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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:
- Thursday 9 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 Thursday 9 June, 2022, -Fartein Nilsen (University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on a pilot study using digital ethnographic methods to study online communities centered around interactions with AI social chatbots. How might such artificial companions be contributing to a reimagining, not only of the social, but also of the human being itself?
Paper long abstract:
Advancements in communications technologies and the proliferation of the Internet has had an enormous impact on the nature of the social. One such impact is that it allows for multiple forms of presence, and of particular interest to this paper is the phenomenon of absent co-presence as mediated through digital devices. In short, it is possible to form and maintain relationships, arguably relationships that people find quite meaningful, without meeting people in physical space. This has arguably been even more cemented with the accelerated digitalization of everyday life seen during the covid pandemic.
Keeping this in mind, this paper draws on a pilot study using digital ethnographic methods to study online communities centered around discussing interactions with AI social chatbots known as Replika. These bots are programmed to present as humanlike, exhibiting personality and appropriate emotions, in their encounters with humans. Recent studies have shown that social chatbots are increasingly successful in forming what are held by users to be meaningful relationships with humans online, and it has become evident that many people greatly enjoy the company that artificial companions might provide.
Paying specific attention to how conceptions of personhood might be affected by interaction with humanlike machines, this paper ultimately asks the questions: How might these artificial companions be contributing to a reimagining, not only of the social, but also of the human being itself? What effect might social robots have on our imaginaries of the posthuman, and are we already living in a posthuman future?
Kirsten Bell (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
Virality is a core metaphor for how we have collectively imagined the processes of digitalization. In this paper I consider what it means to conceptualise human sociality in terms of virality, focusing on the interchanges between the AIDS pandemic, processes of digitalization, and covid itself.
Paper long abstract:
If a single metaphor might be used to capture the processes of digitalization – and how we have collectively imagined them – it is surely virality. To quote virologist John Coffin, ‘a virus is simply a piece of information… but the information is dependent on having a cell to translate that information into the components that then become part of the virus particle that carries the information from one cell to the next’. Translate ‘cell’ to ‘packet switched network’ and you’re describing the structure of the internet itself. But viruses also transmit specific kinds of information that damage their host; what’s more, they are contagious and contaminating – two sibling metaphors that are increasingly invoked to understand the negative social effects of digitalization.
In this paper I want to consider what it means to conceptualise human sociality in terms of virality. My specific interest is the interchanges between the AIDS pandemic, processes of digitalization, and covid itself, which have been ‘meaningfully and messily entangled’ (to quote Cifor and McKinney) from the outset. In so doing, I return to concerns that have long preoccupied anthropologists regarding how conceptions of purity and pollution structure the social.
Ros Williams (University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
Exploring campaigns from racially minoritised cancer patients seeking stem cell donors through analysis of an ethnographic and digital methods study, this paper explores how new digital media–and social media platforms in particular–may (re)constitute the very concept of a racialised community.
Paper long abstract:
This paper takes as its starting point press coverage of a social media campaign to encourage people around the world to register as stem cell donors. Like many similar campaigns, this one focused on a racially minoritised cancer patient in need of, and unable to locate, a genetically matching donor on the stem cell registry. Such coverage generally begins by explaining the (unquestioned) scientific consensus that race determines genetic profiles, before writing that the patient’s mixed-heritage background thus worsens her odds of finding a matching. One article suggests “Biology and culture are both stacked against” the patient, because of her genes, and because mixed-heritage donors are disproportionately few on the registries due to historical disengagement with the biomedical project of donation amongst minoritised groups. The perceived fix? New digital media, that can allow patients such as her to take matters into their own hands, allowing a member of a globally dispersed mixed-heritage ‘community’ to locate others like her, and issue a kind of ethico-racial imperative (Williams 2021) to register as a donor: “Social media”, coverage notes, “can overcome your biological odds”. Supplemented with findings from a ethnographic and digital methods study of racially minoritised cancer patient stem cell appeals, the paper asks: what does all this mean, both for how we understand the notion of a ‘community’–digitised or racialised? What does the ‘democratising’ discourse of new digital media–patients claiming some control over whether they find a matching donor–say about how digital technologies are distributing the work of health equity today?
Irene Marti Gil (Louisiana State University)
Paper short abstract:
The rise of a digital world has brought millennials new ways of satiating the human desire for amassing and displaying capital. Intangible assets in the form of collective and personal experiences are prestige-markers to be collected and curated in modern exhibition cabinets—social media platforms.
Paper long abstract:
The current socio-political and economic circumstances, intimately affected by the exponential development of technology, have impacted millennials' consumerism patterns. Today's globalized mass-consumption trends have paradoxically triggered a postmaterial "experience economy,” leaning toward the increasing appreciation of ephemerality, immediacy, and immateriality. The movement from materialism to postmaterialism has impacted collecting tendencies among the millennial generation, which seem to distance themselves from the long-established accumulation of material culture to approach the gathering of cultural and recreational experiences as status-markers and personhood-definers.
This presentation is intended to expand the traditionally object-based definition of collectionism by adding a new aspect to it —the "intangible collecting." Cultural, recreational, professional, academic, and personal experiences are deliberately gathered with the intention of, not only living through them, but curating and displaying them in the contemporary exhibition cabinets— the social media platforms. These are an ideal stage for displaying social and economic capital in the digital and ephemeral museums of intangible memorabilia. Similar to traditionally tangible collectibles, nonmaterial assets are employed to define the self, add value and prestige, and create social relationships of similarity and otherness. To prove the validity of this new concept and its usefulness in anthropological research, I contextualize the millennial generation to gain understanding about their needs, aspirations, and consumption patterns. Then, I analyze the effects of technology, and particularly of the internet, on the collecting phenomenon. Finally, I shape what "intangible collecting" is by assessing its suitability in the existing collecting theory regarding collectors' drive, modes of collecting, and subject-object relationships.