They flirt, they share porn and they gossip
The last four months of 2015 were tough. I was locking myself in a claustrophobic student carrel every day, spending 9 hours staring at a computer screen but…
Tag: social media
Visual/Media/Digital Anthropology at 14th EASA Conference
Here is a list of panels at the 14th European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Biennial Conference entitled “Anthropological legacies and human futures” (Milan, 20-23 July 2016, #EASA2016)…
What is the difference between a generalisation and a stereotype?
All anthropologists would agree that stereotypes cause harm and should be avoided. Yet anthropology mainly consists of generalisations about groups of people: the Nuer do this, the Trobriand…
Not for Sale: How WWII Artifacts Mobilized Japanese-Americans Online
Banner of JA History Not for Sale Facebook page. On March 5, 2015, Eve M. Kahn’s “Newsworthy Notes” in the Antiques section of the New York Times included…
Nostalgia for a field Christmas
Image courtesy of shanzmataz. It’s the first time I’ve been away from Christmas in Trinidad since I started fieldwork there in 2011 (oh wait, I was home briefly…
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…
Teenagers on social media in southeast Italy – quantitative data
In this blog post I will take a look to the quantitative data from my fieldwork, discussing some findings from a questionnaire I conducted with students in their…
26. Thoughts on the symposium “Internet in Southeast Asia: Power and Society”
This is the twenty-sixth post in the freedom technologists series See also the Directory of freedom technologists This past 3-4 December 2015 I was at the Bandar Sunway…
anthro in the news 11/30/2015
ISIS recruits through friends and social media An article in the New York Times on ISIS recruitment provides extensive commentary from cultural anthropologist Scott Atran, co-founder of the…
Why popular anthropology?
The core mission of anthropology is the understanding of human behaviour in a world full of cultural and historical diversity. The anthropological commitment to this immense plurality…
Why We Post: The Anthropology of Social Media
The Why We Post project is now moving into its final stages at full speed, gearing up for our public launch on February 29th 2016. On this…
Establishing Your Digital Presence: A Primer for Students
Last week I had the opportunity talk with a group of anthropology grad students at the University of Memphis about establishing a professional online presence. These are my…
Death on Social Media: A Virtual Living-Dead
When the creators of Facebook first produced a social networking website designed to connect people to people, they simultaneously produced an opportunity to connect people to the deceased.…
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…
Urban Space, Virtual Space, and the Media In Egypt
What is “the geography of urban uprising during the so-called Arab Spring” and, particularly, what is the relationship between its physical and virtual locations? That’s the question…
Seminar: Media & visual technologies as material culture – students’ projects
The following joint student projects are conducted in the seminar “Media and visual technologies as material culture” at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University…
Online relationships with strangers can be ‘purer’ than with offline friends
“Internet dog” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia. As illustrated in the cartoon ‘On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’, published by The New Yorker in 1993, the…
DERC seminar: Social media and West Papua by Usman Hamid
Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) RMIT University, Melbourne Wed 21 October 2015, 3-4:30pm City campus, Building 13, Room 7, Level 4 Map: http://bit.ly/1PAT2vP Website: http://www.digital-eth…
Seminar: Media & visual technologies as material culture – students’ research ideas
Clustering of individual ideas to create joint research projects in the seminar “Media and Visual Technologies as Material Culture” at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of…
Normativity and social visibility
It has been exactly a year since finishing 15 months of fieldwork in Trinidad. Stories for this blog have moved further and further away from cool stuff that…
Seminar: Media & visual technologies as material culture – course description
Seminar “Media and visual technologies as material culture” by Philipp Budka MA Program CREOLE & MA Program Social & Cultural Anthropology University of Vienna Seminar Description This course…
Surveying Social Relationships
One of the chapters of our forthcoming book How the World Changed Social Media, which will be published as an Open Access book by UCL Press in February…
What’s special about social media in small places?
‘Normal friend: ‘Wow, how beautiful you are!’ / Best friend: It’s Shrek on the phone, says he wants his face back.’ Meme shared on Facebook by Comix From…
Notes on the third digital ethnography reading session
by Will Balmford PhD Candidate RMIT University, Melbourne See other posts on the digital ethnography reading group (DERG) This session we discussed Helen Kennedy’s 2003 article Technobiography: Rese…