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.