Dear All The EASA Media Anthropology Network will be holding its 33rd e-seminar from this coming Tuesday 22 June to Tuesday 6 July 2010 via its mailing list. Jenny Cool (University of Southern California) will be presenting a working paper titled "The mutual co-construction of online and onground in Cyborganic: making an ethnography of networked social media speak to challenges of the posthuman" - see abstract below. Antoni Roig (Open University of Catalonia) will be the discussant. A PDF of this paper is now available on our site at http://www.media-anthropology.net/index.php/e-seminars (with thanks to Philipp Budka). These sessions are free and open to anyone with a genuine interest in the anthropology of media. To subscribe to the mailing list, go to http://www.media-anthropology.net/index.php/mailing-list John Dr John Postill C3 Research Institute (C3RI) Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield S1 2NU United Kingdom http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/ ************* Abstract Cyborganic, the subject of this study, was a San Francisco community whose members brought Wired magazine online, launched Hotwired; led the open source Apache project; and staffed and started dozens of Internet enterprises-from Craig's List to Organic Online-during the first decade of the Web's growth as a popular platform (1993-2003). The imaginaries, practices, and genres of networked social media developed in this group figured in the initial development of Web publishing and prefigured contemporary phenomena such as Facebook and a host of other media collectively known as "Web 2.0." While my ethnography examines the symbiosis of online and face-to-face sociality in the growth of Web publishing, this paper focuses on that symbiosis at a more micro-level, looking at specific forms and practices of networked social media in Cyborganic that have become predominant on the contemporary U.S Internet. Anthropologists have challenged the assumed "isomorphism between space, place, and culture" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 34) and have theorized "technological infrastructures as sites for the production of locality" without a necessarily geographic referent (Ito 1999:2). Despite this decoupling and the tendency to associate online sociality with fragmentation and dematerialization, my Cyborganic study demonstrates that the intermediation of online and onground can work to consolidate and extend, rather than attenuate, affiliations based on place and embodiment that anthropologists have long seen as defining sources of identity and cultural difference.