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.