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 & Humanities

Anthropology doesn't sit in the faculty of Medicine or Engineering. So where does it belong? First of all, universities usually place anthropology is usually placed within the Social Sciences and / or Humanities. In both the humanities and social sciences, scholars tend to use critical analysis.

Critical Analysis: Understanding not judging

Critical analysis means using theories and concepts to study/understand.

We can see this in relation  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.

As with other social sciences and humanities, anthropology tends to focus on describing issues rather than prescribing what should be done about them. 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. So what is the anthropological approach?

Anthropological Approach

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. 

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

'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"). 

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.

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".