David Hakken

Professor of Informatics

E-mail
Phone: (812) 856-1869
Office: Informatics West, Room 318
Hours: Spring term: Wed. 1:15-3:15
Web Site: View David Hakken’s Web site

Other Titles

Director of Social Informatics Program
Director of International Activities
Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences

Research Interests

David Hakken studied cultural anthropology at Stanford, Chicago, and the American University in Washington, D.C in the 1960s and ‘70s. The abiding concerns of his research career have been the complex ways in which social change, culture, and technology, especially automated information and communication technology, co-construct each other. This has led him to study worker education, public policy, and workplace use of new information technology in Britain and the United States; software development in Britain, the Nordic countries, the US, and Malaysia; social service and technology (e.g., assistive technology) in the US; and techno-science in Chinese and Malaysian scholarship and higher education.

Research Projects

He is currently involved in several research projects. These focus on:

Effective incorporation of robust social and cross-cultural perspectives into the design and implementation of computing systems, as well as education in computing (“The Strong Program in Social Computing”);
The implications of Free/Libre and Open Source Projects for the future dynamics of organization (“FLOSS and ‘Virtual’ Organizing: The Case of (the open sourced massive, multiplayer online game) BZ Flag”);
The role of and implications for computing in the recent massive but partial up-scaling of social formation reproduction (“The Cultural Construction of Demi-globalism”); and
What computing contributed to the current crisis and how a different approach to computing could help us get out if it (“Computing and Crisis”).

Education

Ph.D. in Anthropology, The American University, Washington, DC (1978)
M.A. in Anthropology, The University of Chicago (1972)
A.B. in History, Stanford University (1968)

Biography

A cultural anthropologist, Prof. Hakken does his ethnography in cyberspace. His ultimate research goal is to understand both how automated information and communication technologies are shaped by cultures as well as how AICTs shape cultures. He also promotes AICTs that expand, not undermine, human capabilities.

In 2005, he was in Malaysia fieldwork on a Fulbright Research Grant. In 2007 and 2008, he began fieldwork in China.

In addition to four grants from the US National Science Foundation, one from the Social Science Research Council, and two from the Fulbright Program, he has done research for the New York State Technology Foundation, the Resource Center for Independent Living, other not-for-profit organizations and public social services. While teaching Anthropology and Information Studies at the State University of New York Institute of Technology, he also ran the Institute’s Policy Center. He is past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Work of the American Anthropological Association, the first recipient of the AAA’s Textor Prize in Anticipatory Anthropology, and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Besides several scholarly and popular articles, he has written four books on computing and co-edited another. His second Routledge Press book, The Knowledge Landscapes of Cyberspace, was published in October, 2003.