Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Connor Graham, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This seminar will introduce the project “Internet Life and Lore in Southeast Asia: Histories, Mythologies and Materialities”, a proposed collaboration between ARI, NTU, Yale-NUS, MIT and Trinity University. The aim of the project is to explore the “lives and lore” of four representative ”online connected worlds” in Southeast Asia, anchored by Singapore as the most IT developed site. Studies will also be conducted in Myanmar Thailand and Indonesia to give the project a regional, comparative dimension. By “lore” we mean what has traditionally been called “folklore” but needs to be reframed in the internet age, when “folk” are now also online. Taking four basic aspects of folklore as our ‘research tracks’ (storytelling, figures, layering, and rumour) the project aims to test how each has changed (or not) given this new communications medium. The project also means to test three hypotheses through this research, namely: (1) That the assumption of a single, global, monolithic Internet needs to be adjusted to account for multiple internets, and that the diversity of Southeast Asia makes it an excellent site to study this phenomenon; (2) That the multiplicity of online connected worlds are productive of new cultures and social groups, whose speciation is undertheorized and understudied by academics around the world, but particularly in Southeast Asia; (3) That the tracking of internet lore, based on insights from folklore studies but also fields like science and technology studies (STS) and information systems, provides a theoretically and empirically fruitful way to study how online communities form, are maintained, and, occasionally, disappear.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Eric Kerr is Research Fellow in the Science, Technology and Society cluster at the Asia Research Institute and teaches at Tembusu College and the Department of Philosophy. His work centres on the philosophy of technology and social epistemology with a focus on petroleum engineering in Thailand. Dr Kerr has published on topics including scientific evidence, engineering epistemology, survey methods, applied, and cross-cultural philosophy, among other topics. He is Associate Editor and Book Review Editor at Social Epistemology and the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. He is a co-founder and board member of the Society for Philosophy of Information. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and has taught in the UK and the US before moving to Singapore. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Vienna and Delft University of Technology.

Connor Graham’s interests lie in examining people’s relationships and interaction with information technologies in work and domestic settings, uses and deployments of visual technologies, and the different uses of ethnography (e.g. for design). Recently he has been focusing on the use of visual, and in particular photographic, technologies in family life and health care. Most recently he has been pursuing research examining the Internet’s relationship to and role in dying, death, and memorialisation. Dr Graham received his PhD in Information Systems from the University of Melbourne (Australia). He is currently a Senior Lecturer and Residential Fellow at Tembusu College (NUS) where he teaches modules centred on the Internet and society and climate change. He has a joint appointment in the Science, Technology, and Society Cluster at the Asia Research Institute.

REGISTRATION

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