Samuel Collins is teaching a seminar at Hanyang University (ERICA campus) as part of his Fulbright grant in South Korea and, as luck would have it, Matthew Durington is doing the same in Baltimore. The two of them resolved to network their courses together using some of the principles they espouse in Networked Anthropology (Routledge, 2014), combined with some new directions for their research. Among other challenges? The 1 day + 13 hour time difference.

#HanyangTowson

It’s hard to find 2 cities more different than Seoul and Baltimore. Baltimore is a tertiary city, caught between larger, more affluent cities in the U.S. northeast. Seoul is by all accounts a global city–huge, awash with people and capital–a staggeringly complex phantasmagoria. And yet, both of these cities have been profoundly shaped by what we might call advanced capitalism. For Seoul, massive investment and government support have transformed the city into a kaleidoscope media space, a constantly online assemblage of images and spectacles where culture is already “culture content”: text, narrative and media to be bought or sold. Underdevelopment is already pre-packaged as “nostalgia”; labor migration and precarity as “multicultural tourism”. This is the terrain facing anyone who might want to present alternative visions of the city. For Baltimore, a massive lack of investment and government support have transformed the city into a space where entities attempt to navigate their way in the wake of a neoliberal malaise. That condition combines with a tense racial and socioeconomic landscape that produces an array of representations that often border on the stereotypical. Images and spectacles found in mass media historically and in networked media today create a representational burden of the city.

In this context, we determined our media anthropology needs to confront these hegemonies and start to work on presenting alternatives. Moving a media anthropology to a networked anthropology provides a further extension of possibilities. Collins decided to work with local understandings of place. Many of the students in his Media Anthropology course are originally from Seoul or Gyeonggi-do (the province that surrounds Seoul like a donut) and, for them, the area is more than varied spaces for consumption. Even if students find Seoul’s phantasmagoric spaces pleasurable, the goal here is to complicate those representations–to disturb them with community activism, with contestations over urban development. In Durington’s Media Anthropology course he decided to elaborate on multiple years of research in Baltimore City conducted by the Anthropology by the Wire project and past cohorts of students in urban anthropology courses at Towson University. A popular expression by the anthropology faculty at Towson University is to tell students that there is a great place just a few miles south of the campus called ‘Baltimore’ where the conditions of neoliberalism and the social issues they create are impacting a citizenry that they can actually engage through research. There is also the distinct possibility that they may have the opportunity to contribute to social justice issues by creating alternative representations of urban life in Baltimore through media they produce collaboratively.

Collins/Hanyang

First, Collins started with some of the technical questions: doing a tech survey to see what people had access to, opening up new accounts in social media, and running through the basics of a networked anthropology–including social network analysis. The class started with students’ own social networks.

(A smartphone network from a Hanyang student with labels removed. Made with Gephi.)

And then Collins started to interrogate the media that transects their personal networks–those popular or manufactured media practices that overdetermine presentations of the city by limiting them to exchange values: shopping districts, scenes from movies, tourist spectacles, bottled experiences of urban pleasures. Collins tried tag clouds of Flickr images in order to demonstrate these powerful inequalities. Doing searches for one neighborhood in Seoul (neighboring the long-contested U.S. military base in Yongsan)–Itaewon–yields very different associations if you search for “이태원” rather than “Itaewon.”

(A Flickr tag cloud made up of terms that are linked to “Itaewon”)

In order to help students assess the powerful media representing neighborhoods in Seoul as spaces for consumption, Collins had the class use “Storify,” a flexible platform for importing diverse social media and adding your own commentaries.

(A Storify presentation of media images of a prominent neighborhood in Gangnam, Seoul)

Since Storify is linked to Twitter, Collins had them tweet their stories.

(Tweet from Hanyag Media Anthropology student)

With the work of media assessment underway, Collins had the class begin building alternative representations. Then, Collins had the class work on mapping their own daily rounds through urban spaces through “sound maps” designed to defamiliarize routine spaces (and routine assumptions) by removing the spectatorial dimension of urban life in Seoul.

(Sound Mapping through pinning audio files to a Google Map)

Along with sounds maps, students interviewed each other and juxtaposed those recorded media to the mass media they were discovering.

(Life story interviews of Hanyang students)

So–After 8 weeks, Collins’s Media Anthropology class has collected media (television programs, newspapers, public relations), made media (videos, audio, maps), and circulated this through social media and analyzed some of this media through social network analysis and web analytics.

But how to put this together into a more ethnographic multimedia? Collins started a Tumblr blog for the media the class was making:

(http://mediaanthropologyhanyang.tumblr.com)/

But there’s still something missing: a blog may be a place to collect and display a variety of multimedia, but the pieces remain unintegrated and the result mirrors the cacophony of media swirling around student’s lives. Moreover, how can Collins’s class communicate these ethnographic insights to their counterparts in Durington’s class?

The App Project

After conversations with Durington, Collins decided to make the class project in his Media Anthropology an app-building exercise. The ultimate goal is to make an app that is consonant with Collins’s and Durington’s vision for a networked anthropology, i.e., one that 1) links these media together; 2) while at the same time implying a public; 3) in such a way that this public can a) give their input; and b) ultimately shape the course of the app itself. As Durington and Collins discussed in their earlier posting, app development is following 2 stages: a wireframing phase where students are trying out a number of ideas and a prototyping phase involving ARIS, a flexible architecture for app development from University of Wisconsin at Madison.

As the class is entering the app prototype phase the two classes were introduced to one another. The gauntlet is thrown to Durington’s class through dual introductory videos where students are providing their twitter accounts and names while also ‘performing’. Let’s just say the Hanyang dance moves are much more advanced than the Towson repertoire at this point in the networked anthropology experiment.

(Screenshots of introduction videos made by the Hanyang and Towson classes)

Durington/Towson

Now that the challenge of which class can create the best app prototypes has been delivered from the Hanyang group, Towson students are beginning their exercises for a networked anthropology app building project. They are using the same background work as the Hanyang group by conducting a tech survey, creating social media accounts, running analytics and exploring various representations of Baltimore. This is primarily done through a content analysis of various media such as storify, google maps, flickr and the collective media archive of the Anthropology by the Wire website. Predominant imagery in this mediascape more or less confirm many of the dominant elements of the representational burden of Baltimore…pictures of trash, dilapidation and contextual comments on urban blight. There is also some dialogue about the Baltimore Ravens to top it off. The predominantly suburban population of Towson University embodied by the students has to confront their sentiments about these representations. Do they confirm or perhaps complicate perceptions of the city? Whereas many social media platforms become spaces for problematic representations of Baltimore to be found, there are subordinate media that lean toward a more nuanced view. Blog posts throughout the process are spaces of reflexive analysis for these opportunities.

(Storify search using term ‘Baltimore’)

(Exploring research maps made with Google maps and YouTube media)

(Flickr analysis of ‘Baltimore’ Tag)

(Representations of Baltimore through the Anthropology by the Wire project.)

(The Towson course blog site)

The Baltimore group is now undertaking the same final project of app development using POP and Aris that are discussed in previous posts this month. Both classes have started to ‘follow’ one another on social media as they develop their app projects posting their thoughts and exercises using the hashtag #HanyangTowson. The next phase is to map the contours of the shared analytics of the app building project as it develops and is shared between the two groups and beyond. So what do we hope to see from this burgeoning networked anthropology? The pedagogical aspects are obvious as the students in both classes build cross cultural communication, awareness of globalization,understanding how city spaces are interpreted and, perhaps, an acknowledgment that the college student demographic in both countries shares an ambivalence toward assigned coursework in college. Beyond pedagogy, we are also trying to demonstrate that a skill set of research methods, technology utilization and analytical skills can be gleaned from networked anthropology activities that are infinitely marketable for an anthropology degree. Finally, the opportunity to move this experience to an applied ethos and engagement of social justice will often emerge in work beyond the classroom in the urban space. Does the app building process enhance that even more? We shall find out. #HanyangTowson

This app building project is the latest ‘activity’ related to the book Networked Anthropology. Although it is not part of the published book, our website networkedanthropology.com is meant to serve as an ongoing extension of the book and a resource for our collaborators. We welcome you to join us as we forge ahead @networkedanthro

Over the next four weeks Sam Collins and Matthew Durington are posting a series of writings that are theoretical and activity extensions based on their recently published book Networked Anthropology (Routledge).

Just like his colleague Sam Collins in Seoul walking the New App City, Durington meanders the streets of downtown Baltimore and downloads the Baltimore Heritage app in the neighborhood of Marble Hill.  It is across the street from the neighborhood of Bolton Hill and the street Eutaw Place is a symbolic and literal dividing line of race and gentrification in Charm City.  Baltimore Heritage is an organization that attempts to tell stories about Baltimore’s past through buildings and key sites throughout the city.  Their app is a replica of the organization’s website and after geolocating himself through the menu on the app, a marker appears on the screen and once clicked an historical tidbit about an individual named Howard Atwood Kelly is accessible.  Information about this historical figure who lived on the street where Durington is standing appears on his dated iphone.  Hmmmm.  Dr. Kelly was the first professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University, the ‘wizard of the operating room’ for his innovative surgical techniques.  He was also renown for his groundbreaking use of radium to treat cancer. The urban anthropologist now knows something about the past of this neighborhood in Baltimore before white flight.  What about the fact that the zip code where this historical location is marked is now also noted for a different phenomenon by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as a neighborhood with one of the fastest ascending rates of new HIV infections in the United States?  The app provides a connectivity to the past, but not necessarily to the present…that is the continuing project of the researcher.  The app facilitates historical information, but not engagement in the now.  It would be interesting to see what someone living there now thinks about this dilemma.  Could an app oriented toward an applied and engaged anthropology provide it?

For such an under recognized city, Baltimore is tragically overrepresented.  Alongside many other small cities in the United States, it has suffered from the throes of post World War II deindustrialization and the loss of a manufacturing economy while watching a segment of its urban population disappear to the suburbs, exurbs and Sun Belt.  Jobs go away, the tax base erodes, education becomes underfunded, services disappear when needed most, and a demographic shift occurs as white flight reshapes the racialized perception of the city.  As the formal economy dissipates, the informal economy that undergirds all capital flows rises in prominence, as it is one of the few ways in which many are able to literally survive.  One of many consequences of the informal economy related to illicit drug distribution (now being formalized in many sites within the US as a legitimate industry) is a public health problem as addiction creates further strains for social services and is one factor leading to a rise in a particular type of crime.  The concomitant rise in crime from these economic and public health issues creates an over leveraged attention to a particular population resulting in biased incarceration rates and perceived criminality.  All of these factors inform a view of the city as a dangerous space and become the fodder for what we call the ‘representational burden’ of Baltimore in popular culture as seen in shows such as Homicide, The Corner, and the now famous landmark series The Wire.

While many have used The Wire in academia as a quasi-ethnographic treatment of urban life in the United States, we have taken the slant that it represents an overwrought representation of one aspect of a diverse Baltimore…and that it is the best show ever produced for television.  Our National Science Foundation project Anthropology by the Wire has attempted to create alternative representations of Baltimore and its population through collaborative media produced between students, researchers and various groups and entities throughout the city.  After four years we have a substantial media archive of somewhat aesthetically challenged media representing our efforts.  We produce media in the visual anthropology tradition with our collaborators, but quickly became more interested in how media in the project began to be utilized. How was our media linked and shared vis-à-vis social networking sites? This provided a window into reception enabled by the analytics of applications within this burgeoning technology.  As Sam Collins has detailed, the majority of these applications are accessed through smartphones creating a series of networks in the ‘Latent City’.  As our students and collaborators walk the city as of late, they are not necessarily viewing the city itself or its citizens first hand, but are nose down in their smartphone apps immersed in their networks.  Still in the city, but engaging it differently.

Another way to engage a city is through a walking tour.  It can be discovery through commands of others in apps like Dérive or the use of apps like the ones our colleagues at Baltimore Heritage have designed.  We love urban walking tours.  But, there is something about walking around as a sore thumb in a sea of deindustrialization that lends itself to a voyeuristic touristic experience.  We don’t show up in an emblazoned bus as a group, but once we start walking around like a suburban amoeba a dynamic is inevitably created.  Still, walking tours provide our students and us with a sensory ethnographic experience that enhances a textual understanding of the urban.  We also love our partners at Baltimore Heritage who have tried to usurp some of these dynamics by following a participatory ethos in creating walking tours of Baltimore that highlight alternative tropes of the city and its citizens.  In fact, we have provided data for these tours.  These are not the same as tourist-based ventures such as ghost tours and star-spangled banner guided expeditions highlighting historical landmarks and an image of the city frozen in a past time.  Yet, the representation of Baltimore on the Baltimore Heritage website is an ‘Old Web City’.  It’s a reference point that provides a map and context, but not necessarily engagement.  Durington’s stroll around Marble Hill has only a few markers to contend with.  Navigating the green markers on the website and clicking on one connects a series of historical landmarks with various details.  It doesn’t necessarily provide context for getting lost down an alley or stumbling into a mosque representative of the changing demographics of the neighborhood in the last few decades.  The app is a facsimile of the same functionality of the website albeit with the ability to be geolocated to start finding those sites connected to the multitude of green markers.  But, it’s just a starting point for anthropologists and an opportunity to think of the creative misuse of apps even more.

 (A screenshot of the Baltimore Heritage Website)

(Screenshot of the Baltimore Heritage App from a smartphone)

As Collins detailed in our previous post, we are exploring apps as ethnographic speculation and the creation of apps themselves for anthropological research.  We continue to ponder why anthropologists appear to be hesitant to engage this technology that theoretically provides a means of organizing data, arranging space and the possibility of engagement through geolocating capacities.  As one colleague noted on a twitter exchange from our last post, perhaps it is because of the inability of some communities we work with to have access to that technology.  Our sense is that the ‘digital divide’ is eroding quickly.  Moreover, we contend that apps are more accessible than the academic alternatives: articles, books and ethnographic film, all of which present formidable obstacles to publishing, distribution and (paywalled) consumption.  For that reason, we challenged students in Anthropology by the Wire in 2014 to use the Baltimore Heritage app to explore the city.  Through dialogue and analysis of their various self-guided tours they enjoyed the aspect of ‘stumbling upon’ historic sites, but when asked about how they would use it for contextual anthropological research around those sites, they were stumped.  It provides markers, but not the capacity to necessarily go beyond that.  So, how to design an urban anthropology app that does?

We are using an app wireframing tool called Prototyping on Paper, or POP, to start the process of designing an app.  As the POP website and introductory video portends the tool is for entrepreneurs, ad agencies, designers and students “to gain a more solid understanding of UI + UX design”.  Why not anthropologists too?  This tool is tragically simple.  One thinks of an app idea, you draw or ‘wireframe’ what each screen will look like in the app, take pictures of those drawings with a smartphone or tablet and then upload them to the POP design tool in your device.  Once uploaded a variety of functions allow you to highlight different portions of each drawing that is now a screen and create connectivity between pages within the design.  While it does not take the prototype to programming and implementation of an app, it starts the process of how to translate an idea like designing an urban anthropology app to the design phase…in one class.  It literally took about 15 minutes for our fledgling ethnographers to grasp the idea of designing an app that would emulate what we do in Anthropology by the Wire.  How does one design an app that collects information such as notes, photos and videos while also providing contextual information about spaces and places engaged in fieldwork?  And, even more so, provide a means of engagement for the users of the app and collaborators?  Check how one of our students imagined it below:

(Shot/Link of POP Prototype for Anthropology by the Wire)

Play around on the POP prototype for Anthropology by the Wire above via the link.  In addition to a note taking function, mapping capacity, links to social media such as Tumblr and Flickr that we use, and community groups we work with our student included the ubiquitous ‘contact us’ prompt in their imagined Anthropology by the Wire app design.  The scenario we want to create in our anthropological mobile app has the fledgling fieldworker geolocated in a place where they ‘check in’ to do research and the ‘contact us’ function really becomes contact in real time.  The app would enable contact with interlocutors and collaborators who may be available to speak with researchers at any given moment.  This wouldn’t be nuisance anthropology like A Man Called Bee, or bothersome survey takers pounding on a door.  An anthropological collaborator would only be available if they are on the app platform themselves and have checked in ready for dialogue.  Sound a bit like foursquare but not quite?  Well, we were inspired not by personal usage but what we saw happening with geolocating apps like Tinder and Grindr being used for not so anthropological reasons.

 So, why not creatively misuse geolocating apps?  We don’t imagine an ethnographic foursquare review, we imagine an anthropological hook-up in the most platonic sense of the word.  (Disclaimer: we are not advocating the use of Tinder and Grindr for students enrolled in anthropology courses in case you were wondering that).  We want our students to connect with members of the community we are all working with.  We have realized, as many others have, that it is difficult for students to initiate ethnography in the course of a semester.  Our research design for Anthropology by the Wire is based on established rapport and our app would be grounded in that same mode moved to a digital environment beyond social media tools we already employ.  Dare we dream of an app that connects our students and anthropologists with potential collaborators and stakeholders in real time?  Why not?  Could you imagine the applied capacities?  We are.  The possibilities are endless and as we begin to program this app and bring it to beta testing with our computer science friends and community collaborators we will see how it goes.  In the meantime, our next prototyping exercise will connect Sam’s students in South Korea and Matthew’s students in Baltimore in the next few weeks.

Our next post #HanyangTowson will detail that collaborative activity for a networked anthropology and some further speculations.

The Man of the Crowd–Android Version

Collins downloads a free app from the Chongno District Government in Seoul, “Chongno Alleys” (종로 골목길).  The app is an extension of the Chongno tour series (of the same name), each course highlighting lesser known places of interest in Chongno, the central district in Seoul that is home to the lion’s share of Seoul’s national treasures, including palaces, countless museums and architectural landmarks.  But these tours are different.  Developed with neighborhood residents and community groups, these alley courses highlight significant places that are generally overlooked by large crowds of tourists.  It is targeted specifically at Korean tourists (that is, the app is only in Korean).  The app (which appears to have been released in 2011-2012) transforms 9 of the alley tours into a mobile experience using mapping, GPS and gamification.

Opening course number 8, “Sejong Village,” takes Collins down narrow alleys to 1). a white-barked pine tree that is a descendent of a former “natural national monument” (천연기념날), down a maze of modest hanok (한옥)  homes to the former residence of a resistance fighter against the Japanese (Shim Ik-hee), and past government buildings, art galleries and boutique coffee houses to a tiled mural of student art from the National Seoul School for the Deaf and Blind.

(Student art and sign language instruction in front of the National Seoul School for the Deaf and Blind.  Photo by Samuel Collins.)

As he closes in on each site, the GPS in his smartphone highlights the location on his map.  When he gets within 1 km, he can get a “stamp” that confirms that he’s visited the site.  The ultimate goal: getting all of the stamps for all of the courses.  Finally, a link to his phone’s camera app means he can also create a “gallery” of images from his tours.  He can also post comments to Twitter and Facebook.  And he can see comments from other people who posted about these sites.  One of the people who found the White Bark Pine Tree wrote “I almost died trying to find it”.

All in all, this is a fairly typical app: the combination of pre-existing content (descriptions, signage and photographs from the Chongno District government) combined with mapping, GPS, photo apps and social media.

But Collins found several things in this “alley tour” that departed from usual expectations and experiences of urban tourism.  First, Collins’s GPS (on his second-hand, Samsung Galaxy phone) didn’t always accurately update his position and, in order to get his bearings in the narrow alleys of Sejong Village, he crossed back and forth several times before getting his phone to geo-locate correctly.  In other words, he really did “tour” the alleys, crossing and re-crossing a narrow warren of streets and, in the process, taking in a good deal more of the neighborhood.

As structured as the tour may have been, the interface between different parts of the app, together with the limitations of Collins’s smartphone, made even this pre-packaged experience into a “dérive” that brought him to dead-ends and unexpected gardens.  While “dérive,” as “the search for an encounter with otherness, spurred on in equal part by the exploration of of pockets of class, ethnic and racial difference in the postwar city” (McDonough 2009:  would seem to be the exact opposite of tourism (with its commodified and canned experiences), the interstices between the interfaces meant that Collins wandered over into encounters with the “other” whether he planned to or not, including a memorable moment when he walked down a dead-end alley into a group of elderly men gambling in the street.

And there was another sense that the app exceeded its own goals of taking the tourist along the road “less taken”: the encounter with sites and agencies that undermined the vague patriotism that animated the rest of the tour.  For example, Sejong Village (known as “Seochon” before 2010), abuts the complex of buildings surrounding the home of South Korea’s President (청와대).  It may look like a charming, idyllic neighborhood, but Collins noted scores of men with sunglasses and studied, casual dress (shirts untucked!)–the secret service protecting the Blue House from threats to national security.  Two of them asked him where he was from–but it wasn’t in order to make conversation.  Here, the political realities of a Korea still grappling with the legacy of colonialism and the Cold War intrude on the touristic.

(The front-page to the “Chongno Alley” app from the Chongno District Government)

(A series of available courses and a toolbar that features geo-location, a photo gallery, and possibilities for social media)

Anthropology in/of apps

We find it curious that anthropologists have paid relatively little attention to apps.  Yes, there are certainly apps that help in our ethnographic research (we have been big fans of “Evernote” for years), and apps have long been utilized by artists, folklorists, community activists and many others to encourage people to “read” and experience the city in ways that may contravene the commodified spaces of the neoliberal city.  We’re fans of the “Dérive” app, a series of commands that a user scrolls through as they wander a city, the intent of which is to literally lose you in the streets you thought you knew: a deeply subversive exercise that may be as close as the digital world comes to the Situationist project.  And yet, when the ethnographic begins to look too much like tourism (as in the above), anthropologists have not been as academically interested, even though they may work on these same projects in their applied projects.

But there are many things for our work here:

First, apps offer a coherent, purposeful ideological structuring of space, narrative and practice.  They facilitate embodied ideologies, and they mark the exact point of interpellation where structure and symbol meet practice and bodily hexis.  Apps show how institutions and other powerful agents are trying to structure the meaning of cities by combining mobile media and social media through organizing embodied narrative experiences.  Even when apps reproduce already existing content, they do so by structuring experiences in ways that are illustrative of networked power: the city as a series of connections and disconnections that bring some spaces and meaning together while effectively cutting off vast parts of the city from urban practice.  In other words, apps are technologies of inclusion and exclusion, and following their trail can tell us exactly how things like segregation work in an era of the actor network.

Second, these powerful tools are not perfect.  In fact, they’re riven with errors–one of the reasons we like Android-based apps is for all of these lumps and bugs.  But these are more than simply programmer’s errors–we think of them more like Freudian parapraxes.  That is, apps show where there are contradictions, tensions and possibilities for alternative meanings in the interstices of interlocking media platforms.  Like the GPS system that can’t keep up with spatio-temporal shifts of neoliberalism, apps can show us fissures where the exercise of power is still incomplete, the space between symbol, structure and practice that allows for the articulation (or at least the evocation) of difference.  By definition, geo-locatonal apps introduce a gap between structure and practice. For scholars like Jason Farman, they are a clarion call for “creative misuse”.  For us, they remind us that utopia lies in the interstices of the urban fabric.

Third, apps allow anthropologists unparalleled opportunities to organize our multimedia, ethnographic data.  We’re used to working (and re-working) our notes, transcripts and recordings for written ethnographies, or editing (and re-editing) audio and visual recordings for ethnographic film, but what happens when we’ve got all of the above?  Increasingly, anthropologists are leaving the field with a panoply of media: recordings, notes, photos, digital records, etc.  Apps suggest one way of integrating this into ethnographically intended experiences for users.  And there are multiple platforms for anthropologists to use in their own research.  We’ve been experimenting with ARIS, an open-source editor for making multimedia apps for the iPhone, but there are other possibilities out there, including MIT App Inventor.

Moreover, forcing ourselves to organize maps, film, photos, archives and interviews into a (semi)coherent user experience is not just a difficult exercise, it’s a form of ethnographic analysis.  Apps take ethnographers to task for assuming that meaning “inheres” in objects or spaces–with a geo-located app of an urban neighborhood, meaning comes from the ethnographic practice of the user.  Can the user interact with your site in a way that is consonant with your own conclusions?  And if they don’t, isn’t that a problem for you to consider?  Unlike more traditional forms of dissemination (ethnographic and film), apps offer anthropologists a level of feedback (through user-generated content, app analytics or exit interviews) we usually don’t receive until months after our work is published (if at all).  This feedback is itself data–where people go, where they don’t go, what they saw and what they failed to see.   If we dismiss this as ephemeral to our research, we’re missing the point: this is where the ethnography (literally) hits the road.

Finally, apps suggest an ethnography that is collaborative, engaging, open and fluid.  Working with people to produce multiple media, prototyping apps with our interlocutors, testing apps with students, collecting data from usage, and then re-working what we’ve done to reflect our new understanding, all under the auspices of an open-source, open-access platform that people can utilize on even a cheap, 3G phone (like Collins’s).  Is this the future?  Maybe not–but it is one more proof (as if Savage Minds readers needed more) that monographs and articles may not be the best path towards an engaged, public anthropology.

References

McDonough, Tom (2009).  “Introduction.”  In The Situationists and the City, ed. by Tom McDonough, pp. 1-31.  NY: Verso.

Hit us up on twitter: @mdurington @samuelcollins43 @networkedanthro

A Networked Anthropology

“Networked Anthropology” is suspended between a theoretical and methodological program, on the one hand, and a critique and engagement with the network society we’re enmeshed within, on the other.  How can we possibly justify using social media in our applied anthropology?  And how can we afford not to?  Our book, “Networked Anthropology,” lays out the the premises of this ongoing inquiry, contextualizing it within a public, media anthropology.  But the promise and the problems of a networked anthropology hardly end there; each new wrinkle in our socially networked lives suggests new problems for anthropology–and for any scholarly inquiry that purports to engage communities of people.

(Over the next four weeks Sam Collins and Matthew Durington will post blogs related to social media, mobile applications in anthropological research and the idea of a Networked Anthropology…post 1 of 4  below is an excerpt from their recent book.)

Who wouldn’t find social media compelling?  For anthropologists interested in “everyday life and typical behavior,” it’s wonderful and amazing to look at the record of ordinary (and extraordinary) lives that are documented in different ways on social media.  And while food blogging is not anthropology, we still believe that the multitudes of ethno-documentarians uploading their quotidian and extraordinary lives display an anthropological sensibility.  Moreover, people value these self-presentations in a way that is qualitatively different than they did decades ago.  While our interlocutors might have asked for a copy of a photograph of a film two decades ago, now they ask when they can post media up on their Facebook for their networked relations to see.  We would suggest that this means more than just a technological update, a matter of degree.  People realize that their online “selves” can (and should) be regularly maintained and augmented with additional media, and they apologize when they haven’t updated their facebooks or blogs.  They feel an obligation to emote their lives through media platforms, a sentiment shared by non-profits and organizations around the world, who have all—regardless of their primary missions—become media producers, precisely in order to effectively manage their identities on social media that have become steadily more important to their fund-raising.

So shouldn’t anthropologists be part of this?  It is ripe ground for incredible possibilities in research but also represents a minefield of ethical and moral dilemmas.  These manifestations of a networked anthropology could be new incarnations of the kind of hermeneutic violence that anthropology has perpetuated for many decades. Just because social media documenting people’s’ everyday lives is readily available doesn’t mean that those lives should be transparent to anthropologists.  In other words, just because we can “pitch our tent” in Facebook doesn’t mean that we should parasitically lurk there.  This challenge to privacy is a concern to many people, including civil liberties groups.  For anthropology, social media could be just another weapon for us to slot the Other into “savage” categories, one that would allow the unscrupulous to “scrape” data off of media and tell stories about people and their lives without any input from people themselves.  In this dystopian vision, we would become cultural spies on par with the National Security Agency, tracking people’s movements through their posts and spying on the worlds they construct.

But that is not the only possibility for anthropology in the age of the network.  It is also possible that we utilize the global fascination with social media to build more collaboration with communities and to help those communities share their concerns on media platforms.  And it offers the possibility that anthropologists might enjoin new communities—collaborators that are generated through the networks of media content we form.  While there has always been the call for wider access of anthropological research to collaborators and extended communities, the majority of anthropologists show little inclination to do so having already moved on to another segment of research or a new project once a manuscript is published or ethnographically intended media created.  What results of the ethnographic research encounter becomes a static representation of an engagement frozen in time, or, perhaps worse, the anthropologist becomes an advocate for a position or community that has already moved on or been decimated by the processes the anthropologist documents in the first place. Nevertheless, the immediacy of social media, and its rapid propagation, means that we have the potential to make measurable interventions with our collaborative partners.  Unlike academic publishing, or even newspaper editorials, social media can be rapidly disseminated to a strategically selected public.  As a collaborative tool, we believe the “network” is the appropriate metaphor for what we hope to do: creative effective connections between different groups—including anthropologists, interlocutors, students and an emergent “public”—in  order to collaborate on the production of meaning.

These evolving efforts constitute what we believe to be an emerging, networked anthropology.  Over the past 5 years, we have developed a working definition:

“An anthropology undertaken in the age of multimedia social networks, one in which all of the stakeholders—ethnographers, interlocutors, community, audience—are all networked together in various (albeit powerful and unequal) ways.  Networked anthropology generates ethnographic data in multiple media.  Here it overlaps with similar advances in different subdisciplines, including visual anthropology, public anthropology and action research.  The difference is that a networked anthropology produces data that is simultaneously media to be appropriated and utilized by the communities with whom anthropologists work in order to connect to others (other communities, potential grantors, friends and family).  And the opposite is also true—anthropologists are only generating data for their research in the space of their commitments to communities to assist in their efforts to network to different audiences.”

What we’re calling networked anthropology has 7 central components.

1. It’s about process.  The point behind a networked anthropology is to articulate your work through the network, and that means posting up data, ideas and theories that are still in motion.  The moment the book is printed, or the article published, then that process stops, and your work has been ossified—reified—into a singular, static text.  Instead, networked anthropology takes a sometimes terrifying step into revealing ideas that are not fully formed.
2. It’s connected.  What does it mean to be connected?  It means more than just putting something up online.  And it means more than your video going “viral”.  In other words, being connected is entirely different than the 20th century media paradigm of either a) no one seeing your work; or b) everyone seeing your work.  Instead, “connected” refers to the deliberate formation of a network of followers and sites you follow.  It refers to the tagging and creation of metadata you use to delineate and interpret your content for search engines and to attract new nodes and new connections.   Mass media measures “audience” by demographic blocks; a networked audience is never undifferentiated, even if the number of page views scales into the millions.  Each node delineates a particular quality of connection in a connected cluster of similar nodes.
3. It’s cross-platform.  One of the biggest antecedents to networked anthropology is multimedia anthropology.  A networked anthropology, however, is more nomadic, with the same material being used and re-used across different platforms, restlessly re-mixed and re-posted in different configurations. By crossing multiple platforms, meaning inevitably changes, and a networked anthropology seeks to take advantage of that while still admitting the shortcomings (and biases) of commercial platforms.
4. It’s collaborative.  Once you’ve decided on a networked anthropology, then you’ve given up some control and autonomy over your work.  Your immediate collaborators (which include co-researchers, interlocutors and mentors), together with future collaborators (people who have connected to your work in some way through the networks you’ve formed) have measurable impacts on your work.
5. It’s recursive.  What do you gain from a networked anthropology?  One of the most important benefits is immediate feedback, which is not to say that people are necessarily commenting on content you’ve uploaded.  But they are giving you feedback, even if it’s just in the form of site analytics.  In return, that is data you need to incorporate into your research—it’s part of an emergent interpretation of your networked anthropology.
6. It’s about the long-term.  Given the ephemerality of web content, the insistence on the long term seems disingenuous, but this is exactly the difference between viral media that makes the rounds of social networks over the course of a week and disappears (KONY 2012 anyone?) and the anthropology we’re advocating.  A networked anthropology establishes long-term connections for the benefit of everyone in the network.  Premised on reciprocity, collaboration and recursivity, it only works if connections have an opportunity to develop over time.
7. It’s Not for Everyone.  And this may be the most important point. It would be absurd to say that we expect (or even hope) for people to all start practicing networked anthropology.  We can think of many, many field sites where these methods would be entirely inappropriate.  We’re working in some of them right now, and there would be hell to pay if the data we’re collecting for those non-networked projects made it on to Facebook or Youtube.

Some central questions for networked anthropology.

1. Networked ecologies   How are people networked already?  Who are the collaborators?  Is the social media platform you plan on using appropriate for that community?  Networked anthropologists need to elicit people’s networks—both online and offline—before they develop a networked anthropology with that community.  Doing this reveals structures of networks and the gaps in those networks that socially networked media might redress.
2. How do anthropologist enjoin existing networks?  When we plan interventions, we do so in a crowded field of social media and representation, some of which will be familiar to our collaborators.  And some of which might be objectionable for numerous reasons.  People are already uploading videos, photos, and recordings of themselves and their neighbors.  It’s important that we not only acknowledge these other efforts, but also incorporate both the media and the intent behind the media into our work.  This is similar to the concerns all of us bring to fieldwork, but with a difference: not just when do we take out a camera, but when and where does that media get uploaded?
3. Networked publics.  Who are the publics for networked media?  What are the connections?  The disconnections?  Anthropologists and their interlocutors need to ask themselves who is supposed to see media content, and how they are supposed to respond?  Will it be people from the neighborhood?  Will it be potential grantors?  Government agencies in a position to provide services?
4. Networked media.  What kinds of media do we make?  How is that serving diverse publics?  Various media may be tagged differently and may move through social media in different ways.
5. How do networked media change over time?  Media change as they’re networked.  YouTube videos collect comments, views, subscribers, cross-posters who embed the videos on their blogs.  How do we incorporate those features of social media?  Ultimately, how do we treat social media as social and protean rather than fixed texts?  And how can we use those characteristics to the advantage of the communities with whom we work?
6. Networked ethics.  What are the ethical considerations?  Undertaking a networked anthropology imbricates the fieldworker in ethical dilemmas that are unique to social media.  What kinds of ethnographic data can be shared?  Under what circumstances?  How should you incorporate data from networked collaborations (e.g., posted comments)?  How do ethical challenges arise or change over the course of a social media project?  What restrictions need to be placed on networked data?  If creative commons licenses are used, what limits should be placed on these?  Can people change content for their own purposes?  Can they sell it?

Next Steps

Part of the pleasure (and the danger) of networked anthropology is that each new connection opens up new directions and new dilemmas.  In the weeks since we finished the manuscript for Networked Anthropology, we’ve been alternately excited and concerned over different developments in social networks.  But we would argue that each new connection changes the meaning of the whole, and even now we find ourselves linking with different constellations of social media practice.

Our next three posts will outline some of those directions, beginning with the world of app design and gamification, with special emphasis on our continued work in both Seoul and Baltimore theorizing the utility of mobile apps in anthropological research in posts that follow.

Hit us up on twitter: @mdurington @samuelcollins43 @networkedanthro

The World Cup has meant many different things to people throughout the world and has carried varied meanings as well for the citizens of South Africa.  From one perspective it personifies a success story for the leadership of South Africa and President Jacob Zuma.  So far, the tournament has gone off without any major problems that were predicted for the first global sporting event on the continent.  Although the majority of proceeds are going to FIFA and other global entities such as Coca-Cola and whoever makes little leopards kicking soccer balls, it represents a victory for the formal economy of South Africa.  Unfortunately, as pointed out by John Oliver principally (and ironically) it has not meant much for the informal market which is the true economic engine of South Africa or any country for that matter.

The World Cup has also provided an opportunity for the much-maligned Afrikaner segment of the population a chance for some type of rebranding as noted by CNN.  In 2006, I watched the World Cup with both my adopted Afrikaner family and with Zulu friends in Durban.  I knew from that point on the World Cup would be bringing different types of emotion for these two different groups, anxiety for the former and excitement for the latter in the preceding years toward kickoff.  In the homes of both of these groups I felt the emotional ties to competing versions of what a political future might hold for the county.

The notion of home and issues around housing is a principal thread through all of my research and it has brought me into contact with some amazing people in South Africa including Ashraf Cassiem.  He and others from the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign have used the World Cup to continue a focus on housing issues in the country through the first Poor People’s World Cup.  The work of this group and others such as the Shack Dweller’s Movement have demonstrated what the World Cup has meant to many…continued lack of empowerment and a loss of housing rights.

Knowing what the World Cup has meant to so many has made it difficult at times to support the games but sport has provided some entre for me as an anthropologist working in South Africa and Botswana.  In one of the initial blogs for this series on the World Cup a commenter noted that I should refer to Geertz and Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight and the link is definitely there.  In my research on gated community environments in Durban it turned out that being invited to play golf with some older Afrikaner gentlemen was the impetus for a participant observation breakthrough in my research.  And, in Botswana it wasn’t until my colleagues and I were caught up in an intra-village grudge match on the pitch that some major barriers were broken down leading to my favorite picture of all my work below…a photo everyone meant to look like a team photo for the upcoming World Cup.  Soccer means many things to many people, good and bad…and I hear it’s also called football.

In their compelling book Ethnicity, Inc., John and Jean Comaroff discuss the commodification of various groups in the context of a neoliberal world.  I explored this book with my students this past semester and my colleague Laura Powell.  The Comaroffs explore the rising phenomena of cultural commodification and identity incorporation as ethnic federations emerge as commercial enterprises built around identity-based businesses. They have termed this process “Ethnicity, Inc.” at once referencing both the idea of membership in a culturally constituted “people” and the fact that this cultural identity is more frequently being objectified and marketed to a larger global economic community. Through their fieldwork and research as well as the research of others, the Comaroffs develop several key dimensions that make up the larger process including ideas inclusion and exclusion through privileged genetics, that commerce and consumption produce ethnic groups, and struggles over intellectual property for indigenous groups.

For those World Cup fans who attend games in the oft-neglected city of Durban (the best city in South Africa as far as I am concerned) they undoubtedly are immersed in the standard bearer of Zulu identity, Shaka.  They may have landed at King Shaka International Airport, and then possibly proceed to the Lesedi Shakaland Hotel before going onto UShaka Marine World before finally getting it all together through a Shakaland day tour.  Now, anthropologists have always had trepidation when it comes to tourist agendas.  My philosophy is “when you are in the place, you do the thing” and if it rubs against your anthropology identity then analyze it as spectacle to bounce off of your ‘real’ research.  Are individuals engaging this commodified form of Zulu identity getting a ‘true’ glimpse into Zulu ethnicity?  It’s not the form of Ethnicity, Inc. that the Comaroffs are talking about necessarily.  But, if the tour company, cultural village or other form of ethnotainment fits a certain set of criteria, is it commodified culture or entrepreneurial spirit in a very neoliberal South Africa?

In the conclusion to the book the Comaroffs present a dynamic that is both promising and terrifying, “…we recognize, and have sought to make sense of, its appeal: of the promise of Ethnicity, Inc. to unlock new forms of self-realization, sentiment, entitlement, enrichment.  This notwithstanding the fact that it carries within it a host of costs and contradictions: that it has both insurgent possibility and a tendency to deepen prevailing lines of inequality, the capacity both to enable and to disable, the power both to animate and to annihilate.” (Italics theirs) I applaud them for sticking their necks out on this one and speaking to an inherent contradiction in anthropology.  But, it is the last dynamic that gives me shivers and one that some of the marketing around the World Cup has promoted in some capacity.

Sure, there is the inevitable graphics with various indigenous populations swooping in literally and graphically as bumpers for coverage of games or half-time analysis.  And, of course, at the very beginning there had to be someone of San descent holding up the World Cup trophy in a theme eerily reminiscent of The Gods Must be Crazy and extending the fauna fantasy that much more.  But these usual and easy targets of criticism are not the focus here.  It’s not FIFA, it’s Budweiser.  Ok, maybe it’s FIFA and Budweiser.  The graphics and segways showing the cultural and ethnic diversity of South Africa can be gauged on a continuum of authenticity and sincerity but these visuals lend toward the animate side of Ethnicity, Inc. The website and reality show model of ‘Bud House’ blends nationalism and ethnicity in a quasi-competition linked to individual teams that reflects the annihlate side for this visual anthropologist and it is this side of Ethnicity, Inc. that scares me.

One more post left and one question before that, if the Dutch and English sides had ended up playing each other in South Africa, how many references to South African colonial history would have been made by media?

Hope almost lived on for South Africa and Bafana Bafana.  For the space of about 26 minutes there was the sentiment that perhaps the miracle would happen, particularly after the second goal of the first half.  For that brief interlude when the commentators referred to the possibility of the host country advancing, the parties that would be occurring throughout the country, the unification of the population not felt for years, and pondering if Madiba himself in his frail condition was watching somewhere….I could not help but think of Allister Sparks and his book Beyond the Miracle and the whole idea of South African democracy, perhaps waning in an ever increasing neoliberal era. But, unfortunately the goal count would not occur and the French scored as well.

In what would have been a wonderful francophone neocolonial reverse gift the French almost fully imploded in order to let South Africa possibly advance against all odds.  The stellar and redeeming performance by Bafana Bafana thwarted what would have been an overwhelming commentary on the drama of the French side.  The commentary on the French implosion and it’s linkage to a stereotypical French national identity have been overwhelming to say the least. The whole world was watching the French team on Tuesday for all the wrong reasons. My favorite moment came from the PRI show ‘The World’ when a French journalist recommended that the coach only come back to France in a rowboat.  I would have thought this to be a bit over the top until Raymond Domenech refused to shake the hand of the South African coach after the match.  Well, as the ESPN commentators noted, “Perhaps a little too much drama.”

The French implosion threatened to overshadow the tournament, which leads me to James Ferguson and the book Global Shadows. As Ferguson discusses and offered up by a conversation with one of my students, globalization supposedly refers to the entire globe, but in the current world market Africa is most often secluded and is seen as an “inconvenient case” wherein they are unable to provide a significant market and depend upon foreign investment.  In this sense, a shadow is cast over the entire continent symbolizing the political, economic, and sovereign weakness that is often recognized from a western standpoint. The fact that capital within the world market does not “flow” from one place to another is often overlooked. Rather, the exchange of capital, images, and goods work in a criss-cross motion, skipping over and excluding large areas. These excluded regions are often criticized for lacking modernity (as determined by western standards). But, Ferguson suggests that there are alternative forms of modernity that exist in every society and documents this in several instances while warning of an advancing neoliberalism.

Are we seeing that alternative form of modernity in Africa recognized now by the fact that South Africa is actually succeeding as a host for this global event?  Does this mean that South Africa and perhaps Africa will be regarded in a different sense?  Ethnic based tourism is already there (more on that next post via the Comaroffs), but the infrastructure…that’s the issue.

In the meantime, the morphing of the vuvuzela into a punch line in joke after joke may deserve its own treatise now.  In a discussion of that other global event going on now involving a little yellow ball you hit with a racket back and forth across a net, the venerable columnist Frank Deford brilliantly let the sweet sound of the horn come up before saying that, no, he was not falling into that commentary trap.  Kudos to you Frank.  Has anyone checked out the Budweiser United website?  See you after a dramatic weekend assuredly.

The World Cup is THE global sporting event despite claims in the United States to a ‘world series’ or a ‘super bowl’, nothing compares to the unifying aspects of 32 nation states vying for the championship every four years.  As one commentary noted this past week, nothing speaks to the belief in American exceptionalism and unilateralism more than the mass ignorance toward the global impact of soccer. Work stops in many parts of the world during games, particularly in those countries playing at that moment, except for the United States.  The ongoing debate in the United States media is whether or not one should or should not like soccer.  The debate is over.

Thankfully, there are more children in the United States playing soccer now than football so in 12 years the US national team will be in the top tier of FIFA consistently and a threat at that particular world cup.  (Yes, I’m calling it now) I was one of those kids who ended up in the sport via my first team as a child in El Paso, Texas known as the Sand Sharks.  Growing up in Texas you play football…the American version.  If you have not reveled in the guilty pleasure of Varsity Blues or read the excellent book Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger, then this may be another aspect of culture and sport not well known.  One plays football until they are no longer large enough to not get the wind knocked out of them every other play, not that I’m speaking from personal experience necessarily.  So, the fact that soccer is not the standby sport but is primary now for many youth speaks to the opportunity for a more global connection.

Still, in many different media outlets from print, to web to television the story line has been one of fascination with the fervor of fans from different countries, and then pondering why there is not the same fan base in the United States.  The good and the bad:  the National Public Radio blog ‘show me your cleats’ and their general coverage has been more complex than most.  Other news outlets relish in the bewilderment of why so many people pay attention to the games throughout the world.  Unfortunately, almost all media coverage has bought into criticisms of the vuvuzela horn, the principal fan device of South African soccer fans.  When I lived in Durban about one mile from the stadium complex you could hear the buzzing wafting up the hillsides from games.  I grew to love its deafening noise and the festive environment of club soccer in South Africa as well.  It also showed one of many windows into racialization processes in the country.

When one attended games at the old stadium in Durban where soccer was played that was next door to the state of the art facility where the local rugby team played, it brought home the racial politics of sport in South Africa.  Through the built environment one could sense the hangovers of apartheid.   Rugby is the white sport and soccer is the black sport.   The movie Invictus and ESPN commercials about soccer and Robben Island prisoners have demonstrated that dichotomy.  There is a chance now that soccer will have equal standing in South Africa right beside rugby and cricket, the game that marks former colonies more than any other.

The ramp up to the world cup presented much speculation about South Africa as well.  There was an ongoing discussion that FIFA would pull the tournament because the stadiums would not be completed.  Many discussed the fear of crime and the possible consequences of attending matches in South Africa.  Many of my colleagues have been studying the impact of the World Cup on housing and other economic issues in the country.  While one can celebrate as a fan, one must also realize how the World Cup elides many socioeconomic issues in South Africa as elsewhere.  And, there has been constant speculation as to whether or not South Africa would be able to pull it off.  One week in and things are going quite smoothly, and I do not recall in all of my years of watching soccer any of the same discussions about other World Cup venues.  It is not a coincidence that these dilemmas only take place when considering this is the first global sporting event of this magnitude on the African continent.

So, beyond being simply a fan of soccer and the media spectacle and marketing of ethnicity and nationalism that occurs alongside it, why should anthropologists care about the World Cup?  It is a way to talk about globalization.  There are a slew of books out there that do a fairly decent job of this including How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer and Globalization and Football by Richard Giullanotti and Roland Robertson.  Both books add a popular culture approach to discussions of globalization and serve as good counterpoints and/or accompaniments to any discussion of globalization and anthropology.  Whereas the primary way that globalization is usually discussed is through a fascination with speed, commerce and other macro movements, soccer enables a focus on the articulation between the global and the local and other cultural aspects that serve as excellent fodder for the classroom.  As media anthropologists the possibilities of analysis are endless.  One thing is true across the board as commented on by David Brooks, watching soccer is simply agony and every fan knows this no matter where they are located in the world so you may feel my personal strife which goes with how the US and Mexico fare.  Favorite game so far: Serbia vs. Germany.

Next post I will talk about the World Cup pulling on Global Shadows by James Ferguson and Ethnicity, Inc. by Jean and John Comaroff.  In the meantime, if you have the chance, check out the spectacle that is the Budweiser United nationalist play on Big Brother via YouTube.  It takes Benedict Anderson to another level.  And, no place exposes bias more than the several Twitter feeds on the tournament where passion, nationalism and ethnicity expose themselves.  I will be talking about this and other commercials and marketing from an anthropological vantage too.  And, of course, I will have to have some further commentary on the sweet sounds of the vuvuzela and what makes the World Cup in 2010 a uniquely African experience.