Anthropology News • May 2007 30 KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE A Talk by David Coulson JEAN SCHAUMBERG LYNN THOMPSON BACA SCHOOL FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH The African continent is home to some of the world’s most beautiful art—rock art. Images of 20-foot giraffes in Niger’s Aïr Mountains, engravings of human footprints in the Western Kalahari Desert, and carvings of 6.5-foot intri- cately decorated human figures in Chad are just some of the figures meticulously etched into or painted on rock surfaces throughout Africa. Over 500,000 pictographs and petroglyphs dating back as much as 26,000 years tes- tify to the fact that prehistoric African people were prolific artists who created intricate and thoughtful pieces of art across a vast continent. African rock art is among the best preserved on earth and predates writing by tens of thousands of years. While it is difficult to determine the exact age of the rock art using modern scien- tific methods, the images themselves can offer valuable clues. The artists painted and carved what they saw in their world. Raising Awareness of Prehistoric African Rock Art In March, British photographer David Coulson spoke to an audience in Santa Fe, NM at the Lensic, Santa Fe’s Performing Arts Center. The event was a first-time collaboration between the School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe, NM) and The Leakey Foundation (San Francisco, CA). Coulson’s images aptly illustrated the magnif- icent engravings and paintings he documented for the book, African Rock Art: Paintings and Engravings on Stone (2001) that he co-authored with Alec Campbell. Vertical rock surfaces are good locations for rock art, although engravings tend to be concentrated in the Sahara Desert, central Tanzania, eastern Zambia and South Africa. Paintings are found in protected areas either in shelters of sandstone or granite or on cliffs and boulders not exposed to the elements. The locations of several hundred thousand works of art are officially known and each year hundreds more are added to the list. The late paleontologist Mary Leakey intro- duced Coulson to the rock paintings of central Tanzania. Leakey and Coulson shared a love for the rock art and a mutual concern for its protec- tion. This led to the 1996 creation of TARA, the Trust for African Rock Art, a not-for-profit, NGO registered in Kenya and America. “TARA’s mission is to create greater global awareness of the importance and endangered state of Africa’s rock art; to survey sites and monitor their status; to be an information resource and archive; and to promote and support rock art conservation measures.” The organization has the support and endorsement of Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela as well as The Getty Conservation Institute, The National Geographic Society and The Ford Foundation. Vandalism, an encroaching population, and a growing tourist industry are major threats today to the petroglyphs and pictographs. David and TARA are committed to helping preserve the magnificent work of African prehistoric peoples as a legacy for present and future generations. Fighting cats. Photo courtesy of David Coulson Lessons From an Accidental Viral Video MICHAEL WESCH KANSAS STATE U What is Web 2.0 and what does it mean for anthro- pology? By late January of this year I had spent several months struggling to answer this question for a paper I was preparing on the possibilities and challenges of using new web technologies for the presentation of ethnography online. A New Mediascape Web 2.0 is notoriously difficult to capture in words. The name itself is strategically non- descriptive, refusing to declare anything except that whatever it is, it is different than the “Web 1.0” that came before. Coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, there is a healthy skepticism among many that it is nothing more than a marketing buzzword. However, few would argue that technologies like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and tagging that operate under the ban- ner of “Web 2.0” have not significantly trans- formed the way many humans now interact and participate online. What Is Web 2.0? What Does It Mean for Anthropology? The more I tried to explain Web 2.0 and its significance in words, the more I was struck with the irony of trying to represent dynamic, visual and participatory media in a traditional static and authorial paper format. I tried to imagine how I could present my work in the medium I was trying to explain, and the idea for a YouTube video was born. Three days later I had completed a rough draft, posted it to YouTube, and sent the link to ten colleagues. To my great surprise, one week later the video was the #1 featured video on YouTube and had been viewed over one million times. ing that the changes we are witnessing are so pro- found that we may need to rethink everything from copyright and authorship to love, family and ourselves. While the content of the video may not offer enough evidence to support such a radical claim, the journey of the video itself maps out at least three important characteristics of the new mediascape that suggest that some signifi- cant rethinking does need to be done. Speedy Creation and Distribution First, the fact that I was able to create this video in just three days without any professional training demonstrates that the tools for creating content and self-publishing to large audiences are now within the reach of millions of people, including most anthropologists. Publishing writ- ten content is especially easy. Using free hosting services like Blogger or Wordpress, a blog can be created in less than one minute. Second, new web technologies allow self- published information to spread to interested parties across traditional disciplinary boundaries with tremendous speed. In the first day after I released the video it spread slowly by email to just over 100 viewers. Some users of del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites began tag- ging it with words like “Web 2.0” and “anthro- pology,” spreading the link to other users of those services watching for those words. Bloggers began writing about it, spreading it throughout the blogosphere. On day three it received its biggest boost when somebody posted it on Digg.com, a site that allows users to NET@WORKING The video delivers a quick history of the web and highlights the most significant differences between paper-based media and digital media, focusing especially on the ability of digital media to separate form and content. In the video I argue that this allowed more users to create content without needing to know complicated format- ting codes, opening the way for the user-gener- ated revolution we are now witnessing. The video quickly tracks the most common manifestations of this revolution—blogs, media- sharing, tagging and wikis—and ends by suggest-