Doctoral Dissertation Research: Computer Servers and User Communities

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Computer servers, the building blocks of internet connectivity, play a central role in contemporary human interaction. Servers store information, permit computing resource sharing, connect fax machines and printers over networks, support digital video and audio file streaming, and much more. Physically, a server may be a large single device or a collection of such devices that run continuously without direct user input. At the other end of the scale are small servers, computers that connect a network of users for a particular purpose, such as a private email server. Server location, ownership, and operation are critical to the privacy and security of the data they hold. But despite being indispensable, servers work in the background of our lives and remain essentially distant and hidden for the average user. In the research supported by this award, which trains a graduate student in methods of conducting empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, the researcher investigates how users understand this "invisible" but indispensable technology, and how that understanding affects how users actively relate to, interact with, and protect the servers on which they depend. The research is important for social scientists wanting to understand how ideas of time and place are changed by modern technologies, as well as for policy makers concerned to understand technology's political and social effects.The research will be conducted by University of California, Irvine, anthropology doctoral student Evan Conaway, who is supervised by Dr. Tom Boellstorff. Because there is such a wide diversity of server types and users, the researcher has chosen to focus on the servers used by one particular user community. This will allow him to study the issues in greater depth than would be possible if he attempted to cover all servers and all users. The community he has chosen are those who employ servers for role-taking activities. The researcher will explore how and to what extent a regionally stratified sample of these users experience servers as places in and of themselves; as machines for the storage and practice of memory; and as meaningful cultural objects. He will further examine how those experiences affect how the users deploy servers as well as how they understand time, place, and property. Mr. Conaway will conduct twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with three groups connected not by a direct network of interest, but by this common engagement with servers. He will collect data through participant observation, interviews, surveys, and archival research. Findings from the research will address debates and controversies around the location of internet infrastructure, data ownership and security, and emerging issues in intellectual property law.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.