I really enjoyed having Kimberly come to our class today. I feel like digital ethnography has been talked about very theoretically, making it hard to visualize what the process of digital ethnography, alongside participant observation, is actually like in real life. Having her explain her work with a visual presentation made the concepts we’ve been learning far more concrete.

During her presentation, another dichotomy –  in addition to real vs. virtual, public vs. private, virtual home vs. physical home – showed up again: “offline” and “online.” Consequently, the idea of understanding the definitions of words by looking at the words’ opposite, like we did with virtual and real life, was prevalent again as Kimberly contextualized the “online” lives of her interlocuters by understanding their “offline” lives more in depth. I’m very curious how are able to draw the line between online and offline and how that line changes when we add in  ideas about our public and the private lives. For example, in our “online” lives what is the difference between public and private? Are all our “online” lives always public in the sense that our data is being stored somewhere and can be used to extrapolate some pixelated version of ourselves? That would suggest that the ability to create some representation of ourselves from our online activity would make something public. If so, then what makes a private account on Instagram private: the illusion that we can control who has the right to our representations?

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Jeffrey Himpele says:

November 2, 2020 at 11:28 am

Emily – Very clear description of the labyrinthine logic we might be stuck in! I suggest that the larger question we might ask is not where is the line between online and offline, but what social facts persuade us that such a line exists? One approach would be to take Mitchell’s form of analysis and outline the actual “method of truth and order” that encompasses the domains in which this opposition operates. Another would be to return to Miller and Horst who argue that the gap between them, their opposition, is constitutive of digital humanity. Or, are then saying al something complementary that adds up to a fully anthropological approach that starts with the social? Also, I suggest looking at Rei’s post this week which is more skeptical of that line. Other posts this week also ask questions about how to account for personhood.

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After our discussion on Tuesday in regard to health data I realized that the way in which we, as Americans, experience healthcare is a lot like the breakdown of data. What I mean is that we have created specialty doctors for different body systems, much like the idea of datafied power in the Ruckstein and Schull piece. We start with a general practitioner where an overview of our ailments and symptoms and diagnoses are kept. This is our go-to health provider in times of need, they know the basics of our health. But, once a diagnosis becomes specified, we are referred to a different doctor that concentrates on the area of the diagnosis/ailment. We share more specified data, more symptoms with this doctor, and create a different picture of ourselves in order to better understand who we are as a person. This is much like the way that we portray ourselves through data in the digital age. Each data outlet allows us to explore different areas of who we are.  Yet, health is fluid and a person’s physical state is everchanging so that how they are at one moment could be drastically different from the next. I started writing this post and I felt fine but now as I write this sentence my vision is blurring and I am starting to go into a migraine. The data we produce is merely a small snippet of who we are at one moment and while it rings true for that one moment, the data is fragile and has the ability to change in an instant and no longer be a representation of an individual’s reality anymore. I think that this realization can connect back to the idea of ethnography. If we think of doing ethnographic work much like a specialty doctor, we are able to see that the data we collect is merely a snippet of localized symptoms of culture. We will never be able to get at the whole picture and we will only be able to analyze the symptoms which the individuals provide to us but we hone in on what we are provided with. I do hope this makes sense because now I can’t see but I am thinking back to Geertz.

This week, I was reminded of not only the complex implications of media’s contextuality, but also the inherent difficulties associated with adapting the existing regulatory landscape to fit our shifting conceptual understanding of the link between data and personhood. As our fantastic guest lecturer, Kimberly Hassle, elucidated on Thursday, digital anthropology is defined by “its continuous questioning of pre-existing dichotomies”. After our six-week long interrogation of the distinction between representation and reality, I found this description to be a succinct encapsulation of the inherent liminality of media and how ethnography is uniquely equipped to navigate and interpret these eroding boundaries. In other words, media is a mediation, situated on the border of representation and reality, the digital and physical, and the public and private. In many ways, Ms. Hassle’s statement represents an important conceptual step forward by framing media as the center of a techno-cultural nexus, not just a footnote implicated in the more general production of culture. Thus, instead of focusing our analysis merely on the contextual influences imbued in the content of the message and the extent to which it is distorted, it is also important to consider how the structure of the media itself shapes the message and its communication in less overt ways through a Foucauldian limitation of the involved parties’  conceptual possibilities. Whether it’s by restricting the exposure afforded to certain topics or incentivizing both negative and positive engagement, digital platforms, especially social networking often employ different tactics to assert subliminal control over its users, delimiting the rules and social norms that govern the digital realm. As Professor Himpele touched on, it is only through the contextualization of the media that we can begin to deconstruct these conceptual schemas influencing our interpretation of public discourse.

With that said, I’d like to briefly turn to Ruckenstien and Dow Schull (2017)’s “pixelated person” and the challenges related to the delineation of a privacy threshold.  After some deliberation, I’ve come to the realization that the threshold dictating how much data constitutes a person is probably much lower than I previously conceptualized. As we’ve discussed in previous weeks, authenticity is fallacy and most representations are merely attempting to portray a non-existent or severely altered reality. With the idea of a true reality called into question, your digital representations, the vestiges of self you leave in your wake as you navigate the Internet, in a way become your real identity. This would lend itself to a pro-regulation argument, encouraging governmental intervention in cases of corporate surveillance by emphasizing the exploitive aspects of data mining. Enforcement, however, is a separate, and far more daunting, issue. The Internet is an untamable, organic, and adaptive organism and human ingenuity enabled by technologization will always be able undermine laws implemented by regulatory bodies dependent on a lethargic legislative process. In light of this obstacle, I am not convinced that there is a perfect solution. That said, the first step towards the expansion and protection of individual privacy rights is to increase awareness in order to promote a sense of urgency. Thus, the complexities discussed in this post are all important considerations for us to keep in mind as we attempt to analyze datafication as a social phenomenon and further uncover media’s role in the production of culture. See you all next week!

Comments

Jeffrey Himpele says:

November 2, 2020 at 11:20 am

Zack – lot’s of interesting connections here. The idea that media is more than a passive technology or footnote. The term “mediation” does a lot of work in recognizing media as agentive. We have not really dug into the idea sufficiently, but a number of our readings build on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to recognize the agency of non-human actors that are in play and opens up creative new ways of thinking about media. Related to the second paragraph, I wonder if identity is not working as a term for us any longer. That it is a fixed notion or processual or even partial of some “thing”. This is why we might consider our “presence” as subjects in a range of media forms and representations. What do you think?

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This post is a continuation on multiple previous posts from fellow classmates.  Many of them have suggested that social media accounts are a representation of themselves, offering to the public only the aspects of their lives that they consider positive.  These presented selves are not the reality, and are just references to their “redeemable” qualities.  Whether or not this is the case, I would argue that it is impossible to display every detail of your life on to a social media page.  With that in mind, it makes sense to post only experiences and traits that are buoyant.

Earlier this week we discussed Big Data and possible definitions for the term.  I believe Rei brought up that perhaps Big Data is something that is collective, as in not pertaining to the individual.  I believe that this is true if you must be able to draw “on large data sets to identify patterns in order to make economic, social, technical, and legal claims.”  (Boyd and Crawford 663) That is because we cannot feasibly document the individual to an extent that would be considered large data.  There is so much information on an individual that they themselves may be unaware of.  For me personally, I am sure that there are plenty of important aspects of my life that I have forgotten or was never aware of.  I imagine that this value would be infinite.  If it were possible to analyze each thought, interaction, and choice of a person, I believe that would be large a enough data set.

Comments

Jeffrey Himpele says:

November 2, 2020 at 11:00 am

Matthew – this is a terrific extension of ideas in earlier posts this week. I’m persuaded by the claim here that it’s impossible to display every detail of one’s life in social media, that people are selective. I especially agree that we are not even aware of al the data we might generate. Subjectively, we are not even completely knowable to ourselves.

Further, the idea in this post that we should start with a collective definition of big data is important. By doing that, it doesn’t matter how large or small the data set is. Instead, we define it by the relationships among data points in the set, and relations across data sets. (And this is what boyd and Crawford propose in their piece.) This all makes “big data” a misnomer, or misguided, because it often involves measurements and quantities.

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In this week’s blog post, I want to expand on a possible contention I found when comparing the Ruckenstein & Dow Schull and Miller readings that I am a bit stuck on. On page 670, Ruckenstein & Dow Schull argue that relations displayed through social media, in the form of big data, are not the same as kinship structures. They also state that the ability to represent relationships between people as a graph or chart does not mean that they convey equivalent information. I understand the point they are making: as data pushes for a person to be a pixelated phenomenon, it could create a different context of a person in terms of their relationships to other people. However, the discipline of anthropology has been thinking about people and relationships for a long time, and views the person not as a discrete, isolated thing, but as an aggregation of their relationships. 

I’ll contrast this to the conversation we had yesterday, in which we discussed how anthropology could be the inspiration to see how different networks are mobilized and activated in different ways for social networking sites. Miller argues against the idea that, “Internet-based networks were too dispersed and partial to equate with these older forms of sociality” and states that, “rather, SNS have turned out to be something much closer to older traditions of anthropological study of social relations such as kinship studies” (Miller). Kimberly even provided us with some ethnographic examples of how social media can be utilized as an aggregation of relationships, such as those formed through the Leonardo DiCaprio fan club. 

I think both of these authors use context as an argument in two different ways: Miller sees that social networking sites “reflect an aggregate of an individual’s private spheres” which is similar to kinships structures, while Ruckenstein & Dow Schull view social networking sites, and the data that come from them, as segmentations of a person. I’m struggling with how to bridge this difference; how can we think of social media as both an aggregate of relationships but also as pixelations of a person? 

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Jeffrey Himpele says:

November 2, 2020 at 10:54 am

Lauren – this is a very rich question. I wonder if you this would be resolved, or take you somewhere productive, if the question did take the person as the starting point, or as the unit. Instead, starting with varying forms of networks or aggregations where differing roles can be activated at various nodes – public, private, both, somewhere in between – might enable the contradiction to be generative and reflective of actual social facts rather than dead ending in a bounded person. Further, even persons at different nodes can enact different relationships in the same network – even in the same household at once (e.g mother, aunt, sister, cousin, etc.). As Miller says people themselves are social network sites. I also this is the kind of logic that Miller and Horst are using in their essay we read a number of weeks ago which enable contradictions to be fundamental and generative.

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Yesterday’s class brought up so many interesting questions, and one that was particularly of note to me was whether or not we can draw a line between and online and off-line at this point–which points further to the question of whether or not the internet even exists. When I think back on the Miller article about SNS, something that I extracted from that paper was the ability for an individual to expose different parts of their personality through the use of different SNS. The spheres of who they post to can determine what they expose of themselves, or how they choose to present themselves. For example, on my snapchat (which I used to have, but no longer do), which consisted of school/college-aged friends, I used to post content related to my everyday social life, such as friends I was catching up with, parties I was attending etc. Looking back now, I definitely catered my content to who my snapchat “friends” were. Would I have ever posted anything remotely serious? probably not. On facebook, however, I am friends with both peers and older adults, so my content has been less about my social life (though I had posted pictures of my friends), but more about my career-related advertisements such as shows that were coming up, recording sessions that I was doing, or even a place to announce big life achievements, such as my admission to Princeton, for example. In both platforms, facebook and snapchat, I am presenting different sides of my self. Is one representation on an SNS more authentic to who I am than the other? Do either encompass my entire sense of “person” or “individual”? Definitely not. Each representation of myself on these sites is a small piece in the greater puzzle of who I am.

Then this makes me think, is real life any different? Am I ever in a situation where the person I am interacting with in real life can fully understand the entirety of who I am? Or, just in SNS, am I only showing pieces of myself? When I am interacting with my parents, they see the whole lot of who I am, yet, they don’t exactly see the version of myself that I am with my friends–which, as one might expect, is much different. I would say that neither of those interactions, with my parents or friends, is more or less authentic to myself–they are just different sides of me.

In both of these examples, in the digital realm, and in person, I am presenting different parts of myself depending on who my audience. I wouldn’t say I really did this consciously, but I think it certainly says something about how audience affects how we exist in whatever atmosphere. I think that my points also further support the notion that that the internet and real-life are actually much more similar than one might think, and that the line between begins to blur. These observations also make me wonder, is it ever really possible, on the “internet” or in “real-life”, to present the entirety of your true self and personhood? Or are we always only showing pieces of ourselves? Possibly it’s not about who you’re interacting with, but how long you’ve been interacting with them. So does that mean that only when I have been on Facebook for 40 years, that my “friends” will be able to gain a better sense of who I am in my entirety? And possibly, can I say that only until I grow old with my significant other will they truly see each side of me that makes up the whole of who I am? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions, obviously, but they have certainly made my head spin quite a bit.

Comments

Jeffrey Himpele says:

November 2, 2020 at 10:41 am

Maya – I very much appreciate the conclusion your post reaches: ” I would say that neither of those interactions, with my parents or friends, is more or less authentic to myself–they are just different sides of me.” I think the next question is whether there is a total “you” that can be knowable by adding up all the “parts”? Do they all add up for you, since you participate in them all? My opinion is no. It’s even well-nigh impossible to explain one’s own dreams!

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What stuck with me from this week’s readings, discussions, and Kimberly’s lovely presentation, was this notion of presenting selves. How do people present themselves on social media, in virtual communities, on Zoom…and why? Growing up in the age of Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, I find myself guilty of participating in a culture that seeks to showcase only the “good” and “desirable” aspects of everyday life; at least on Instagram, rarely does anyone ever share photos of themselves struggling, “failing” at something, or even sharing captions in which they express genuine and raw sentiments. Obviously this is a generalization, but for me there is definitely a reason why- especially now- I haven’t been posting current photos of myself or really anything at all: because I’m bored, missing my friends, at times feeling really down, and not living the life that I know is up to “Instagram standards.”

My screenwriting professor always tells us that putting our characters through a series of decisions is the best possible way to grasp and to illustrate who they are and what motivates them. Based on the choices they make- no matter how large or small- you can get a clear picture on the kind of person someone is without having to explicitly state it…and that is the driving principle of screenwriting, or of really any mainstream form of storytelling, I guess: “show, don’t tell.” Relating this back to my crude Instagram usage example, it is interesting how you can learn a lot someone based on their decisions on what to post, what to “like,” and what to “follow”- if at all. There is a lot to be said about someone’s virtual “silence” as well. This also brings me back to Prof. Himpele’s “Arrival Scenes”- what does the image you’re selling to an audience say about your intentions? It’s like that famous man/vase optical illusion where you’re able to identify an object based on its outline. In a world where public “selves” are constantly transforming and are honestly unreliable or elusive, I feel like your best bet in grasping someone’s “true identity” is to investigate the contours that shape their personhood rather than their  personhood itself…right? I’m not really sure..

Comments

Jeffrey Himpele says:

November 2, 2020 at 10:34 am

Ailee – very thoughtful. Do you think the self-aware selectivity of presenting selves enables people to recognize the same partiality of others? And what about in other media such as film? Or is this awareness of choice-making more media-specific. To social media, that is?

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Our discussion of smartphone usage and smartphone addiction made me think about how I engage with the various technological devices in my life differently. For example, I see no point in owning a TV, since I don’t actually watch anything that is on TV. Modern trends also point to more and more of the population switching from cable networks to streaming services like Netflix or Hulu. The device itself is not necessarily becoming obsolete, since people still privilege being able to access and stream content on larger screens at higher resolutions. Smart TVs also allow for users to quickly connect to the internet or their secondary devices in order to access these streaming services. 

But I believe that most people would agree to having more “meaningful” relationships with their personal laptops and their mobile phones. I find the uniqueness of these relationships with physical objects very interesting, especially because our sentimental feelings (which at their extreme might be called addiction) likely stem from our associations of the physical objects with their capacity to connect to digital spaces and communities i.e. via SNS. Personally, I access social media on both my laptop and my phone, which I think is common. But I know some people who choose to only access social media on their laptops. 

I also associate my laptop and my phone with different things. I mostly associate my phone with entertainment; I use this device to watch shows, to read for pleasure, and to chat with friends. My laptop is mostly reserved for work; I use this device to attend classes, to complete my assignments, and to write emails. The devices are not distinctively reserved for the activities that I associate them with, since I will also watch shows on my laptop and write emails on my phone. However, this exchange of activities is not equivalent across the two devices. I am more likely to do work on my phone than I am to use my laptop for entertainment purposes. In terms of my personal values and feelings–I am perfectly happy to shut my laptop off and not touch it for a week. I don’t believe I am capable of doing the same thing with my phone. However, I also know of people who value and prioritize their relationship with their laptop over their phone. I think that the individualized and unique nature of these relationships that people have with their different digitally-capable devices is worth exploring anthropologically. 

Comments

Jeffrey Himpele says:

November 2, 2020 at 10:31 am

Cynthia – this would be a fascinating topic for a thesis. How has the relationship between screens in daily life changed from the TV as a household centerpiece for paternalist broadcasting in the 1950s to the more intimate relationships people with ubiquitous smaller screens where much content/data is user-generated?

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An interesting concept that Kimberly identified from her research is the idea that the “offline” life is viewed as necessary to contextualize or complement “online” life. We’ve previously struggled with defining these terms, so I’d like to leave aside for now the inherent contradictions and problems that come with policing the boundaries between the offline and the online, and consider further the relationship between the online and the offline.

Kimberly expressed the finding that the prevailing view is that the offline is better than the online, and that the online life (or interests) are supposed to complement the offline. For example, the Leonardo DiCaprio fan club is an interest expressed online but based upon something “offline” (an actor); the same relationship is expressed through online documentation of instagrammable locations that are experienced in-person. I definitely see this sentiment (privileging in-person interests and experiences) expressed around me as well, especially considering the sentiments people express about “returning to in-person life” and all the discussions about what constitutes the “college experience”.

Considering this view, though, makes me wonder about digital interests and their relationship with the physical: do all interests and activities circle back to this emphasis on in-person (for lack of a better word) experiences? For example, take video gaming. Video games initially required a physical presence and existing relationship (think of the earlier consoles like NES); then, with online games like Minecraft or World of Warcraft, the pendulum seemed to swing towards online relationships that could be conducted entirely in the digital. However, what about the meet-ups, or conventions, or tournaments, whose purposes are to facilitate in-person meetings? Although I don’t really play video games, I know of the importance of meeting the person “behind the avatar” so to speak; the large amount of money invested in tournaments where people gather together to watch gaming (when it could just as easily be watched from a screen) seems to also underline the significance of the “offline”, even in online communities.

Are there communities or online activities that don’t privilege the in-person? I initially thought online gaming was one such example, but I’ve just generated a counterexample for myself. It would be interesting to hear if anyone else can think of a community that lives entirely in the digital and has no basis or connection to the physical.

Comments

Jeffrey Himpele says:

November 2, 2020 at 10:28 am

A very interesting post, Rei. I appreciate your apprehension about too quickly drawing a line between online and offline. For instance, where does DiCaprio’s online presence start and stop? Aren’t fans responding to that, too, in the form of his instagram posts? A lot of what you cite here also reminds me of the very first piece we read about “why zoom is terrible.” As for us, we are not asking which is better online or offline, but why do we say one is? Why persuades us they are different and can be ranked?

On the other hand, Miller and Horst insist on a constitutive gap between them. Looks like we might have to make a choice or develop a more complex model….

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To continue on the theme of last class, I think there’s an underlying connection between the mp3 and so-called Big Data, and the technological tracks they occupy. The mp3 and similar digital container technologies have been rendered largely obsolete, at least in the sense of ownership, by streaming; Big Data techniques have ushered in a clustering paradigm, both as the sought-after piece of analytical knowledge and as the natural application of that analysis, a consequence of the ubiquity of data.

How do we interact with streaming media? I think an instructive archetype is the Spotify playlist. No one’s playlist has songs that someone else couldn’t put in their own playlist, so the inherent meaning or value derives from the space/genre/cluster defined by the playlist’s songs. In this zero-sum game, now that the ownership of music means little, the taste or preference or subculture-membership of the playlist creator takes on meaning (this meaning has always been present to some degree, but I think it can be argued that the meaning implied by music object ownership has traditionally suppressed it).

How does Big Data analysis proceed? Broadly, by identifying meaning that isn’t explained by any single observed variable.

In both technological tracks we could pick out a similar shift—when our pool of data (media content, data in the scientific sense) reaches such a level of omnipresence that everyone pretty much has access to the same set, we try to determine the latent space that remains now that the noise of our informational infrastructure has become peripheral and no longer creates space of its own (although this space will surely have lasting implications), and then we try to settle into it.

It actually seems like the Editor-in-Chief of Wired had a point in emphasizing that “we can track and measure [what people do] with unprecedented fidelity,” and that to be able to do this endangers the utility of fields that cluster people by hand, as it were. To be sure, the numbers don’t speak for themselves, but for the most part they do display themselves silently in full public view.

This also seems like an unstated reason for boyd and Crawford to adopt the idea, from boyd’s previous work with Alice Marwick, that “being in public” is distinct from “being public.” How do we describe spaces that are both public and private? We could imagine a vast, unfenced, latent field (for boyd and Crawford, a park) on which groups of people cluster together for social interaction. Anyone could visit any cluster, but distance between clusters makes such travel difficult. Privacy scales with distance (which we could say scales inversely with the number of public data points about a cluster), so it’s no longer a binary concept. This is why Zack’s point last class is crucial—he said we’ve reached a point where our data is basically fully “out there,” and the only thing mediating a dox is effort.

Comments

Jeffrey Himpele says:

October 26, 2020 at 6:09 pm

An evocative set of connections, Joe. I enjoyed reading this. Taken as a whole, however, the questions here reminds me of the point that Miller and Horst made in the “Digital Anthropology and the Human.” And that is that the digital has revealed the mediated and framed nature of the non-digital world. What do you think?

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I found this week’s readings were particularly mind-blowing. One thing that I would like to hone in on in this post is the 3rd point in the Boyd and Crawford reading, the idea that bigger Data are not always better data for big data. That in itself is wildly confusing but I did find that after our discussion on Thursday I am having a bit more clarity as to the implications of this statement. The text argues that “When researchers approach a data set, they need to understand — and publicly account for — not only the limits of the data set, but also the limits of which questions they can ask of a data set and what interpretations are appropriate.” (Boyd and Crawford 669-70) The example used in the text was about tweets on Twitter and our discussion was centered around health data. I think that one thing we need to consider in this whole idea is the question that Renie brought up about the definitions of a person, especially in data and online forums. While data can be useful in understanding populations as a whole, what big data tends to falter in is the human experience of individuals in the data. Therefore, in order to define a person in such a context, the researcher/anthropologist would need to be able to humanize it in some way or another. While large numbers are meaningful in their own right, the individual experience tends to be more poignant. This brings me back to thinking about the final project in this class. My group is focusing on a nurse’s account of the covid-19 outbreak. While the video that we are viewing pertains to the Pandemic and the large data sets that have resulted, what makes our media so important is that it focuses on the small size of data within the big data. This post is everywhere but I think that in order to understand a piece of media the larger context of big data is imperative in order to fully understand the gravity of the topic.

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Jeffrey Himpele says:

October 26, 2020 at 6:01 pm

Anna – this post makes a very persuasive point: data is incomplete without ethnography to contextualize it. Further, it seems like your group will be able demonstrate how different visual forms can be brought together to do this. That is, the video account seems to get at the specific ethnographic dimension while data visualizations can convey the larger data in patterns. How your group will relate the two is the question!

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This week, I’ve been preoccupied by a project for my senior thesis. I plan to include a discussion of the text Izme Pass in my thesis, which is about electronic literature. Unfortunately, Izme Pass was only ever distributed on a 3.5 inch floppy disk that works on a specific operating system for a Macintosh computer and accompanied a paper journal publication called Writing on the Edge in 1991. Only thirty years have passed since this technology has dominated our culture, but it is now so obsolete that tracking down and getting access to a legible copy has proved to be a difficult task. In the case that I will not be able to find access to a computer that has the capacity to run the program, it’s been suggested that someone who does set up a Zoom call with me in order for me to read and peruse the text remotely and vicariously through them. 

I find it incredibly ironic that this electronic literature is so difficult to obtain or read, since at the time it must have been written under the impression that the technology used to make it should allow the work to be even more easily accessible and easily distributed than print literature. However, technology changes rapidly and becomes obsolete rapidly. I’ve found our discussions about old technology this week to be especially meaningful. Based on our reading of the piece “The Digital and the Human”, Ailee had suggested in class that although technological progress might at first dominate over cultural change, culture will change just as rapidly and soon match the speed of technology’s change. However, I am not sure that this will always be the case. I believe it’s true that culture adapts rapidly to adopt new technology, but the production and proliferation of new technology can cause the production of other new technology to grow at almost exponential rates. In reading the piece on Big Data, I was particularly struck by the suggestion that part of the reason size shouldn’t be a consideration for thinking about big data is because processing this data used to require supercomputers but now “can now be analyzed on desktop computers with standard software”. 

I find discussions about the ways in which rapidly changing technologies inevitably changes culture and cultural activities really interesting. Even more interesting are the ways in which we have to adapt our academic methods and understandings in order to suit these societal changes. I recognize how even the advent of linear filmmaking has influenced the field of anthropology, since that is a major aspect of this class and discussed extensively in Media Worlds. I’m interested to see how the changes of these current times might influence the field of anthropology in the future. 

Comments

Jeffrey Himpele says:

October 26, 2020 at 5:55 pm

Cynthia – your thesis sounds interesting. Maybe there is a web-based simulator of the Mac OS you need. Indeed the looping between technology, culture and even human physiology is fascinating. A map of things that are out of sync vs in sync would be fascinating. For example, as Zack alludes in his post, our laws around intellectual property are not well equipped for the event and flow based forms of digital commodities. I suggest revisiting the Miller and Horst essay (on digital anthropology) and read what they argue about “normativity” in the final pages.

And here in the academy, I think of the work we are doing in this course is exactly to adapt and create understandings of the changes, while de-normalizing what we take for granted. For at the same time, we should be mindful that our ways of knowing also become the basis for technology and forms of power.

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Maya posted a really interesting question on Miro today: “this article very clearly states that numbers don’t always speak for themselves, but to play devil’s advocate, can we ever think of a situation where they DO speak for themselves. Or is interpretation/context/subjectivity always imbued underneath?”

I think back to the instance of Terry White court case as a parallel situation where instead of numbers speaking for themselves, we were asking: does the film speak for itself? By looking at the Terry White case, yes! Interpretation, context, subjectivity is always imbued. Thus, I guess when we say when [blank] speaks for itself what we really mean is that there is only one interpretation that should be held as more “true” or “real” than other interpretations. The problem, then with numerical Big Data, is the lack of considering other contexts when making an interpretation.

That leads me to wonder how we can add more context into numerical Big Data and perhaps this question will open the door to new kinds of ethnographic work. I am speculating that when interpreting numerical Big Data, the context that is probably normally left out is the actual, qualitative everyday lived experiences of the people who the numerical Big Data represents. The Big Data represents the what happened but not necessarily the why. Thus, perhaps ethnography can help us to better understand the meaning and purpose that drives these lived experiences that are captured and in turn shape the interpretation of Big Data. I guess what I’m asking is: can we use ethnography to begin to collect “small, thick data” to create the categories and definitions that are used to interpret Big Data to come up with a more complete understanding?

Comments

Jeffrey Himpele says:

October 26, 2020 at 5:49 pm

A provocative post, Emily. Whether we define big data as either massive amounts (e.g. scalar) or as a set of relationships (following boyd and Crawford), more data suggests that more interpretations might be possible. Instead, as the post points out, assuming that data speaks for itself lays the groundwork for eliminating other points of view, because they cannot possibly exist!

Also, I agree 100% that the big data (and maybe small data, too) demands ethnography to provide context and the “why”. That’s put very nicely (Jerome made a similar case this week in his post.) I like the questioning about categories here, too, except we must keep in mind that categories are also used to collect and imagine data. Check out Lauren’s post on that.

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