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.