Anthropology has two main tasks: to understand what it is to be human, and to examine how humanity is manifested differently in the diversity of culture. These tasks have gained new impetus from the ...extraordinary rise of the digital. This book brings together several key anthropologists working with digital culture, to demonstrate just how productive an anthropological approach to the digital has already become.
Through a range of case studies from Facebook to Second Life to Google Earth, Digital Anthropology explores how human and digital can be defined in relation to one another, from avatars and disability; cultural differences in how we use social networking sites or practise religion; the practical consequences of the digital for politics, museums, design, space and development to new online worlds and gaming communities. The book also investigates the moral universe of the digital, from new anxieties to new open-source ideals. Digital Anthropology shows how only intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveals its profound consequences for everyday life.
Combining the clarity of a textbook with an engaging style which conveys a passion for these new frontiers of enquiry, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies and sociology.
With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game ...communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area.Features include: * a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology; * * exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations; * * consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale; * * in-depth analyses of different interfaces in ethnography, from mobile technologies to digital archives. *
This article draws upon a desk-based review and expert interviews with practitioners in the Global South to understand the diverse forms of data mediation that have become increasingly visible in the ...wake of the global coronavirus disease-19 pandemic. In contrast to accounts that frame the Global South solely as a site for the extraction of data and cheap, unskilled digital labor, we explore alternative accounts of the ways in which individuals and organizations in the Global South are asserting their role as active mediators of data who carve out spaces for value creation that are meaningful in their local and national contexts. From data collection and “refining” to the analysis of data for local needs and markets, these forms of data mediation demonstrate some of the changing dynamics of data practices globally and reflect the necessity of more nuanced analyses of value and power within and across regions.
Automation in the home is often presented as a value neutral process which makes life easier, more efficient and more productive. As recent research on the introduction of domestic technologies has ...revealed, these technologies are rarely value neutral and often work to reinforce gender dynamics in the household. This article examines the gendered and generational dimensions of how smart and automated technologies are being integrated into homes. Drawing upon 3 years research conducted between 2015 and 2017 in 11 households in Melbourne, Australia, we examine how households manage the storing and transfer of digital material and digital devices (images, videos and files from smartphones, tablets and laptops). Digital materials move within households and between different family members, and these processes are governed by often unstated rules, including changes in the life course. By examining the relationships between gendered and generational roles and automation in the household, we highlight the importance of smaller scale interpersonal relationships, which influences the negotiation of automation in emotionally laden contexts of families. Automated decision making may both support and challenge gendered norms around technology ownership and management.
Although much mention has been made of the importance of ICTs for transnational migrants, we know relatively little about how these technologies affect or change everyday transnational ...communications. Tracing the shift from community phone boxes to individually owned mobile (cell) phones in rural Jamaica, in this article I focus on the integration of mobile phones in Jamaican transnational communication. Equipped with a mobile phone, rural Jamaicans no longer rely on collect phone calls and expensive calling cards to initiate the connections between their friends and relatives living abroad. For many Jamaicans without access to a regular or reliable phone service prior to 2001, the mobile phone is viewed as an unadulterated blessing, transforming the role of transnational communication from an intermittent event to a part of daily life. For others, however, the mobile phone remains an object of ambivalence, bringing unforeseen burdens and obligations.
From innovations such as virtual fit through 3D body scanning, smart clothes, wearable technology and virtual styling assistants to more mundane capabilities such as digital photography and social ...media, deciding what to wear and how to wear an item is now accompanied by a range of new information and perspectives. This article examines the sociotechnical systems that support everyday decisions about what to wear, and how this decision-making process is being re-imagined in response to technology. Drawing upon closet ethnographies with women in the USA and Australia, we focus upon the ways in which women make decisions about what will help them to ‘look professional’. Specifically, we attend to two key dimensions of the decision-making process – visions and validations – to understand the ways in which women weigh the opinion of other people, media and technologies, and the real and imagined role of how new technologies such as the Amazon Echo Look may be integrated into this process. Through fine-grained analysis of the ways that women receive, reject or ignore information about their performance of looking professional, we reflect upon the relative importance of different technologies in the process of decision-making.
This article examines how the use of mobile phones and associated software creates and sustains regionally diverse urban communities. There is an interdependent connection between music that is ...highly participatory and locally relevant, and processes involved in sustaining key social relationships across a variety of groupings. Increasingly ubiquitous technologies such as mobile phones are used for musical purposes in ways that specifically put certain processes to work to sustain these social phenomena. This connects people with transnational software‐based commerce through social media, local telecommunications companies and phone manufacturers. That results in the navigation of ecologies and economies of data, hardware and software that work in local urban circumstances. In the case of data, we demonstrate how modes of exchange and reciprocity tied to social relationships exhibit similarities with informal economies of tobacco and betelnut. With social groups, the church‐based community perspective provides urban examples of communities that cross regions, and extended family networks. This ethnographic perspective shows how increasingly global technologies are used in urbanite Melanesia in ways that sustain longstanding values and practices, while also incorporating identities and associations around changing urban, national and international circumstances.
This Special Issue examines the relationship between imaginaries and infrastructures. Through a specific focus on the Asian region, the four articles contained herein demonstrate how these ...imaginaries span, transform and proliferate various boundaries. They also create new regimes of visibility and present a range of ethical dimensions for those who use them and the companies and governments that regulate the infrastructures. These include dating and video sharing apps, digital money transactions and diverging historical accounts of communications technologies. Such diverse examples demonstrate how media infrastructures and the media content they carry enable the production of imaginaries and meaning.
This article explores the ways in which 5G networks are imagined in the Pacific Islands nations of Fiji and Papua New Guinea. What promises, anxieties and futures have the prospects of 5G provoked, ...and for whom in particular? To answer this question, we consider how current mobile network users, corporate techno-elites and state actors such as regulators and politicians imagine 5G futures. We argue that 5G deployment is challenged by the cosmological orientations of those who do not share the vision of a modern, secular state driven by economic development. In addition, any attempt by national governments and mobile network operators to build the infrastructure necessary for 5G are subject to the geopolitics of China and the US and its allies. Reflecting upon the tensions between cosmopolitics and geopolitics, this article demonstrates how both sociocultural and political economic forces have come together to frame digital imaginations of 5G networks.
Altered mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) occurs in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease (AD); how mtDNA synthesis is linked to neurodegeneration is poorly understood. We previously ...discovered Nutrient-induced Mitochondrial Activity (NiMA), an inter-organelle signaling pathway where nutrient-stimulated lysosomal mTORC1 activity regulates mtDNA replication in neurons by a mechanism sensitive to amyloid-β oligomers (AβOs), a primary factor in AD pathogenesis (Norambuena et al., 2018). Using 5-ethynyl-2′-deoxyuridine (EdU) incorporation into mtDNA of cultured neurons, along with photoacoustic and mitochondrial metabolic imaging of cultured neurons and mouse brains, we show these effects being mediated by mTORC1-catalyzed T40 phosphorylation of superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1). Mechanistically, tau, another key factor in AD pathogenesis and other tauopathies, reduced the lysosomal content of the tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), thereby increasing NiMA and suppressing SOD1 activity and mtDNA synthesis. AβOs inhibited these actions. Dysregulation of mtDNA synthesis was observed in fibroblasts derived from tuberous sclerosis (TS) patients, who lack functional TSC and elevated SOD1 activity was also observed in human AD brain. Together, these findings imply that tau and SOD1 couple nutrient availability to mtDNA replication, linking mitochondrial dysfunction to AD.
•Tau-dependent regulation of lysosome-associated mTORC1 control mitochondrial DNA synthesis.•mTORC1-mediated phosphorylation of SOD1 regulates mtDNA synthesis.•Soluble amyloid-β oligomers stimulate SOD1activity.•SOD1 activity is elevated in human AD brain.•mtDNA synthesis is also disrupted in fibroblasts from patients affected by tuberous sclerosis.
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