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Abstract

The growing popularity of new social and participatory media at a time of global turbulence raises challenging questions for anthropologists wishing to engage with publics beyond academia. In this chapter I draw from my experience as a media anthropologist researching activism and social protest to explore some of these challenges. I argue that an updated public anthropology is required if we are to reach out beyond the mass media channels familiar from previous decades. The new digital media environment is a ‘hybrid’ system made up of old and new technologies, actors and practices interacting in contingent ways (Chadwick 2011) as well as a domain of cultural production mired in a deep political and economic crisis. This situation demands open-ended, idiosyncratic, and collaborative approaches to public engagement that take into account both the unique affordances of today’s digital technologies and the aftereffects of the 2011 and 2013 waves of social protest around the globe. I exemplify this argument through my experience with four distinct platforms, namely a mailing list, a research blog, Twitter and Facebook, in a range of public contexts.

Introduction

Like other professionals, anthropologists work in a public environment that has undergone profound technological changes over the past 10 years. New forms of publicness have arisen out of three converging global trends, namely the rise of ‘viral media’ such as Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, the mainstreaming of ‘nerd politics’ epitomised by Wikileaks and Anonymous, and the digitisation of public spaces. I will now consider each of these trends in turn.

First, with the proliferation of new social and mobile media around the world, millions of citizens now have in their hands the ability to decide how and with whom to ‘share’ digital information and commentary (Postill in press). There is nothing new, of course, about forwarding messages through electronic means. What is novel is the sheer scale, routinisation and sophistication of the new culture of ‘sharism’ (Mao 2008), with the ubiquitous ‘Likes’ and ‘tweets’ of social media indexing the shift. If 10 or 20 years ago internet users could readily forward emails with hyperlinks to their contacts, today the very architectures and business models of social media and smartphones are built on ‘sharing’ digital contents. While early cyberspace scholars announced the coming of an age of ‘virtual reality’ (Turkle 1984), what we have seen over the past five years is rather the rise of what I call ‘viral reality’, i.e. the accelerated co-production of news and opinion by media professionals and amateurs through social and mobile (or ‘viral’) media (Postill in press). This is a flattened informational terrain that the mainstream media must now share with alternative media outlets and millions of digitally savvy citizens. While the mainstream media have retained the ability to set the day-to-day current affairs agenda (Chadwick 2011), they must also contend with the ability of ordinary citizens not only to reach the scene of a media event before reporters, but also with their new power to ‘Like’ a potentially viral item of news or opinion (Shirky 2008). The study of virality is still in its infancy, but given the participatory nature of their research anthropologists can play an important part in its development (Postill 2012).

A second shift currently underway is the mainstreaming of ‘nerd politics’ (pace Doctorow 2012), epitomised by formations such as Wikileaks, Anonymous, Spain’s Indignados or the global Occupy movement. This is a novel phenomenon whereby geeks, hackers, bloggers, copyleft lawyers and other ‘information activists’ (Brooke 2011) have learned to take their once niche internet struggles to the heart of the political process by linking them to broader popular demands. A spectacular instance of this trend was the release in November 2010 by Wikileaks via mainstream news media organisations (including the New York Times, the Guardian, and El Pais) of over 200,000 US State Department cables. Less well known are the earlier activities of Julian Assange and fellow information activists which eventually led to significant changes to Icelandic legislation protecting the country’s freedom of information, or the strong ties forged between information activists and grassroots protesters during the Arab uprisings and among the Indignados and Occupy movements. But the crucial point is that it is not only ‘tech nerds’ who co-produce and share digital contents in support of greater internet freedoms, political and financial transparency, ‘distributed’ forms of democratic participation, and so on. Thanks to the new viral media environment, even anthropologists who not long ago boasted of being technophobes have now begun to actively participate in these new forms of public engagement (see chapters on Savage Minds and the Open Anthropology Cooperative, this volume).

Third, in many urban centres the explosive uptake of smartphones combined with new forms of civic engagement in the wake of the Arab uprisings are reconfiguring citizens’ public ideas and practices (Corsin and Estalella 2011). One defining moment was the mass occupation of Tahrir Square in January 2011 to demand the end of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, followed in real time around the world via a plethora of mainstream, alternative and social media. This successful occupation was an inspiration for citizens worldwide demanding political reform and social justice. The Tahrir model was adapted by a small group of hacktivists and other citizens who occupied Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square later that year. In turn, the Madrid template was exported to New York by an activist network in Vancouver, giving rise to Occupy Wall Street (Juris 2012), from where is spread to hundreds of cities around the globe in October 2011. The occupied squares were not only utopian exercises in direct democracy (della Porta 2011). They were also highly experimental ‘hackerspaces’ (Brooke 2011) in which the mainstreaming of nerd politics acquired a public (inter)face, a manifestation of viral reality, and a context where the disenchantment and fear of the educated middle classes was articulated with that of the general population.

As we face new national and global crises in the coming years (witness, for instance, the June 2013 protests in Brazil and Turkey), it is likely that new and old forms of public engagement will continue to interact and co-evolve. In this chapter I draw from my own recent experience as a public anthropologist to explore some of the ways in which anthropologists can not only ‘reach out’ to non-academic constituencies via different media, but also help to constitute new forms of public engagement and democratic reform.  I argue that an updated understanding of public anthropology is required if we are to transcend the mass media channels of a previous era. The new digital media environment is a ‘hybrid’ system made up of old and new technologies, actors and practices interacting in contingent ways (Chadwick 2011) as well as a domain of cultural production mired in a deep political and economic crisis. This situation demands open-ended, idiosyncratic, and collaborative approaches to public engagement that exploit both the unique affordances of today’s digital technologies and the aftereffects of the 2011 and 2013 waves of social protest around the globe. I exemplify this argument through my experience with four distinct platforms, namely a mailing list, a research blog, Twitter and Facebook, in a range of public contexts.

Sustaining a mailing list

Although there is little doubt that today’s media environment differs markedly from that of the early 2000s, and even more so from earlier environments, it is unwise to adopt a ‘replacement model’ of media change in which ‘new’ media replace ‘old’ media (Apprich 2013). Thus in a recent ethnographic study set in Italy, Barassi and Trere (2012) found that an ‘old’ internet technology, the humble listserv, took pride of place among student activists who valued its interactivity and discretion (see also Trere 2012). These authors caution against the current rhetoric around ‘Web 2.0’ as the age of interactivity and user-driven content, as if email and other earlier technologies had not possessed such affordances. Moreover, they found that young Italian activists were often using social network sites and other ‘Web 2.0’ technologies in strategically non-interactive ways.  Similarly, Kelty’s (2008, 2010) ethnohistory of the free software movement reveals the long-standing centrality of mailing lists to the making and remaking of ‘recursive publics’ around the practices of open-source coding (which in turn, we could add, eventually led to the mainstreaming of nerd politics). These listservs were in fact a key resource in Kelty’s archival research (Postill 2010).

Mailings lists have been a mainstay of academic life for decades, and show no signs of decline despite the parallel rise in social media usage amongst academics. The number of European Association of Social Anthropologists’ (EASA) networks continues to grow every year, and they all rely on listservs as their main communication tool. For instance, the EASA Media Anthropology Network – which I co-founded and convene –  relies on its thriving listserv. Set up by a small group of enthusiasts during the 2004 EASA conference in Vienna, the listserv has continued to spread by word of mouse and today boasts over 1,400 subscribers from a wide range of national and professional backgrounds. As stated on the Network’s website:

[M]embership of EASA is not a prerequisite for subscribing to the Media Anthropology Network mailing list. The mailing list is open to scholars, research students and others anywhere in the world who have a legitimate interest in the anthropology of media.

The decision to open the list to non-EASA members, and indeed to anyone with an interest in the subfield, lent it a public dimension, although in practice most active participation comes from scholars and advanced students working within academic institutions. Another formative influence was the informal agreement to focus on the anthropological (and related) study of media rather than on anthropology’s presence in the public domain. Nevertheless, and particularly in the network’s early years, we have occasionally engaged with journalists, activists, documentary film-makers and others working at the intersection of anthropology and public life but the thrust of the list – and the network as a whole – has always been media-related academic research.

This research-driven agenda is clearly at work in the mailing list’s widely praised innovation, its e-seminar series. E-seminars are chaired sessions that unfold around a working paper over a period of two weeks. The sessions were originally designed to ‘remediate’ (Bolter and Gursin 1999) a familiar offline social script, the co-present academic seminar, so as to serve a dual purpose: to present cutting-edge research in the subfield whilst fostering a sense of collegiality amongst list subscribers.

Now it could be argued that this mailing list – and others across the academic field – is merely a small inward-looking group that does not make a substantial contribution to the public projection of its discipline. However, this criticism would assume that the only meaningful ways of ‘doing’ public anthropology are either through the mediation of mainstream media outlets or by means of traditional outreach events such as public lectures. On the contrary, I would argue that mailing lists can be an important means of building and sustaining new publics that can reach out beyond the walls of academe. In the case of the media anthropology list, we do so in mostly indirect ways, by sharing and co-producing specialist knowledge not only with fellow ‘experts’ but also with researchers and practitioners from many walks of life, including journalism, activism, technology and film production, many of whom may be ‘lurking’ on the list.

Too narrow a conception of the notion of ‘engagement’ can be misleading here, for experience suggests that far from being idle onlookers, lurkers can in fact be active but silent members of a vibrant public. An anecdote will illustrate this point. In December 2012 I presented a working paper to the media anthropology e-seminar. Towards the end of the session I joked about the inclusive nature of these events by suggesting that even lurkers had been busy theorising during the seminar. To my surprise, soon after making this remark, a colleague recommended the seminars to her Facebook friends and described herself as a lurker who had indeed been theorising all along, but too busy to post. Although this colleague is also an anthropologist, many of her Facebook friends are not. This is an example of a modest but cumulatively significant type of indirect or unintended outreach. Another instance of unintended publicity would be those occasions in which network participants are approached for an interview by journalists or bloggers who have found or been referred to the mailing list. In sum, even the most seemingly academic of exchanges can find its way into wider public domains through the mediation of inter-field practitioners and technologies (e.g. search engines, ‘Like’ buttons, tweets).

A public research blog

While mailing lists are taken-for-granted features of most scholars’ email routines, blogs occupy a more ambivalent position in academia. Despite the strenuous efforts of leading anthropology bloggers to promote this practice amongst colleagues, blogging remains very much a minority pursuit in the discipline. One common sight is to find anthropology blogs that were started with great enthusiasm only to be abandoned or neglected within weeks or months. Experience suggests that those rare anthropology blogs that have achieved great longevity tend to be collective rather than personal endeavours, e.g. Savage Minds (see this volume) or Neuroanthropology.

The reasons for the low uptake and lack of sustainability of personal blogs among anthropologists are complex and would require a separate discussion. I would nevertheless hazard the following two factors. First, blogging requires considerable time and effort, both of which are in short supply amongst anthropologists and other academics facing heavy teaching and administrative workloads in an increasingly competitive marketplace.  Second, blogging is a low-status practice regarded as having far less career value than publishing in respected journals or securing research grants. Like other scholars, anthropologists blog against the grain, as a meaningful activity in its own right with low external rewards (see Warde 2005).

My own research blog is named media/anthropology. Although launched in July 2006, it was only in April 2008 that I started blogging in earnest. I use this site primarily for research, self-promotion and archiving. As stated on the homepage, the aim of the blog is

to put out in the public domain materials that I am already working with as part of my research activity under the broad theme of media anthropology. The idea is to keep colleagues, students and others informed of my work as well as to keep an online notebook for my own personal use, e.g. as an easy way of tracking down materials that may otherwise have remained hidden in my personal records.

Notice the double disclaimer contained in this passage. First, I imply that this is not the place to find time-consuming ‘passionate blogging’ (Estalella 2011). Rather this is a site of modest ambitions run by a busy academic. Second, the site has a personal archival purpose riding alongside its public mission. In other words, I am both the sole owner of the blog and a key member of its target audience, not in a “Dear diary” confessional mode but as a future seeker of specific contents via Google or the blog’s own search engine. Indeed, I sometimes find that a Google search for online materials on a given topic will direct me to my own blog (e.g. “practice theory”)!

Another example of the blog’s labour constraints is that while comments are allowed on the site I seldom solicit them from readers, as a high volume of comments would add to the burden of running the blog on a very limited time budget. This reinforces Barassi and Trere’s (2012) earlier point about the gap between the potential and actual interactivity of ‘Web 2.0’ technologies such as blogs or social network sites.

That said, there have been a number of interactive episodes throughout the blog’s short history. Thus on preparing for fieldwork in Catalonia in 2010 I wrote a small number of blog posts on the topic of regional nationalism in Spain. Although my aim was to position myself as an impartial observer with a scholarly interest in the subject, some of the comments made by blog visitors challenged this neutrality. After some reflection on the issue – a privilege conferred on the blogger by the asynchronicity of this medium – I decided to steer clear of the topic in future posts so as to maintain access to prospective research participants when working in nationalist circles.

One obvious attraction of owning a personal research blog it the almost complete editorial freedom it allows its proprietor. This is not to say that owners operate in a moral and political vacuum, but in contrast to a collective blog such as Savage Minds, a personal blog requires no communal negotiation on the theme, register or style of its contents. The onus is entirely on the solo blogger. This makes personal blogs idiosyncratic media stamped with an individual’s unique traits and preoccupations, the quintessential home of ‘me-centric’ or ‘networked’ individualism (Castells 2001, Wellman 2001). Coupled with the time constraints just mentioned and the incessant demand of the medium for new contents, the results are often uneven. Thus, in my blogging career I have made virtue out of necessity by turning all manner of materials to hand into unlikely blog posts, including presentation notes, summaries of readings, tweet collections, working papers, reblogged posts, musings on topical issues, and so on. Because of the archival nature of blogs (Estalella 2011), items that were originally neglected by blog readers may acquire new audiences when they are ‘rediscovered’ weeks or months later through a search engine and shared via social media or other means. Some blog posts have remained perpetually popular, such as the post ‘What is practice theory?’, an extract from the introduction to Theorising Media and Practice (Bräuchler and Postill 2010). Since I posted it in October 2008, this entry has been viewed over 35,000 times and received 22 comments, and continues to draw traffic to the site. This is an example of a high publicity return on a low investment in time and effort.

Twitter’s transient publics

There are probably few web platforms as misunderstood as the micro-blogging site Twitter. One common misconception about this site is that it is first and foremost an outlet for narcissistic trivia and celebrity self-promotion. While there is some truth to this portrayal, there is far more to Twitter than mindless entertainment. In fact, Twitter is surprisingly conducive to the practice of public scholarship.

The media theorist Nick Couldry (2010) argues that certain powerful (media) practices ‘anchor’ other practices. For example, televised state ceremonies such as a royal wedding can anchor offline gatherings in pubs and homes (Couldry 2003). This is an intriguing metaphor, but it does not travel well to public microblogging. The term anchor suggests, of course, immobility. Instead, we need dynamic metaphors that can capture how microblogging may be ‘spearheading’ both socio-political change and the creation of new publics in which anthropologists can play an important part. Looking back at the trajectory of Spain’s leading internet activists over the past two years, I regard activist microblogging as a cutting-edge, disruptive practice that has helped to ‘unsettle’ powerful fields such as politics, journalism and finance whilst creating new transient publics ripe for anthropological intervention.

Launched in 2006, Twitter is today a hugely popular platform where information can be shared and discussed via brief messages known as tweets. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is based on asymmetrical relationships. That is, to establish a visible relation on the site there is no need to be ‘friended’ by another user; one need only ‘follow’ them. The result is a huge disparity in users’ follower-to-followed ratio – a key index of prestige on Twitter. Thus, while A-list celebrities will typically boast millions of followers, they are likely to follow in return far fewer people. In stark contrast, ordinary users may find it difficult to recruit more than one or two hundred followers, with public scholars generally lying somewhere in between.

Like many other social media platforms, Twitter is free of charge and poses no significant technical challenge to prospective users. However, most novices must embark on a steep learning curve if they wish to be noticed amidst Twitter’s relentless torrent of information. Many newbies must also overcome the initial ‘culture shock’ of a giant platform teeming with half a billion users who generate over 340 million tweets and make more than 1.6 billion search queries every day.

Twitter’s 2011 tagline “Follow your interests” encapsulates one of the chief attractions of the site, namely the ability it confers users to keep track of those people and issues that matter to them. Interestingly, this tagline mirrors the old ethnographic maxim “Follow their interests”, making Twitter a milieu that is highly conducive to ethnographic research. Most topics are freely created and shared (or ‘retweeted’) by users themselves, not by the site owners, and arranged into topical threads through ‘hashtags’ (e.g. #anthropology, #worldcup). Topics that are rapidly gaining in popularity at any given time are publicly listed by Twitter as ‘trending’ nationally and/or globally. As can be expected, there is fierce competition among certain kinds of Twitter users and groups (including political activists) to create and maintain trending topics.

In recent years Twitter has become integral to the work of activists and protesters around the world, not least in Spain. As one veteran Catalan activist told me in the summer of 2011, when broaching the subject of the 15M protest movement: “I had no choice but to join Twitter to find out what was going on”. Thus during the mass occupation of Spain’s central squares in May 2011, two 15M activists highlighted the role played by Twitter in these terms:

The assemblies in each of the encampments are essential not only for logistical reasons but also because everyday and mid-term tasks are outlined in their committees. Above all, they are massive, transparent exercises in direct democracy… However, the [movement’s] direction is mostly set on Twitter. The hashtags serve not only to organise the debate. They also set the collective tone: #wearenotgoing #wearenotafraid #fearlessbcn … (@galapita and @hibai [2011], my translation).

The importance of Twitter to my own research became clear in December 2010. Having spent four months ‘chasing’ activists across Barcelona while slowly building a directory of campaigns and groups on my research blog, it was on Twitter that I ‘found’ them all gathered in one place. More importantly, Twitter became a central rallying space and ‘meme factory’ for activists and protesters themselves (Postill in press). Although Twitter came to be one of my key field sites, I resisted the temptation to turn the inquiry into an ‘online community’ study (see Postill 2008) and instead, continued to ‘follow the conflict’ (Marcus 1995) across a range of online and offline sites (Postill and Pink 2012). My Twitter persona (@JohnPostill) was that of a UK anthropologist researching new media and activism, with special reference to Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain. In order to keep the flow of information manageable, I limited the number of people I followed to 130 to 140 users, while steadily building up a following that reached around 1,400 on leaving Barcelona (2,000 at present). Twitter was my default aggregator, a ‘human-mediated RSS feed’ (Naughton 2011) where knowledgeable informants operating in different domains filtered news and commentary on a large set of actors and issues related to my research question.

Over time, I learned to craft my tweets to increase the likelihood that they would be retweeted, e.g. by tweeting in English on topics generally discussed in Spanish, or posting messages during peak hours of Twitter traffic in Spain so that they would reach a larger audience. I also made ample use of my interstitial position as a bicultural scholar with access to academic, journalistic and blogging resources in both English and Spanish (and occasionally other languages as well) to feed relevant contents into the appropriate discursive streams. One important part of the process was learning how to play social games on Twitter. I turn now to four of the games I learned to play, which I shall provisionally label ‘working the algorithm’, ‘gathering the #facts’, ‘self-promoting’ and ‘killing time’.

In the weeks and months leading to the 15 May 2011 mobilisations across Spain, influential activists promoted certain slogans and ideas by means of Twitter’s trending topics facility. Aware that the site’s algorithm prioritises novelty over volume when ranking the more popular topics (Cullum 2010), skilled players would constantly change the campaign keywords, asking their followers to share them widely so that they would trend. To find my own competitive advantage in this game, I developed a set of techniques such as using Google to search for recent news items in English on a Spanish trending topic, and then feeding the more valuable finds into the relevant thread, often copying the tweets (via the ‘cc.’ abbreviation) to influential Twitter users operating in specific niches such as online journalism or copyright law. I found this game to be rewarding both extrinsically – in that it boosted my ‘name and fame’ (Miller 2000) – and intrinsically, as a pleasurable activity in its own right with instant psychological rewards (Warde 2005).

A second game that I played with Spanish activists and other field agents was ‘gathering the #facts’ – a sub-type or variant of working the algorithm. This relatively new Twitter game is a modification of the now classic internet game that grew around the actor Chuck Norris, under the rubric ‘Chuck Norris facts’. The original game consisted of sharing, tongue in cheek, made-up ‘facts’ portraying Norris as ‘a tough, all-powerful super-being’ (Wikipedia 2012). Since 2005, this subgenre has spawned countless variants around the world and been applied to many other public figures. The Twitter version of the game turns the phrase into a hashtag. For instance, in late December 2010 the Spanish pop star and tax exile Alejandro Sanz tweeted: “Spanish politicians are such cowards, they’re not going to vote for the new bill safeguarding intellectual property” (my translation). This tweet provoked an outcry that was channelled through the Spanglish hashtag #alejandrosanzfacts, with tweets ranging from the humorous to the factual via the outright insulting. Not surprisingly, Sanz’s alleged tax evasion featured prominently in the discursive torrent.  As this case shows, a transient Twitter public – here formed by a heterogeneous universe of users – can instantly expand to swallow up an unsuspecting microblogger who is then hurled into a turbulent sphere of discursive action over which they have little or no control. (By the same token, these ephemeral publics will often contract and dissipate equally as fast).

A third Twitter game I play regularly is ‘self-promoting’. In common with other forms of online and offline self-promotion, the prefix ‘self-’ belies the thoroughly collective and reciprocal nature of this activity. Thus, seasoned Twitterers tacitly understand that retweeting a contact’s self-promoting messages may be reciprocated in due course. As in other contexts, this game must not be overplayed. In other words, public scholars promoting their work on Twitter must also engage in activities of other kinds, such as sharing topical information on events or publications not directly related to their career achievements, or participating in both serious and light-hearted threads of conversation.

My final example is a game we may call ‘killing time’. Not all Twitter activity can be devoted to the dogged pursuit of professional or political agendas. As in all social worlds, there are also times on Twitter for relaxation and conviviality. One common way of doing this is to join existing trending topics where the conversation is likely to be animated and the cognitive investment required low. The topics are usually steeped in popular culture but can vary widely in subject-matter (e.g. sport, TV, sex, health), longevity (from a few hours to a day), cultural framing (regional, national, global), and so on. For the anthropologist these seemingly banal threads can provide valuable glimpses into the state of ‘the national conversation’ at any given point in time. Over a period of months or years, recurrent themes and trends can be triangulated with other sources of data (the mainstream media, interviews, offline observation, etc.). My own participation in the game of killing time will vary from non-participant observation and replying to a particularly amusing tweet – often from a total stranger – to posting my own informal tweets.

Awkward Facebook

Boyd and Ellison (2007) have suggested that the term ‘social network site’ is a more accurate way of describing platforms such as Facebook or MySpace than the commonly used phrase ‘social networking site’. This latter formulation, they argue, is more applicable to sites such as LinkedIn designed for the purpose of ‘networking’ for career or other instrumental ends. By contrast, Facebook and similar sites draw their sustenance from users’ existing social networks.

However, this neologism – popular today among internet scholars – is itself problematic, for it conflates a fundamental distinction made by social network theorists since the 1960s, that between ‘whole’ and ‘personal’ networks (Knox et al 2006). A personal (or ego-centred) network comprises an individual’s set of ties, e.g. friendship, family, work, etc. Diagrammatically, this is represented by a central ‘ego’ connected through nodes and lines to a finite set of other individuals. In contrast, a whole (or socio-centric) network lacks an individual centre – or indeed, a centre of any kind. Examples of whole networks include organisations, cities and markets.

Personal networks are unique social formations in that they revolve around individuals without whom they cease to exist, normally after the individuals’ biological death. Virtually all other social formations centre around a collectivity not an individual. Therefore, from the perspective of its individual users Facebook could be described as a personal network site. At the same time Facebook is a gigantic whole network comprising hundreds of millions of individual users and clusters of users (e.g. fans of a given football team, celebrity or cause). It is the dynamic interactions between the personal, group, and total logics of Facebook that lend this multitudinous site its unique character and attraction.

While a great deal of media and academic attention has been paid to issues such as privacy and collective action on Facebook (Liu et al 2011), surprisingly little work has been done on the curious social morphology of this platform. Following ethnographic research in Trinidad, Miller (2011) writes:

Facebook has all the contradictions found in a community. You simply can’t have both closeness and privacy. You can’t have support without claustrophobia. You can’t have such a degree of friendship without the risk of explosive quarrelling. Either everything is more socially intense or none of it is.

Leaving aside the problematic status of ‘community’ as an anthropological concept (Amit and Rapport 2002, Postill 2008), this passage highlights a crucial aspect of Facebook: its awkwardness as a social space. Facebook collapses the inner walls of our personal networks, bringing into close contact people from different times and regions of our life trajectories. This architecture results in a digitally mediated ‘open plan’ sociality, a quality of social intercourse in which formerly discrete facets of our lives are now within the purview of our wider network. Increasingly, Facebook brings into the semi-public personal spaces of ethnographers two sets of significant others, namely the researched and the non-researched, sometimes even blurring the distinction between the two. This is the stuff of scientific insight – and potential trouble.

For example, early in my Barcelona fieldwork I shared on Facebook a news item related to the controversial Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon. Shortly after posting this item, a robust exchange took place between two of my Facebook friends holding diametrically opposed political views. Although privately sympathetic to the leftist, pro-Garzon position, I managed to defuse the tension by adopting a diplomatic stance. Because the exchange took place on my Facebook wall, I had no choice but to play the role of a congenial host mediating between two quarrelsome guests.

On another occasion, my Facebook wall was the setting for a rather more scholarly exchange about Spain’s Indignados movement. Here I found it more difficult to remain impartial, as I had recently undergone something of a political conversion to the new movement (Postill in press). My exchanges with a Barcelona-based political scientist were particularly helpful in that they shed light on the chasm between emic and etic understandings of the unfolding protests.

Intra- and inter-platform engagements

As we have just seen, each of the main media platforms that I use for my anthropological work is unique. This uniqueness compels me to behave in ways that I consider appropriate to that particular site. Compare, for instance, the relative sizes of the media anthropology mailing list versus Twitter. Whilst the listserv is a small bounded network of some 1,400 subscribers, Twitter is a huge aggregation of over 500 million users. Another key difference is the mode of communication. Mailing lists are designed to facilitate many-to-many exchanges, even if in practice some subscribers will of course be more prolific than others.  By contrast, Twitter affords one-to-many exchanges – the ‘many’ varying greatly from a score to millions of followers. But arguably the most striking difference is the absence of bounded groups within Twitter. Although efforts were made in the past to form Twitter ‘tribes’ (known as Twibes) around common interests such as art, golf or anthropology, these have all foundered. Instead, Twitter has become the world’s preeminent open market of news, commentary and discussion, with participants engaging with one another through ephemeral threads, not sustainable groups. As a result, on Twitter the public scholar has no option but to engage with a far more heterogeneous population of users and issues than is the case on a specialist forum such as the media anthropology list or a subject-specific blog like Savage Minds.

In my pre-social media research in suburban Malaysia in 2003-2004 (Postill 2011), I found that internet-savvy activists, politicians and others had to tread carefully when traversing the country’s variegated online terrain. For instance, the influential activist Jeff Ooi developed a rugged ‘networked individual’ (Wellman 2001) persona when blogging, a stance that brought him accolades from fellow bloggers but made him run afoul of the country’s ruling elites. Yet despite his national prominence, Ooi had to mind his language when interacting online with fellow residents of the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Subang Jaya. Thus another resident once took him to task for bragging about his achievements on a residents’ web forum devoted to discussing ‘community’ issues – ironically, a forum that Ooi himself had founded (Postill 2011: 77).

Similarly, public scholars must learn how to navigate the often treacherous waters of online discourse by developing an acute sensitivity to the specific ethos and ‘netiquette’ of each site. For example, some years ago a new subscriber of the media anthropology list used the list to loudly protest the four-post limit imposed on e-seminar participants, a rule intended to encourage wider participation. He regarded this rule to be contrary to the free spirit of the internet. This was a strange accusation coming from a seasoned anthropologist, who would have known that different social groups will develop their own rules and conventions over time – internet-based groups being no exception.

Of course, human agency always intervenes in the maintenance and transformation of socio-technical practices (Tenhunen 2008, Shove et al 2012). In my own public anthropology practice, I have learned how to exploit the limits and possibilities of different platforms not in an ahistorical void but through the vagaries of both my life course and a changing media landscape. One ongoing area of learning is cross-platform participation in issues of public concern. Given the centrality of participant observation to the ethnographic approach, anthropologists are well placed to study the use of participatory media in public processes. As said earlier, one remarkable feature of the Indignados movement was the pervasive, decentralised use of social media by hackers, students, pro-democracy activists and countless ordinary citizens to form a common front. Although a few fundamentalist hackers refused to use corporate platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, most campaigners I encountered justified their use of corporate social media on pragmatic grounds. For example, when the Barcelona chapter of the umbrella organisation Real Democracy Now! (in Spanish, DRY) was created in March 2011, participants were encouraged to use both Facebook and a non-proprietary web forum to coordinate their activities. When it became apparent that Facebook was the preferred platform, the group’s informal leaders readily went along with the majority.

Throughout the course of my research into the 15M movement, I took part in a range of collaborative activities across various online platforms. As a native English and Spanish speaker, part of my modest contribution to the movement was to act as an occasional translator and proofreader. Thus I once shared via Facebook what I regarded as an improved version of a passage taken from the English translation of the DRY manifesto. In a matter of minutes, another user replied with what we both agreed was a better translation, which I duly forwarded via email to the manifesto team. This example may seem pedestrian, but it captures neatly the sorts of micro-political collaborations amongst strangers – including scholars – that social media, especially Facebook owing to its critical mass and popularity, enable on a much vaster scale than was possible even a few years ago.

Conclusion

It is exciting to look back at the digital progress anthropologists have made from around 2005 to the present (2013). Reluctantly at first, countless anthropologists (young and old) have acquired valuable digital skills and, perhaps more importantly, digital self-confidence in a matter of four or five years. Let us not forget that Facebook only opened to the general public (us included) in September 2006, or that Twitter caught the world’s attention a mere six years ago, in 2007. I have no figures to hand, but personal experience suggests that a substantial proportion of anthropologists are now regular users of mailing lists and Facebook. This means that they are also likely to be, via other people’s shared contents, indirect users of Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Academia and so on.

In this chapter I have argued that the practice of public anthropology is today caught up in three convergent global trends: the mainstreaming of nerd politics, a viralised media environment, and digitised public spaces. With their commitment to ethnographic methods, anthropologists are well equipped to contribute to the new public environment, characterised by its increasingly participatory and politically engaged nature. To support this argument, I drew from my own personal experience ‘doing’ public anthropology while researching and participating in momentous techno-political events unfolding in Spain and other countries on the receiving end of post-2008 ‘austerity’ measures. Spain’s protesters, like their counterparts in Greece, Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere, are collectively ‘hacking’ their country’s representative democracy and demanding new forms of governance and social justice. In the process, they are ceaselessly forming and reforming new publics open to anthropological interventions of the kind discussed above.

Digital media are integral to these processes, but they are by no means the preserve of young ‘digital natives’. While inequalities of class, race, gender, age, etc, will remain important, never before has access to personal and communitarian media been so wide. As mobile media continue to experience rapid growth across the global South, there is an urgent need for new forms of civic engagement and democratic reform to which anthropologists can contribute their cross-cultural expertise. The omens are good for anthropologists wishing to conduct further incursions into uncharted digital territory – many of whom were happy until recently to leave Web content creation and sharing to others. These incursions could well include those outlets once known as the mainstream media.

Acknowledgment

Some parts of the section “Intra- and inter-platform engagements” are taken from Postill (2012).

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Media Anthropology and the Anthropology of Mediation. In The ASA Handbook of Social Anthropology, R Fardon (ed.) Sage, forthcoming.

When one speaks of media and mediation in social-cultural anthropology today one is usually referring to communication and culture. This is to say, when anthropologists use the term ‘media’, they tend to remain within a largely popular semantics, taking ‘media’ to mean communicational media and, more specifically, communicational media practices, technologies and institutions, especially print (Peterson 2001; Hannerz 2004), film (Ginsburg 1991; Taylor 1994), photography (Ruby 1981; Pinney 1997), video (Turner 1992, 1995), television (Michaels 1986; Wilk 1993; Abu-Lughod 2004), radio (Spitulnik 2000; Hernandez-Reguant 2006; Kunreuther 2006; Fisher 2009), telephony (Rafael 2003; Horst and Miller 2006), and the Internet (Boellstorff 2008; Coleman and Golub 2008; Kelty 2008), among others. These are the core areas of attention in the rapidly expanding sub-field of anthropological scholarship often known as the ‘anthropology of media’ or ‘media anthropology’, which has spent much of the last 40 years researching how the production and reception of communicational media texts and technologies have enabled or otherwise affected processes of cultural production and reproduction more generally.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with this established focus on communication, and media anthropology has certainly thrived, particularly in the past 20 years, cementing its subdisciplinary substance and legitimacy through, among other things, a series of fine review articles (Spitulnik 1993; Ruby 1996; Mazzarella 2004; Coleman 2010), edited volumes (Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg et al. 2002; Peterson 2003; Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005), professorial chairs and research and training centres (e.g., the USC Center for Visual Anthropology, the Program in Culture and Media at NYU, the Programme in the Anthropology of Media at SOAS, the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at Manchester University, the MSc in Digital Anthropology at University College London, among others), and research networks (e.g., EASA’s media anthropology listserv).

Yet, as my fellow practitioners of media anthropology would likely agree, it is very difficult to separate the operation of communicational media cleanly from broader social-political processes of circulation, exchange, imagination and knowing. This suggests a productive tension within media anthropology between its common research foci (which are most often technological or representational in their basis) and what we might gloss as processes of social mediation: i.e. social transaction in its broadest sense of the movement of images, discourse, persons and things. The problem of mediation obviously raises the question of practices of communicational media-making and media-receiving, which media anthropologists have addressed at length, especially in the last 20 years. But mediation also raises the question of how we should conceptualize ‘media’ in the first place.

Read on [PDF]

Abstract

During the 2011 wave of protests millions of citizens around the globe employed a vast range of digital media to demand greater democratic freedoms and social justice. Although mobile phones were widely used in all these protests, their significance remains unclear. This chapter draws from both qualitative and quantitative research to shed light on the recent uses of mobile technologies for social protest, with Spain’s Indignados (or 15M) movement as the case study. The chapter argues for the importance of processual analyses of the new protests that situate the uniqueness of each mobile technology and ‘mobile ensemble’ within a particular moment in the collective biography of a movement. This approach reveals the importance of smartphones as new articulators of online spaces and occupied physical spaces, especially via Twitter and live streaming.

Abstract

The study of mobile phones has boomed over the past ten years. Today it is doubtless one of the more vibrant research areas across the whole of media and communication studies. But this is also an undertheorised field, as a number of authors have pointed out. In this paper I heed the call for further theoretical work by addressing a blind spot in our field of vision, namely the elusive relationship between mobiles and sociocultural change. I suggest that we think about change not in the present continuous as we usually do (how things are chang-ing at present) but in the recent past, revisiting the empirical examples we have to date on actual changes that have already taken place, and then try and work out what part, if any, mobile phones played in those changes. I explore this approach through examples drawn from three strands of the bourgeoning mobile telephony literature, including some of my own primary research, namely political mobilisation, mobiles and markets, and everyday mobile sociality.

Introduction

Good afternoon.

First of all, I’d like to thank Laura Stark and the rest of the organising committee for their invitation and for all the brilliant work that has gone into putting this conference together. I’m thrilled to be here and I look forward to some great papers and discussions.

I’d also like to thank two people who can’t be here today, namely Francisco Osorio (Universidad de Chile) and Arnau Monterde (IN3, Open University of Catalonia), with whom I’ve done some collaborative work on mobiles and social and political change that has shaped my thinking on these issues.

The focus on actual changes in the title of this talk is no accident. In fact, it comes out of a series of conversations we’ve been having over at the Media Anthropology Network under the theme “Theorising media and social change”. I am particularly grateful to Sirpa Tenhunen and Elisenda Ardevol for their shared enthusiasm for the topic, which will result in the co-edited volume Theorising Media and Change we are currently preparing.

The study of mobile phones has seen a tremendous growth over the past ten years or so, and today it is doubtless one of the more vibrant research areas across the whole of media and communication studies (Ling and Horst 2011).

Great opportunity for media and communication studies to continue to internationalise; from the outset mobile studies has been a global field in its geographical remit, unlike media or internet studies. An opportunity that we should take now before the window closes and mobiles become normalised, taken for granted (Ling and Donner 2009).

But this is also an undertheorised field, as a number of authors have pointed out (Pearce 2013, Ling and Horst 2011).

In this talk I will heed this call for further theoretical development. There is nothing, I repeat: nothing, more practical than the practice of theorising. We should theorise not for its own sake, but in order to be able to ask better questions; do better empirical research – which in turn will help refine our theories in a dialectical process (Couldry 2010).

I will address a question that is integral to all studies of mobile phones in the developing world but at the same time a blind spot, namely the elusive relationship between mobiles and sociocultural change.

First I will discuss some of the key challenges that go with trying to theorise change, a slippery concept to work with, and how we may begin to overcome them. My suggestion is that we think about change not in the present continuous as we normally do (how things are chang-ing right now) but in the past, revisiting the empirical examples we have to date on actual changes that have already taken place, and then try and work out what part, if any, mobile phones played in those changes.

In other words, I’m not asking the question ‘What part, if any, are mobiles play-ing is current changes taking place in the developing world?’. What I am asking is rather: ‘What part, if any, did mobiles play in recent changes in the developing world?.

I explore this approach through examples drawn from three strands of the bourgeoning mobile telephony literature, including some of my own work, namely political mobilisation, mobiles and markets, and everyday mobile sociality.

Theorising change

Sociocultural change is a mind-boggling notion. After all, change is everywhere, it is the hallmark of modernity, or so we are told. And it has been an integral part of popular and political culture for a very long time.

Take for or example, Britain’s former PM Harold MacMillan’s address to the Parliament of South Africa in 1960 in which he famously announced that “The wind of change is blowing through this continent.”

Or think of Bob Dylan’s release 4 years later, in 1964, of the album ‘The times they are a-changin’”.

That is precisely the trouble, that the times are always a-changin’; so in everyday and media parlance, as well as in the humanities and social sciences, change happens not in the past but in the present continuous, in the -ing form (Postill 2012).

The present continuous of how things are currently changing is firmly entrenched in grant applications, calls for papers, scholarly publications, informal academic conversation, and so forth.

We may say we are studying new media and social change, but more often than not what we mean is social changing; change in progress. Most of us suffer, as I have suggested elsewhere, from an undiagnosed condition called ‘imminentism’ – i.e. the fascination with the present and the near future, with the ‘emerging’ future (Postill 2012). Indeed just two days ago, on the way here from Melbourne, an ad by the global bank HSBC caught my eye. It read: “The future is emerging”.

Mobile studies, like the rest of media and communication studies, is no exception. Part of the problem, I would suggest, has to do with a divide running through the entire field. I don’t mean the familiar digital divide but rather a less noticed epistemic divide, the one that separates media and communication historians from non-historians. We don’t seem to talk to each other much, which I think is a pity.

So how do we get to the study of mobile phones and sociocultural change? How do we move, for the time being, from the study of ongoing (or potential) changes to the study of actual changes that have taken place in the recent past? I suggest we do so indirectly, via the following eight principles:

1. First of all, let us be specific – let us speak not of change in general but of one or more specific changes. Whilst change is everywhere and anywhere at the same, a change is more concrete, e.g. a regime change in Tunisia, an environmental change in Sumatra, a financial change in a local firm, or a change of marital status by one of your research participants. We can leave change in general to social philosophers.
2. Let us also distinguish between past, present and future changes to get away from the present continuous, with its penchant for clouding our thought.
3. For the time being, we can focus on changes that have already occurred in the past, i.e. on actual changes, especially in the recent past. For one thing, they are easier to study than ongoing changes, let alone future changes. We can leave these for later; first we need to get better at this game of studying changes.
4. Think of changes diachronically; otherwise you’ll be trying to clap with one hand; you can’t take a snapshot only, we need at least two points in time. Multi-sited research is an option in this line of work, but multi-timed research is a must.
5. And think of changes processually, i.e. stage by stage; changes go through a life course (a curriculum vitae, a Lebenslauf) not a life cycle – changes have a beginning, a middle and an end, a collective socio-technical biography. Changes may be unpredictable, but they still have a ‘processual form’ (ref) that is amenable to reconstruction after the fact.
6. Let us stay away from technocentrism polemics. Assume neither that ICTs such as mobile phones will have played a key role in the process of change nor the opposite; impact (or the lack of it) is open to empirical investigation; that said, it is likely that impact will be uneven – more mobile phone impact at certain stages, less at others.
7. While we’re at it, let’s avoid ‘what’s so new about this ‘new’ technology’ polemics, too. To silence the nonbelievers in the novelty of a given technology, be specific about the technology and date it – no-one can seriously argue that Twitter is an old platform. It may have borrowed ideas from all sorts of places, but there is no doubt that Twitter was launched in 2006, not earlier, and that it has spread unevenly around the much of the world ever since (except for China, North Korea and a few other countries). Twitter is barely seven.
8. In principle, all changes, big and small, matter. Only time will tell whether an accumulation of seemingly insignificant, hardly noticed changes will turn into a cascade of epochal transformation.

So to explore how these ideas could work in actual research practice, I turn now to three literatures on mobile phones in the global South, namely (a) political mobilisation, (b) markets and mobiles and (c) everyday mobile sociality. In other words, I’m about to explore these ideas by considering in turn mobiles in relation to political, economic and social changes.

Political mobilisation

Good example of media and communication research area where global South and North in there from the outset. The best place to start arguably Rheingold’s book Smart Mobs (2002). Seattle 1999, Manila 2001, etc, to show how mobile technologies amplify human talent for cooperation, in the process changing the world (Monterde and Postill forthcoming).

Best known example Manila 2001. Impeachment trial against President Estrada over corruption. When seemed that would get off scot-free, huge gatherings at emblematic EDSA square, central Manila. Text messages, ‘pass it on’. Partly as a result of these protests, Estrada resigned.

Madrid 2004 following terrorist bombs just before general elections – ‘pasalo’ smart mob when tried to blame Basque separatists. Vote swing, Socialist Party surprise win over the ruling Popular Party.

Some authors critical, though, of smart mob idea for being technocentric, e.g. Rafael (2004), Miard (2008). More recent technocentrism debate reignited with Shirky’s (2008) Here Comes Everybody, optimistic contra Morozov pessimism.

With spread of online and social media since mid-2000s  and 2011 wave of protests calls for holistic research on mobiles – cannot separate them from rest of ‘media ecology’, e.g. Chiumbu (2012) South Africa, or Wilson and Tufekci (2012) on Arab Spring.

This is fine but careful with media ecology holism as can give you static, snapshot, simplified accounts where specificity of mobiles, role they played, can get lost. So we need what we could call ‘dynamic holism’ – these collective actions unfold over time; and different technological affordances will come to the fore at different stages of that unfolding (Monterde and Postill forthcoming).

Clear example is England riots of 2011 where the mostly young, low-income protestors found that Blackberry was the ideal technology for riots, whilst others (mostly the middle classes?) found Twitter to be highly suited to coordinate the clean-up operations; i.e. there were different soci0-technological mixes at different stages. Or see the Egyptian uprising of January 2011 for another example.

What of actual changes then, and how do we study them over time? Well I have an example not from an emerging economy but rather from a sadly submerging economy: Spain.

Three complementary ways:

1. You study mobile collective action as a process of change in its own right. In this case, you could revisit through historical research the 2004 protests in Madrid and undertake a stage-by-stage analysis of their birth, development, decline and death, examining carefully the uses and effects of mobiles at each stage – in relation to other means of communication (Monterde and Postill forthcoming).
2. You compare mobile action at two points in time, for instance 2004 and 2011. If Madrid 2004 texting was the key mobile app that enabled collective action at very short notice, in Madrid 2011 occupation, texting was just one among myriads of technologies within a much more complex and diverse communicative landscape. This doesn’t mean that texting has been replaced but rather that it’s now one among many other mobile options open to protesters in an age of ‘polymedia’ (Madianou and Miller 2011).
3. Or one could borrow a conceptual trinity from the historian and social theorist William Sewell (2005), formed by the notions of trends, events and routines and track changes and continuities in mobile phones for protest in Spain, say from 2004 to 2011. Sewell  (2005: 273) argues that the temporality of any historical sequence is complex, i.e. ‘combination of many different social processes with varying temporalities’. Three types of temporality:

• Trends = ‘directional changes in social relations’, marked by historians as ‘rise’, ‘fall’, ‘decline’, etc.
• Routines = ‘practical schemas that reproduce structures’. Institutions are ‘machines for the production and maintenance of routines’.
• Events = ‘temporally concentrated sequences of actions that transform structures’.

The two big events would likely be March 2004 and May 2011, one important trend would be the spread and appropriation of smartphones and social media from the late noughties, and we would find both continuities and changes in activists’ and protesters’ day-to-day routines being shaped by those events and trends.

Mobiles and markets

If the obligatory entry point to mobile collective action is Rheingold’s (2002) Smart Mobs, is equivalent in the study of mobile phones and markets in the global South was conducted by Jensen (2007). Team collected data during five years among 300 sardine fishing units in three districts of Kerala, in India.

Between 1997 and 2001, a mobile phone service was introduced throughout Kerala, a state in India with a large fishing industry. Using microlevel survey data, we show that the adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers was associated with a dramatic reduction in price dispersion, the complete elimination of waste, and near-perfect adherence to the Law of One Price. Both consumer and producer welfare increased.

A number of Mobiles for Development (M4D) researchers have stressed the complexity of the issues at stake and questioned narrowly financial assessments of the purported ‘benefits’ of mobiles. Thus, Jagun, Heeks and Whalley (2008) suggest that although Jensen (2007) and others may well be correct in arguing that mobiles can improve market performance by meeting some of the ‘informational challenges’ that hinder economic actors in the global South, this may further disadvantage people without access to mobiles. Heeks (2009) is critical of M4D studies that define the costs and benefits derived from acquiring a mobile phone in simple monetary terms, and suggests that poor people derive a ‘complex mix’ of values (financial, psychological, social, symbolic, etc.) from mobiles.

Similarly, Donner (2007, 2009) argues that the ‘benefits’ of mobiles are likely to vary considerably depending on the type of entrepreneurial activity, to the extent that some micro-entrepreneurs may have no need for mobiles. Thus, whilst taxi drivers may benefit from the micro-coordination features of mobile phones and wholesalers from speedy access to accurate price information, shoeshines and knife sharpeners may find no economic use at all for this technology. Donner suggests that the M4D field requires ‘a better taxonomy’ of those small businesses more likely to gain from specific technological features (2007: 11).

Following a similar argument, in yesterday’s doctoral workshop, Sanna Tawah presented some rich  ethnographic materials. She’s just come back from studying informal trade in the Cameroonian grasslands, worsened since 1980s and structural adjustment policies supported by Western institutions; yes mobiles integrated into lives of petty traders but again don’t remove hurdles of poverty, poor education; mobile money may work in East Africa, but in West Africa not making many inroads etc.

OK, these are fair critiques of Jensen’s well-known case study about mobiles and markets among Kerala fishermen.

Yet if we’re interested in mobile-related changes (big and small), careful with YES-BUT types of argument such as: “Yes, mobiles are making a difference, but they don’t change the status quo in any fundamental way”. Or “Yes there are changes, but let’s not forget the continuities”.

I wish to propose that we break the YES-BUT device into its two component parts (a) yes and (b) but, and concentrate our energies on the ‘yes’ to begin with. This way we’ll be able to see actual changes that have already taken place. We can leave the ‘but’, i.e. the continuities, for later.

NB1 – I’m not suggesting we ignore entrenched inequalities, or cultural continuities, rather that we study actual changes carefully before moving onto the continuities.

So in the Cameroonian example, Tawah tell us that during her fieldwork traders appreciated mobiles because:

• They eased communication
• Made them feel connected to friends and family
• Facilitated business transactions
• Reduced transport costs
• Reduced trade-related stress

When making this list of changes I have taken the liberty to switch the tense from Tawah’s original present simple to the past simple, e.g. from the original wording that mobiles ‘make them feel connected’ to the idea that they made them feel connected at that particular point in time. Whether or not traders will feel that way in 2014 or 2015 or 2020 remains to be seen.

I do this to hypothesise that some changes have already taken place, and that they merit attention in the past tense. So when research participants claim that mobiles have reduced transport costs, I would want to know since when, by how much, with what social and economic consequences, etc.

NB2 – The bullet point list above refers to seemingly positive changes, but there is no reason why we shouldn’t include in our analyses changes that some research participants deem negative, e.g. “Mobiles have made young people immoral”.

Everyday sociality on the move

Everyday life, mobiles and social change in developing world is another growing area of research, especially amenable to ethnographic research.

Here Horst and Miller (2006) make a convenient starting point to the discussion.  In their ethnography The Cell Phone, based on fieldwork in Jamaica, they interrogate influential scholarly ideas about a Network Society (Castells) or ‘networked individualism’ (Wellman) by developing an account of mobile phone uses that starts and ends with the cultural history of Jamaica, where ego-centred ways of networking (or ‘link-up’ as Horst and Miller call them) have been around for a long time. In an argument analogous to Miller and Slater’s (2000) thesis about the internet in Trinidad, mobile phones fit into existing forms of relating to other people, including to those friends and relatives who have emigrated. This doesn’t mean, however, that there is no novelty. There are of course novel aspects to mobile phones, but these must be understood, the authors insist, within the culturally specific dialectical (two-way) processes whereby people and things constitute one another.

But there’s a problem with this stance, according to Tenhunen (2008).  Building on fieldwork on mobile ICTs in rural West Bengal (India) to argue that many anthropologists, including Horst and Miller (2006), have a tendency to overstress social reproduction at the expense of social change. Tenhunen also takes issue with practice theorists for overlooking historical agents’ ‘critical faculties’. This author regards mobile technology as ‘a source of dynamism’ that shapes culturally specific ‘social logistics’, highlighting the need to attend to people’s desire for social change. Thus, she shows how mobiles have given young women in rural West Bengal greater autonomy from their elders’ surveillance, whilst paradoxically reinvigorating traditional cultural forms such as kin-based reciprocity

Since Tehnunen article was published 5 years ago, I should mention some developments in practice theory, incl. Bräuchler and Postill (2010) Theorising Media and Practice. In the introduction to the book I argue that practice theory is no panacea for media and communication studies. Nevertheless, one of the research areas it can help us with is the uses of (mobile) media in everyday life.

Or take Shove et al (2012) The Dynamics of Social Practice, published last year. They ask the following questions:

1. How do practices emerge, exist and die?
2. What are the elements of which practices are made?
3. How do practices recruit practitioners?
4. How do bundles and complexes of practice form, persist and disappear?
5. How are the elements, practices and links between them generated, renewed and reproduced? (2012: 14).

Taking these questions to mobile phone research in the global South could be an interesting exercise. Like practice theorists in other fields of inquiry you would still ‘shadow’ people engaged in practices such as fishing, trading, motoring, teaching, learning, drinking and so on, but here with an emphasis of a specific material element of the practices, namely mobile phones as socio-technical artefacts integral to numerous practices.

And in following the practitioners you would inquire once again about actual changes that have already taken place, taking care not to fall into the YES-BUT trap (yes there have been changes, but let’s not be celebratory and move on quickly to the continuities). So you would ask questions such as:

What are the mobile-related changes that have already taken place among these practitioners (say taxi drivers) in the early 2000s? What stages did they go through? How can we explain them?

Conclusion

To recap, I have argued that the study of mobiles in the global South needs more theorising. This is not something we should do for its own sake, or because we want to keep up with metropolitan fashion. Theory allows to ask better questions, to do better empirical research – which in turn will help refine our theories.

How do we begin to grapple with the huge but crucial question of mobiles and sociocultural change? I suggested by not conflating past, present and future and addressing – for the time being – actual changes that have already taken place in the recent past (i.e. 1990s to the present), coming back to this question again and again through examples related to political, economic and social life in developing countries.

I should clarify that I’m not suggesting we should give up on the present continuous, but rather that in mobile phone and other media research we should become more aware of the crucial distinction between emergent changes that are still in progress, and changes that have already occurred.

We should also use ‘changes’ in a value-neutral way. Whether a mobile-related change is positive, negative or both is something open to investigation and debate; it shouldn’t determine our research choices.

References

Chiumbu, S. 2012 “Exploring mobile phone practices in social movements in South Africa – the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign”, African Identities 10 (2): 193-206.

Couldry, N. 2010. ‘Theorising Media as Practice’ in B. Bräuchler and J. Postill (eds), Theorising Media and Practice, Oxford: Berghahn.

Donner, J. 2007.  Customer acquisition among small and informal businesses in urban India: Comparing face to face, interpersonal, and mediated channels, in The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, vol. 32, pp. 1-16.

Donner, J. and M. Escobari 2009, A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs), in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, IEEE, April 2009

Jensen, R. (2007) ‘The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(3): 879-924.

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Ling, Rich and Heather A. Horst. (2011). Mobile communication in the global south. New Media & Society (NMS) 13(3):363-374.

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Postill, J. 2012. Media and social changing since 1979: Towards a diachronic ethnography of media and actual social changes. Paper to the Media Anthropology Network E-Seminar Series, December 2012.

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Slater, Don and Miller, Daniel (2000) The internet: an ethnographic approach. Berg Publishers, Oxford.

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My own contribution was a keynote titled “Mobile phones and actual changes (big and small) in the global South: a preliminary exploration“.

I’ll try to post some brief reflections on my take on the topic as well as on the conference as a whole in the near future, but meanwhile here are some notes from Jonathan Donner‘s (Microsoft Research) closing keynote, titled “Everybody’s Internet: Mobile data in the developing world“.

1.   Great presentation, combining in-depth knowledge of mobiles in global South with theoretical and practical sophistication; the idea of mobile data as potential research area (“mobile data is coming”) was new to me, and I suspect to others in the audience. Looks very promising.

2.   Also found intriguing Donner’s point about mobile-only internet access comparing unfavourably with PC-and-mobile access. In other words, there is a lot of rhetoric out there about how mobiles have bridged the digital divide in Africa and other developing regions, but the truth is that mobiles are good for access, but bad for data manipulation. To go beyond simplistic binaries of internet access vs. non-access he introduced the notion of ‘spectrum of digital affordances’.

3.   Got me thinking about the epistemic divide between internet studies (or internet research) and mobile studies, and their focus on the network vs. the device respectively. Why don’t we hear of PC studies or mobile network studies? Which relates to Donner’s point about the importance of not getting too fixated on the devices at the expense of the infrastructure.

4.  Donner also pointed out that when you look at how people use the internet in poor countries, you realise that there are not one but many internets (which is not something internet freedom fighters in the global North usually take into account, in my experience). We need to disaggregate in our research the artefact, not treat the mobile as a monolith (Donner 2008), ie what do we mean by ‘mobile phone’ when we present our research? Do we mean voice calls, P2P, SMS, apps?

5. This got me thinking about Miller and Slater’s (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, in which they describe the internet as a symbolic unity but practical multiplicity, or words to that effect. Could we say that they are also right, in that there is only one internet (on one level) but at the same time there are many internets (on another, e.g.. when it comes to the limited data manipulation options for mobile-only users in poor countries)? Incidentally, where does the internet killer app known as the Web fit into all of this?

6.  On the other hand, let’s not forget the marked differences within and among rich countries either, e.g. rural vs. urban dwellers in many rich countries, or frustrated South Koreans living in Australia who complain that what the Australians have isn’t really the internet! (they should try North Korea sometime for a real shocker).

7. It’s all very well, adds Donner, to celebrate how micro-entrepreneurs in the developing world benefit from mobile phones but they are still hampered by the technical and organisational limitations that go with their line of work, not least their relative data poverty: “Walmart don’t run their business on mobiles”. Yet I’m wondering whether compering micro-businesses with Walmart is a fair comparison.

8.  Methodologically, the strategy of revisiting three recent-past case studies armed with a new conceptual repertoire was music to my ears — see notes on my keynote in a future blog post in which I urge mobile and other digital media researchers not to conflate the past, the present and the future in their efforts to theorise their findings, and to spend more time studying actual mobile-related changes (big and small, positive and negative), that have already taken place in the recent past.

Media Anthropology Network
European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)
E-seminar 42

4-18 December 2012. John Postill (RMIT): Media and social changing since 1979: Towards a diachronic ethnography of media and actual social changes. (PDF, 230 KB)

Comments: Brian Larkin (Columbia University) (PDF, 80 KB)

E-Seminar on Media and social changing since 1979 (PDF, 220 KB)

Abstract

In this paper I address the question of how to study media and social change ethnographically. To do so I draw from the relevant media anthropology literature, including my own research in Malaysia and Spain. I first sketch a history of media anthropology, identifying a number of key works and themes as well as two main phases of growth since the 1980s. I then argue that anthropologists are well positioned to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of media and social change. However, to do so we must first shift our current focus on media and ‘social changing’ (i.e. how things are changing) to the study of media in relation to actual social changes, e.g. the suburbanisation of Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s to 2000s, or the secularisation of morality in post-Franco Spain. This shift from the ethnographic present continuous to the ethnographic past simple (how things changed from A to B) – a move from potential to actual changes – does not require that we abandon our commitment to ethnography in favour of social or cultural history. Rather, it demands new forms of ‘diachronic ethnography’ that can handle the biographical logic of actual social changes.

Keywords: media, social change, social changing, diachronic ethnography, multi-timed ethnography, media anthropology, social history, world history.

p. 27-28 ‘If Castells… was the [late 1990s] social theorist of the rise of the World Wide Web, Hardt’s and Negri’s joint work, which came at a later stage, bears the stamp of the era of mobile media and the new forms of collective action their diffusion inspired. Compared to Castells’ discussion of networks, Hardt and Negri do recuperate an appreciation of the role of the body and its mobility… Yet they too fail to take into account the emplaced character of collective action, the fact that it requires physical locations as stages of its performance’.

p. 28 ‘The place of the multitude, Hardt and Negri suggest, is a ‘non-place’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 40)’.

p. 27 Hardt and Negri (2004) notion of  ‘swarm intelligence’ similar idea to Wasik’s flash mobs and Rheingold’s (2003) smart mobs.

p. 26-27 ‘The concept of the swarm comes to represent… nomadic corporeality, this ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 40), a multitude which can act together without being reduced to one identity or one place’. For these authors, today’s ‘complex technical linkages’ allow for the emergence of collective action out of heterogeneity and multiplicity, without the need for centralisation. Swarms without hives.

p. 28 Yet ‘We know from biology that while honey-bees fly across great distances they also need a fixed place to return to, and some comrade bees to remain there to keep the hive in place.’

p. 29 In common with Castells, Hardt and Negri reject the ‘imaginary of the crowd or the mass’. This ‘brings about a disregard for the importance of places as sites for the display of collective action – which clearly leaves little room for an understanding of the ‘take the square movements’ of 2011, and the importance of the occupation of public spaces has acquired in their unfolding’.

p. 29 That said, both Castells and Hardt and Negri ‘correctly identify a situation of radical heterogeneity and multiplicity at the root of contemporary society’.

In the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, the concept of “affordances” was introduced as a way to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of technological determinism, on the one hand, which views new modes of social relations as actively caused by particular forms of technology, and technological constructionism, on the other hand, which views technological artifacts as entirely socially shaped, both in terms of their form and meaning (Hutchby 2001:441–442). In contrast, a theory of “affordances” (Gibson 1979) views technologies as artifacts that “may be both shaped by and shaping of the practices humans use in interaction with, around and through them” (Hutchby 2001:444). Ian Hutchby specifically defines affordances as “functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object” (2001:444). For analyses of technological affordances in relation to the Internet and social media, see Wellman et al. 2003 and Boyd 2011.