Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Daniel Miller
(University College London (UCL))
Shireen Walton (University College London)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Hannah Knox
(University College London)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- S110 - Alumni Lecture Theatre
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 12 April, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Digital technologies are a commonly named culprit for our contemporary unwell world. But it is generally only anthropologists who are present at the point where we can assess such consequences for people in their everyday lives. This panel presents an ethnographic assessment of those consequences.
Long Abstract:
One of the most commonly named culprits for our contemporary unwell world are new digital technologies, whether this is overheating or surveillance or replacing fundamental relationships. These accusations range from the impact on the welfare of workers within the digital industry such as `ghost’ workers to the consequences of social media for families and politics. Working 24/7 from home may have consequences for mental health, but also on physical health through lack of exercise.
Consequence can only be established through direct observation of people in their everyday lives and the only discipline committed to being present at the point of consequence is ethnographic anthropology. Anticipated papers for this panel include ethnographic work on major IT corporations, people engaged in e-commerce, studies of the consequences of surveillance and self-tracking apps, and digital platforms that sustain imagined worlds through gaming, all of which use traditional holistic contextualisation to examine the consequences of digital technologies as a ubiquitous part of everyday life. These practices trace changes in practices of kinship, friendship, and other relationships. This is a particularly rich time to make such assessments. Two years of Covid have accelerated our dependence upon online and other digital technologies, and bequeathed us the experiences of more work from home, lock-down, zoom worlds etc. These technologies have likely created a new self-consciousness and active appraisal of the consequences of digital technologies for humans across the world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 April, 2023, -Emmi Holm (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on recent fieldwork in Ghana and Finland, this paper explores how fashion designers who target global audiences navigated a coercive algorithmic system during the COVID-19 pandemic and balanced with the dissonance of selling sustainable fashion on platforms imbued with capitalist logic.
Paper long abstract:
Posting on social media, especially on Instagram and TikTok, has become an integral part of a sustainable fashion industry and introduced added layers of work to design, manufacturing, and marketing. In this paper, based on fieldwork conducted in Ghana, Finland and digitally on social media during the pandemic, I ask how fashion designers whose livelihoods are dependent on a social media presence deal with the unpredictable, even mystical nature of the algorithmic system that no one except the platforms themselves seem to fully understand. Navigating this system brought about concerns of account hijackings, scams, shadowbans, and public shaming that some labeled as algorithmic retribution. Furthermore, as the notion of sustainability was understood by their global audiences as an indication of morally produced clothing, the bid for morality seemingly extended to the designers as well. In the Finnish context this resulted in fears of not “being good enough”, while in Ghana, the designers enjoyed a rise in conscious shoppers looking for Black owned businesses in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. I untangle the ambiguous feelings stemming from the algorithmic fabric of the digital market and its logic that at times is restrictive, and at times supportive, and show how in order to please both the audiences and the algorithms, designers utilized digital tropes signaling intimacy and authenticity. Ultimately, I discuss how the need to be digitally present and authentically available results in a continuous evaluation of not only the posted content but of the ethical self as well.
Shireen Walton (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores issues relating to digital social participation in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan. The concept of ‘social availability’ is employed to discuss how people modulate care labour and availability to/for others, with various implications for social life, health, and wellbeing.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I discuss digital social participation and care in Milan, based on 16 months of ethnographic research studying ageing, health, and smartphones in an inner-city neighbourhood. The paper refers to the period before, and during the early months of Covid-19, examining how neighbourhood residents – older adults and migrants from a range of backgrounds – live, communicate, and care for each other within families, other groups, and neighbourhood collectives.
At the core of the paper lies the concept of 'social availability' (Walton 2021), which seeks to describe how people modulate care labour and ‘availability’ to others via a range of digital practices, often via smartphones and social media. The concept relates to people’s sense of care duties and social responsibilities in the wider context of their own health, wellbeing and life; off- and online, locally, as well as transnationally. These local informal care networks are then examined against wider initiatives from local NGOs, the church, and the state (Giordano 2014); such as projects seen during the pandemic aimed at supporting citizens through ‘digital solidarity’ packages, for example, that offered a range of digital services such as free online newspapers, faster internet, and access to e-learning platforms for households. These examples will be discussed to tease out various tensions seen in digital/care infrastructures across the city and beyond. Conclusions reflect on the ongoing vicissitudes of digital daily life and wellbeing in this setting, concerning relational obligations, care duties, and health, between the bliss and burdens of social life.
Aivita Putnina (University of Latvia)
Paper short abstract:
The paper addresses the impacts of digitalization at later age. While technologies seem to provide cost-efficient services, it also creates gaps which are mended by solidarity of family and community networks thus becoming a crucial factor for bridging between technology and care.
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores Latvian older population living at the intersection of digital transformation of space and services and age-related needs. One of the consequences of COVID era was a rapid digitalization and centralization of public services, coupled with the EU-wide financial investment in digital transformation. Based on national policy review and participatory research in two locations, I argue that digitalization has influenced not only life opportunities for older generation but has contributed to the very perception of older age as digitally amendable and thus potentially productive period of life. Technologies and remote modes of access become the main means and tools for organizing public life and constructing policies, often disregarding real life experiences and needs of older people as well as likening ageing processes in people with those in technology, knowledge, and infrastructure. Data obtained with the help of our older co-researchers show how they and interlocutors adapt to the changing environment, using both mutual care networks and technologies to mend the gaps in availability of services and in their abilities to use the new digital technologies. Thus, the success of digital transformation paradoxically depends upon informal social solidarity and care networks in the community, while at the formal level efficiency of public services is achieved by the very replacement of formal social networks with digital technologies.
Haichao Wang (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
Social e-commerce demonstrates how economic values and inalienable values might be deployed simultaneously to form a new mode of sociality. The values employed ini legitimising WeChat business among Han Chinese and Hui Muslims are diverse, responding to gender and religious differences.
Paper long abstract:
Social e-commerce or WeChat business, is practiced by tens of millions in contemporary China. Over 90% are females with social and economic disadvantages. This mode of business initially starts from their relational networks lof kinship and friendship, and expands through the expectation of making friends with a wider customer base. It forms a 'sisters' companionship', securing other kinds of instrumental utility such as potential financial and social support. Meanwhile, Hui Muslim traders extend pre-existing offline family business through WeChat to demonstrate their adoption of digital technology, and to counter the social stigma of being 'less-advanced' and 'backwards' that is found in public discourse. WeChat business practiced by Han females and Hui Muslim traders potentially reprises the classic anthropological debate concerning the contradictory nature of economic values and human intimacies. My evidence suggests that social e-commerce forms new a sociality equally incorporating both inalienable and economic values . There are additional ways in which WeChat business has been used as a dynamic intervention within what might be regarded as conflicting value systems. For example,. Among female Han practitioners, an imagination and performing of the 'modern independent female' has been incorporating into pre-existed values associated with being a normative daughter, wife and mother. At the same time a considerable number of Muslim females are indifferent to such claims. Instead Muslim traders believe that doing WeChat business, as a sign of adapting China's digital trend, can be regarded as religiously meritorious.
Kellynn Wee (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses a study of Dungeons & Dragons to examine a world made by players in Singapore that recuperates an experience of attending school. Through practices that traverse online and offline modalities, players recover an unwell world through play by collectively deciding what should be real.
Paper long abstract:
Everyday realities are made and remade through constant effortful practices of relation and creativity. A study of virtual worlds created online through play allow for a meta-examination of how we make things "real"—a topic that has interested anthropologists for many years. This paper uses a study of tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons to examine a world made by players in Singapore that recuperates an experience of attending school as a teenager and young adult. Created in part through embodied role-playing practices such as narrating, speaking, and witnessing each other play, but also in part through a shared Discord server where realities are elaborated upon, proposed, or denied, the world made collectively is a complicated assemblage of online and offline modalities. Objects can be conjured in speech, elevated by music, transported to virtuality by art, and then made material and relational by gifts. While Singaporean schools have come under fire for the intense pressures they place on students to excel, the discriminatory treatment of queer and transgender students and recurrent cases of sexual harassment and assault, magical school in Dungeons & Dragons is one where queerness is accepted, the giddiness of romantic and platonic relationships amplified, and rites of passage made triumphant. This recovery of an unwell world is made possible by a mixture of creative labour, multiple scales of canonicity and fan practices created on- and offline, and shape a collective decision of what should be real.
Polly Macpherson (University of Plymouth)
Paper short abstract:
How can digital coding, fabrication and 3d clay printing processes be used in ‘partnership’ with a ‘non-human’ to co-create new data objects generating unique interpretations of wellbeing, renewal & repair?
Paper long abstract:
This paper describes a practice-based investigation into a research collaboration with a particular digital technology (*ceramic 3D digital printing) and how it has been used to create 'new' data objects that are centred around damage, renewal & transformation.
As a visual cartographer and object maker this work emerges from a *South West Creative Technology Network Automation Fellowship (* Research England CCF, 2020) which focused on enhancing ideas and enquiries around the theme of broken lines and regeneration. In many cases, objects can be a vital source for human well-being; these can include artefacts with historical happy memories or plants which boost and encourage positive thoughts of evolution and lifecycle. Whilst artefacts play a key role in how we sense and make sense of the relationships between ourselves and our non-human environments there is much to be explored when ‘designing’ new ‘things’ for the purpose of understanding disruption and rebuild.
The presentation will include describing a new working partnership with a ‘non-human’ and the ‘designing’ and ‘co-creating’ of objects to preserve, re/generate and nourish our affective, sensory and conceptual relationships with artefacts in order to embrace perceived understandings of damage, disruption and repair.
Key words:
Symbols and metaphors, collaboration, coding, digital fabrication, data, 3D ceramic printing, porcelain objects, kintsugi, damage, disruption, repair and new interpretations.
References:
* Ceramic 3D digital printing - www.3dwasp.com/en/ceramic-3d-printing-wasp-clay
* SWCTN - https://www.swctn.org.uk
* Research England CCF - https://www.ukri.org/councils/research-england/
* Polly Macpherson - www.pollymacpherson.com/creative-practice
- www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/polly-macpherson
Katharina Graf (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Paper short abstract:
This paper describes how domestic food work has been digitalising in Germany thanks to smartphones and kitchen robots. It argues that digital technologies and the access to knowledge online enable new forms of wellbeing. Yet, because it is largely women who use them, this potential is invisible.
Paper long abstract:
Even if smart fridges or drone delivered food are still more futurist visions than everyday reality in most households in Germany, kitchens are long since smart. Smartphones, tablets and laptops are routinely involved in all kinds of domestic food work across the world, from ordering ingredients or entire meals to searching for a recipe, sharing eating experiences or disposing of leftovers via app. Food has emerged as one of the major topics online and on social media. Much more quietly has been the recent success of digital kitchen robots, especially the internet enabled Thermomix of the German firm Vorwerk (elsewhere in continental Europe known as Bimby). With its abilities to, for example, weigh, chop, cook, ferment or steam food but also manage shopping lists, suggest one from among thousands of specially coded recipes and guide through the cooking process, it is transforming domestic cooking in Germany (and also in Italy, France, Portugal or Poland) from the ground up. The first part of this paper describes how domestic food work has been digitalising in Germany thanks to smartphones and the Thermomix, based on ethnographic research among twenty single and family households in Germany since January 2022. The second part argues that digital technologies and the limitless access to knowledge and experience online enable entirely new forms of personal and family wellbeing. Yet, because it is largely women who harness these digital technologies in everyday life, this potential has been invisible, even ignored in the wider public.
Catherine O'Brien (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
During the pandemic potters in Britain participated in online spaces and communities to learn skills, share work, and meet others. Focusing on identity, belonging and social connectedness, I argue that their participation in online communities was integral to the wellbeing impact of pottery making.
Paper long abstract:
From the Arts and Crafts Movement in mid-nineteenth century Britain, through subsequent craft revivals up until today, craft has been positioned ideologically in opposition to mass production, modernity, and digital technologies. However, people increasingly learn, share, produce, and consume crafts through engagements online. This paper discusses the relationship between pottery making, eudemonic wellbeing, and social media in the context of my digital ethnographic research with British potters during the Covid-19 pandemic. When physical access to spaces such as studios was limited, these potters turned to social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube to learn new skills and connect with other potters from within their homes. This paper addresses the dissonance between how many of my participants felt that pottery offered them an escape from their phones, while simultaneously much of their enjoyment of pottery came from their participation in these online spaces. I attend specifically to identity, belonging, and social connectedness, discussing how participants constructed their individual identity in relation to positive self-image and a sense of worth, and how this sat in respect to identifying as part of a wider community of others with shared interests, fostering a sense of belonging and connectedness. Importantly, these digital engagements also had negative eudemonic impacts, particularly concerning the stresses and pressures of operating small businesses on Instagram, cultivating a particular image of self, or ‘brand’, and the projection of authenticity.
Xiaolin Li (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores period-tracking apps in China, with a focus on the concept of the normative co-constructed by local medical practice, the design of the apps, and the consumption of the apps, to demonstrate how the female body is normalized, disciplined, and reimagined with the digital.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores a popular form of self-tracking in contemporary China: period-tracking apps which are normally used to track menstruation, fertility, and gynecological health. Through the discussion of local medical concepts and practices, the production and design of the apps, and the consumption and daily usage of the apps by their users, this paper will specifically focus on the theoretical concept of normativity in anthropology, exploring how the female body is normalized, disciplined, and reimagined in the practice of digital period-tracking.
This paper will demonstrate two different types of normativity in period-tracking: the first is the normativity constructed by the medical discourse and medical practice as well as the period-tracking company, and the second is the sense of normativity judged and decided by individuals of various age groups, between which there is a potential gap. More specifically, I will discuss how the concept of normativity is respectively constructed in the clinical setting and medical practice, in the product design of the company using big data, algorithms, and quantification, as well as in the daily use of the app which demonstrates users' agency in understanding irregularity, normal menstruation, and their personalized menstruation data. Based on the aforementioned discussion, this paper will also point out the social consequence of self-tracking technologies in constructing a normative and disciplined female body.
Alice Riddell (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
Surveillance is a sickness but also a form of care. Through an ethnographic analysis of the live crime-tracking app Citizen, this paper will examine the simultaneous pejorative and productive consequences of digital community surveillance in gentrifying neighbourhoods in Brooklyn.
Paper long abstract:
Citizen is a live crime and safety tracking app in New York City that uses AI to monitor police scanners for incidences that are relevant to “public safety”, whilst also utilizing user-recorded footage, as users near a crime, fire or accident, are encouraged to ‘go live’ and film unfolding events. Users comment, submit additional information and post expressive emojis as incidences unravel. In sharing information across a digital network, Citizen functions as both a form of social media and a peer-to-peer surveillance app. Through this lens, my ethnographic research investigates the impact of the digitization of crime and how this affects community relationships in increasingly gentrified neighbourhoods in Brooklyn.
Within the contemporary unwell world, surveillance technologies are often positioned as an omniscient and malevolent source of sickness, and not without cause. In the case of Citizen, in which surveillance is lateral and often racialized, fears are stoked about one’s community, bringing into question who does and doesn’t belong and, as such, bringing certain parts of the community together while further marginalizing others. However, digital technologies are inherently ambivalent and Citizen is no exception. My ethnographic research also uncovered innovative and unintended uses of Citizen, as a source of social inclusion and protest mobilization. This paper will address these tensions by exploring the delicate balance between care and surveillance, and the way in which anthropological enquiry is uniquely placed to unravel and examine such a relationship in the context of gentrifying neighbourhoods in Brooklyn.
Daniel Miller (University College London (UCL))
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents three successive attempts to develop health interventions based on the ASSA project on smartphones and ageing. One on menopause failed. One on social prescribing that might yet succeed. Finally, an intervention on hypertension in Trinidad is showing positive results.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores several attempts to take the results of the ASSA project on the anthropology of smartphones and smart ageing and employ these for the direct benefit of people’s welfare through developing an anthropological alternative to conventional mHealth that we call - Smart From Below. An initial summary will be made of multiple such interventions before focusing on three I was personally involved in. The first example was an attempt with Pauline Garvey to use research on menopause to improve people’s knowledge and discussion of this process. I will discuss why this is needed and why our attempt to develop this failed. With the key issue becoming one of envisaged uptake. The second proposed intervention, also with Pauline Garvey, was the development of two Social Prescribing initiatives comprising digital compilations of social activities within a specific location. Activities that could be `prescribed’ as alternatives to the prescribing of medical interventions, for the treatment of conditions such as depression. I will explore why this has (so far) failed but might yet succeed. The third attempt was the development in collaboration with Sheba Mohammid of a strategy to lower hypertension in Trinidad and Tobago. In this case, the emphasis will be on the positive outcomes. The first intervention based on Facebook was more successful than envisaged and we are optimistic about a second intervention based on a game that we have jointly created for downloading to smartphones, whose results should be known by the time of the conference.
Martin Webb (Goldsmiths, University of London) Riad Azam (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology) Farhat Salim (Jawaharlal Nehru University , New Delhi)
Paper short abstract:
Our paper explores the use of selfies and other images in the everyday organization of accountability, work/time discipline and networks of visibility in projects and services delivered by remote workers operating in the margins of the 'hybrid' state in Delhi, India.
Paper long abstract:
In India the taking of "selfies" as a means of checking if workers or school children are present is becoming increasingly prevalent. Facial recognition software is used to log pupils into classrooms. Corporations offering "at home services" via digital platforms use selfies to confirm the identity of operatives. Workers in community facing roles, often working remotely in the margins of the neoliberal state, circulate selfies and other images as evidence of presence and tasks completed via WhatsApp groups set up by project managers. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in Delhi in 2021 this paper explores the everyday production of networks of visibility within projects by employers and workers, and the informal repurposing as organizational tools and 'transparency devices' of messaging and social media apps designed to facilitate participatory digital cultures of pleasure, leisure and self-making. By paying attention to these practices we begin to develop a grounded view of the ways in which technology, media, and image making practices play a key role in the everyday organization of projects and services and are becoming woven into regimes of transparency, accountability and work/time discipline.