Cultural Anthropology and High Tech: It's about time!

From the It's About Time file, Smart Mobs reports:

Ethnographic methods are being applied to friend-finding networks such as Friendster, multi-player online role-playing games such as Everquest and online dating systems,' he explains. And these networks and games are proving useful to social scientists in their academic research. 'Future technologies will in turn be affected by our studies of the way people behave on these networks.'

This reveals--once again--that technology is useful only to the extent that it connects with social forces.