Scottish Primrose (Primula scotica): Swords into plowshares? (An old Quaker theme) And hoverbikes in a #RealisticVirtualEarth for Air Traffic Control #RealisticVirtualEarthForAirTrafficControl * * * Are computers & programming languages the new spinning wheel & Khadi? re Does Narendra Modi (India's PM) wear Khadi? * * * Programming for Anthropologists? Would love to teach a 3rd course with Lego Robotics, & its programming language, with Scratch drag & drop programming (eventually online) re machine learning * * * Plannining ALL museums from all time in ALL 7,097 LIVING languages ... in a #RealisticVirtualEarth (think Google Street View with TIME SLIDER / Maps / Earth / TensorFlow / with realistic AVATAR BOTS ... even making the art (Homer, Michelangelo ...) ... and where WUaS is WIKI too * * * [Medianthro] Discussion of e-seminar: The Digital Turn

Dear all

I’d like to thank Sahana Udupa, and the EASA medianthro group, for inviting me to comment upon this paper. Offering a follow-up e-seminar to the panel in Sweden does alleviate the sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) among those of us who couldn’t attend the 15th EASA conference, and I am pleased to have had a chance to read through this paper and learn of the array of rich ideas and projects that were shared.

As the opening sections of the paper discuss, most anthropologists interested in media have shifted their attention to digital technologies in recent years. In some cases, they are simply following a natural transition of the practices they were studying: in my own research on television consumption, I have had to follow my research participants’ transition from largely watching free to air broadcast television, to increasingly engaging with multiple platforms and networks to access their preferred television content. But other anthropologists have also critically considered the rise of digital technologies as potentially creating much deeper kinds of transformation – both to social practice and to social theory. By bringing together the range of papers at the EASA panel, this paper and many of the panellists seem to be engaging in this second, deeper kind of questioning.

Does the “digital turn” require any rethinking of media anthropology’s purpose? Does it really constitute a “paradigm shift”? Has the ongoing acceleration of digital technologies’ presence in the media ecologies or everyday landscapes of people and their communities disrupted any of the founding principles of our ethnographic work? These are productive questions, but my answer to each of them at this stage is “no – which is good”. I think this is borne out by the careful and considered work in the paper but I do invite other list members to respond.

Across the three sub-themes, the researchers show that understanding their topics of research requires an ongoing attention to matters of materiality, of structure and of power. With the rise of visual elements in digital technology, it is clear that scholarship in visual anthropology and material culture studies offer important insights. But just as important is the acknowledgement (an old one in media anthropology) that economic and cultural contexts shape great differences in how “visual” digital media can be. Smartphones remain elusive for many low-income mobile users, at least for now, and video-heavy downloads require high-speed connectivity. Differences in access and in opportunity lie within as well as across communities, and along these lines the sub-theme of the gendered dimensions of digital media research was correctly described as filling a gap that has not been sufficiently explored.

Transforming or expanding the options for communication seems, at least at moments, to offer new opportunities for people to try out new ways of expressing, resisting, or avoiding preferences and expectations. But in their individual acts of expression, resistance or avoidance, users may not necessarily be uprooting social norms (as Costa observes). Still, the capacity to communicate in a wider range of ways does seem to “give voice” to less powerful people and groups. This is seen not only in the case of women discussed by Costa and Tenhunen, but also in the case of people engaged in online extreme speech as studied by Hervik and Udupa.

Across the projects, we see many examples of what anthropology has long done best: the rooting of analysis in local contexts and existing traditions, while also acknowledging the shifting technological and political dimensions that open up new practices. As the Kupiainen (2016) study quoted suggests, new formations of digital cultural identities might best be understood by considering pre-digital forms of identity construction and visual representation. Hervik emphasises how “a neo-nationalism - neo-racism narrative is what leads people into activism and not the new technology per se”. Close attention to the complexity of actors’ contexts and lives, whether in the selection of emojis or the posting of online extreme speech, obliges us to not assume the technology as inherently transformative, nor to assume the transformation as total. In these and other ways, the work considered across the session shows that the digital turn of media anthropology has not done away with the particular recommendations that anthropologists have long brought to the study of media. So my rather conservative assertion that the digital turn cannot be said to constitute a paradigm shift is far from being a critique of the work presented, and is rather an assertion of the ongoing value of our contributions to interdisciplinary debates in the face of digital transformations.

Some final thoughts: as I was reading this seminar paper I was in Manila, having just participated in a conference on Digital Transactions in Asia. As many of you will be aware, in Manila digital technologies are playing a central role in current political developments. While reading of Mollerup’s discussion of photographers in Aleppo, I thought of the Manila’s “nightcrawlers”, photojournalists who cover the night killings by police and vigilantes that have reached many thousands in the past two years. Online extreme speech too plays a role in the Philippines, where recent research shows that trolling and extreme political debate is often the result of paid and organised economies of political disinformation. In public scholarship, close ethnographic research is playing an important role alongside other methodologies and approaches<https://drugarchive.ph/post/14-antidrug-dataset-public-info-killings> in documenting how the digital, while inserted into longstanding political and economic structures, produces real effects in people’s lives (and as Cheryll Soriano observed at the closing of the Digital Transactions conference: the dead also play a role in these digital economies)(Ong & Cabañes 2018<http://newtontechfordev.com/newton-tech4dev-research-identifies-ad-pr-executives-chief-architects-fake-news-production-social-media-trolling/?fbclid=IwAR352pL6alHbQf-aVH3vaB9hIFYMTRhobn2l_NQTfRXV-hmMBoDX9jFZbDw>). It is noteworthy that much (if not most) of this ethnographic work is being done in digital media studies, by scholars who are deeply familiar with, but are not themselves, anthropologists. I offer this as evidence that the “digital turn” in media anthropology converges with, and is perhaps subsumed by, an equally significant and well-established ethnographic turn in digital media research.


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Anna Cristina Pertierra| Director, International
Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis

School of Humanities and Communication Arts
P: 61 2 9772 6565 | E: a.pertierra@westernsydney.edu.aua.pertierra@westernsydney.edu.au