Internet Ethnographers’ Guest Blogs

We have two USC post-doc ethnographers of internet culture coming your way in the next month or so, Jenny Cool and Patricia Lange.

Dr. Cool is a postdoctoral research fellow at USC’s Center for Visual Anthropology. She conducted dissertation field research on the social imaginaries and practices of media production and consumption in Cyborganic, “an influential early Web community.” I hope she will do a post on this fascinating work after exploring the fleeting togetherness in smart elevators.

Dr. Lange is a Postdoctoral Fellow at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts studying the semiotics of video production, sharing, and reception on YouTube and in the video blogging community.

Give them a Savage welcome!

Adam Fish

I am a cultural anthropologist and media studies scholar currently teaching and researching in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, UK. I investigate media technologies, digital finance, and network activism. @mediacultures

4 thoughts on “Internet Ethnographers’ Guest Blogs

  1. All this trendy research yet no concern with the internet’s racism, sexism, and first worldism and how they control and determine communities just like “IRL”.

  2. Saying the internet is racist is like saying the air is classist because it is dirtier in cities. There are racist activities everywhere but that does not make everywhere racist. This work is trendy if studying anything originally and novel is trendy, which would disqualify the study of any cultural iteration in the present. What on the earth or beyond are you talking about?

  3. So “activities” which systematically occur within a defined system in no way reflect on that system? Doesn’t sound like anthropology to me.

    And note what I said: that this sort of head-in-the-cloud research does not observe the systems of power which are grounded offline. I did not say that the internet medium is itself sexist or racist — though I can certainly say it is first worldist — that would imply that the internet can only be controlled and perpetuated by white middle-class males. Anyhow, I didn’t expect a much better response from the blog that idealizes 4chan’s Anonymous. Emergent internet “activities” are anthropology’s new tribe.

  4. dd, I share your indignation over the state of social justice in the world and even your sense that celebratory discourses of the Internet obscure real (material and informational/imaginary) conditions of existence, production, and reproduction and the larger structural forces that shape them.

    However, as one whose work you’ve dismissed as “trendy,” “head-in-the-clouds,” and racist, sexist, first-worldist sight unseen, I can’t see how that kind of summary judgment and execution serves either social justice or anthropology. I appreciate where you’re coming from, but might you consider the possibility that you have intellectual brethren among those who study techno-culture?

    I embarked on my own studies in 1993 in response to Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) that urges all who would oppose domination (in its myriad forms) not to let technical knowledge remain the province of the “high-tech boys.” I read her appeal as a personal call to take up ethnographic study among the “Net-ravers”. A central objective of my dissertation was to ground celebratory and utopian discourses of new technologies genealogically, showing how what is heralded today as “revolutionary” grew from earlier techno-socialities, similarly hailed as revolutionary in their day. Rather than rupture with the past, narratives of social revolution through technology have a long cultural history that is anything but trendy, particularly in the USA.

    As an ethnographer, my project has been to try to understand the geek community I lived and worked among from 1993-1999 in their own terms, before (but not instead) of situating the phenomena in relation to systemic, structural forces of economy and society; and making an immanent critique of the techno-utopian imaginaries and practices of my subjects. In this approach, I have been inspired by the work of Jan English Lueck whose book Cultures@SiliconValley combines rich, compassionate ethnography with critical insight.

    [FWIW, though I’m thankful for Adam’s point about not disqualifying an entire site of study as the province of a philistine “new tribe,” I would argue that the air, or rather pollution, is classist in so much as its effects are disproportionately felt by those with less socio-economic power.]

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