
Geek Researcher Spends Three Years Living With Hackers - cyphersanctus
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/coleman/
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JoeAltmaier
My game-inventing club has an ethnographer from the local University attending
our meetings. We welcome here; teach her our gentle ways and show her how to
achieve the good life: by inventing fun things!

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gyardley
Anthropology is ridiculously useful for sales and marketing.

I owe a guy named Michiel van Meeteren a beer or three for his 'Indie Fever'
(<http://www.madebysofa.com/indiefever/>), a ethnography of indie Mac
developers - which came out right when I was crafting a pitch to indie Mac
developers at the start of the iOS software boom back in 2008.

That book is terribly dated now - the success of iOS completely mutated the
culture. But it was accurate at that time, and helped me avoid some terrible
errors - errors I totally would have made, had I just followed my instincts.

If you're selling or planning to sell anything to the hacker community she
researched, you should jump on her book, stat.

~~~
indiecore
>That book is terribly dated now

>If you're selling or planning to sell anything to that community you should
jump on her book, stat.

???

 _Edit_ : I misunderstood the last line, he's talking about the book in the OP
article.

~~~
klipt
Different books. Different authors, even.

~~~
indiecore
OH! Thanks, edited original post.

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valdiorn
Am I the only one who's slightly offended by being portrayed like a rogue
tribe of bushmen that researchers "go and live with" to study?

Hackers, aka. software developers, are just people with a specific job.

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ebiester
We also have a culture, and anthropologists don't only study distant tribes.
I'm in Turkey and have a few anthropologist friends here studying everything
from the statistics department to television stations to poor Turks displaced
by gentrification. An ethnography on a single evangelical church has been
published. If it's a group of people, an anthropologist is either studying or
considering studying it.

~~~
ommunist
mmm. This recalls me the situation when a young monkey is taken into lab to
the elder one and asks what is the monkey job. The elder one puffs: "Its
anthropological research!". "What is it?" - asks the young one. "You see, I
push this button and measure how fast these large white monkeys will give me a
banana".

~~~
potatolicious
Ah there it is, my daily dose of "programmer snarkily trivializes a complex
field". I was wondering what took so long.

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VLM
Regarding her quest for good hacker films, try Jason Scott's BBS documentary
or to a lesser extent his text adventure documentary.

If she's looking for a big name formulaic Hollywood blockbuster, don't bother,
because there's no original comic book for them to make a sequel or remake of.
Maybe in a generation (or two) Hollywood could turn xkcd or penny arcade into
a movie remake?

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xradionut
Works of this ilk has been done in the past. Look at the original "Hackers"
book or "Soul of a New Machine". And the jokes that she finds very funny are
mostly bad puns to the folks that have been in the "culture" for decades.

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kondro
This is all very meta.

I'm not sure how I feel about being anthropologized.

~~~
indiecore
I think it's neat. Nerds/Geeks/Hackers/etc are generally a solitary lot and
even in groups the group is very inward focused so it's nice to have an
outside opinion.

 _edit_ :

I especially like

>There’s a whole chapter on joking, humor and cleverness among hackers. And
that, to me, was one of the fascinating areas. And I feel that I’ve just
scratched the surface with that chapter — to how deep and complex their oral
histories are and their folklore is.

Because I've always been fascinated with Internet History and much of it is
recounted through what is basically oral tradition simply because a lot of the
old era hasn't been saved.

 _edit 2:_

>They come from the meme world.

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louischatriot
Here is a tldr of the interview:
<http://tldr.io/tldrs/50b61713bb2203997700013f>

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zerostar07
Her 'findings' are not really related to hackers. In fact, every observation
she makes could equally apply to physics geeks of the 50s.

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derrida
So you've read the book?

~~~
zerostar07
I was referring to the interview

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kragen
Biella is, among other things, a really sweet person, and I look forward to
reading her book. I was confused when I saw the title of this submission
because it sounds like something that just happened, not something that
happened several years ago.

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davidw
I recall meeting Biella a number of years ago in that area of the world. She
seemed very nice and committed to her research.

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trendspotter
I'm suprised to see this story landed on Hacker News :P

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indiecore
Does anyone know of any other good Geek/Nerd/Internet Ethnology/History books?
I find myself very interested in the subject lately.

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babarock
I highly recommend "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy

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steverb
Second that.

I would also recommend "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the
Computer Age" and "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and
the Next Generation at Microsoft".

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ommunist
For three years jedi knights tolerated questions about the Force and
everything from a young she-padawan. Until they realised she can't spell "42".

Dudes, seriously, does anyone of you want to be treated like monkey tribe?
Even if it is anonymous?

~~~
__ingrid__
The article is kinda ridiculous, but why are you bringing gender into this
discussion? It is irrelevant.

~~~
ommunist
I am also bringing the Force. It is also irrelevant.

