There's a working definition of digital anthropology on Wikipedia. Of the eight possible things it is described as meaning, these are the three of most interest to me:
I have compiled below some notes on key concepts deployed by digital anthropologists and closely related social researchers. Journal sources are mostly shortened to the keyword letters in their titles e.g. ARA is 'Annual Review of Anthropology'. Have a look at the 'bibliographies' section for reading lists compiled by others. Expand all the boxes and then run a find (Ctrl + F) for particular terms not listed as concepts.
1. Using technology as the basis for a wider discussion on what it means to be human
2. Using anthropology to better understand and optimise our use of technology
3. The study of the practice and experience of digital technologies in comparative cultural context
In terms of applying theory, I believe the material culture approach holds a lot of value. There's a neat intro to it in the context of a discussion of Chinese social media practices here.
Concepts used by digital anthropologists
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Activism, social movements, protest movements and new media
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http://johnpostill.com/2010/07/05/three-working-assumptions-about-social-media-and-activism-j-postill/
There is no overarching network society, no network logic at work in the world of activism. Instead I expect to find an ever expanding universe of socio-technical formations, both new (Twitter streams, Facebook groups, Delicious friends) and old (e-mail lists, marches, protests, meetings, peer groups), each with its own logic and interacting in complex ways. Instead of relying on a handful of poorly defined and overused notions such as community, network or public sphere, we need to expand our socio-technical lexicon to keep up with a veritable explosion of socio-technical life forms.Microblogging as a protest practice: 3 games playedPublic protest in a digitised world...these movements exhibit four main characteristics, namely: they (a) propagated through viralised media ecologies...
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Pfaffenberg ARA 1992 Social Anthropology of TechnologyNorman (75:9), who calls attention to an artifact's affordances. An affordance is a perceived property of an artifact that suggests how it should be used. Affordances are inherently multiple: Differing perceptions lead to different uses. You can drink water from a cup to quench thirst, but you can also use a cup to show you are well bred, to emphasize your taste in choosing decor, or to hold model airplane parts. But is not such a point just so much strained, special pleading? Everyone knows that chairs are primarily for sitting in; despite "minor" variations associated with specific historical styles and tastes, isn't the chair's function the pre-eminent matter? Such a distinction between function and style is common sense only to the extent that we ignore a key component of technology, ritual. In the preceding section I stressed ritual's prominent role in coordinating labor in sociotechnical systems. Here, I emphasize the equally prominent role of ritual in defining the function of material culture.Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications - boyd 2010-Networked technologies introduce new affordances for amplifying, recording, and spreading information and social acts. These affordances can shape publics and how people negotiate them. While such affordances do not determine social practice, they can destabilize core assumptions people make when engaging in social life. As such, they can reshape publics both directly and through the practices that people develop to account for the affordances…. Four affordances that emerge out of the properties of bits play a significant role in configuring networked publics:Persistence: online expressions are automatically recorded and archived. (Both writing and photography provide persistence, but they also transform the acts they are capturing)Replicability: content made out of bits can be duplicated.Scalability: the potential visibility of content in networked publics is great.Searchability: content in networked publics can be accessed through search.
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BOOKSThe Cellphone by Miller and HorstWe also seek to build upon the general arguments that have emerged from studies of the adoption of media. Ling (2004), for example, provides one of the most thoughtful texts that attempts to assess the literature concerning the impact of the cell phone to date. Following Silverstone and Haddon (1992) and Silverstone and Hirsch (1992) he argues that the evidence to date supports an approach termed the domestication of technologies, which was devised in order to move beyond arguments between various forms of technological determination and social determination. Several of the terms and ideas employed in this approach, such as appropriation and objectification, were adopted and adapted from Miller (1987, 1988)6 and, in the main, this is the perspective we employ here.In essence such approaches have their original derivation in dialectical philosophy, here introduced under the term objectification. In effect, this means that we do not imagine ourselves as studying the adoption of objects by subjects, because there is no fixed thing called a cell phone or fixed group called Jamaicans. Rather, this book will seek to find out what Jamaicans have become in the light of their use of the cell phone and what the cell phone has become in the light of its use by Jamaicans. What one has to study are not things or people but processes (Miller 2005). But in turn we also have to accept that there are many types of cell phones and many more differences amongst Jamaicans. We do not apologize for using such terms: everyone in Jamaica uses them constantly, so that the general term Jamaican exists as a constant discourse in the voices and aspirations of its people, irrespective of its relationship to any ideology of nationalism (see Thomas 2004). Indeed, as we shall demonstrate, it has become a thoroughly international term, much less tied to location than in the past, and one of the instruments that has effected this change is, of course, the cell phone itself. This is just one of the ways we argue that it is Jamaicans who are as much subject to change in this new relationship as the cell phone.BLOGSCultural appropriation entails a diachronic process of domestication (Silverstone, Morley, and Hirschs 1994). Five empirically messy stages can be distinguished: 1. acquisition (why and how the locals acquired the new medium), 2. objectification (how they turned an alien artefact into a familiar thing), 3. incorporation (how they inserted the new medium into their routines), 4. conversion (how they converted it into social currency), and 5. disposal (how they eventually dispensed with the medium, if at all).As newer media spread to new areas they seldom replace the existing media. Instead they combine and collide and remediate (e.g. web TV) in complex and unpredictable ways (Jenkins 2006). Exactly in what ways this happens is something that ethnographic research is well-equipped to document.Over the 1980 to 2010 period we have seen in most locales around the globe a great increase in the number of different media technologies that interact with one another and with their adopters. Countries and regions appear to be highly resilient to global cultural homogenisation.
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Coleman Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media ARA 2010
- About 1. Cultural politics of dm, 2. vernacular culture, 3. prosaics.
INTRO
Local truths via ethnog but few by year 2000 (ok theory eg appadurai)
In pop culture utopianism/rupture/transformation (miller: no, expansive realization ie social reproduction and no, tech cant make change alone)
Latterly hype around web 2.0 but much academic contestation about liberatory participation architectures (...) and ginsberg 'modernisation deja vu' and access and positing a new 'dig native' too ambitious ie no such single new subjectivity.
Ok, dm implicated in new comms modes, self awareness, reorganised social perceptions, established collectivities, practices etc. Eg groups can culturally dwell in digital tech, ok tho niche
More generally dm role in other processes, memory, space perception, cult logic of capitalism etc VIP to consider the materiality of dm too ie soc and tech protocols and infrastructure re heterogenous use of dm
1. DM AND CULT REPRESENTATION. Diasporic groups: aids. Ethnic. Youth (eg changes to friendship, public/private and gaming role). Cell phones (econ but also reinforcing friendship, transforming patterns of social coord, status and visibility, new avenues for intimacy)
2. DM VERNACULARS practices, subjects, modes of comms and groups dep on dm-tho consider offline contexts and relation to past too via e.g. remediation. How dm centrally implicated in ancient debates eg liberal rights extended and transformed eg free software. Leftist traditions renewed eg via parallels between technical and pol decentralization. Some groups as unimaginable b4 but others now routinised. Other digital activism (nb surveillance counterweight).
Also dm as part of post fordist (eg biao bodyshopping exposes abstract features of informational capitalism). Litter. Dm as part of informalization trajectory, play, morality, linguistic culture (based on media ideologies gershon) studies. Fieldwork possibilities
3. PROSAICS OF DM-lived experiences: conditions in which deployed (eg sociology on how capitalisms reach extended, tho dm sustains informal economies eg piracy too) (eg news and journalists as group, eg religionists as group reconfiguring and being refigured, eg patients) (but also studies re individuals so focus is perception/self awareness, personality, friendships, public private, memory) (virtual spaces >not non spaces as links with real and vv), comms genres, material & ideological functions produced.
FINAL
How ethnographic detail/particularity tied to broader processes (fischer and 'worlding') e.g. 419 emails knock on with systems admins, corruption etc- ie 419s touch on many frames above even as other phenomenae dont
- About 1. Cultural politics of dm, 2. vernacular culture, 3. prosaics.
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Academy and the Internet By Helen Fay Nissenbaum, Monroe Edwin Price
- Looks at anthropologies of production (a legacy of technoscience interest) and consumption
- ARA 2007 gender and technology bray
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WEBCAM AND THE THEORY OF ATTAINMENT
Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan (UCL)
Working Paper for the EASA Media Anthropology Network's 41st e-Seminar
http://www.media-anthropology.net/file/miller_sinanan_webcam.pdf
In anthropology there is no
such thing as pure human immediacy; interacting face-to-face is just as culturally
inflected as digitally mediated communication but, as Goffman (1959, 1975) pointed out
again and again, we fail to see the framed nature of face-to-face interaction because
these frames work so effectively.‘ A conversation through webcam is not more mediated
than a conversation conducted through the appropriate etiquette dictated by kinship.
PLUS
people who have access to a new media
are at first usually concerned to use this technology to facilitate things they already had
been trying to do but were thwarted by the lack of means, before they turn to more
unprecedented uses. So the emphasis is on a humanity in some ways always in a
situation of incompleteness with respect to what we want to be or do.
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If we combine these two perspectives, we can see how they point away from humanity
as a position of prior authenticity, or a given condition, by focusing instead of humanity
as a project that is never complete but always in various ways frustrated by lack of
means. It is this that leads to our new theory of attainment. A Theory of Attainment is
one in which we view a new technology in terms of its facilitating our ability to attain
something, rather than disrupting some prior holistic being.
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PAPERSGOODMarwick STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0On the audience becoming the networked audienceSelf-presentation is dependent on context and audience (Goffman 1959). In linguistics, studies of ?code-switching? examine how language is leveraged for different communicative ends based on ?domain,? or situation (Stockwell 2002, 9). In contemporary American culture, the ability to culturally code-switch is associated with high-status, elite individuals (Peterson and Kern 1996). Online, perception from others is necessary for identity construction (Markham 2005). Online identity is both the sum and traces of a person's online content and actions; identity cues can be gleaned from an e-mail address, a nickname, or a digital picture. More self-conscious identity performances have been analyzed in internet spaces like social network sites (boyd 2007; Livingstone 2008), blogs (Reed 2005; Hodkinson and Lincoln 2008), dating sites (Ellison, Heino, and Gibbs 2006) and personal homepages (Papacharissi 2002; Schau and Gilly 2003). The ability to code-switch or vary identity presentation is compromised in many online spaces which exhibit ?context collapse,? or the simultaneous existence of multiple audiences such as friends, co-workers, relatives and so forth (boyd 2008; Marwick and boyd 2010).-The predominant popular way of thinking about audience comes from broadcast media. This audience model implies a shared experience of viewership: people in a movie theater collectively focused on the screen, or a family clustered around the television. The traditional broadcast audience follows a one-to-many content model in which a single institutional source provides content to a mass, undifferentiated audience.-Work in media studies during the 1980s reconceptualized audiences as active, maintaining that the meaning of a media text is negotiated. Rather than consuming without thought, audiences use interpretive lenses and bring individual experiences to bear when making meaning from media (Radway 1984; Fiske 1989). Conceptualizing the ?audience? as a stable entity that congregates around a media object has been displaced with the ?interpretive community,? ?fandom,? and ?participatory culture,? concepts that assume small, active, and highly engaged groups of people who do not simply consume content, but produce their own as well (Baym 2000; Jenkins 2006).-In contrast, the networked audience consists of real and potential viewers for digital content that exist within a larger social graph. The viewers are connected to each other as well as the content creator, using social media to maintain an active, communicative network. While the broadcast audience imagined a mass audience for institutional content, the networked audience flattens a persons social connections into a singular digital mass, the ?friends list.? Although digital content creators do not know, and can never know, precisely who exists in the networked audience, it contains familiar faces; it is both potentially public and personal. Like the broadcast audience, the networked audience includes random, unknown individuals, but, unlike the broadcast audience, it has a presumption of personal authenticity and connection.-Members of the networked audience take turns serving as creator, commenter, spectator, and lurker. Facebook users write status updates to be seen by their audience as they simultaneously watch videos or read notes posted by friends. Because social media users broadcast content to people who in turn broadcast content to each other, there is a rich social context for each piece of digital information. This opportunity for communication influences how speakers respond and what content they create in the future.-In social contexts like the tech scene, where boundaries between offline and online are liminal and constantly shifting, the networked audience becomes the norm for social media use. While every site has lurkers and much social media content is theoretically available to the larger public, using such sites does not simply involve creating and disseminating content, but viewing what other people have contributed. When there are existing relationships between people connected through social media, whether strong ties or weak acquaintanceships, the networked audience comes into play. It is the networked audience that perceives the user, determines social norms, and gives feedback.BLOGS
Foucault's panoptic model: ubiquitous visibility AND invisibility on social mediaIn the case of visibility, users simultaneously angst over an omnipresent gaze and relegation to the margins�(Bucher flips the panoptic model. She argues that social network sites� discriminating algorithms produce not a threat of full visibility, but instead, create a dearth of visibility. In short, the real threat is that of�invisibility)
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Marwick STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0The three strategies….[of self presentation]…share an emphasis on authenticity, transparency, and truthfulness. This value stems partly from the belief in transparency as a check on abuse of power, which is found in many contemporary social movements. For example, free and open/source software advocates promote the availability and modifiability of source code as a way to ―reorient power and knowledge‖ (Kelty 2008, 10-11). There is also a strong cultural belief in the value of being oneself. Carl Elliott calls this ―the notion of authenticity as a moral ideal: the idea that we each have a way of living that is uniquely our own, and that we are each called to live in our own way rather than that of someone else‖ (2004, 29). But authenticity is not an absolute property that can be excavated. David Grazian writes, ―authenticity itself is never an objective quality inherent in things, but simply a shared set of beliefs 18about the nature of things we value in the world‖ (2003, 12). Authenticity is a social construct that is always positioned in contradistinction to something else. In this case, authenticity is positioned as a more honest and valuable alternative to the banal conformity of middle-class life (Grazian 2003), particularly the homogeneity supposedly furthered by mass culture and large corporations.Much of Web 2.0 ideology claims that social media allows for more authenticity than broadcast media, as it cuts out the corporate and institutional middle-men which constrain individualism and self-expression.
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A digital anthropology bibliography
http://gabriellacoleman.org/blog/?p=2077&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Interprete+(Interprete)&utm_content=Twitter
A media ethnography (post 2002) bibliography
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uF_nxuevBm-wPJj_d6GaDR1NqYTOuP5IDZTu8q0GAyw/edit?pli=1
A bibliography of research on Social Network Sites
http://www.danah.org/researchBibs/sns.php
A cyber optimist's bibliography
http://www.no-straight-lines.com/living-bibliography/
A 'cyberspace' bibliography
http://www.openanthropology.org/ANTH498/biblio.htm
Hacker culture reading list
http://gabriellacoleman.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Coleman-Hacker-syllabus-2012-FINAL.pdf
Social network studies
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking/projects
Social network studies
https://sites.google.com/site/exploringsns/
Digital urbanisms
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PAPERSFrom Punched Cards to "Big Data": A social History of Database Populism
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=cpoBig Data for All: privacy and user control in the age of analyticsStatisticalphysicshasworkedwondersinthelastfewhundredyearsproducingmagnificentinsightsintothebulkpropertiesofmatterthroughthescienceofthermodynamics.Thebiggerquestionhereiswhetherasimilarlygrandapproachtohumanitywillproducejustasspectacularinsightsintothebulkpropertiesofsociety.- Data has always been there: also in the format of knowledge and stories· - Some data will always resist being digitised· - Data exists in relationships, not just discrete bytes, making analytics exponentially harder to do. Analytics: data is social e.g. it is exchanged by social actors (example Indian market phone data vendor)· - Data comes from a place: i.e. a context which lets it make sense· - Data can run wild beyond the controls/spaces we put on it. Regulators fear it· - Data has responsibilities e.g. aboriginal data transmission has to be done in the right way = imagining information differently· - Data wants to look good: we exaggerate for example (ok lies are interesting too but have to be able to distinguish)· - Data confounds our expectations for impermanence: how can we design· - There will always be new data- In future we might design systems to assume data alive and intentional
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Distinction - Bourdieu: Deployment of
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http://web.archive.org/web/20100530070036/http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=650:do-we-bend-it-like-beckham-a-facebook-solution&catid=37:nicolas&Itemid=34
See very bottom of the web page
http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/03/31/ttw2011-panel-spotlight-poets-and-scribes/#more-1811
Bourdieu’s distinctionTheoretically, the desire to limit network size can be understood via Pierre Bourdieu. In his famous work La Distinction, Bourdieu shows that prestige is acquired by those who can separate themselves from the masses. Today, the masses are connected through social media—and connected in public ways. To limit access to one’s friendship, and the associated knowledge about one’s life, is a means by which distinction can be regained….. Based on the literature, and my own ongoing qualitative study, I note three interrelated ways in which social actors limit both network size, and access to the self on Facebook: 1) (public)friend purges; 2) incorrectly spelled usernames and “Fakebooks;” 3) sophisticated use of privacy settings.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027153090300017X
Other
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Pelaprat First Monday-Assumptions of self–interest as the rationale for action are powerful for understanding how markets work as social andcultural processes, but can lead one astray when looking at other forms of socialinteraction. By understanding social patterns as partly constituted by relations ofreciprocal recognition, where giving seeks out the other to draw the other out, weargue that researchers are better equipped to understand how online interactionconstitutes social bonds.-Underlying Kollock and Pirolli’s perspective (and, broadly, much work on online behaviour) isas set of assumptions about action known as “rational choice theory” (RC T) (Becker, 1976;Arrow, 1990; Sen, 1997). RC T has underlined many key assumptions in analyses oftechnology use and its description of users as goal–directed is, in many ways, foundational…. Individuals, under this rubric, remain strangers in a crowd. Social life spontaneously emergesvia competing logic of individual and collective rationality, and then dissolves just as quickly…. thewidespread adoption of micro–economics and game theory to comprehensively explain socialactivities — particular exchange and reciprocity — is risky…. Most socialphenomena end up reduced to problems of social cooperation — i.e., of acting because oneexpects to receive an eventual benefit in return…. Often, social phenomena are interpreted asa dilemma between individual rationality (doing what is best for oneself) and collectiverationality (acting in a way that may eventually return a benefit). Thus “society” meanscollaborating or contracting to further different interests, and then it’s over. Online behaviouris therefore social insofar as self–interest motivates collaboration, and it is meaningful so faras utility explains our actions.- The problem with self-interest and rational choice as models of social interaction is that onecan, ex post facto, deduce self-interest from anything anybody does….. When it disaggregates social phenomena into the sum of“isolated acts of choice,” RC T fails to understand the complex, diverse social meanings of behaviour.- The concept of reciprocity in anthropology is central for understanding behaviour. …anthropological studies of reciprocity draw attention to the symbolism, types of bonds, and obligations produced and maintained by giving and exchange… We describe four key parts of our understanding of reciprocity: symbolic exchange through objects; obligations; the ambiguity of the economic value of objects; and, the role of giving and reciprocating to facilitate social bonds….-Mutuality (the way we are the same) is not the same as reciprocity (the way we are distinct but have a relation with each other), but reciprocal relations are gateways to mutuality.- Our arguments here refer to exchanges broadly, to social relations as relations ofexchange, and not just to exchanges of material goods, or even exchanges ofpresents. Any object that can be given and reciprocated — such as tokens, time, afirm handshake — can, depending on the social context, reproduce individuals in socialrelationships. Our relationships can be struggles, they can be antagonistic (this too issocial life), because we are caught in the logic of having to reciprocate and, thereby,inaugurating a new obligation in the other to do the same- Web Fora The body building site that they studied was not important simply a sitefor information exchange, but as a site for appraisal, self–promotion and recognition……. Posting a question or responding to a question on a forum is not an isolated socialaction where the goal is simply having your question answered. It is, rather, a firstmove of in a series of turn–taking exchanges that form social bonds of diverse kinds.Such bonds form becomes actions that seek reciprocity are actions that seek to drawothers in. They express a desire to be–with. True, there is a search for information;but the message is also, at the same time, a symbolic object caught in the logic ofreciprocal exchange. The symbolic nature of asking, responding, and iterating thisrelation is necessary to the production of help itself.-SNSs This exposure of quasi–public reciprocal actions is important: they lend a specialquality to the obligation to reciprocate, a quality that infuses the action with an addedsymbolic aspect. Just like a ceremony requires an audience, so now the actions ofeach individual unfold as though on a stage reserved for only some and not all…. The tag, and ‘retweeting’ generally, can be used as a powerful way of publicallyacknowledging others — recognition through reciprocation.
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MAKING UP ART, VIDEOS AND FAME
The Creation of Social Order in the Informal Realm of YouTube Beauty Gurus
Spyer 2011
...the research confirmed that conceptualizing action as the origin of value creation represented a rich alternative to examine how this group engineers its social organization.
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http://web.archive.org/web/20100530070036/http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=650:do-we-bend-it-like-beckham-a-facebook-solution&catid=37:nicolas&Itemid=34
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BOOKThe Cellphone by Miller and Horst‘communicative ecology’ (Slater and Tacchi 2004; Slater 2005). They argue that in order to understand any one particular technology of communication one needs first to appreciate its role as part of communication ecologies, which may be embedded in media such as radio or the bus service
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PAPERS
~GOOD~
Marwick dissertation: STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY
AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0
I also use ―scene‖ because it allows me to skirt the endless debates over
use of the term community when applied to technologically-mediated groups. The
traditional definition of community involves solitary groups of densely-knit
neighbors located in a common geographical space (Wellman and Gulia 1999).
This idealized gemeinschaft is often valorized as an ideal state, before
urbanization, media, crime, television, etc. alienated neighbors from each other.
By this measure, virtual community, which Howard Rheingold defines as ―social
aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public
discussions long enough, with sufficient human, feeling to form webs of personal
relationships in cyberspace‖ (2000, xx), is simply a weak substitute. This division
between ―offline‖ and ―online‖ communities has been debated at length, with
some scholars arguing that the internet decreases community, some that it
increases community, and still others that it changes community (Markham 1998;
Rheingold 2000; Wellman, Boase, and Chen 2002; Wilson and Peterson 2002).
The interaction and blending of ―online‖ and ―offline‖ has rendered many of these
debates moot, but the word ―community‖ is no longer analytically useful
primarily because it is so contested. However, my informants often used
―community‖ in a colloquial sense, and when asked, firmly agreed that the scene
functioned as a community. As a result, my use of community is in this vernacular 33
sense rather than a precise analytic terminology, similar to how Annalee Saxenian
uses the term to describe Silicon Valley as ―a prototypical high-tech community‖
(1996, 18
IRL (IN REAL LIFE): BREAKING DOWN THE BINARY OF ONLINE VERSUS OFFLINE SOCIAL INTERACTION Stephanie TuszynskiWhat troubles me about the debate are the arguments used by those who deny the word"community" from discussion of online groups wholesale, because some of thearguments stem from the same prejudices that reinforce the real/virtual binaryNMS 2008 Localizing the internet Postill
- In suburban studies, a reliance on community and network is strangely at odds with a frontier-like scenario in which people, technologies and other cultural artefacts are co-producing new forms of residential sociality in unpredictable ways
- Field theory betterPERSONAL NETWORKS: THE INTERTWINING OF TIES, INTERNET AND GEOGRAPHYa network society was already in existence before the internet. But with theinternet and social networking sites such as Facebook, the number and type of nonlocal networks have surged. The proliferation of networks points not to a decline of community as feared, but the rise of a liberated form of community increasingly defined by social rather than spatial accessibility (Hogan, 2008).
Lysloff 2003 re online music community ie arguing they take features of offline (and change/add some)
When we take such on-line social collectivities seriously and acknowledge the reality they can accrue in the social relationships they engender (think of reality as a kind of capital), we might then finally understand what constitutes community, whether we theorize it as real or imagined.
BOOKS
GOOD
Verschueren From virtual to everyday life in Towards a sustanable information society
- Re: history of community idea
- In the first half of the 1990s, the concept of the virtual community broadened the view on information and communication technologies. It shifted attention from the technological, communicative, political and economic aspects of computer networks towards the social and cultural ones. The concept of the virtual community, however, also separated the Internet from local everyday life contexts. It stressed the Internet as a global context for social relations rather than a medium used within particular local contexts.......
- The alternative, everyday life perspective that is gaining prominence assumes that social behaviour is embedded in wider networks, and that these networks are sustained by various technologies and social practices. This view stresses that the Internet continues, maintains and extends relationships, that it is used to perform one’s identity (Goffman, 1959) and to spin webs of significance (Geertz, 1973) in old as well as new ways. People will continue to meet in online environments, but these are not entirely separate from their physical lives and corporeal contexts.
- The socialization into online communities, the negotiation, reproduction and contestation of identities, and the integration of computing technologies into everyday practices are some of the issues that cannot be understood as long as the online/offline dichotomy is sustained (Wilson & Peterson, 2002).
- EJC 2009 Mark Deuze Media Industries, Work and Life
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Media and social changing since 1979: Towards a diachronic ethnography of media and actual social changes
http://www.media-anthropology.net/file/postill2_eseminar.pdf
To some of us, Internet research has always been about social change, not least when it comes to the highly dynamic relation between media and globalization (e.g. Appadurai 1996, Escobar 1994, Hannerz 1996, Uimonen 2001). And anthropology has long been concerned with processes, not least when addressing questions of cultural complexity in contemporary society through various types of macro-anthropology (e.g. Hannerz 1992). One of the theoretical contributions of anthropology has been to show with great ethnographic detail that progress is not linear (eg. Ferguson 1999, Comaroff andComaroff 2000, 2006, see also Latour 2010), thus challenging dominant views of social change entailing a clear-cut transformation from A to B. As for covering longer periods of time in our ethnography, a good deal of work is already taking place. In my recent research (Uimonen 2012), I thought I was engaged in longitudinal fieldwork (2002-2009), only to realize that there are more senior anthropologists who have engaged with their field sites for three decades!
JCMC 2010 Burrell Evaluating Shared Access: Social equality and the circulation of mobile phones in rural Uganda
Users relate newly available technologies to an existing social order and may
manipulate access to technologies accordingly to preserve, enhance or challenge that
order......The purchaser is able to benefit from the phone in all the possible ways, by
manipulating it as an object of exchange, transferring ownership by offering it as a
gift, charging for its use by others, or by using it to place calls and manage social ties
at great distances. By contrast, the humble user may be denied even the opportunity
to press the buttons on the phone and any privacy in communication and in that
way is limited in terms of the range of benefits from access. Pre-existing relational
dynamics (such as social policing or a sense of obligation between men and women)
can become concretized materially in these roles, but possessed goods can also
be employed to amplify, reformulate, or undermine one individuals control over another.
Mobile phones: the new talking drums of everyday Africa By Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Inge Brinkman . Burrell's chapter
p153
New technologies like the internet present alternative ways of indicating status, new ways of constructing and maintaining social networks and of distinguishing oneself from ones peers and otehr social groups (eg in Ghana powerful symbolic value to having overseas connections so internet used for that - ok internet could instrumentally reduce need to travel for education motivation etc but desire still exists in connection with host of benefits independent of this)
Internet as a space (Biyd 2006) and also internet cafes as a place away from parental supervision ie use of internet and cafes not solely about engaging in global processes and meeting foreigners but also having a role in face to face activities of local groups (social cohesion, status and roles) [Like the english lang used in India ethnography]. Formation of organised youth groups as pre existing social practice
Postill
http://johnpostill.com/2010/02/26/new-media-and-cultural-change-from-1980-to-2010-a-set-of-notes/
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PAPERSGeography/Internet: Ethereal Alternate Dimensions of Cyberspace or Grounded Augmented Realities? TGJ 2013 Grahammany of the ways in which we discuss, imagine, and envision the internet rely on inaccurate and unhelpful spatial metaphors. In particular, the paper focuses on the usage of the ‘cyberspace’ metaphor and outlines why the reliance by contemporary policy makers on this inherently geographic metaphor matters. The metaphor constrains, enables, and structures very distinct ways of imagining the interactions between people, information, code, and machines through digital networks. These distinct imaginations, in turn, have real effects on how we enact politics and bring places into being.FM 2009 Burrell The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research
Imagined spaces are "social imaginaries" conceived of in spatial terms (Anderson and Taylor) eg Ghanains constructing a notion of cyberspace and who is in it from their experiences and other sources of information. They would also imagine geographic territories like foreign countries (fantasies of US via conversations, mass media, internet encounters etc have real bearing). Cant participate in or observe these spaces really: find them through repetitions of themes and from PO in their encounter with reality eg US embassy visa. Therefore imaginary spaces as important soures of meaning relatable to the nonimaginary plane of activityCA 2005 Green Scales of Place and Networks- Cyberspace (from sci fi) as well as an internet-enabled global non-territorial space above our ‘local’ heads depends upon cultural imagination—on people’s ability to generate a sense of place that is different from the spatial logic of the nation-state in the latter case (i.e. now an “imagined network” as well as earlier “imagined community”, which was also achieved with media)- Don’t forget that the places the ‘space defying’ technologies generate that are imagined but also the places from which they are apparently separated.- The making of places is something that anthropologists have studied for many years, arguing that not only cultural imagination and/or phenomenological experience but also powerful interests, both political and economic, become involved in the continual process of their construction- Rest of the paper about “the imperative to connect” [to Castells’ Network Society] in Europe: a widespread compulsion that pervaded publicly driven development initiatives whereby the EU, and city councils were intended to ensure that the specific regions they represented in this new world were not left behind and to gain some control over the transformation.- The types of connections that are imagined for networks are not the same as those imagined for “communities”: whereas communities are usually depicted as bounded, fairly resilient, and containing people who at least imagine that they have broadly common interests (Amit 2002, Amit and Rapport 2002, Anderson 1983, Cohen 1985), networks are more often regarded as open-ended and flexible, with no clear boundaries, no centers, and no necessary commonalities or even sustained or ongoing relations between the entities that are connected through them (Otis 2001). This conception of “networks” obscures the way they are linked, in public sector promotion of information and communications technology networks, to specific place-making projects such as “Manchester,” “Europe,” and “Britain,” terms which come to stand for particular locations in and particular relationships with the “networked” globe.- We have shown that a particular notion of “network” and its apparently self-evident and rather special capacity to overcome problems of scalar differences and distances tended to generate an idealized imperative to connect that failed to recognize that connections usually involve disconnections, entanglements, and constraints.Convergence 2012 ChesherNavigating sociotechnical spaces: Comparing computer games and sat navs as digital spatial mediaDigital spatial media open up abstract relationships to space, but not from the distance that Lefebvre associates with ‘conceived’ spaces. Instead, they work in ‘lived space’, which is becoming dominant…. critical understandings of social space need increasingly to incorporate readings of digitally mediated spatiality.BLOGSPart of the seductiveness of the cyberspace fantasy is that, by denying the complex, mutually determining relationship between our society and the Web, it makes our lives and our everyday judgments simpler…. the fantasy of cyberspace represents a refusal to accept digital information (and its physical extension in computer terminals and other machines) as part of the natural world we inhabit. And, as such, those digitally augmented things appear alien and unnatural to us. We believe them to be separate from us in some profound way….. The great irony of the cyberspace concept is that, though we embraced it to resolve cognitive dissonance, it has come to cause only more of it…. We all know intuitively that what we do online affects us offline and vice versa — that both comprise the same friends, the same conversations, the same events. Yet the collective fantasy of cyberspace and all its related vocabulary are so deeply embedded in our cultural logic that we cannot help but lapse into denial of these obvious truths. Our language betrays us; it obfuscates the truth of our experience…. Western culture has a long history of creating such dualisms when confronted with crises of meaning or identity. …Cyberspace… is an article of faith, not the product of lived experience…. The problem arises when we begin to prioritize that fictional narrative over actual experience, when we let these speculations control the reality that emerges…. The cost of upholding this mythical separation is that we have become disassociated with many aspects of our lives.
- Gender and technology Bray
New technologies may be conceptualized as prostheses, elements of cyborg fusions between human and machine that extend our capacities and permit enhanced modes of being and relating; new forms of interpenetration of zones of space and time; and new possibilities for action at a distance, for connection, coalition, or control (Axel 2006, Rafael 2003, Wright 2001).
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PAPERS
Donner 2008 - review of mobile developing world studies
the classic “diffusion of innovations” approach developed by Rogers (2003) as a common theme in technology research.
BOOKS
Network Models and Methods for Studying the Diffusion of Innovations by ValenteThere are network effects on adoption: demonstrate effect via behavioural change interventions targeting opinion leaders i.e. social factors are influential on adoption. More research combining diffusion and networks needs to be done: hard to measure quantitatively the impact on behaviour of influence via social networks
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An academic primer on what digital anthropology is from a UK (specifically UCL p.o.v.) http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/93/114
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VERY GOODDigital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovations in Digital edited by Gunnar Liestøl, Esp chapter 'we all want to change the world'Re: What if anything makes it different to old media and who gains from the ideology of newnessHow the internet isn't one thing (also see Ito in networked publics)
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BOOKS
Ito in Networked Publics
As the Internet has evolved from a medium for the exchange of text, to now pictures, sounds, moving pictures, and 3D worlds, the scope of our culture and knowledge that is available for digital aggregation and access has expanded dramatically....Objects and places are the next targest for aggregation into the digital network.
Remix Cinema�, and point to ways in which networked devices and resources are facilitating new artistic audiovisual practices and cultures. The concept of 'remix' describes a broad set of social and cultural practices centred around the fragmentation and re-ordering of already existing and new content, whether text, sound or images.�
BLOGS
Because so much of Internet content (and capabilities) is now created by end-users,the diversity of human culture is being replicated inside the system that once was formalized and controlled. In this way, the human cultural experience, and all of its messiness, cannibalizes software and creates a localized cultural experience: a real world 'place' within the 'non-place' of the network/Internet. This is evidence of 'real world' mapping to the Internet and may explain the rapid growth and popularity of 'Social Computing', as humans carve out spaces for their cultures within software frameworks. http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20101018_334
6 cultures of the internet: CastellsThis lecture will examine and explore the origins of the Internet in the culture of freedom, sharing and libertarian ideals. These early influences have profoundly influenced the network that we use today, and this lecture will argue that widespread sharing, open source, mass self-communication and individual autonomy can all be traced back to these cultural roots.
- IN (Internet) as a network of computer networks. Mobile internet permeate range of human activity.
- IN like all tech is a cult construction ie one of many possible forms / practices
- IN built on series of values and interests of creators and users. constantly reconstruction by cultures and practices embeded in IN
- IN eveloved from 6 diff cult sources, in time order: 1. technomeritocratic culture (Cerf etc expression of scholarly comms ie academic culture brogught into IN ie pursuit of sc and tech for sake of it ie open source) 2. Hacker culture (lovers of tech/devvers of programmes MIT 60s ie want respect of peers - interest in new tech and diffusion/sharing to do better - ie more important than acad as diffuse in larger community thriving on creating new cultures) 3. irtual communitarian culture (70s-80s people building a communal life/utopias - so element of conviviality included ie live and create together ie not tehc heads but good at builign communities ie vip for social networking. 4. Entrepreneurial culture (ie kn of IN to create new business - progs and tech and films. entrep accompany waves of each tech dev. Ie privatisation of IN on 90s - taking advantage of '90 WWW creation to spread IN through world ie thru ent culture IN grew bigtime) 5. Mobile youth culture��= wireless explosion. Youth community built on permanent connectivity and constant ineraction on and offline ie new form and uses translated into Internet. 6. Culture of social networking sites from friendster 2002 1.3bn - culture emerging through SNS's: people want to be together and do things not just chat ie building network of their lives ie online and offline lives in contiunuity. Builgin networks of practice and socialbility so taking charge.
All cultures combined has created major comms system ie we live with all the time . New layers will add as all open cultures based on free comms, autonomy of indiv and autonomy of projects people construct with the tech of communication
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https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~tefko/Courses/Zadar/Readings/Selwyn%20dig%20natives,%20Aslib%20Proceedings%202009.pdf
The digital native – myth and reality Neil Selwyn Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK
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Coming of Age in Second Life
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Boellstorff, T. (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.For the author, the 3D virtual world Second Life (SL) is not a simulation; it may approximate aspects of reality for purposes of immersion, but it does not seek to replicate the actual world. SL is not a social network comparable to Facebook or MySpace – it is a place. SL is not a posthuman world; in fact, it makes us more human. SL is not a sensational new world of virtual Californication, virtual money that can be exchanged for real money, etc; more often than not it is place where everyday banal forms of interaction take place. SL does not herald the advent of a Virtual Age that will sweep aside the actual but an Age of Techne with continuities as well as changes with what came before. Humans have always crafted themselves through culture (homo faber). What is truly unique about SL and other virtual worlds is that they allow the emergence of homo cybers, humans who can craft and recraft new worlds of sociality in a virtual ‘third place’. In SL you can find friends and lovers, attend weddings, buy and sell property: you cannot do that inside a TV programme or a novel. This is why an ethnographic and holistic approach adopted in this study has worked so well, because virtual worlds are ‘robust locations for culture’, locations that are bounded but at the same time porous.
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The Internet: Miller
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JRAI 2009
Of the four monographs, it is arguably Miller and
Slater’s that best foreshadows the studies reviewed in
the present article. These authors investigated the late
1990s uses of the Internet by Trinidadians both at
home and abroad. Distancing themselves from the
information and communication technology (ICT)
domestication literature (see Silverstone & Hirsch
1994), they argue that Trinidadians are not merely
‘appropriating’ the Internet; rather they are putting
themselves on the global stage via the Internet just as
much as users in metropolitan centres. Miller and
Slater take issue with much of the earlier Internet
literature for its postmodern celebration of
fluid/blurred on-line identities, which they found had
little bearing on Trinidadian uses of the Internet, and
for its assumption that ‘cyberspace’ is a placeless
‘virtual’ domain divorced from actual physical places.
Instead they urge Internet scholars to start from the
opposite assumption, namely that online domains are
part of – not apart from – everyday off-line contexts.
To these ethnographers, the Internet involves ‘many
different technologies, practices, contexts: it is no one
thing, and our study encompassed a wide range of
contexts, from ways of doing business to socializing in
cybercafes’ (Miller & Slater 2000: 3). One key finding
was Trinidadians’ seemingly ‘natural’ affinity with the
Internet, even in low-income areas where many
people’s access was mediated by friends or family. This
finding complicated their pre-fieldwork expectations
of a vast ‘digital divide’ separating rich and poor
Trinidadians – and indeed Trinidadians from
Westerners (2000: 27).
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JRAI 2009
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GOOD
Marwick dissertation: STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0
- While some ethnographies still focus on single online spaces (Boellstorff 2008), internet researchers have since recognized the necessity of an anthropology of the internet that breaks down the divisions between ―virtual‖ and ―real‖ or ―online‖ or ―offline‖ (Orgad 2008; Baym 2009; Garcia, Standlee, and Bechkoff 2009
- Is using a mobile phone to call someone ―offline‖ communication,
but using that same phone to send a Twitter direct message ―online‖? These
unanswerable questions show that these divisions are no longer analytically useful
terms
- So what are the methodological implications of this move away from a
strict delineation between online or offline? Just as media anthropology has called
for situating media use as embedded practice, I believe that digital media must be
studied as a practice that takes place in a specific geographic location...........
ARA 2010 Coleman - Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media
3 types of enthog into digital media
1. cultural politics of media.
This work examines how cultural identities,
representations, and imaginaries, such as those
hinged to youth, diaspora, nation, and indigeneity,
are remade, subverted, communicated,
and circulated through individual and collective
engagement with digital technologies.
2. The
second category explores the vernacular cultures
of digital media, evinced by discrepant
phenomena, digital genres, and groups—
hackers, blogging, Internet memes, and migrant
programmers—whose logic is organized
significantly around, although not necessarily
determined by, selected properties of digital
media.
3.The final category, what I call prosaics
of digital media, examines how digital media
feed into, reflect, and shape other kinds of social
practices, like economic exchange, financial
markets, and religious worship. Attention
to these rituals, broad contexts, and the material
infrastructures and social protocols that enable
them illuminates how the use and production of
digital media have become integrated into everyday
cultural, linguistic, and economic life.
re: 1
...indig groups and their practices vis a vis dig media leading to reexamining western notions of free/paid culture as the only dichotomy in town
...Used to transmit voice, send texts,
and take pictures, cell phones have become important
multimodal tools not only for economic
activity, but for extending sociality and kin networks
(Horst & Miller 2006
Re: 2
...The bulk of this
work, however, continues to confound sharp
boundaries between off-line and online contexts
and between the past and the present
....the study of digital
media transforms the possibilities and contours
of fieldwork (Burrell 2009, Wesch 2007).
....To understand
the culture and linguistics of digital media, it
will be crucial to pay ethnographic attention
to what Gershon (2010) defines as media
ideologies: “beliefs about how a medium
communicates and structures communication”
(p. 3), measuring these beliefs against what
people actually do with this media, a method
she deftly applies in her work on the use of
digital media for mediating romance,
Re: 3
...Looking
at digital media in similarly prosaic terms
means uncovering the lived experiences of digital
media; discussing the conditions in which
they are made, altered, and deployed (finance,
religion, news); attending to particular genres
of communication (blogs, spam, video-sharing
sites); and finally placing attention on the material
and ideological functions produced and
sustained by digital technologies.
...Many other domains and groups are being
refigured and refiguring themselves through
their everyday reliance on digital media including
religious worshipers (Eisenlohr 2006, Ess
et al. 2007, Radde-Antweiler 2008), people with
disabilities (Boellstorff 2008, Davidson 2008Ginsburg 2007, Keating & Mirus 2003), and
patients and their families who are turning to
each other via online forums to supplement
or supplant doctor’s advice, devise treatment
strategies, discuss side-effects of medications,
seek emotional support, and organize advocacy
campaigns (Dumit 2006, Epstein 2008, Gillet
2003, Orgad 2005, Radin 2006).
JRAI 2009 Postill Researching the Internet
re: Boellstorff who, opposing miller and slater 2000 (ie that ‘virtuality – as the capacity of communicative technologies to constitute rather than mediate realities...is neither new nor specific to the
Internet") says "what is new about Internet sites such as Second Life is that ‘human craft ... can now create new worlds for human sociality’ from within those worlds". Tho ok (Boellstorff) social network
sites such as MySpace or Facebook do not qualify as virtual worlds as their significance derives – like the
Trinidadian websites and chat rooms described by Miller and Slater – from ‘a direct relationship to the
actual world’ (p. 238). Boellstorff concludes with the cogent assertion that virtual worlds are ‘distinct
domains of human being’ that deserve being studied on their own terms, not on those of actual worlds (p.
238). [See Boyd 2008 for a counter]
....Boellstorff explains that although Second Life may
approximate some elements of reality for purposes of
immersion, it is most emphatically not a simulation
(i.e. it is not ‘virtual reality’); nor is it a social network
site comparable to Facebook or MySpace but rather it
is a place; nor is it a posthuman realm (in fact, it
makes us more human) or a sensational world of wild
cybersex and rampant consumerism, as portrayed by
the news media (instead, mundane daily practices are
the norm)
GOOD
Verscheuren From virtual to everyday life re history of community idea, in 'Towards a sustanable information society'Includes dystopia/utopia and ethnography getting to grips with real dynamics but limited if only analyses of online conversations which do not tell much about the ways in which individuals move between communities. Neither do they reveal much about the ways in which this behaviour is embedded in historical and socio-cultural contexts.
GOOD
Boyd 2008 Response to Christine Hine
- In a networked society, we cannot take for granted the idea that culture is about collocated peoples (1st challenged by geographic mobility). It is not a question of mobility but of access to a hypertextual world. Geography can no longer be the defining framework of culture; peopleare part of many cultures including those defined by tastes, worldview, language, religion, social networks, practices, etc.
- search has continued to collapse all placedriven web contexts
- with blogs and SNS's these more recent technologies, “community” is an egocentric notion where individuals construct their social world through links and attention. Rather than relying on interests or structure-based boundaries, current social groups are defined through relationships. Each participant’s view is framed by her or his connections to others and the behaviors of those people. The difficulty with this egocentric network view is that there’s no overarching set of norms or practices; instead, each node reveals an entirely different set of assumptions. [is this like "The conceptof the ‘personalized network’ may avoid many problems associated with the traditional concept of community." and "The concept of the ‘personalized community’, proposed by the sociologist Wellman": from Verschueren in 'From virtual to everyday life' in 'Towards a sustanable information society')
- In contemporary networked life, culture is socially proximate not geographically defined; creating boundaries by medium or genre only confuses matters. Thus, it makes far more sense to find a sample population and try to flush out who they know and the culture that forms among them. During the course of my study, for a selection of people, I try to spiral out to understand their worldview and compare it to other worldviews that I see within the broader system
- Begin by focusing on a culture. What defines that culture? Its practices? Its identity? Who are the relevant social groups? What are the relevant social dynamics? What boundaries are applicable? Unlike other methodologies, ethnographers do not begin with rigid, narrow questions; they begin with cultures
- With digital ethnographies, the cultural mindsets are same but we have to negotiate diff architectures with 5 features (persistence, invisible audiences etc)....My research centers on these properties precisely because they reveal how critical context is to human behavior
- When we look to understand people’s practices online, we must understand the context within which the individuals think they are operating. This imagined context provides one mechanism for bounding our research. For example, in my own research, I’m only interested in the online spaces that teens perceive to be meant for them to congregate with their friends and peers
Hine, Christine (2000), Virtual Ethnography, London: Sage.Hine suggests that in cultural terms we can understand the Internet in two different ways: (1) as culture, (2) as cultural artefact. The first approach focusses on studying the construction of bounded ‘online communities’ in their own right. This largely ethnographic endeavour was an improvement with regards to early ‘reduced social cues’ models of computer-mediated communication (CMC) studies, but it tended to overstress the separateness of online worlds from everyday offline contexts. The second approach – the Internet as a cultural artefact – treats the Internet as being thoroughly social, a product of the struggles and negotations of variously positioned social agents.Boyd 2008 dissertation 'Taken Out of Context American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics'
VERY GOOD
FM 2009 Burrell The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research
Online Worlds 2008 Ch10 Boellstorff A Typology of Ethnographic Scales (ie his position is one or several sites can comprise a fieldsite - kind of makes sense: depends on the issue but in no case do you have to ignore external influences)
- One reason so little has been written on gay Indonesians is that these persons fall outside one's analytical horizon if that horizon is founded in the spatial scale of locality. Researchers who equate culture with locality can miss the forest for the trees, so to speak: they will see all kinds of cultural logics that are local, but those that are translocal in some fashion will appear as inauthentic impositions. I realized soon after beginning my research in Second Life that the conceptual tendencies with regard to virtual worlds were strikingly opposed to those I had
encountered in my earlier work....Whereas in Indonesia studies, the presumption was in the direction of locality, in the study of virtual worlds the presumption was in the direction of translocality. For instance, there were (and still are) persons claiming that all virtual-world research projects must include meeting persons in the actual world to be valid!
- The 4 confusions - they arent games, just visual, mass media (its a place), just anonymous/roleplaying
- 3 ethnographic scales: First Ethnographic Scale: Virtual/Actual Interfaces (eg Miller/Slater, needing meeting people in actual world), Second Ethnographic Scale: Virtual/Virtual Inteifaces, Third Ethnographic Scale: Virtual Worlds In Their Own Terms.
GOOD
Boyd argues ethnography appreciated realities and that therefore at variance from cyberutopians or view that internet just an extensoin of everyday life (eg in terms of libreating/chaining to bodies). Credits Hine with seeing Intenet as both a culture and a cultural artifact in broader surroundings. Discusses ethnographers coming to straddle on and offline fieldsites as seamless ie multisites. Then social constructivism (challenged by Boellsdorff - ie why cant online be a context of itself BUT real world does intrude AND offline ethnog started to emphasise interconnectedness of all cultures as unbounded). Don't relegate online context by always emphasising its background of offline..."Both mediated and unmediated
fieldwork should have as their goal a rich understanding of the networks of people, objects, and practices."..."Both Burrell and Appadurai acknowledge that mediated landscapes disrupt traditional ideas of spatiality and that this requires rethinking how ethnographers should traverse such spaces."
GOOD
CCSJ 2010 Marshall: Ambiguity, Oscillation and Disorder: Online Ethnography and the Making of Culture
JCE 2009 Doing ethnography online review
CA 2008 Axel Anthropology of communication technology Re miller
- Miller engages in defense of traditional canons of ethnographic inquiry” (2000:21) against both the “promulgation of the ideal of multi-sited ethnography” (2003:50) from within the discipline and the
usurpation of the term ethnography by other disciplines, “such as cultural studies”
(see Ethnography and the Extreme Internet in "globalisation: studies in anthropology" edited by Eriksen)
- Admittedly, the views of Miller and Slater on ethnographic practice are exceptional,
if not somewhat extreme, in their championing of the traditional. For proponents of more diversified and open ethnographic approaches in the traditional mode, see also, for example, Blank 2001; Eickelman and Anderson 1999; Graham and Khosravi 2002; Jacobson 1996, 2000; Lysloff 2003; andWellman and Haythornthwaite2002.
For methodological debates around on-line ethnographic research online, see the EASA Media Anthropology e-seminar ‘Researching the Internet’, 27 September to 4 October 2005 ( http://www.media-anthropology.net/braeuchler_eseminar.pdf )
Kozinets 2002 Netnography
Like Boyd being concerned with online ethnog. But focus on market research ie on what underlying decions (symbolism, meaning) and why vip cos a process of brand advocacy going on..".researcher must be conscious that they are analyzing the content of an online community’s communicative acts rather than the complete set of observed acts of consumers in a particular community. This is a crucial difference between “netnography” and traditional ethnography"..."To be trustworthy, the conclusions of a “netnography” must reflect the limitations of the online medium and the technique"
From SSI 2010 ((Beaulieu, Anne ))
ethnography, especially in the cultural anthropology tradition, has had a difficult relationship to mediation, which is often experienced as a challenge to its core epistemic commitments to witness face-to-face (often oral) communications and interactions. Ethnography has thus been involved in border disputes with other disciplines that focus on ‘texts’, such as cultural studies or history (Amit, 2000; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997).
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In fact, encountering things I did not explicitly care about happens to me significantly more than the days I had to click-click-click my way around “cyberspace” because as much as I thought I wandered around, I could never wander around within the richness and depth of my encounters through the social web…. In the new era of connecting to people, I am exposed to a lot more because “people” are a lot broader than “categories of information” which are, by definition, narrow…. Online, I interact with people with whom I share at least one strong interest–but….I am not exposed to just that limited topic but the much wider universe of what my friends share. And this is always much broader than the narrower affinity that first connected me with that particular person….(In fact empirically) your Facebook friends are almost never friends with each other… platforms like Facebook connect you with people who connect you with information you simply would not have encountered yourself—and these connections happen especially through your weaker ties who, structurally speaking, are more likely to be in open triads with your other friends, i.e not friends of your their friends… An Internet that is collection of sites which brings together, say, “people interested in model airplanes to talk about model airplanes” is going to be a lot less likely to expose us to the unexpected than the social Internet which connects us to people in their fuller richness.
- Geertz - Available Light on Google Books c. p246
Ok there is more global interdependence and connection but this village has neither solidarity or tradition, edge or wholeness. Plus cultural demarcations not loosening or reducing but being reworked, intensified and multiplied [ie not everyone coming together] = hardly a borderless village....Still not so easy to chart these demarcations/continuities ie draw lines around sets of individuals as following a more identifiable form of life in practice....Can't just give up and say we share a common humanity because people themseves make distinctions..."Whatever we might wish, or regard as enlightenment, the severalty of culture abides and proliferates, even amidst, even in response to, the powerfully connecting forces of modern manufacture, finance, travel and trade. The more things come together, the more they remain apart: the uniform world is not much closer than the classless society."
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http://culturalbyt.es/post/654163884/three-useful-perspectives-on-technology-design-and
- Kentaro Toyama as cited on Culturalbytes website: ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxutDM2r534&feature=player_embedded)
Fruitless as advancement is about capacities and intent. No amount of tech will benefit poor farmer (teach a man to fish argument). Notes that despite technoevangelism since ARPAnet, poverty rate has remained the same
- Plus Agre’s amplification model of how new institutions don’t necessarily create new social behaviors, rather they amplify existing ones, explains how the internet doesn’t change society but draws out existing social forces: Agre - 2002 - Real-Time Politics The Internet and the Political Process (plan B NHSIL)
ITID 2008 Burrell Problematic Empowerment: West African Internet Scams as Strategic Misrepresentation
Internet not an unalloyed good (see information age / esp internet as a good)
Emerging technology practices
like scamming that challenge the beneªts of connectivity
must be more directly addressed in technology
for development movements. The creation of
necessary supporting structures—speciªcally, training
in media and technology literacy—that would
mitigate these disruptions should be integral to all
technology access initiatives.
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New technologies at work: people, screens, and social virtualityBy Christina Garsten, Helena WulffMiller chapter- Financial virtualism allied to technology posits much increased value in future explicitly, but the reification of ideals of technology exists anyway so we need to look at actual practice without trying to establish this practice as ideal (compared to those in the industry trying to tell us that this is the future)...ie re 'virtual ideals'- Abstraction of ideals is everyday but becomes bad 'virtualism of the ideal' when (potential) positive uses of tech get sacrificed on the altar of it. ie the ideal gets abstracted so far from any link with practice and gets fetishised as an ideal to live up to. Eg ideals get fetishized like more screen/more info for traders is future when this just means more reliance on social sources of info. Such fetishism can also be objectified in bodies/practices of workers re how supposed to behave- Dance as example of where conscious of what new creatively can bring and contrast with what supposed to be more authentic and immediate (yet we forget a theatre is just as artificial). Sense of gain and loss until new conventions established (Goffman frame analysis)Marwick STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0early computing pioneers mapped 1960s countercultural ideals on to the creation and dissemination of computer technologies, resulting in a deep faith in technology’s ability to bring about decentralization, participation, and transparency (Markoff 2005; Turner 2006) I argue that counter-globalization protesters, media reformers, free/open source advocates and other contemporary activist movements similarly critique legal, governmental, and corporate practices for encroaching on freedom and traditional liberal values. Many of these cultures viewed the early internet as a burgeoning alternative,
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PAPERSGOODMarwick STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB2.0Self-presentation is dependent on context and audience (Goffman 1959). In linguistics, studies of ?code-switching? examine how language is leveraged for different communicative ends based on ?domain,? or situation (Stockwell 2002, 9). In contemporary American culture, the ability to culturally code-switch is associated with high-status, elite individuals (Peterson and Kern 1996). Online, perception from others is necessary for identity construction (Markham 2005). Online identity is both the sum and traces of a person?s online content and actions; identity cues can be gleaned from an e-mail address, a nickname, or a digital picture. More self-conscious identity performances have been analyzed in internet spaces like social network sites (boyd 2007; Livingstone 2008), blogs (Reed 2005; Hodkinson and Lincoln 2008), dating sites (Ellison, Heino, and Gibbs 2006) and personal homepages (Papacharissi 2002; Schau and Gilly 2003). The ability to code-switch or vary identity presentation is compromised in many online spaces which exhibit ?context collapse,? Or the simultaneous existence of multiple audiences such as friends, co-workers, relatives and so forth (boyd 2008; Marwick and boyd 2010).BLOGSSo using Facebook runs counter to our lived experience of identity fluidity, code switching, on and offstage separation. Its emphasis on information over presence as the essence of identity muddles the way we are in the world, the sense of control we want to have over adapting to circumstances. It fucks with the degree of autonomy we expect to have over our self-presentation from situation to situation?.The problem isnot that Facebook exposes how we’ve changed or that identity is performative in general; the problem is the searchable archive. It’s that Facebook stores details about our identity performance as decontextualized information. It encourages the idea that identity isn’t embedded in context but is strictly a matter of data. This makes usvulnerable to having our identities remixed by anyone who can access the identity information about us and verify we are connected to it somehow.?It is easy to argue for people to be ?real? when their ?real? identityis widely accepted?.not only self protection but identity play suffers under Zuckerberg/Jarvis/Schmidt philosophy../?[my] Foucauldian critique that acknowledges the highly limiting nature of this obsession of some fictional ?true? self at the expense of identity play both on and offline. The norm that needs changing is not for people to stop playing with identity, as Jarvis argues, but for that playfulness to be better accepted and promoted.when our process of identity formation is recorded and made immediate?it collapses the past into the present and removes temporal distance that basically alleviates the pain that?s all too often wrapped up in who we used to be?.What social media does is introduce a new or at least an intensified wrinkle into this process, by disrupting the coherence and consistency of our narratives. Social media any technology that records the details of our past pulls back that curtain. The more we try to maintain the illusion of a single consistent identity, the way Mark Zuckerberg would like us to, the more obvious it becomes that such a thing is impossible, was?never possible, will never?be?possible.
+ - Information age esp internet as a good
-
Miller Facebook 2010
The internet is not a revolutionary form of new political economy (in opposition to Castells in 'The information age'). This and other writings that use 'actor network' fetishise the network itself and envisage that the post/modern world exists in a more direct relationship between the individual and a global network BUT no evidence for a global network and no evidecne for an isolated individualism. This book is about social relationships that dont reduce to either of these extremes. People are clearly less individualistic as a result of Facebook
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Networked-The-Social-Operating-System/dp/0262017199/ref=pd_ybh_4
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-know/?pagination=false
ITID 2008 Burrell Problematic Empowerment: West African Internet Scams as Strategic Misrepresentation
- Much of the information contained within scammers' messages was an accounting of social status, social ties, and available resources that was meant to persuade the target to act in a desired manner. This is a sharp contrast to conceptualizations of the “Information Age” that value the disembedding and circulation of “information” as a move toward egalitarianism. That view neglects the way social context and relations of trust function as a source for knowing how to interpret and use information and is, itself, vital information (Granovetter, 1985; Molony, 2007; Overå, 2005)....
Where information is regarded as neutral, the power dynamics at play in the production of “information” are obscured, and the reality that what traverses the Internet may include opinions, lies, nonsense, and biased, incomplete, ºattering, or defamatory representations of individuals and social groups is not confronted (Castells 2001 guilty of in comparing to electricity etc.)...
In early theoretical research, an overextended notion
of cyberspace as a distinct spatial terrain completely
disconnected from ofºine life prevailed
(Slater, 2002; Wakeford, 1999). Similarly, the way
the Internet is described as a massive information
accumulation, storage, and distribution system disconnects
from the story of how such information is
constructed and consumed. In particular, where impersonal
information is described as the central catalyst
of development, the Internet’s welldocumented
history as a space of meaningful personal
communication is sidelined. The Internet’s capabilities
are compartmentalized. Ultimately,
concrete case studies of how these issues play out
on the ground can be drawn upon, as in this article,
to show how distinctions between information and
communication—in practice—are unclear...
>>>>>The arguments made for connectivity as a valuable
social good often point to the capacity for disembedding
information from location and social
context. Yet, the case of Internet fraud demonstrates
that the Internet is not universally experienced
as a neutral space, an impartial repository of
information. Particularly, where it is used (as it was
among Internet scammers) to address real-world aspirations
and privations, the Internet does not escape
from the complexities of human relationships
and problems of ethnocentrism, prejudice, and
greed. It is yet another space where the complex
and problematic conditions of post-coloniality and
embodied identity are played out.
Ito in networked publics
The current growth of networked publics is grounded in the spread of digital technologies and networks. ...Yochai Benkler characterizes this as one of the central shifts toward a networked information economy: “the move to a communications environment built on cheap processors with high computation capabilities, interconnected in a pervasive network.” = the distribution of the means of cultural and knowledge production,
- Mobile phones: the new talking drums of everyday Africa By Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Inge Brinkman : Burrell chapter
For ghanaians chatting and email and foreign pen pals were what the internet was about, not searching for information. Ie via personal contacts not depersonalised info that entertainment and real opportunities for personal development cld be found
- SA 2011 Eisenlohr introduction to media anthropology
70s-90’s (culture as static, bounded, spatial, processual, fragmentary, contested) = Politics of culture notion and Attention on public circulation of cultural traditions (e.g. Appadurai's public culture notion) esp via discourses and texts, now also outside national frames in a networked imaginary at great speeds. Esp significant because belongings emerging through changes in way culture circulates through media e.g. print (Anderson) and governance (Cohn) and also looking at media producers (Boyer) and religious media
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BOOKS
~GOOD~
Engaging Anthropology, Eriksen p59
....the memeticists. They, or at least some of them (Dawkins, Dennett, Blackmore) nevertheless claim that memetics is not merely a loose analogy to genetics: meme evolution ‘obeys the laws of natural selection quite exactly’ (Dennett 1995: 345). The three principles of natural selection are variation, heredity and differential fitness among the replicators. Anthropologists have noted, with some irritation, that none of the leading advocates of memetics discuss earlier work on cultural diffusion, which is very considerable. This is forgivable; the most original research is sometimes produced by newcomers to a field who are unburdened by conventional assumptions. However, ignorance of earlier research may also lead people into the same pitfalls as their predecessors. Memetics is a kind of diffusionism: a research strategy which aims to discover how cultural ideas and practices spread from their point of origin outwards, and promises to explain why some cultural items become very widespread while others do not. The question raised is excellent. Alas, so far, memetics, at least in its popular form, has not delivered anything but pompous programmatic statements peppered with anecdotal evidence. What was a mitigating idea in Dawkins comes, in Blackmore’s and Dennett’s development of it, close to absurdity.
BLOGS
We stop retweeting and reblogging a meme (about saying something of ourselves as much as it is about the election) when its ability to express a unique authentic identity diminishes into the mere performance of mob conformity. [though don’t agree that “we share them as autonomous actors declaring what we think is creative or funny, not what the campaigns or traditional mainstream media outlets think matters.” – see http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/10/21/twitter-media-invisibleobama-binders/1641967/].....Might viral success actually portend long-term failure (applied to Occupy)
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Facebook backgrounds the narrative coherence of memory grounded in past experience in favor of the immediacy of spatially and visually mediated presence. We do well, however, not to frame this opposition too starkly. The introduction of Facebook's Timeline interface may be seen as a tilt in the direction of Aristotelian memory and narrative. Nonetheless, memory, when anchored to spatially arranged databases of images, more readily answers to the desire for the immediacy of presence rather than the temporally inflected logic of narrative�.Visual databases of memory, whether mental, analog, or digital, may invite commentary and explication, but not a linear narrative of one's experience.
- Facebook 2010
Facebook is important but it is not transcendent. Its most important effects are on close persona relationships (re tendecney to oppose individuals to the network: there is no evidence of more individualism). It is global like whisky but not a universal brain. You dont communicate with the globe but with close friends. This spread just as fast before ok helped by Facebook now.
The internet 2000
- So, as in transient kinship, Internet relationships are more dyadic, voluntaristic and based on the continuity of their re-constitution through constant acts of exchange. This is not to say that the relationships are more superficial or less normative or lacking in the possibility of affection; but rather it makes these compatible with using relationships to objectify a project of freedom as a central value of modernity. This argument thereby exemplifies the dynamics of normative freedom as discussed in Chapter 1.
- there may be elective affinities at play; but most importantly, the argument suggests that the relationships outlined here cannot be assumed to mere creatures of the Internet developed in opposition to or replacement of something else called ‘traditional kinship’.
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Bell in WSJTo provoke moral panic, a technology must satisfy three rules. First, it has to change our relationship to time. Then it has to change our relationship to space. And, crucially, it has to change our relationship to one another….From Socrates and writingIRL (IN REAL LIFE): BREAKING DOWN THE BINARY OF ONLINE VERSUS OFFLINE SOCIAL INTERACTION Stephanie Tuszynskiwe can keep certain relationships only on one point of the continuum (strictly online) or movefrom different points on the continuum within the same relationship (using e-mail tokeep in touch with family we then visit at the holidays); that we cycle through all theseforms of interaction and have more choice of which type of interaction we will have, allcontributes to what Shields called the "crisis of boundaries between the real and virtual,between times zones and between spaces, near and distant" (7, italics original). Much ofthe alarm being raised about the dangers of replacing face-to-face activity withmediated online interaction, the fears of what it could mean to our more traditionalforms of community and society building, come, I believe, from this sense that ourcommunication forms have changed and that what we took to be solid boundariesbetween the concrete and the fantastic are in need of redefinition. But it is important toask, have the boundaries actually changed, and were they truly solid to begin with? Perhaps the problem lies not with the boundaries being altered but that we placed boundaries on our experiences at all. What is the source for the real/virtual binary?
- ITID 2008 Burrell Problematic Empowerment: West African Internet Scams as Strategic Misrepresentation
- On the issue of media representations, it has been proposed that technologies, like the Internet, that de-professionalize media production make it possible for members of marginalized societies to represent themselves, make their interests known, and reach a wider public (Castells, 1997; Froehling, 1999; Ginsburg, 1994; Spitulnik, 2002; Turner, 1992). However, Internet scammers point out that, beyond the technological capabilities of publication, there is the important matter of audience. Scammers felt that they could not get attention without misrepresenting themselves in a stereotyped fashion, that foreign audiences were deaf to more authentic representations. Scammers perceived the strategic employment of ªctional identities as a way of gaining attention from a disinterested Western audience....
The argument made here is not that empowerment
is impossible, but rather that further
discussions need to address conditions that facilitate
empowering self-expression versus conditions where
individuals become complicit in their own damaging
self-representations
Mobile phones: the new talking drums of everyday Africa By Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Inge Brinkman. Burrell chapter
Marginality also within society eg as well as using internet to access global processes, social authority with the old in Ghana making internet cafe activity in ghana also about a negotiation of constraints in own society : "The tech and its cafe milieu also played a role in mediating local interpersonal relations between peers and the older and younger generations" p159
- 'e-mobilization' literature up until the mid-2000s in Andrew Chadwick's textbook Internet Politics (2006), see Chapter 6
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Marwick STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0social media applies contradictory, yet intertwined ideals of counterculture and capitalism to the self, friends, relationships, and interpersonal interactions. People can spread ideas and creations to a formerly inconceivable mass audience, but in ways bounded and influenced by the confines of modern neoliberal capitalism.David Harvey defines neoliberalism as ―a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade‖ (Harvey 2007, 2)…… Neoliberalism is also an ideology of the integration of these principles into daily life; neoliberal discourse reproduces by encouraging people to regulate themselves ―according to the market principles of discipline, efficiency, and competitiveness‖ (Ong 2006, 4). Aihwa Ong identifies ―technologies of subjectivity,‖ which use knowledge and expertise to inculcate this expertise in individual subjects. Exploring such technologies reveals how neoliberalism is experienced, and how these subjectivities are formed.I argue that social media is a technology of subjectivity which educates users on proper self-regulating behavior.
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Ie networks have become THE defining social architecture of our era, e.g. for Castells, Wellman, Wittel whereas useful but shouldn't be posited as so deliberate
http://johnpostill.com/2009/03/29/the-weakness-of-weak-ties/
I argue that residential politics does not provide fertile ground for the growth of ‘networked individualism’ – the
claim that contemporary social relations are being reconfigured around individuals
(Wellman, Castells). Instead of egocentrism, leaders’ personal media practices
sustain a socioc entric field of residential politics around ‘community’ issues such as
waste disposal and petty crime
http://johnpostill.com/2008/09/10/two-anthropological-approaches-to-networks/
beginning to think that a useful distinction may be one between (a) those anthropologists who ‘found’ networks in the field, so to speak (e.g. when working with network-oriented transnational activists or technocrats, see Edelman 2005, Green et al 2005, Juris 2008, Knox et al 2006, Riles 2000) and (b) those anthropologists who wish to rethink this problematic notion of ‘network’ even though it is not a key folk notion in their own field sites (e.g. Amit 2007, Hinkelbein forthcoming, Horst and Miller 2006, Moeran 2003). I belong to b).
Like most anthropologists, I am very dubious of the idea that there is such a thing as an increasingly dominant ’network logic’ (Castells) or ‘networked individualism’ (Wellman) diffusing across the globe, calling instead for closer empirical attention to the claims and actualities surrounding the network metaphor in different places and historical periods.
Networked individualismI am not at all claiming that this augmentation of bits and atoms does not have profound consequences; it does. For example, thanks to the Internet, we are more increasingly able to connect with people with whom we share affinities rather than people we happen to live next to ….This is what sociologist Barry Wellman calls “networked individualism”: instead of being completely confined to historical “boxes” of family history and geography, we can open up to constructed ties of interests and affinities. This is a profound change and it is still playing out in the early stages. (Carr and others worry that this might lead to “filter bubbles” as we get our information mostly from chosen friends. Maybe, maybe not, as I reflect on this here.)CHI 2010 Dourish ‘Audiences and Publics’Michael Warner’s concept of “publics.”Warner’s work has been very influential not only in media theory but also in anthropology and cultural studies, where it provides a basis for understanding the constitution of social collectives through their collective engagement with “mediascapes” (Appadurai, 1996).Networked individualismRainie and Wellman, using scores of data, argue that we live in a networked operating systemcharacterized by networked individualism. They describe the triple revolution (the social network revolution (The Turn from Bounded Groups: Place-Based, Densely-Knit Solidarities To Social Networks: More Far-Flung, Sparsely-Knit, Multiple & Partial), internet revolution (The Proliferation & Differentiation of the Personalized Internet), and mobile revolution (The Personal Mobile Always-Accessibility)) that got us here, and discuss the repercussions of this triple revolution within various arenas of social life (e.g. the family, relationships, work, information spread). They conclude with an empirically informed guess at the future of the new social operating system of networked individualism, indulging augmented fantasies and dystopic potentials. Importantly, much of the book is set up as a larger argument against technologically deterministic claims about the deleterious effects of new information communication technologies (ICTs).PERSONAL NETWORKS: THE INTERTWINING OF TIES, INTERNET AND GEOGRAPHY-Adopting a personal network approach means viewing social relations ptolemaically– that is, from the standpoint of an individual managing his/her ties with othernetwork members from the centre (Chua, Madej and Wellman, 2011). This contrastswith the whole network approach, which observes an entire set of ties (typically in abounded area) from the outside looking in. The personal network approach is notanti-neighbourhood: it merely eschews the a priori assumption that they are of soleimportance. Methodologically, the personal network approach begins by askingpeople who they are related to and where they live, treating that as a community,and then seeing if the reported ties are local (Wellman, 1979). The unit of analysis is,first and foremost, the tie…..- The network revolution, that is, the spread of hyper-connectivity between modernindividuals, is a function of both internet and mobile revolutions. Although networkshave always been with us, when the internet and mobile phone rose to prominence,opportunities to network and communicate grew exponentially (Rainie andWellman, 2012). The three revolutions (network, internet, and mobile phone)constitute central pillars of ‘networked individualism’, or the rise of person-toperson connectivity (superseding household to household and place to place). Together, they accelerate the move towards a highly interconnected world where autonomous individuals build online and offline ties using multiple communication technologies (Hogan, 2008).- Whereas personal networks were once mostly confined to groups in villages orneighbourhoods, contemporary networks are widely dispersed, including both local and global contexts. At the same time, they are sparsely knit in the sense that oneperson’s network members may not know each other. Finally, they are specialized inthat modern individuals are likely to call upon different kinds of people to solvetheir various problems. It is not a case where a single tight-knit group solves allproblems; rather, individuals choose the most appropriate helpers for each specifictask (Wellman and Wortley, 1990)…. Wellman and Wortley use a metaphor of shopping at ‘specialized interpersonal boutiques’ rather than at general stores (1990:583). The internet is a broad platform of diverse information that caters to the specialized nature of moderncommunity. Special interest groups and listservs bind people with specializedinterests in a common framework within which important conversations andresources are exchanged (Rainie and Wellman, 2012)PERSONAL NETWORKS: THE INTERTWINING OF TIES, INTERNET AND GEOGRAPHYa network society was already in existence before the internet. But with theinternet and social networking sites such as Facebook, the number and type of nonlocal networks have surged. The proliferation of networks points not to a decline of community as feared, but the rise of a liberated form of community increasingly defined by social rather than spatial accessibility (Hogan, 2008).Wellman on networked individualismPerson To Person:Networked IndividualismMobile Phones, Portable Computing, Easy Travel• Little awareness of context• Individual, not household or work group• Personalized networking• Tailored media interactions• Private concerns replace public civility• Move from small towns to cities, suburbs– Less face to face surveillance– More electronic coveillance (Facebook)– More electronic surveillance (government, FacebookGoogle• Online interactions linked with offlinePeople Function More as Networked Individuals• .. and less as group members• Social ties and events organized around the individualrather than a social unit such as a family, neighborhood,or organization• The person has become the individual unit ofsocial connectivity; and not the place,– be it household or workplace• Agency: Each person operates own network• Cell phones and internet allow person-to-person contactto supplant place-to-place communication.• The social network revolution has provided theopportunities – and stresses –for people to reach beyond the world of tight groups
BOOKS
Tales from FacebookMiller...the suggestion that the internet represents a revolutionary new form of political economy [is] a thesis most forcefully expressed in…The Information Age [Castells]. The problem with this and other writings that use terms such as actor network is the tendency to fetishize the network and to envisage that the modern world exists principally in a more direct relationship between individuals on the one hand and a global network on the other….There is no evidence for a global network and no evidence for isolated individualism. The entire volume is focused on social relationships that reduce to neither of these two extremes. People in Trinidad are clearly less individualistic as a result of Facebook…Facebook is important but it is not transcendent. Its primary effects are on close social relationshipsIto in Networked publics
The term networked publics references a linked set of social, cultural, and technological developments that have accompanied the growing engagement with digitally networked media. The Internet has not completely changed the media’s role in society: mass media, or one-to-many communications, continue to cater to a wide arena of cultural life. What has changed are the ways in which people are networked and mobilized with and through media. The term networked publics is an alternative to terms such as audience or consumer. Rather than assume that everyday media engagement is passive or consumptive, the term publics foregrounds a more engaged stance. Networked publics takes this further; now publics are communicating more and more through complex networks that are bottom-up, top-down, as well as side-to-side. Publics can be reactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception. With the growth of multimedia on the Internet, publics can traffic in both professional and personal media, in new forms of many-to-many communication that are often routed around commercial media distribution. Personal media and communications technologies such as telephony, e-mail, text messaging, and everyday photography and journaling are colliding with commercial and mass media such as television, film, and commercial music. This is what Henry Jenkins has described as “convergence culture, where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where the power of the media producer and the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”[3] This book describes the current state of networked publics at the layers of place, culture, politics, and infrastructure, examining historical context and speculating about an unfolding future.
- Re place We are still very much in the midst of negotiating appropriate social norms in this era of layered presence.
- As networks expand, the dynamic tension between the broader network and individualized niches becomes more pronounced. This is a dynamic that Manuel Castells has famously dubbed the relation between the network and the self,[18]
Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of ... By Daniel Araya page 237 originsSummarises Benkler's the wealth of networks
PAPERS
CA 2005 Green Scales of Place and Networks- The types of connections that are imagined for networks are not the same as those imagined for “communities”: whereas communities are usually depicted as bounded, fairly resilient, and containing people who at least imagine that they have broadly common interests (Amit 2002, Amit and Rapport 2002, Anderson 1983, Cohen 1985), networks are more often regarded as open-ended and flexible, with no clear boundaries, no centers, and no necessary commonalities or even sustained or ongoing relations between the entities that are connected through them (Otis 2001). This conception of “networks” obscures the way they are linked, in public sector promotion of information and communications technology networks, to specific place-making projects such as “Manchester,” “Europe,” and “Britain,” terms which come to stand for particular locations in and particular relationships with the “networked” globe.- We have shown that a particular notion of “network” and its apparently self-evident and rather special capacity to overcome problems of scalar differences and distances tended to generate an idealized imperative to connect that failed to recognize that connections usually involve disconnections, entanglements, and constraints.Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications - boyd 2010-Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. Assuch, they are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologiesand (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people,technology, and practice. Networked publics serve many of the same functions as othertypes of publics – they allow people to gather for social, cultural, and civic purposes andthey help people connect with a world beyond their close friends and family. Whilenetworked publics share much in common with other types of publics, the ways in whichtechnology structures them introduces distinct affordances that shape how people engagewith these environments. The properties of bits – as distinct from atoms – introduce newpossibilities for interaction. As a result, new dynamics emerge that shape participation.- Cultural and media studies offer a different perspective on the notion of whatconstitutes a public. In locating the term “public” as synonymous with “audience,” SoniaLivingstone (2005) uses the term to refer to a group bounded by a shared text, whether aworldview or a performance. The audience produced by media is often by its very naturea public, but not necessarily a passive one. For example, Michel de Certeau (2002) arguesthat consumption and production of cultural objects are intimately connected and HenryJenkins (2006) applies these ideas to the creation and dissemination of media. Mizuko Itoextends this line of thinking to argue that “publics can be reactors, (re)makers and(re)distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and socialexchange as well as through acts of media reception” (Ito, 2008, p. 3).It is precisely this use of public that upsets political theorists like Jurgen Habermaswho challenge the legitimacy of any depoliticized public preoccupied “with consumptionof culture” (Habermas, 1991, p. 177). Of course, not all political scholars agree withHabermas’ objection to the cultural significance of publics. Feminist scholar NancyFraser argues that publics are not only a site of discourse and opinion but “arenas for theformation and enactment of social identities” (Fraser, 1992) while Craig Calhoun arguesthat one of Habermas’s weaknesses is his naive view that “identities and interests [are]settled within the private world and then brought fully formed into the public sphere”(Calhoun, 1992, p. 35).Networked publics exist against this backdrop. Mizuko Ito introduces the notion ofnetworked publics to “reference a linked set of social, cultural, and technologicaldevelopments that have accompanied the growing engagement with digitally networked media” (Ito, 2008, p.2). Ito emphasizes the networked media, but I believe we must alsofocus on the ways in which this shapes publics – both in terms of space and collectives.In short, I contend that networked publics are publics that are restructured by networkedtechnologies; they are simultaneously a space and a collection of people…. What distinguishes networked publics from other types of publics is their underlying structure. Networked technologies reorganize how information flows and how people interact with information and each other. In essence, the architecture of networked publics differentiates them from more traditional notions of publics.The Networked public sphereCommunicating For Change: media and agency in the networked public sphere….the new networked public sphere offers opportunities for better journalism and more effective cosmopolitan communications but it warns against the dangers of relying on online marketing and having too high expectations of the potential for understanding and change.Habermas RefeudalisationHabermas (2008) speaks of the process of “refeudalization.” The process, referring to the manipulation of information by spin doctors or public relations experts as well as advertisers and corporate-controlled media, will hamper the citizens‟ ability to engage in rational debates and obstruct public reasoning (Habermas, 2008). Concerns of media manipulation can be understood in terms of how news slants can be propagated in the media by telling audiences not only what to think about an issue (Cohen, 1963) but also how to think about it (Entman, 1993; Kuypers, 2002)
-
BOOKS
GOOD
Academy and the Internet By Helen Fay Nissenbaum, Monroe Edwin Price (good short topline p76/77)
ie virtuality for dystopians linked to postmodern simulation and for utopian poststructuralists to a lab in which identities can be deconstructed and transcended. Thereby the internets 'seperateness' highlighted beacuse these projects shout loudest. Not good starting point for looking at groups and established relations/sociality tho ok, it might change; why do sometimes people treat it as seperate in their context is the right way to proceed ie virtuality as a social accomplishment rather than assumed feature of internet. Ie "virtuality = the capacity of comms techs to constitute rather than mediate realities" - but this a charcteristic of mediation per se eg newspapers and imagined commnuities (danger of their and the internets reification e.g. what Castells does).
GOOD
Geographies of media and communication: a critical introduction By Paul C. Adams ch7
The Internet, Miller and Slater 2000 (p5)
- "we need to treat internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces" ie looked at internet cafes etc to understand how norms of trini social life extended into online spaces
This book is not a case-study of localization or the appropriation of a
global form by local cultural concerns. It is not about domesticating a
technology. On the contrary, it is largely about how Trinidadians put them-
selves into this global arena and become part of the force that constitutes it,
but do so quite specifically as Trinidadians. Indeed, the significance of studying
the Internet is the degree to which it transcends dualisms such as local against
global. It forces us to acknowledge a more complex dialectic through which
specificity is a product of generality and vice versa. Local Trinidadians do not meet a global Internet. The object we call the Internet actually consists
of groups such as the Trindadians you will meet in this volume.
- Castells's primary distinction between ‘the Net’ and ‘the Self’ appears to replicate the classical sociological distinction between structure and agency. The result is to separate out the net as a monolithic and reified structure (or ‘morphology’) whose impact on identity is then investigated. It also seems to run too close to a technological deter- minism (1996: 1–23). This clearly runs against our refusal to treat the Internet independently of its embeddedness. The problems come out most clearly in
his concept of the ‘culture of real virtuality’ (e.g. 1996: 358–75). Every chapter
in this book demonstrates why the assumptions made there about the separa-
tion between the real and the virtual are misguided
- What is so lacking in Castells is by contrast superbly drawn in the writings
of Latour on mediation, in particular, in his exemplary studies demonstrating
how one can avoid what he calls the two pitfalls of sociologism and tech-
nologism (1991:110) or more generally science and society (1993). Everything
that is important is what happens in the mediations that dissolve these
dualisms. We would also affirm the Internet as an actant (Latour 1999: 116-
27, 303) in the story that is told here. This is not a book about the Internet
as a technology that is then appropriated by another thing called society. It
is a book about material culture, which can never be reduced to some prior
subject or object. We do not start from two premises, that is, the Internet on
the one hand and Trinidad on the other. As will become clear in the body of
this work, it is more fair to say that both the Internet and an understanding
of what it means to feel Trinidadian (e.g. Chapter 4) are seen as the conclusion
of the processes we study. In the section (below) on the dynamics of mediation
we note examples of new genres such as ecommerce and the norms of
Trinidadian Internet chat that cannot be understood except as examples of
what Latour terms a hybrid that is irreducible to either its human or its
material agents. We trace other dualisms that the embedded Internet renders
increasingly anachronistic, especially that of production and consumption.
Daniel Miller and Don Slater critique “that earlier generation of Internet writing that was concerned with the Internet primarily through concepts of ‘cyberspace’ or ‘virtuality’. “These terms focused on the ways in which the new media semed able to constitute spaces or places apart from the rest of social life (‘real life’ or offline life), spaces in which new forms of sociality were emerging, as well as bases for new identities, such as new relations to gender, ‘race’, or ontology” (2000: 4). Miller and Slater highlight the assumption that Internet communities represent social relations and identities that are dematerialized and dis-placed. Their suggestion is to start “from the opposite assumption, that we need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces, that they happen within mundane social structures and relations that may transform but that they cannot escape into a self-enclosed cyberian apartness” (p. 5).
BLOGS
(The world is one but) Bits and atoms have different properties and their current integration creates many novel configurations we have not yet adapted to as societies….Facebook can be so jarring at times: it often ignores deeply ingrained cultural conventions based on laws of physics. It puts all your friends in the same room, by default–and its new timeline defies rules of flow of time as we knew it…/… interaction is one of the key mechanisms through which ties can strengthen or weaken–and certainly accessibility through online interaction is part of this mix…. Connectivity has become augmented and for me and the deeper divide has become not whether or not connectivity is online or offline, but whether there is some kind of connectivity or not.“augmented reality” in the broader sociological context of social interaction that flows between digital and physical (as opposed to the more limited computer science definition that describes it as merely the overlaying of digital information on the physical environment)…. The way I conceive of and interact with the world is shaped by the existence of Facebook and the entire environment of digital documentation and digitally-mediated communication, regardless of whether I am on the grid at a given moment. As Pierre Bourdieu might say, I have developed a pattern of habits, behaviors, and beliefs (a habitus) that are appropriate to augmented realityMost of the “blame” for treating our use of the Internet as an online/offline dichotomy stems from literature like Turkle’s work in the 80s and 90s, all the work on MUDs, and media portrayals of online interactions such as the “Rape in Cyberspace.” These works went far beyond the belief that we selectively self-present online (which we all most certainly do to some extent) to this idea that people used the anonymity of online interactions to become someone else,……………. SNSs–and especially Facebook–were a game changer. Facebook’s primary goal is to connect you to people from all stages of your life. These are pre-existing relationships, not new friends or romantic partners (for the most part). And when we are taking our “offline” identity and exporting it to an online space comprised of our offline connections, we are probably not going to radically diverge from that offline identityAll I am attempting to do in this essay is situate the fallacy of web objectivity within the underlying digital dualist fallacy that the digital and physical are separate.….the specific form of digital dualism that is perhaps the most dangerous…..….code has always been embedded in social structures allows persistent inequalities enacted in the name of computational objectivity to be identified (e.g., the hidden hierarchies of Wikipedia, the hidden profit-motive behind open-source, the hidden gendered standpoint of computer code, and so on). I will argue that the fallacy of web objectivity is driven fundamentally by digital dualism, providing further evidence that this dualism is at once conceptually false, and, most importantly, morally problematic. Simply, this specific form of digital dualism perpetuates structural inequalities by masking their very existence….Masking the deeply embedded political motives that undergird computer code with claims of “objectivity” serve to make more invisible those very motives. Technology never removes humanity from itself, it never creates a space outside of fundamental social structures, and the notion that digitality was ever somehow a new space that transcends basic facts of social life is the height of digital dualism…..There is a long history of those from dominant groups thinking of themselves as the “neutral” or “natural’ human being. And it is precisely this fallacy that allowed the Internet to be conceptualized by some as a sphere outside of socialization, of the digital being somehow separate from the physical…..It is my hope that identifying this digital dualism and calling for an augmented perspective that always situates digitality and physicality as mutually constitutive can be one more small step towards shedding conceptualizations that mask social inequalities.The relationships that we curate and maintain online through Faceboook and other social media services are deeply anchored in offline interaction. There is no “second self” on my Facebook profile- it’s the same one that is embodied in flesh and blood. I might make myself look better than I really am, I might even lie, but how is this categorically different than my choice of clothing, the bumperstickers on my car, or a cheesy Hallmark greeting card? You might consider Facebook, bumper stickers, clothing, and Hallmark to be shallow modes of expression, but thendeal with all of these symmetrically. What is the underlying social ontology that produces these things? A symmetrical approach, one that looks for antisocial tendencies in digital as well as nondigital technologies, will bring you to radically different conclusions (which I will spell out later).We need new terminology that makes reference to the enmeshed, imploded, overlapping, interpenetrating nature of the physical and digital.digital dualism. The implicit, and incorrect, assumption is that the on and offline are zero-sum, that being offline means being not online, and vice versa….Instead, the atmosphere of information is always at once analogue and digital, and we exist within it, always both on and offline…. it remains important to differentiate between information, as it travels fluidly on and offline, that is coming at us from bodies or tweets, paper or pixels….The question should never have been ‘is Twitter good or bad?’ but how to best arrange your digital and analogue inputs and outputs in real-time….http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/05/10/social-media-you-can-log-off-but-you-cant-opt-out/Social media is non-optional: You can log off but you can’t opt out…is it possible to abstain completely from digital social technologies, and came to the conclusion that the answer is “no.” Rejecting digital social technologies can mean significant losses in social capital; depending on the expectations of the people closest to us, rejecting digital social technologies can mean seeming to reject our loved ones (or “liked ones”) as well. Even if we choose to take those risks, digital social technologies are non-optional systems; we can choose not to use them, but we cannot choose to live in a world where we are not affected by other people’s choices to use digital social technologies…citing Haraway…flows of digital information are now an unavoidable force in our daily lives. Atoms can no longer escape the influence of bits... Facebook not only retains data it should have deleted, acquires and curates information that pertains to individuals other than those from whom the information is obtained…What may influence our belief that opting out is possible is the belief in digital dualism i.e. that there are two ontologically separate worlds, when in reality “Technology is so deeply intertwined with our social reality that, even when we are logged off, we remain a part of the social media ecosystem”. (Another consequence of digital dualism elsewhere on the blog is the mirror one of ‘web objectivity’ i.e. the moral belief that code exists apart from the material world’s inequalities, a legacy of William Gibson etc., first leading to cyber utopianism but also a reaction in fear of this incomprehensible different world: cyberbullying etc.. We’ve achieved some transparency/accommodated to web but currently the dystopian rhetoric is about the loss of intimacy, authenticity, and intellectual depth but best challenge to cyber ut/distopians is to disavow digital dualism)Documentary Vision‘…the habit of experiencing more and more of life with the awareness of its document-potential.’Sync Facebook with Spotify or the Wall Street Journal and what you listen to or read will be passively published on the new Facebook live-ticker. This more passive sharing furthers an already established trend: we are increasingly living life under the logic of the Facebook mechanism. Facebook and the rest of the new and social media influence us most powerfully when not logged-in and staring at some glowing screen. Instead, the biggest role social media plays in our life is phenomenological; that is, it changes how we experience the world even when logged off. The logic of Facebook has become part of the logic by which we experience our augmented reality. So much so that it has become hard to experience anything that is fully outside the realm of documentation on social media in one form or another….Social media effectively combines documentation technologies with the guarantee of an audience. It provides both opportunity and motive to document ourselves online…..two different models of [deliberate] documentary vision: the camera eye where we seek to capture our reality more or less truthfully, and the Claude Glass which focuses on an idealized view of ourselves and our lives….Documentary vision coupled with this more passive sharing further blurs the line between experiencing something and the documentation of that experience….experience and documentation are not separate, but mutually co-determining. The causality goes both ways: Life has now become as subservient to the document as the document is subservient to life (digital dualists don’t recognise this)COMMENT: we have always ‘performed’ under a documentary gaze, but the documentation was in the memories of those we were performing for, i.e. the social context….we’ve always lived with this constant awareness. It’s the same as the awareness of what our social context is……But if we have digital tools that let us take advantage of our natural awareness of social context, we can experience a much less anxious, much more natural, much more collapsed digital life i.e. As our control over digital media becomes better and more fine-grained, and more closely model our offline social contexts, we will become more comfortable with sharing online.PolySocial RealityCOMMENT: if someone is walking down the street whilst talking on a mobile phone, their body is in ‘x,’ the physical location. However, they are also connecting to ‘not x,’ the network, an ethereal location where their conversation is taking place. They appear to conceptually be in two locations, both ‘x’ and ‘not x’ simultaneously. This is the condition that we suggest when indication that simultaneously “x” can equal “not x.” We refer to our notion of (‘x’ = ‘not x’), as a PoSR as it contains a social experience that combines both physical location and virtual non-physical location referents.Ultimately, this is a story of how the one, augmented, city has been fundamentally changed. The power of new technologies Harris is describing are precisely born of the fact that they arenot, as the title of the story suggests, of a “Twitterland.” The power-grabs in play are those of one reality, one of physical space, material inequalities, bodies that hurt, people with histories, pains, pleasures, re-networked together. As such, the sightlines are different: we can conjure the eyes of the many. Spaces darkened to hide the subtle operations of power can be illuminated. We have become reoriented to each other; we are negotiating these new freedoms but also need to be aware of the new boundaries those in power will try to enact.At no point can we forget that these new technologies, these new reorientations, will also be used by those in power. New enlightened spaces will be used to create new shadows spots of domination and control. Twitter exists to make a profit, remember (something that Harris is himself very aware of in the story). But by kicking the system around, playing with it, we are learning its shape. In a moment where the contours of knowledge and power are being reshaped by these technologies of orientation, there is something of a gold rush to figure out these new flows, how to exploit them for one’s own purpose; some to demand new rules, and others to as quickly as possible recreate the existing order before too many figure out that something, for a brief moment, could have really changed.Online and offline experiences are both real, but they have positive and negative effects on each other.Summary of utopia/dystopia and elimination of distance
PAPERS
~GOOD~
IRL (IN REAL LIFE): BREAKING DOWN THE BINARY OF ONLINEVERSUS OFFLINE SOCIAL INTERACTION Stephanie Tuszynski When considering the two concepts of real and virtual, too many people placethem on opposite sides of a wall (binary opposition), when in fact they are on differentends of a spectrum………… Sitting in a coffee house eating, drinking and speaking directly toanother person would count as "real" interaction and also would be privileged as themost valuable of all forms of interaction between people. The sense is that thisencounter is direct because the two people are in the same physical location andcommunicating without any machines in between them. However, this encounter is stillmediated. The two people are using spoken language and body language, both of whichmediate the interaction……. While this kind of face-to-face activity may be less mediated thanonline interaction, it remains on the continuum of mediated social activity. Indeed, theonly way to remove all forms of mediation from human interaction would be a directpsychic link between people, which would remove the need for representative symboland sound systems known as language…….. Supposedly at the other end of the spectrum would be an anonymous interchange of words, either in email or on a online forum, where the two participants know nothing about each other besides their handles, avatars or email addresses. This is a purelyvirtual interaction in that it is entirely mediated through machines. Differences do existin the ways these two encounters work. I conceive of the contrast to primarily rest oninvoluntary information, a concept similar to Erving Goffman's notions of "expressions given" and "expressions given off." The two people sitting in the coffee shop are able tolearn things about each other via their senses, whether or not the other person desiresthe information to be known (i.e. hair color, whether the fingernails have beentrimmed). In an online environment, information is given out by the participants only oftheir own choosing……… With the heavy mediation interpolating between users, it ispossible to release very little information about oneself into the ether. From this controlover information, we get the perceptions of distance, removal and security oftenascribed to online interaction [e.g. Turkle]…. We take what is familiar and known and use it to make sense of the unknown [e.g. metaphor ‘desktop’ or asking interlocutor for real word identifiers]…. Conversely, new technology can bring with it new phenomena that we adapt to and adopt into our everyday lives in a variety of ways…. Events which occur in online social spaces, ranging from one-on-one relationships (documented by Sunden and a vast number of other researchers) to theinfamous "Rape in Cyberspace" (Dibble), sometimes have deep emotional and possibly economic, legal or physical consequences…. Others dismiss virtual interactions, especially the type of sexual interaction Sunden is referencing, as being simple experimentation in a "theme park" (an ideaborrowed from Waldby) that has no real world consequences. Sunden argues that sexualfantasies which occur in virtual social spaces, and I argue all types of interactionswhich occur online, "become components in cybernetic systems of circulating fantasiesand desires. A scene played out in one part of the system will, inevitably, have an effecton other parts"… We cross into virtual realms, we bring in ourselves, our backgrounds, our personalities to those online spaces (Wellman & Gulia, 170), and we emerge from them having felt some impact from the social activity during that time, and we are incapable of leaving the accrued impressions behind when we go back into the "real world."….. The mere fact that we interact in all types of mediated spaces, virtual and face-to-face, means we pass through the supposed brickwalls which separate the real from the virtual. Our participation in virtual spaces andour continued corporeal interaction with the world bind together those supposedlyseparate places……… if we follow the bias inherent in the real/virtual binary to its logical conclusion, anything non-corporeal, including ideas, stories, faith and so on, is inherently less valuable than physical experience. Clearly, this perspective is not an accurate representation of how most cultures operate……… we can keep certain relationships only on one point of the continuum (strictly online) or move from different points on the continuum within the same relationship (using e-mail to keep in touch with family we then visit at the holidays)… the perception of digital media, especially cyberspace, as being radically new lingers. "Because cyberspace, or the digitally virtual, has been treated as ahistorical, located outside of longer trajectories of cultural and technological development, it has been made to appear as an awesomely magical yet violent rupture" (Shields, 54)….[ignoring communications studies,] the framework being used is what has lead to the real/virtual binary… The separation between "real" and "virtual" has in fact long been a source of cultural tension, "rooted in ancient distinctions… What lies at the heart of the real/virtual split is a separation between empirical knowledge and experiences which cannot be measured. Simply put, it is the difference between the quantifiable and the qualitative…….. The exclusion from the realm of the empirical is the commonality between them [philosophy, art], and the basis, I believe, for much of the discomfort people feel towards events that occur within a space that defies our traditional notions of empirical proof (e.g. A face-to-face conversation provides evidence we cancollect with our senses, where a virtual encounter does not) Yet it is important to remember that experiences which leave no hard evidence can motivate people to action, sometimes extreme action….(book burnings: books as a ‘real’ danger)….. The virtual rebounds on the material and the abstract, changing the Enlightenment tradition of simple dualisms….Contempt for using the Internet primarily as a social tool seems to me to be tied intimately to the value system that places the pursuit of knowledge in a rational manner higher than recreational activities such as socializing, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, is part of the gendering of technology use….a strong, highly negative stigma continues to surround using the Internet as a means for seeking out companionship and social interaction, just as, in the past, women were stereotyped as using the telephone for gossip rather than work…The embarrassment of making friends through a virtual environment was frequently associated with having to "come out" to offline friends or family about these activities….In the same way that people attempt to categorize interaction as "real" or "virtual," scholars have attempted to find discrete boxes to understand media effects. Both these approaches, I maintain, come from the same original framework (i.e. attempts to take something deeply individual and unpredictable and find a way to measure it)….Human social interaction is a complex and highly individualized process, and human interaction with the media produces just as wide a range of responses. When human social interaction is combined with human-media interaction, the results are irreducibly complex
GOOD
Marwick dissertation: STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0
- While some ethnographies still focus on single online spaces (Boellstorff 2008), internet researchers have since recognized the necessity of an anthropology of the internet that breaks down the divisions between ―virtual and ―real or ―online or ―offline (Orgad 2008; Baym 2009; Garcia, Standlee, and Bechkoff 2009
- Is using a mobile phone to call someone ―offline communication, but using that same phone to send a Twitter direct message ―online? These unanswerable questions show that these divisions are no longer analytically useful terms
- So what are the methodological implications of this move away from a strict delineation between online or offline? Just as media anthropology has called for situating media use as embedded practice, I believe that digital media must be studied as a practice that takes place in a specific geographic location...........
Summary in Religion 2002 Maxwell Virtual religion: cyber this and that and utopias
EASA 2010 The Mutual Co-construction of Online and Onground in Cyborganic: Making An
Ethnography of Networked Social Media Speak to Challenges of the Posthuman by Jenny Cool
- (which is about: on the big scale the importance of place in the development of Web publishing AND at same time digital intermediation reconfigures experiences and imaginaries of place, identity, and embodiment, without dematerializing these sites of subjectivity or rendering them obsolete as sources of anthropological insight (we can see this by looking at forms, practices and imaginaries on the small scale)....
The online/offline conceptual dichotomy so prominent in early social research on the Internet has largely been supplanted by attention to ways the Internet is taken up in everyday life, and by growing appreciation for the mutuality of these two domains. Communications scholars (Jones 1995, 1997, 1998; Shields 1996; Gurak 1999), social geographers (Kitchin 1998), sociologists (Smith and Kollock 1999; Wellman and Gulia 1999) and ethnographers (Miller and Slater 2000; Hine 2000) have all emphasized the interdependence of online and face-to-face and the way the “Net itself is mediated by everyday life (Shields 1996:8). The mutuality of online and onground in the social construction of networked media has been the most distinct finding of my ethnography of Cyborganic.....my ethnography situates Cyborganic genealogically in relation to two regional cultural histories: first, of Silicon Valley as a milieu of technical and economic innovation; and second, of the role Bay area countercultures played in the social construction of networked personal computing. Both underscore the formative role of place—physical
collocation in particular places and the embodied, face-to-face sociality that this affords—in the
development of networked media....
In the 1990s, anthropologists challenged the assumed "isomorphism between space, place, and
culture” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a: 34) and theorized "technological infrastructures as sites for
the production of locality" without a necessarily geographic referent (Ito 1999:2). Despite this
decoupling, my study of Cyborganic demonstrates that spatial and technologically mediated
proximity can interact in significant ways. Rather than return to an ethnographic subject defined
by place and face-to-face interaction (Foster 1953; Redfield 1960), I conceive of place in terms of collocation....
Each of the social imaginaries and practices of collocation, presence casting and configurable sociality I have analyzed demonstrate ways in which the decoupling of spatial and social proximity opens new possibilities for their recombination and reconfiguration. None suggests the dematerialization of place or erasure of embodiment as corollary to the proliferation of computer-mediated sociality. Rather, in the case
of Cyborganic, mediated and face-to-face communication worked together synergistically to
reconfigure the experience and social relations of presence and place...
In both the large-scale view of cultural history, and the
micro-view of particular media practices, I have spoken of various sites of subjectivity—place,
presence, colocation, identity—as mutually co-constructed online and onground. This is how I
perceive the anthropological subject in the cybernetic circuits of contemporary society.
EASA 2010 The Mutual Co-construction of Online and Onground in Cyborganic: Making AnEthnography of Networked Social Media Speak to Challenges of the Posthuman by Jenny Cool- The cybernetic subject: the prevailing but historically specific liberal human subject comprising mind which is autonomous and free has found its way naturally into discourse on the disembodied cybernetic subject BUT we AREN'T dismbodied. This is like the tradition of how postcolonial, feminist etc anthros challenged the universal subject by doing ethnogs of the particular and of spatially, temporally, and socio-culturally situated subjects...In similar manner, I have worked in my ethnographic account of Cyborganic to read and write the flesh back into the genealogy of contemporary forms of techno-sociality...In both the large-scale view of cultural history, and the micro-view of particular media practices, I have spoken of various sites of subjectivity—place, presence, colocation, identity—as mutually co-constructed online and onground. This is how I perceive the anthropological subject in the cybernetic circuits of contemporary society....In recognizing thathuman subjectivity is constructed both through the mediation of material (eg place) and symbolic realms, we are well positioned to contest, with Hayles, the “teleology of disembodiment” that reinscribes the liberalhumanist subject into conceptions of technologically-mediated subjectivity and sociality- plus talks about posthuman as the way to talk about humanity to supercede the old 'human' idea which is based on the culturally specific liberal humanist subject
Life After Cyberspace Agre 1999
ie the internet is embedded in the real world
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IRL (IN REAL LIFE): BREAKING DOWN THE BINARY OF ONLINE VERSUS OFFLINE SOCIAL INTERACTION Stephanie TuszynskiResearch on new media and new forms of communication has been influencedheavily by postmodern thinking, in particular the idea of simulation and the belief thatwe (collectively as a society) are coming to accept simulation in the place of "reality."Ideas such as "hyperreality" and the supremacy of signs and simulacra seem to blendalmost naturally into our conceptions of cyberspace, where all interactions andexperiences are taking place via symbols on a screen… The substitution of the simulation for reality is assumed to happen and to a negative result that deprives human beings of more direct, real andvalued contact with each other. Sherry Turkle brought up this fear in The Second Self,
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PAPERS
Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications - boyd 2010-Some argue that privacy is now dead (Garfinkel, 2001) and that we should learn tocope and embrace a more transparent society (Brin, 1999). That is a naive stance, bothbecause privacy has been reshaped during other transformative moments in history(Jagodzinski, 1999) and because people have historically developed strategies formaintaining aspects of privacy even when institutions and governments seek to eliminateit (McDougall and Hansson, 2002; Toch, 1992). For these reasons, I argue that privacy issimply in a state of transition as people try to make sense of how to negotiate thestructural transformations resulting from networked media.
We are always�connected�to digital social technologies, whether we are connecting through them or not�.this inescapable connection serves to complicate two prevailing discourses of privacy, both of which assume autonomous individuals as subjects: Shame on You (disclosure your fault no matter labrynthine policies) and Look at Me�.(latter: forced transparency:�a form of outing�by the powerful with dubious efficacy for encouraging either tolerance or accountability)�. the conception of privacy as an individual matter�whether as a right or as something to be renounced�is the linchpin of the troubling consequences that follow: the reality of inescapable connection and the impossible demands of prevailing privacy discourses have together resulted in what I term�documentary consciousness, or the abstracted and internalized reproduction of others��documentary vision� (especially hard on some because �visibility is a trap� Foucault))�. privacy and visibility are not simply neutral consequences of individual choices, and those choices are not individual moral responsibilities�.privacy must be also a collective responsibility�It is time to stop critiquing the visible minutiae of individual lives and choices, and to start asking critical questions about who is looking, and why, and what happens next.
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boyd and Baym 2012
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GOODFirst Monday article by Etiene PelapratReciprocity is a key concept for understanding social behaviour. It involves complex interactions of giving and returning. This paper examines the concept of reciprocity to think about, and design for, online social interactions. We argue that reciprocal exchange is symbolic insofar as it produces and enacts many forms of social life by drawing individuals into a relation of recognition. Indeed, reciprocal interactions underlie much online activity, and a fuller understanding of the concept explains important aspects of how social life is conducted with others online. We contrast our understanding of reciprocity with those of more dominant theories of interaction built on the assumption that actions, including those that seek reciprocity, are self–interested or otherwise altruistic. This assumption ignores how social actions that solicit a return–action seek to neither profit nor benefit, but rather express a desire to draw in others into social life and relationships. After analysing three kinds of online activity (web forums, social networking sites, and online games) using our view of this concept, we conclude with implications for designers who seek to support the development of our digitally–mediated social life.
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FI Davis 2012 Social Media and Experiential AmbivalenceFacebook: sampling, coding, interviewing, observingMulti-sited/comparative ethnographiesWe will all be studying social network sites, and a core question anyone engaged in such studies must ask themselves, is to what degree the particular usage we observe is a product of the nature of the fieldsite where they work, or the social network site that they also observe. Is this because it is Brazil or because it is Facebook? The problem is that a single ethnography can only surmise on the basis of the evidence of that site which is always a conflation of these two (and of course many more) facets…. Now we are hopefully too sophisticated to simply draw mechanical conclusion. It is possible there is another fator: a common sense of modernity say that all sites share, which prevents us from merely assuming that commonality means we look for a more technological foundation for this behaviour. Nevertheless the way in which our evidence is cited comparatively means that the level of disussion and analysis can start from a significantly higher level than if we were an isolated study with no idea of how our work related to similar investigations in other places…. our core focus is on something that, in its infrastructure, does not vary other than the contrast between QQ in China and Facebook which conveniently gives us another way of trying to decide what is because of Facebook itself and what from other factors.
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BLOGSThe research questions that keep me up at night relate to how we self-present on SNSs, which are characterized by context collapse (i.e., flattening of multiple audiences into one your Friends List). Even if our offline and online serves arent inherently different, our self-presentation strategies vary based on our audience, and SNSs make it more difficult to know your audience and adapt accordingly.PAPERSMarwick STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0Openness as a virtue-In Web 2.0 discourse, transparency is highly valued for its contribution to accountability, freedom, and participation….Similarly, self-disclosure [via publicity: the strategic promotion of self-provided information] is framed as a way to positively live the principle of openness in everyday life….If everyone reveals personal information, nobody can be discriminated against and culture will change for the better…. Idealizing openness implies that there should be no difference in self-presentation regardless of circumstance. This is a particular definition of authenticity which suggests that an honest and forthright person will be who they ‗really are‘ regardless of who is listening. Of course, this does not reflect the realities of how people present themselves to manage impressions (Goffman 1959; Leary and Kowalski 1990; Banaji and Prentice 1994). People present themselves differently based on characteristics of the audience, such as friendship ties (Tice et al. 1995), status differentials (Leary and Kowalski 1990, 38), and racial differences (Fleming and Rudman 1993). Even in difficult circumstances, people are skilled at using gesture, language, and tone to manage impressions face-to-face (Banaji and Prentice 1994). The idea of a single, ―authentic self, although it carries a great deal of currency in contemporary American culture, is a social construction, and at odds with actual social practice- Promoting transparency also implies that privacy is only necessary for people who have something to hide [BUT] Virtually everyone who advocates openness in their personal lives is talking about selective revealing rather than making everything about themselves available… Daniel Solove, Priscilla Regan, and Helen Nissenbaum all argue that conceptualizing privacy as secrecy ignores the myriad of other reasons that privacy is necessary-Pundits and entrepreneurs frame openness as socially beneficial, but the discourse of Web 2.0 promotes a particular kind of openness and transparency because it drives profit to Web 2.0 companies, not to further freedom and democracy.Marwick STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0Self presentation/impression managementIdealizing openness implies that there should be no difference in self-presentation regardless of circumstance. This is a particular definition of authenticity which suggests that an honest and forthright person will be who they ‗really are‘ regardless of who is listening. Of course, this does not reflect the realities of how people present themselves to manage impressions (Goffman 1959; Leary and Kowalski 1990; Banaji and Prentice 1994). People present themselves differently based on characteristics of the audience, such as friendship ties (Tice et al. 1995), status differentials (Leary and Kowalski 1990, 38), and racial differences (Fleming and Rudman 1993). Even in difficult circumstances, people are skilled at using gesture, language, and tone to manage impressions face-to-face (Banaji and Prentice 1994). The idea of a single, ―authentic‖ self, although it carries a great deal of currency in contemporary American culture, is a social construction, and at odds with actual social practice.Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications - boyd 2010Self presentation/impression managementOn social network sites, people’s imagined – or at least intended – audience is the list of Friends that they have chosen to connect with on the site. This is who participants expect to be accessing their content and interacting with them. And these are the people to whom a participant is directing their expressions. By serving as the imagined audience, the list of Friends serves as the intended public. Of course, just because this collection of people is the intended public does not mean that it is the actual public. Yet, the value of imagining the audience or public is to adjust one’s behavior and self-presentation to fit the intended norms of that collective.
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PAPERS~GOOD~Are social networks technologically embedded? How networks are changing today with changes in communication technologyTools of communication provide new resources to negotiate individual timetablesand social exchanges, making it possible to adjust roles, hierarchies and forms of power in relational economies. We argue that the general change observed over the last 20 years is from established roles to mutual reachability. The traditional communication model, where tele-communication is used to connect people who are physically separated from each other, is gradually being supplanted with a new pattern of “connected presence”. In this new mode other people are telephoned, “SMSed”, seen and mailed in alternated way and small gestures or signs of attention are at least as important as the message content itself…… we argue that at the levels of the construction and experience of social ties, the nature and the role of the mediation technologies that are used to support them matter. In that sense, social ties and social networks are embedded in a web of interaction-supporting artefacts……. Sociability is made up from the flow of exchanges people maintain with those to whom they are tied. We see sociability as having three distinct poles: (i) social networks (sets of social ties with various possible metrics); (ii) exchanges, that are performed through a succession of embodied gestures and language acts (these may take a number of different formats or genres, even within one medium—as has been shown by research on writing, the telephone, or on the forms of interactional reciprocity); and (iii) the various technical means which are available at a given moment of historical time and which mediate actual interactions. Each of these poles poses constraints on interaction, and provides resources for it, and thus each shapes the various forms relational practices may take……………. In this new pattern technologies of communication (in particular mobile phones) are not just substitutes for face-to-face interaction, but constitute a new resource for constructing a kind of connected presence even when people are physically distant…………….. In a sense, any type of mediated contact does the job of sustaining social bonds in the regime of “connected presence”. ICTs then need not be seen as a surrogate for the face to face: physical encounters, letters, phone calls, e-mails and SMS may share the same positive value of bridging seemingly unbearable experiences of absence and silence, however fleeting those might appear to be. [also see jenny cool]….. The calls are so frequent that they act as reminders of the other’s presence. It is less necessary in this mode that the messages should manifest commitment to a strong tie: the reciprocal commitment is visible in the very frequency of the calls and messages which coordination of shared activities make necessary….. For themore numerous communications become, the more frequently people have to interrupt theactivity they are currently engaged in to fit in with another cadence. The risk is that ties withfriends will become institutionalized in the form of expectations and mutual obligations tobe constantly available electronically. Mediated sociability currently seems to be counteringthis risk of control and preserving playful pleasure and improvisation in the interpersonaltie by making greater use of less intrusive means of communication. Thus in the last 10years there has been rapid growth of telephone and electronic contacts, but an even morerapid growth of message systems…..BUT a new way of living together of connected presence: Empty mailboxes seem to contradict the idea that there is an inner sense of commitment [on the part of the other]……. Phatic communication is spreading, for it constitutes a key resource in the management of quasi-continuously connected relationships. Rather than constructing shared experience by recounting small and large events of the day or the week, one sends short expressive messages, giving one’s sensations or reactions to some event, an emotion, or perhaps asking the person to express themselves in this way….. But it is the repetition of these little messages, which maintain the tie, filling in absence via asort of incantation…. a “connected” mode of managing their relationship via their use of e-mail….. “connected” presence, in its emotional and expressive register especially, exploits non-dialogic means of communication (voice messages, electronic message systems, SMS), which signal a demand for attention but allow a deferred response…..Meaning of absence and presence as a subject of anthropological studySocial Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications - boyd 2010-Comments are not simply a dialogue between two interlocutors, but a performance of social connection before a broader audience.Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications - boyd 2010-The affordances of networked publics [PRSS] introduce new dynamics with whichparticipants must contend. Many of these dynamics are not new, but they were never sogenerally experienced. Analyzing how broadcast media transformed culture, JoshuaMeyrowitz (1985) articulated that the properties of media change social environmentsand, thus, influence people and their behavior. He examined how broadcast media’sability to rework scale reconfigured publics, altered the roles that people play in society,complicated the boundaries between public and private, collapsed distinct social contexts,and ruptured the salience of physical place in circumscribing publics. Just as many of theaffordances of networked media parallel those of broadcast media, many of the dynamicsthat play out in networked publics are an amplification of those Meyrowitz astutelyrecognized resulting from broadcast media. Three dynamics play a central role in shapingnetworked publics:Invisible audiences: not all audiences are visible when a person is contributingonline, nor are they necessarily co-present.Collapsed contexts: the lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makesit difficult to maintain distinct social contexts.The blurring of public and private: without control over context, public andprivate become meaningless binaries, are scaled in new ways, and are difficultto maintain as distinct.-in an environment where following the content of one’s friends involvesthe same technologies as observing the follies of a celebrity, individuals find themselvesembedded in the attention economy, as consumers and producers.- Persistence and replicability also complicate notions of “authenticity,” as acts andinformation are not located in a particular space or time and, because of the nature of bits,it is easy to alter content, making it more challenging to assess its origins and legitimacy.- While there are limits to how many people can be in one physical space at a time,networked publics support the gathering of much larger groups, synchronously andasynchronously…. In essence, networked media allows anyone to be a media outlet (Gillmor, 2004) and with this comes the potential of scalability… Although networked publics support mass dissemination, the dynamics of “media contagion” (Marlow, 2005) show that what spreads depends on the social structure underlying the networked publics. In other words, scalability is dependent on more than just the properties of bits.- In some ways, teens are more prepared to embrace networked publics because many are coming of age in a time when networked affordances are a given. Adults, on the other hand, often find the shifts brought on by networked publics to be confusing and discomforting because they are more acutely aware of the ways in which their experiences with public life are changing
~GOOD~IRL (IN REAL LIFE): BREAKING DOWN THE BINARY OF ONLINEVERSUS OFFLINE SOCIAL INTERACTION Stephanie Tuszynski When considering the two concepts of real and virtual, too many people placethem on opposite sides of a wall (binary opposition), when in fact they are on differentends of a spectrum………… Sitting in a coffee house eating, drinking and speaking directly toanother person would count as "real" interaction and also would be privileged as themost valuable of all forms of interaction between people. The sense is that thisencounter is direct because the two people are in the same physical location andcommunicating without any machines in between them. However, this encounter is stillmediated. The two people are using spoken language and body language, both of whichmediate the interaction……. While this kind of face-to-face activity may be less mediated thanonline interaction, it remains on the continuum of mediated social activity. Indeed, theonly way to remove all forms of mediation from human interaction would be a directpsychic link between people, which would remove the need for representative symboland sound systems known as language…….. Supposedly at the other end of the spectrum would be an anonymous interchange of words, either in email or on a online forum, where the two participants know nothing about each other besides their handles, avatars or email addresses. This is a purelyvirtual interaction in that it is entirely mediated through machines. Differences do existin the ways these two encounters work. I conceive of the contrast to primarily rest oninvoluntary information, a concept similar to Erving Goffman's notions of "expressions given" and "expressions given off.".....EASA 2010 The Mutual Co-construction of Online and Onground in Cyborganic: Making An
Ethnography of Networked Social Media Speak to Challenges of the Posthuman by Jenny Cool
- Technologically mediated sociality brings implications for the human subject (so that it may be called posthuman to fit with disturbances to the inherited human by eg feminists) becasue of distortions of time space and being in the cultural worlds of CMC (raising questions of virtuality, materiality and embodiment) ie "digital intrermediation can reconfigure experiences and imaginaries of place, identity and embodiement without dematerializing these as sites of subjectivity, or rendering them obsolete as sources of anthropological insight"
Configurable sociality using the internet in the above and also the below:
Technology and Transnationalism: on the Ambivalence of Belonging by Burrell
Re: Ghanaian immigrants not forming a monolithic transnatonal identity and not using tech in this quest. Quite the opposite: if you look at individuals they also actively try to connect with others for various reasons eg self realisation/financial/status beyond what a narrow transnatonal community can offer and use technology for this purpse to expand their social space (and sometimes avoid using tech if they want to get away from aspects of transnational community eg requests for support)
Religion 2002 Maxwell Virtual Religion in Context
- Existing forms may actually be strenghtened, citing Woolgar 'five rules of virtuality'
CCSJ 2010 Marshall – Ambiguity, Oscillation and Disorder: Online Ethnography and the Making of CultureThe internet, and these ongoing boundary ambiguities, draws attention to a central and rarely studied feature of modern life namely the temporary and voluntary associations that people form which may be separated, to some extent, from their daily lives. These can include: ‘support groups’, religious meetings, fitness classes, a group of fellow clubbers, sporting associations and so on. The people a person meets at these various groups may be kept quite separate from each other and, say, from their work life…As it seems impossible to describe a person’s social life by observing their behaviour in one place, we have to recognise these other places, and may try and find out about them as part of our ethnographyAffinity Spaces Gee 2005When I get to affinity spaces, I will argue that they capture one characteristically modern and important form of social affiliation, one that can fruitfully be compared and contrasted with other forms… what people have an affinity with (or for) in an affinity space is not first and foremost the other people using the space, but the endeavor or interest that around which the space is organized,…This is why the sorts of romantic notions of people bonding to each other that are carried by the term “community” do not apply here. In affinity spaces people “bond” first and foremost to an endeavor or interest and secondarily, if at all, to each other.PERSONAL NETWORKS: THE INTERTWINING OF TIES, INTERNET AND GEOGRAPHY-space continues to be important in that many social interactions are rooted in such concrete local arenas as families, neighbourhoods, schools and voluntary associations. In the United States, the number of online-only ties is typically very small – less than ten (Wang and Wellman, 2010) out of an average network size of about 600 (Zheng, Salganik and Gelman, 2006)-Wellman and Wortley use a metaphor of shopping at ‘specialized interpersonal boutiques’ rather than at general stores (1990:583). The internet is a broad platform of diverse information that caters to the specialized nature of modern community. Special interest groups and listservs bind people with specialized interests in a common framework within which important conversations and resources are exchanged (Rainie and Wellman, 2012)- a network society was already in existence before the internet. But with theinternet and social networking sites such as Facebook, the number and type of nonlocal networks have surged. The proliferation of networks points not to a decline of community as feared, but the rise of a liberated form of community increasingly defined by social rather than spatial accessibility (Hogan, 2008). - both geography and ICTs – working alone and/or together – shape patterns of association between modern individuals (Takhteyev, Gruzd and Wellman, 2012).
BLOGS
Networked individualismThanks to the Internet, we are more increasingly able to connect with people with whom we share affinities rather than people we happen to live next to ….This is what sociologist Barry Wellman calls “networked individualism”: instead of being completely confined to historical “boxes” of family history and geography, we can open up to constructed ties of interests and affinities.….all Social is social, but not all social is Social….It is easier to swallow massive changes to interpersonal norms,expectations, and behaviors when such shifts are repackaged and presented as the delightful idea of being “social” with “friends.”…/… “social” pertains to pretty much anything that transpires between two or more people (directly or indirectly; on- or offline). Given that we are indeed social creatures, and that much of what we conceptualize as personal and individual is actually shaped and influenced by the societies in which we live (for example, our taste preferences, emotions,etc), “social” pertains to nearly every component of our day-to-day lives.Yet startup scenesters, digital media moguls, and Internet Cool Kids (to name just a few) use the word “Social” to reference a much more specific portion of human sociality…behavior is Social to the degree that it is easily databaseable….Social (capital-S) aims to reshape sociality in ways that direct as much interaction as possible through the specific channels of digital media, in order to harness that interaction for commercial purposes….Silicon Valley Capitalists would love to remold sociality around the logic of Social, in order to reroute as much social interaction as possible through trackable digital channels. To an extent, they’re already succeeding. Digital dualists may claim that only offline things are “real,” but young people seeking housemates from pools of strangers (for instance) have started to demand Facebook profiles as proof that applicants are “real.What Is the Social in Social Media? Geert Lovink- The conceptual leap relevant here concerns the move from groups, lists, forums, and communities to the emphasis on empowering loosely connected individuals in networks. This shift happened during the neoliberal 1990s and was facilitated by growing computing power, storage capacity, and internet bandwidth, as well as easier interfaces on smaller and smaller (mobile) devices. This is where we enter the Empire of the Social.-new environment not entirely amenable to Baudrillard’s analysis of the social disappearing in face of subject as consumer, because people are exchanging communication together ie new media not passive- The social is no longer a reference to society—an insight that troubles us theorists and critics who use empirical research to prove that people, despite all their outward behavior, remain firmly embedded in their traditional, local structures.-institutions try to co-opt but futile-the social no longer about the masses in person or social agglomerations: are 19th/20th C theories applicable?-The social now just means us jockeying in a social constellation of contacts hosted by computers- a graph [cameron marlow’s day job?]-Finding the Other (ok deeply human) and building ephemeral connection around forgettable insubstantial exchange is typical activity (characteristically youthful)-Social media superseded online communities and now means whatever's trending: added to interactivity and content upload is viral distribution and constant feedback.-Also social life reduced to sharing and status updates in the software cages of fbook and google. -This is criticised as Turkle does but misses true potential of old fashioned unruly (physical) social to subvert-The social today is defined by code to connect people to data to people and the activity of constant monitoring of stats and status game of building connectionsWhat data I’ve seen makes a strong case that social isolation is increased by factors like suburbanization, long-commutes, long work hours, decline of community and civic institutions, etc—not online sociality. As I argued, what data we do have argues that social media (and Facebook) works against this. I speculate that there are three reasons: 1. correlation of rise of isolation and rise of social media use made causal, 2. contrast with and under appreciation of meaningful interactions possible with social media and that it’s verifiably not zero sum3. Cyberasociality is the inability or unwillingness of some people to relate toothers via social media as they do when physically-present. (Tufekci, 2010)… [like language/reading] We need to convert mediated-interaction to the same kind of unmediated interaction version we have to get evoke a similar reaction to “present in-person” socialitySocial groomingthe vast majority of Twitter users are there to maintain social relations, keep up with friends and acquaintances, follow high-profile users, and otherwise connect. It’s all about shared intimacy that is of no value to a third-party ear who doesn’t know the person babbling.social media is propelling transitions and disruptions in the composition of social networks. Increasingly, what used to be a given (social ties you inherited by the virtue of where you lived or your familial ties) is now a task (social ties based on shared interests and mutual interest). Surely, there will be new winners and losers. None of this, however, indicates a flight from human contact.PolySocial RealityCOMMENT: if someone is walking down the street whilst talking on a mobile phone, their body is in ‘x,’ the physical location. However, they are also connecting to ‘not x,’ the network, an ethereal location where their conversation is taking place. They appear to conceptually be in two locations, both ‘x’ and ‘not x’ simultaneously. This is the condition that we suggest when indication that simultaneously “x” can equal “not x.” We refer to our notion of (‘x’ = ‘not x’), as a PoSR as it contains a social experience that combines both physical location and virtual non-physical location referents.1. The sharing you see on sites like Facebook and Twitter is the tip of the 'social' iceberg. We are impressed by its scale because it's easy to measure.2. But most sharing is done via dark social means like email and IM that are difficult to measure.3. According to new data on many media sites, 69% of social referrals came from dark social. 20% came from Facebook.4. Facebook and Twitter do shift the paradigm from private sharing [long extant, pre social networks/social media] to public publishing. They structure, archive, and monetize your publications [they didn’t introduce sharing per se and aren’t responsible for most of it now]‘Devolved friendship’s attendant depersonalization’-my inability to read frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasts as friendship-labor (or as “personal social interaction”) in and of themselves, is that these forms lack clear mutual acknowledgement. The problem is that they’re depersonalized, not that they’re digitally mediated…[though] I can’t come up with an analogous non-digital form of depersonalized friendship-labor.When we consider the lopsided rationalization of ‘sharing’ and ‘shared with,’ as well as the depersonalization of frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, what becomes clear is this: the social media deck is stacked in such a way as to make being ‘a self’ easier and more rewarding than being ‘a friend.’….it is now up to us to turn our friends’ generalized broadcasts into personal interaction, we can never know how many opportunities for connection slip by and are lost when we get behind in sifting through our streams. = FOMO ‘Fear of Missing Out’Producing generalised content is easier than sorting others’ in order to find a material to engage with (ie producing addresses FOBM – Fear of Being Missed)We may be prosumers of social media, but the reward structures of social media sites encourage us to place greater emphasis on our roles as share-producers—even though many of us probably spend more time consuming shared content than producing it. There’s a reason for this, of course; the content we produce (for free) is what fuels every last ‘Web 2.0’ machine, and its attendant self-centered sociality is the linchpin of the peculiarly Silicon Valley concept of “Social”Obviously there’s a whole lot more to friendship than sharing links, songs…[but]…It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that the affordances of social media platforms might also affect how we see friendship and our obligations as friends most generally.'Mediated communication channels' : summary of Stefana Broadbent TED lecturere her observations e.g. intimate channels extended into work, the fact that we culturally place diff types of people in intimacy circles dep on our culture but that overall we only have close contact/reciprocal relationship with a few, change in nature/content of convo if now using Skype for 40 minutes every day not phone 10 mins a week (e.g. can share experience not summarise it), levels of intimacy diff channels allow (e.g. a switch will happen between SMS and IM not to another channel as writing best for xyz), types of interaction eg microcoordination 27%. She is looking for patterns in relationship/channel choice based on characteristics. Applying theories eg attachment theory, pragmatics, politeness theoryAlso see Danny Miller on Polymedia
BOOKS
~GOOD~
Boellsdorff 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life
Computer mediated virtuality throws humanity “off-balance”. Notions change e.g. privacy
An Extreme reading of Facebook, Miller 2010 Foundational to Western social science has been the belief that human societies exhibit aslow but constant trajectory away from what are taken to be an earlier state in which people lived in communities, based around close kinship ties and devotion to immediate social relationships. Whether starting from the writings of Tonnies, Durkheim or Simmel, social scientists have assumed that under such conditions we do not study people just as individuals, but rather each person can be understood as a site of social networking. This became the premise for the development of anthropology. With its emphasis on kinship, any given person was seen primarily through their place in such a network,.…an assumption that older forms of tight social networking colloquially characterised by words such as community or neighbourhood are increasingly replaced by the dominance of individuals and individualism. My own recent book The Comfort of Things based on a single street in London gave strong confirmation to such arguments, since households proved to be largely detached from those who lived nearby and often from all other forms of community or wider social groupings…/…[PLUS] Research by myself and Don Slater was among the first to show that that while the internet may be hugely important in other ways the evidence that it was leading to a `reversal’ in the macro social change towards individualism was very limited… just because one could find extensive material on the internet that claimed to represent some sort of community was no evidence in itself…./…[BUT]… what happens when social networking matures into a facility increasingly popular with older people and in countries other than the US…The research in Trinidad demonstrates that there really is a case for saying that SNS reverse certain key trends presumed by most of social science…. What had become regarded as the natural attrition of relationships is reversed. Previously we tended to lose touch with groups we once knew well whobecome replaced by new sets of friends. But almost inevitably the first action in using Facebook seems to be the resurrection of all lost relationships… to resurrect what might be seen as a more traditional devotion to close social relationships that do come close to classical ideas of community.[I'm not so sure Miller characterises the meta shift to individualism well: it, Wellman’s version of networked individualism at least, just suggests people have been forming relationships with non-geographically proximate people and based on interests, a trend accelerated by the internet. Ie not that people are leading atomised lives: ie Miller creates a bit of a straw man]- She contrasts her experience with that of a friend who lives in a much more typical settlement within Trinidad…For her friend there simply isn’t enough actual community. She is frustrated at how little she knows or interacts with the people who live close to her. So her experience of Facebook does the opposite. It helps create a bit more social intensity in a situation where people have an insufficiency of direct communication and contact with each other…. Facebook has all the contradictions found in a community. You simply can’t have both closeness and privacy….This is one of the ironies of the huge emphasis on the loss of privacy that we find in journalist’s accounts. It’s the same public discourse that goes on and on about how we have lost neighbourhood and community and everyone is so individualistic and lonely. Well if you really do want to have more community and less isolated individualism then that means trading privacy. But popular discourse wants it both ways,- So the most important thing Facebook provides is a means to complement the offline version of community and to live with those same contradictions…. the best way to understand Facebook is in relation to anthropological studies of close-knit and intense society, not as part of sociology’s encounter with contemporary individualism and the kind of networking envisaged by Castells8. Facebook seems like the end of what previously was the natural attrition of social networks. It brings all those who were once disregarded back into the frame of current regard, such as lost kin and school friends. Equally important is the ability of Facebook to bring back Diaspora populations and ameliorate the effect of their residence in different countries…. Facebook is six years old, but if it continues on its currently trajectory and a billion people use it for several hours a day mainly for actual social networking, with the resultant intensification of those social networks, then we will see a kind of shift from sociology to anthropology that we never dared expect. This is perhaps the most profound challenge to the basic presuppositions of social science for a century.
Absent presence
See Gergen in 'Perpetual contact. Mobile communication, private talk, public performance', 2002
- ETHICOMP 2011 has the overall theme of "The social impact of social
computing".
Wang et al (2007 p79) explain, "With the advance of Internet and Web
technologies, the increasing accessibility of computing resources and
mobile devices, the prevalence of rich media contents, and the ensuing
social, economic, and cultural changes, computing technology and
applications have evolved quickly over the past decade. They now go
beyond personal computing, facilitating collaboration and social
interactions in general. As such, social computing, a new paradigm of
computing and technology development, has become a central theme across
a number of information and communication technology (ICT) fields. It
has become a hot topic attracting broad interest from not only
researchers but also technologists, software and online game vendors,
Web entrepreneurs, business strategists, political analysts, and digital
government practitioners, to name a few."
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BOOKS
~GOOD~
Mandiberg: The Social Media Reader
The Oxford handbook of Internet psychology By Adam N. Joinson, Katelyn McKenna, Tom Postmes CH9From psychology povHow online community can be described as such: from the social network pov ie free from geog constraints. Longstanding fear of losing interpersonal ties (Gesselschaft/gemeinschaft - Tonnies in 50s). Social network perspective means that find out about nature and pattern of interrelations B4 calling something a community. To be a community it must at least offer added value and some kind of affect and social capital
PAPERS
boyd, danah. 2009. "Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?" Microsoft Research Tech Fest,
Redmond, Washington, February 26.
- Social media since cave paintings. Comms and sociality among 1st internet apps. What Web 2.0 means for business, users and techies. Facebook and Myspace history. Network effects not features most important adoption driver. For youth a contiumuum with socialising ie hanging out and status - micro exchanges vip social grooming, confimring friendships. For adults a social utility/communicating with past - collapsed contexts awkwardness. Twitter public, for adults - teens prefer private or those with power can see ie social factors behind adoption. UNintended effects eg powerpoint: iterate with users. 5 properties of social media making them diff than unmediated sociality, with an effect on engagement - persistence, replicability across media, search, scalability (or not!), (de)localability = invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, blurring of public and private. "Social media is here to stay. Now we just have to evolve with it."
GOOD
Boyd 2008 Taken Out of Context American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics
- from p105 pdf. Social networK not KING sites as amalg etc. Diff to social media tools which includes email, but grew out of.....teens primarily use social network sites in ways that reinforce and replicate unmediated social dynamics...Not only do social media extend the individual (as per Marshall McLuhan [1964]), but social network sites also appear to extend the social context and peer culture.
Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications - boyd 2010-Social network sites are similar to many other genres of social media and onlinecommunities that support computer-mediated communication, but what defines thisparticular category of websites is the combination of features that allow individuals to (1)construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list ofother users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list ofconnections and those made by others within the system (boyd and Ellison, 2007).
Convergence 2008 Boyd: Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence
People relish personal information because it is the currency of social hierarchy and connectivity.
BLOGS
Our position in a network and the structure of the network dictates transmission of norms and behaviours, even moods (starts with reference to obesity)
http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks.html
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/egypt/110218/malcolm-gladwell-social-media-facebook-twitter
Gladwell demeaning twitter re: egypt uprising - opponents pointing out tech and soc shape eachother
- Pfaffenberg ARA 1992 Social Anthropology of Technology
ST systems include eg water temples in Bali, overlooked by pure anthro or econ analysis. Basically you must have symmetry if you are going to blame social factors for system faiures according to the Standard View of technology, you have to recognise that culture is invovled in defining the very needs that give rise to particular technology (rather than the resultant technology being the inevitable outcome of functional needs). ST systems are those that have resisted dissociation (Latour). Ritual should not be discounted from socail anth analyses of tech becasue not 'effective' as it organises labour/social rels like a machine does. Technological drama (a la turner) is the political process that sees adaptation to or resistance/replacement of prior dominant which goes hand in hand with rival discourses. Rupture from tools to machines [and to digital] is not the case - old ST systems were just as complex and capable of alienation and new ones as capable of being basis of self-formation (Miller)
Ito in networked publics
As computers have moved from being standalone boxes that were “computing machines” or “models of the mind” to being networked devices for human communication, our popular understandings of computers have also changed. We look to the online world as a source of sociality and culture, and designers of new online systems recognize that they are engaged in social engineering as well as technical engineering.....More recently, with the advent of portable networked technologies such as the mobile phone and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, as well as location-based networked systems, we are also being forced to recognize information systems’ relation to the materiality of diverse objects and places.
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PAPERS~GOOD~Marwick STATUS UPDATE: CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY AND SELF-BRANDING IN WEB 2.0social status, one‘s position in a social hierarchy, which is present in virtually every human association. Status may be reflected in skill, credentials, reputation, social or cultural capital, resources, or cultural competency (Malaby 2009, chap. 1). The desire for status motivates social participation and affects how people present themselves to others (Turner, 1988). Because status primarily involves how one is seen by the world, it is almost entirely determined by public display and self-presentation (Elliott 2004; De Botton 2005). This is no different in internet technologies. Status is omnipresent online and a major motivator for online activity (Lampel and Bhalla 2007). Because online self-presentation inherently involves representing oneself digitally, online identity presentation may be more self-conscious than its face-to-face equivalent and therefore more instrumental at seeking status. I found that all social media technologies demonstrate status, either through features built into the application (status affordances) or through user-created mechanisms that stem from interaction (emergent mechanisms)…… I offer a comprehensive account of how status operates in the social media scene, identifying three online self-presentation techniques (that is, life-streaming, micro-celebrity, and self-branding) which have emerged in response to social media‘s popularity. I argue that they are linked to commodified notions of the self drawn from branding, celebrity culture, and neoliberal ideas of self-governance. Social media promotes an individualistic view of technology use which encourages and rewards focus on the self and competition with others….Self-presentation becomes a strategic way to display and garner status, and tangibly translates into material rewards. That Web 2.0 has given rise to this sort of self-presentation should not be considered obvious or inevitable; in fact when computer-mediated communication first emerged, it was theorized as a utopian playground that would break down identity constructions (Turkle 1995; Stone 1996)…………… Status increases up to a point with the ability to attract and attain attention online. The ability to position oneself successfully in a competitive attention economy becomes a marker of reputation
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Definition: That the actual effect and social use of x is determined/fixed by the technical possibilities x allows forPAPERS~GOOD~FI Davis 2012 Social Media and Experiential Ambivalence- At once fearful and dependent, hopeful and distrustful, our contemporary relationship with technology is highly ambivalent…I work to both diagnose and illustrate this sense of ambivalence…/….technological ambivalence is rooted primarily in the deeply embedded moral prescription to lead a meaningful life, and a related uncertainty about the role of new technologies in the accomplishment of this task. On the one hand, technology offers the potential to augment or even enhance personal and public life. On the other hand, technology looms with the potential to supplant or replace real experience. I examine these polemic potentialities in the context of personal experiences, interpersonal relationships, and political activism. I conclude by arguing that the pervasive integration and non-optionality of technical systems amplifies utopian hopes, dystopian fears, and ambivalent concerns in the contemporary era….I approach the debate from an experiential perspective, looking at the stories that people tell about themselves and their relationships with technologies….- Facebook as fieldsite (though shorthand for all devices, services etc. that it acts as hub for)- Ambivalence is not:Utopic: liberation/progress for world, physical bodies, social and emotional lives Kurzweil, Turkle, Gingrich (true public sphere), Negroponte, now Zuckerberg (open and connected world)OR Dystopic: dehumanising. Foucault applied, Lessig: freedom. Bowling Alone (Putnam), Alone Together (Turkle): Interpersonal connection, community loss not only in spite of but largely because of technology. Even medicalised (Golub re: moral panic in China=addiction clinics: equated to opium! Threat to bodies/minds and family/society moral order)- Ambivalence of technology: Artifacts: STS. Indeterminacy of artifacts: Actor Network. Schraube, Massumi….The next step is to understand how the ambivalence of technology affects experiential ambivalence with technology…./…To make sense of their experiences, participants articulate ambivalence by drawing skillfully and simultaneously on polemic metaphors of self-control and deserved enjoyment. Liu concludes: “The internet is not merely a technological object, but it serves as part of a web of values, relationships, symbols and routines that make up social life. As such, it is unavoidably loaded with competing meanings, which are reflected by the different, and sometimes conflicting, notions about what constitutes ‘proper’ use.”…. Like Liu, Elliott’s notion of technological ambivalence is rooted not only in an uncertainty about the effects of the technology, but also in the relationship between the technological object and living a “good” or “moral” life…([Anyway], Moral tenets are highly complex, and often, contradictory—increasingly so in a “postmodern” era of relativist values)- We look now at how technological ambivalence manifests experientially in personal experiences, interpersonal relationships, and political participation. 1) By personal experiences I mean how, as thinking and emotive beings, we experience our lives, and how social media affects this. Indeed, the moral actor works to remain engaged, appreciative of the moment, and tuned in to those with whom s/he shares it. The potentialities of social media both facilitate and threaten this engagement…. Participants therefore struggle to “find a balance” between keeping abreast and staying visible [via documentation], without losing themselves to a “virtual” world 2) As mediating devices, social media can connect and separate; conjoin and isolate. 3) “The Internet,” social scientists have discussed and debated its potential as a “public sphere”. Democratic participation is not only an established American “right” but indeed, a perceived moral “duty”(: debate re: whether social media beneficial for grass roots, multiple voices OR used to control)… social media can supplement or enhance political participation by providing a platform through which to share views and to learn from others, as well as a means to organize and document injustice (e.g., engage in “sousveillance”[53]). On the other hand, however, the ease with which users can deploy social media for political purposes (e.g., signing and sharing petitions) threatens to conflate activism with empty identity work, undermining democratic conversation and replacing it with narcissistic “slacktivism.”…tensions between action and identity work, organization and isolation, access and the façade of access, multiplicity of voice and a din of noise- the sharpness of this experiential ambivalence in light of social media’s pervasiveness. “non-optional system” (Haraway)BOOKSIto in Networked PublicsWhen writing about new technologies, it is tempting to focus on the technologies as the site of interest and the most decisive driver of change; however in this book we work actively against a technically determinist frame. One of the primary theoretical innovations of contemporary technology studies has been the recognition that technology does not stand apart as an external force, impacting society and culture. Rather, technologies are embodiments of social and cultural structures that in turn get taken up in new ways by existing social groups and cultural categories.[4] As Lawrence Lessig famously argues in the case of legal structures being embodied in technical architectures, law is code. Similarly, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have argued that information has a social life that structures its uptake and creation.[6]Virtual geographies: bodies, space and relationsBy Mike Crang, Phil Crang, Jon MaAnti-essentialist accounts of identity formation that stand independent of overarching structures eg comms, meaning that new idents are not the outcome of tech/social processes but identity formation has its own dynamicKallinikos, Jannis (2011) Governing through technology: information artefacts and social practice.An attempt to reconcile approaches to research which focus too much on technology and those which focus too much on social relations. Argues that both are flawed. To understand the technology properly, you need to move beyond the interface and unpack the black box, which e.g. starts to reveal that technology is not amoral, because of its provenance and that it structures social behaviours [Echoes of Lessig on architectures of control]VIDEOJohn Durham Peters: Two Cheers for Technological Determinism, PANEL IV: HISTORIES OF MATERIAL MEDIAVeblen: a technological determinist (in the way Marx is an economic determinist re: social change), but not in a simplistic way that critics assume. In fact, critics are the ones mainly using this term: no-one really supports it. McLuhan put technology in driving seat of social change and attracted criticism for it e.g. from Williams who said, from a Marxist point of view, that McLuhan was too simplistic and abstract, ignored agency and paid no attention to structural/moral issues. Ends in Latour subject/object distinction refutation and the argument that technology may not be causal of change but is implicated in it, so we should be more open to those accommodating itBLOGSmy favourite maxims about the role of technology in society is calledKranzberg's first law. He argues that "technology is neither good nor bad – nor is it neutral". It's irresponsible to assume that the tools being built just wander out into the world with only positive effects. Technology doesn't determine practice, but how a system is designed does matter. How systems are used also matters, even if those uses aren't what designers intended….[also]… it's often hard to talk in a nuanced way about the role that technology is playing in shifts that are already underway [e.g. culture of fear grounded in attention economy and role of social media in magnifying the latter]Tom Lord Comment
: “technology” is not merely the nuts and bolts that allow the transmission of messages but, instead, is how these bits and pieces are deployed in their historic specificity. It’s not surprising that a person can’t stop checking their email if, for example, their job requires them to respond rapidly to changes in certain commodity prices
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Technology as ‘the study of techniques'
- MC 2009 Coupaye_2009c_-_Ways_of_Enchanting_JMC
where technique is the study of interactions between people and the physical world, whether it is one’s own body or that of others, leading to a real or supposed transformation [here using method of operational sequences]
...It is very difficult to define or delimit a particular technique. For instance,
gardening in a given society of New Guinea is a technique. Building a fence
to protect a New Guinea garden from semi-domestic pigs is also a technique,
part of the first one. To sink a post in the ground, or to compress the ground
at the bottom of the post with one’s foot, heel, or toes, are also technological
actions that might be called ‘techniques’...
...technical acts are never isolated, but always part of an overall project...
five basic ‘components’ of technical systems:
action, objects, energy, matters and knowledge, which ‘interact together
to form a technology’...Complemented with dates, places,
durations, peoples, materials transformed and local terms of phases and
steps, the process is thus contextualized.
While focusing on the
artefact itself, the long yam, I had to avoid being confined to the purely
physical, mechanical, or material features if I wanted to understand the
series of values embedded within the process. Thus, it became clear that
all the actions and events intervening in the work session could potentially
be considered parts of the entire sequence. They could all be related
to the purpose of the actor, and be integrated in the complex network of
causes AND [given] reasons that surrounded the project.
...also need to consider what the ‘major narrative’ often considered as peripheral, and not essential to the
(material/physical) success of the operation eg sociality thus becomes an essential component to be
included in the process if you consider breaks where future use of garden discussed plus eg ritual actoins maximising the human essence that gets conveyed through cultivation to ensure success
sociality is thus seen as playing a technical role
in terms of efficacy, intimately associating material operations with human
interactions.
In my own use of the chaîne opératoire, the most tricky part was to find
the right balance between the etic position of the ‘technographer’, and
the emic perceptions of my Nyamikum friends. These emic elements tied
my initial sequence to other types of operations that, in some instances,
would be overlooked by a strictly ‘technicist’ approach, as not falling
within Western notions of technical operations.
emic reasons also provided
information about what ultimately constituted the artefact produced – information that would not have been apparent from just observing the
material result, nor directly from observation of the usage and engagements
with it once it was finished......At the highest level of description, it
allowed me to highlight the relationships between yam cultivation (both
long and short) and the annual yam ceremonies, called Waapi Saaki in
Nyamikum.
while the way in which operational sequences have
allowed me to investigate was nothing particularly new, from an anthropological
point of view, their application has highlighted the logical
connections made by Nyamikum people between different domains of
activity.
Agency, distributiveness and materiality in my case bring into focus
notions such as efficacy and intention, and the local way of relating action
and results. These notions offer a way of tempering the forms of linear
determinisms (material, social, environmental, historical) in which technical
activities have often been couched, and which constitute one of the
main reasons why technology has fallen out with anthropology
‘Technology’, as the study of techniques, implies the combination of
the objective study of how people do and make things, and the reasons
they have and give for doing and making them in particular ways, while
keeping in mind the place of materials (or materiality). We do things because
we intend to transform, create, adapt, or destruct.13 Thus, people’s
actions can be understood not only in terms of the objective, real, material
effect, but also in terms of their intentions and how both relate to one
another. People’s explanations force us to include in the picture dimensions
that go beyond the supposedly ‘mere’ technical aspects, or rather,
that invite us to extend our conception about what to include in technical
activities. We could then start thinking about how technical processes
can be seen to be related to our will to ‘enchant’ (or disenchant) the world.
- MC 2009 Coupaye_2009c_-_Ways_of_Enchanting_JMC
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Technology as a prism
- Culture + technology: a primer By Jennifer Daryl Slack, John Macgregor Wise
Received US view: Tech as defining the nature of human existence. Our tools have changed the nature of culture. Bronze age to digital age - different images of cultural life. Tech as means and end (the perfection of it) of our cultures eg industrial production in industrial age. Tech shapes our US culture and culture organised to give it starring role. The authors against this - culture not subservient: culture encompasses tech as culture = a 'whole way of life' (they are cultural theorists)
Religion 2002 Maxwell: Virtual religion
cyberspace religion may lead to better understanding of realworld
- Culture + technology: a primer By Jennifer Daryl Slack, John Macgregor Wise
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Virtual environments
http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20101108_337
OII Undergraduate Lecture Series. 5: Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual EnvironmentDiff techs for being there togehter VEs = techs giving you experience of being in another place other than one you are physically in 2 directions: a) VE/VR tech creating computer generated environments b) and videoconfernecing - people can talk as if in room Both are different ie in a) you can appear differently, fly or b) stuck with what camera captures (think bak about about this) Immersive enviroments, is face to face better than doing things virtually? Spatial tasks can be done just as well in virtual. Ok hype/hope cycles but main point is that a) is diff to b). Both have advantages but a and b are diff, with diff possibilities and constraints
- boyd, danah. 2009. "Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?" Microsoft Research Tech Fest,
Redmond, Washington, February 26.
- For the technology crowd, Web2.0 was about a shift in development and deployment. Rather than producing a product, testing it, and shipping it to be consumed by an audience that was disconnected from the developer, Web2.0 was about the perpetual beta. This concept makes all of us giggle, but what this means is that, for technologists, Web2.0 was about constantly iterating the technology as people interacted with it and learning from what they were doing. To make this happen, we saw the rise of technologies that supported real-time interactions, user-generated content, remixing and mashups, APIs and open-source software that allowed mass collaboration in the development cycle. We saw half-baked ideas hit the marketplace and get transformed by the users in an elegant dance with the developers. This was a critical disruption to the way in which technology was historically produced, one that rattled big companies, even those whose agile software development cycles couldn't cope with including all consumers as active participants in their process.
For the business crowd, Web2.0 can be understood as hope. Web2.0 emerged out of the ashes of the fallen tech bubble and bust. Scars ran deep throughout Silicon Valley and venture capitalists and entrepreneurs wanted to party like it was 1999. Web2.0 brought energy to this forlorn crowd. At first they were skeptical, but slowly they bought in. As a result, we've seen a resurgence of startups, venture capitalists, and conferences. At this point, Web2.0 is sometimes referred to as Bubble2.0, but there's something to say about "hope" even when the VCs start co-opting that term because they want four more years.
For users, Web2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends. For many users, direct communication tools like email and IM were used to communicate with one's closest and dearest while online communities were tools for connecting with strangers around shared interests. Web2.0 reworked all of that by allowing users to connect in new ways. While many of the tools may have been designed to help people find others, what Web2.0 showed was that people really wanted a way to connect with those that they already knew in new ways. Even tools like MySpace and Facebook which are typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks.
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