Someone who studies the factors regulating the distrubution and abundance of life on the internet.

Kind of apt. And, hey, you could even say you were in internet community ecologist, putting us in similar disciplines – with only the internet standing between. HA!

well, i am a designer. i am a visual communication designer. i am an information designer. i am a new media designer. woh woh….but wait. when is say these things…do i really know how many strings i am trying to stretch alongwith it.??!!! which is to say, i have dived in philosophy,psycholohy,sociology,ethnography,architecture,computing,meditation,trascendental consciousness, rave parties, kundalini workshops..blah.blah.blha.blahh…blh., when i work on one project in design.

so, design is about taking a coherent approach to define and taking different perspectives to look at the same thing.( remember “doors of perception”???).

and lately, what i feel, is that different discplines like information design, new media, interface design, interaction design, electronic arts are blurring the boundaries of expertise and forming a communal and a collective approach( from djs,vjs, ledartist, designers, architects to psychologist,sociologist,new genre of physicists( film: what the bleep do we know?) to define and derive solutions for an intensive research on the on going subjects like pervasive computing, immersive spaces, social computing, ambient spaces.

and to define a system which works on the mechanics of collective intelligence, is hard to render by one node of information or an “ist”. it is a collective process to thrive, govern,evolve and sustain it.

we as sociable designers, have been always disguising ourself or to put it in a better format, have been always in a state of fluidity, in a constant flux, to place ourself in different containers or rather wearing this glasses to change our landscpae of information.

its as though we are constantly connnecting the dots within a great connect-the-dots drawing book, or discovering the patterns within patterns of an infinite cosmic mandala.

hope so it has helped you, if not define, but atleast to ponder upon for a while….

“I’m not a number (oops a word in -ist)”

If asked to pigeonhole myself, I like to say “interested” and leave it at that. It’s annoying that people feel the need to pigeonhole their contacts.

That said, it’d be kind of interesting to create an experimental website where people do actually assign tags to their contacts. I think it’d be awful to have to read (presumably it would need to be anonymous), but at the same time interesting. Hmm, if I have a spare five minutes …

Actually, like Thomas Vanderwal, I struggle with what I am called, having laboured under creative technologist for a while, I now think a better term for what I do is product design.

Social scientist probably is closest to what you are doing and of those anthropologist is maybe the most appropriate. You don’t need the web, media o technology prefix I think, people can work that bit out for themselves.