Posts tagged anthropology

Articles: Digital Form - The Materiality of the Digital

This collection of articles focuses on the materiality of the digital: the objects through which digital technology is constituted. In this context, “form” is the technical and infrastructural components of digitality, encompassing everything from source code to hardware, network protocols to software.

Published in journal Cultural Anthropology, read editors’ introduction here.

AAA Panel: Towards an Anthropology of Social Media (Nov ‘12, SF, US)

Anthropologists are uniquely positioned to study the particularities of emerging media platforms and practices in global and transnational contexts. Yet an anthropology of social media must contend with the challenges of studying rapidly transforming global communication networks and social practices.

Jordan Kraemer <jkraemer(at)uci.edu> and Charles Pearson <charles.a.pearson(at)gmail.com> are organizing this panel for the American Anthropological Association annual meeting this fall (11/14-11/18 in San Francisco). Please contact one of them if you are interested. Thanks!

Abstract:

Towards an Anthropology of Social Media

By the end of 2012, Facebook stands to have one billion global users, while two hundred million tweets (Twitter posts) are sent daily and YouTube users upload 60 hours of video each minute. Alongside these well-known online platforms, numerous smaller ones attract users in different regions across the globe and in many languages (such as RenRen in China or Orkut in Brazil).

So-called “social media” are emerging as an ubiquitous facet of everyday life for both anthropologists and people with whom we work. In contrast to this diversity of users and practices, however, popular discourse often portrays social media in binary terms. While some accounts warn that emergent media will further social isolation, others frame social media in terms of celebratory cyber-utopianism. In such enthusiastic narratives, social media provide a universally democratizing space for communication, offering users new means for civic participation while collapsing distinctions between producer and con sumer or local and global. Indeed, social media have even been heralded for eradicating modes of alienation.

Anthropologists are uniquely positioned to study the particularities of emerging media platforms and practices in global and transnational contexts. Yet an anthropology of social media must contend with the challenges of studying rapidly transforming global communication networks and social practices.

On one hand, since users may be radically distributed and place-ness may be difficult to locate or identify, how can we rethink single- and multi-sited methods to address the spatial dimensions of social media practices? On the other, what are the increasingly informational aspects of new modes of expression and circulation?

This panel will address the specificities and particularities of social media and emerging modes of production.

  • Whose sociality do social media represent, articulate, or facilitate?
  • How are certain forms of connectivity and interactivity privileged, and under what circumstances?
  • In short, what are the concerns and possibilities for an emerging anthropology of social media?

Call for Papers: Socially-Mediated Publicness

Abstracts due December 12, 2011.

Social media call into question conventional understandings of what it means to “be public,” what it means to be “in a public,” and even the meaning of “public” itself. New types of publics are emerging because of the technological affordances of social media and individuals may be more visible than ever before, whether they seek this or not. This special issue will explore these issues.

We seek scholarship from an array of theoretical and methodological perspectives that critically examines how public life is reconfigured because of or in relation to social media. We welcome articles from diverse fields, including media studies, communication, anthropology, sociology, political theory, critical theory, etc.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Processes and practices of building and living in online publics
  • How new technologies of publicness affect celebrities, artists, musicians, and other creators
  • How mediated publics challenge social, political, and economic assumptions
  • The meaning of concepts such as “audience” and “listening” in mediated public spaces
  • How counterpublics and intimate publics are reshaped by technology
  • The relationships between being public and being part of a public
  • Degrees, boundaries, and scales of technologically-mediated publicness
  • How new types of publicness reconfigure identity and race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and/or nationality

Special Theme Issue of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media

Guest Editors: Nancy Baym (University of Kansas), danah boyd (Microsoft Research)

Editor: Zizi Papacharissi

In order to be more public, this special issue of JOBEM will be published as an open-access issue. All articles will be available online at the point of publication. The anticipated publication date for this issue is September 2012.

Manuscripts should conform to the guidelines of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media.

By December 12, 2011, you should send a title, abstract, and list of 5 potential reviewers to jobem.publicness(at)gmail.com to help us streamline the peer review process.

Articles should be submitted no later than January 6, 2012 at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hbem (select “Special Issue: Socially Mediated Publicness” as a manuscript type).