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Digital Anthropology
Digital Anthropology
Edited by Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller
London • New York
English edition
First published in 2012 by
Berg
Editorial ofÞ ces:
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP, UK
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
Heather A. Horst & Daniel Miller 2012
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congres s.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 85785 291 5 (Cloth)
978 0 85785 290 8 (Paper)
e-ISBN 978 0 85785 292 2 (institutional)
978 0 85785 293 9 (individual)
www.bergpublishers.com - v -
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
PART I. INTRODUCTION
1. The Digital and the Human: A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology 3
Daniel Miller and Heather A. Horst
PART II. POSITIONING DIGITAL ANTHROPOLOGY
2. Rethinking Digital Anthropology 39
Tom Boellstorff
3. New Media Technologies in Everyday Life 61
Heather A. Horst
4. Geomedia: The Reassertion of Space within Digital Culture 80
Lane DeNicola
PART III. SOCIALIZING DIGITAL ANTHROPOLOGY
5. Disability in the Digital Age 101
Faye Ginsburg
6. Approaches to Personal Communication 127
Stefana Broadbent
7. Social Networking Sites 146
Daniel Miller
PART IV. POLITICIZING DIGITAL ANTHROPOLOGY
8. Digital Politics and Political Engagement 165
John Postill
vi • Contents
9. Free Software and the Politics of Sharing 185
Jelena Karanovi
10. Diverse Digital Worlds 203
Bart Barendregt
11. Digital Engagement: Voice and Participation in Development 225
Jo Tacchi
PART V. DESIGNING DIGITAL ANTHROPOLOGY
12. Design Anthropology: Working on, with and for Digital Technologies 245
Adam Drazin
13. Museum + Digital = ? 266
Haidy Geismar
14. Digital Gaming, Game Design and Its Precursors 288
Thomas M. Malaby
Index 307
- vii -
Notes on Contributors
Bart Barendregt is an anthropologist who lectures at the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is coordina ting a four-year research project (Articulation of Modernity) funded by the Netherlands
Organization for
Scientifi c Research (NWO) that deals with popular music, modernity and social c hance in South East Asia. As a senior researcher, he is also affi liated with an NWO project titled The Future is Elsewhere: Towards a Comparative History of Digital Futurities, which examines Islamic ideas of the information society, halal software and appropria- tion and localization of digital technology in an overt religious contex t. Barendregt has done extensive fi eldwork in Java, Sumatra, Malaysia and the Philippines and has pub- lished on South East Asian performing arts, new and mobile media and popular culture. Tom Boellstorff is professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. From 2007 to 2012 he was editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist, the fl agship journal of the American Anthropological Association. He is the author of many articles and books, including The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2005); A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Duke University Press,
2007); Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually
Human (Princeton University Press, 2008); and
Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A
Handbook of Method, with Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce and T. L. Taylor (Princeton
University Press, 2012).
Stefana Broadbent is currently a teaching fellow in digital anthropology at University College London. Since 1990 she has been studying the evolutio n of digi- tal practices at home and in the workplace and has recently published a book on the blurring of the boundaries between the two: L'Intimite au Travail (FYP Editions,
2011). Previously, she was research director and member of the Strategy Board
of Swisscom, where she started the Observatory of Digital Life. The Observatory studied longitudinally the evolution of digital activities in Swiss hous eholds. She has been a lecturer in ethnography and design in the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, and the Ecole Superieur des Art Decoratifs in Paris. Lane DeNicola is a lecturer in digital anthropology at University College London. His research interests include culture and design; spatial information t echnology and viii • Notes on Contributors geomedia; the social and political dimensions of open design; space indu strialization in the developing world; scientifi c visualization; immersive systems and gaming. Prior to his doctoral training in science and technology studies, he wor ked as a pro- grammer and simulation designer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the Center for Space Research at MIT.
Adam Drazin
is coordinator of the MA degree programme in culture, materials and design at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He lectured previously at Trinity College Dublin. Drazin works principally in the fi elds of mater- ial culture, design anthropology and the Romanian home. He has conducted design anthropology work with HP Labs, the Technical University of Eindhoven and Intel Ireland, mostly exploring material culture with a view to critical desig n approaches. Prior to lecturing at Trinity College Dublin, he ran his own sole-trader consultancy business. His current research interest is on the cultures of openness a nd home- making for people who have moved from Romania to Ireland. Other interest s include the material culture of intentionality, cultures of design and the more appropriate use of ethnography in innovation. He recently guest-edited a joint speci al edition of Anthropology in Action and the Irish Journal of Anthropology on 'Anthropology, Design and Technology in Ireland' and has published in Ethnos and Home Cultures, among other places. Haidy Geismar is assistant professor of anthropology and museum studies at New York University. Her research focuses on issues surrounding value and materiality, using museums as a fi lter. Her research interests are intellectual and cultural prop- erty, the formation of digital objects and most broadly the ways in which mu seums and markets infl uence and engender relations between persons and things. Since
2000 she has worked as a researcher and curator in Vanuatu and Aotearoa, New
Zealand, England and the United States.
Faye Ginsburg
is founder and ongoing director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University, where she is also the David Kriser Professor of Anthropology, and codirector of the Center for Religion and Media and of the NYU Council for the Study of Disability. She is an award-winning editor/author of four books, including Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain and Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media in the Digital Age, which is still in press. She is cur- rently carrying out research on cultural innovation and learning differences with
Rayna Rapp.
Heather A. Horst is a Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and the co-director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre. She is the coauthor (with Daniel Miller) of The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Berg, 2006) and (with Ito et al.) of
Notes on Contributors • ix
Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (MIT Press, 2010). She is currently writing an ethnography focused on digital media and family life in Silicon Valley. Her current research examines com- municative and monetary ecologies in the Caribbean and Pacifi c.
Jelena Karanovi
is adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Trained in cultural anthropology, French studies and computer science, Karanovi pursues research on new media ac- tivism, information rights, media ethnography, media and globalization, France and Europe. Her book manuscript, in preparation, explores the experiences an d dilemmas of French free software advocates as they reinvent civic engagement arou nd digital media. By drawing on twenty months of fi eldwork conducted online and offl ine in 2004 and 2005, she analyses how prime vehicles of free-market globali zation - intellectual property law and digital media technologies - have invigor ated public debates about European integration and the transnational political econo my. Her work brings anthropology into dialogue with media studies, science and t echnology studies and European studies. Her 2010 article, 'Contentious European ization: The Paradox of Becoming European through Anti-Patent Activism', appeared in Ethnos:
Journal of Anthropology.
Thomas M. Malaby
is professor and chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has published numerous works on games, practice and indeterminacy. He is continually interested in the ever-changing rela- tionships among institutions, unpredictability and technology - especia lly as they are realized through games and gamelike processes. His most recent book,
Making
Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (Cornell University Press, 2009), is an ethnographic examination of Linden Lab and its relationship to its creat ion, Second Life. He is also a featured author at the blog Terra Nova. Daniel Miller is professor of material culture in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, where he recently established a programme in digital anthropology. Relevant publications include Tales from Facebook (Polity Press,
2011), Migration and New Media: Transnationalism and Polymedia (with M.
Madianou, Routledge, 2011), The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (with H. Horst, Berg, 2006) and
The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (with
Don Slater, Berg, 2000). Other recent books include Blue Jeans (with S. Woodward, University of California Press, 2011) and Consumption and Its Consequences (Polity
Press, 2012).
John Postill
is an anthropologist (PhD University College London) who specializes in the study of digital media. A senior lecturer in media at Sheffi eld Hallam University, he is the author of Localizing the Internet (2011) and Media and Nation Building x • Notes on Contributors (2006) and the co-editor of Theorising Media and Practice (2010). He has conducted fi eldwork in Malaysia and Spain and is currently writing a book about digi tal media and the indignados movement. In addition, he is the founder and convener of the Media Anthropology Network, European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Jo Tacchi
is deputy dean of research and innovation in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT University. Research and its application in the area of communication for development have been a focus of Tacchi's research since 1999. Her work in this area has been centrally concerned with issues around cu lture and social change, and in developing suitable methodologies for investigatin g this. Since
2002 she has led research and research teams spread across Australian universities
and a range of national and international organizations, including the United Nations Educational, Scientifi c and Cultural Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, Intel Corporation, international nongovernmental organizations and Australian government departments and agencies to develop and test innov ative methodologies for monitoring and evaluation, for developing and research ing ap- proaches to participatory content creation and for research in communica tion, media and information and communication technology for development.
Part I
Introduction
- 3 - -1-
The Digital and the Human:
A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology
Daniel Miller and Heather A. Horst
This introduction will propose six basic principles as the foundation fo r a new sub- discipline: digital anthropology. 1 While the principles will be used to integrate the chapters that follow, its larger purpose is to spread the widest possible canvas upon which to begin the creative work of new research and thinking. The intention is not simply to study and re fl ect on new developments but to use these to further our un- derstanding of what we are and have always been. The digital should and can be a highly effective means for refl ecting upon what it means to be human, the ultimate task of anthropology as a discipline. While we cannot claim to be comprehensive, we will try to cover a good d eal of ground, because we feel that to launch a book of this kind means taking responsibil- ity for asking and answering some signifi cant questions. For example, we need to be clear as to what we mean by words such as digital, culture and anthropology and what we believe represents practices that are new and unprecedented and what re- mains the same or merely slightly changed. We need to fi nd a way to ensure that the vast generalizations required in such tasks do not obscure differences, distinctions and relativism, which we view as remaining amongst the most important co ntribu- tions of an anthropological perspective to understanding human life and culture. We have responded partly through imposing a common structure to this volume . Each of the contributors was asked to provide a general survey of work in the ir fi eld, fol- lowed by two more detailed (usually ethnographic) case studies, conclu ded by a discussion of potential new developments. In this introduction we use the fi ndings of these individual contributions as the foundation for building six principles that we believe constitute the ke y questions and concerns of digital anthropology as a subdiscipline. The fi rst principle is that the digi- tal itself intensifi es the dialectical nature of culture. The term digital will be defi ned as all that which can be ultimately reduced to binary code but which produc es a further proliferation of particularity and difference. The dialectic refers to the relationship between this growth in universality and particularity and the intrinsic connections be- tween their positive and negative effects. Our second principle suggests that humanity is not one iota more mediated by the rise of the digital. Rather, we suggest that digital
4 • Digital Anthropology
anthropology will progress to the degree that the digital enables us to understand and exposes the framed nature of analogue or predigital life as culture and fails when we fall victim to a broader and romanticized discourse that presupposes a greater authenticity or reality to the predigital. The commitment to holism, the foundation of anthropological perspectives on humanity, represents a third principle. Where some disciplines prioritize collectives, minds, individuals and other fragmen ts of life, an- thropologists focus upon life as lived and all the (mess of) relevant factors that comes with that. Anthropological approaches to ethnography focus upon the world consti- tuted within the frame of a particular ethnographic project but also the still wider world that both impacts upon and transcends that frame. The fourth principle reasserts the importance of cultural relativism and the global nature of our encou nter with the digital, negating assumptions that the digital is necessarily homogenizi ng and also giving voice and visibility to those who are peripheralized by modernist and similar perspectives. The fi fth principle is concerned with the essential ambiguity of digital culture with regard to its increasing openness and closure, which emerge in matters ranging from politics and privacy to the authenticity of ambivalence. Our fi nal principle acknowledges the materiality of digital worlds, which are nei- ther more nor less material than the worlds that preceded them. Material culture approaches have shown how materiality is also the mechanism behind our fi nal ob- servation, which is also our primary justifi cation for an anthropological approach. This concerns humanity's remarkable capacity to reimpose normativity just as quickly as digital technologies create conditions for change. We shall argue that it is this drive to the normative that that makes attempts to understand th e impact of the digital in the absence of anthropology unviable. As many of the chapters in this volume will demonstrate, the digital, as all material culture, is more t han a substrate; it is becoming a constitutive part of what makes us human. The primary point of this introduction, and the emergence of digital anthropology as a subfi eld more gen- erally, is in resolute opposition to all approaches that imply that becoming d igital has either rendered us less human, less authentic or more mediated. Not only are we just as human within the digital world, the digital also provides many new op portunities for anthropology to help us understand what it means to be human. De fi ning the Digital through the Dialectic Some time ago Daniel Miller and Haidy Geismar were discussing the launch of the new master's programme in digital anthropology at University College London. Re fl ecting upon similar initiatives in museum studies at New York University, Geismar mentioned that one of the challenges of creating such programs revolved around the fact that everyone had different ideas of what the digital implied. Some scholars looked to three-dimensional visualizations of museum objects. For others , the digital referred to virtual displays, the development of websites and virtual ex hibitions. Some
The Digital and the Human • 5
colleagues looked to innovations in research methodology, while others focused on the digitalization of collections and archives. Still others focused upo n new media and digital communication, such as smartphones. Alongside novelty, the word digital has come to be associated with a much wider and older meta-discourse of mode rnism, from science fi ction to various versions of technoliberalism. At the end of the day, however, the word seems to have become a discursive catchall for novelty. For the purposes of this book, we feel it may therefore be helpful to st art with a clear and unambiguous defi nition of the digital. Rather than a general distinction between the digital and the analogue, we defi ne the digital as everything that has been developed by, or can be reduced to, the binary - that is bits consisting of 0s and 1s. The development of binary code radically simplifi ed information and com- munication, creating new possibilities of convergence between what were previously disparate technologies or content. We will use this basic defi nition, but we are aware that the term digital has been associated with many other developments. For example systems theory and the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener (Turner 2006: 20-8; Wiener
1948) developed from observations of self-regulatory feedback mechanism
s in liv- ing organisms that have nothing to do with binary code but can be applied to e ngi- neering. We also acknowledge that the use of term digital in colloquial discourse is clearly wider than our specifi c usage; we suggest that having such an unambiguous de fi nition has heuristic benefi ts that will become evident below. One advantage of defi ning the digital as binary is that this defi nition also helps us identify a possible historical precedent. If the digital is defi ned as our ability to reduce so much of the world to the commonality of a binary, a sort of baseline 2, then we can also refl ect upon humanity's ability to previously reduce much of the world to baseline 10, the decimal foundation for systems of modern money . There is a prior and established anthropological debate about the consequences of money for humanity that may help us to conceptualize the consequences of the d igital. Just like the digital, money represented a new phase in human abstraction whe re, for the fi rst time, practically anything could be reduced to the same common eleme nt. This reduction of quality to quantity was in turn the foundation for an explo sion of differ- entiated things, especially the huge expansion of commoditization linked to indus- trialization. In both cases, the more we reduce to the same, the more we can thereby create difference. This is what makes money the best precedent for understanding digital culture and leads to our fi rst principle of the dialectic. Dialectical thinking, as developed by Hegel, theorized this relationship between the simultaneous growth of the universal and of the particular as depend ent upon each other rather than in opposition to each other. This is the case both with money and with the digital. For social science much of the concern was with thquotesdbs_dbs25.pdfusesText_31
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