3. Online Communities: "Virtual" or "Digital"? (Boellstorff--community)

Welcome to Section 3 of Introduction to Digital Anthropology.

Recap 

In Section 2, we considered the construction of personhood in relation to the development of digital technologies. We framed this issue as how the Internet relates to ideas of self. The focus now moves, in Section 3, to online communities. We consider the extent to which the concept of "virtual" or "digital" aids in understanding online communities. For this analysis, we will focus particularly on Second Life.

Community: Anthropological concepts

To start with we need to define "community". You will need a clear idea of how anthropologists understand the community and the debates that have arisen. For that, you could start with this blog. You should be familiar with organic vs mechanical; gemeinschaft vs gesellschaft.

Imagined Communities

Some anthropologists don't accept that communities are real, actual things that are 'out there'. In his Imagined Communities, political-scientist and historian, Anderson famously treated communities as things that we merely imagine exist. The idea of the Turkish people, or Americans, is a figment of people's cultural imagination. Anderson accepts that there are people who live in Turkey but, for him, the idea that Turkish people form a national community is only something that exists in their minds.

Anderson's line of argument, rightly or wrongly, has become standard among Social Scientists. (I have blogged a summary of chapter 2 here.) For instance, some anthropologists have argued that there was no such thing as a real community. Whether it is an isolated village or a globally-connected city--all communities are imagined. 

Digital Communities

We see this in the reading from the section Digital Anthropology: Introduction & Overview, where Digital Anthropologist, Daniel Miller is describing the work of another Digital Anthropologist, John Postill:

John Postill (2008) questioned debates about digital political communities, because often these make simplistic assumptions about the prevalence of prior offline communities. If we ask, ‘is this online forum a real community?’ it makes it sound as though previously everyone lived in such real communities, when actually, as Postill notes, that may not have been the case at all. 

The idea here is that all communities, whether online or offline, are created by an act of the imagination.

Online Communities

We see this in relation to online communities. For that, we can watch Jakob Svensson 12:39 - 21:50:

Svensson refers to the important work by Kozinets. Kozinets 2010 Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online describes "online community" in terms of a group of people who use computers to connect in an Internet common arena. This understanding is not perfect but will do for the meantime.

Internet communities: YouTube

The World Wide Web is changing the way we view life and community. But how? A mostly positive vision of a joyous, international, cosmopolitan community emerges in Michael Wesch's 2008 lecture An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube:

As you might expect, Wesch has made this available on YouTube. 

Media: Mediating human relations

Wesch understands YouTube as part of a new mediascape:

We are living in a different mediascape... we got to think about the anthropology of YouTube... my video is an example of how it is posted on YouTube and travel through the blog, Facebook and MySpace, Dig and so on and this is showing there is an integrated mediascape that we now live in and at the centre of this mediascape is us and this makes it slightly interesting. As an anthropologist I see media differently. Media is not just content and I don't think of it as just tools of communication. I think of media as mediating human relationships. I think that is important as media change then human relationship change and that is where the anthropology of this comes in. It's important to digress to this subject of YouTube because many anthropologists do work in Digital Anthropology under the banner of the Anthropology of media.

 OK, now we have some context about online community let's move to the focus of this week: an online community or virtual community called Second Life.

Second Life

What is Second Life? According to a Vice article:

Second Life may look like a crappier version of World of Warcraft. It's a vast digital space many people can log into with their virtual avatars, only instead of going on wild adventures, slaying dragons and collecting epic swords, it just seems like a bunch of people hanging out in bars, offices, galleries—normal places.

So it's not a game so much as a place or environment to create an avatar (a fictional character) and build

Anthropologist Boellstorff describes his research in Second Life in his Coming of Age in Second Life. According to Boellstorff,  Second Life:

abbreviated ("SL" or "sl")...is a virtual world owned and managed by a company, Linden Lab, where by the end of my fieldwork tens of thousands of persons who might live on separate continents spent part of their lives online. 

So this is what Boellstorff studies. But how did the author research this topic? What specific aspects of SL did he focus on?

Understanding Boellstorff: Virtual life 

Here is a brief introduction to the book spoken by the author, a 'digital ethnographer':

After watching the video, read Chapter 2 of Boellstorff's (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human.

Then watch this interview with the author. As you go along. answer these questions:

*When, at 11:01, Boellstorff states "something about our everyday lives was already virtual", what do you think he means?

*At 15:27, Boellstorff describes "bleed over". Can you think of other examples of this?

*At 30:31, Boellstorff writes. "It's not going to be the news of the week as an example for us to think about a deep underlying issue that people have been thinking about for decades." Which anthropological principle does this most closely resemble:

a. Methodological relativism

b. Large issues, small places.

c. Holism.

d. Comparison.

* At 51:26, Boellstorff writes, "There are aspects to human existence that we won't learn from doing a survey or based on what people write themselves in a blog post...we want to understand what people are actually doing, not just what they say that they are doing. So it's really valuable to have ethnographers studying all of these different aspects of online life because all of this technology--and it gets more-and-more complicated and fancier as the days go by--but it all comes down still to humans and to users. We need to understand the human beings...  How it is that we are involved in these technologies. How they are shaping us and how we are shaping them". This seems to us like a great overview of Digital Anthropology. If you were going to describe Digital Anthropology in 50 words, what would you say?

Imagined Communities & Technology

For this reason, in this weeks' reading, Boellstorff insists that all communities are virtual. Whether a social media community or a village community: the community doesn't exist except in people's imaginations. Therefore, social media communities are not particularly new or groundbreaking. Digital communities are basically imagined groups of people which is enabled by technologies.

Second Life as a virtual community

This leads us to the important point that  Digital Anthropologists (like Boellstorff in this week's main reading) find telling. Anderson argued that this kind of imagining--of a national community--was made possible through the emergence of technologies like the printing press and the newspaper. This leads us to think that new communications technologies, rather than undermining community strength, are actually crucial to communities. For Boellstorff, Second Life is a virtual community. What he implies by this is that an online community is equally real as an offline community. 

Summarizing Boellstorff 

If you want a summary of Boellstorff, you should turn to this Blog by, John Postill, a prominent anthropologist who is based in Melbourne, Australia. 

Analyzing Boellstorff 

Like all the texts we use in the course, you will need to be able to critically analyze Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life. 

Analyzing Boellstorff: virtual v digital

One terminological point arises. Miller prefers "digital" to "virtual" to describe things like Facebook. Miller writes:

No attempt to define ‘the digital’ should go unchallenged. The definition that will be used for the purposes of this essay will be everything that can be reduced to the outcome of binary coding.... There are several alternatives. Some might focus more on the rise of cybernetic systems, while others concentrate upon a separate online world termed ‘virtual’ (e.g. Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor 2012).

Miller argues that using a definition of digital, which is "based upon binary coding", is useful because it's so simple.

By contrast, Boellstorff prefers "virtual" to "digital" writing:

I have difficulty identifying the analytical work “digital” is supposed to accomplish. Since these uses of “digital” imply electronic technology (not binary counting using stones or human digits, for instance), “digital” is a conceptual Klein bottle, incorporating every aspect of contemporary human life under its purview. What, nowadays, is not digital in some way? Additionally I doubt those who currently study the “digital” would recuse themselves from studying online analog technologies. The analytic work “digital” performs appears to be one of identifying continuities. Just as one can take a social phenomenon and examine it from the perspective of gender, law, or religion (since gender, law, and religion permeate all aspects of human life, not just marriage, trials, and worship), so one can examine a social phenomenon or context from the perspective of technology (for which “digital” appears to be a placeholder). “Digital,” however, is less useful for analyzing cultural logics that do not cross what I will term the gap between the virtual and the actual. The virtual and the actual are not reducible to each other, even in their mutual constitution (indeed, precisely because of their mutual constitution).

At this point, do you agree with Miller or Boellstorff? An opinion is a good starting point, but we hope you develop an informed position (rather than just an opinion) by the end of this course. 

In general, Anthropologists approach these issues not as if one person is right or wrong, but rather we should debate these issues and keep an open mind. The two authors actually seem to agree that culture and language in the offline world are just as 'mediated' (Miller) or 'virtual' as the online world.

More on Boellstorff

Tom Boellstorff kindly agreed to be interviewed--in Second Life! Here my avatar Carmen Esmerelda interviews the dapper Tom Bukowski in his pretty chic digs:

Billet & Sawyer: online communities as support groups

More accounts regarding online communities have emerged in recent years. The online world offers a niche community to belong to and support its members. La Trobe University sociologists Paulina Billet and Anne Marie Sawyer (2018) have described this in their research amongst women who are part of an online support group for infertility. Their book is entitled Infertility and Intimacy in an Online Community and it's available online at La Trobe Library. Chapter 3 is especially relevant to this section's theme. Paulina also suggests reading the following:

• Hart, M. (2015) ‘Youth Intimacy on Tumblr: A Pilot Study’, Young 23(3): 193-208.

 Jo Byrne: Bronies 

Jo Byrne (a co-author of this blog) conducted research on Bronies (Brothers who love My Little Pony). In some ways, her research shows similar online community support as Billet and Sawyer's sociological research. Jo's Honours project covered not only how Bronies online is a community for men with the same interests but those who are 'coming out' in other areas of their gender and sexual lives.

You can read more about this online community in a blog article by Amy Bruckman, a lecturer of social computing and culture teaching about online communities who described her encounter with the 'Bronies' through her students' group project.

A Bronies website mentioned Bruckman's blog

Jo Byrne is now writing up her PhD on Mumpreneurs, mothers who run online businesses.

Heather Horst: on & off-line communities

Unlike those who begin their ethnographies with online communities, Heather Horst (2015) also did anthropological research amongst a community that is well known as the epicenter of digital technology-creation, the US Silicon Valley and the families that live there; specifically looking at their everyday digital lives both offline and online.

According to a recent media article, "Silicon Valley parents raising their kids tech free", kids in this area are now being raised 'technology free'. This represents a new value system where technology is seen as harmful for children How, as anthropologists, might we critically analyse this parenting values of family and technology-free relationship in Silicon Valley?

Child (in color) escapes the black & white world of screen time

Compare Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (mentioned in a previous blog) and the news article "Silicon Valley parents raising their kids tech free". In what ways could it be said that both idealize and implicitly seek to return to a form of innocent childhood?

Next week

Now we have considered online communities in general, in Section 4 we will consider specifically intimate relationships.

Secondary readings

Billett, P & Sawyer, A-M, 2019, Infertility and intimacy in an online community, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Fred Turner, 2005, Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community. Technology and Culture 46(3):485–512.

2. Online Self/Selves: Netizens & (In)dividuals (Dalsgaard--personhood)

Welcome to Section 2 of Introduction to Digital Anthropology. Your essential reading for this week is Dalsgaard's "Facework for Facebook". 

Recap & Overview

Section 1 defined "digital" and considered how anthropologists approach it. Section 2's theme is the online self. The main question: how is our self and identity shaped or enabled by the digital? Before proceeding, you should check up on what anthropologists mean by"self", "identity", and "personhood".  Having a grasp on these concepts will help you address Section 2 question: what has happened to personhood (and our conceptions of self and identity) with the rise of digital technologies?

Netizen

Back in the 1990s, 'internet gurus' (not anthropologists) predicted that the rise of the digital would fundamentally alter what it was to be a human. For instance, Michael Hauben argued that the enriching experience of the information superhighway would break down barriers. Instead of citizens of different nations, we would become the Netizens of the world. In other words, Netizen was a new kind of person that the Internet was said to be creating. Did the Netizen arrive? Why haven't anthropologists tended to use this idea of personhood as a way of analyzing human life?

Dividual vs Individual

Before you proceed, it is essential you can differentiate between "individual" and "dividual". This blog explains the distinction. 

Dividuals on Facebook

"Facework on Facebook" was written by an anthropologist called Daalsgaard. He uses it to show how the idea of dividual might also apply to the use of Facebook in the 2008 US elections.  Read his article to see how "dividual" identity is facilitated through Facebook. You can find a summary of the article in the blog "Dalsgaard--Facework on Facebook". 

Aidan Craney explains "dividual" in the following clip:

Dalsgaard's research method

To repeat, Dalsgaard uses the concept of "dividual"--an analytical tool developed to analyze societies without Internet (namely 1980s Melanesia)--to understand Facebook in 2008 USA. Put simply, an insight about human life developed by research on non-internet communities is used to analyze communities with Internet on the other side of the world.

In 2020, he graciously agreed to be interviewed by Aidan Craney and me about what he would change if he was writing "Facework on Facebook" twelve years later. 

 

Revision Question

I now want to ask a question revising Section 0: Introduction to Anthropology. If you use the same theoretical concepts to analyze different societies, which anthropological principle are you using? Is it relativism, holism, or comparison?

Technology & History

Before if someone had told me that a concept developed by researching the Melanesian (i.e. "dividual") was used to study the USA, my first response might have been, "wow, they are getting ideas from a timeless, exotic, and backward society and applying them to a modern, technological nation". This is because I used to associate perpetual technological innovation, progress, and change with the West.  

nice one!

The idea that the West progresses and the rest of the world remains timeless is a culturally specific understanding of history From an anthropological perspective, the people of Melanesia, (where researchers came up with this concept of dividual) have been part of modernity as long as many other cultures. However, their experience of modernity has been one of colonization, war, indentured labor ('Blackbirding'), exclusion, and poverty. In spite of that, cell / mobile phones have become more prominent. And the way these technologies are adopted reflects local understandings and practices. 

You can see examples of the way digital technology is put to use in Melanesia in several publications. The use of cell/mobile phones which are internet-enabled--otherwise known as 'smartphones' is widespread. You can see this in John Taylor's Drinking money and pulling women: mobile phone talk, gender, and agency in Vanuatu. You can also find out more in Foster and Horst's publication. And for a recent digital anthropology article by Daalsgard (fieldwork in PNG) have a look at his "The Ethnographic Use of Facebook in Everyday Life".

Next Section

OK, we hope you enjoyed Section 2. Now we've looked at ideas of personhood and identity, the next section in this course is to look at the effect of digital technologies on community and vice versa. We'll see you there in Section 3.

Further reading

Humphreys, Lee. 2018. “Introduction.” In, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the

Accounting of Everyday Life, 1–28. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sökefeld, M., 1999. Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology. Current Anthropology, 40(4), pp.417–448.

Ross, S., 2019. Being Real on Fake Instagram: Likes, Images, and Media Ideologies of Value. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 29(3), pp.359–374.

1.1 Digital Methodology: Methods of Digital Anthropology

It used to be that ethnographers were physically present with the people they study. In the digital age, however, digitally mediated research is becoming increasingly popular. Ethnographers increasingly use social media, video calls, etc to do their research. Doing ethnography through the Internet could be thought of as a "digital method" of ethnography. The digital method may not always be ideal, but as ethnographers, we think that our work is important and we work around the impediments that exist (such as pandemics, travel bans, etc.).

Netnography? Digital Ethnography?

One term to describe ethnography on the Internet is "Netnography". Jakob Svensson an anthropologist in Sweden describes what this means in this video.  Michael Wesch describes a similar process as "digital ethnography". Anthropologists generally aren't too precious about whether you call it "netnography" or "digital ethnography" or something else. 

Digital Methods?

Another way to think about research about and using digital technologies is "Digital Methodology". Here Dalsgaard talks about Digital Methods in particular in an insightful discussion about using the anthropological toolkit to approach digital technologies.  

 Commitment to fieldwork

As mentioned in Section 0, the method of participation-observation defines anthropology. For instance, by entitling his book "Coming of Age", anthropologist Tom Boellstorff connects his work to Margaret Mead, who is famous for conducting participant observation in Samoa. This method of long-term fieldwork is shared by contemporary Anthropologists. Tom Boellstorff also uses the method of long-term, participant observation in Coming of Age in Second Life. To understand this reference, it is useful to turn to Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. This Blog outlines a little about her research methodology and the ensuing controversy that emerged from her findings. Note that rather than a 'primitive' population, as was the aim in the early years of Anthropology, Boellstorff's ethnography was conducted entirely online.

Online & offline research

One choice in the method of digital anthropologists relates to online and offline research. Some anthropologists, including Boellstorff, insist that conducting research entirely online is possible and perhaps preferable. Here Jeff Juris has a different take:

Miller's "Introduction to Digital Anthropology" (2018), which we covered in Section 1, makes the case for combining offline and online. Miller (2018) writes: 

The value of ethnography is demonstrated in that in all these cases we find an appreciation that online activity can only be understood relative to changes that have taken place offline.

Jeff Juris, who researches digital activism, prefers to research online & offline as he explains here.

 

In what ways does this contradict Boellstorff's approach? The answer is that Boellstorff explicitly disagrees with Miller's idea that anthropology of the internet should also be based in 'actual', offline worlds. In Chapter 2 of Coming of Age in Second Life, he argues that researching Second Life entirely online was a better method. 

 

1. Digital Anthopology: Introduction & Overview (Miller--Digital Anthroplogy)

Welcome to Section 1 of Introduction to Digital Anthropology. Previously we looked at the "anthropology" part of "digital anthropology". Now we turn to the "digital" part. Your essential for this week is Miller's "Digital Anthropology" in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.  The main point Miller makes is that in Digital Anthropology is that we go past saying digital technologies are terrible or digital technologies are great. Instead, we focus on how we use digital technologies and what that can tell us about the human condition. This Blog will provide a context to understanding Miller's encyclopedia entry.

Recap

But before you go on, do you know the basics of anthropology? Do anthropologists try to find out about lost tribes and record them before they go extinct? Do anthropologists go to far-off places and find relics from the past? 

If you answered "yes" to either of these questions, then what you mean by "anthropology" is different from we take "anthropology" to mean. So, read this blog on the basics of anthropology first, so that we're on the same page.

This Blog

Now let's get on to what we mean by "Digital Anthropology"?

1. What is Digital?
2. What is Digital Anthropology?
3. Why have Digital Anthropology?
4. Getting past the cliches
5. Conclusion

1. What is Digital?

We must now address the question of what is digital. For this we turn to the main reading for Section 1, namely Miller's "Introduction to digital anthropology" (2018), Miller describes the digital as "everything that can be reduced to the outcome of binary coding". 

In order to represent information, programmers of computers usually use a 'code' composed of either an electrical pulse or no electrical pulse. A pulse is represented as "1". No electrical pulse is represented as "0". 

So 'binary' refers to a number system in which information is encoded. My blog, on the anthropology of numbers, describes binary code in more detail. 

For our purposes, digital technologies and issues include:

• Algorithms; Algorithmic Enclaves;
• AI (artificial intelligence)
• Augmented Reality
• Big data
• Block chain, digital currency, non-fungible tokens
• Cyborgs, human-machine interface
• Cyberbullying
• Cyberwarfare
• Digital divides
• Digital 'futures'
• Dispersed consciousness (too much attention to screens)
• Fake news
• Internet of things
• Online dating 
• Online Echo Chambers / Filter Bubbles
• Online gaming
• Robotics
• Slactivism & Hacktivism
• Social Media & Polymedia (FB, Twitter) & Multimedia (e.g. using video, music, text)
• Surveillance
• Video streaming 
• VR (virtual reality) 

What do these topics have in common? One commonality is that they are all based on digital technologies. The other is that these issues are, or could be, researched when we take an anthropological approach to the digital.

2. What is Digital Anthropology? 

In general, Digital Anthropology is what is produced when anthropologists apply anthropological principles and understandings to the study of digital technologies. 

So how do Digital Anthropologists research the digital?  Most of the anthropologists we study in this subject share a commitment to studying digital technologies by implicitly or explicitly applying the methods of critical analysis, participant observation, holism, methodological relativism, comparison, and reflexivity. They also try to avoid ethnocentrism. 


This all sounds a little airy, so let's pin down some more concrete understandings.

 Boellstorff: Digital Anthropology

 We'll start with Boellstortf. At 51:26 of this interview, Boellstorff says:
   "There are aspects to human existence that we won't learn from doing a survey or based on what people write themselves in a blog post...we want to understand what people are actually doing, not just what they say that they are doing. So it's really valuable to have ethnographers studying all of these different aspects of online life because all of this technology...comes down still to humans and to users. We need to understand the human beings... How it is that we are involved in these technologies. How they are shaping us and how we are shaping them". 

OK, so that's one take on Digital Anthropology. 

Miller: Digital Anthropology

Other anthropologists provide different explanations of Digital Anthropology. Here is Daniel Miller (the author of this weeks reading, Digital Anthropology:

Jo Byrne: Digital Anthropology

In this interview, Jo explains to Nick a little more about the history of the digital and how anthropologists are interested:

A question of whether anthropologists can solely immerse themselves in the e.g. an online community like Facebook or whether anthropologists need to see users offline as well emerges in online will be covered in later weeks.

Miller: Digital Anthropology

Now it's time to read the main reading for this week, Miller's "Digital Anthropology". Miller asserts four main ideas about digital anthropology:

• 1. First, Miller observes how anthropologists have always been interested in empathetically engaging with populations in order to “help us understand both what they do and how to understand the world from their perspective.” This includes the way life in a community is impacted by digital technologies such as the way people work or socialize online and offline. Miller argues that digital anthropology evolved from media anthropology (television, newspapers, radio, etc). Miller then specifically looks at how digital technology has changed the way we work (journalists writing for newspapers published online) for certain communities. These include hackers (such as the group Anonymous); scammers in West Africa; gamers in China who sell their computer game credits to others; vloggers creating YouTube videos; Digital Nomads from developed countries (e.g. Australians maintaining their online business, using a co-working space and living in Bali Indonesia (pictured below).

A community of digital nomads in Bali. Photo courtesy ABC News.

• 2. Internet technologies impact upon the everyday lives of people, worldwide. So, secondly, Miller argues that anthropology needs to observe and account for this impact. Anthropology has achieved this through holistic ethnography. Anthropologists situate digital worlds in the context of wider social relations and practices. Miller also argues that rather than trying to adjudicate digital technologies as positive or negative, anthropology may also focus upon their inherent contradictions. Through this anthropology has made a significant contribution. Ethnography will show how digital technologies produce both new possibilities for political activism and also for state oppression, creating conditions for the commodification of music and other media and the de-commodification of those same media simultaneously.
• 3. Third, Miller argues that digital technologies impact the way anthropologists conduct their research or anthropological methodology. The study of digital anthropology, therefore, went: - from the exploration of online communities (Wilson & Peterson 2002) such as ethnography of the online computer game Second Life, where many of the characteristics of traditional ethnography applied to an entirely online world. Many of the disputes over property ownership and between neighbors online in Second Life echo those from traditional offline contexts (Boellstorff 2008). - to the ethnographic approach to digital media (Coleman 2010). We can see this in the way research participants may want to remain in daily contact with the ethnographer through social media even after the anthropologist has left the field site. Another example of this is ethnographers doing research both online and offline in order to research migrants who try to re-integrate their families online.
• 4. Last, Miller argues that digital anthropology impacts on anthropology's conception of itself and what it means to be human. This might be shaped by the potential impact of the collection of vast amounts of data online. An example of what digital anthropologists may study is the impact of this new technology on our sense of ‘dehumanization’. In other words, how people come to see themselves more as visualizations of data rather than simply as persons.

The idealized conception of the Internet implied in this image
is not exactly what Digital Anthropologists envisage. How is the way
Anthropologists think of the Internet different?

You can find a similar argument in Horst and Miller, "Introduction" (2013), which is summarized in this Blog.

3.  Why have Digital Anthropology?

Hopefully, you have a sense of this new field of Digital Anthropology. But why even bother? After all, isn't academia getting too specialized? Doesn't anthropology already have enough fields? The answer to these questions may indeed by "yes", but Digital Anthropology has a special case to make. Postill (2013, 164) explains this well by critiquing the existing literature on digital politics. He takes one publication, by Nancy Baym, as an example of the limitations of research undertaken in other fields:

In Personal Connections in the Digital Age, communication scholar Nancy Baym (2010) lists seven digital media variables: interactivity, temporal structure, social cues, storage, replicability, reach and mobility. She then differentiates two main types of online collectivity: communities and networks. This stark contrast between a rich set of technological concepts and a meagre pair of sociological concepts [communities and networks] signals the need for anthropological studies...relying on this odd couple [communities and networks] for our social and political mapping is unwise. For one thing, both notions have had chequered careers as social scientific concepts. More importantly, the vast diversity of social and political formations found among humans— ranging from predigital nuclear families, associations and organizations at one end of the spectrum to digital-era formations such as Facebook groups, Twitter hashtags and mobile phone contacts at the other— can hardly be captured with two terms. This is akin to expecting that a team of biologists embarking on a survey of Amazonian biodiversity make do with the terms plant and animal. 

In other words, Postill (2013, 164) is saying:

it's OK to use the two sociological concepts of community and networks but you need to understand the pros and cons of these concepts. Also you'll need more sociological concepts if you want to understand how being human interrelates with the digital.

In this course, you'll learn some of these sociological concepts and their pros and cons.

Daniel Miller's "Why We Post" Project

One of the landmark achievements in Digital Anthropology is a series of (free online) books about social media. These books are all part of Daniel Miller's research project entitled "Why We Post". The project lists 12 findings, or 'discoveries', as they are called.


In case you would like to do more research on Miller's work, have a look at his latest free online book (co-authored with Jolynna Sinanan, University of Western Sydney) 'Visualising Facebook' (2017).

Miller and Sinanan's publication.

You might also want to look at other free online books in the series from Miller's collaborative digital anthropology project on social media in Trinidad, Brazil, China, Chile, India, Italy, and Turkey: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/8399.

4. Getting past the cliches

For me, one of the challenges in studying digital anthropology was that I came armed with common knowledge about digital technologies. The distinction between virtual and real is breaking down (I got that from 1980s computer movies where the hero gets sucked into the computer); technology is transforming our lives (this is an old one); games are making our kids more violent or may they aren't (when I was growing the problem was TV apparently); technology helps people connect or maybe they don't really connect. The challenge for me was to go past ideas like theses. 

For example, I don't think the breakdown of the division between the real world and virtual world is an area that anthropologists have taken any particular interest in. If we think about gaming, anthropologists assume that there is a reality to gaming and move on from there. So it's not that the ideas I had were wrong, it's more that there are a lot of other interesting things to study. And to study these we can use the kinds of concepts introduced in this subject. These concepts belong to digital anthropology specifically (e.g. "playbour", "ambient co-presence", "digital kinning") orto anthropology in general (e.g. "emic", "dividual", "diaspora")

5. Conclusion

Summary: anthropological approaches to the digital

In summary, anthropologists are not particularly interested in whether social media are good or bad for us. Rather they are interested in how digital technologies affect culture and society and, more often, how culture and society affect the way we use digital technologies.

Anthropological approaches to the digital tend to:

• Focus on the mundane and everyday, rather than the sensational.
• Be based on long-term fieldwork: either partially or fully 'online'.
• Use the close and narrow study of a particular topic to make more general claims about the human condition.
• So rather than making general claims about the digital technologies, anthropologists tend to focus on the cultural and social elements of social media usage in specific contexts (e.g. Trinidad and Singapore)
  

You should now be able to answer the questions in the comments section.

Although the World Wide Web is barely three decades old, already Digital Anthropology is too big to cover in an introductory course. So this course only focuses on human relationships and the digital. Here is a list of the topics we will cover.

1. Digital Anthropology: Introduction & Overview  (Miller)--Digital anthropology
2. Online Self/Selves: Netizens and (In)dividuals (Dalsgaard)--Identity
3. Online Communities: "Virtual" or "Digital"? (Boellstorff)--Community
4. Intimate Relationships Online (Gershon)--Neoliberalism
5. Digital media and Family Relationships (Wilding)--Kinship
6. Extended Family & Digital Diasporas (Herriman & Winarnita)--Diaspora
7. Digital Citizenship & the Digital Divide (Postill)--Political Anthropology
8. Activism & Extremism on the Internet (Juris)--Insider & Outsider
9. Selfies & Social Media Influencers (Abidin)--Emic & Etic
10. Work: Digital Natives & Digital Disruption--Nomad 
11. Reflecting on Digital Anthropology (Horst & Miller)--Digital Futures 
12. Revision

Notice the bold type at the end of entries 2-11. Each week we'll be covering an anthropological concept (from identity to digital futures). These will help you understand the material covered in the relevant section or in the course generally.  

Next section

So to get things rolling, let's look at how the digital relates to being a person in Section Two.

0. Introduction to Anthropology

Before we get going with "Digital Anthropology", let's first focus on the "Anthropology" bit. Your reading for this section is Boellstorff's "Ludicrous Discipline". This short article introduces how anthropology apply to digital gaming. It gives a great introduction to Anthropology. But if that's not enough, this blog post attempts to give you more!

So if you're not familiar with Anthropology, this blog post will cover the following:

1. What anthropology isn't
2. The Four Branches of Anthropology
3. The Social Sciences
4. The Anthropological Approach
5. Sub-disciplines of Anthropology

Each discipline has a set of questions it pursues and ways of answer these. The questions and the method for answering them tend distinguish the disciplines. So if you're writing an essay for your anthropology subject, it generally won't to use research from a nursing, journalism, IT publication

1. What Anthropology isn't

 Futurologists, futurists, influencers, and so on sometimes brand themselves as "anthropologists". This is great, because it shows the appeal of anthropology. But this course is not concerned with what anthropology could be or should be, but rather with teaching anthropology as it is published in scholarly journals, by scholarly presses, and practised by people with degrees in the field. 

Going by that definition, some people who say they are anthropologists in fact are not. For instance, this on a website for the above man, who describes himself as :

a world-renowned digital analyst, anthropologist and futurist who has been called "one of the greatest digital analysts of our time.”

He describes 'the anthropology' of digital disruption in this blog. In terms of his own work, he sees the importance of understanding 'digital anthropology' for his career:

Doing  "digital anthropology" helps me better understand how disruptive technologies also affect society, behavior, norms, values, etc. Now, I consider myself a digital analyst and aspiring digital anthropologist and apply both approaches to my work today.

This man and others like him may provide great assistance to CEOs and industry leaders etc. However,  what these people do is not necessarily what professional anthropologists consider to be anthropology. Put another way, I think that what people like him do is not anthropology. Maybe my understanding of what constitutes anthropology needs to change to include this. But, in the meantime, what is anthropology, as we scholars think of it?

2. The Four Branches of Anthropology

Anthropology, we used to say, has four branches:

1. Biological/Physical Anthropology
2. Linguistic Anthropology
3. Archaeology
4. Cultural Anthropology

This image shows the four branches of Anthropology (Image from Norton)

This 'four branches' division is good enough to start with. This subject on digital anthropology is cultural anthropology. From now on, when I use the word "Anthropology", I will mean "cultural anthropology". 

Anthropologists ask different kinds of questions and have different ways of answering them. So if you're an engineer, a software analyst, a medical student, or an Anthropologist you have different questions about digital technologies and different ways of answering them.  For instance "Are violent video games bad for children?" is not a question anthropologists tend to ask. We might ask rather "Why do people worry that video games might be bad for children?". Or in response to the question "what do young women in Trinidad think about social media?" we don't conduct an online poll for Trinidadian youths. We use other research methods. So the questions and ways of answering them are different in anthropology.

To explain these let's first consider where Anthropology lies in the world of university.

3. The Social Sciences

Social Sciences

First of all, Anthropology is usually placed within the Social Sciences or Humanities. The social sciences 

 In the social sciences, we tend to use critical analysis. This can mean different things within the social sciences, so we'll just focus on critical analysis means to us as anthropologists.

Critical Analysis: Understanding not judging

Critical analysis means using theories and concepts to study/understand. The objective is not so much to scorn or praise, but to deeply understand.

The first example we will use for this drunkenness at sports clubs. Before trying to change a culture of excessive alcohol consumption in a sports club, a social scientist would first seek to understand it

Social scientists studying violent drunkenness in amateur sports clubs would try to put aside feelings of disgust. They try, in the first instance, to understand it before we judge it. They might analyze it in terms of a "culture of violence". They might turn to social factors of gender (expectations of 'manliness'); class (lower class); economy (underprivilege). They might also turn to psychological factors (patterns of abuse; depression; etc.). For all these explanations, the emphasis is not on blaming but rather describing and understanding. This is characteristic of the critical approach. This may or may not lead to 'outcomes' like policies, programs, etc. to address the issues.

It's the same if you're a psychiatrist, the second example we will use. If your patient is a mother who has urges to kill her child or other people, you don't say "something is very wrong with you; you're a psycho, you sick, sick human being!". Rather, in the first place, you seek to understand the causes of these urges without rushing to judge your patient. This is also typical of the critical approach.

Our third example is related to digital technologies. "Social Media Could Make It Impossible to Grow Up" is an excerpt from Eichhorn's book End of Forgetting. In this excerpt, Eichhorn argues that the problem with social media is not so much that it can spoil or ruin the innocence of childhood, but rather that children and adolescents can avoid growing up by living in online worlds.

Screengrab of "Social Media..." article

Eichhorn's approach to social media is not characteristic of the social sciences. Her analysis is interesting and intelligent, but the moralistic tone would not normally be considered intellectual or scholarly by social scientists. Social scientists are not particularly concerned to prescribe that children should use less (or more) social media. Rather, social scientists would be more interested in how and why children use social media.

Indeed, social scientists would not generally use a text like "Social Media Could Make It Impossible to Grow Up" to understand social media.  We would not use it to understand how social media works. Rather a historian might see it as a text produced in a historical context. A literary theorist might analyze the text as a form of crisis narrative. A linguist might analyze it for syntactical structures.  Anthropologists might analyze "Social Media Could Make It Impossible to Grow Up" as a kind of story that people in Western (and other) cultures tell themselves about Social Media.

Description vs Prescription

Another way to understand the approach in the social sciences is a commitment to describing the things we study rather than prescribing how things should be. For instance, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff first did research among gay people in Indonesia. He critically analyzed gay identities in Indonesia. Then he wrote the book, Coming of Age in Second Life, about a virtual world. He explains that his method of analysis of both Indonesian gay identities and Second Life is based:

descriptive analysis, rather than prescriptive modes of argumentation... When studying gay Indonesians, I do not ask "is it a good thing that gay identities have emerged in Indonesia?"; I take their emergence as given. Similarly in this book [on Second Life] I do not ask "is it a good thing that virtual worlds have emerged" or "is Second Life headed in the right direction?" While such questions are important to many persons in Second Life and beyond, in this book I take Second Life's emergence as given and work to analyze the cultural practices and beliefs take form within it.

So critical approach can be applied, whether we are studying gay identities or an online community.

Critical analysis also characterizes cultural anthropology. Let's consider this example from research by anthropologist, John Postill, on digital democracy:

the field of digital democracy has at its core the concept of ‘public sphere’, associated with the social philosopher Jürgen Habermas. A public sphere is ‘an arena, independent of government . . . which is dedicated to rational debate and which is both accessible to entry and open to inspection by the citizenry. It is here . . . that public opinion is formed’. Despite Habermas’s insistence that his concept of public sphere referred to a particular phase in European history, for many authors the public sphere has become a normative ideal.

Postill observes that the "public sphere" was a descriptive concept devised by Habermas. Habermas analyzed the public sphere 'arena' as the product of particular historical circumstances. Subsequent researchers, however, have treated as an ideal. For such researchers, an active, rigorous, un-censored, responsible public sphere is thought to be essential to a functioning democracy. So they have used "public sphere" as a prescriptive ideal rather than as a description. This preference for description over-prescription, at least in the early phases of research, characterizes Social Sciences and Anthropology.

4. The Anthropological Approach

The modern discipline of Anthropology emerged in the 1870s. Like other disciplines (e.g. History, Archaeology, Psychology, Politics, Political Science, the Studies of Literature, Music, Fine Arts, etc.), Anthropology also took a critical approach.  But one thing, in particular, came to distinguish it. From around the time of WWI (1914-1918), Anthropology was distinguished by a specific approach or method. So what is the anthropological method?

Anthropological Method

Anthropological research tends to be based on a researcher’s experience of living with a community. The word we use for living with a community is “fieldwork”. Typically, anthropologists use a special method when doing fieldwork. They don’t use questionnaires and they don’t use focus groups. Nor do they conduct controlled experiments on the local people or do they measure the size of their heads and other body parts. Rather anthropologists use a method called "ethnography". 

What is ethnography? See this blog for some answers.

Participant-observation

When doing ethnography, anthropologists usually conduct participant observation Participant-observation basically that you hang out with the people you are studying. You learn to interact with them by picking up their language and habits. You participate in and observe everyday life. For more, see this blog on participating and observing. While you are participating and observing and afterward, you reflect on or analyze this experience. How do we analyze or reflect on the experience? 

We use what is called the "anthropological approach".

Anthropological approach: holism, comparison, & relativism

The anthropological approach is basically the principles we use to analyze our fieldwork experience. You might say the approach boils down to 3 interrelated principles:

• Holism: this is slightly different from being 'holistic'; so be careful.
• Methodological relativism: means not judging cultural practices, at least before you understand them deeply
• Comparison: means applying in one cultural context, theoretical concepts which, we imagine, also apply in different cultural contexts.

These are described in this presentation:

So now once the anthropologist has completed participant observation and reflected on and analyzed this, the next step is then to produce a journal article, book, film or other product. These kinds of products are called “ethnographies.”

Methodological Relativism

The most challenging principle for may undergrads is "methodological relativism", so I'll provide a bit more detail here.

You may be concerned about cyberbullying and want to write about what can be done to stop it. However, anthropologists usually take a methodologically relativist position on the topic they are studying. We don't assume cyberbullying is true or false, good or bad. So we don't point out which measures have been successful at reducing cyberbullying (e.g. encouraging skills in digital citizenship, encouraging parents to take time with their children while they are on the Internet, etc.). Rather we take a step back and analyze what does it mean to live in a society which is pervaded by fears of cyberbullying. We might ask, under what social and cultural conditions did the fear of cyberbullying come to replace the fear of physical bullying in the classroom? Why is one of the things parents now worry about in our society? How does is it compare to fears parents express in other societies. Can you see the difference between the two approaches to cyberbullying? The second analysis adopts an approach of methodological relativism. 

I'll give you another example. Where I do fieldwork the greatest fear for the youth, not to mention everyone, is sorcery. Sorcery can kill children and adults alike. What makes it so pernicious is that it usually emanates from some you are intimately acquainted. The sorcerer could be your friend, neighbor, or even your family member. Now as an anthropologist, I don't assume that sorcery is true or false, good or bad. I don't provide solutions to the problem (e.g. you should hide amulets in your walls, avoid contact with the sorcerer; if possible, if you are affected go to the strongest shaman you can find for counter-magic). Rather as an anthropologist I ask a different set of questions like the following:

1. What does the fear of sorcery say about relationships between family, neighbors, and friends? 
2. How is the fear connected with both reciprocal and market economic relations? 
3. What does the killing of sorcerers in witch-hunts say about state violence in Indonesia?

 Can you see the difference in the two approaches to sorcery? If I say sorcery is false or bad, I'm immediately rushing to make a judgement about it. By contrast with the three question I adopt methodological relativism--I don't take a stance on whether it is real or bad but what the effects of the fear of sorcery are. 

So methodological relativism implies we don't, in the first instance at least, classify cyber-bullying as bad. For instance, some people would say that mean and derogatory tweets about public figures such as Donald Trump and  Jeremy Corbin is bullying, others might say it is not. Anthropologists try to avoid passing judgment and instead try to understand why there might a difference of opinion about what constitutes bullying; what does it say about social media, for example?

Here's the final example. Abidin uses methodological relativism to analyze influencers in Singapore. She states that they are not simply "Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online”, as the title of her article reads. On the other, hand though it is tempting to argue the contrary, that these women are improving and empowering themselves, Abidin shuns this too.  Abidin analyses "positive" self-improvement as merely a 'narrative'. So Abidin rejects saying that influencers are positive or negative. Rather she uses anthropological concepts to analyze these influencers.

 As anthropologists, we aren’t interested in making moral evaluations of whether social media are positive or negative. Rather we are interested in how our lives are changing as a result of social media and how are our lives are changing social media as well. To explain that ‘how’ we turn to theory.

Ethnocentrism & Reflexivity

Two more concepts are important. Ethnocentrism is something that anthropologists try to avoid. If an Englishman says "eating frogs is gross" or "eating horses is gross" he is looking at the world through the values of his own culture. Reflexivity is something that an anthropologist tries to apply. Imagine this same Englishman completes a degree in anthropology. He then says:

well for Indian Hindus, eating cows is offensive and for pious Muslims and Jews eating pigs is gross, so I guess there is nothing natural or normal about me eating beef and pork or nothing gross about French people eating frogs and horses.

Here the Englishman is being reflexive, not ethnocentric. Now he is beginning to apply to principles of critical analysis to thinking about his own culture; he is not taking it for granted that English ways are superior or correct. 

Reflexivity has a second, related, meaning in anthropology. This applies to when you are doing ethnography--participant-observation, say. You think critically about how your race, class, gender, ethnicity, wealth, and other aspects of power in relation to the people you research (this is called your "positionality"). You also think about how it impacts upon your research. Then you attempt to mitigate the effects fo this. You also acknowledge (when you present the results of your research) how you think your position in the world would affect that. By doing these things, you are being reflexive. You don't have to worry too much about this second meaning at the moment as you won't be conducting ethnography until you're a qualified anthropologist.

You might say these two concepts (i.e. ethnocentrism and reflexivity) are already implied in the 'trinity' of holism, methodological relativism, & comparison above. 

In summary, Anthropologists gather data through participation-observation and then analyze it using data using critical analysis, the 'trinity', and ethnocentrism and reflexivity, 

Small Places, Big Issues

Finally, Anthropology is devoted to the larger question of what is to be human. We study large issues (how has the growth of capitalism changed family structures? what are the effects of digital technologies on personal identity) in small places (in a rural town in Mexico; among digital nomads living in Bali).


These principles outlined above emerged over a century from the beginnings of the modern discipline in the 1870s probably crystallizing by around 1970. However, from the 1970s onwards, Anthropologists began to question anthropology itself.

Challenging early Anthropology

Applying the principle of reflexivity to earlier Anthropologists' work made some of the views seem ethnocentric. For instance, up to and including Malinowski's time, many anthropologists a treated the 'natives' whom they studied as being steeped in tradition, magic, and ritual. These early anthropologists apparently viewed natives as living in exotic, isolated, and thus 'timeless', cultures. It seems that for these early anthropologists,  'natives' to represent example (for these early anthropologists) of what 'we' (as in White, Western males) used to be, in prehistoric Europe, before 'we' became civilized. However, the early anthropologists ignored the contact with other societies, the historical forces, and the changes these societies had been through. Their way of seeing 'natives' also ignored the powerful forces of tradition, magic (yes!) and ritual in the Western experience. Finally, from the 1970s Anthropology has become more diverse; steadily the centrality of White, Western men has been decreasing.


Reflexivity, as described above, is associated with the 'reflexive turn'. This was a direction of research, beginning in the 1980s. Australian businessmen spend years in Indonesia and still think of Indonesia as an exotic and sensual place. Indonesian businessmen spend years in Australia and still think of Australia as a godless place of debauchery. In other words, it doesn't matter how long you spend in a location, the preconceived cultural notions you have will predominate. This principle also applies to anthropologists. So instead of spending their time trying to write about people in other places, they should spend time being reflexive, focusing on their own preconceived cultural notions. 

Decolonization

Given the connections between anthropology and colonization, a push towards what is now called the decolonization of anthropology has gained some ground. In a Deakin Uni podcast, Akhil Gupta explains the push towards decolonizing anthropology:

there was some political impetus towards decolonizing anthropology that came out of the fact that a postcolonial generation of scholars had entered the academy. For example,  African-American and Native American scholars entered the American academy. And that lead to a push towards decolonization (c.19:00). 

 In summary, later anthropologists came to see aspects of early anthropology as ethnocentric.

Exotic fieldsites

As a result, it no longer seemed preferable to go to an exotic fieldsite--a village in an isolated island, jungle, or desert--to study what it is to be human. Now it made just as much sense to study a motorcycle gang in Birmingham, England; homeless people in San Francisco;  educated, cosmopolitan, and super-rich elites in Cambodia; or avatars inhabiting the virtual world of Second Life. 

Second Life

Applied Anthropology

Another change has emerged since the 1970s. Instead of just merely explaining or observing communities, Anthropologists have increasingly become more self-conscious and systematic about helping communities to change. They might, for instance, help create a legal case for Indigenous to assert a form of control over lands. When anthropologists do this, it could be argued that they move from merely describing to prescribing change. On the other hand, it is expected that anthropologists will follow the lead of people in the community they might be studying. Ideally, Anthropologists ask, "how can I help you?" and then go about effecting change. Whatever the reality of this kind of work is, it has various names but in general, it's called "Applied Anthropology".

'Why' and 'how' not 'whether'

An abstract point is worth making. Often in Anthropology, 'whether' is not so much the question. Rather, anthropologists focus 'how', 'why', 'in what ways' and/or to 'what effect'. For example, Postill (2013, 167) writes that instead of asking whether digital media influence social movements, Anthropologists might ask how digital media influence social movements and, conversely, how social movements influence digital media. This abstract point works at a simple level, but the distinction may break down upon reflection (for instance, you might ask whether the accessibility of Facebook helps explain why it was a preferred tool in some social movements"). 

Qualitative, not quantitative

It's probably obvious already, but Anthropology mostly uses qualitative (experience) rather than quantitative data. 

Anthropology as a 'divergent discipline'

What we have written above represents a very rough outline of Anthropology. You won't two anthropologists who agree on all this. And that's part of the nature of Anthropology. Anthropology (and Digital Anthropology within it) could be called a 'divergent discipline'. Academics in the Disciplines of Physics, Biology, and Mathematics generally agree on the basic principles upon which to proceed with research and study. In Anthropology, academics do not seem to agree on the basic principles. So the principles we have outlined above are, in practice, frequently questioned. Even we three (Jo, Monika, and Nick) cannot agree on them. Notwithstanding, they will suffice for the purposes of this introductory course.

Why does Anthropology matter?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we Anthropologists believe that Anthropology might just save the world. You might be skeptical, so check out this blog by my colleague at Deakin Uni, David Giles, and see what you think.

5. Sub-disciplines of Anthropology

Digital and human relationships

As mentioned above, anthropology has four branches, one of which is socio-cultural anthropology. Socio-cultural anthropology itself is formed of various subdisciplines including:

• Economic Anthropology
• Kinship
• Political Anthropology
• Medical Anthropology
• Linguistic Anthropology (which is distinct from linguistics)
• Ethnomusicology (basically the anthropology of music and dance)
• Political Anthropology etc. 
• etc.

One of the newest subdisciplines in Socio-Cultural Anthropology is  Digital Anthropology.  So let's move on to the section "Digital Anthropology: Introduction & Overview".