Smartphones “In-Between” or: What Do Smartphones Have in Common With Doors?*
Suzana Jovicic Credits: Thomas Sobottka It is Friday night in a youth centre on the outskirts of Vienna; the lights are dim, and loud local Rap music is…
Tag: Privacy
Connection and Inequality in the Remote Classroom
The switchover to remote teaching in the wake of COVID-19 has prompted a flurry of conversation among academics regarding technology’s (in)capabilities in replicating the conventional in-person classr…
Period Tracking Apps: Something Old, Something New
They’re sleek and colorful, “fun and easy”, full of icons and dials. Period tracking apps, or “menstruapps,” are an increasingly common way a large segment of the populat…
Cloud Security for Anthropologists
By Alexander Taylor Our ethnographic data is in the cloud, but our heads are not More and more anthropologists are conducting, storing and circulating their research in the…
Internet Privacy Hogwash
What does anthropology have to say about privacy? Ever since the early years of the Internet, privacy and public conduct have been hot button issues. Some initial bad…
Data Doppelgängers and Issues of Consent
Editor’s Note: This is the fifth post in our Law in Computation series. In February 2018, journalist Kashmir Hill wrote about her collaboration with researcher Surya Mattu to…
DragNet: February 1 – February 15, 2018
Image from ACLU.org For this dragnet update we have several fascinating articles to highlight. Among the stories from the United states was an article on the NYPD’s unofficial power…
What does social media tell us about sociality in Grano?
‘Good morning’ message received on WhatsApp [double-click on the image to see the video]. So, what does the ethnography of social media use in southeast Italy tells us? In my…
In the Journals – December 2015
As both the holidays, and the year, draw to a close, we here at In the Journals wish all our readers the best in their endeavors in the…
WhatsApp ban in Brazil: the word on the ground
The text above the image reads: ‘me without WhatsApp’. In this post Juliano Spyer suggests that the vocal backlash against the recent blocking of WhatsApp in…
Fieldwork is haunting me, thanks to WhatsApp
When is the end of fieldwork? (Photo:Merlijn Hoek CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) When is it that fieldwork finishes? Thanks to social media, the separation between being in the fieldsite…
The Privacy Paradox: IRBs in an Era of NSA Mass Surveillance
[This invited post was written by Daniel O’Maley, who recently graduated with a PhD in cultural anthropology from Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the global Internet freedom movement…
Encrypting Ethnography: Digital Security for Researchers
(This invited post comes to us from Jonatan Kurzwelly. Jonatan is a a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. You can email him at kurzwelly@mailbox.org .…
Digital Deities?
A new study by economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz tells us that Internet searches for “God” are way down. He notes that this is true even in cases of catastrophe:…
What’s our conclusion? Introducing ‘scalable sociality’
Scalable Sociality Right now we are finishing the last of our eleven volumes from this project, a book which will be called How the World Changed Social Media.…
Is Weibo on the way out? For some in China, it was never in.
Weibo: share your thoughts with the world (assuming, of course, you actually want to). Photo: bfishadow (CC BY 2.0) I read with interest Celia Hatton’s BBC News article published…
Aligned Anxieties: Rethinking Critiques of the Internet through the Anxieties of Web Professionals
The following is a paper I gave at the 2015 Theorizing the Web Conference on April 18. Below you will find: my presentation with audio, the video of the…
App-ography: A critical perspective on medical and health apps
All My Apps by alf eaton + Anatomical Position by Connexions I have been thinking and writing about mobile apps recently and how they are used for medical…
Measurements: The Qualitative Work of Quantitative Work
Katie Pine Max Liboiron Editor’s Note: Katie Pine and Max Liboiron continue this week’s theme of makers, hackers, and engineers with a post about the politics and performativity…
Falling in: how ethnography happened to me and what I’ve learned from it
Austin Toombs Editor’s Note: Austin Toombs (@altoombs) brings a background in computer science and a critical sensibility to his ethnographic research on maker cultures. He explores the formati…
Studying Up: The Ethnography of Technologists
Nick Seaver Editor’s Note: Nick Seaver (@npseaver) kicks off the March-April special edition of Ethnography Matters, which will feature a number of researchers at the Intel Science and Technolog…
March-April 2014: Studying Hackers, Makers, and Engineers
This month’s theme – ethnographies of hackers, makers, and engineers – is edited by Morgan G. Ames, who made the transition from being a hacker to studying them…
Tell Me More danah boyd: an interview with the author of “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens”
danah boyd (@zephoria) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and a Fellow at Harvard’s…