it is that they were not allowed access. If Obendorf et. al had been given access to the actual remains of casts of high resolution photos of it, then we likely would have avoided this entirle debacle. It seems ridiculous to condemn this paper for having been written without better access to quality data when information sharing is a problem within the broader community. This paper was a product of its environment. Yes, Obendorf et al. could have decided against bringing their voices into the room concerning this debate, bu they didn't. Why not publish a paper challenging the generally accepted theory based almost solely on bad data and wishful thinking when so few others have access to quality information? It's definitely a way of adding papers to your curriculum vitae. And, maybem just maybe, the people holding a monopoly on the evidence will tire of the challenges based on flimsy evidence and finally allow other people access to the find.

Earlier on, I mentioned a comment that Peter Brown made about the sella turcica. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must say I failed to convey the spirit of the quote. Since guilt plagues me so, I'll provide you with it now. Peter Brown said that "I'm the only person on the planet to have seen what's left of the pituitary fossa. It is very poorly preserved and not capable of meaningful measurement." Yup, that's right. He's the only person in the world to have seen that area of the skull, so, of course, he would know. But we wouldn't. John Hawks, an American paleoanthropologist provides a rather astute critique of this comment. In his blog he states "It may be true, but that doesn't make it science. If nobody can see it, then nobody can replicate it. Which means we have no reason to believe it."

Social Media: The Intersection of Sociocultural Anthropology and New Media

New media, including video games, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, wikis, mash-ups, et cetera, are part of the mediascape. The mediascape is one of five dimensions of the social imaginary, as stated by Arjun Appadurai(1999). The concept of the social imaginary was expanded in the 1990s from the original notion of psychoanalyst and theoretician Jacques Lacan that served to indicate the cultural practices and values of a particular culture/community.The expanded usage of this phrase by Appadurai is that the imagination is "an organized field of social practices" that exist as social facts-social structures and/or cultural norms that are external in relation to the individual. He indicates that the social imaginary possesses five different dimensions; they are ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1999). The term "mediascapes" refers to both the "distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information" to a large number of people as well as the "images of the world create by these media(Appadurai 1999)." Mediascapes are characterized by being image centered, narrative based and by their ability to offer a "series of elements...out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives(Appadurai 1999)."

Various blogs are now paying attention to the mediascape and conducting ethnographic research as well as theoretical explorations of this sphere of human-system-technological interaction. Among those researchers are Michael Wesch and Brad Levinson. Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor at Kansas State University who is working towards the creation of an ethnography of YouTube. He discusses the sites' limitations and its possibilities in a blog post that exhibits student work, responds to criticisms levied at the site and highlights the merits of studying entities within the cultural contexts which they inhabit as exmplified by Twitter, a micro-blogging platform. Brad Levinson, MA, previously of Georgetown's Communication, Culture and technology Program, currently works within the public affairs/strategic communications sector and discusses the relation between technology and culture by examining Twitter as a social-technological phenomenon. I have commented within these blogs and, for the sake of convenience I will repost my comments here.

Social Media and Social Anthropology, Part One:Technological Constructivism

Comment:
I rather favor your perspective in that I also believe that culture shapes technology and applies technology so as to satisfy it's needs and desires. In addition, i think that these needs fluctuate over time and dictate the changing functions and formats of technology. The relationship, as you state it, is one of constant change that emphasizes quite heavily the impact culture has on the creation and usage of technology. This being the case, I find myself curious to hear more about the ways technology impacts culture. By this I do not mean to say I believe that technology determines culture, because I do not believe that to be the case. I just find myself curious to know more about the ways technologies impact the lives of individuals, the minute components of culture.

Your discussion of how Twitter exemplifies the formula and steps within your post is well done and reinforces your thesis. It also provides an individual unfamiliar with that platform information on the cultural context from which it emerged and an idea of it's potential personal applications. As an individual user, would you be able to tell me about your experience and how you re-shaped/modified your life to allow room for Twitter to exist within it? Also, has your usage of Twitter changed over time from when you initially began using it? I find myself curious to know this.

Upon further reflection, I find these ideas of the technological determinist/constructivist to be rather binaristic. I do not think that operating based off of seemingly mutually exclusive dualistic principles can allow us to make great gains in terms of mapping mediascapes and their impact on culture, the technology and the individuals involved in their creation/existence. In real life, it would seem that there is an overlap between these two perspectives in that the culture possesses unmet needs, the technology is shaped to meet these needs and the individuals then shape their lives to these technologies as a response to their personal needs. From this point I imagine that the changing needs and desires on the individual level change the needs and desires of the culture, that then in turn changes the technologies to meet these newly modified needs and desires. A discourse, as opposed to a simple give/take relationship exists between three entities and not two. Perhaps you meant to convey this notion in your blog and I simply failed to understand it, but I would be interested in seeing you highlight the discourse between the individual, the culture and the technology in future posts.

Visualizing the Mediascape(another step toward an ethnography of YouTube)

Comment:
YouTube is only a small part of the mediascape. The criticisms levied at the site by those individuals on "The State of the Art" panel at the 24/7 DIY Video Summitt, as portrayed within your post, certainly did not seem to take this fact into account. As you point out, Henry Jenkins and Yochai Benkler do make mention of the fact that users embed videos into their blogs and other forums for public discussion and so in this regard they do address YouTube as only a component of a larger phenomenon. But, overall, it seems as though the time would have been better spent if the panelists critiqued the structural limitations of YouTube while emphasizing users and how they cope with/navigate around these limitations. A deeper exploration and discsussion of how users interface with YouTube to create community and advance discourse within other locales would probably draw attention to how users impact the mediascape through their manipulation of and interaction with diverse cultural tools.

By looking at what the users are doing and where they are doing it, a web of inter-relatedness among various other components of the mediascape would emerge. This would both increase our understanding of the mediascape in terms of where it is and what is currently occurring within it more broadly. I believe it would also facilitate the mapping of the mediascape through the usage of static imagery.

You were absolutely right when you said "We think understanding this broader context of YouTube is necessary for understanding YouTube itself." We are better able to understand entities by exploring their structures and examining where they are situated within a particular historical context. Your ideas to map the mediascape and create an ethnography of YouTube are ingenious and, honestly, inspire some amount of admiration and envy within me [laughs]. As an individual who does not see herself as particularly involved within this dimension of the social imaginary, I'm extremely interested in learning what is occurring within this sphere. As a student of anthropology, I find your projects to be extremely enterprising and exciting, and hope that the field will continue to produce understanding in areas that it had previously left unexplored.


Source:
Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy." Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999. 220.