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

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

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

Green (2020)  Digital Nomads in Chiang Mai

Recap

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

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

Nomadism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milking a yak 

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

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

Digital Natives

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

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

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

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

'Native' digital natives 

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

Problems with the "digital native" concept 

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

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

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

Digital Disruption 

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

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

Digital disruption in the media industry esp. journalism

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

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

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

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

'Emic' understandings of digital disruption 

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

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

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

Scholarly analysis of digital disruption 

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

Digital Nomads

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

Research on digital nomads 

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

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

A 'digital nomad' working remotely from El Salvador

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

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

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

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

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

Ethic & Digital Nomadism

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

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

Playbour

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Further research

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

Next week

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

Further reading

 

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.