Digital Anthropology

It was a wonderful, intense week full of readings and some ethnographic films. I’m in the process of setting up my research project in Digital Anthropology, since I will be presenting about that on Thursday next week. More on that later.

The readings, presentations and discussion in Digital Anthropology Unit 10 landed in the conviction (for me at least) that the “true or false” is the least important aspect of fake news. Instead, they and their adherents should be seen as a belief system or cult, as worthy of study (and respect) as any esoteric group. Focusing on “true or false” thereby becomes as uninteresting as discussing whether God exists.

I think the framework of virtual world research would be applicable for the study of “fake news fans”. Pizzagate is an example of how things go completely wrong when someone takes the virtual concept of fake news into the actual world. Like an exception that proves the rule, that incident confirms how the virtuality of fake news is taken for granted.

In Ethnographic Film Unit 9 Lydall’s text Beating around the Bush was really interesting in describing and analysing the “wife beating” of the Hamar.

Reading I started reading Michael Fisch’s ethnography on the Tokyo commuter train network An Anthropology of the Machine. I heard an interview with him in the Anthropod podcast in September 2018 (week 38, 2018), and when he surfaced again in a seminal reading by Brian Larkin for Digital Anthropology Unit 9, on infrastructures (week 2, 2019), I checked him up again and realised that this book had just been released. So far he’s laying out the theory. Although I primarily bought this book “for fun”, I think it fits very well into my studies and projects.

Just like Tom Boellstorff in his Second Life research, Fisch focuses on “the gap”. Whereas Boellstorff’s gap is between the virtual and the actual world, Fisch’s gap is between the time table of the trains (the ideal world) and the actual outcome. It’s not unrelated at all and definitely relevant for the things I want to study.

Since the chapter 8 in the handbook by Boellstorff et al was the reading for the Digital Anthropology Colloquium 1 next week, I started reading the book from the start. It’s such an easy an inspiring read, and so well written, that I think the book in full should be mandatory for the very first unit of this course. (We read chapters 2 and 4 for Unit 4 – week 48, 2018.)

Finished Mr Robot season 2 but was not impressed by the resolution.

The week ended with Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil. I did not like it. At all.

As every week I checked the latest Gutenberg reviews. It’s so sad to see people work a lot on something and then get it completely wrong.

Study

Digital Anthropology Unit 10

Studying online phenomena: Fake News, Virality and manipulative data practices

The Conversation/Yuwei Lin: #DeleteFacebook is still feeding the beast – but there are ways to overcome surveillance capitalism
Michael Zimmer: How Contextual Integrity can help us with Research Ethics in Pervasive Data

Digital Anthropology Colloquium 1

Students’ Planned Research & the Ethical Considerations.

Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Cecilia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor (2012): Chapter 8: Ethics. In Ethnography and Virtual Worlds. Handbook of methods., pp. 129-150.

Extra

Readings related to my research.

Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Cecilia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor (2012): Ethnography and Virtual Worlds. Handbook of methods:
- Foreword by George Marcus (pp. xiii-xvii)
- 1: Why this handbook? (pp. 1-12)
- 3: Ten myths about ethnography (pp. 29-51)
Fisch, Michael (2018): An Anthropology of the Machine. Tokyo’s Commuter Train Network:
- Preface (pp. ix-xi)
- Introduction: Toward a Theory of the Machine (pp. 1-28)
- 1: Finessing the Interval (pp. 29-47)
Frennea, Melissa (2012): The Prevalence of Rape and Child Pornography in Yaoi, 34 p.

Ethnographic Film Unit 10

Issues of Representation: A Case Study of the Hamar

Lydall, Jean (2006): Imperilled name and pained heart. More about Duka’s Dilemma’. In Jean Lydall and Ivo Strecker (eds.): The Perils of Face, Essays on cultural contact, respect and self-esteem in southern Ethiopia, pp. 311-337.
Lydall, Jean (1994): Beating around the Bush. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, volume II, 26 p.

And these films:

Robert Gardner: Rivers of Sand (1974, 84 min)
Kaira Strecker and Jean Lydall: Duka’s Dilemma (2001, 88 min)

Ethnographic Film Unit 11

Autoethnography

Russell, Catherine (1999): Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self. In Experimental Ethnography, pp. 275-315.

And the film:

Chris Marker: Sans Soleil (1982, 100 min)

Other

Articles

The Economist: The steam has gone out of globalisation
The Economist: Donald Trump made a dreadful miscalculation over the shutdown
The Economist: Companies can appeal to workers and consumers with liberal messages
The Economist: The arrival of Foxconn in Wisconsin divides Democrats
The Guardian/Elfriede Jelinek, Milan Kundera, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, and 26 others: Fight for Europe – or the wreckers will destroy it
The Independent/Lucy Jones: Why the Fyre Festival documentaries were so terrifying
Insider: The world’s biggest YouTube stars told us they’re burning out because of the unrelenting pressure to post new videos
Post Status/Brian Krogsgard: Post formats are slowly dying, and that’s okay (great piece from 2014 that made me understand the trajectory of post formats and why I don’t need them)

Podcast

Alexandre Enkerli: Rapport: The Informal Ethnographer Podcast (2009)
- 6: Draft Aesthetics
- 7: Teaching Ethnography
- 8: Failures of Anthropology

Film & video

Hubert Sauper: Darwin’s Nightmare (2004, 107 min)
Gurminder K Bhambra: Colonial Histories/Postcolonial Societies: On the Politics of Selective Memory in Europe (2018, 95 min)
Casey Neistat: Burnt OUT YouTubers
Simone Giertz: My brain tumor is back

This week’s unit of Digital Anthropology was a workshop, for which we had an interesting assignment. The briefing was to make “a practise-led experiment to try and get you exploring the aesthetic, representational & infrastructural aspects of your field site”:

Pick a field site – could be an online platform, could be a material space with digital tools engaged with… If possible, use your field site for your final projects. But no worries either way. This is just an experiment.

Final Delivery will be uploaded to either Youtube or Vimeo. So you have sight and sound as the two senses to experiment with.

60 seconds – no more, no less.

“Try and create an impression of the field site & how you engage with it”.

What do you see? Where are you placed? How are you guided through the field site? What are the ‘invisibilities’ (the things that aren’t ‘unique’ to the field site, but are present)? Think about pace. The speed of engagement. What you hear. What is not said. The moment ‘after you stop recording’ – contextualise the journey. Explore the senses. And try to sense-make yourselves. Think ‘haptic cinema’ — what is the sensorial experience of the field site.

& #NOW create. Experiment. Observe & Document.

Create an impression of the field site.

I felt super inspired by that brief and picked up on keywords like pixel, play, and the senses. I began experimenting and this is what I came up with (Youtube has age-restricted the video, so I can’t embed it):

Twitter Rush

My aim was to convey the feeling you (I) have when browsing this particular nook of Twitter. The distance created by faceless bodies, and the vast amount of them along with stats and preferences, can create a rush akin to addiction – according to me. The pace further enhances the video’s “sensationalising” aspect, as the lecturer called it. That aspect is important, since it reflects how the user might feel at times.

Or does it? The big question is of course if the Japanese men who use Twitter in this sense actually get the kind of rush I’ve tried to convey in the video, or if it’s just me. My tutor suggested I should find that out by showing the video to my informants and ask them.

Other points that the lecturer brought up:

Music in ethnographic film is usually considered a nono – “but I say, fuck the nono’s”. However, one should be aware of why it has been frowned upon: Because it’s not considered to be a true depiction. We continued discussing music after watching another student’s piece too, and I made the point that music can enhance what you have seen and are trying to describe – it should be no more controversial than framing or any other choices you do as an ethnographic filmmaker.
Scaling: The lecturer brought up the point of how I move into the “supermacro” and “non-human agents”: “We move into what lies beyond the eye.” He compared this to the text by Mirzoeff that we read for this class.
Rupture, as described by Mirzoeff: The break with the linear. I have to check in the text what this actually refers to, because even though I can understand the non-linear feeling, the video actually goes from “login” via “like” and “follow” to sending off the first message, which says “hello”. So I would say there is a linearity within the non-linear – which may reflect the user experience.

Among the students the main sentiments were that the edit corresponded well with the content, that the music made it intense, and that the result was a very “haptic” piece.

If I continue studying this field site and do a longer and more well-informed piece on it, I will certainly work with pace, and doublecheck with my informants about how they use the platform. In fact, doing this mini-machinima made me realise what questions I want to ask my informants. So far, the only “thick” informant I have in this field site has told me at length about his life and thoughts, but now I realised that I want to know the details of how he interacts with this platform.

Week 4: 21-27 January 2019