Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic interviews with seasoned far-right online activists, who use extreme speech targeting "non-Western" refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, the paper argues that a neo-nationalism-neo-racism narrative drove people into extreme speech and not the new digital technology per se.

Paper long abstract:

In digital and media anthropology, there is much talk about shifts, transformations, turns, and accelerated change brought about by digital media technologies - and rightly so. But what does it really mean from the perspective of persons who frequently write pieces for the traditional news as well as for social media platforms? More specifically, this paper focus on far right-wing activists, who use extreme speech targeting so-called "non-Western" refugees, migrants and asylum seekers. Through an analysis of ethnographic interviews with these activists whose writings and engagements extend beyond social media platforms such as Facebook, Tweeter, Instagram and others, I will argue that a neo-nationalism - neo-racism narrative is what leads people into activism and not the new technology per se. At the same time, I will argue that while anyone can access and check information anytime, the community building relies on blurred boundaries between fact and fiction and little critical assessment of sources or opposing views. In short, the community of the liked-minded relies more on ritual opposition than anything else.

Paper short abstract:

Examining key features of global digital media, this presentation argues that online media culture should be seen as a context for right-wing extreme speech, and not merely as a channel for the discourse produced outside of it.

Paper long abstract:

Online extreme speech aimed at vulnerable communities is a crucial element in the recent rise of right-wing politics across the world, as it both reflects and provides the means for exclusionist nationalism and populist sentiments to become acceptable, normal and enjoyable. While resentment against global migration and neoliberal consensus is recognized as a key driver for right-wing populism in the global North, beneficiaries of globalization and economic growth are some of the key actors of online nationalism in countries like India, and in China, bottom up nationalism has a complex relation with state control but with growing reliance on online resources. It then raises the question on the mediation of global digital cultures beyond the diverse political-economic factors, and the need for critiquing new media as a sociotechnological dynamic inflected by the market that provides the resources, formats, and cultures of use to normalize online vitriol. Examining anonymity, gamification, fun, data mining, and generation of continuous mass feedback as new media features central to online vitriol, the presentation argues that online media culture should be seen as a context in itself, and not merely as a channel for the discourse produced outside of it.

Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates the power of pairing data science and ethnography, which makes legible how Trump and Brexit broadcast news coverage and its social media ecology constitutes a battleground for the state's monopoly over white masculine domination.

Paper long abstract:

While media anthropologists have struggled with the scale and multimodality of news, the populist moments of Trump and Brexit have dictated the need for new approaches to the anthropology of journalism. This paper combines machine learning and ethnographic methods to map news coverage and its social life in network(ed) society. I argue that TV coverage of Trump and Brexit by a range of "mainstream" and "fringe" news marks a battlefield where political parties struggle over defining the relationship between masculinity and nationalism.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims at re-thinking the concept of human agency to recognize the role that digital technologies play in the fulfillment of women's desires within patriarchal societies. The paper integrates two different scholarly traditions, the anthropology of the Middle East and digital anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims at re-thinking the concept of human agency to recognize the role that digital technologies play in the fulfillment of women's desires within patriarchal societies. The paper integrates two different scholarly traditions, the anthropology of the Middle East, which has extensively elaborated on women's agency, and digital anthropology, which has instead called the agency of subjects and objects into questions. It draws from a long-term ethnographic research on uses and consequences of social media on people's everyday life in Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey. On social media, young women have created a heterotopic space (Foucault 1967; 1984) where they can fulfill wishes and desires that cannot be realized offline. Social media have become the place where they can meet friends and start new social relationships outside the control of family and neighborhood. Interactions on online private and semi-private spaces are ruled by social norms that are different from those regulating social life offline. A research participant noted, "Facebook in Mardin is used to break down barriers!" Yet, on the other hand, enactments of desires enabled by social media are socially legitimate because are hidden or private. The paper shows that agency-structure relationship is not a zero-sum game and that the enactment of agency does not lead to social change. The paper rather aims at developing further reflections on women's agency in digitally mediated worlds.

Paper short abstract:

My paper explores gendered mobile phone use in rural India. Based on long-term fieldwork (2005-2013), I argue that the role of new media in social change depends on how the emerging media-saturated contexts of social interaction and communication relate to pre-existing contexts and social changes.

Paper long abstract:

My paper contributes to the understanding of gender, mediation and social change by exploring mobile phone use in rural India. Based on long-term fieldwork (2005-2013) in rural West Bengal, I provide a nuanced picture of the contested nature of kinship and gender. I argue that the role of new media in social change depends on how the emerging media-saturated contexts of social interaction and communication relate to pre-existing contexts and social changes. By enabling new contexts for speech, phones create possibilities to voice critical ideas, which can challenge the power structure in the household. Both kinship relationships and women's rights discourses have encouraged and motivated mobile phone use, which, in turn, has helped transform relationships. Women's increasing access to a mobile phone influences the relationships between men and women, but—more crucially—it influences the kinship code of conduct and kinship hierarchies within families and between kin groups. Phones have helped introduce changes in women's relationships with each other: phones facilitate young wives to challenge their mother-in-law's authority and build closer relationships with their mothers after marriage. Unlike women's lengthy visits to their natal homes, which are regarded as a threat to women's work contribution in her in-law's house, greater communication by phone with one's natal relatives does not undermine their position in their in-laws' house. A woman's ability to use the mobile phone does not only signify her agency but also the position she has been able to carve for herself in her family.

Paper short abstract:

This paper proposal contributes to the exploration of the digital turn in anthropology by showing how combining digital and in-person ethnography can shed light on how young people give meaning to, and negotiate, their gender and sexuality by using social media.

Paper long abstract:

Young people have always searched -and found- ways to hang out with their peers (in streets, malls, clubs, bedrooms), and in doing so constitute their gender and sexual peer cultures. Nowadays, youth´s number one hangout spot is social media. It is here that the magnitude with which they constantly relate to each other is strongly amplified. By posting, liking, sharing and commenting in digital cultures, social media are constantly mediating gendered recognition. To understand these practices, I focus on what various gender enactments (e.g. 'sexy selfies', sex, love and relationship talk, sharing nudes, showing affection and the body) can tell us about the constantly shifting boundaries of femininities and masculinities; how the meaning of gender is inflicted by sexuality and vice versa; and what this does to inter- and cross gender relations.

As a contribution to this panel on the digital turn in anthropology I will however not focus on the results of my research per se. Instead, I will thoroughly scrutinize the research process and show how theoretical insights often stem from methodology. I will use examples of my feminist informed ethnographical account of everyday digital youth cultures in Chile to illustrate this.

Paper short abstract:

A particular potential of digital media is that they afford practices based on the similarity between physical entities and their computer-mediated representations. Using the example of Emojis, the paper elaborates this argument and shows how affordances of digital visualities unfold in practice.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of affordances is widely used in studies of digital media "to account for the ways that technological artefacts or platforms privilege, open up, or constrain particular actions and social practices." (McVeigh-Schultz / Baym 2015) So far, however, there is a lack of theoretical discussions which consider the concept's analytical potential for an analysis of digital media in contrast to non-digital media. By bringing affordance theories together with Tom Boellstorff's proposal of an "indexical theory" (2012) for digital anthropology and Philip Brey's discussion of the "digital" as related to both the "physical" and "virtual" (2015), I introduce a particular approach to the ethnographic study of visual practices enacted through digital media. From this perspective, particular functions of digital media afford virtual practices based on the similarity between actual physical entities (objects, bodies, spaces or processes) and their visual computer-mediated representations. The empirical example to demonstrate this will be the use of emojis in the context of sharing digital pictures made at heritage sites in Berlin. I will draw on the notion of similarity to discuss how, in this case, the "material dimensions of digital visualities" (CfP, point 3) provide particular affordances for virtual practices. Using an emoji means enacting the similarity between a material entity (e.g. a smiling face) and its visual representation (the symbol/icon of a smiling face) in order to do emotion (Scheer 2016). Thus, emojis are a telling example for how affordances of digital visualities unfold in practice.

Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates the importance of digital media technologies for local, non- or semi-professional photographers in Aleppo and their ability to disseminate their work, focusing on the time when the city was under rebel-control.

Paper long abstract:

Images from the war in Syria have been spread extensively across the globe, including by news corporations. However, for several years these corporations have refrained from sending staffed photographers to Syria because of the immense danger and have thus depended on local photographers for visual documentation. These local photographers have developed their skills and networks due to the need for visual documentation and their desire to inform the world about atrocities, aided only by limited training and occasionally equipment provided by international NGOs. This paper builds on anthropological literature on media and conflict and understands digital media as co-constitutive of conflicts (Postill, Budka and Bräuchler forthcoming). The paper is based on interviews with local photographers from Aleppo and NGO workers as well as digital, image-focused ethnography. It interrogates the importance of digital media technologies for local, non- or semi-professional photographers in Aleppo and their ability to disseminate their work, focusing on the time when the city was under rebel-control. When the regime regained control of Aleppo in the end of 2016, photographers had to physically carry harddrives with visual documentation out of the city, highlighting the intersections of political control and (lack of) digital access. That is, in the everyday life of photographers in war, materialities of the digital is pushed to the fore because access to digital infrastructures is dependent on the shifting physical control of the city, proximity to political borders and availability of devices.