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- Convenors:
-
Kirsten Bell
(King's College London)
Bruce Kapferer (UCL University of Bergen)
Marina Gold (University of Zurich)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 6 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel will address the methodological implications of anthropology in the digital age – an era of radical transformations in the imagination and formation of socio-political realities and potentially the very nature of human being itself.
Long Abstract:
The digital era promises profound changes and disjunctions in the constitution of humanity and the socio-economic and political situations of experience that has no clear parallels. Even the changes and consequences of the printing press (documented by Elizabeth Eisenstein and numerous others) are dwarfed by the digital, which is reaching into the realities of almost everywhere in the globe in a way far more expansive than did the effects of print.
In this panel, we begin to grapple with the implications of this transformation, which, we suggest, represents nothing less than the total restructuring (and reimaginationing) of the nature of sociality and, indeed, human being itself. Our goal is to examine such processes (accelerated under conditions of covid) and their impact on all aspects of life at all levels of scale – from political and economic orders, to the intimate and mundane (the everyday life of the digital).
The changes that are imagined, and even now being realized, raise issues of a thoroughly anthropological nature that may question hitherto prevailing assumptions. By centring the digital as a vital point of anthropological questioning, we explore its methodological significance for anthropology at this significant moment in history.
We aim for a mix of participants drawn from diverse geographic locations addressing critical areas of the digitalizing process including:
• the reimagination of interpersonal everyday life
• the restructuring of political/economic orders
• new dynamics of control and freedom
• reconfigurations of humanity and identity
• the social contradictions of digital realities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 6 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Do digitally and A1 mediated social realities demand anthropological and sociological reconceptualization?Human social being is being remastered, is evolving in innovative ways, with major methodological implications for established anthropological conceptual and descriptive understanding.
Paper long abstract:
The presentation will concentrate on digital platforms in gaming, commerce, and particularly in social communication and other media where the effort is to create the semblance of non-digitally mediated social interaction or socially based effects. Initial attention will be on a variety of sociological/anthropological perspectives such as symbolic interactionist, social phenomenological, and institutionalist/structuralist perspectives. The interactionist work of Erving Goffman will provide one outstanding example. Current algorithim platforms are creating forms of sociality with institutional effect that are radically distinct from those influenced by what could be described as conceptually conventional and traditional anthropological approaches. AI directed information gathering involves a vast range of socio-behavioural information to be used for commercial purposes and often for socio-political control and surveillance. Interactional, orientational, emotional, personal, biological etc. data of all kinds is continuously stored. This is engaged to multiple purposes. Of specific focus in the presentation are the dialectical processes whereby such information participates in dialectical feedback loops mediated by digital platforms between what might be called lived actualities and their machinic organization into meaningful or sensible frames that structure or become in turn orientational and structuring of lived existence. The digital platforms, of course, are not ideologically free and in situations where they achieve dominance over social and political processes are major agencies in the constructions of social and political life. The presentation will address this aspect. But the major concern will be with the aspects of the radical innovative conceptual constructions of lived realities that are taking place that throw into serious question many conventional anthropological/sociological conceptualizations.
Part of the presentation will be concerned with the society of the image that is being mediated into existence by Ai technology and the dynamic of whereby the virtual becomes the real and vice versa. The political and social effects of this will be of concern. But an additional matter of interest will be again the problematics for established anthropological understandings.
Altogether the presentation will argue for the radical innovation and new horizons of understanding in the anthropological comprehension of human being that AI and digital technologies portend.
Paper short abstract:
This paper sets out the cultural and social processes by which Western subjects captured by a new mode of digital governance and a new mode of expropriation are being constructed and organized by post-neoliberal corporate states. Examples of these processes are given.
Paper long abstract:
This paper sets out the cultural and social processes by which subjects captured by a new mode of digital governance and a new mode of expropriation are being constructed by the conditions of post-neoliberal corporate state society. The paper first sets out the process by which humans in the West are being increasingly brought into a new subjectivity through the digital technologies they employ, which in turn are employed upon them as digital subjects. The paper sets out the stages through which digital technologies first seduce their subjects, then re-order their behaviors and affects into new conditions of enslavement. Through this process digital technologies come to expropriate the living qualities of the persons that use these technologies at two levels. First, they transform vital human attributes (e.g., gender, race, movement through space, sexual behavior) into data artifacts; second, they transform these artifacts into commodities of data assemblies that are employed by corporations and states to predict and govern the collectives of persons from whom these data have been extracted. Finally, for specific collectivities marked by their racial and class specificities, these technologies allow states and corporations to engage in the violent expropriation of the attributes (e.g. labor, property) of the persons who make up these collectivities.
Paper short abstract:
Youtube videos narrating Xinjiang abound. The region is being re-created online in polarised utopian and dystopian versions respectively. In these digital worlds, the political subjectivities of thousands of diaspora Uyghurs are being shaped. This paper tracks this dynamic between screen and person.
Paper long abstract:
The number of Youtube videos on Xinjiang abound. Young, Uyghur, female, political influencer Anniguli alone has uploaded more than 800 since 2018 in support of PRC policies. Uyghur activists in the US and Turkey have uploaded a corresponding number harshly criticising the same politics. The picture they draw of Xinjiang could not be more different: a utopia and dystopia respectively. Meanwhile, all reactions to these videos – comments, likes, reposts or the choice not to comment, like or repost – are monitored by the Chinese state on the one hand and the Uyghur diaspora community on the other. All Uyghurs in the diaspora are very aware of this while they follow or are active on social media as this is only place to keep contact with and gain information about their homeland. Through the dynamic of seeing and being seen, of reading and acting they become drawn deeper and deeper into these digital realities. This decidedly shapes their speech and action on- and off-line. Based on on- and off-line fieldwork, this paper tracks two extreme sides of the digital construction of Xinjiang and the political subjectivities they help create within the Uyghur diaspora in Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Germany and Sweden.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork into people’s narratives, images, hopes, and fears about Artificial intelligence, this paper will lay out some of the historical precedents, risks, and opportunities for future anthropological research in the Metaverse and beyond.
Paper long abstract:
Large corporations such as Facebook/Meta and Microsoft have recently announced their desire to shape and control the impact of the ‘Metaverse’ – a networked, persistent online 3-D virtual environment – and the next iterations of the Internet, or ‘Web3.0’. Such virtual spaces will increasingly rely on ‘ambient intelligence’: “digital environments that are responsive and aware of a user’s needs” through AI agents including personified assistants or ‘non-player characters’. Anthropologists wishing to follow communities and individuals into these new spaces will encounter a blurring of the human and the non-human other. What tools do we already have as anthropologists to conceptualise these interactions, and what are the dangers involved in accepting the obfuscation of the human in the virtual domain? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork into people’s narratives, images, hopes, and fears about Artificial intelligence, this paper will lay out some of the historical precedents, risks, and opportunities for future anthropological research in the Metaverse and beyond.