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Paper: Media anthropology & the archives

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Budka, P. (2023). Media anthropology and the archives: On exploring and reconstructing sociotechnical life, histories, and biographies. Paper at EASA Media Anthropology Network Workshop: “Theorising Media and Time”, Copenhagen, Denmark: University of Copenhagen, November 9-10.

Screenshot of MyKnet.org records in the Internet Archive.

Abstract

This paper looks into digital archives and how they not only serve as facilities to collect, store, and categorize media content and artifacts, but how they mediate between the past and the present. How archives potentially contribute to the future projecting and envisioning of media as well as related technologies and practices. For that the paper explores the role of archival work in media anthropological research. It builds on material from my project on the Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET), an organization established by the tribal council Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) to connect remote First Nation communities in Canada’s Northwestern Ontario to the internet (e.g., Budka, 2019). I was particularly interested in exploring and reconstructing the sociotechnical life of the platform MyKnet.org (1998-2019), which was set up exclusively for First Nations people to create personal homepages within a cost- and commercial-free space on the web. By tracing the rise and fall of MyKnet.org, this paper adds to the steadily growing body of research into missing and marginalized internet histories (Driscoll & Paloque-Berges, 2017).

Besides considering historical and sociocultural contexts of First Nations’ life, it critically reviews theoretical accounts and conceptualizations of change and continuity that have been developed in an anthropology of media and technology (e.g., Pfaffenberger, 1992; Postill, 2017) as well as in postcolonial technoscience (e.g., Anderson, 2002). During fieldwork many people told me stories about their first MyKnet.org websites in the early 2000s, how they evolved, and what they meant to them. People vividly described how their homepages were designed, structured, and linked to other pages. To deepen my interpretation and understanding of these narratives, I used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to recover archived versions of these websites whenever possible. Thus, the Wayback Machine became an archaeological tool for my anthropological research into the sociotechnical life and history of MyKnet.org and the digital biographies of its users.

References

Anderson, W. (2002). Introduction: Postcolonial technoscience. Social Studies of Science, 32(5–6), 643–658.

Budka, P. (2019). Indigenous media technologies in “the digital age”: Cultural articulation, digital practices, and sociopolitical concepts. In S. S. Yu & M. D. Matsaganis (Eds.), Ethnic media in the digital age (pp. 162-172). New York: Routledge.

Driscoll, K., & Paloque-Berges, C. (2017). Searching for missing “net histories”. Internet Histories, 1(1–2), 47–59.

Pfaffenberger, B. (1992). Social anthropology of technology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 491–516.

Postill, J. (2017). The diachronic ethnography of media: From social changing to actual social changes. Moment. Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(1), 19–43.

Lecture: Von der Cyber Anthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie

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On invitation of Christoph Bareither, I gave a lecture on the formations, the differences and similarities of cyber anthropology and digital anthropology for the colloquium “Digital Anthropology” at the University of Tübingen, Germany (in German). The talk built on a text published in 2019 for the edited volume Ritualisierung – Mediatisierung – Performance. Find the chapter as PDF file below:

Budka, P. (2019). Von der Cyber Anthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie. Über die Rolle der Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie im Verstehen soziotechnischer Lebenswelten. In M. Luger, F. Graf & P. Budka (Eds.), Ritualisierung – Mediatisierung – Performance (pp. 163-188). Göttingen: V&R Unipress/Vienna University Press. https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737005142.163

Lecture Abstract

Anhand ausgewählter wissenschaftstheoretischer und -historischer Aspekte zeichnet Philipp Budka in seinem Vortrag die Entwicklung sowie die Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede der Forschungsfelder der Cyber Anthropologie und der Digitalen Anthropologie nach. Beide sind bestrebt, zu einem besseren Verständnis komplexer soziotechnischer Systeme in unterschiedlichen Gesellschaften beizutragen. Während die Cyber Anthropologie – der Kybernetik folgend – sich nicht nur mit kommunikationstechnischen, sondern auch mit biologisch-technischen Grundlagen und Veränderungen von Systemen und Organisationsformen befasst, fokussiert die Digitale Anthropologie dezidiert auf digitale Technologien, Medien oder Infrastrukturen. Wie Budkas Vortrag verdeutlicht, gestaltet die Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie die interdisziplinäre Auseinandersetzung mit den komplexen Beziehungen zwischen Mensch, Technik und Technologie – sowie die damit verbundenen Phänomene, Prozesse und Praktiken – entscheidend mit.

Internet café in Toronto, ON, Canada. (Photo by Philipp Budka)

Presentation: Cultural dimensions of digital ethics

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Budka, P. (2023). Cultural dimensions of digital ethics: Anthropological notes and perspectives. Presentation at Academies for Global Innovation and Digital Ethics (AGIDE) Workshop, Vienna, Austria: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 17-18 April.

From the AGIDE workshop brochure:

“The digital transformation is changing the way we live, the way our societies and economies function, and is shifting global power relations. Moreover, it has brought about an unprecedented degree of global interconnectedness. In cooperation with other Academies of Sciences worldwide, Academies for Global Innovation and Digital Ethics (AGIDE) seeks to embrace the socio-cultural variety of perspectives from all over the world and to further explore differences and similarities without forcing uniformity or consensus. The first AGIDE workshop will focus on the main questions of the project, that is, how various regions and cultures experience digitalization and whether particular ethical challenges arise due to various cultural dimensions. A series of renowned international speakers were invited to investigate, beyond stereotypes, in which ways cultural dimensions influence how technologies are welcomed, perceived and dealt with. Three main questions were were identified to guide the discussions at the workshop:

1) What is your vision of a ‘good digital future’ within your cultural context or region?

2) When you step out of the ‘bubble’ of the expert community, what are the views of lay people you meet ‘outside’?

3) What is the most annoying cultural stereotype with regard to approaches to digitization? Why do you find it annoying and what would you change about that stereotype?”

I commented on these questions by providing an anthropological perspective.

Seminar: Digital Visuality & Popular Culture

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Photo by Gian Cescon on Unsplash

The seminar “Digital Visuality and Popular Culture” for the MA program CREOLE at the University of Vienna provides an overview about digital visuality as a key phenomenon of contemporary visual culture and its connection to popular culture. By working on ethnographic research projects, students explore the diversity of digital practices, their visual dimension and their meaning for popular cultural processes and phenomena.

With the advent of digital media and technologies, internet-based devices and services, mobile computing as well as software applications and social media platforms new opportunities and challenges have come to the forefront in the anthropological research of visual culture. Digital media technologies have become ubiquitous means of visual communication, interaction and representation. For anthropology it is of particular interest how people engage with digital media technologies and content, how “the digital” is embedded in everyday life and how it relates to different sociocultural phenomena.

One of these phenomena is popular culture: processes and practices related to the production, circulation and consumption of, for example, music, film, fashion and advertisements as well as the construction and mediation of celebrities. Moreover, popular culture is closely connected to other cultural phenomena such as fan culture, public culture and participatory culture. Fans, for instance, engage in various forms of visual productivity and play a crucial role in the creation and circulation of cultural artifacts related to their fandom such as memes.

By working on different case studies, students get a comparative overview about digital visuality and visual aspects of popular culture. Students conduct ethnographic projects and engage with key questions. What theoretical concepts and analytical categories of sociality can be used to study visual and popular culture? How does digital visuality constitute and mediate cultural performances and rituals? How do social media platforms enable and change visual culture and communication?

Article: Social media – power & politics

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Udupa, S., & Budka, P. (2021). Social media: Power and politics. In H. Callan & S. Coleman (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Hoboken: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2482

Abstract

By centering and unpacking the “social” in social media, anthropological scholarship has drawn on its disciplinary strengths in excavating the social, cultural, and everyday dimensions of mediated milieus, offering, in turn, some unique contributions toward understanding the political cultures and sociocultural ramifications of internet-enabled social media.

While social media have been the subject of intense scrutiny in other disciplines, anthropological scholarship distinguishes itself with its focus on embodied contexts of use and situated meanings surrounding social media.

Anthropological studies have examined progressive activism and everyday experience, as well as violent movements enabled by social media in the context of longer histories of racialization and colonialism. However, ethnographic research on difficult topics such as populism, extreme speech, and surveillance confronts several challenges in terms of data access, safety, and data confidentiality.

Article: Anthropological perspectives on digital-visual practices

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Budka, P. (2021). Kultur- und sozialanthropologische Perspektiven auf digital-visuelle Praktiken. Das Fallbeispiel einer indigenen Online-Umgebung im nordwestlichen Ontario, Kanada (Anthropological perspectives on digital-visual practices). In R. Breckner, K. Liebhart & M. Pohn-Lauggas (Eds.), Sozialwissenschaftliche Analysen von Bild- und Medienwelten (pp. 109-132). Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613681-005

Abstract

In times of increasing digitalization, it is of particular interest for anthropology to understand how people in different societies integrate digital media and technologies, internet-based devices and services or software, and digital platforms, into their lives. The digital practices observed here are closely related to emergent forms of visual communication and representation, which need to be described and interpreted through ethnographic analysis, careful contextualization, and systematic comparison.

This paper discusses aspects of digital-visual culture through a case study of the online environment MyKnet.org, operated exclusively for First Nations between 1998 and 2019 in the remote communities of Northwestern Ontario, Canada, by the Indigenous internet organization Keewaytinook Okimakanak Kuhkenah Network (KO-KNET).

The analytical framework is a practice theory approach linked to ethnographic fieldwork, historical contextualization, and cultural and diachronic comparison. The creation, distribution and sharing of digital images, collages and layouts for websites in MyKnet.org can thus be described, analyzed and interpreted in relation to the phenomenon of hip hop and the associated fan art, as well as the digital biographies of users.

These digital-visual practices are closely connected to individual and collective forms of representation, as well as the maintenance of social relationships across larger distances, and thus also to the construction, negotiation and change of digital identity. They point not only to the global significance of visual communication, representation and culture, but also to the locally specific relationships that people maintain with online environments and digital platforms.

Paper: Indigenizing digital futures

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Budka, P. (2021). Indigenizing digital futures: The case of a web-based environment for remote First Nation communities in Northwestern Ontario, Canada. Paper at German Anthropological Association Conference, Online (hosted by University of Bremen, Germany), 27 September – 1 October.

Abstract

Exploring digital phenomena, processes and practices in an indigenous context point to the fact that the mediation of culture and the formation of identity include the mixing and recombination of cultural elements (e.g. Budka 2019). Such an “indigenization” perspective (Sahlins 1999) promotes an open and dynamic understanding of digital culture and offers a critical view of Euro-American centred concepts of digital modernity, such as “the digital age” and “the network society”, that imply a unilinear evolutionary world view that tends to ignore culturally different ascriptions of meaning to digital realities (Ginsburg 2008).

Between 1998 and 2019, the free and community-controlled web-based environment MyKnet.org, which was operated by the First Nations internet organization KO-KNET, enabled residents of remote communities in Northwestern Ontario, Canada, to establish their own web presence, to communicate and interact, and to create and share content. Through an anthropologically informed approach that advocates the significance of indigenous realities in understanding the diversity of digital life and by building on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper discusses how digital futures were imagined and shaped in and in relation to MyKnet.org.

Paper: The rise & fall of an indigenous web-based platform

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Budka, P. (2021). The rise and fall of an indigenous web-based platform in Northwestern Ontario, Canada. Paper at Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials (RESAW21) Conference: “Mainstream vs Marginal Content in Web History and Web Archives”, Online (hosted by University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg), 17-18 June.

Abstract

In 1998, the Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET), an internet organization established by the tribal council Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) to connect remote First Nation communities in Canada’s Northwestern Ontario to the internet, developed the web-based platform MyKnet.org. This platform was set up exclusively for First Nations people to create personal homepages within a cost- and commercial-free space on the web.

By the early 2000s, a wide set of actors across Northwestern Ontario, a region with an overall indigenous population of about 45,000, had found a new home on this digital platform. During its heyday between 2004 and 2008, MyKnet.org had more than 30,000 registered user accounts and about 25,000 active homepages. With the advent and rise of commercial social media platforms user numbers began to drop. To reduce administrative and technical costs, KO-KNET decided to switch to WordPress as hosting platform in 2014. Since this required users to set up new websites, numbers continued to fall. In early 2019, there were only 2,900 homepages left and MyKnet.org was shut down a couple of months later.

MyKnet.org used to be extremely popular among First Nations people. As I found out during my ethnographic fieldwork in Northwestern Ontario (six months between 2006 and 2008, including participant observation and 96 interviews) and in MyKnet.org (between 2006 and 2014) this was mainly because of two reasons.

  1. People utilized MyKnet.org to establish and maintain social relations across spatial distance in an infrastructurally disadvantaged region. They regularly visited the homepages of friends and family members to see what they were up to, they communicated via message boxes, and they interlinked their homepages.
  2. MyKnet.org contributed to different forms of cultural representation and identity construction. Homepage producers used the platform to represent themselves, their families, and their communities by displaying and sharing pictures, music, texts, website layouts, and artwork. Such practices not only required people to learn digital skills, they also contributed to the creation of a web-based indigenous territory on the web (Budka, 2019).

This paper explores the rise and fall of MyKnet.org, aiming thus to contribute to the analysis of missing and marginalized internet and web histories (Driscoll & Paloque-Berges, 2017). By considering the historical and cultural contexts of First Nations’ everyday life and by drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, it critically reviews theoretical accounts and conceptualizations of change and continuity that have been developed in an anthropology of media and technology (e.g., Pfaffenberger, 1992; Postill, 2017) and in postcolonial technoscience (e.g., Anderson, 2002). In doing so, it examines how sociotechnical change and cultural continuity can be conceptualized in relation to each other and in the context of (historical) processes of digital decoloniality.

During fieldwork many people told me stories about their first MyKnet.org websites in the early 2000s, how they evolved and what they meant to them. People vividly described how their homepages were designed, structured, and to which other websites they were linked. To deepen my interpretation and understanding of these narratives, I used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to recover archived versions of these websites whenever possible. Thus, the Wayback Machine became an additional methodological tool for my ethnographic research into the history and social life of MyKnet.org.

References

  • Anderson, W. (2002). Introduction: Postcolonial technoscience. Social Studies of Science, 32(5–6), 643–658.
  • Budka, P. (2019). Indigenous media technologies in “the digital age”: Cultural articulation, digital practices, and sociopolitical concepts. In S. S. Yu & M. D. Matsaganis (Eds.), Ethnic media in the digital age (pp. 162-172). New York: Routledge.
  • Driscoll, K., & Paloque-Berges, C. (2017). Searching for missing “net histories”. Internet Histories, 1(1–2), 47–59.
  • Pfaffenberger, B. (1992). Social anthropology of technology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 491–516.
  • Postill, J. (2017). The diachronic ethnography of media: From social changing to actual social changes. Moment. Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(1), 19–43.

Seminar: The Materiality and Visuality of Social Media

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This online course for the summer semester 2021 at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna gives a critical overview about the material and visual dimension of social media and their interconnection. Social media platforms and services, such as Facebook or Instagram, have become important (visual) communication and (re)presentation tools. For social and cultural anthropology it is of particular interest how these platforms are integrated and embedded into everyday life, by considering changing sociocultural, political and economic contexts. Students therefore explore and discuss the relevance of a material culture approach for (the understanding of) technology appropriation as well as (culturally) different digital-visual practices. By working on case studies in small empirical projects and by sharing and comparing their findings, students gain insights into material and visual culture in a digital context.

Selected Literature

  • Dourish, P. (2016). Rematerializing the platform: Emulation and the digital–material. In S. Pink, E. Ardevol, & D. Lanzeni (Eds.), Digital materialities: Design and anthropology (pp. 29–44). Oxford: Bloomsbury.
  • Favero, P. (2018). The present image: Visible stories in a digital habitat. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Góralska, M. (2020). Anthropology from home: Advice on digital ethnography for the pandemic times. Anthropology in Action, 27(1), 46–52. https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270105
  • Horst, H., & Miller, D. (2012). Normativity and materiality: A view from digital anthropology. Media International Australia, 145(1), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X1214500112
  • Miller, D., & Sinanan, J. (2017). Visualising Facebook: A comparative perspective. London: UCL Press. https://www.uclpress.co.uk/collections/series-why-we-post/products/83994
  • Miller, D., et al. (2016). How the world changed social media. London: UCL Press. https://www.uclpress.co.uk/collections/series-why-we-post/products/83040
  • Pink, S. (2017). Technologies, possibilities, emergence and an ethics of responsibility: Refiguring techniques. In E. Gómez Cruz, S. Sumartojo & S. Pink (Eds.), Refiguring techniques in digital visual research (pp. 1–12). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Sumiala, J, et al. (2020). Just a ‘stupid reflex’? Digital witnessing of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the mediation of conflict. In P. Budka & B. Bräuchler (Eds.), Theorising Media and Conflict. Anthropology of Media Vol. 10 (pp. 57–75). New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
  • Walton, S. (2018). Remote ethnography, virtual presence: Exploring digital-visual methods for anthropological research on the web. In. C. Costa & J. Condie (Eds.), Doing research in and on the digital: Research methods across fields of enquiry (pp. 116–33). New York: Routledge.

MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment

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This blog post is a shorter version of a paper presented at the Engaging with Web Archives (EWA20) conference in September 2020 (Book of Abstracts).
Budka, P. (2020). MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment. Paper at Engaging with Web Archives (EWA20): “Opportunities, Challenges and Potentialities”, Online (hosted by Maynooth University), 21-22 September.

This blog post builds on selected results of an anthropological project that explored various indigenous engagements with digital media, technologies and infrastructures in Northwestern Ontario, Canada (e.g., Budka, 2015, 2019; Budka et al. 2009). The project was conducted in cooperation with the First Nations internet organization Keewaytinook Okimakanak Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET).

In this post I briefly reflect upon traces of “digital decoloniality”, a concept borrowed from Alexandra Deem (2019), by exploring selected aspects of the sociotechnical history of KO-KNET’s web-based environment MyKnet.org and by discussing facets of a MyKnet.org user’s digital biography.

KO-KNET & MyKnet.org

KO-KNET Network, 2010, courtesy of KO-KNET

In 1994, the tribal council Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) established the Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET) to connect Canada’s indigenous people in Northwestern Ontario’s remote communities through and to the internet. At that time, a local telecommunication infrastructure was almost non-existent. KO-KNET started with a simple bulletin board system that developed into a community-controlled ICT infrastructure, which today includes landline and satellite broadband internet as well as internet-based mobile phone communication (e.g. Fiser & Clement, 2012).

Together with local, regional and national partners, KO-KNET developed different services: from e-health and an internet high school to different remote training programs. The most mundane of those services was the digital environment MyKnet.org, which enabled First Nations people to create personal homepages within a cost- and commercial-free space on the web.

MyKnet.org was set up in 1998 exclusively for the First Nations people of Northwestern Ontario. By the early 2000s, a wide set of actors across Northwestern Ontario, a region with an overall indigenous population of about 45,000, had found a new home on this web-based platform. During its heyday, MyKnet.org had more than 30,000 registered user accounts and about 25,000 active homepages.

With the advent and rise of commercial social media platforms, such as Facebook, user numbers began to drop. To reduce administrative and technical costs, KO-KNET decided to switch to WordPress as hosting platform in 2014. Since this required users to set up new websites, numbers continued to fall. In early 2019, there were only 2,900 homepages left and MyKnet.org was shut down a couple of months later.

Continue reading MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment

Blog Post: Collaborative ethnography in the digital age: Towards a new methodological framework

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Palmberger, M., & Budka, P. (2020). Collaborative ethnography in the digital age: Towards a new methodological framework. Digital Ethnography Initiative (DEI) Blog, 13 Nov.

Digital ethnography has become a very vibrant research field, as the growing body of literature indicates (e.g. Hjorth et al., 2017; Pink et al., 2016). Nevertheless, we sense that methodological debates often fall short. With this contribution to the Digital Ethnography Initiative (DEI) blog, we would like to open up a discussion on key methodological and ethical issues.

More precisely, we would like to start sharing a reflection process on theoretical and methodological debates in the field of digital ethnography that we have been engaging in over the last year. This resulted in (1) a project proposal to an Austrian funding body as well as (2) in the Digital Ethnography Initiative at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna that we launched together with our colleague Suzana Jovicic.

In this blog post, we propose and briefly discuss three key issues and questions that are related to the challenges of ethnographic research in times of increasing digitalization. They address

(1) the individualization of interaction via smartphones and other mobile devices, which is connected to

(2) new issues of confidentiality and intimacy that call for the development of

(3) explicit collaborative research methods involving research partners in the process of collecting, interpreting and representing data.

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Interview: On COVID-19 & digital technologies in everyday life

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In May 2020, I was asked by the European Science-Media Hub of the European Parliament to participate in a short written interview about COVID-19 and digital technologies in everyday life. The interview can be found below and on the website of the European Science-Media Hub, where it is also part of the new Digital Humanities Series.
Comments are, as always, more than welcome.

Q: How do you evaluate the current push to “live” our personal lives with and through digital technologies?

As an anthropologist who has been exploring digital phenomena from a social and cultural perspective for more than 15 years, I wouldn’t describe the current situation as a “push” to a more digitized and digitalized life, but rather as an accelerated development, which includes social, technological and economic changes and transformations in all sectors of society (Thomas Hylland Eriksen nicely illustrates the aspect of accelerated change in relation to globalization in his book Overheating [2016]).

People have been living their lives with and through digital technologies long before the current health crisis – some more, some less. In 2006, when I started to conduct an ethnographic project about the appropriation and utilization of internet technologies in remote indigenous communities in north-western Ontario, Canada, I learned that due to the region’s geographical remoteness and people’s sociotechnical isolation, self-organized infrastructural connectivity and self-designed internet-based services and programs were well underway for some years. Local people were using all sorts of digital media and technologies to connect to each other, to create online presences and digital identities, and to access globally distributed information. Internet services, such as online learning and video conferencing, were – thanks to broadband connectivity – already embedded into local everyday life.

I notice similar tendencies in Europe today, where people have been forced to isolate and distance themselves due to COVID–19; not only from family and friends, but also from colleagues at work and school. E-learning, for example, has become part of the everyday learning experience. Which is probably not a big issue for students, who grew up with digital technologies and social media and are therefore used to computer-mediated communication and interaction, but certainly a challenge for institutions and teachers who are not yet that familiar with digital technologies in an educational context. In respect to digitality, I understand the current health crisis as a phenomenon that has been speeding things up. Our lives have become more digital; faster than expected, but not necessarily different than without the virus.

Q: More generally, what did you find in your project about the blending of our intimate space with the professional, the administrative, the cultural and the political spheres by means of digital technology?

Throughout my career, I have been involved in anthropological projects about the sociocultural consequences of digital media and technologies, which build on ethnographic fieldwork as the key methodological approach. Such an approach situates the researcher into the daily life of research participants over a considerable period of time. The intimate, the personal and the private are therefore central to the work of anthropologists and difficult to artificially separate from collective spheres of sociality. People have always brought their personal positions and individual interpretations – that are shaped by intimate experiences – into politics or the workplace, for instance. However, through digital and networked technologies, it is much easier today to identify, share and also manipulate private data and personalized information.

From an anthropological perspective, it is important to emphasize that there are cultural differences. Not all people share Euro-American conceptions of privacy or intimacy and therefore indicate different concerns over these matters in respect to digital life. While people in remote north-western Ontario, for example, were well aware that their very personal reflections, which they openly posted and shared in an online environment, can be potentially accessed globally, they were not concerned. They rather experienced this environment as a purely local space of expression for indigenous people only, not of any interest to outsiders (for more ethnographic examples in different cultural contexts, see, e.g. the results of Daniel Miller’s Why We Post project).

Due to the rise of social media monopoly, platform capitalism, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and current debates about COVID–19 tracing apps, digital privacy and surveillance are high on the public and political agenda, particularly in Europe. However, as anthropological evidence continues to show, related ideas and concepts are perceived and evaluated differently also because of cultural diversity.

Panel: Digital Ethnography: Revisiting Theoretical Concepts & Methodological Approaches

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Panel “Digital Ethnography: Revisiting Theoretical Concepts & Methodological Approaches” @ Vienna Anthropology Days 2020 (VANDA2020, Sept. 28 – Oct. 1), convened by Philipp Budka & Monika Palmberger.
More details, including the paper abstracts, to be found at https://vanda.univie.ac.at/scientific-program/.

Session 1

Rebecca Carlson (Temple University / TMDU): Online with bioinformatic scientists in Tokyo: Doing digital ethnography in a pandemic

Simone Pfeifer (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz): Digital ethnography on, with, and through social media and messenger services: Ethical and methodological reflections from two different research projects

Monika Palmberger (University of Vienna): “New media of care”: Methodological reflections on digital diaries

Annika Richterich (University of Sussex): Critical making and digital ethnography

Franziska Weidle (Brandenburg University of Technology): Co-creating with software: Towards a computational correspondence in digital ethnography

Session 2

Cristiane Damasceno (UNC Greensboro): Innovative research methods for the disinformation age

Marie Hermanová (Czech Academy of Sciences): Too real is fake: Authenticity and digital intimacy between influencers and researchers

Christian Ritter (Tallinn University): Mediated relationships and remote ethnography: Following the rise and fall of travel influencers

Suzana Jovicic (University of Vienna): Neither here nor there: Smartphone in the ethnographic encounter

Libuše Veprek (LMU Munich): Bringing the subject into focus in large scale textual data analysis

Session 3

Maria Schreiber (University of Salzburg): #strokesurvivor: Studying a “hashtag public” on Instagram

Zoë Glatt (LSE): Becoming a YouTuber: (Auto)ethnographic explorations of the online video industry

Xiaowei Huang (Guangzhou College of Commerce): Second Life, ethnography and virtual culture

Philipp Budka (University of Vienna): Digital ethnography and web archives: The case of an indigenous web-based environment

Blog Post Series: Von der Cyberanthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie – Teil 4

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Diese Serie von Blogeinträgen beschreibt die Relevanz kultur- und sozialanthropologischer Zugänge in der Untersuchung digitaler Technik und Technologien, dargestellt anhand wissenschaftstheoretischer Aspekte in der Entwicklung der Forschungsfelder der “Cyberanthropologie” und der “Digitalen Anthropologie”. Kommentare und/oder Anmerkungen sind dezidiert erwünscht.
Die einzelnen Blogeinträge bauen, leicht verändert, auf einen Text, der 2019 im Sammelband Ritualisierung – Meditatisierung – Performance publiziert wurde:
Budka, P. (2019). Von der Cyber Anthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie. Über die Rolle der Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie im Verstehen soziotechnischer Lebenswelten. In M. Luger, F. Graf & P. Budka (Eds.), Ritualisierung – Mediatisierung – Performance (pp. 163-188). Göttingen: V&R Unipress/Vienna University Press. https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737005142.163

Cyberanthropologie 2/2

Im deutschen Sprachraum war Manfred Kremser einer der ersten Kultur- und Sozialanthropologen, der sich ausführlich mit neuen digitalen Technologien und deren Bedeutung für Mensch, Gesellschaft und Kultur auseinander setzte.1 Ab 1996 bot er Lehrveranstaltungen zu ausgewählten cyberanthropologischen Themen am Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie (vormals Völkerkunde) der Universität Wien an. Dabei verstand er es geschickt, das neue Forschungsfeld der Cyberanthropologie mit Frage- und Problemstellungen zu verbinden, mit denen er sich bereits zuvor intensiv auseinander gesetzt hatte, besonders im Bereich der afrikanischen und afro-karibischen Religionen. So untersuchte Kremser beispielsweise, wie der soziokulturelle Raum des Cyberspace “Afrikanische Traditionelle Religionen” und “Afrikanische Diaspora Religionen” um eine zusätzliche Dimension, die Kremser (2003: 447) als “Afrikanische Digitale Diaspora Religionen” bezeichnet, erweitert.2 Historisch betrachtet, wurden afrikanische Religionen und deren Traditionen in der Diaspora laufend transformiert. Die “Afrikanische Digitale Diaspora” transformiert nun wiederum das bereits Transformierte auf neue Art und Weise (Kremser 2001a: 111). Diese “Cyber-Transformationen” implizieren einen fundamentalen Wandel von traditionellen und diasporischen Religionen (Kremser 2003: 448). Indigene religiöse Konzepte und Praktiken verlassen ihr lokales Territorium und werden durch global vernetzte digitale Technologien für viele Menschen weltweit verfügbar. Im Zuge dieses Globalisierungsprozesses werden afrikanische Kosmologien und Ritualsysteme in neue Formen von “Kultur” transformiert, an der ein Publikum global teilhaben kann (ebd.).

In seiner Forschung arbeitete Kremser (z.B. 2001a, 2001b, 2003) die Besonderheiten dieser Transformationsprozesse heraus. Die Genese digitaler afrikanischer Diaspora-Religionen ermöglicht es beispielsweise, die Ähnlichkeiten zwischen afrikanischer Spiritualität und grundlegenden Prinzipien des Cyberspace zu erkennen. So spielen etwa binäre Codesysteme sowohl in der Computertechnik als auch bei Ifá-Orakel in der Religion der Yoruba (vor allem im westlichen Nigeria) eine entscheidende Rolle (Kremser 2001b; siehe auch Eglash 1999: 86ff.; Eglash/Bleecker 2001: 357ff.). Digitale afrikanische Religionen bilden neue Kontexte für etablierte Konzepte und Praktiken und ermöglichen so deren Neuinterpretation und das Erleben neuer religiöser Dimensionen. Viele religiöse PraktikerInnen sind, nach Kremser (1998: 141ff.), nun in unterschiedlichen sozialen Feldern engagiert: etwa als PriesterInnen in lokalen Gemeinschaften, als LehrerInnen und spirituelle FührerInnen bei internationalen Workshops und Diaspora-Treffen sowie als ComputerspezialistInnen und religiöse UnternehmerInnen in globalen Online-Gemeinschaften der digitalen Diaspora. Um diese Felder auf methodischer Ebene zu berücksichtigen, schlägt Kremser (ebd.: 135ff.) vor, das “klassische” Konzept ethnographischer Feldforschung zur “Felder-Forschung” zu erweitern, in der sich EthnographInnen mit unterschiedlichen soziokulturellen Feldern befassen, die sich auch in den digitalen Raum erstrecken, sich überlappen und ergänzen (siehe auch Marcus 1998).

Continue reading Blog Post Series: Von der Cyberanthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie – Teil 4

Blog Post Series: Von der Cyberanthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie – Teil 4

Blog Post Series: Von der Cyberanthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie – Teil 4 published on No Comments on Blog Post Series: Von der Cyberanthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie – Teil 4

Diese Serie von Blogeinträgen beschreibt die Relevanz kultur- und sozialanthropologischer Zugänge in der Untersuchung digitaler Technik und Technologien, dargestellt anhand wissenschaftstheoretischer Aspekte in der Entwicklung der Forschungsfelder der “Cyberanthropologie” und der “Digitalen Anthropologie”. Kommentare und/oder Anmerkungen sind dezidiert erwünscht.
Die einzelnen Blogeinträge bauen, leicht verändert, auf einen Text, der 2019 im Sammelband Ritualisierung – Meditatisierung – Performance publiziert wurde:
Budka, P. (2019). Von der Cyber Anthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie. Über die Rolle der Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie im Verstehen soziotechnischer Lebenswelten. In M. Luger, F. Graf & P. Budka (Eds.), Ritualisierung – Mediatisierung – Performance (pp. 163-188). Göttingen: V&R Unipress/Vienna University Press. https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737005142.163

Cyberanthropologie 1/2

Internet Café, Toronto, Canada. Photo by Philipp Budka

Die Bezeichnung “Cyberanthropologie” lehnt sich an Wortschöpfungen wie “Cyberspace”, “Cyberkultur” und “Cyberpunk” an, die vor allem der Science-Fiction-Literatur und damit der Populärkultur entstammen (Knorr 2011; Tomas 1991). Der Begriff “Cyberspace” beispielsweise wurde das erste Mal vom Science-Fiction-Autor William Gibson in der Kurzgeschichte Burning Chrome (1982) verwendet und beschreibt einen computergenerierten Raum kollektiver Halluzination (siehe auch Gibson 1984). Das Präfix “Cyber” hat eine längere Geschichte und wurde durch den Mathematiker Norbert Wiener Ende der 1940er Jahre popularisiert. Er verwendete den Begriff “Kybernetik” (“Cybernetics”), um einen interdisziplinären Wissenschaftskomplex zu beschreiben, der sich mit Steuerung und Regelung in informationellen, mechanischen oder natürlichen Systemen befasst (Wiener 1948). In ihrer grundlegenden Form versteht Wiener Kybernetik als eine Theorie von Informationen, Signalen oder Nachrichten, die das Ziel verfolgt, ein Verfahren zur Informationsgenerierung und -organisation zu entwickeln, um etwa Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation zu ermöglichen (Axel 2006: 359; siehe auch Knorr 2011: 31ff.; Matzker 1998: 157ff.).

Die Arbeit der Kybernetiker trug maßgeblich dazu bei, dass Themen wie Kommunikation sowie soziotechnische Beziehungen und Systeme in den Mittelpunkt anthropologischer Projekte rückten (z. B. Axel 2006; Boyer 2010). Gregory Bateson (2000) beispielsweise war besonders an den kommunikativen Beziehungen zwischen Organismen – menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen – und deren Umwelt interessiert. Kybernetik, so hoffte er, könnte entscheidend zum Verständnis komplexer Systeme, von Mensch-Nicht-Mensch-Interaktionen und letztlich auch des menschlichen Geistes selbst beitragen. Während die Kybernetik als interdisziplinäres Projekt in den 1980er Jahren an Schwung verlor, wurde die Suche nach Antworten auf komplexe Problemstellungen in Zusammenhang mit zunehmend technologisierten Systemen sowie Mensch-Nicht-Mensch-Kommunikation und -Interaktion in der Anthropologie fortgesetzt. Mitte der 1990er Jahre ließen sich drei größere cyberanthropologische Forschungsprojekte identifizieren, die einerseits miteinander verknüpft waren, andererseits ihren Fokus aber auf unterschiedliche Phänomenbereiche legten (Escobar 1994: 215ff.):

Continue reading Blog Post Series: Von der Cyberanthropologie zur Digitalen Anthropologie – Teil 4

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