The Digital and the Human: A Prospectus for Digital
Anthropology [1]
Daniel Miller and Heather Horst
This introduction[ii] will propose six basic principles as the foundation for a new subdiscipline –
Digital Anthropology. While the principles will be used to integrate the chapters that follow, its larger
purpose is to spread the widest possible canvas upon which to begin the creative work of new
research and thinking. The intention is not simply to study and reflect on new developments but to
use these to further our understanding of what we are and have always been. The digital should and
can be a highly effective means for reflecting upon what it means to be human, the ultimate task of
Anthropology as a discipline.
While we cannot claim to be comprehensive, we will try to cover a good deal of ground because we
feel that to launch a book of this kind means taking responsibility for asking and answering some
significant questions. For example we need to be clear as to what we mean by words such as digital,
culture and anthropology and what we believe represents practices that are new and unprecedented
and what remains the same or merely slightly changed. We need to find a way to ensure that the
vast generalisations required in such tasks do not obscure differences, distinctions and relativism
which we view as remaining amongst the most important contributions of an anthropological
perspective to understanding human life and culture. We have responded partly through imposing a
common structure to this volume. Each of the contributors was asked to provide a general survey of
work in their field, followed by two more detailed, usually ethnographic case studies, concluded by a
discussion of potential new developments.
In this introduction we have taken the findings of these individual contributions and used them as the
foundation for building six principles that we believe constitute the key questions and concerns of
digital anthropology as a sub discipline. The first principle is that the digital itself intensifies the
dialectical nature of culture. The term digital will be defined as all that which can be ultimately
reduced to binary code, but which produces a further proliferation of particularity and difference. The
dialectic refers to the relationship between this growth in universality and particularity and the
intrinsic connections between their positive and negative effects. Our second principle suggests that
humanity is not one iota more mediated by the rise of the digital. Rather, we suggest that that digital
anthropology will progress to the degree that the digital enables us to understand and exposes the
framed nature of analogue or predigital life as culture and fails when we fall victim to a broader and
romanticized discourse that presupposes a greater authenticity or reality to the pre digital. The
commitment to holism, the foundation of anthropological perspectives on humanity, represents a
third principle. Where some disciplines prioritize collectives, minds, individuals and other fragments
of life, the anthropologist focus upon life as lived and all the mess of relevant factors that comes with
that. Anthropological approaches to ethnography focus upon the world constituted within the frame
of a particular ethnographic project but also the still wider world that both impacts upon and
transcends that frame. The fourth principle reasserts the importance of cultural relativism and the
global nature of our encounter with the digital, negating assumptions that the digital is necessarily
homogenising and also giving voice and visibility to those who are peripheralised by modernist and
similar perspectives. The fifth principle is concerned with the essential ambiguity of digital culture
with regard to its increasing openness and closure, which emerge in matters ranging from politics
and privacy to the authenticity of ambivalence.
Our final principle acknowledges the materiality of digital worlds, which are neither more nor less
material than the worlds that preceded them. Material culture approaches have shown how
materiality is also the mechanism behind our final observation, which is also our primary justification
for an anthropological approach. This concerns humanity’s remarkable capacity to reimpose
normativity just as quickly as digital technologies create conditions for change. We shall argue that it
is this drive to the normative that that makes attempts to understand the impact of the digital in the
absence of anthropology unviable. As many of the chapters in this volume will demonstrate, the
digital, as all material culture, is more than a substrate; it is becoming a constitutive part of what
makes us human. The primary point of this introduction and the emergence of Digital Anthropology
as a subfield more generally is in resolute opposition to all approaches that imply that becoming
digital has either rendered us less human, less authentic or more mediated. Not only are we just as
human within the digital world, the digital also provides many new opportunities for anthropology to
help us understand what it means to be human.
1) DEFINING THE DIGITAL THROUGH THE DIALECTIC.
Some time ago Daniel Miller and Haidy Geismar were discussing the launch of the new MA
programme in Digital Anthropology at University College London. Reflecting upon similar initiatives
in Museum Studies at New York University, Geismar mentioned that one of the challenges of
creating such programs revolved around the fact that everyone had different ideas of what the digital
implied. Some scholars looked to three dimensional visualizations of museum objects. For others,
the digital referred to virtual displays, the development of websites and virtual exhibitions. Some
colleagues looked to innovations in research methodology, while others focused on the main topic of
her chapter, the digitalization of collections and archives. Still others focused upon new media and
digital communication, such as smart phones. Alongside novelty, the word digital has come to be
associated with a much wider and older metadiscourse of modernism, from science fiction though
to various versions of technoliberalism. At the end of the day, however, the word seems to have
become a discursive catch all for novelty.
For the purposes of this book we feel it may therefore be helpful to start with a clear and
unambiguous definition of the digital. Rather than a general distinction between the digital and the
analogue we define the digital as everything that has been developed by, or can be reduced to, the
binary, that is bits consisting of 0s and 1s. The development of binary code radically simplified
information and communication creating new possibilities of convergence between what were
previously disparate technologies or content. We will use this basic definition, but we are aware that
the term digital has been associated with many other developments. For example systems theory
and the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener (Turner 2006: 2028, Wiener 1948) developed from
observations of selfregulatory feedback mechanisms in living organisms that have nothing to do
with binary code, but can be applied to engineering. We also acknowledge that the use of term
digital in colloquial discourse is clearly wider than our specific usage; we suggest that having such
an unambiguous definition has heuristic benefits that will become evident below.
One advantage of defining the digital as binary is that this definition also helps us identify a possible
historical precedent. If the digital is defined as our ability to reduce so much of the world to the
commonality of a binary, a sort of base line 2, then we can also reflect upon humanity’s ability to
previously reduce much of the world to base line 10, the decimal foundation for systems of modern
money. There is a prior and established anthropological debate about the consequences of money
for humanity that may help us to conceptualise the consequences of the digital. Just like the digital,
money represented a new phase in human abstraction where, for the first time, practically anything
could be reduced to the same common element. This reduction of quality to quantity was in turn the
foundation for an explosion of differentiated things, especially the huge expansion of
commoditisation linked to industrialisation. In both cases, the more we reduce to the same the more
we can thereby create difference. This is what makes money the best precedent for understanding
digital culture and leads to our first principle of the dialectic.
Dialectical thinking, as developed by Hegel, theorised this relationship between the simultaneous
growth of the universal and of the particular, as dependent upon each other rather than in opposition
to each other. This is the case both with money and with the digital. For social science much of the
concern was with the way money meant that everything that we hold dear can now be reduced to
the quantitative. This reduction to base line 10 seemed at least as much a threat as a promise to our
general humanity. Generalised from Marx and Simmel’s original arguments with regard to capitalism
by the Frankfurt school and others, money threatens humanity both as universalised abstraction and
as differentiated particularity. As an abstraction, money gives rise to various forms of capital and
their inherent tendency to aggrandizement. As particularity money threatens our humanity through
the sheer scale and diversity of commoditized culture. We take such arguments to be sufficiently
well established as to not require further elucidation here.
Keith Hart[iii] (2000, 2005, 2007) was the first to suggest that money might be a useful precedent to
the digital because money provides the basis for a specifically anthropological response to the
challenges, which the digital in turn poses to our humanity. Money was always virtual to the degree
that it extended the possibilities of abstraction. Exchange became more distant from facetoface
transaction, and focused on equivalence, calculation and the quantitative as opposed to human and
social consequence. Hart recognised that digital technologies align with these virtual properties;
indeed, they make money itself still more abstract, more deterritorialised, cheaper, more efficient
and closer to the nature of information or communication.
Hart previously argued that if money was itself responsible for such effects then perhaps humanity’s
best response was to tackle this problem at its source. He saw a potential for human liberation in
various schemes that reunites money with social relations, such as Local Exchange Trading
Schemes (LETS) (2000: 280287). For Hart, the digital not only exacerbates the problems of money,
but also can form part of the solution since new moneylike schemes based on the internet may
allow us to create more democratised and personalised systems of exchange outside of mainstream
capitalism. PayPal and eBay hint at these emancipatory possibilities in digital money and trade.
Certainly, as Zelizer (1998, 2008) has shown, there are many ways we do domesticate and re
socialise money itself. For example many people use the money they earn from side jobs for
personal treats, ignoring the apparent homogeneity of money as money.
By contrast Simmel’s (1978) masterpiece, The Philosophy of Money, includes the first detailed
analysis of what was happening at the other end of this dialectical equation. Money was also behind
the commodification that led to a vast quantitative increase in material culture. This also created a
potential source of alienation as we are deluged by the vast mass of differentiated stuff that
surpasses our capacity to appropriate it as culture. Similarly, in our new clichés of the digital we are
told that humanity is being swamped by the scale of information and the sheer number of different
things we are expected to attend to. Much of the debate about the digital and the human is premised
on the threat that the former poses for the latter. We are told that our humanity is beset both by the
digital as virtual abstraction and its opposite form as the sheer quantity of heterogenised things that
are thereby produced. In effect, the digital is producing too much culture, which because we cannot
manage and engage with it, renders us thereby superficial or shallow or alienated.
If Hart argued that our response should be to tackle money at the source, an alternative is presented
in Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Miller 1987). Miller suggested that people struggle
against this feeling of alienation and superficiality not by resocialising money, in the ways described
by Zelizer, but through their consumption of commodities in their specificity. The everyday act of
shopping in which we designate most goods as not `us’ before finding one we will buy is (in a small
way) an attempt to reassert our cultural specificity. We use goods as possessions to try and turn the
alienable back into the inalienable. Often this fails but there are many ways in which everyday
domestic consumption utilises commodities to facilitate meaningful relationships between persons
(Miller 2008a)
If we agree to regard money as the precedent for the digital, Hart and Miller then provide two distinct
positions on the consequences of the digital for our sense of our own humanity. Do we address the
problems posed by the digital at the point of its production as abstract code, or in our relationship to
the mass of new cultural forms that have been created using digital technologies? What does seem
clear is that the digital is indeed a further twist to the dialectical screw. At the level of abstraction
there are grounds for thinking we have reached rock bottom; there can be nothing more basic and
abstract than binary bits, the difference between 0 and 1. At the other end of the scale it is already
clear that the digital far outstrips mere commoditisation in its ability to proliferate difference. Digital
processes can reproduce and communicate exact copies prodigiously and cheaply. They can both
extend commoditisation, but equally in fields such as communication and music we have seen a
remarkable trend towards decommoditisation, as people find ways to get things for free. Whether
commodified (or not) what is clear is that digital technologies are proliferating a vastly increased field
of cultural forms, and we have the feeling that what we have seen so far may be just the beginning.
To date, most of the literature on the revolutionary impact and potential of the digital has tended to
follow Hart in focusing upon the abstract end of the equation, and is represented in this volume by
Karanovic’s discussion of free software and sharing. For example, Kelty (2008) uses both historical
and ethnographic methods to retrace the work of those who founded and created the free software
movement that lies behind many developments in digital culture (see also Karanovic 2008),
including instruments such as Linux, Unix and distributed free software such as Napster and Firefox.
There are many reasons why these developments have been celebrated. As Karanovic notes, they
derive from long standing political debates which include ideals of free access and ideals of
distributed invention both of which seemed to betoken an escape from the endless increase in
commoditisation, and in certain area such as music have led on to a quite effective de
commodification. Software that was shared and not sold seemed to realise the new efficiencies and
relative costlessness of digital creation and communication. It also expressed a freedom from control
and governance, which seemed to realise various forms of anarchist or more specifically the
idealised links between new technology and liberalism that are discussed by Barendregt and Malaby
and is a trend continued by the hacker groups discussed by Karanovic leading also to the more
anarchist aims of organisations such as Anonymous studied by Coleman (2009).
What is clear in Karanovic and others’ contributions is that, just as Simmel saw that money was not
just a new medium, but also one that allowed humanity to advance in conceptualisation and
philosophy towards a new imagination of itself, so open source does not simply change coding. The
very ideal and experience of free software and open source leads to analogous ideals of what Kelty
(2008) calls recursive publics, a committed and involved population that could create fields ranging
from free publishing to the collective creation of Wikipedia modelled on the ideal of opensource. At
a time when the left leaning student idealism that had lasted since the 1960’s seemed exhausted,
digital activism became a plausible substitute. This trend has been a major component of digital
anthropology to date including the impact of mainstream politics discussed by Postill. The
enthusiasm is reflected in Hart’s own contribution to anthropology that included the establishment of
the Open Anthropology Cooperative, a social networking forum for the purpose of democratising
anthropological discussion. Many students also first encounter the idea of a digital anthropology
through the equally enthusiastic `An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube’ by Michael Wesch, a
professor at the University of Kansas, which again celebrates this sense of equality of participation
and creation (Wesch, Library of Congress June 2008).
There are however some cracks in this wall of idealism. Kelty (2009) also documents the disputes
amongst activists over what could become seen as heretical or alternative ideals (see also Juris
2008). Two people’s development of code could soon become technically incompatible reaching a
fork where people have to take sides. The ideal was of a new arena in which anyone can participate,
Companies such as Apple and Microsoft retain their dominance over open source alternative partly
because such ideals flourish more in the initial creative process than in more tedious areas of the
management and repair infrastructure, which all platforms require, whether open or closed. But the
reality is that only extremely technically knowledgeable `geeks’ have the ability and time to create
such opensource developments. Though this would be less true for businesses and in addition
patent controversies and hardware tieins can stack the deck against free software.
Curiously Nafus, Leach and Krieger’s (2006) study of free/libre/open source development found that
only 1.5% of the geeks involved in open source activities were female, making it one of the most
extreme examples of gender discrepancy in this day and age. Even in much less technical areas, a
report suggests only 13% of those who contribute to Wikipedia are female (Glott, Schmidt and
Ghosh 2010). Women seemed less likely to embrace what was perceived as a rather antisocial
commitment of time to technology required of radical activism and activists (though see Coleman
2009). This is precisely the problematic area addressed by Karanovic in her analysis of
GeekGirlfriend, a specific campaign that clearly acknowledges, although not necessarily resolves,
this issues of gender discrepancy. Such interventions rest in part on what Karanovic and Coleman
have revealed to be quite an extensive sociality that contrasts with stereotypes of geeks.
As Karanovic discusses, there remain regional distinctions in these developments partly because
they articulate with different local political traditions. For example French Free Software activists are
mostly oriented toward French and EU interlocutors. One problem in these discussions is that the
very term liberal is seen in the US as a position in opposition to conservative forces, while in Europe
the word liberal is used to describe the extreme individualism of US rightwing politics and
capitalism. In Brazil, the government support of open source software and free culture more broadly
was tied to a culture of resistance to hegemonic global culture and resistance to the global order and
traditional patterns of production and ownership with the aim of providing social, cultural, and
financial inclusion for all Brazilian citizens (Horst 2011). Following Hegel, European political
traditions tend to see individual freedom as a contradiction in terms; ultimately freedom can only
derive from law and governance. Anarchism suits wideeyed students with little responsibility, but
socialdemocratic egalitarianism requires systems of regulation and bureaucracy, high taxation and
redistribution to actually work as human welfare.
The dialectical contradictions involved are especially clear in the impact of the digital upon money
itself. There are many welcome technological advances that range from the sheer availability and
efficiency of ATMs, new finance (Zaloom 2006), the way migrants can remit money via Western
Union to the emergence of calling cards (Vertovec 2004), airtime minutes, micropayments and
related services in the “payments space” (Maurer forthcoming). Inspired by the success of MPesa in
Kenya, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and other model projects, throughout the developing world
the promise of mobile banking (mbanking) has led to a number of initiatives focused on banking the
socalled “unbanked” (Donner 2008; Donner and Tellez 2008; Morawczynski 2007). This latter area
is subject of a major anthropological programme led by Bill Maurer and his Institute for Money,
Technology and Financial Inclusion. Preliminary work on the emergence of mobile money in post
earthquake Haiti by Espelencia Baptiste, Heather Horst and Erin Taylor reveals modifications of the
original visioning of mobile money; in addition to the peertopeer (P2P) transactions imagined by
the services’ designers, early adopters of the service are using metome (M2M) transactions to
store money on their mobile accounts for safety and security. The cost associated with sending and
saving money on ones’ own account is perceived as worth the risk of loss of the sum total of the
amount saved (Horst, Baptiste and Taylor 2010; Taylor, Baptiste and Horst 2011).
This situation is not quite so positive when we turn to the world of virtual money. In his research,
Dibbell (2006) used the classic ethnographic method of participant observation and set himself the
task of making some real money via investing and playing with virtual money. He noted that, at the
time, in games such as World of Warcraft, `merely getting yourself off to a respectable start might
entail buying a level 60 Alliance warrior account from a departing player ($1,999 on eBay)’ (2006:
12) and that, taken as a whole, in 2005 these games were `generating a quantity of real wealth on
the order of $20 billion each year’ (2006: 13). His ethnography revealed that the virtual world of
digital money was subject to pretty much every kind of scam and entrepreneurial trick that one finds
in offline business….and then some. Furthermore, Dibbell (2007) also provides one of the first
discussions of Gold Farming, where it was claimed players in wealthy countries farmed out the
repetitive boring key strokes required to obtain virtual advances in these games, to low income
workers in places such as China, though the idea may have become something of a discursive trope
(Nardi 2010). More clearly documented by the anthropologist Xiang’s (2007) is Body Shopping
where digital labour for mundane tasks such as debugging is imported from lowincome countries to
Australia or the US but at lower wages.
The example of money shows that we can find both clear positives in new accessibility and banking
for the poor, but also negatives such as body shopping or new possibilities of financial chicanery
found in high finance (Lewis 1989) which contributed to the dot.com debacle (Cassidy 2002), and
the more recent banking crisis. This suggests that the new political economy of the digital world is
really not that different from the older political economy. The digital extends all the possibilities
previously unleashed by money equally the positive and the negative. All this follows from Hart’s
argument that we need to find emancipation through taming money or expanding open source that is
at the point of abstraction. The alternative argument made by Miller looked to the other end of the
dialectical equation, at the mass of highly differentiated goods that were being created by these
technologies.
Following that logic, we want to suggest an alternative front line for the anthropology of the digital
age. The exact opposite of the technophiles of California might be the main informants for a recent
study of mothering whose typical participant was a middle aged, female Filipina domestic worker in
London, who tended to regard new technologies as either male, foreign, oppressive, or all three
(Madianou and Miller In Press). Madianou and Miller’s informants may be deeply suspicious of, and
quite possibly detest, much of this new digital technology and only purchased their first computer or
started to learn to type within the last two years. Yet Filipina domestics could be the real vanguard
troops in marching towards the digital future who effectively accomplish that which these other
studies are in some ways searching for. They may not impact on the creation of digital technologies
but they are in the forefront of developing their social uses and consequences. They use the latest
communicative technologies not for reasons of vision, or ideology, or ability, but for reasons of
necessity. They live in London and Cambridge, but in most cases their children still live in the
Philippines. In an earlier study, Parrenas (2005) participants only saw their children for 23.9 weeks
out of the last 11 years. Such cases exemplify the wider point noted by Panagakos and Horst (2006)
regarding the centrality of new communication media for transnational migrants. The degree to
which these mothers could effectively remain mothers depended almost entirely upon the degree to
which they could use these new media to remain in some sort of contact with their children. In short,
it was hard to think of any population for whom the prospects granted by digital technologies would
matter more. It was in observing the usage by domestics that Madianou and Miller formulated their
concept of polymedia, extending earlier ideas on media and communicative ecologies to consider
the interactivity between different media and their importance to the emotional repertoire that these
mothers required in dealing with their children.
But transnational mothering through polymedia was not the first time the Philippines appeared at the
vanguard of digital media and technology. As has been chronicled by Pertierra, Ugarte, Pingol,
Hernandez and Dacanay (2002), the Philippines is globally recognised as the `capital’ of phone
texting. From its early introduction through today, more texts are sent per person in the Philippines
than anywhere else in the world. Texting soon became central to the formation and maintenance of
relationships, and was also claimed (with some exaggeration) to have played a key role in
overthrowing governments. The point of this illustration is that texting is a prime case of a technology
intended only as a minor add on, whose impact was created through the collectivity of consumers. It
was poverty and need that drove these innovations in usage not merely the affordances of the
technology.
In the case of the disabled activists discussed by Ginsburg necessity is paired with explicit ideology.
They are well aware that digital technologies have the potential to transform their relationship to the
very notion of being human. A vision driven by long years in which they knew they were equally
human, but other people didn’t. This is not to presume such realisations, when accomplished, are
always entirely positive. In general, the mothers studied by Madianou and Miller claimed the new
media had allowed them to act and feel more like real mothers again. When Madianou and Miller
spoke to the children of these same domestics in the Philippines, some of them felt their
relationships had deteriorated as a result of this constant contact that amounted to surveillance. As
Tacchi notes in her contribution, the use of digital media and technology for giving voice involves far
more than merely transplanting digital technologies and assuming they provide positive affordances.
The subsequent consequences are created in the context of each place, not given in the technology.
The point is not to choose between Hart’s emphases upon the point of abstraction or Miller’s on the
point of differentiation. The principle of the dialectic is that it is an intrinsic condition of digital
technologies to expand both, and the impact is also intrinsically contradictory, producing both
positive and negative effects. This was already evident in the anthropological study of money and
commodities. A critical contribution of digital technologies is the way they exacerbate but also reveal
those contradictions. Anthropologists need to be involved right across this spectrum from
Karanovic’s analysis of those involved in the creation of digital technology to Ginsburg’s work on
those who place emphasis upon their consequences.
2) CULTURE AND THE PRINCIPLE OF FALSE AUTHENTICITY
Having made clear what exactly we mean by the term digital, we also need to address what is
implied by the term culture. For this we assert as our second principle something that may seem to
contradict much of what has been written about digital technologies: people are not one iota more
mediated by the rise of digital technologies. The problem is clearly illustrated by a recent book by
Sherry Turkle (2011) which is infused with a nostalgic lament for certain kinds of sociality or
humanity deemed lost as a result of new digital technologies ranging from robots to Facebook. The
implication of her book is that prior forms of sociality were somehow more natural or authentic by
virtue of being less mediated. For example, Turkle bemoans people coming back from work and
going on Facebook instead of watching TV. In fact when it was first introduced TV was subject to
similar claims as to its lack of authenticity and the end of true sociality (Spiegel 1992); yet TV is in no
way more natural and, depending on the context, could be argued to be a good deal less sociable
than Facebook. Turkle reflects a more general tendency towards nostalgia widespread in journalism
and a range of work focusing on the ‘effects’ of media, that views new technology as a loss of
authentic sociality. This often exploits anthropological writing on smallscale societies, which are
taken to be a vision of authentic humanity in its more natural and less mediated state.
This is entirely antithetical to what anthropological theory actually stands for. In the discipline of
anthropology all people are equally cultural, that is the products of objectification. Australian
aboriginal tribes may not have much material culture, but instead they use their own landscape to
create extraordinary and complex cosmologies that then become the order of society and the
structures guiding social engagement (e.g. Munn 1973, Myers 1986). In anthropology there is no
such thing as pure human immediacy; interacting facetoface is just as culturally inflected as
digitally mediated communication but, as Goffman (1959, 1975) pointed out again and again, we fail
to see the framed nature of facetoface interaction because these frames work so effectively. The
impact of a digital technologies, such as webcams, are sometimes unsettling largely because they
makes us aware and newly selfconscious about those taken for granted frames around direct face
to face encounters.
Potentially one of the major contributions of a digital anthropology would be the degree to which it
finally explodes the illusions we retain of a nonmediated noncultural, predigital world. A good
example would be Van Dijck (2007) who uses new digital memorialisation such as photography to
show that memory was always a cultural rather than individual construction. Photography as a
normative material mediation (Drazin and Frohlich 2007), reveals how memory is not an individual
psychological mechanism, but consists largely of that which it is appropriate for us to recall. The
foundation of anthropology, in its separation from psychology, came with our insistence that the
subjective is culturally constructed. To return to a previous example, Miller and Madianou’s research
on Filipina mothers depended on much more than understanding the new communication
technologies; at least as much effort was expended upon trying to understand the Filipina concept of
motherhood because being a mother is just as much a form of mediation as being on the internet.
Using a more general theory of kinship (Miller 2008b), Miller and Madianou argue that the concept of
a mother should be understood in terms of a triangle: our normative concept of what mothers in
general are supposed to be like, our experience of the particular person who is our mother, and the
discrepancy between these two. Filipina mothers were working simultaneously with regional,
national and transnational models of how mothers are supposed to act. By the end of the book
(Madianou and Miller In Press) the emphasis is not on new media mediating motherchild
relationships; rather, it is far more about how the struggle over the concept of being a proper mother
mediates how we choose and use polymedia. Tacchi’s contribution further illustrates this point .
Those involved in development around new media and communication technologies have come to
realise that what is required is not so much the local appropriation of a technology but the
importance of listening to the differences in culture which determine what a particular technology
becomes. Similarly, Ginsburg demonstrates the issue of what we mean by the word human is what
determines the impact of these technologies for the disabled. Unless they can shift the meaning of
humanity, technology alone will not make the rest of us more humane.
To spell out this second principle, then, digital anthropology will be insightful to the degree it reveals
the mediated and framed nature of the nondigital world. Digital anthropology fails to the degree it
makes the nondigital world appear in retrospect as unmediated and unframed. We are not more
mediated simply because we are not more cultural than we were before. One of the reasons digital
studies have often taken quite the opposite course, has been the continued use of the term virtual,
with its implied contrast with the 'real.' As Boellstorff makes clear, online worlds are simply another
arena, alongside offline worlds, for expressive practice, and there is no reason to privilege one
against the other. Every time we use the word “real” analytically, as opposed to colloquially, we
undermine the project of digital anthropology, fetishizing predigital culture as a site of retained
authenticity.
This point has been nuanced recently by some important writing on the theory of mediation
(EIsenlohr 2011 and Engelke 2010). As consistent with Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus, we
may imagine a person born in medieval Europe would see their Christianity objectified in countless
media and their intertextuality. But in those days the media would have been buildings, writings, and
clothing accessories, preaching and so forth. Meyer (2011) notes that the critical debate over the
role of media in Christianity took place during the reformation. Catholics fostered a culture of
materiality in which images proliferated, but retained a sense of mediation such that these stood for
the greater mystery of Christ. Protestants, by contrast, tried to abolish both the mediation of objects
and of wider cultural processes and instead fostered an ideal based on the immediacy of a
subjective experience of the divine. In some respects the current negative response to digital
technologies stems from this Protestant desire to create an ideal of unmediated authenticity and
subjectivity. In short, anthropologists may not believe in the unmediated, but Protestant theology
clearly does.
As Eisenlohr (2011) notes, the modern anthropology of media starts with works such as Anderson
(1983) who showed how many key terms such as nationalism and ethnicity, developed in large
measure through changes in the media by which culture circulates. There are excellent works on the
ways, for example, cassette tapes impact upon religion as a form of public circulation prior to digital
forms (Manuel 1993, Hirschkind 2006). But in all these cases it is not that media simply mediates a
fixed element called religion. Religion itself is a highly committed form of mediation that remains very
concerned with controlling the use and consequences of specific media.
This is evident when we think about the relationship between Protestantism and digital media. At
first we see a paradox. It seems very strange that we have several centuries during which
Protestants try and eliminate all objects that stand in the way of an unmediated relationship to the
divine while Catholics embrace a proliferation of images. Yet when it comes to modern digital media
the position is almost reversed. It is not Catholics, but evangelical Protestants, that seem to embrace
with alacrity every kind of new media from television to Facebook. They are amongst the most
enthusiastic adopters of such new technologies. This only makes sense once we recognise that for
evangelical Christians the media does not mediate. Otherwise they would surely oppose it. Rather
Protestants have instead seen media, unlike images, as a conduit to a more direct, unmediated
relationship to the divine (Hancock and Gordon 2005). As Meyer (2008) demonstrates, evangelical
Christianity embraces every type of new digital media but to create experiences that are ever more
full blooded in their sensuality and emotionality. The Apostolics that Miller studied in Trinidad only
asked one question of the internet. Why did God invent the Internet at this moment in time? The
answer was that God intended them to become THE Global Church and the internet was the media
for abolishing mere localised religion such as an ordinary church service and instead become
globally connected (Miller and Slater 2000:187192). More recently the same church has been using
Facebook and other new media forms to express the very latest in God’s vision for what they should
be (Miller 2011:8898). This is also why, as Meyer (2011: 33) notes, the less digitally minded
religions, as in some versions of Catholicism, try to protect a sense of mystery they see as not fully
captured by new media.
In summary, an anthropological perspective on mediation is largely concerned to understand why
some media are perceived as mediating and others are not. Rather than seeing predigital worlds
less mediated, we need to study how the rise of digital technologies has created the illusion that they
were. For example, when the internet first developed Steven Jones (1998) and others writing about
its social impact saw the internet as a mode for the reconstruction of community. Yet much of these
writings seemed to assume an illusionary notion of `community’ as a natural collectivity that existed
in the predigital age (Parks 2011: 1059, for a sceptical view see Postill 2008, Woolgar 2002). They
became so concerned with the issue of whether the internet was bringing us back to community that
they radically simplified the concept of community itself as something entirely positive (compare
Miller 2011: 1627). In this volume we follow Ginsburg and Tacchi in asserting that any and every
social fraction or marginal community has an equal right to be seen as the exemplification of digital
culture, but this is because, for anthropology, a New York accountant or Korean games player is no
more and no less authentic that a contemporary tribal priest in East Africa. We are all the result of
culture as mediation, whether through the rules of kinship and religion or the rules of netiquette and
game play. The problem is with the concept of authenticity (Lindholm 2007).
Curiously the much earlier writings of Turkle (1984) were amongst the most potent in refuting these
presumptions of prior authenticity. The context was the emergence of the idea of the virtual and the
avatar in roleplaying games. As she pointed out, issues of roleplay and presentation were just as
much the basis of predigital life, something very evident from even a cursory reading of Goffman
(1959, 1975). Social science had demonstrated how the real world was virtual long before we came
to realise how the virtual world is real. One of the most insightful anthropological discussions of this
notion of authenticity is Humphrey’s (2009) study of Russian chat rooms. The avatar does not
merely reproduce the offline person; it is on the internet that these Russian players feel able,
perhaps for the first time, to more fully express their `soul’ and passion. Online they can bring out the
person they feel they `really’ are, which was previously constrained in mere offline worlds. For these
players, just as for the disabled discussed by Ginsburg, it is only on the internet that a person can
finally become real.
Such discussion depends on our acknowledgment that the term `real’ has to be regarded as
colloquial and not epistemological. Bringing together these ideas of mediation (and religion),
Goffman, (the early work of) Turkle, Humphrey and the contributions here of Boellstorff and
Ginsburg, it should be clear that we are not more mediated. We are equally human in each of the
different and diverse arenas of framed behaviour within which we live. Each may however bring out
different aspects of our humanity, and thereby finesse our appreciation of what being human is.
Digital anthropology and its core concerns thereby enhance conventional anthropology.
3) TRANSCENDING METHOD THROUGH THE PRINCIPLE OF HOLISM
The next two principles are largely a reiteration of two of the basic conditions of anthropological
apprehensions of the world, but both require a certain caution before being embraced. There are
several entirely different grounds for retaining a holistic approach within anthropology, one of which
has been largely debunked within anthropology itself. Many of the theoretical arguments for
holism[iv] came either from the organic analogies of functionalism or a culture concept that
emphasised internal homogeneity and external exclusivity. Both have been subject to trenchant
criticism and today there are no grounds for anthropology to assert an ideological commitment to
holism.
While theoretically suspect, there are however other reasons to retain a commitment to holism which
are closely connected to anthropological methodology especially (but not only) ethnography. We will
divide these into three categories: the holism that pertains to the individual, that which pertains to the
ethnographic and that which pertains to the global. The first is simply the observation that no one
lives an entirely digital life, and that no digital media or technology exists outside of networks that
include analogue and other media technologies. While heuristically anthropologists will focus upon
particular aspects of life, a chapter on museums, another on social networking, another on politics,
we recognise that the person working at the museum builds social networks and gets involved in
politics, and that the specifics of any of these three may depend on understanding the other two.
What Horst conveys in her chapter is precisely this feeling of easy integration of digital technologies
within the lives of her participants as mere part and parcel of life as practice.
The concept of polymedia developed by Madianou and Miller (in press) exemplifies internal
connectivity in relation to personal communications. We cannot easily treat each new media
independently since they form part of a wider media ecology in which the meaning and usage of any
one depends on its relationship to others (also Horst 2009); using email may be a choice against
texting and using a social network site; posting comments may be a choice between private
messaging and a voice call. Today, when the issues of cost and access have in many places of the
world fallen into the background, people are held responsible for which media they choose. In
Gershon’s (2010) ethnography of American college students being dumped by your boyfriend with
an inappropriate media adds much insult to the injury of being dumped. In Madianou and Miller’s (in
press) work, polymedia are exploited to increase the range of emotional fields of power and
communication between parents and their left behind children.
But this internal holism for the individual and media ecology is complemented by a wider holism that
cuts across different domains. For Broadbent the choice of media is only understood by reference to
other contexts. Instead of one ethnography of the workplace and another of home, we see how
usage depends on the relationship between work and home, and between very close relationships
set against weaker relational ties. This second level of holism is implicit in the method of
ethnography. In reading Coleman’s (2010) review of the anthropology of online worlds (which
provides a much more extensive bibliography than that provided here), it is apparent that there is
almost no topic of conventional anthropology that would not today have a digital inflection. Her
references range from news broadcasting, mailorder brides, medical services, aspects of identity,
finance, linguistics, politics and pretty much every other aspect of life. In essence, the issue of
holism relates not just to the way an individual brings together all the dispersed aspects of their life
as an individual, but also how anthropology transcends the myriad foci of research to recognise the
copresence of all these topics within our larger understanding of society. Another point illustrated
clearly in Coleman’s survey is that there are now more sites to be considered because digital
technologies have created their own worlds. Her most extended example is the ethnography of
spamming, a topic that exists only by virtue of the digital, as would be the case of the online worlds
represented here by Boellstorff, or our enhanced perception of relative space in offline worlds
described by DeNicola.
The holistic sense of ethnography is brought out clearly by the combination of Boellstorff and
Ginsburg’s reflections on the ethnography of Second Life. Granting Second Life its own integrity
matters for people who feel disabled and disadvantaged in other worlds but here find a site where,
for example, they can live a full religious life carrying out rituals they would be unable to perform
otherwise. Boellstorff points out that the holistic ideal of ethnography is increasingly honoured in the
breach. This is well illustrated by Drazin who reveals how in design, as in many other commercial
contexts, the very terms anthropological and ethnographic are commonly used these days as
tokenistic emblems of such holism often reduced to a few interviews. He argues that we can only
understand design practice within the much wider context of more traditional extended ethnography
found in anthropology and increasingly in other disciplines.
But if proper ethnography were the sole criteria for holism, it would itself become something of a
liability. This is why we require a third holistic commitment. There are not just the connections that
matter because they are all part of an individual’s life, or because they are all encountered within an
ethnography. Things may also connect up on a much larger canvass, such as the political economy.
Every time we make a debit card payment, we exploit a vast network that exist aside from any
particular individual or social group, whose connections would not be apparent within any version of
ethnography. These connections are closer to the kinds of networks of things discussed by Castells
and Latour or to older traditions such as Wallerstein’s (1980) world systems theory. Anthropology
and ethnography are more than method. A commitment to ethnography that fails to engage with the
wider study of political economy and global institutions would see the wider holistic intention
betrayed by mere method. This problem is exacerbated by digital technologies that have created a
radical rewiring the infrastructure of our world. As a result we see even less and understand less of
these vast networks than previously. For this bigger picture we are committed to travel those wires
and wireless connections and make them explicit in our studies. Anthropology has to develop its
own relationship with what has been called Big Data (boyd and Crawford In Press), vast amounts of
information that are increasingly networked with each other. If we ignore these new forms of
knowledge and inquiry, we succumb to yet another version of the digital divide.
Although Broadbent and her associates conducted long term and intensive studies of media use in
Switzerland, she does not limit her evidence to this. There is also a considerable body of statistical
and other metadata and a good deal of more systematic recording and mapping that formed part of
her project. She thereby juxtaposes data from specifically anthropological methods with data from
other disciplines in order to reach her conclusion. In this introduction we are arguing for the
necessity of an anthropological approach to the digital, but not through exclusivity or purity that
presumes it has nothing to learn from media studies, commercial studies, geography, sociology and
the natural sciences. In addition, we do not have a separate discussion of ethnography and
anthropological method here since this is well covered by Boellstorff’s contribution. We affirm his
conclusion that holism should never mean a collapse of the various terrains of humanity, which are
often also our specific domains of enquiry, into each other. Online worlds have their own integrity
and their own intertextuality taking their genres from each other as was evident in Boellstorff’s own
monograph on Second Life, which includes (2008: 6065) a spirited defence of the autonomous
nature of online worlds as the subject of ethnography. Both we and Boellstorff think that this integrity
is compatible with our preference for including the offline context of internet usage, where possible,
depending upon the actual research question (Miller and Slater 2000). For example, it is instructive
that when Horst (2010) in an investigation of teenagers in California, pulls back the lens for a
moment to include the bedrooms in which these teenagers are located while on their computers, one
suddenly has a better sense of the ambience they are trying to create as a relationship between
online and offline worlds (see also Horst 2009). In his contribution Boellstorff argues that theories of
indexicality derived from Pierce can help relate evidence from different domains at a higher level.
Digital worlds create new separated out domains, but also as Broadbent shows they can also
effectively collapse established differences as between work and nonwork, despite all the efforts of
commerce to resist this.
There is a final aspect of holism anthropologists cannot lose sight of. While anthropologists may
repudiate holism as ideology, we still have to deal with the way others embrace holism as an ideal.
Postill’s discussion of the digital citizen reveals how while democracy is officially secured by an
occasional vote, mobile digital governance is imagined as creating conditions for a much more
integrated and constant relationship between governance and an active participatory or community
citizenship that deals embracing much wider aspects of people’s lives. Though often this is based on
assuming that previously it was only the lack of appropriate technology that prevented the realisation
of such political ideals, ignoring the possibility that people may not actually want to be bothered with
this degree of political involvement. Political holism thereby approximates what Postill calls a
normative ideal. He shows that the actual impact of the digital is an expansion of involvement but
still, for most people, largely contained within familiar points of participation such as elections, or
communication amongst established activists.
4) VOICE AND THE PRINCIPLE OF RELATIVISM
Cultural relativism has always been another vertebrae within the spine of anthropology; indeed,
holism and cultural relativism are closely connected. It is worth reiterating with respect to digital
anthropology that much debate and representation of the digital is derived from the imagination of
science fiction and modernism that predicts a tightly homogenised global world that has lost its prior
expression of cultural difference (Ginsburg 2008). As with holism, there is a version of relativism
anthropologists have repudiated, (at least since the Second World War) associated with a plural
concept of cultures that implied pure internal homogeneity and pure external heterogeneity. These
perspectives took cultural differences as essentially historical and a priori based on the independent
evolution of societies. By contrast, more contemporary anthropology recognises that within our
political economy one region remains linked to low income agriculture and conservatism precisely
because that suits the interests of a wealthier and dominant region. That is to say, differences are
often constructed rather than merely given by history.
For this reason Miller (1995) argued that we should complement the concept of a priori difference
with one of a posteriori difference. In their ethnography of Internet use, Miller and Slater (2000)
refused to accept that the internet in Trinidad was simply a version or a clone of `The Internet’; the
Internet is always a local invention by its users. Miller makes a similar argument here with respect to
Facebook in Trinidad where the potential for gossip and scandal (and generally being nosy) is taken
as showing the intrinsic `Trinidadianess’ of Facebook (Miller 2011). Within this volume, Barendregt
provides the most explicit analysis of relativism. He shows that even quite mundane uses of digital
communication such as chatting, flirting or complaining about the government become genres quite
specific to Indonesia rather than cloned from elsewhere. While in Trinidad the emphasis is more on
retained cultural difference, in Indonesia this is overlain by a very deliberate attempt to create a new
normativity the use of digital technologies based on explicit criteria such as their acceptability to
Islamic strictures. This may be a response to concerns that if digital technologies are `western’ then
they are likely to be the Trojan horse that brings in unacceptable cultural practices such as
pornography. This produces a highly conscious filtering and transformation to remake these
technologies into process that actually promote rather than detract from Islamic values.
Similarly In Geismar’s contribution we find the conscious attempt to retain cultural difference. The
problem for museums is that homogenisation can be imposed most effectively at a level we
generally fail to appreciate or apprehend because it occurs within basic infrastructure; the catalogue
systems that are used to label and order museum acquisitions. If aboriginal societies are going to
find indigenously appropriate forms (Thorner 2010), then it may be through control over things such
as the structure of archives, modes of viewing and similar logistical fundamentals that need to
properly reflect concepts such as the Vanuatu notion of Kastom, which is quite distinct from Western
historiography.
The cliché of anthropology is that we assert relativism in order to develop comparative studies. In
reality, comparison is more usually an aspiration than a practice. Yet comparison is essential if we
want to understand what can be explained by regional and parochial factors and what stands as
higherlevel generalisation. For example, Postill directly compared middle class political engagement
in Australia and Malaysia. Horst and Miller’s (2006) study of mobile phones and poverty in Jamaica
showed that generalisations about the use of phones for entrepreneurship and finding jobs in other
regions may not work for Jamaica where they found a rather different pattern to economic impact.
Karanovic shows that national differences may remain important even in projects of global
conception such as Free Software. Her work also demonstrates that such practices can have
powerful transnational effects, sometimes indirectly such as conforming to the dominance of the
English language, a relatively neglected aspect of digital anthropology more generally.
In practice, the legacy of anthropological relativism continues through the commitment to regions
and spaces otherwise neglected as well as the concern for the peoples and values of those regions.
For Barendregt the exploitation of raw materials, the dumping of ewaste, exploitative employment
practices, such as bodyshopping, racist stereotypes within roleplaying games and new forms of
digital inequality are all aspects of our diverse digital worlds. More specifically many anthropologists
have become increasingly concerned with how to give voice to small scale or marginalised groups
that tend to be ignored in academic generalisation centred on the metropolitan West. With a few
exceptions (see Ito, Okabe and Matsuda 2005, Pertierra, et al 2005), most of the early work on
digital media and technology privileged economically advantaged areas of North America and
Europe. Ignoring a global demography where most people actually live in rural India and China
rather than in Los Angeles and Paris, the theoretical insights and developments emerging from this
empirical base then reflect North American and northern European imaginations about the world
and, if perpetuated, becomes a form of cultural dominance. As digital anthropology becomes more
established, we hope to see studies and ethnographies that are more aligned with the actual
demographics and realities of our world.
As Tacchi notes, it is fine to pontificate about giving voice but often dominant groups failed to
engage with the very concept of voice and as a result failed to appreciate that voice was as much
about people being prepared to listen and change as a result of what they heard as about giving
people the technologies to speak. It is only through others listening that voice acquires value, and
this requires a radical shift from vertical to horizontal relationships, as exemplified by the case
studies she has herself been involved in over many years. The meaning of the word voice is even
more literally a point of engagement for Ginsburg. In some cases digital technologies are what
enables physical actions to be turned into audible voice. For some who are autistic, the conventional
frame of voice in facetoface interaction is itself debilitating in its distractions. Here digital
technologies can be used to find a more constrained medium, within which an individual feels others
can hear them and they can finally come to have a sense of their own voice.
Tacchi provides several further examples that echo Amartya Sen’s insistence that a cornerstone to
welfare is a people’s right to determine for themselves what their own welfare should be. This may
demand advocacy and pushing into the groups such as female migrants who as noted above matter
because of their dependence upon technologies (Miller and Madianou in press, Panagokos and
Horst 2006, Wallis 2008). One version of these discussions has pivoted around the concept of
indigeneity (Ginsburg 2008, Landzelius 2006, for an important precedent see Turner 1992). Where
indigenous signified merely unchanging tradition, then the digital would have to be regarded as
destructive and inauthentic. But today we recognise that actually to be termed indigenous is a
modern construction and is constantly subject to change. We are then able to recognise the creative
usage by all groups however marginal or deprived. At the other end of the scale are anthropologists
such as DeNicola recognising that it may today be science in China or South Asia that represent the
cutting edge in, for example, the interpretation of digital satellite imagery or the design and
development of software (e.g. DeNicola 2006, 2009).
This leads to the question also of the voice of the (digital) anthropologist. Drazin shows how
ethnographers involved in design are also used to give voice to the wider public, such as Irish bus
passengers, and increasingly that public finds ways of being more directly involved. The problem,
however, is that this is quite often used more as a form of social legitimacy than to actually redirect
design. As part of the digital anthropology MA programme at UCL we have had a series of talks by
design practitioners. Many report how they are recruited to undertake qualitative and comparative
research, but then they see the results of their studies reduced by more powerful forces trained in
economics, psychology and business studies, to five token personality types or three consumer
scenarios from which all the initial cultural difference has been eliminated. Ultimately many design
anthropologists report that have been used merely to legitimate what the corporation has decided to
do on quite other grounds. Others have used these spaces for other ends.
5) AMBIVALENCE AND THE PRINCIPLE OF OPENESS AND CLOSURE
The contradictions of openness and closure that arise in digital domains were clearly exposed in
Dibbell’s (1998) seminal paper, A Rape in Cyberspace. The paper explores one of the earliest virtual
worlds where users could create avatars, then often imagined as gentler, better people than the
figures they represented off line. Into this idyll steps Bungle, whose superior technical skills allows
him to take over these avatars who then engaged in unspeakable sexual practices both with
themselves and others. Immediately the participants, whose avatars have been violated, switch from
seeing cyberspace as a kind of post Woodstock land of the liberated, into desperately searching
around for some version of the Cyberpolice to confront this abhorrent violation of their online selves.
A theorisation of this dilemma also appeared as `The Dynamics of Normative Freedom’, one of four
generalisations about the internet in Trinidad (Miller and Slater 2000). The internet constantly
promises new forms of openness, which are almost immediately followed by calls for new
constraints and controls, expressing our more general ambivalence towards the experience of
freedom. Perhaps the most sustained debate has been with regard to the fears of parents over their
children’s exposure to such unrestricted worlds, reflected in the title of boyd’s (2006) Facebook's
Privacy Trainwreck, and the work of Livingstone (e.g. 2008) on children’s use of the internet (see
also Horst 2009, this volume). As DeNicola notes, the location broadcasting functions of Foursquare,
Latitude and Facebook Places have been spectacularly highlighted by sites such as
PleaseRobMe.com and ICanStalkU.com.’
The digital came into its own at the tail end of a fashion in academia for the term postmodern which
celebrated resistance to authority of all kinds, but especially the authority of discourse. Geismar
concisely reveals the problems raised by such idealism. Just opening up the museum space tended
to lead to confusion amongst those not wellinformed and dominant colonisation by the cognoscenti.
Museums envisage democratic republics of participants, crowdcuration and radical archives. This
may work in small expert communities, but otherwise, as in most anarchistic practices, those with
power and knowledge can quickly come to dominate. Utopian visions were rarely effective in getting
people to actually engage with collections. Furthermore, concerns for the indigenous usually require
complex restrictions that are in direct opposition to ideals of pure public access. An equally vast and
irreconcilable debate has followed the evident tendency of digital technologies to create conditions
for decommodification, which may give us free music downloads, but start to erode the viability of
careers based on creative work. Barendregt discusses the way digital technologies can exacerbate
inequalities of global power leading to exploitation. It is precisely the openness of the digital that
creates fear amongst the Indonesians that this will leave them vulnerable to further colonisation by
the very `open’ West. On the other hand Barendregt also shows how digital cultures are used to
create visions of new Islamic and Indonesian futures with their own versions of technoutopias.
The contradictory nature of digital openness is especially clear within Postill’s chapter on politics,
where there is as much evidence for the way Twitter, Facebook, Wikileaks and AlJazeera helped
facilitate the Arab Spring as there is for the way oppressive regimes in Iran and Syria use digital
technologies for the identification of activists and their subsequent suppression (Morozov 2011). By
contrast Postill’s own ethnographic work in Malaysia is one of the clearest demonstrations of the
value of an anthropological approach, not just as longterm ethnography, but also its more holistic
conceptualisation. Instead of just trying to label the political impact as good or bad, Postill gives a
nuanced and plausible account of the contradictory effects of digital technology on politics. Instead
of idealised communities we find cross cutting affiliations of groups using the internet to think
through new possibilities.
This ambivalence between openness and closure becomes even more significant when we
appreciate its centrality to the initial processes of design and conception in creating digital
technologies, especially those related to gaming. For Malaby the essence of gaming is that unlike
bureaucratic control, which seeks to diminish or extinguish contingency, gaming creates a structure
that then encourages contingency in its usage. He sees this realised through his ethnography of the
workers at Linden Labs who developed Second Life (Malaby 2009). They retained much of the
influence of 1960’s idealism found in books such as the Whole Earth Catalogue (Brand 1969,
Coleman, 2004, Turner 2006) and similar movements that view technology as the tool of liberation.
They remain deeply interested in the unexpected and unintended appropriations by users of their
designs. By setting limits upon what they would construct they hoped to engage in a kind of co
construction with users who themselves then became as much producers as consumers of the
game. Many of the `early adopters’ are themselves technically savvy and more inclined to do the
kind of wild adventurous and proficient things the people at Linden Labs would approve of. However,
as the game becomes more popular consumption becomes rather less creative until `for most of
them this seems to involve buying clothes and other items that thousands of others have bought as
well’ (Malaby 2009: 114). The end point is very evident in Boellstorff’s (2008) ethnography of Second
Life, which constantly experienced the reintroduction of such mundane everyday life issues as
worrying about property prices and the impact on this of one’s neighbours.
Not all designers retain these aspirations. Gambling can also be carefully designed to create a
precise balance between contingency and attention – we might win, but we need to keep on playing.
Malaby quotes the rather exquisite study by Schull (2005) of the digitisation of slot machines, where
`digitization enables engineers to mathematically adjust games’ payout tables or reward schedules
to select for specific player profiles within a diverse market’ (ibid 70). Video poker can be tuned into
a kind of personalised reward machinery that maximises the amount of time a payer is likely to
remain on the machine. Again this is not necessity. Though Malaby’s own example of the Greek
statesponsored gambling game ProPo returns us to some sort of collusion with Greek people’s
own sense of the place of contingency in their lives.
There is an analogous and extensive literature that arises around the concept of the prosumer (Beer
and Burrows 2010) where traditional distinctions between producers and consumers break down as
the creative potentials of consumers are drawn directly into design. For example digital facilities that
encourage us to make our own websites and blogs or populate ebay or transform MySpace. When
students first encounter the idea of digital anthropology through Wesch’s (2008) infectious
enthusiasm for YouTube, the appeal is to the consumer as the force that also largely created this
same phenomenon (see also Lange 2007). This suggests a more complex digital world not just
where producers deliberately delegate creative work to consumers, but also one where designers
have little choice but to follow trends created in consumption. This ideal of a prosumption that
includes consumers is becoming something of a trend in contemporary capitalism (Ritzer and
Jurgenson 2010). Consumers appropriate commercial ideas and are quickly incorporated in their
turn (Thrift 2005) and so on. Related to prosumption is the rapid growth of an online feedback
culture such as Trip Advisor for researching holidays, or Rotten Tomatoes for reviewing films and a
thousand similar popular sources of assessment and criticism that flourished as soon as digital
technologies allowed them to. These have so far received far less academic attention than for,
example, blogging, though they may have more far reaching consequences.
The tensions and cross appropriations between new openness and closure reaffirms our first
principle that the digital is dialectical, that it retains those contradictions analysed by Simmel with
regard to the impact of money (1978). But as stated in our second principle, this has always been
the case. We are not more mediated or contradictory than we used to be. Mediation and
contradiction are the defining conditions of what we call culture. The main impact of the digital has
often been to make these contradictions more explicit, or expose contextual issues of power, as in
political control for Postill, parentchild relationships for Horst and both empowerment and
disempowerment in Ginsburg and Tacchi. As Karanovic notes positive developments such as free
software work best when they grow beyond mere utopianism and recognise that they require many
of the same forms of copy write protection and legal infrastructure as the corporate owners they
oppose. After a certain point many of them would settle for successful reformation rather than failed
revolution.
Yet, curiously contemporary mass societies seem often no more ready to accept culture as
intrinsically contradictory than smallscale societies. Just as EvansPritchard understood the
response in terms of witchcraft (1937), so today we still find that most people prefer to resort to
blame and assume there is human intentionality behind the negative side of these digital coins. It is
much easier to talk of patriarchy or capitalism or resistance and assume these have done the job of
analysis, rather than appreciate that a digital technology is dialectical and intrinsically contradictory;
often what we adjudicate as its good and bad implications are inseparable consequences of the
same developments, although this is not intended to detract from appropriate political intervention
and discernment.
6) NORMATIVITY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF MATERIALITY
The final principle of materiality also cycles back to the first principle concerning the dialectic. A
dialectical approach is premised upon a concept of culture that can only exist through objectification
(Miller 1987). Several of the authors in this volume have been trained originally in material culture
studies and have engaged with digital anthropology as an extension of such studies. As has been
argued in various ways by Bourdieu, Latour, Miller and others, rather than privilege a `social’
anthropology that reduces the world to social relations, social order is itself premised on a material
order. It is impossible to become human other than through socialising within a material world of
cultural artefacts that include the order, agency and relationships between things in themselves and
not just their relationship to persons. Artefacts do far more than just express human intention.
Materiality is thus bedrock for digital anthropology and this is true in several distinct ways, of which
three are of prime importance. First there is the materiality of digital infrastructure and technology.
Second, there is the materiality of digital content, and, third, there is the materiality of digital context.
We started by defining the very term digital as a state of material being, the binary switch of on or
off, 0 and 1. Kelty’s (2009) detailed account of the development of opensource clearly illustrates
how the ideal of freely creating new forms of code was constantly stymied by the materiality of code
itself. Once one potential development of code became incompatible with another, choices had to be
made which constrained the premise of entirely free and equal participation. The recent work by
Blanchette (2011) is promising to emerge as a sustained enquiry into the wider materiality of some
of our most basic digital technologies, most especially the computer. Blanchette explicitly rejects
what he calls the trope of immateriality found from Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995) through to
Blown to Bits (Abelson, Lewis and Ledeen 2008). His work builds, instead, upon Kirschenbaum’s
(2008) detailed analysis of the computer hard disc. Kirschenbaum points out the huge gulf between
metatheorists who think of the digital as a new kind of ephemerality, and a group called computer
forensics whose job it is to extract data from old or broken hard discs and who rely on the very
opposite property, that it is actually quite difficult to erase digital information.
Blanchette proposes a more sustained approach to digital materiality focusing on issues such as
layering and modularity in the basic structure of the computer. What is notable is that at this most
micro level, dissecting the bowels of a Central Processing Unit (CPU), we see the same trade off
between specificity and abstraction that characterised our first principle of the dialectic at the most
macro level, what Miller (1987) called the humility of things. The more effective the digital
technology, the more we tend to lose our consciousness of the digital as a material and mechanical
process, evidenced in the degree to which we become almost violently aware of such background
mechanics only when they break down and fail us. Kirschenbaum states `computers are unique in
the history of writing technologies in that they present a premeditated material environment built and
engineered to propagate an illusion of immateriality’ (2008: 135). Objects such as hard discs
constantly produce errors but are designed to eliminate these before they impact on what we do with
them. We delegate such knowledge as the syntax of a UNIX file to those we term `geeks’ who we
characterise as antisocial thereby exiling this knowledge from our ordinary social world where we
find it obtrusive (Coleman 2009).
Another example of this exclusion from consciousness is evident in the topic of ewaste. As with
almost every other domain the digital has contradictory implications for environmental issues. On the
one hand, it increases the potential for less tangible information so that music and text can circulate
without CD’s and books, thereby removing a source of waste. Similarly, the high carbon footprint of
long haul business class fights can potentially be replaced by webcam conferencing. On the other
hand we are becoming aware of a vast detritus of ewaste that often contains problematic or toxic
materials that are difficult to dispose of. These are of particular concern to anthropology since e
waste disposal tends to follow the inequalities of global political economy, being dumped onto
vulnerable and outofsight areas as in Africa (Grossman 2006, Park and Pellow 2002, Schmidt
2006)
While Kelty, Kirschenbaum and Blanchette deal with the forensics of material infrastructure,
chapters by Drazin, Geismar and Malaby reveal how design itself is a means of systematically
embodying and often imposing ideology. Malaby shows how far at Linden Labs this included explicit
consideration of how to incorporate the creativity of future users. As Drazin illustrates, it has taken a
while for those involved to move from seeing the social and cultural as merely the context to
technology, and instead acknowledge that they themselves are actually the agents who attempt to
realise social and cultural values as technology. In a similar way Geismar shows how attention is
moving from the representational implication of museum displays to the way the catalogue often
encodes ideas about social relations. Such issues remain pertinent to everyday digital goods, such
as Barendregt’s discussion of how Islam tries to ensure that the mobile phone itself is rendered
Halal or religiously appropriate. This is part of a wider field of technology performed as part of a
system of informal cannibalisation favoured by the street market reengineering of phones found in
such peripheral economies as Indonesia.
The second aspect of digital materiality refers not to digital technology but to the content it thereby
creates, reproduces and transmits. Dourish (forthcoming) points out that virtual worlds have made
us increasingly, rather than decreasingly, aware of the materiality of information itself as a major
component of such content. Coleman (2010) has several references to anthropological and others
examination of the impact of digital technologies upon language and text (Jones, Schiefllin and
Smith, 2011, e.g., Lange, 2007, 2009). The chapter by Broadbent on the specific technologies of
personal communication is clearly relevant. There are also obvious domains of visual materiality. For
example Miller (2000) used Gell’s theory of art to show how websites, just as art works, are
systematically designed in order to seduce and entrap some passing internet surfers, while repelling
those they have no reason to attract. Similarly Horst shows how online worlds are aesthetically
integrated with the bedrooms of young people going on line in California, while Geismar explores the
impact of digital technologies on museum display. In general digital, and especially online words,
have greatly expanded the scope of visual as well as material culture studies.
Materiality applies just as much to persons as to that which they create. Rowlands (2005)
ethnography of power in the Cameroon grasslands is a study of such relative materiality. A chief is a
highly substantial and visible body, while a commoner may be only ever able to be a partially
realised, insubstantial and often rather invisible body. A similar problem arises for the disabled
individuals given voice here by Ginsburg. A person can be present but that doesn’t necessarily
mean that they are particularly visible. The critical feature of digital technologies here is not
technical; it is the degree to which they impact upon power. Where being material in the sense of
being merely visible can be transformed into material in the sense of being acknowledged and finally
respected. If you will forgive the pun, fundamentally being material means coming to matter.
Third, in addition to the materiality of technology and the materiality of content, there is also the
materiality of context. Issues of space and place are the central concern of DeNicola’s chapter and
his discussion of spimes, which imply objects, and not just people’s, awareness of space. This leads
to a kind of internet of things where the digital results not just in enhanced use of absolute space, as
in GPS, but increasing awareness of relative proximity. This may refer to people, such as gay men
making contact through Grindr but also objects sensing their own relative proximity. As DeNicola
notes digital location awareness is not the death of space but rather its further inscription as indelible
material position. Similarly several chapters demonstrate how what has been termed the virtual is
more a new kind of place rather than a form of placelessness. For example Boellstorff’s work on
Second Life, Horst’s discussion of a fan fiction writer navigating parents, teachers, friends and her
fan fiction community of followers, and Miller’s suggestion at the end of his chapter that that in some
ways people make their home inside social networks rather than just communicate through them.
There is no chapter on time to complement that on space but this volume is replete with references
to speed that suggest how far digital technologies have been important in shifting our experience of
time, but also that so far from creating a timelessness we seem to be becoming constantly more
time aware. We might also note a truism within the digitisation of contemporary finance. Here digital
technologies are used to create complex instruments intended to resolve issues of risk, which simply
seem to increase the experience of and exposure to risk. The example of finance supports
DeNicola’s contention following Gupta and Ferguson (1997) that one of the consequences of these
changing forms of materialisation may be the transference or more often the consolidation of power.
Context refers not just to space and time but also to the various parameters of human interaction
with digital technologies, which form part of material practice. Suchman’s studies have led to a
greater emphasis upon humanmachine reconfigurations (2007) that are complemented by the
whole development of HCI as an academic discipline (e.g. Dix 2004, Dourish 2004), an area
discussed within Drazin’s contribution. Several chapters deal with another aspect of interaction
which is what Broadbent calls attention. A good deal of contemporary digital technologies are, in
essence, attention seeking mechanisms, partly because one of the most common clichés about our
digital world is that it proliferates the amount of things competing for our attention so any given
medium has, as it were, to try still harder. Broadbent notes that some personal media such as the
telephone require immediate attention, while others such as Facebook are less demanding.
Malaby’s chapter has many references to the attention attracting and maintaining capacity of games.
Finally, although this section has concentrated on the principle of materiality, it also started with
Blanchette and Kirschenbaum’s observation of the way digital forms are used to propagate an
illusion of the immaterial, a point central to Boellstorff’s discussion of the concept of the virtual, but
evident in fields as diverse as politics and communication. But then, as MacKenzie (2009) notes in
his excellent book on the materiality of modern finance, with regard to new financial instruments `we
should not simply be fascinated by the virtual quality of derivatives, but need to investigate how that
virtuality is materially produced’ (2009:84). It is because technologies are constantly finding new
ways to construct illusions of immateriality that a material culture perspective become ever more
important. Of all the consequences of this illusion of immateriality the most important remains the
way objects and technologies obfuscate their own role in our socialisation. Whether it is the
infrastructure behind computers to that behind finance, or games, or design or museum catalogues
we seem less and less aware of how our environment is materially structured and that creates us as
human beings. The reason this matters is that it extends Bourdieu’s (1977) critical argument about
the role of practical taxonomies in making us the particular kinds of people we are, who
subsequently take for granted most of what we call culture. Bourdieu showed how a major part of
what makes us human is what he called practice, a conjuncture of the material with the socialisation
of habit, that makes the cultural world appear as second nature, that is natural. This is best captured
by the academic concept of normativity.
To end this introduction on the topic of normativity is to expose the single most profound and
fundamental reason why attempts to understand the digital world in the absence of anthropology are
likely to be lacking. On the one hand we can be left slack jawed at the sheer dynamics of change.
Every day we share our amazement at the new: a smarter smartphone, the clear webcam chat to
our friend in China, the uses of feedback culture, the creativity of 4Chan, which gave rise to the
more anarchist idealism of Anonymous in the political sphere, as well as Wikileaks. Put together we
have the impression of being immersed in some Brave New World that washed over us within a
couple of decades. All these developments are well covered by other disciplines. Yet perhaps the
most astonishing feature of digital culture is not actually this speed of technical innovation, but rather
the speed by which society takes all of these for granted and creates normative conditions for their
use. Within months a new capacity becomes assumed to such a degree that when it breaks down
we feel we have lost both a basic human right and a valued prosthetic arm of who we now are as
human beings.
Central to normativity is not just acceptance but moral incorporation (Silverstone and Hirsch 1992).
Again the speed can seem breath taking. Somehow in those few months we know what is proper
and not proper in posting online, writing in an email, appearing on webcam. There may be a short
moment of uncertainty. Gershon (2010) suggests this with regard to the issue of what media within
polymedia we are supposed to use to dump a boy and girlfriend. But in the Philippines Madianou
and Miller found that, this more collective society, tended to impose normativity upon new forms of
communication almost instantly. In her case studies of new media technologies in the home Horst
also shows how quickly and easily digital technologies are literally domesticated as normative. One
of the main impacts then of digital anthropology is to retain the insights of Bourdieu as to the way
material culture socialises into habitus, but instead of assuming this only occurs within long term
customary orders of things given by history, recognise that the same processes can be remarkably
effective when telescoped into a couple of years.
We would therefore suggest that the key to digital anthropology, and perhaps to the future of
anthropology itself is, in part, the study of how things become rapidly mundane. What we experience
is not a technology per. se., but also an immediately a cultural inflected genre of usage. A laptop, an
archive, a process of design, a Facebook page, an agreement to share locational information none
of these can be disaggregated into their material as against their cultural aspects. They are integral
combinations based on an emergent aesthetic that is a normative consensus around how a
particular form should be used which in turn constitutes what that then is. What we will recognise as
an email, what we agree constitutes design, what have become the two accepted ways of using
webcam. The word genre implies a combination of acceptability that is simultaneously moral,
aesthetic and practical (see also Ito, et al. 2009).
Normativity can be oppressive. In Ginsburg’s powerful opening example, the disabled activist
Amanda Baggs makes clear that digital technologies have the capacity to make someone appear
vastly more human than before, but the catch is that this is only to the degree that the disabled use
these technologies to conform to what we regard as normatively human. For example, performing
that key process of `attention’ in what are seen as appropriate ways. This direct confrontation
between the digital and the human is what helps us understand the task of digital anthropology.
Anthropology stands in direct repudiation of the claims of psychologists and digital gurus that any of
these digital transformations represents a change in either our cognitive capacities or the essence of
being human thus the title of this introductory chapter. Being human is a cultural and normative
concept. As our second principle showed, it is our definition of being human that mediates what the
technology is, not the other way around. Technology may in turn be employed to help shift our
conceptualisation of being human, which is what Ginsburg’s digital activist is trying to accomplish.
The anthropological apprehension is to refuse to allow the digital to be viewed as a gimmick or,
indeed, as mere technology. A key moment in the recent history of anthropology came with Terence
Turner’s (1992) report on the powerful appropriation of video by an Amazonian Indian group the
Kayapo, in their resistance to foreign infiltration (see also Boyer 2006). It was the moment when
anthropology had to drop its presumption that tribal societies were intrinsically slow or passive or
what LeviStrauss called cold. Under the right conditions they could transform within the space of a
few years into canny, worldly and technically proficient activists, just as people in other kinds of
society.
Prior to this moment anthropology remained in in the thrall of associations of custom and tradition
which presumed that anthropology would become less relevant as the speed of change in our
material environment grew apace with the advent of the digital. But with this last point regarding the
pace of normative impositions we see why the very opposite is true. The faster the trajectory of
cultural change, the more relevant the anthropologist because there is absolutely no sign that the
changes in technology is outstripping the human capacity to regard things as normative.
Anthropology is one of the few disciplines equipped to immerse itself in that process by which digital
culture becomes normative culture and to understand what this tells us about being human. The
lesson of the digital for anthropology is that so far from making us obsolete, the story that is
anthropology has barely begun.
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[i] Acknowledgements: Thanks to Stefana Broadbent, Haidy Geismar, Keith Hart, Webb Keane,
Wallis Motta, Dan Perkel, Kathleen Richardson, Christo Sims and Richard Wilk for comments upon
a draft of this paper.
[ii] All references to authors within this book are to their contribution within this volume unless stated
otherwise.
[iii] See also Keith Hart’s website: http://thememorybank.co.uk/papers/
[iv] At the methodological level, holism represents a commitment to understanding the broader
context and the integration of the various institutions into an analysis. Theoretically, holism is
associated with structural functionalism which held that certain phenomenon in society (e.g. kinship
or houses) represent the whole.
UCL Anthropology, 14 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 8633