{"id":4467,"date":"2020-10-30T11:52:24","date_gmt":"2020-10-30T15:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/?p=4467"},"modified":"2020-10-30T11:52:24","modified_gmt":"2020-10-30T15:52:24","slug":"miller-ruckenstein-dow-schull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/miller-ruckenstein-dow-schull\/","title":{"rendered":"Miller, Ruckenstein & Dow Schull"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this week\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll contrast this to the conversation we had yesterday, in which we discussed how anthropology could<\/span> 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, \u201cInternet-based networks were too dispersed and partial to equate with these older forms of sociality\u201d and states that, \u201crather, SNS have turned out to be something much closer to older traditions of anthropological study of social relations such as kinship studies\u201d (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 <\/span>Leonardo DiCaprio fan club.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think both of these authors use context as an argument in two different ways: Miller sees that social networking sites \u201creflect an aggregate of an individual\u2019s private spheres\u201d which is similar to kinships structures, while <\/span>Ruckenstein & Dow Schull view social networking sites, and the data that come from them, as segmentations of a person. I\u2019m 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?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this week\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2389,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4468,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4467\/revisions\/4468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}