What is Digital Anthropology?

Diaspora

the dispersion or spread of any people from their original homeland

"So long as 'free' is paid for by surveillance" as one activist technology scholar has put it, "the Internet will represent a Faustian bargain for radical social movements".

(Saxon 2009)

Recursive public

A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public.

Diaspora and information technologies stand in a "homologous" relationship to each other because "in both cyberspace and the spaces of diaspora. . . location is ambiguous, and to be made socially meaningful, it must be actively constructed".

Bernal (2005)

Emergent technologies ushered in a"historically new reality" —one that is "fundamentally altering the way we are born, we live, we sleep, we produce, we consume, we dream, we fight, or we die"

Castells (1996)

"Despite the massive amount of data and new forms of visibility shored up by computational media, many of these worlds remain veiled, cloaked, and difficult to decipher. Long-term ethnographic research is well suited to tease out some of these veiled dimensions, however tentatively, to unearth the remarkable depth, richness, and variability of digital media in everyday and institutional life."

Coleman 2010 Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media

Digital piracy in its totality partly interferes with the smooth functioning of capitalist and liberal-legal imperatives, tearing into what Derrida calls the "mystical foundation of authority" and inducing a moral panic in the copyright industries

Derrida (1992)

"This techno-imaginary universe of digital eras and divides . . . has the effect of reinscribing onto the world a kind of "allochronic chronopolitics". . . in which 'the other' exists in a time not contemporarywith our own. This has the effect of restratifying the world along lines of a late modernity, despite the utopian promises by the digerati of the possibilities of a 21st-century McLuhanesque global village".

Ginsburg (2008)

Far from stimulating novelty, digital technologies in many instances facilitated social reproduction, catalyzing "expansive realizations" of self and culture.

Miller and Slater (2000)

Used to transmit voice, send texts, and take pictures, cell phones have become important multimodal tools not only for economic activity, but for extending sociality and kin networks.

Horst & Miller 2006, Ito et al. 2005, Wallis 2008

Free software is a "recursive public" whereby continuous and collaborative modification of software is what marks this "geek" public as distinctive from those publics mediated primarily by print culture.

Kelty (2008)

The informality and playfulness of texting demonstrates how Giriamian youth construct a "fantasized persona" that is not bound to local customs. Among many elders, however, "mobile-phone technology and language are saturated with a kind of witchcraft that threatens Giriama identity".

McIntosh (2010)

"[o]ne blinds some birds to make others sing more beautifully"

Nietzsche (1980)

Cell phones, generally a domesticated object, can assume extraordinary symbolic power, for example, when deployed during spectacular street protests, as in the People's Revolution in the Philippines in 2001.

Pertierra 2006, Rafael 2003

Schull provides a wide-ranging ethnographic analysis of slot machine addicts in Las Vegas, for whom gambling becomes a means of self-suspension in which "time, space, the value of money, social relations, and even a sense of the body dissolves".

Schull (2008, 2011)

Social media allows for more communicative interactivity, flexibility, social connectivity, user-generated content, and creativity, facilitating more democratic participation than previous digital platforms and greater interaction among larger swaths of the global populace.

Shirky 2008, Weinberger 2007

"To be compelling, a new media product must capture the psychic and social experiences of a particular time and place, and these include the experiences of older media, as well as the hopes and anxieties around the introduction of new media technologies themselves."

Silvio (2007)

Scholars can reach significant cultural and social conclusions via mediation only in the form of the questions and analytic frames brought to bear on the objects and subjects of analysis.

Weber (1949)

What enters our analysis depends on a particular type of mediation, as Weber famously insisted when he argued that we cannot nakedly apprehend the full force and complexity of any social phenomena.

Weber (1949)

Web2.0 technologies

a term used to distinguish contemporary social media (Wikis, blogs, embedded videos) from their immediate predecessors, the static Web pages and message forums that had characterized what was retroactively dubbed Web 1.0