Introducing Anthropology. Laura Pountney
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approach to the digital world for anthropological research practice?
Interview with Sarah Pink (2020)
Sarah Pink is Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Australia, and has a joint appointment across the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture and the Faculty of Information Technology. Her research focuses on emerging intelligent technologies, automation, data, digital futures, safety and design for wellbeing. Here, she explains how digital ethnography is used in her own research.
digital ethnography This is an approach to ethnographic practice that accounts for the relationship between the digital, material and physical elements of human activities, experiences and environments
WHAT IS DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY?
Digital ethnography is an approach to ethnographic practice that accounts for the relationship between the digital, material and physical elements of human activities, experiences and environments. A digital ethnographic approach understands the digital, material and physical as being inseparable in the contemporary world.
HOW IS DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY DIFFERENT FROM CLASSICAL FIELDWORK?
Digital ethnography acknowledges that the digital layers of life are now inextricable from our everyday worlds and therefore need to be accounted for in ethnographic practice. It therefore moves seamlessly between digital and material environments. It might involve following research participants as they move through material and digital environments or social worlds simultaneously – for example, as a person walks along the street talking with a friend, while at the same time moving through online maps and including another person in the conversation through an app.
HOW DO ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES INFORM YOUR WORK?
My ethnographic practice is informed by three key approaches: attention to sensory perception and experience – those things that we feel in our bodies and emotions that we cannot necessarily put into words; the idea that people and things are always moving (both digitally and materially); and theories of place and emergence whereby I understand human experience and activity to occur in a continually changing and evolving situation that different things and processes move in and out of.
HOW DO YOU CONDUCT FIELDWORK ONLINE? Online fieldwork can be undertaken by participating in a range of online activities. For example, this might be in online forums, in social media and though engagement with participants in other online practices and platforms, always with their permission. My own research brings together online and offline as part of the same context; however, other researchers have usefully developed methods for doing research online.
DO YOU COLLABORATE WITH OTHER DISCIPLINES IN YOUR RESEARCH?
Interdisciplinary research underpins much of my work and this enables me to do research that would have been impossible for me as a lone anthropologist. I have collaborated with researchers from many disciplines, including, engineering, design, arts practice, media studies, cultural studies, art therapy, safety science, organization studies, pedagogy, sociology and geography. I collaborate with researchers based both in universities and in industry. This allows me to develop projects that advance academic theory and methodology, on the one hand, and, on the other, that make a contribution outside academia.
WHAT IS YOUR LATEST WORK?
My current work focuses on the anthropology of emerging technologies – such as new modes of automation and artificial intelligence, and how they are experienced in technologies like self-driving cars and future mobility systems, energy futures and healthcare environments. I want to understand how we can best engage such technologies for the benefit of human futures, and I argue that anthropology has an important role to play in guiding such futures.
WHAT ARE THE ETHICAL ISSUES REGARDING DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY?
Ethical issues tend to be specific to different research contexts and questions rather than being particular to digital ethnography per se. My recommendation is to underpin any digital ethnographic research with rigorous and reflexive anthropological ethics that attends to questions of participants’ informed consent, privacy and wellbeing and regards research as a collaborative relationship.
Interview with Crystal Abidin (2020)
Crystal Abidin (aka ‘wishcrys’) is an anthropologist and ethnographer of internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation and vulnerability. Her books include Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (2018), Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame (2018, co-edited with Megan Lindsay Brown), Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (2020, co-authored with Tama Leaver and Tim Highfield) and Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media (2020, co-edited with Katie Warfield and Carolina Cambre). She is listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia as well as Pacific Standard 30 Top Thinkers Under 30. Here, she talks about her work and what it means to be an anthropologist of internet cultures.
Instagram by Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin (Polity 2020)
WHAT IS DIGITAL ANTHROPOLOGY?
This could be an anthropological framework, perspectives, theories, concepts, even an ethos and belief system regarding how you study things that are digital. Digital ethnography is less of a framework or system of beliefs but more of method, and is employed by many people especially in the social sciences, cultural studies as well as media studies. It provides a sustained way of doing ethnography adapted for the internet age. But at the heart of the discipline of anthropology, we are most focused on people, culture and social practices, which means that these interests guide my focus when I am doing my research.
HOW IS DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY DIFFERENT FROM CLASSICAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELDWORK?
I do a mixture of traditional and digital ethnography even when I study internet celebrities, influencers, and internet popular culture and platforms. A lot of my fieldwork involves going to meet with these people face-to-face to observe and participate in their activities – when I say ‘in the field’, this could be when I was researching social media influencers and serving as their personal assistant or secretary, or when I studied online fashion stores and worked as a packer or administrator. I orchestrated a situation where I would be able to meet with my informants on a daily or weekly basis, for weeks or months at a time depending on the field context, to understand what they do behind the screens and how they produce content. At the same time, I continue to observe them online, so there is this very nice juxtaposition and corroboration of different methods. The first leg of my fieldwork usually includes serial meetings and interviews, before I commit to extended participant observation with a selected group of informants.
CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR OWN WORK? I am looking at people, on platforms, and also on internet phenomena like memes and gifs that do not have people as units of empirical data. In the latter, I may conduct textual or object analysis akin to physical anthropology or archaeology looking at artefacts.
Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (2018, Emerald Publishing) is one of a four-part series that I have planned. It is pitched at the general public, for students, for anyone who is from any discipline and for people in the industry. The language is public-oriented, and the theories and concepts are surmised in reviews of literature and a brief introduction to some of my empirical research. I consider this the primer among my books.
Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame (2018, Emerald Publishing, co-edited with Megan Lindsay Brown) is an edited collection of how people become or practice internet celebrity cultures around the world, but especially in the global South. I really enjoyed putting this book together with my co-editor because almost every one of our contributors was an early career researcher or a PhD student at the time of