This topic, the digital and culture, and our class discussion immediately reminded me of a New York Times article I had read three days ago (it turns out Prof H actually linked it earlier in Slack), describing a group of researchers who use tweets to measure the emotional state of people globally. The researchers are using the digital (algorithms, computing) to measure social attributes that are more intangible. (While “intangible” was associated with the digital in class today, I would argue that many social interactions are intangible in a different way than the digital. For example, emotions and tone are notoriously hard to convey over texts or the internet.)

There are tons of interesting ideas and connections here to the Miller Digital Anthropology and other previous readings. The author says that “Without our normal social life as antidote and anchor, our social media now feels more like real life than ever before”, which is the sentiment that Maya echoed today. There’s the issue of the cultural context of language usage; the researchers have only looked at English so far, so what sentiments would be expressed in spaces that use other languages? There’s the idea of cultural context and how that changes, which comes up with discussion of the increased use of swear words (and subsequent decoupling with intense emotion). There’s also a connection here to the illusion of truth and fidelity – the researchers present May 31^st, 2020, as the saddest day on record, but is their algorithm an accurate measure of mood? The truthfulness here is reinforced through citing the amount of data, and the look at the collective.

Interestingly, the article also presents a way to use these collective data analysis findings and re-apply them to the individual, for example, looking for signs of post-partum depression in tweets of individual mothers. This example presents a way to merge the concepts of “thick description” (big data in the sense of tons of individual big data) with the more numerical concept of digital big data.

Article link again: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/style/self-care/social-media-.html