Patricia Lange's Bio
Patricia Lange is a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. She is currently conducting research on YouTube and on video bloggers as part of a large-scale, MacArthur-funded project on digital youth and informal learning. Specifically, her project is concerned with studying the semiotics of video creation, sharing, and reception online. By studying the mediated experiences of everyday life among youth affects, the project increases our understanding of concepts such as identity, negotiating acceptable forms of online communication, place, and the fractalization of the public and private.
Prior to joining the Annenberg Center, Lange served as a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at San Jose State University where she taught courses in: Culture Through Film; Organizational Cultures; and Emerging Global Cultures. She has also taught Social Problems in the United States at Santa Clara University and was a visiting scholar in Linguistics at Stanford University.
Her doctoral work in anthropology at the University of Michigan identified a construct she terms "performing technical affiliation" in which online participants in technically-oriented communities perform alliances to technical beliefs, values, and technologies in ways that may complicate access to knowledge, access to speaking rights and privileges, and access to non-normative forms of expression online. Her work combines long-term ethnographic methods with micro-anlayses of conversation to see how online participants negotiate and interrupt performances of technical affiliation to create opportunities for non-normative forms of expression. Lange's work also shows that contrary to popular belief, hostile interactions in online environments are not an inevitable result of anonymous encounters but rather are used to remove significant levels of anonymity between participants who impart complex information about their identities by engaging in arguments and emotional encounters.
Lange's work has appeared in journals such as: Anthropology of Work Review, The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society, First Monday, The Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Symposium about Language and Society-Austin, and Social Science Computer Review.
Lange also worked for seven years as a technology analyst at the Business Intelligence Center at SRI International where she investigated technical, commercial, and social aspects of advanced computer interfaces such as virtual environments, pen-based mobile devices, speech recognition, and natural language processing systems.
