Digital Anthropology: 2019

Thursday, 17 October 2019

12. Revision & Further Study

Summary: Main point

In this course we have traced a general movement from the person, to kinship, to political organization action and 'influencers', to work in general. Over the weeks, the focus has become generally broader--from self to family to work and politics. But throughout, the emphasis has been on analyzing experiences of researchers who have lived with and studied people using digital technologies. In other words, we have taken an anthropological approach to digital technologies.

The anthropological approach to digital technologies is unique. It is different from the approach taken by a scholar from disciplines such as IT, Gender Studies, Visual Arts, Philosophy or English. If scholars from these fields studied the same topics we have in this course we would expect different (but equally valid) findings. What makes the anthropological approach unique is its method (participant-observation based research) and its approach (holism, relativism, comparison, etc.) and data (primarily qualitative with quantitative elements). Perhaps of more importance is something less tangible. Each discipline as a certain way of thinking and speaking; and anthropology certainly has its own. Whatever it emerges from, anthropology provides insights into certain aspects of digital technologies and does not consider others.

Significance: So what? The more things change, the more they don't?

That being said, what does anthropology tell us about digital technologies? The general picture is that nothing fundamental has changed with the emergence of digital technologies. Sure communication is now mediated digitally, but communication perforce must be mediated by language, spoken and written, in the first instance. Yes, we now have virtual communities, but communities have always been virtual in a sense. Selfies are all the rage now, but self-portraits have been a feature in, for example, Western art for at least half a millennium. We're still humans, we just have the internet now.

'Trolling' is often taken as an example of how terrible we humans have become thanks to the Internet. However, if we are to define trolling here as anonymous, hateful messages sent largely en masse, we can see historical precedent. For instance, from the mid-1800s to the 1940s Vinegar Valentines. These were anonymously sent cards Instead of a romantic message like "Will you be my Valentine," they came printed with insults. These would be sent to neighbors, colleagues, members of the local community and wanted or unwanted romantic partners.

A Vinegar Valentine from 1870 mocks the recipient,
suggesting he is superficial and would not make a good husband

Does this mean digital technologies have had no effect on us? Not entirely. Anthropologists have detected massive changes brought about by digital technologies, just not in the areas typically identified. These changes relate to the selfhood, the character of migration, the experience of family, the possibilities of political action and so on.

As Horst and Miller note, Anthropologists, like Malinowski, used to study 'tribal' societies (as they were mislabelled). We spent a long time with a group learning their customs and language. We incorrectly assumed that these 'tribal' societies were static and timeless. However, misguided the initial assumptions may have been, the long-term method we used to study our 'tribes' situated us well to study social and cultural change. What this means is that we can study the way technologies first appear (often in the midst 'moral panic' or at least angst about the youth, families and/or the fabric of society) and with careful attention and recording chart how they soon become normalized - just another part of everyday life. Possibly, in 2012, Horst and Miller were making the case for the continued relevance of Anthropology as a discipline - one that has been thoroughly demonstrated in the intervening years,

So, why study digital technologies? We study digital technologies because we study people and people use digital technologies. To put it another way, we study rituals, languages, and symbolic forms because our understanding of the world around us, of each other and of our relationships to each other are mediated by such things. Digital technologies are another way in which we mediate ourselves and our world. We use, shape and are shaped by digital technologies.

Further Research: What next?

Our intention is that by completing this course you have a grasp of Digital Anthropology suitable for an undergraduate student.

If your interest lies in all things digital, then the next step would be to study different approaches to the digital; you can gain great insights by looking at digital technologies from the standpoint of other disciplines; sociology, psychology, Information Technology, and so on.

For further study specifically in digital anthropology, you could turn to Tom Boellstorff's graduate course syllabus in Digital Anthropology.

As we three (Jo, Moni, & Nick) are all anthropologists, we commend our discipline to you. There are many fascinating areas of human life that we study outside of digital technologies. For instance, at La Trobe Uni we are currently offering some of the following:

CULTURE AND GLOBALISATION
TRANSFORMING LOCAL COMMUNITIES
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA
HUMAN AND ANIMAL ANTHROPOLOGY
CHILDHOOD, YOUTH & CULTURE
CORE ISSUES IN ANTHROPOLOGY
FOOD AND DRINK
ANTHROPOLOGY OF WITCH HUNTS
CULTURE & ENVIRONMENT
BODY, MIND & CULTURE
CULTURE, HEALTH & HEALING
KINSHIP, GENDER & MARRIAGE
DOING ANTHROPOLOGY:

Whichever path you take, we wish you well in your further studies.

Saturday, 24 August 2019

11. The Digital and the Future (Horst & Miller--"time" & "the future")

Welcome to Week 11. Your essential reading for this week is Miller & Horst's "The Digital and the Human". This blog gives you some materials to contextualize that reading.

Anthropologists are not really interested in whether there will be a utopia or dystopia. Instead, we try to understand how people think about the future. This ties into the idea of sociotemporality.

Sociotemporality: Anthropological Concepts

Cultural understandings of time

Our thinking and experience of time and space are deeply cultural. Conceptualizing this represents one of the hardest anthropological tasks. Scarcely anything appears more common-sense and as universal as the idea "I am here, now". Yet even Western philosophers have struggled to articulate what time consists in--how do we know for sure that time exists? And anthropologists have joined the chorus, showing that Western understandings of our existence in time are not universal. Rather, as this blog on different cultural understandings of time demonstrates, understandings of time differ between cultures. The concept "sociotemporality" might be used to describe the way experiences of time differ between cultures.

Dialectic

When dealing with time, an important associated concept to recognize is "dialectic", which is covered in this presentation. "Dialectic" is a notion can mean different things, including

A process that occurs when two people have a philosophical argument. If you argue that free will is impossible, I argue that it is possible, and we compromise: agreeing that our notion of "free will" is problematic and needs further work; we have a kind of dialectic according to the ancient Greek philosophers. I had an erroneous idea, you had an erroneous idea, and by arguing it out, we arrived at a mutual and superior.
A process that pushes the world and universe towards perfection. The dialectic according to Hegel all physical, social, or other processes in the universe is an underlying principle. They are all progressing towards perfection.
A historical process by which opposing forces are resolved into other opposing forces. The dialectic, according to Marxist thinkers, could be thought of as an equation (thesis + antithesis = synthesis). In ancient Rome, slaves (thesis) rebel against citizens (antithesis) in a revolution (synthesis) which provides a new kind of society, serfs, and lords in feudal Europe.
A process by which opposites merge. In this non-specific sense, the term dialectic simply means when you get two opposites and they somehow merge into something new or better. That's kind of how it is used by Horst & Miller in this week's reading.

(In usages 2 & 3, "dialectic" is related to that idea of the triumphant march of history, which was so popular in the 1800s and still has its adherents today. Some academics, particularly Marxists, see the events of the world occurring in accordance with a dialectic.)

Cultural visions of the Future

We can see that conceptions of time are culturally determined by looking at the idea of the future. Many of the above models of past time provide a model as to what will happen later or after. For Javanese aristocrats, the future would be an endless cycle, the goal of life being to dissociate or rise above suffering and joy. So bearing in mind the cultural nature of visions of the future, let's consider digital futures as anthropologists. In other words, let's consider 'digital futures' as a deeply cultural concept.

"Digital Futures"--dystopia and utopia

Digital 'futures': dystopia

What impact will digital technologies ultimately have on us? What changes and what stays the same? . Some visions are dystopic. This means that the visions are of a terrible future, for example, where robots take over the world or someone 'flicks the switch off '; the Internet collapses; everyone buys crossbows; chaos reigns.

Fictional stories like Orwell's Animal Farm or Atwood's The Handmaids Tale imagine dystopian futures

Around the 1990ss, many people were anxious about digital technologies. Some scholars even expressed fears about the digital world. As noted in Howcroft and Fitzgerald's 1998 overview, such dystopian scholarship feared that technology 'had the capacity to exacerbate human misery'. In summary, many dystopian scholars saw virtual or digital social connections as 'shallow, impersonal, and often hostile'. This fuelled one of their main fears that these new technologies would engender wide-spread alienation. Additionally, as discussed in our course section on work, there were also many worries over the internet's impact on our ability to learn and retain information. Anthropologists view these ideas not so much with skepticism but rather as culturally specific visions. Why?

Fears of new technologies
When a new technology arises, fears always seem to emerge. Maybe Douglas Adams sums up our attitude:

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things

New technology: automobiles and cinema

The cinema and cars, in the decades when they first became popular are an example of this fear of the new. Tales from the Deadball Era describes the perception that movies and cars were ruinous to the health of baseball players:

These days cars are both despised for their impact on health (obesity and pollution) and the environment. However, considerable fascination persists with new models, car shows, motor racing etc. attracting considerable interest. Thus, as the technology becomes incorporated it seems less threatening.

New technology: writing
We can even see the fear of new technology in relation to writing. Socrates feared the effects of writing on humanity. As Gershon shows, in "Unfriend my heart", an article we read in our section on selfhood and identity of this course:

Socrates' concern that writing, as a new technology, threatens intimacy in the ways it alters relationships and how knowledge circulates: "Writing parodies live presence; it is inhuman, lacks interiority, destroys authentic dialogue, is impersonal, and cannot acknowledge the individuality of its interlocutors; and it is promiscuous in distribution ... Communication must be soul-to-soul, among embodied live people, in an intimate interaction that is uniquely fit for each participant" (Peters 1999:47). Peters argues that for Socrates, disembodied dissemination undermines the care and attentiveness to personal perspectives with which ideas should be transmitted. Writing lacks, Socrates felt, attentiveness to one's audience that in-person communication encourages. As such, writing can be distributed willy-nilly without being anchored to a particular time and place. As Peters points out, Socrates' concerns about the havoc writing will wreak on intimacy resonates with the anxieties about intimacy that often seem to travel alongside the introduction of new communicative technologies (see also Marvin 1988, Gitelman 2006, Sconce 2000, Umble 1996).

Many of us now take writing technology for granted.

Anthropologists should understand Socrates' dilemma. Firstly, we value 'hanging out' face-to-face with people. We assume that there is something different about immediate contact. That's our method. On the other hand, our discipline exists mostly in writing. We mostly spread our ideas by writing. We place a high value on conferences, seminars, ethnographic films, and non-written forms of communication, but regardless we are wedded to writing primarily. So - technologies do impact human life but, as Horst & Miller show, in contradictory ways.

Digital futures: utopia

On the other hand, in another deeply cultural way of imagining the Internet and digital technologies the resembles a utopia--where technology improves humanity. Such utopian visions are often made in big claims by Internet 'visionaries' and futurologists.

Anthropologist Wesch presented an "Anthropology of YouTube". This presentation, posted on YouTube and garnering more than 2 million views, might be the most famous example of anthropology in decades:

We could see Wesch's view as part of a larger school of Internet Visionaries. Early internet 'visionaries' advanced an idealistic and utopian vision of what the Web might mean for human connections and relations. It would be anarchy (in the positive sense!): freedom, self-expression, and sharing.

The future of the Digital: summary
In summary, From the 1990s to the 2000s, scholars, commentators, pundits, cultural critics, maybe even your dad, thought of the Internet in contradictory terms. Some believed that digital technologies democratized access to information thus allowing a new era of political action and involvement. Class, race, gender distinctions would break down. We'd be uncoupled from offline divisions that racked humanity. We were heading for Utopia! Others believed that digital technologies brought out the worst in us - anonymity allowed  allowed for bigotry, hatred, chauvinism to expressed without repercussion.

Analyzing digital futures
Miller treats these visions as deeply cultural:

Digital anthropology therefore has to contend with the way culture itself has grown in scale and form, including new dreams and new nightmares about who we are becoming, and who or what should be regarded as modern or traditional
It is no coincidence that Miller's article has an image of people using 'smartphones':

This image, from Miller's article, seems in line with Miller's vision of the internet

So if Miller analyzed this evocative image of an exciting new ethereal technological world...

(image from: https://teachingandlearningindigitalworldweb.wordpress.com/)

...he would treat the above image as a deeply cultural way of understanding the digital and not necessarily the reality of the internet.

How are the two images different?

The first image is more like how Miller conceives of the digital world. One reason for this might be that there are people in the picture. As can also be seen in the "Introduction" to the book he co-edited with Horst, Miller argues that not much has really changed with the growth of digital technologies. The main reading for the section is Horst and Miller "Introduction". If you would like, you can also read my summary of Horst & Miller's chapter.

Internet of Things: Dystopian fears, Utopian hopes

The Internet of Things (IoT) is another topic that is often described in dystopian or utopian terms. In the 'Internet of things', things around the house and in our lives (fridges, cars, sprinkler systems) are connected to each other through the Internet. These gadgets form a networked assemblage of uniquely identified devices able to transfer data without human interaction. For example, this polished and positive ad for Google home demonstrates an imagined near-future in which the internet of things is fully integrated into our everyday home lives:

Though not all-encompassing, another way to think about the Internet of Things is that it can refer to a network of 'smart' devices. In the case of a typical Western home, this could include smartphones, smartwatches, smart TVs, smart vacuums, smart fridges, etc. It is important to note that all these devices - while connected to each other - are also connected via a collection of servers owned by companies such as Amazon or Google. These companies collect the data produced by our interactions with these devices. This collection of servers is also known as 'the cloud'.

This positive ad from IBM, like the ad above for Google home, demonstrates a utopian vision for the Internet of Things. It posits that the integration of devices and mass collection of data allows for smoother 'user experience', in this case, of driving and maintaining a car:

In contrast to the imagined utopian integration of smart devices into everyday life as proposed by Google and IBM's videos above, the dystopian imagined near-future described by Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu is one where everyday life is tracked, collated and quietly surveilled in aid of data-gathering and market research. The video below references possible dystopian repercussions of the Internet of Things: invasions of privacy and a lack of control over personal data.

Summary

"Time" and "the future" are deeply cultural concepts. We must bear this in mind when we consider predictions of our digital future.

Friday, 23 August 2019

10. Work: Digital Nomads & Playbour (Green--digital nomads OR Pink--playbour)

Welcome to Section 10, your required reading this week is:

Pink et al. (2017) “Digital Work and Play: Mobile Technologies and New Ways of Feeling at Home.”. OR

Green (2020) Digital Nomads in Chiang Mai

Recap

As we have seen, social media influencers can turn their activities into a livelihood. In other words, posting selfies, vlogs etc. becomes a form of work. This is one (admittedly strikingly) example of a general shift in work patterns. Indeed, digital technologies have profoundly transformed work (for better or worse, according to those who are experiencing it). We analyze this change anthropologically in this section.

So the question we are looking at here is "How have digital technologies affected work and leisure?"

Nomadism

You probably have heard of nomads before. The Mongols and Tibetans who follow their herds around the pastures represent famous examples of nomadism. Most of the Indigenous/Aboriginal societies of Australia were also nomadic, pre-colonization. Less famous are Sama-Baja, sea nomads of Southeast Asia.

In this ethnography, Gillian Tan of Deakin Uni describes "people in a region traditionally known as Kham, who move with their yaks from pasture to pasture, depending on the milk production of their herd for sustenance"

So why are some groups of people nomadic and others sedentary?

One way to answer this is mode of adaptation. Mode of adaptation represents the way a society makes a living. Specifically, anthropologists use this term to describe the way entire societies adapt to the environment in order to survive. I describe this more in this blog and in this video.

Anthropologists have identified five main modes-of, listed below with famous examples:

Hunter-gatherer--Sama-Bajau; pre-colonization Indigenous Australians; and American Plains Indians;
Pastoral--herders of the Eurasian steppe;
Horticultural--gardeners of PNG;
Agricultural--farmers of England;
Industrial--factory workers of southeast China.

Basically, there are two forms of nomadism: hunter-gathering and pastoral. Traditionally, anthropologists used to reserve the concept nomadism to apply only to these two modes of adaptation.

Milking a yak

So why are they always on the move? Hunter-gatherers and pastoralists can only sustain low population density. The hunter-gatherers have to continually move to find new food sources. Pastoralists must keep their herds moving. Neither can afford to be sedentary.

The term "nomad" has recently been extended to describe more contemporary sociological phenomena including "grey nomads" (retired Westerners who travel around the country in motorhomes") and "digital nomads". In this section, we consider the latter example. They have emerged in what might be a new mode-of-adaptation. It might be argued that a digital revolution has profoundly disrupted traditional work patterns and has created an information economy dominated by digital natives and characterized by digital nomads.

Digital Natives

Digital natives are supposed to be a generation of young people with superior digital skills and a fundamentally different way of thinking, working, etc. The term "Digital Natives" was coined and championed by Prensky in 2001. He believed that 'digital natives' think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors, as a result of being surrounded by new technology. As Prensky stated in the below lecture, "the young people they're different". They are living the life of a "digital native". They "communicate through instant messaging and chat; the share through blogs and MySpace," etc.

This idea of 'digital natives' attracted a great deal of anguish in the early 2000s. Because they'd grown up with technology, it was thought that the 'new' generation would process information in a fundamentally different way; this was supposed to profoundly impact their learning. So initially, people were worried about the digital natives, how can we teach them? The flipside was that this digital generation would be far more literate and technologically savvy.

For instance, a Library of Congress (2008) series entitled "Anthropology of Digital Natives" assumes that digital natives exist and need to be studied. Here is a summary of the lecture:

Young people today born into a digital world are experiencing a far different environment of information-gathering and access to knowledge than a generation ago. Who are these "digital natives" and what are they thinking? How are they using the technology, and are IT experts adequately responding to them? These questions will be addressed in a new Library of Congress series titled "Digital Natives." The four-lecture series will examine the generation that has been raised with the computer as a natural part of their lives, with emphasis on the young people currently in schools and colleges today. The series will seek to understand the practices and culture of these digital natives, the cultural implications of the phenomenon and the implications for education -- schools, universities and libraries.

'Native' digital natives

We can find only a few cases where the concept of "digital native" has been used as an analytical tool by anthropologists. Specifically, in the edited 2006 publication Native on the net: indigenous and diasporic peoples in the virtual age, various authors, including La Trobe's Helen Lee, argued that Indigenous and diasporic people proved to be remarkably adept and 'early adopters' of digital technologies. One publication's title played on the word "native" meaning "Indigenous person". They were in two senses, digital natives. However, for the most part, the "digital native" concept did not take hold in the social sciences.

Problems with the "digital native" concept

One of the reasons the concept failed to gain traction may have been the difficulty in identifying people who actually matched the definition. Further research indicated that those who should have been digital natives did not necessarily possess superior 'digital literacy' as it was known. Though we use a fridge every day, we don't necessarily understand its inner mechanics. Indeed, much current research labels the concept inaccurate (Judd 2018; Bennett & Maton 2010; Rodi, Spangler, Kohun & DeLorenzo 2014). Some scholars go so far as to describe digital natives as a myth (Kirschner & De Bruyckere 2017) or even as a 'moral panic' (Bennett, Maton & Kervin 2008). So the idea of "digital native" has been largely abandoned - not just in anthropology but in IT and communications as well. The abandonment of the "digital native" concept among social scientists is largely due to the broadening and further study of how people engage with digital technologies.

The "digital native" concept placed a divide firmly down generational lines, but later scholarship showed that this is not the most significant factor in digital uptake, nor does it accurately reflect how young people engage with digital technologies. Such studies uncovered other, more significant barriers to digital tech use and understanding. For instance, Helsper & Eynon (2010) see the breadth of use, gender, education levels as more significant than a generation. This fits into the broader shift away from seeing the digital as a distinct and separate 'place' that influences 'offline worlds', re-orienting the digital as a fluid space wherein its use and understanding are shaped by the culture/society/community in which the digital tech is being used.

Put another way, academics came to think that 'digital native' was not particularly useful as an 'etic' term for developing a scholarly analysis of the world. It is not a useful concept for social scientists to use. It came to be thought of as more an emic concept, to be studied and analyzed itself. Nevertheless, the idea that digital natives were transforming the worldwide economy was [widely accepted outside scholarly circles]. Indeed, many people began talking about digital disruption.

Digital Disruption

Particularly tied to business and economic dealings, 'digital disruption' usually refers to transformations and innovations that break from (or 'disrupt') traditional ways and means of conducting business. Central to the definition of digital disruption is the assumption that these new ways and means are fostered by advanced or innovative digital technologies. Examples include Netflix's disruption of media consumption or Uber's disruption of the taxi industry. The concept of disruption seems to imply destruction as well as opportunities. For example, anthropology graduates at the Australian National University (ANU), discuss both sides of the digital disruption coin in a blog summarised as follows:

Jodie (6:53) asks about digital disruptions and their unintended consequences. Are we looking only to a future of corporate power and social atomization? Can it all be bad? “Surely some of the changes must be positive, in a non-hedonistic way.” Patrick gives us some hope, by telling us about a use of technology that we didn’t foresee: “I was actually, the other day, trying to find an app that would allow me to scan someone’s body for the health of their chakras.” And Julia points out that “what digital disruption might mean is that our imagination and our superstition and our beliefs in various systems like chakras could be destroyed, through relying more and more on ‘digital objectivity.’”

Digital disruption in the media industry esp. journalism

To understand digital disruption, we could consider one example: the media industry. First, let's consider the effects of digital disruption. Digital disruption has transformed print journalism into a 24hour news cycle. The journalists had to produce material instantaneously and in large quantities across multiple platforms (Online news for Twitter, Instagram, etc). They also had to be multi-skilled. Most often the case, there's no longer a separate photographer, videographer, editor, sub-editor, researchers--reporters had to do it all for online news consumption and only using their 'smart-phone'.

As a comparative example, here is a summary of what digital journalism is like in Malaysia (Firdaus 2018):

Social media has brought about massive changes in the make-up of numerous industries. Journalism, in particular, has had to contend with digital disruptions in the forms of blogs, citizen journalism and massive user-driven interactive platforms offering alternatives to traditional news media. Firdhaus' book examines this new 'media ecology' in the Malaysian context. She coins the term 'network newswork', describing it as an emerging practice of news production. Not only does this provide a term for the complex media environment, but it describes how user-driven sources can be incorporated into various stages of news production. Her work unveils a new way of thinking about the process of digital disruption and how traditional industries respond to these new challenges.

For more information on an anthropological understanding of how the media industry is transformed by digital disruption, have a look at Anna Cristina Pertierra's (2018) book Media Anthropology for the Digital Age (available as an e-book from La Trobe library).

'Emic' understandings of digital disruption

Now let's turn to how journalists themselves believed the changes would play out. In other words, what was the 'emic' understanding among those in the media industry? The general perception was that young people were digital natives. It was believed that:

They would be able to pioneer the 'digital transformation' of the media towards online instead of print news.

During mass global lay-offs (2012-ongoing) of print-based journalists, younger journalists, who were considered 'digital natives' were presumed to be able to survive the decimation of the print news industry. They would keep their jobs because they were lower-paid (cost less to employ) or they would move on to another job in the online media industry, catering to younger readers who were also considered digital natives.

In other words, the emic belief was that digital natives created and would thrive in the digital transformation.

Scholarly analysis of digital disruption

However, current research does not support these emic notions. Younger journalists, who were considered digital natives, were the ones experiencing burn-out because of the digital disruption to the media industry. For example, Zion, Sherwood, & Winarnita (all La Trobe Uni scholars) show that in Australia about 3000 journalists, including young journalists, who lost their jobs in mass lay-offs, have their working lives profoundly changed because of digital disruption. Thus journalists around the world, regardless of whether they are young or old, 'digital natives' or not, have struggled with the transformation.

Digital Nomads

It is presumed that digital nomads are young digital natives who are responding to digital disruption and digital transformation of work. The term "digital nomad" refers to 'location-independent' workers who use the Internet and other digital technologies for work. In theory, digital nomads could travel anywhere in work. In practice, they tend to congregate in certain locations such as Ubud, Chiang Mal, and so on. Mourtadis (2018) defines "digital nomad" as "people who have rejected the idea of working in a conventional office, but instead, they work and travel without a clear destination". Of course,
as Dave Cook of University College of London shows in the Conversation, the reality of digital nomadism doesn't always live up to the promise. But, as anthropologists, we want to get past this kind of analysis and find out how the digital technologies interact with the culture of work.

Research on digital nomads

Digital nomadism was not discussed deeply in academia until relatively recently. The term became popular in metaphor and as a way to describe new ways of working and connecting with others made possible by an increasingly digital globe. In this period, (1990s - mid 2000s), the possibilities and detriments of digital technology were the subjects of great speculation. With either trepidation or excitement, theorists began to discuss the use and implications of newer technologies, higher computing power and other such digital innovations.

This speculation predicted both utopian and dystopian social consequences. In the utopian interpretation of digital nomads, digital technologies enabled: freedom (from office space and routine); democratization (in the sense that the ‘tools’ to build a business would be available to everyone for little to no cost); and the ultimate in self-determination. In the dystopian interpretation, digital technologies, while alluring, brought with them: distortions of identity; no work-life balance (as one always had the potential to work, one could never truly be ‘off work’); substitutions of real connection with virtual ones; and a lack of stability (in housing, profession, marital status, etc).

A 'digital nomad' working remotely from El Salvador

So, to the anthropologist, do digital nomads represent a revolution in our attitudes to work - unencumbered by the constraints of physical work-space and traditional life-narratives? Or, are Digital nomads perpetually ‘on-the-clock’, unable to connect with others, with ‘nothing to show for it’? As noted more broadly in Horst and Miller’s work, both utopian and dystopian predictions for digital technologies did not come to fruition. So too with digital nomads. Paul Green, an anthropologist from Melbourne Uni, talks about his research in a fascinating interview (1:41 - 12:26). We could summarize Paul Green's observations as follows:

A digital nomad is a person who is "leveraging digital technology to be able to combine work and travel interests"(2:01). Though there are a variety of factors in the decision to become a digital nomad, many coalesce around lifestyle. Most digital nomads come from developed nations (USA, UK, European nations, etc) and it appears to be no coincidence that many head to popular tourist destinations around South East Asia. 'At home' younger people may feel excluded from the property market or that they have fewer opportunities. There is also a generational shift in values away from property ownership and long-term often office-based work.
In contrast, SE Asian countries often have a lower cost of living, making it possible to eat well and live healthily with many touristic opportunities that can fit into a travel lifestyle. In this sense, 'digital nomads' reflect a general trend in developed nations but also on broader, global inequalities. On an individual level, the digital nomads perceive a number of negatives associated with the experience of digital nomadism. There can be quite a lot of pressure to 'live up' to the glamorous image of being a 'digital nomadism' as well as; loneliness, struggles with setting up or maintaining businesses, low motivation, and questions over maintaining long-term relationships or having children while trying to maintain a digitally nomadic lifestyle.

To follow up on this maybe read, Green (2020) Digital Nomads in Chiang Mai

What does this workstation say about the type of lifestyle digital nomads want to lead and portray?

In his anthropology thesis "Digital Nomadism: Travel, Remote Work and Alternative Lifestyles", Mourtadis describes perceived advantages and disadvantages of the 'digital nomad' lifestyle. For instance, Digital nomadism unhooks many from the 9 to 5 drudgery of working in an office. Many are able to adapt to their new working situation by forming new ways to communicate, work and socialize. Travel patterns, productivity, work/leisure practices, and sociability have to be renegotiated when they are no longer bound to a certain locality. Constantly on the move, digital nomads have no designated work hours and have to deal with the lack of a clear division between leisure time and work time. Mourtadis also found that although they are traveling from place to place nomads want to be perceived as something “more” than a tourist.

Ethic & Digital Nomadism

This concept of ethic becomes relevant when we consider the idea of digital nomads and work. By the time the digital revolution gained traction, c. 2000, the Protestant ethic had spread far outside the circles of Protestants. In many segments of Australian society, for example, if you were not working, you were considered unproductive, a burden, or worse. The digital disruption caused by the new technologies has begun to wreak havoc in the lives of some who identified themselves with their work.

On the other hand, another ethic had emerged probably from the hippy movement of the 1960s. This was to live 'free', unchained and unhindered by authority and capitalism. The digital nomads of recent years have sought to combine this vision with a new kind of working practice.

Playbour

Pink et. al. point to the emergence of “playbour”. This is when we mix play and labour in our lives by e.g. gaming while in the office or working while in bed at home. Pink analyses this in terms of ‘atmospheres’. Atmosphere describes our feeling or vibe while we are going through our daily lives using social media, cooking dinner, sitting on the bus etc.. It's how we feel about the:

relationship between work, home, play and mobile media and the feelings that are associated with it are emerging in a context where mobile media are integral to the making of contemporary mundane worlds.

Pink et. al. don't have any 'hard findings' or make any large claims. But I think the research is important. Why? Because anthropology is the study of what it is to be human. And for many people, life is like the boring couple in Melbourne, Nerida and Amanda, who post photos of their cats playing on their iPad, who play solitaire in bed, and so on.

Conclusion

Digital technologies have produced new ways of working. But at the same time, old forms of labour persist. The other is, aside from free and open-source ware, many applications and some of the content are created through paid work. And what about the unpaid work--the emotional labor and so on that social media 'influencers' force themselves to undertake?

Further research

Digital has transformed work but, equally, work has transformed the digital. Changing patterns of work and leisure (e.g. Covid work from home) have affected digital technologies (we now do a lot of zooming!). To understand the culture of work (and leisure) you also might want to consider the emergence of "work" and "labour" in Western cultures, in relation to the Protestant ethic, and how they don't necessarily apply in non-Western cultures.

Next week

Utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares about the digital transformation are the topic in the next section of this course.

Thursday, 22 August 2019

9. Selfies & Social media influencers (Abidin--emic & etic)

Welcome to Section 9. Your main reading this week is Abidin, "Aren't these..."

Recap

In the previous sections, we considered a digital take on political anthropology including activism and extremism. We discussed how social influencers play important roles in these fields. In particular, social media influencers have emerged as prominent figures. Taking this idea of social media influencers we now return to the theme of identity online.

Emic & Etic: Anthropological concepts

As we've designed this course to be accessible for non-Anthropology majors, we have been introducing and revising Anthropological concepts each week. In this section, the concepts we'll draw on are "emic" and "etic". So you need to read this blog on emic and etic first.

Selfies

Now let's move on to Selfies, the first of two main topics this week.

Screengrab from Twitter. The image is a selfie featuring Ellen a talkshow celebrity (dressed in white). This
image represents "likely the most high-profile commercial selfie" of 2014 (Abidin 2016)

It's easy to judge selfies as vain, egocentric and narcissistic as in the Chainsmoker's song...

.

..but there is a lot more going on around selfie culture.

Self Portraits

If the definition of a selfie is 'taking a picture of yourself', then selfies have been around longer than the internet itself. In the Western tradition, there is a form known as the self-portrait.

Was Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1523-1524) the first selfie? (Shipley 2015, 406)

We might start with the self-portrait, a popular mode of painting in the West in the modern period (1500-).

Woman taking a selfie with a box camera
and a mirror circa 1900

Photography of course allowed for a new form of portriature. Instead of artists applying paint to canvas, now people could point a camera towards themselves and allow reflected light to form an image on film stored within the camera. However, there were many barriers to analog photography. Even 100 years after the invention of this technology, analog cameras and film were expensive. It took time to learn how to use them, film rolls limited the number of pictures one could take, and developing the photos costs additional money. Early digital cameras, while not as detailed or vibrant as analog photography, allowed for the storage of hundreds, even thousands of pictures and (revolutionary for the time) enabled you to see and then choose to keep or delete a photo as soon as it was taken. But it was the inclusion of digital cameras in smartphones that brought the selfie to prominence. The massive increase in the availability and usability of cameras – breaking down previous barriers to entry – coincided with an upswing in selfie-taking, posting and sharing in online spaces. Building on our discussion of polymedia, when cost is removed as a barrier to use, the social meaning of media becomes more significant. The selfie has emerged recently emerged as a distinct category of contemporary digital media.

Selfie definition

So how are we to define a "selfie"? Shipley defines selfie holding "the cameraphone at arm's length, preferably at an elevated angle" (Shipley 2018) and taking a photo of yourself. But as he notes selfies are much than this. Abidien cites the Oxford definition: Oxford Dictionaries define selfies as “[a] photograph that one has taken of oneself, taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website” (“Selfie,” 2015).

Selfies have also morphed into:

"belfies"--butt selfies
"us-fies" and "we-fies"--group selfies (Shipley 2015, 407)
"ironic selfies" (Shipley 2015, 407)
photos taken by other people which are stylized in the selfie genre (Shipley 2015, 405)

Group selfie taken at a Holi celebration, 2014

Selfies in Trinidad (Jolynna Sinanan)

Are selfies always narcissistic? As you might expect anthropologists apply methodological relativism, meaning we don't judge things as good or bad. As you might also expect, anthropologists apply holism; trying to understand a phenomenon (e.g. selfies) in a cultural and social context. If you expected this you'd be right.

Sinanan's "When taking selfies in Trinidad" demonstrates that a culturally distinct idea of personhood emerges in social media posts by young Trinidadian women. Based on her 'ethnographic' observations living in Trinidad for 15 months, Sinanan writes:

Instead of believing that the truth of a person lies within and what we see on the outside is superficial, Trinidadians value what you see on the surface. What is styled, crafted and created is the truth of a person – inside is where secrets and lies are buried. Identity then is something that is cultivated and judged by appearance on each and every occasion. “What you see is what you get” is the goal of crafting appearance.

(It's almost as if your true self is on the outside and what lies within is false. This runs in contradiction to a typically Western idea of self, whereby the self is something and hidden within that you 'have to get in touch with'. This an emic idea of self. So anthropologists don't necessarily believe in a true self. You can imagine that changes what a selfie would be. This is an element of holism. Put another way, In Trinidad, your true self is the one you portray to the outside world. In European/Western cultures, often the idea is that the true self is the inner self. Who you are when no one is looking is your real self.).

In line with the Anthropological principle of comparison, Sinanan contrasts selfies in Australia...

a quick look at my Australian friends’ social media profiles – shows that selfies are only posted by a “type” of person, not personality-wise but looks-wise: young, attractive, feminine, model-thin or glamour model-curvy, the types of women whose images dominate our media.

Jolynna Sinanan selfie (during fieldwork in Trinidad?)

...with Trinidad:

– women of all ages, shapes, class and ethnic backgrounds post selfies, front-on, from the side and showing clothes and styles... Their motivation for posting selfies is “because I felt like it”, “I was in a good mood”, “I liked what I was wearing” or “my make-up looked good”. All these reasons remind me that you don’t need to be a celebrity, a well-timed selfie can help you just celebrate yourself.

So Sinanan has gone way past the idea the selfies are narcissistic etc. Furthermore, Sinanan suggests:

"There’s a kind of social exchange – notoriety and fame are accrued through likes and comment". (The exchange here is in likes; you liked my selfie, so I'll like yours). This is reminiscent of Dalsgaard's argument, which we encountered in the section: Online Self/Selves: Netizen & (In)Dividual about politicians and normal people trying to get 'likes'.

In particular, this comes through in her scholarly research. See Sinanan's "Choose Yourself"

In other words, it's not simply that selfies and social media are used differently by young women in Trinidad. You need to understand Trinidad's culture and society before you can understand these young women's posts. Of course, much more can be said about selfies and social media, so let's look at some different approaches.

Selfie love

Visual anthropologists study how the popular culture of selfies affects how people around the world react to cameras, reshape the protocols and contexts for image taking, and, by extension, reimagine themselves as part of dispersed urban and transnational publics. Shipley, for example, contends that the selfie, rather than a singular form of technologically driven self‐portraiture, is a multimedia genre of autobiography or memoir that makes the image-maker into the protagonist of stories of his or her own composition. People now assume that anything, at any time, could potentially be posted and circulated online. Anything might be considered photogenic. This shapes how people experience both public social situations and intimate moments. These technologies and techniques are not only part of life in Western metropoles, but aspiring youth in rapidly growing Global South urban centers. Youth living in her fieldwork sites of Lagos, Nigeria; Guangzhou, China; and Sao Paulo, Brazil are at the forefront of selfie culture. Shipley's findings show that for youth in the Global South, owning a mobile device and connecting via social media is more important than things like having a stable place to live. However, the significance of selfies and selfie cultures varies depending on context

Children taking a selfie at school, 2018

Shipley on Selfies

In the following section, we summarize Shipley's essay on selfies:

Selfies promote debate on sex, race, and violence. For instance, in her 2014 exhibition, artist Kara Walker incorporated selfies as part of the artwork. Visitors to the installation were invited to "share pictures on social media". Nevertheless, when "white folks" took selfies around the sculptures "Controversies immediately sprung up online--particularly around white folks taking selfies in front of these figurative sculptures depicting laboring and sexually vulnerable black bodies" (Shipley 2015, 403). In this way, the selfies "incited a conversation about the history of raced, gendered, sexed violence".

[Artist Kara Walker in front of her?] Sugar Sphinx sculpture (photo by New Yorker)

Selfies also are engines of celebrity culture. We can see this in relation to African, and specifically Ghanian, celebrity cultures. Ghanian hip-hop artists, Reggie Rockstone and VIP produced remixes of the Chainsmokers' Selfie track:

In this and another track "Selfie Remix", we get a sense:

of the "pleasures of self conscious reflection through image taking" (403)
of the "selfie as sexual foreplay" (403)
that "holding on to a momentary experience is more significant than the experience in and of itself" (403-404).

Rockstone "encouraged fans to tweet selfies to him, curating and reposting the most original and sexiest to his 170,000 followers." So while the original Chainsmokers track condemned the practice ("go fuck your selfie!"), Rockstone used selfies to drive his celebrity status.

These two examples demonstrate the diverse uses and locations of selfie culture. This has created selfieness is:

a new way of being which changes how people imagine themselves (404)
about the process of capturing and circulating the idea of self-production (405)

Selfies: Conclusion

In conclusion, the research on selfies indicates that these images are more than vainglory. They are instrumental in a changing culture in which we experience ourselves and our lives differently.

Subversive Frivolity: Abidin on Social Media influencers

Social media influencers represent a new form of celebrity. Whether brand endorsers or extremist online preachers, their influence and fame can far outstrip that of ordinary film stars. How are we to understand this new popular culture phenomenon?

Abidin on influencers

Digital anthropologist Abidin does fieldwork in Singapore, Australia, and Sweden. She researches how selfies have become marketable to youth who may aspire to become 'influencers'. These social media influencers emerged as (semi-)professional selfie-producers who take selfies as a purposively commercial, thoughtful, and subversive endeavor. In this blog post (via the Selfie Research Network), Abidin outlines the most common types of selfies posted by these influencers. She argues that influencers’ engagements with selfies on Instagram shape selfies into sellable objects, as a form of tacit labor, and as an expression of contrived authenticity and reflexivity. Abidin uses the term “subversive frivolity”:

As selfie-takers, female Influencers have been renarrativizing the moral panic surrounding selfies to such a successful extent that good selfies and selfie-taking skills are a prized asset in the Influencer industry...If being consistently under-visibilized and under-estimated allows for the generative power of selfies to subvert the affordances of Instagram, the expectations of female entrepreneurs, the gaze of the camera, and representations of authenticity, selfies, and their subversive frivolity may continue to thrive under the radar.

"Subversive" means that they are fighting aginst the power structures (specifically gender power structures). "Frivolity" means that they do this subversion by having fun. In other words, they are not explicitly talking about 'fighting the powers that be', but they are actually being politically active.

Here she talks more about social media influencers:

In a nutshell, Abidin argues that influencers' use of selfies is not frivolous but rather subversive (that means that selfies challenge the power norms in a society).

In later work, Abidin shows how social media can become more explicitly political. Abidin was also interviewed on ABC about the use of the online platform TikTok by the 'young activists' involved in organizing the 2019 climate change strike. Abidin posted this on her public Facebook page:

This ties in with themes of digital citizenship and activism on the internet, which we covered earlier.. In other words, if someone said that selfies were just vain and narcissistic they would be overlooking the political potential of selfies (and the influencers who use them).