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Paper short abstract:

How do households and families assign value to digital goods? Streaming services (e.g. Netflix, Spotify) despite their artificial scarcity, come to be valued as the locus of household consumption and kinship reproduction. This paper details ways in which digital value(s), too, are socially shaped.

Paper long abstract:

How do households assign value to digital goods? Economic anthropologists have shown kinship is mediated by consumption practices (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979; Miller, 1987). Consumption is critical to reproducing household values, preferences and commensality, predicated on value being determined through the decision to allocate scarce resources. But what does an anthropological theory of value look like when — as with digital goods —goods are artificially scarce? The household is the locus of sociality and moral reproduction (Sahlins, 1972). Yet households’ consumption of digital goods remains significantly undertheorised, despite their central place in time use and resource allocation.

This paper is based on ten remote ethnographic interviews conducted in mid-2021, conducted with members of households who share streaming service subscriptions in the UK, Australia and India. To resolve conflicts over what to watch and when, household members engage in active practices of negotiation, including technical restrictions on sharing passwords, placation, or reciprocity. Such practices are marked by intra-household power relations (Zelizer 2007). Yet digital goods can also facilitate new forms of expressing kinship values, for instance by allowing parents and adult children to continue to share preferences.

This paper argues for foregrounding the social practices that go into constructing digital value, rather than reifying technical affordances as their source. More broadly, more attention ought to be paid to how values and preferences are socially shaped in an age of algorithmic culture. While household practices may be increasingly digitally mediated, digital consumption practices continue to reflect and embed deeply relational, communal norms.

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Paper short abstract:

Shaped by the architecture of algorithms and machine intelligence, the virtualised kitchen space of a promised togetherness began with enthusiasm but over the extended time of the pandemic grew weary.

Paper long abstract:

In the weariness of social distancing the rupture of the pandemic revealed we are ‘alone together’ (Turkle, S., 2011), however much the video conference platform companies tell us otherwise. The choice of something so sensorial and biologically profound – cooking and eating together – set within the sterile and efficient digital space was like two worlds colliding. And in that collision society’s hidden pandemics of loneliness and vulnerability were observed and talked about. From my auto-ethnographic studies, thematic and diary-style interviews with the chef educators, observations of 50 online cooking group lessons, online food workshops, presentations, illustrations and articles I gained unexpected insights. Because of its visible absence what I extrapolated from the intensity of conducting fieldwork during a pandemic was the need for public facing physical displays of togetherness – such as extra-domestic commensality. And that the tethered-ness of internetworked communities of affinity distort or mask the vitalness of physical togetherness founded upon the mutualised workings of the sensorium—the internalised bank of senses and memory. The transformation of physical and relational activity into the virtual space revealed digital wayfaring; hierarchies of control through software design features; a new digital lexicon; blurredness of time; the tensions of asynchronous interaction; human-machine synthesis and how the physical absence of togetherness impacted on mental health and wellbeing. I intend that the research will show how anthropology can interpret and understand digital society and contribute to mental and social healthcare transformation.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper asserts the replacement of 'art' and 'artist' with 'creation (content)' and 'creator' to be of significant anthropological relevance. Among others, it considers differentiating between deterministic and algorithmic systems, Kant’s notions of 'Spiel (game-toy)' and 'Kunst (art-artifice).'

Paper long abstract:

Modern physics associates consciousness neither with creativity nor with computation, emphasizing instead awareness of one’s relation to the game played by the given agent, while differentiating between deterministic and algorithmic systems (Penrose). Conversely, algorithmic culture (Striphas), from which contemporary modes of social production e.g. the creator and the attention economy arise, makes no such distinction. In ‘the informational space,’ (Bagheri Pour Fallah) from the centralized landscape of AI to the decentralized proposition of blockchains, algorithms are given precedence, albeit in opposing capacities, through computational excellence, over their human counterparts, provisionally granting the latter the freedom to assume the role of the creator, in an implicitly utopian vision of society. The term ‘creator’ here follows neatly the notion of the ‘prosumer’ (Toffler), taking simultaneous cues from relational and participatory art, asserting itself as the sine qua non of both web2 and web3 architectures of the internet as one coalescing into greater society. This paper asserts the replacement of the terms art and artist with creation (content) and creator to be more than a matter of semantics, and of significant anthropological relevance. Kant’s Anthropology locates man’s horizon as one ‘that goes from the ambiguity of the Spiel (game-toy) to the indecision of the Kunst (art-artifice)’ (Foucault). Similarly, in the existential anthropology of Peter Wust, man is in essence ‘the artist’ in the extent that ‘he is conscious of himself.’ To locate man today is therefore a matter linked with his role in the (network) society, as artist—beyond the creator economy.